Typhoon (2008)

by Charles Cumming

  Marston stirred. “So you’re saying these guys are ripe for revolution?”

  Josh risked a gentle put-down. “Well I wouldn’t want us to get too ahead of ourselves, but you would certainly have to look at the Uighur population and conclude that the notion of separation from the state wouldn’t be a particularly hard sell.”

  “Does somebody want to put that in plain English?”

  Jenson defended his man against yet another Marston attack. The former Assistant Secretary of Defense was incapable of conducting himself in a professional environment without finding at least one individual to pick on. Usually it was Sally-Ann, but in the late twentieth century’s rampant climate of political correctness, he didn’t want to appear sexist. “What Josh is saying, Bill, is that the Uighurs are sick of being treated as third-class citizens.” Sally-Ann looked up at Josh and did something with her eyes which he interpreted as sympathetic. “Fifty years ago, Xinjiang was their country. When Mao came to power in ‘49, Uighurs made up—what?—about eighty per cent of the population. Today that figure stands at somewhere nearer fifty. There’s been a deliberate policy of Han immigration to dilute the ethnic group.”

  “Stalin had the same routine,” Lambert muttered. “Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. Same routine.” Marston, a fellow Cold Warrior, made a noise which confirmed this. He liked to be reminded of the good old days.

  “Stalin had nothing on these guys,” Josh replied. If his voice had assumed a tone of mild insolence it was because he no longer cared what Marston thought of him. He just wanted to get to the nub of the issue and then break for lunch. “The Communist Party hands out financial rewards to Han who intermarry with Uighur Muslims. They’ve also waived the one-child policy for their offspring.”

  “Off spring who are registered as Chinese,” Jenson added, continuing to support his boy.

  “What you’re talking about is a systematic attack on Uighur religion, Uighur resources, Uighur freedom of expression.” Josh paused briefly to gather his thoughts. “Most senior officials and all of the military commanders in Xinjiang are Han stooges appointed by Beijing. The Han control almost every element of the local economy, an economy geared exclusively to the needs of China. This builds a huge amount of resentment, a resentment not solely confined to the Turkic population.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Lambert asked.

  “Don’t forget that we’re talking about Sufi Muslims here. The examples of fundamentalism seen across the Islamic world in recent years, most notably in Algeria with Hezbollah and in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, have thus far failed to manifest themselves in Xinjiang. The Uighur people are not by nature extremist. That said, some of them fought with the mujahaddin and Beijing has long been concerned about cross-pollination between the Taliban and the Uighur minority. Any kind of trade in weapons across the Afghan- Chinese border, for example, would be virtually unpoliceable. And, of course, those same Taliban have strategic knowledge of fighting the Soviets, knowledge which they might be only too happy to pass on to their Muslim brothers in China. Allow me to finish.”

  Marston had begun to speak, but such was the force and confidence of Josh’s request that he was silenced. The CEO of one of the largest corporations in the United States of America, a man who had supped with Kissinger and Gorbachev, was briefly humbled.

  “I also wanted to add something here about Saudi Arabia.” Josh cleared his throat and saw that Sally-Ann was looking at him. “We believe that the more the Chinese repress the Muslims of Xinjiang, the more the Saudis will be inclined to give financial assistance to their cause. Again, you only have to look at their support for the Afghan resistance between ‘80 and ‘89 for evidence of what they’re prepared to do. Now this is vitally important as far as China is concerned. Saudi Arabia is a source of oil for China, and China needs to keep that oil flowing in order to facilitate its rapid economic growth. In short, Beijing cannot afford to upset the House of Saud.”

  “I know the feeling,” Marston muttered.

  It was an impressive monologue, produced in its latter stages entirely without notes. Sally-Ann found a more explicit look of admiration for Josh and the young man from the CIA felt buoyed. Then Miles’s voice came thumping out of the speakers.

  “So what does all this add up to?” he asked.

  Josh and Jenson caught each other’s eye. The question was rhetorical and they knew that Miles had every intention of answering it. He was about to make the CIA’s case for TYPHOON.

  “What it adds up to is an opportunity for the American government to run a clandestine operation in mainland China aimed at bringing about the restoration of democracy in an independent Eastern Turkestan. And, as I understand it, you gentlemen have kindly offered us the full co-operation of your organization in pursuit of that goal.”

  Miles’s words substantially shifted the tone of the meeting. Everything was now political. Lambert and Marston leaned forward in their chairs and tried to look like patriots.

  “We’re here to help,” Marston said.

  “And that’s great. But why do we need your help, sir? Why is this meeting today necessary?” Again, the questions were self-evidently rhetorical. “Well, I guess on one level it’s pretty obvious.” He took a sip of water. “If organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, or Freedom House, want to help run fair elections in, say, Central Africa, maybe try to bring democracy to eastern Europe, then that’s something that the Company has always been able to help them with.” Miles’s mouth was dry and he went for more water. Maybe last night’s hangover was finally kicking in. “But trying to pull that kind of thing off in China is infinitely more complex. Beijing has always been suspicious of non-profit organizations operating within its borders. Fact is, they don’t get in. You might find a few Christian missionaries operating in major cities, some of them even on our books, but as far as China is concerned, the Agency’s hands are tied. There are just too many obstacles to running effective campaigns. So we have to resort to other methods. We’ve had to think out of the box.”

  Both Lambert and Marston looked at Jenson as if they were now expected to speak. Instead, aware of the gathering silence in Washington, Miles carried on.

  “What we want to suggest to you today, gentlemen, is a strategy on several fronts. Dick, Josh, you OK if I go ahead?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Miles glanced at a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him on which he had scrawled some bullet-pointed notes. “Now it’s my understanding that Macklinson has offices outside of Beijing in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Harbin, Golmud, Xining and Chengdu. Is that correct?”

  “That is correct,” Lambert told him.

  “Well then here’s what we would like to suggest.”

  18

  MARYLAND

  Sally-Ann McNeil is nowadays a mother of three children—two boys, one girl—living in a quiet suburb of Maryland, married to a balding, wealthy, not exactly charismatic tax attorney named Gerry. Their house, with its low white roof and its sprinkler on the lawn, is no more than an hour’s drive from the airport and resembles every other house on the anonymous residential street on which they have chosen to make their home. Sally-Ann works part-time at a local real estate office, offers private tuition to dyslexic schoolchildren and plays golf with her friend Mary up to three times a week.

  “Bill Marston got me into it,” she says. “If he was still alive today, I could kick his ass.”

  It took a while to track Sally-Ann down. Her name has changed through marriage and, in the wake of TYPHOON, she was understandably reluctant to stick her head above the parapet. We spoke one weekday afternoon in 2006 in a warm, plant-filled conservatory at the back of her house when Gerry was away at work and the eldest of their children at school. If she was nervous about talking to a nosey writer, she did not betray it, although the breaking of her long silence was something for which she had clearly been preparing herself for some time.

  “To be honest, it was all so long ago. I thoug
ht nobody would ever ask,” she said, letting the two-week-old baby she was holding in her arms suckle on a manicured finger. “It was part of my job to be anonymous, to be the note taker, the assistant who fixed coffee. Nobody even seemed to notice I was there.” She looked sideways out of the window and her gaze seemed regretful. “I knew right away that I was carrying a pretty burdensome secret. I’ve never told Gerry a thing, you know? I figured the day that I did would be the day that they came looking for me.”

  Sally-Ann now began to relate what Miles had said on the long-distance line as the Washington meeting developed either side of lunch. Her voice was low and steady and I was impressed both by her memory and by her grasp of the political ramifications of the discussion. In common with most Europeans over the previous five or six years, I had tended to underestimate the intelligence of the average Bush-voting American, but Sally-Ann was as lucid and as perceptive as I could have wished.

  “What you have to remember is that Bill Marston was a politician first and a businessman second,” she said. “With Mike Lambert it was the other way around.” I was taking notes and my pen ran out of ink. She was still talking as I swapped it for a biro in my jacket pocket. “Both of them had this image of themselves as patriots, when in fact they were just ignorant, ambitious neocons. I guess you’ve seen it a lot in the past few years. Throwbacks from a different era with little or no understanding of how anybody east of New York really behaves. Men of money and power whose sole objective is to make America richer and more powerful than she already is. So when this articulate, seemingly well-informed spy from Hong Kong started to suggest using Macklinson hardware and know-how to get access into mainland China, they both just started to glow. The plan was so crazy, but it was perfect. They were going to conceal explosives, weapons, cellphones, laptop computers, printers, photocopiers, even Korans, in Macklinson freight shipments coming in by air or sea from the United States.

  Coolidge knew we had contracts running in dozens of Chinese cities, including four, I think, in Xinjiang itself, and others just over the border in Gansu and Qinghai. He proposed funding the setting up of English-language schools on site, nominally for teaching Chinese-speaking employees how to communicate with their American bosses, but in reality as cover for CIA teachers in Xinjiang and surrounding provinces to recruit disaffected laborers for the creation of civil strife.”

  “Some of those teachers got caught,” I muttered.

  “Sure,” she replied, as if this wasn’t news to her. “Then they sent out literally hundreds of video cameras for distribution among the peasant underclass so they could record the riots when they took place, with the idea of exerting extra pressure on Beijing through the subsequent outrage of the international community. I think maybe that was one idea that actually worked, right, because I saw a news report on CNN.” I nodded, unsure whether CNN had covered the same riot story as the one picked up by the Washington Post in the summer of 2003, when video footage of a pitched battle between disgruntled peasants and gangs employed by a Chinese electricity company was leaked to the Post by a farmer. The film showed a small group of peasants who had refused to abandon their land being attacked by a gang armed with pipes and shovels. “And then of course they were going to fill Macklinson with deep-cover CIA guys who would nominally be working on road or rail construction projects but would in fact be running agents across the entirety of north-west China. It was all on an unbelievable scale. Coolidge talked about encouraging Saudi funding using ‘well-established channels,’ about the need to identify and fund a Uighur leader at the head of an Eastern Turkestan government-in-exile. They even talked, at that early stage, about recruiting Uighur pilgrims when they travelled to Mecca. It was very imaginative, very persuasive. Yet even as I was listening to it all, with everybody going into detail and new ideas springing up all the time, I remember thinking, How can it be that this morning neither Bill Marston nor Mike Lambert could point to Xinjiang on a map? Yet here they are signing up a publicly listed company to a top-secret CIA project which nearly bankrupted its operations in Asia.”

  “Oil,” I said, because, when it came to TYPHOON, oil was the answer to almost everything.

  “I guess you’re right.” Sally-Ann’s middle child, a blond-haired toddler called Karl who was watching television in the next room, suddenly waddled in and asked for some fruit juice. She fetched it for him and then returned to the conservatory carrying a plate of apparently home-baked cookies. As if she had been turning the idea over in her mind, she said, “I think Mike was always a lot smarter than Bill, y’know? The top guys at Macklinson were almost always figureheads, former government officials who lent a certain kind of gravitas and credibility to the boardroom. Men like Mike Lambert were the ones making the decisions. He’d been with the company from the age of twenty-two. Now he’s worked his way to the top. And I definitely think you’re right when you say that it was the prospect of the oil and gas in Xinjiang that made him go along with it. That was the quid pro quo with the CIA as far as he was concerned. You scratch our back now and we’ll scratch yours later. You could actually see him envisaging an independent Xinjiang run by a puppet government of the United States. That was how delusional they were. Macklinson sweeping up contracts to build pipelines, refineries, road networks, hotels in the desert …”

  Sally-Ann suddenly looked tired and I realized that she had probably been up most of the night feeding her baby. She laid the child in a crib on the floor and I wondered whether this was my cue to leave. We had been talking for several hours.

  “What time is Gerry due back?” I asked.

  She looked at her watch. “In about a half-hour.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything else you can remember?”

  She looked directly at me, as if she knew what I was angling for. The best journalists already know the answers to half the questions they want to ask. A contact had placed Kenneth Lenan in Garden Road on the night of the conference call and I needed that information confirmed.

  “Well, there was one last thing,” she said. I picked up one of the cookies and took a bite out of it in an effort not to appear too eager. “Towards about four o’clock, a second man joined Coolidge in the booth and started to take part in the conversation.”

  “An Englishman?” I asked, just to help her along.

  “Sure, an Englishman. How did you know that?”

  “Go on.”

  “I can’t remember his name. Only that he had one of those typical British accents, you know? A little bit superior, a little bit upper class.”

  “Could his name have been Kenneth Lenan?”

  “That’s right.” Sally-Ann’s voice leaped to such an extent that the carefully swaddled baby stirred and moaned. “Kenneth Lenan. Sounded like a member of the British Royal family. Real snooty.”

  “That’s the one.” I was smiling to myself. “Lenan was Coolidge’s contact in MI6, the British end of TYPHOON. What happened?”

  “Well, he just kind of showed up. Miles was in the middle of talking about some of the terrorist activities that had been happening on Urumqi public transportation and he suddenly announces that somebody else was going to be joining us.”

  “Did that surprise Jenson? How did Josh react?”

  Sally-Ann appeared to struggle for the memory here, which suggested to me that Lenan’s appearance had been preordained. “No, I think they kind of just ran with it,” she said. “We’d all been there so long it didn’t seem weird that someone should be coming in at that point. I guess we’d lost sight of the fact that it was maybe three or four o’clock in the morning over in Hong Kong and that for somebody from MI6 to be sitting in with Miles was not unusual.”

  “So Miles acknowledged that he was from British intelligence?”

  “Yup.”

  “And what did Lenan say?”

  “Far as I can remember, the tone of the conversation became a little bit—how can I put it?—triumphalist. I guess the point was to show Macklinson how
serious the Agency was about TYPHOON and how far down the line they already were in terms of planning. Coolidge introduced Lenan and said they were about to run a particular agent into Xinjiang, a professor of something or other who’d just come over from China. It sounded kind of far-fetched to me but Bill was real impressed.”

  This astonished me. “They were talking about Wang already, even at that stage?”

  “Who?”

  “Wang Kaixuan. A Han academic from Urumqi. He was recruited by Lenan and sent back into Xinjiang to organize a network of separatist radicals.”

  “He was the one?” Sally-Ann was frowning. It was all starting to fall into place. She looked down at the baby and said, “Well it certainly sounds like the same person. Coolidge was real excited by it. Said this guy had just fallen into their laps.”

  “What about Lenan? What did he say?”

  From the front of the house I could hear what sounded like a car pulling up in the drive. It might have been on one of the neighbouring properties, or somebody turning around in the road, but I was concerned that Gerry had returned home early and would now interrupt this last vital stage of our conversation. I had a flight to catch to Beijing the next day and this would be my last chance to talk to Sally-Ann for several weeks.

  “He was more measured,” she said, “like he was too superior to get excited about it. You know how a certain type of English person can be like that? A little condescending, like everything is beneath their dignity?” I smiled. “From what I remember Lenan kind of picked up where Coolidge left off. Said he had just gotten back from Taiwan where he’d debriefed the agent and that it ‘was indeed very encouraging news,’ or some shit like that. Said that Wang represented the new China, was a forward-thinking democrat, a man of hope. Kind of thing that made Bill Marston drool. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but in some ways it sounded as though the British guy would have preferred not to be there.” Sally-Ann pushed a twist of hair behind her ear. “Makes me wonder why Miles called him in.”