The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  “And when the Americans counterattack, when they destroy our navy, what will the people say then?”

  “The Americans won’t attack us, Comrade Zhang. The world won’t allow it.”

  “Perhaps the world won’t stop it.”

  “We will push them once more, just once, and then give them a way out.”

  “What do you mean, push them? Speak clearly now.”

  The moment he’d been working toward for all these months had arrived, Li knew. He explained his plan. When he was finished, the room was silent.

  “And you think the Americans won’t respond.”

  “As long as they understand that we don’t intend to invade Taiwan, they’ll accept our response as justified. They know they’ve overstepped their bounds even if they won’t admit it. Besides, our action will give them a new respect for our capabilities.”

  Zhang pounded a fist against the table. “Comrade Li, go back to your tanks and leave strategy to wiser men. We’ve gone up the mountain twice now, first with the agreement with Iran and then with our missile tests. Now you want us to go up a third time. We will surely encounter the tiger.”

  “The Americans aren’t the tiger. Our people are the tiger, Minister Zhang. If we don’t defend the honor of the Chinese nation, they won’t forgive us.”

  “The honor of the Chinese nation?”

  “Perhaps you’ve forgotten what those words mean.”

  “Because I’m not a warmonger?”

  Xu pushed himself to his feet. “Ministers. We are all servants of the people. There is no need for this. Now. I have decided.”

  “You have decided?” Zhang couldn’t hide his astonishment at the old man’s tone.

  “I have, Economics Minister. Am I not the general secretary?”

  Xu paused. And Li realized that the old lion was enjoying himself. For years, Zhang had usurped Xu’s power, leaving Xu as a figurehead. Now Li’s challenge to Zhang had given Xu a taste of his lost power. So Xu’s next words didn’t surprise Li.

  “General Li. Please use our forces to carry out the plan you’ve outlined.”

  “Thank you, General Secretary.” This time, Li didn’t even bother to look at Zhang as he walked out of the room.

  Outside the hall, Li’s limousine waited to ferry him to his offices. As he trotted toward it, another limousine pulled up. General Baije Chen, head of the PLA’s intelligence directorate, jumped out.

  “Minister. I’m sorry to disturb you. There’s something you need to see. May we speak alone?”

  “As you wish.” Li followed Baije into the parking lot beside the hall. Whatever Baije wanted, it must be important. He lived on pots of green tea and rarely left his office. When they were well away from the entrance, Baije handed Li two sheets of paper, one in English, the other in Chinese.

  “As you can see, it’s from our contact at the American embassy—”

  Li raised a finger to his lips. He’d read the note for himself. When he was done, he had to call on all his discipline to keep from shouting curses at the sky. All his work, all his planning, and now this? A traitor among them?

  “When did this come in?”

  “This morning.”

  “And it’s reliable?”

  “Yes, General.”

  Nearly a year before, Matt Kahn, a Marine guard at the American embassy, had fallen hard for Hua, a waitress in Sanlitun, a northeast Beijing neighborhood where expats gathered to drink cheap beer and watch day-old football and soccer. Only after they had been together for three months did the unfortunate Marine discover that his girl Hua was actually a boy named Hu. By the time the Beijing police arrived at Hu’s apartment, Kahn had gouged out one of Hu’s eyes and both of his testicles. The officers called in their captain, who saw the situation’s potential as soon as he learned where Kahn worked. Within an hour, the police had sent the case to the Second Directorate, who offered Kahn a choice. He could face a court-martial and public humiliation on two continents. Or he could give the Chinese a peek at the embassy’s intelligence files, whatever he could get in a quick one-time sweep.

  “It will take only a few minutes,” the Second Directorate colonel told Kahn. “And then all this”—he gestured to the slim, hairless man in the bloody dress in the corner—“will be over.” For Kahn, the choice was no choice at all.

  But Kahn realized too late that spying was easier to get into than out of. The colonel came back to him a month later, and a month after that, each time demanding more information. Now Kahn wished he’d taken his punishment at the beginning instead of stepping into this pit. Three times, he put his pistol into his mouth and wished he had the guts to pull the trigger. But he didn’t. Meanwhile, he needed to keep the Chinese happy. And so twice a month he filled a flash drive with all the files he could get and passed them to the Second Directorate.

  This time, the files included Cao Se’s note to the agency asking for a meeting. Of course, he hadn’t used his name in the note. Still, its importance was obvious as soon as it was translated. It reached Baije in hours.

  Li reread the note, to be sure he understood. A Chinese spy, code-named Ghost, was asking for an immediate meeting with a CIA operative, someone who had never worked in China. “How?” Li said, under his breath, more to himself than to Baije. He had been sure that his American mole had rooted out all of the CIA’s spies inside China. But he’d been wrong.

  Yet this spy, whoever he was, obviously didn’t know that the Second Directorate’s had penetrated the embassy. The note explicitly set out the time and place of the meeting.

  “Of course, the Americans may not respond,” Baije said. “They know we’ve penetrated them. They may think this Ghost of theirs has been doubled too.”

  “General Baije.” Li put a finger into the smaller man’s chest. “Don’t tell me what the Americans may or may not do. Tell me that our men are tracking every American who comes into Beijing this week. Tell me that we are going to catch this agent, and the traitor who’s helping him. Those are the only words I want to hear.”

  29

  EVEN BEFORE HE REACHED THE CENTER OF BEIJING, Wells felt the electricity of approaching war on the avenues of the giant city. Enormous banners in Chinese and English dangled from overpasses: “China stands as one!” “America will be sorry!” A torn American flag fluttered off the skeleton of a half-finished office tower, while the flag of the People’s Republic, five yellow stars against a blood-red background, waved off every car and truck.

  As his cab swung from the airport expressway onto the third of the ring roads that surrounded Beijing, Wells saw a dozen mobile antiaircraft missile batteries, their green-painted rockets pointing in every direction. Hundreds of Chinese surrounded the launchers, taking pictures, saluting the PLA soldiers in their crisp uniforms. Their excitement was palpable. They were standing up to the United States, and the show was about to start. The First Battle of Bull Run must have felt this way, Wells thought, the crowds turning up to watch the Rebs and the Union boys fight, shocked when the pageantry ended and blood began to flow.

  Indeed, aside from the flags and banners, life in Beijing seemed to be proceeding fairly smoothly. The immigration officers at Beijing airport hadn’t been overly hostile to Wells or the other Americans who’d come in from San Francisco. The cabbie outside the terminal had shown no irritation when Wells told him to head to the St. Regis, a five-star hotel close to the United States embassy and favored by Americans. Workers were hammering away everywhere on new buildings. And the traffic was the worst Wells had ever seen, making Washington’s supposedly busy roadways look like racetracks in comparison.

  As the cab again stopped dead, the driver glanced at Wells in his rearview mirror.

  “Where from?”

  “California.” So his passport said, anyway. Wells waited for the driver to explode in anti-American slurs, or throw him out of the cab and make him walk the rest of the way. Instead the driver turned to Wells and smiled, revealing a mouthful of broken yellow teeth.


  “Ca-li-fornia. My cousin—Los Angeles.”

  “I’m from Palo Alto,” Wells said. His cover story. “Northern California. Near San Francisco.”

  But the cabbie wasn’t interested in Palo Alto. “Los Angeles,” he said again. “Hollywood. Hungry.” The cabbie offered a thumbs-up.

  “Hungry?”

  “Gong-ri.” The cabbie held up a glossy magazine, a Chinese tabloid that featured a beautiful woman on the cover. Amid the Chinese characters were the English words “Gong Li.”

  “Gong Li. She’s an actress, right? I don’t see too many movies.”

  “Gong-ri. Holly-wood.”

  “Got it. I guess we’ll save the serious discussion for next time. You have no idea what I’m saying, do you? I mean, I could be offering to sell you my sister for all you know. If I had a sister.” Wells felt a pang of guilt. He hadn’t talked to Evan, his son, in weeks. When he got back, he was taking the boy fishing in the Bitterroots—the mountain range on the Montana-Idaho border, just outside his hometown of Hamilton. Maybe hunting too, if Heather, his ex, would let him. But fishing for sure. Whenhe got back. Not if.

  The cabbie grinned and gave Wells another big thumbs-up, then reached back through the cab’s plastic barrier with a crumpled pack of 555s. “You like cigarette?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You like China?”

  “Sure.”

  And with that, the cabbie seemed to have exhausted his English. He popped a 555 in his mouth and smoked silently until they reached the hotel a half-hour later.

  BUT OUTSIDE THE ST.REGIS, the mood turned grim. Four jeeps and a dozen soldiers formed a makeshift barricade that blocked the driveway. As the taxi stopped, a young officer rapped on Wells’s window.

  “Passport,” he said. The passport, sent by courier to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco for an expedited visa application, identified Wells as James Wilson, a thirty-seven-year-old from Palo Alto. If anyone asked, Wilson was the founder of Prunetime. com, an Internet start-up that specialized in small-business software. The business was real, at least on paper—one of the dozens of ghost companies that the agency had created over the years. Prunetime had a bank account, a Dun & Bradstreet credit report, a record of incorporation with the California secretary of state, even an office in San Francisco. Wilson was real too. Besides his passport, he had a California driver’s license, a working Social Security number, and a wallet full of credit cards.

  Of course, none of those records could answer the red-flag question: Why was James Wilson so anxious to get to Beijing at this moment, with China and America close to war? Why had he applied for a visa on such short notice? But Wells had a plausible cover, a three-day trade fair for software and Internet companies. And despite the rising tensions, he was hardly the only American in China. His 747 from San Francisco had been half full, mostly Chinese but a couple of dozen Americans too, joking nervously that they hoped the bombs would wait until they got home.

  “Passport,” the Chinese officer said again. Wells reached into his bag and handed it over. The officer flipped through it nonchalantly. “Out.” As Wells unfolded himself from the cab, the officer walked off, passport in hand, disappearing into a windowless black van behind the jeeps. Wells leaned against the cab and waited. A few minutes later, an older officer in a pressed green uniform stepped out of the van and waved him over.

  “You speak Chinese?” He looked up at Wells, his chin jutting out, his face square and unfriendly.

  “No, sir.”

  “Of course not. First trip to China?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why you come now?”

  “There’s a computer conference starting tomorrow. I’m looking to hire some programmers—”

  The officer held up his hand. Enough.“How long you staying?”

  “Five days.”

  “You doing anything for United States this trip?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand? I’m asking you if anyone in America told you to report back on what you see here,” the officer said. “Military preparations.”

  Wells raised his hands defensively. “No, no. I’m a businessman.”

  “If someone did, it’s better to tell now. We put you on a plane, send you home.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “This bad time for Americans in China,” the colonel said to him. “Be careful. If we catch you by military base—” He left the threat unfinished, handed Wells back his passport, and waved the cab through.

  A MINUTE LATER WELLS WALKED through the hotel’s big glass doors and felt whipsawed again. A giant pot of fresh-cut orchids and tulips sat on a marble table near the front door, filling the lobby with fragrance. The air was cool and calm, the doormen brisk and efficient. At the front desk, a smiling concierge upgraded him to a suite, telling him that cancellations had left the hotel empty.

  And finally, Wells lay on his bed, hands folded behind his head, watching CNN International play silently on the flat-panel television, constant updates on “The China Crisis” scrolling across the bottom of the screen, accompanied by stock footage of F-14s soaring off an aircraft carrier. The correspondents were doing their best to manufacture news, though not much had changed since Wells took off from San Francisco.

  Following the sinking of the fishing boat by the Decatur, China had ordered the United States to pull all its vessels at least 1,000 kilometers—620 miles—from the Chinese coast. The Chinese had also threatened to blockade Taiwan, and even made noise about dumping their trillion-dollar foreign reserve, a move that would send the dollar’s value plunging and put the United States into recession. In response, the United States insisted that China needed to end its support for Iran and stop threatening Taiwan before it would even consider pulling back. America also warned China not to “play games with the world economy.” The sinking was an accident and shouldn’t impact the broader crisis, the White House said.

  Wells closed his eyes and heard the hotel’s thick windows rattle as fighter jets rumbled in the distance. He supposed Exley and Shafer were right. He shouldn’t have come. He was meeting a man he’d never seen or even spoken with, a man who might already have been doubled. He was here on a contingency plan that was a decade old and that no one had ever expected to use. At best, this trip was the equivalent of heading out for a three-day backcountry hike in March without a backpack or even a compass. If nothing went wrong, he might get home with a touch of frostbite and an empty stomach. But he had no margin for error. And, of course, if Cao Se had been doubled and the Chinese knew he was coming, he was as good as dead already.

  His actual instructions for the meeting were simple. Since Cao didn’t know how to recognize or reach him, he was using what the agency called a 2-F protocol. Fixedlocation, fixed time. Essentially, Wells would show up at the meeting point and follow the instructions of whoever met him. Ideally, Cao Se would be waiting. More likely he would be greeted by a courier, by the police, or no one at all. If nobody showed up, Wells had no backup spot. He was simply supposed to return to the meeting point an hour later, then once more the following day. If Cao didn’t show by the third meeting, Wells would leave—assuming the flights between China and the United States were still running. The embassy and station chief had no idea he was here, of course. The agency assumed that the mole had compromised all its networks in China. Wells had to come in alone to have any chance of staying clandestine.

  Wells flicked off the television and lay on the floor. The opulence of the suite made him uncomfortable. He didn’t like having his bags carried, or fancy soap and shampoo in the marble bathroom. Strange but true: he’d rather be on a cot in Afghanistan. The room’s luxury made the danger of the mission seem less real. What could possibly go wrong inside a five-star hotel? Would he choke to death on an undercooked steak?

  Wells supposed his uneasiness here proved he was a less than perfect spy. A true master could fit in everywhere, from a Siberian prison camp to a Des Mo
ines mall to a Brazilian beach. That was the theory, anyway. Wells had his doubts such an animal existed in real life. A spy who could infiltrate an Iraqi insurgent network probably didn’t have much in common with one who could talk his way into a private casino in Moscow.

  Wells shucked his clothes, padded into the bathroom, turned on the shower. No low-flow shower-heads here, and no waiting for the water to heat up. He had to admit that staying at a five-star hotel had some advantages.

  AT THE HEIGHT OF CHINA’S tensions with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, Mao had ordered the building of a bunker under Zhongnanhai capable of surviving a direct hit from a nuclear warhead. The vault had been expanded over the years. It was now a miniature underground city, sprawling across six acres, with its own electrical supply, food stocks, even a seven-room hospital.

  But the bunker’s newest and most technically advanced room was the strategic-operations center that the People’s Liberation Army had opened just six months before. A room 150 feet square, the operations center was more advanced than the White House Situation Room or the Air Force’s NORAD facility inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Video feeds allowed the PLA’s generals to watch takeoffs and landings at China’s air bases in real time. Secure fiber-optic links connected them with the silos that housed China’s nuclear arsenal. One wall was devoted to a giant digital map of the eastern Pacific that of fered an integrated view of the positions of the Chinese and enemy fleets.

  The room was crowded but not claustrophobic, thanks to its twenty-foot-high ceilings, and surprisingly quiet. Its humming hard drives and clicking keyboards provided background music that was as soothing in its own way as ocean waves, and as unceasing. All the while, information moved up the chain of command, orders back down. They met at a raised platform in the center of the room, where Li stood, reading a message from the Xian.

  When he was done, Li turned to the wall-sized map of the Pacific.