Their meeting came under the well-honed rule of Total Deniability. There would be no record kept of the secure-line phone calls to set up the meeting or its purpose. The flight plan and the passenger manifest were classified. Only Porter Goss and John Scarlett knew the purpose of the trip. Senior diplomats at the State Department in Washington and the Foreign Office in London had deliberately been kept out of the loop so that they could truthfully deny any knowledge of the mission.
Dagan had familiarized himself with Mossad’s profile of Qiao Shi and the ultimate control he had over the activities of five spying organizations: ILD, the International Liaison Department, was engaged in covert activities primarily directed against the United States; MID, the Military Intelligence Department, targeted the military capabilities of America, Great Britain, and other member states of the European Union; MSS, the Ministry of State Security, handled all counterintelligence within China; STD, the Special Technical Department of the Ministry of State Security, who had helped carry out the theft from Los Alamos, also collated all signals traffic from Chinese embassies overseas; and NCNA, a news service reporting on Chinese affairs and also a cover for CSIS spies abroad.
CSIS had its own buildings in Beijing. Counterintelligence was housed in a four-story structure on West Qiananmen Street; foreign intelligence operated from a modern building near the city’s main railway station. But the major activities of the several thousand men and women CSIS employed were coordinated from inside the compound at Zhongnanhai, where the Chinese leadership lived and worked. Next to the prime minister’s office was a single-story, squarely built building with the traditional curved, red-tiled roof and a paved area containing a helicopter pad and parking space for cars. The building’s roof was festooned with aerials. An American satellite’s photograph revealed the building had an inner courtyard with an ornamental pond and a landscaped miniature garden. Qiao Shi’s private office was the only one with direct access to the courtyard.
It was from there that he ran intelligence networks that extended across the Pacific into the United States and Europe, into the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Japan. At his command was an army of spies and informers and an unrivaled budget to maintain them.
His entire career had been based on adroit, low-key moves, climbing up through one ministry’s bureaucracy to another. His command of languages—he spoke French, Japanese, and Korean—had brought him to the Foreign Ministry. As a diplomat he had traveled widely before being recalled to a senior position in the Ministry. In 1980, he had been appointed by Deng Xiaoping as head of state security. Deng had died, but Qiao’s power remained undimmed: he knew all the secrets, the peccadillos, and other personal shortcomings of the old men of Zhongnanhai, the last survivors of the Long March of 1934 when they had made an unforgettable two-year journey of six thousand miles across mountain ranges and provinces larger than most European nations; it had been not only a strategic military retreat from the terrible reality of brother killing brother but a major migration leading to eventual nationhood for a new China.
One of the first decisions of Mao Tse-tung after he proclaimed the birth of the Communist state on October 1, 1949, was to create a leadership compound in the lea of the Forbidden City from where the emperors had ruled for seven hundred years. Qiao Shi had helped to turn it into one of the most fortified areas on earth. There were guard posts in the most unexpected places: cut into the trunks of trees with each niche just large enough for a man, or concealed within shrubbery. Sensors, tripwires, and body-heat-sensing cameras proliferated. No aircraft was permitted to overfly, and only helicopters, ferrying the old men to and from their summer palaces in the hills to the west of the city, came and went. In the compound they lived along the eastern shore of the lake in the center of the compound. Many of the homes were palaces, often with thirty or more bedrooms, magnificent salons, and indoor swimming pools. Furnished with artefacts removed from the Forbidden City, each mansion had its retinue of servants and guards who lived on the north side of the lake in several barracks screened by vegetation. There were over a hundred varieties of trees and shrubs planted around the compound as a reminder of those the old men had seen on the Long March. The lake itself was filled with carp. Mao had initially ordered a hundred thousand; over the years the number had increased, some said to several million. More certain was that the water was dark with their feces, and a team of gardeners were employed to constantly remove it. The few foreigners who had been admitted to Zhongnanhai had said there was an unpleasant smell from the lake.
