Miss Part I? Read it here.
Thomas Crane, the CIA’s base chief in Chengdu, tugged the consul general down the stairs to the consulate basement on Lingshiguan Road. A secretary and a Chinese administrative officer tried to follow, but Crane blocked them and locked the basement door. He paced the length of the big room, peering at the concrete floor and chipping at any irregularities with an ax he had brought from the armory upstairs.
“What the hell are you looking for?” asked the consul general. He was balding, in middle age, wishing he wasn’t stuck in the Chinese provinces.
“A hole in the floor,” answered Tom. “I need a flashlight.” He pointed to a big lamp on the wall. He shined the beam into the corners of the room and behind the filing cabinets and bookshelves that lined the walls.
“How do you know there’s a hole?” demanded the diplomat. His intelligence chief was scaring him.
“I can’t tell you,” Tom answered. The consul general started to protest, but Tom raised the palm of his hand. “Sir, please don’t ask any more questions.”
The consul general retreated while Tom continued his investigation. At the rear of the room was a wooden wall that enclosed an empty storeroom. He surveyed the wall, calculating its position. He looked up toward the ceiling and rechecked his measurements. By his reckoning, the boundary wall of the CIA base’s classified workspace was three floors above.
“Ground zero,” said Tom. “Has to be.”
Tom took his ax and swung it hard against the wall, splintering the wood. The consul general shouted for him to stop, but he swung again, harder, and once more, until the frame gave way. Tom shined his flashlight along the floor, and there, in the concrete, was a six-inch hole, with a thick rubber casing sprouting from the opening and rising up through the ceiling to the floor above.
“Those bastards,” muttered Tom. “They’ve run wires upstairs.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said the consul general. He looked dazed. The worst thing that could befall a U.S. diplomatic facility abroad seemed to have happened to his little piece of real estate. “What do I do now?”
“Stay put,” said Tom. “Don’t let anyone come down here.”
Tom raced up two flights of stairs to the CIA base, ax in hand, navigating the maze of doors and locks. To anyone he encountered along the way, he barked, “Can’t talk now.”
Inside the secure area of the base, Tom took his ax to the supporting wall. The inside was lined with a thin strip of metal to prevent intrusion. After four clanging blows, the wall and its lining collapsed. Inside was the top of the same rubber tube Crane had seen in the basement. He peered inside. It appeared to be empty.
“Oh, no, no, no!” Tom muttered, followed by a loud oath. He knew what the empty casing meant. Yu Qiangsheng had told him in one of their endless tradecraft discussions that the Ministry of State Security designed its surveillance systems so that wires could be withdrawn quickly if they were ever discovered.
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Tom ordered a CIA colleague to secure the space and then ran pell-mell back down the stairs to the basement. The befuddled consul general was standing by the splintered wall there. Tom ignored him. He hacked at the rubber tube with his ax until it severed and examined the interior. There were still some wires inside; the Chinese hadn’t been able to pull them all out yet.
The consul general had his arms up, begging for an explanation.
“Not now,” said Tom. He bent the rubber casing to a 90-degree angle and buried the ax halfway in, so that the remaining wires couldn’t be extracted.
“Duct tape,” he shouted, and the consul general fumbled around until he found some in a supply storage cabinet. Tom taped the wires to a nearby support beam, so they couldn’t be retracted more.
The consul general was sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor, his head in his hands. All of this, whatever it was, would be his responsibility.
“What should I tell Washington?” he asked plaintively.
“Leave it to me,” said Tom. “Right now, you need to go upstairs and tell everybody that things are fine. We just had a little electrical problem.”
The base chief took charge, to the consul general’s relief. Tom summoned a CIA Technical Services team overnight from Beijing. The team tapped into the remaining wires, but they had gone dead. In the CIA’s workspace on the second floor, the technicians dismantled the walls to check for cameras or microphones. They found nothing. The Chinese evidently hadn’t been able to fish their wires past the metal lining. And they hadn’t penetrated the Acoustic Conference Room, where the base did its most sensitive work, or the classified computer system.
“Maybe we lucked out,” Tom told his CIA colleagues in the bubble after the frantic search ended. But he was haunted by the possibility that the Chinese had seen or heard something that might prove valuable.
He sent a quick flash cable home on the Restricted Handling channel. He received back an RH cable from Langley commending him for prompt, decisive action. It wasn’t until a day later, when he was alone in his office with his wife, that he let himself breathe.
“That was, uh, unusual,” he said. “Right on the line between near disaster and total disaster.”
“You did good,” she responded. “Iceman.”
The State Department lodged a protest with the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The Chinese government denied responsibility, though it offered no alternative explanation. Had an army of rats with tiny jackhammers burrowed through the concrete foundation of the building? State decided against issuing a public complaint. The Chinese had been caught red-handed; a public shaming would only create more problems.
Tom wanted to take the offensive. The Technical Services team widened the hole in the basement and sent down cameras, hoping to collect more Chinese surveillance gear. But the lines were dead, and any other equipment had been extracted.
Tom then proposed excavating the tunnel and sending a CIA Global Response Staff team down in hot pursuit of the Ministry of State Security. But Hendrick Hoffman, the chief of the East Asia Division, told him that would be a “cowboy move,” risky and insecure. Tongue in cheek, Tom proposed a vivid demonstration of America’s reaction: Widen the hole, enclose it in plastic and use it as a toilet.
Tom and his colleagues concluded that the best response would be to feed concrete through a tube into the small opening, pump it as deep as it would go, and then seal it up tight. The consulate’s maintenance department mixed the concrete in the basement, so the Chinese wouldn’t see, and siphoned it into the hole.
A Ministry of Public Security official appeared at the gate and requested entry for a building inspection, but the consul general reminded him tartly that the compound was sovereign American territory.
Tom and Sonia were the only consulate officers who knew that the breach had been disclosed by a “walk-in” from the MSS.
What to do about Chen, the deputy CG whose treachery had been proffered by the walk-in as a sign of his bona fides? Hoffman, back at Headquarters, wanted to put him under surveillance and wait for his next meeting with his handler. But the State Department nixed that. Too sensitive, too vulnerable, too much of a pain in the butt for an already frazzled consul general. State chose its favorite way of saying no: How would it look when it was published in The Washington Post?
Instead, Chen was quickly summoned to Beijing for a supposed meeting with the ambassador. He was greeted by a joint CIA-FBI team who said they had rock-solid evidence he had been recruited by the MSS. This wasn’t true, but Chen cracked and agreed to spill everything he knew in exchange for a reduced sentence.
The FBI at first wanted to double Chen back against the Chinese, but he was so jittery, the bureau decided he would break under the stress. Chen delivered what his inquisitors demanded: He provided a detailed account of his recruitment during his previous posting in Bangkok, including the honey trap that had snared him and the identity of the MSS case officer who had pitched him.
“All they saw was my Chinese skin,” Chen said during his interrogation in Beijing. “They targeted me because they thought they already owned me as a Chinese man.”
When Tom heard that comment, he remembered what Yu had said about how Chinese people were always Chinese. This racism was an MSS vulnerability, but Tom knew that it afflicted the CIA, too. He watched the way his wife was treated, how some other members of the station would stop talking when she came around. When he asked her about it, she just shrugged. Her parents were U.S. citizens, but one was always “African” and the other was “Chinese.” It couldn’t be fixed.
Chen was sent home on the next plane. He later agreed to a negotiated plea; in exchange for cooperation, he received a suspended jail sentence.
Tom had a team of watchers deployed on the ground and satellite eyes overhead to stake out Chen’s next scheduled meeting with his case officer. But the MSS officer was a no-show. They knew Chen was busted.
Tom Crane had punched his ticket. He had recruited a penetration agent inside his adversary’s spy service. Now he had to communicate with him and keep him alive.
In the paper bag that Tom had given his agent, he provided the simplest and most secure means for communicating: A pad to code and decode messages in an unbreakable cypher, and a secure radio frequency on which to exchange messages with the CIA. But for two months, the man vanished back into the anonymity of Chengdu.
Tom’s colleagues back home predicted that the walk-in would never make contact again. But he thought otherwise. In their momentary interaction, the Chinese spy had a rapturous look on his face, melded with his terror of discovery. He had said in his initial pitch that he needed money to fix a “woman problem,” but Crane guessed that like a gambler, he was aroused by his risk-taking, too. This man liked walking on the edge, and he’d be back for more.
“I love tunnels,” said a genial Hoffman, the East Asia chief, during a secure videoconference chat with Crane after the dust had settled. “They never work.”
And it was true: Tunnels had a poor history in modern espionage. The CIA had dug one to tap a Soviet Army communications line in East Berlin during the 1950s, and the Russians had used it to feed disinformation. The FBI had bored a shaft under the new Russian Embassy on Mount Alto in Washington during the 1980s, but the plot was discovered before the tunnel was finished. Now, the Chinese tunnel had reached a similar dead end — though, in truth, the CIA was lucky it was tipped off in time.
The tunnel discovery had turned Tom into a star. But it is a universal truth in the spy business, as in most aspects of life, that success breeds envy. Some of his colleagues thought his recruitment of the MSS volunteer who had brush-passed him on Renmin Road had been too easy, too perfect.
Tom dismissed the grumbling. The CIA was like high school, where you were surrounded by jealous kids and bullies. Nice people worked for the Commerce Department or the Bureau of Land Management. Colleagues wondered if he’d been more than lucky in Chengdu. Some even wondered if he had been a witting tool of the MSS.
The tunnel “mistake,” as MSS officials privately described it, was another blunder for a Chinese intelligence service that seemed in 1999 to be snakebit. The Politburo fired the ministry’s director. The new director, in turn, fired the head of the North America section. The People’s Liberation Army argued that a separate intelligence ministry shouldn’t exist at all, since the PLA’s Third Branch did the truly important work of signals intelligence, including the strange new wizardry known in English as “cyber.”
The only MSS officer who benefited from this latest stumble was Ma Wei, the deputy chief of the North America section, who was still known as “the American girl.” After the firings, she was promoted to chief of the section and immediately began what she called a “restructuring.”
“All our secrets were disclosed a decade ago by Yu Qiangsheng,” she told her colleagues in her maiden speech as chief of the section. The room was silent. “He shamed our service. Now, we need to create a new service untouched by his crimes.”
Ma was haunted by Yu. He had stolen not only the secrets of the MSS but also its soul. Every day he lived in exile in America was a reminder that the new China was unsteady. It was a toy of the West; it could be bought.
When the MSS chief mentioned Yu during a private lunch after Ma’s promotion, he was startled by the vehemence of her response. “I have a fervent desire to put a bullet in his head,” she said.
Ma set about building a new service. She thought the MSS was too timid and lazy. More Americans could be recruited if China acted more boldly. She reorganized her branch to better identify targets: The MSS had made a practice of scooping up vast quantities of defense and economic information and then sifting it for useful nuggets. It was antiquated, like panning for gold. Ma instead imposed what the CIA called “targeting” and “tasking.” She instructed her officers to identify people who had real secrets and pursue them.
The Chinese knew the essence of good tradecraft, but some people had forgotten. Ma reminded her colleagues of Sun Tzu’s advice to know their enemy and know themselves. She dropped 2,500-year-old field notes into her tradecraft lectures. “If the trees move, the enemy is approaching.” “Where birds congregate, the field is empty.” “If the birds take flight, beware of an ambush.” People weren’t always sure what she was talking about, but they liked it.
Ma thought her colleagues were too uptight. She encouraged them to relax. Failure was okay. A perfect score was a sign that you weren’t taking enough risks. She organized cocktail parties and karaoke nights at the ministry social club, and basketball and ping-pong games in the gym. She tried to make the compound at Xiyuan feel more like the college campus she remembered in Madison.
Ma referred to China’s slowly growing roster of American agents as “our dear friends.” Yes, most of the assets were still Chinese American, drawn from the easiest recruiting pool. But there were more needy and greedy Anglos, too. Ma had studied psychology as a graduate student; now she created a psychology unit in the North America section to understand people’s needs and vulnerabilities.
“Americans are born to expect success,” she said at the introductory psychology lecture. “But most Americans these days do not succeed as they hoped. When they reach forty-five years, they take stock: Their marriages are unhappy; their jobs are boring; money is scarce; debts are large; their parents are old and feeble; their children are disobedient. That is our moment, to reach out to our dear friends and find a way to provide what they are missing.”
Ma Wei didn’t tell her colleagues, but her life-cycle approach was classic CIA tradecraft, an espionage version of Gail Sheehy’s “Passages.” To the cadres of the MSS, bound by tradition and cut off from the West, the concepts sounded revolutionary.
Ma introduced another practice that proved devastatingly effective. She insisted that senior staff of the North America section reassess every known case in which the CIA had recruited a Chinese agent. She asked her team to look for patterns. How did the CIA’s recruits communicate with their handlers? How often were they in contact? What common features characterized the people who were recruited? What was the communications protocol? Were there any common internet addresses or radio frequencies?
As soon as the MSS found a pattern that was repeated, she advised, it could begin to crack the code. Her students listened.
Tom Crane’s agent in the MSS proved to be a stone-cold professional. Following their initial rendezvous at Xinglong Lake, Tom never had another face-to-face meeting with him. But after two months of silence, the agent sent an encrypted radio message using his one-time pad. He wanted to exchange new secrets for more money. The agency gave him a cryptonym, LCBRINK, and a “201” file, and began reconnoitering dead-drop sites where they could make exchanges.
The Cranes prepared each drop site meticulously. Satellite reconnaissance identified potential locations. Remote, but accessible; situated so that they allowed a few seconds of invisibility from any chance observer. The satellites were distant partners; they could watch the sites before the Cranes dropped a package, and then monitor the pickup. But the human factor was still decisive. Crane aborted one early drop because he felt a shadow of doubt that he was clean, even when technical surveillance gave a green light.
The Cranes were the only people in China who knew the CIA was running an MSS agent in Sichuan. For them, it was the closest thing to having a child. The agent was utterly dependent on them for safety and nurture; one clumsy moment and he would be doomed. It was strange, but what Tom loved about intelligence work was the intimacy of that bond.
“I know him,” Tom told his wife after LCBRINK made the third successful pickup and drop. “I’ve watched him move. I’ve seen his face. I know where he lives. I’ve seen his wife and his mistress. I know where he gambles. I know how crazy and needy he is. I don’t want him to get caught.”
“We’ll keep him dry,” said Sonia.
The Cranes were true partners. Tandem couples sometimes got so stressed they started running covert actions on each other, but the Cranes happily cohabited their secret compartment. Sonia had joined the agency as an analyst because of her fluent Chinese, but after she and Tom married, she received “hostile environment” training at Camp Peary and became a case officer. She was a natural operator, nimbler on the ground than Tom was.
CIA officers always live two lives. Tom had proposed to her in Chinese. She had laughed and answered “yes” in English. Some nights at home she sang to him in Portuguese. When they went to clubs, she could vamp like Lil’ Kim. When Tom asked her once in bed if she was a liar, she answered proudly, “Yes.”
Sonia alternated with her husband in making the drops. She moved effortlessly between disguises, altering her skin tone, clothing and posture so deftly that even her husband might not recognize her. She insisted on handling the most sensitive drop since the first meeting by the lake.
Headquarters had decided that after six months and three successful drops, LCBRINK should be given a direct covert communications device. It was a simple burst transmitter that uploaded the agent’s messages to a satellite and downloaded the agency’s instructions.
The cov-comm device was hidden in an artfully configured stock of pine wood, seemingly fallen from a tree, like those strewn across every park in Chengdu. The wooden fragment was indistinguishable from other sticks and branches on the ground except for a reddish fungus on its underside.
Sonia walked the taut wire of surveillance alone. The drop site was in a thickly forested park north of the Third Ring Road. Sonia circumnavigated the city several times, following the route she and her husband had mapped. She changed vehicles and directions many times, but more important, she changed her appearance, one hour in the guise of an older Chinese woman draped in a gray shawl; next as a younger woman wrapped in a silk headscarf; then as a slender man in a cloth cap and baggy jeans.
In this last disguise, as a youth on a leisurely stroll in the park, she approached the wooded area that was the drop zone. The tree branch with its electronic treasure was stuffed into the bag slung over her shoulder. She was clean. Her run had been perfect. She felt so dry she was fluffy. She walked toward the drop site.
A car was parked in the far distance; a red Honda Accord, with two people in the front seat. It was a new model, one just marketed in China. Ten minutes earlier, she had seen a white Accord, also with two occupants. Coincidence, maybe. Two new cars out driving in a scenic park. She walked toward the glen where she would drop the disguised tree branch. She steadied her gait, loping, boyish. Her heart pounded against the tight binding around her chest.
Sonia reached toward the bag for the covert communications device. As she did so, she took a breath and closed her eyes. Breathe, she told herself. Remember. Yu had told the Cranes that the Chinese lived for American mistakes; their advantage was in their numbers; they were everywhere; coincidence didn’t happen in their world.
In that silent moment, eyes wide shut, Sonia saw in her mind’s eye the image of the man she knew as LCBRINK, cuffed to an iron chair as he was interrogated. And she sensed, instantly, that she was about to deliver a death sentence.
She kept walking, easy steps, past the drop site and toward a clearing beyond, pausing occasionally to look at the trees, until she reached the south gate of the park and caught a bus back toward the city. Overhead reconnaissance photographs later confirmed that the two Hondas were part of the MSS motor pool.
“You saved his life,” Crane told his wife later in the ACR at the consulate, when he debriefed her about the run.
“This time,” she answered. “Next time, it’s your turn.”
Chengdu was a triumph for the Cranes. They asked to extend their tour when it ended after two years, but Headquarters wanted them back home to help Hoffman run the East Asia Division. Before Tom left, he revisited the concrete-filled opening of the Chinese tunnel to say a benediction; he rechecked the communications protocols and drop sites that would be handed off to the next base chief, who would take over his agent inside the MSS.
When the Cranes boarded the plane for the long trip back to Washington, the MSS agent was still operating, invisible and undetected. The ministry knew it had a leak, but it hadn’t yet found the pattern.
Tom Crane and his wife returned to China six years later. This time, Tom was appointed chief of operations in the Beijing station. The station chief at the time was an analyst rather than an operations officer, so Tom would effectively run clandestine activity in China. He would be a “declared” officer, officially part of the CIA. Sonia would not; that meant she would be taking more risks.
In the intervening years, the Cranes had grown up in the way a lucky couple can in middle age. The first two years back, Tom was a senior deputy in the East Asia Division, planning and running operations against Chinese targets around the world. They had then moved to Tokyo, where Tom, undercover as a U.S. trade official, became a “singleton,” a lone-wolf recruiter who traveled abroad on false passports and in disguise, pitching prospective Chinese-speaking agents.
The Cranes returned to Washington for another two years, as Tom continued the singleton role. He was the closer, the officer the agency sent in to complete big recruitments. He traveled to California to visit Yu, who was fading into a defector’s cantankerous dotage. The man was still an encyclopedia of Chinese tradecraft, but it was dated now, and sometimes he seemed to be repeating the same page.
Sonia had taken most of those six years off to start a family. Since leaving Chengdu, they’d had two daughters, now five and three, both with the easy adaptability of expat kids. Sonia knew she was starting to get restless when she began looking for gigs as a singer with an Afro-Portuguese band in D.C.
Tom went ahead of the family to set up shop in Beijing. He flew into a China that had hurtled forward in the years he had been away. Beijing Capital International Airport was so dense with flights that it had added a second terminal and was about to open a third; China was already planning another, entirely new airport about forty miles south in Daxing.
The country’s growth astonished him; it was something you couldn’t fathom from intelligence reports. Tom did the math: A country growing ten percent a year roughly triples its wealth in a decade. That was what had happened to China. Everything old had become new again.
Like everything else in Beijing, the U.S. Embassy was bursting at the seams; work had started on a fancy new compound northeast of the city center, but it wouldn’t be ready for another few years. The old building was in the Jianguomenwai compound, three miles east of Tiananmen Square; the dowdy building had once been the embassy of Pakistan. The CIA station competed for space with every other American agency and interest group that wanted a piece of the new China.
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The family had been assigned a comfortable, soulless apartment in a compound near the embassy. It was late winter when Tom moved in, and Beijing was dry and bitterly cold. From his window, he could see the leafless trees that lined the diplomatic area, bending against the winds gusting in from the mountains north and west of the city. Cold weather was miserable, but it was good for spies. Watchers hated to stay out on the streets. Disguises were easier in bulky coats and hats. Cold people made mistakes.
“I hate this apartment,” Sonia announced the day after she arrived that spring. She stood at the windows, looking at the dull vista of the diplomatic quarter; it had the charm of a well-tended prison.
“What do you think they’re beaming at us?” she said, rapping at the windowpane. “Lasers or microwaves or both?”
Tom put a finger to his lips and pointed to the ceiling.
“No, I want them to hear,” said Sonia, eyes flashing. “We have two young children. Their health is precious. Five people who served in the U.S. Embassy Beijing since 2000 have been diagnosed with melanomas. Did you know that? We had a briefing at the State Department a week ago. Five people! Everyone should know that.”
Tom nodded his head. Nobody signed up to get cancer.
“You’re right, sweetheart. I hope they’re listening.” He raised his voice. “If anything happens to my wife or children while we’re here, I will hold the government of China legally and morally responsible. Tongshi! Comrades, you don’t want me as an enemy.”
The wild card for Tom wasn’t the Chinese economic landscape. It was counter-terrorism, which had become a near-obsession for the CIA in 2006 and consumed a surprisingly large part of his time as chief of operations. Instead of recruiting and running Chinese spies, he was meeting with them to discuss counter-terrorism cooperation.
The Chinese were beginning a savage repression campaign against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Of course, they claimed that the Uyghur rebels were really an al-Qaeda front. The MSS offered to share intelligence from their penetrations of the groups and asked for reciprocal CIA help. Tom thought it was a poisoned cup, but he drank.
Tom’s chief liaison partner was Ma Wei, now one of the deputy chiefs of the Ministry of State Security. She had been promoted two years earlier from her post as chief of the North America branch. She was still the ministry’s avenging angel. In addition to running aggressive operations against the United States, Ma was said to be cracking down on the corruption that had been endemic in the MSS — and making enemies in the process.
Tom studied Ma Wei’s impressive biography in his briefing book on MSS leadership. “I wonder if she’s recruitable,” he asked himself. That would be his “extra credit” assignment in Beijing, he decided. To draw the very best talent in the MSS into a conversation with the CIA.
Tom met her at a one-day counter-terrorism seminar the MSS was hosting for the visiting CIA director. The participants’ fervid denunciation of Muslim extremism was predictable; Tom approached Ma during a coffee break and began a conversation about the welcome arrival of spring. She chatted back, amiably. She wasn’t pretending to be shy in English anymore. Crane sought her out at the next coffee break and invited her to join him for lunch; to his surprise, she agreed.
Miss Ma proposed that they meet on “neutral” ground, in a private room at the Beijing Hotel on the grand boulevard known as Chang An, next to Tiananmen Square. The hotel was an old Soviet-era monstrosity and every room had been wired for sound for decades, but Tom didn’t object. It was a start. The next time he would choose the lunch spot.
The “American girl” welcomed him. She had dropped her black sneakers and ponytail now that she was a senior cadre. She dressed fashionably in clothes she had bought from Zara, which had just opened a branch in Beijing. Crane planned to do the talking; now that he was a “declared” officer, part of his job was carrying the flag.
But it was Miss Ma who steered the conversation. She asked Crane if he missed Chengdu. His CIA cover there was blown, obviously, now that he was a declared CIA officer in Beijing. She apologized for the “tunnel incident.” It was a mistake, she said; the chief of the MSS office there had been replaced.
“How did you know the hole was there?” she asked sweetly, with what seemed almost a wink. “It was a great secret.”
“Lucky guess,” answered Tom, winking back and then changing the subject. He wondered if she knew anything real; probably she was just probing.
“And your wife. Does she work for the CIA?”
Tom hesitated, only for an instant. “No, thank goodness,” he replied. “She’s a consular officer.”
Tom debated whether he should meet her a second time, and then he made an invitation for another lunch, “early next year.” She accepted.
Why was Crane optimistic that his outreach to Ma Wei was worth the trouble? China watchers back at Langley thought she might be on a collision course with the new minister of public security. He had made his reputation (and fortune) running party operations in regions that had begun to boom in the 1990s and early 2000s, moving from oil-rich Liaoning to Sichuan, which was gushing with money from new start-ups, and finally, back to Beijing to run security.
The security chief was a tough, canny operator. Like everyone in his generation, he had survived the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. As he rose, he made common cause with the wealthy children of the party elite, doing them favors, helping them launder the profits of China’s roaring boom. He was a very different animal from Ma Wei; where she had made her name through finesse and precision, he understood raw power.
One detail in the security chief’s résumé jumped out at Crane. He was very close to the Communist Party secretary in Shanghai, a former minister of construction who had been appointed to the Politburo in 2002. This man had spent his career rehabilitating his image and ingratiating himself with party cronies who were becoming rich. His family name was Yu; the CIA files said that he was the younger brother of Yu Qiangsheng.
So it was with some curiosity that Tom met Ma for a second lunch in February 2007. He proposed a chic restaurant frequented by art dealers and collectors in a new office tower east of the city center. Crane said his wife helped him pick it out. The place featured spicy dishes from Yunnan province in the far south, near the Laotian border.
Ma startled him with her first question.
“How is Sonia?” she asked pleasantly. “Is she enjoying her consular work?”
“Loves it,” said Tom quickly. “The kids are happy, too. Thanks for asking.”
Ma seemed almost relaxed over lunch. She ordered a mushroom dish that was a house specialty and said she loved it. She admired the art on the walls, especially a retro-Maoist painting that showed workers painted in day-glow yellow and red and the word “art” painted in the corner.
Tom tested the limits. He mentioned a story that had just appeared in the South China Morning Post about new worries in the party about corruption. It had obviously been a leak from party officials. What did she think?
Ma parried that one. “Hard to say. I didn’t see the story.” And to a question about the charismatic new party chief in Chongqing, rumored to be campaigning to become the next general secretary of the party, she demurred, as well. “I cannot say I know this gentleman personally.”
Tom asked her when they finished the meal if she would join him a third time; she answered that she would see if it was “convenient.” He wondered if he would ever hear back.
And why was Ma Wei willing to meet with the CIA officer Thomas Crane? That was a more complicated question.
Ma had taught her generation of MSS officers how to interrogate facts. The ministry was a hoarder: It stored every audio record, every intercepted communication, every case of shadowing known or suspected CIA officers throughout China. Ma was especially curious when MSS operations failed. She wanted to know why.
So, of course, she had wanted to understand the famous “tunnel mistake” in Chengdu. Evidently, there had been a leak, but the ministry had never discovered who it was. So, Ma had decided to interrogate the facts of that case.
The tunnel had been discovered in 1999. The CIA must have learned of it hours before. She instructed her analysts to look for anything unusual that week in the Chengdu office of the ministry: Were there any sudden absences or breaches of duty? Then she asked for the surveillance logs on Thomas Crane, who she now understood must have been base chief. Surveillance teams had followed him all over town but never caught him at a drop or a meeting.
Ma’s research team examined a dozen suspects in the MSS office in Chengdu, tracked their movements and tapped their phones. But they had come up empty-handed there, too. So, eventually, Ma had put the case aside.
Ma’s interest revived after her first lunch with Crane. There was something about his odd, momentary stutter before he insisted that his wife didn’t work for the CIA that turned on a light. Of course: Crane’s wife was a deep-cover officer and part of the team that serviced the MSS agent.
Ma began anew, looking for evidence about Sonia Machel. She had her team search the audio tapes from the aborted penetration of the secure area of the consulate. That operation hadn’t produced much, because the microphones hadn’t reached to where the base’s officers discussed sensitive matters. But Sonia Machel’s voice was distinct among those allowed to enter the base. She was clearly an operations officer, under deep cover.
Ma’s team looked for Sonia by combing through thousands more photos and audio recordings. The search required hundreds of people; it was a marriage of old-school and new. But finally, the facts confessed. There were photos of Sonia taken by officers in two Hondas from the MSS, arriving at a glen in the forest and then leaving. The watchers had checked; she had never made a drop; it was just a walk in the woods.
Ma suspected otherwise. She instructed her army of analysts to scrub every surveillance image from every entrance and exit to the park for the following week, looking for any member of the MSS staff in Chengdu who entered the area where Sonia had been. And soon enough, they found it. The agent had come looking for the drop that Sonia aborted. A long-distance camera captured him searching on the ground for a stick that wasn’t there.
Tom Crane’s chief worry in the Beijing station was a tall, slender Chinese American officer named Arthur Li. He was a Yale graduate, an agency throwback in that respect. He came to the CIA with his own version of “great expectations.” His father was a prominent MIT-trained chemical engineer; his mother was a concert violinist. Perhaps he suffered from this burdensome background, but Arthur Li proved to be a complainer and an underperformer. He was a “declared” officer, so he didn’t do much spying himself, and he seemed bored by his other duties.
“That kid is trouble,” said Sonia, after he had behaved with a sullen lack of interest at a small dinner the Cranes gave at their apartment. As in most things, she was right.
Tom gave him a negative fitness report in his annual review, and Li complained bitterly to the station chief. He claimed that Crane had a racial bias, stating in a written response: “Mr. Crane doesn’t trust me because I’m Chinese. He won’t give me serious assignments.” The station chief, being a modern bureaucrat, advised Tom that it would be very unfortunate, indeed, if Li filed a discrimination complaint with the inspector general.
So, Tom gave the young officer more responsibility. He wasn’t about to send him out on operations. But he brought him into the station’s inner circle, where he had access to information about the agents the CIA was running in China. The files he saw didn’t have agents’ real names, to be sure, only cryptonyms. But they contained some details about the tradecraft the CIA used to contact each one.
“Thank you for recognizing my abilities,” said Li when Tom offered him this additional responsibility. And he seemed to become more interested in his work. But after six months, he grew listless again and asked for a larger role in reviewing operations. The next major operation was a sensitive drop that involved Sonia. Tom flatly refused Li’s request.
Li’s tour ended a few months later, and he departed Beijing. He had a vituperative exit interview with the station chief, who by this time had concluded that he was a spoiled brat. Li refused to shake Tom’s hand on the way out the door, but his sullen temper did him no good. Hoffman, the East Asia chief, warned him about poor performance when he returned home, and the inspector general’s office, after a brief review, rejected his discrimination claims. A year later, informed that he would not be promoted, he began the long resignation process at the CIA.
On a day in the summer of 2007, near the end of the Cranes’ second year in Beijing, Chengdu suddenly and uncharacteristically turned up in high volume in National Security Agency monitoring of the signals traffic from the MSS headquarters in Beijing.
The Chengdu office then went into lockdown — with no messages going in or out. The CIA base in Chengdu tried to contact its only agent on the books there, LCBRINK, but the cov-comm message went unanswered at first. A day later, a message was sent in plain, unencrypted text. It was zàijiàn, which means goodbye.
The agency queried Taiwanese intelligence, which had good coverage in Sichuan. Were they aware of anything unusual involving the security service in Chengdu? The Taiwanese reported there was a rumor in senior party circles that the MSS office had arrested one of its mid-level officers.
The Cranes spent their last days in the Beijing station with a sense of dread. They had been considering whether to extend their tour for another year and had promised to let headquarters know soon. Finally, a week before their decision was due, the hammer fell.
On a Restricted Handling channel, Tom received a photograph of the courtyard at MSS headquarters at Xiyuan that had been taken by a satellite operated by the National Reconnaissance Office.
It showed a man strapped to a chair in the court of the ministry, naked from the waist up. The exquisite precision of the image showed the prisoner’s face. He had been badly beaten, but Tom could recognize his features. It was the Chinese man who had dropped a note into his pocket eight years before and had spied for the CIA ever since.
The agony showed on the prisoner’s face, and it was felt by Tom and Sonia in their hearts. They ended their tour at the end of the summer and went home. And the bad times were just beginning.
To be continued.
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