Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

“What did Navy Intel get out of the flight?”

  “That’s another report,” Jonathan said, holding up another paper. “SIGINT confirming that PLA Joint Operational Headquarters in Fujian has assumed command of the buildup. The order of battle matches what APLAA says we should see in an invasion force, except for the missile batteries not standing up. They argue that the Chinese would want to soften up the Taiwanese defenses with a long-range bombardment before sending the troops in. But DIA and the Pentagon say the troop numbers are too small for that just yet. And Tian hasn’t made any moves to put the Chinese economy on a war footing, and the People’s Daily ran an editorial this morning saying this is an exercise.”

  “Which we can’t trust,” Kyra said.

  “Of course not.” Jonathan smiled. Now you’re thinking like an analyst.

  “So it looks like an invasion force, but nobody wants to call it because the numbers aren’t big enough and nobody wants to risk being wrong and offending the Chinese,” Kyra said.

  “Correct,” Jonathan replied. He watched her study the overhead imagery. Given how bloodshot her eyes were this morning, he was mildly surprised that she could see anything.

  “Do they think Tian is moving tanks because the PLA needs to burn up some surplus diesel?” The Vicodin was doing good things for her headache but nothing for her patience.

  “Hardly,” Jonathan said, unmoved. “But you may be right for the wrong reason. With Kinmen occupied, this could be the buildup of an invasion force for Penghu. If they’re going to move on Taiwan in stages, it’s the next logical step.”

  “You could have just said ‘I agree,’” Kyra said, satisfied and annoyed at once.

  “That wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun,” he replied. “In any case, we should focus on the Assassin’s Mace. APLAA tried to preempt us by offering their collective wisdom on the matter.” He tilted the monitor toward her.

  “That was fast,” she said.

  “The China analysts have been waiting a long time for this,” Jonathan said. “The running joke is that they have stacks of prewritten President’s Daily Brief articles on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan sitting on their desks, though I suspect they had to think about this one a bit.”

  For the President

  * * *

  Tian Threat Likely Refers to PLA Submarine Force

  Chinese President Tian Kai’s claim that the PLA Navy (PLAN) could threaten US naval vessels likely depends on four Russian Kilo-class submarines purchased starting in 1995. Despite progress in the PLA’s shipbuilding efforts, the Kilos remain the most advanced attack submarines in the Chinese fleet.

  • The PLAN fleet also includes seventeen Ming-class, thirty-two Romeo-class, and five Han-class submarines. All three classes are older than the Kilos and suffer from outdated designs and technology that leave them at a disadvantage against newer US submarines.

  The PLAN also has four Russian-made Sovremenny-class destroyers in its surface fleet, but getting them within striking range of US aircraft carriers would be difficult. Despite acquiring the Sovremennys, the PLAN surface fleet remains more of a coastal defense force than a long-range force.

  • The PLAN surface fleet carries several classes of antiship missiles in its inventory, including a reverse-engineered version of the French Exocet. However, the PLAN has struggled to train its personnel in effective over-the-horizon missile targeting tactics.

  This article was prepared by CIA.

  The facing page was a montage of photographs of Russian-made ships and missiles. A small map of the Chinese coast covered the lower right corner and displayed icons marking PLA naval base locations.

  “I take it you think they’re wrong?” Kyra asked. It always seemed to be his default answer.

  “Russian-made ships and subs in the hands of the PLA Navy are a threat,” Jonathan admitted. “But we know that the Chinese didn’t restrict their little carrier-killer research project to buying up Russian equipment.”

  He walked around a group of short filing cabinets to the whiteboard, then took up a red marker and eraser. He stopped short, staring at the scrawls of his previous thought experiment on the slick surface. Jonathan frowned, then finally began to erase.

  “Giving up on detecting confirmation bias?” Kyra asked.

  “Hardly,” he said. “But the more interesting problem gets the space.” He wiped the board clean, then retrieved a large bound volume from a nearby desk and dropped it on Kyra’s with a loud thump. “I’ve been going over the Agency’s last National Intelligence Estimate on the PLA—everything the intelligence community thinks it knows about Chinese military capabilities in one report. It’s two years old and this is the short version. The long version has an extra hundred pages with the really good intel; it backs up what APLAA said. China doesn’t have the combat power to force unification. No exceptions for an Assassin’s Mace. The other intel backs that up. Variations on a theme, but everything says the same thing.”

  “APLAA wrote it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that explains it,” she said.

  “Yes and no. They accounted for the PLA’s known capabilities, no question, and I didn’t doubt they would. What we need to determine is whether there are gaps in the intelligence that point to unknown capabilities.”

  “Where do we start?” Kyra asked, frustrated. “We’ve got reports on the PLA going back to Mao.”

  “Nineteen ninety-one, I think, unless we can find something more recent and conclusive,” Jonathan said after a moment’s thought. “The Gulf War inspired the PLA’s push to modernize their arsenal.”

  “That was twenty-five years ago,” Kyra noted.

  “Weapons platforms aren’t developed on a short schedule.”

  “And what if we don’t find any that APLAA hasn’t considered?” Kyra asked.

  “Then we tell Cooke that APLAA is right. And I hate for APLAA to be right about anything,” Jonathan said.

  Kyra held out a paper two hours later. “The original PDB on the ‘Assassin’s Mace from ninety-seven.”

  Jonathan took the paper and scanned it quickly, then began reading aloud. “ ‘Jiang Zemin Speech Augurs Increase in Military Spending. PRC President Jiang Zemin’s call for an ‘assassin’s mace’ weapon could spark a significant increase in PLA research and development spending.’” He dropped the article on the table. “I’m sure it was exciting at the time, but it’s hardly news to us now. Certainly nothing there that narrows down the technology. What else?”

  “Since that PDB was published, nineteen hits that didn’t appear totally useless,” Kyra said. She laid a printed page on the desk and grabbed a yellow highlighter. She marked off a text block in the list. “These five are NSA reports, all PLA discussions about whether an ongoing project should qualify for the Mace label. Somebody up at Fort Meade probably tapped some PLA colonel’s phone. Some projects qualified, some didn’t, but none of them say what the criteria are.”

  “We can assume ‘anything that can cripple a carrier’ and start from there,” Jonathan said.

  “Works for me,” Kyra continued. “These”—which took up more than half the page with reference numbers and titles—“are excerpts translated from Chinese military publications. Those start in 1999. They all talk about possible changes to PLA military doctrine to accommodate Assassin’s Mace weapons but they don’t give specifics. This last one talks about proposed changes in PLA Air Force doctrine and strategy to accommodate new weapons, but again, no specifics on the weapons.”

  “Which month?”

  Kyra checked the report header, which mashed together both the date and time when the report had been issued. “May ninety-nine.”

  “What does it say about the source on that one?” Jonathan asked.

  “It’s a HUMINT report, human source who has access to the information because of his position, has an established reporting record, and is reliable. That doesn’t tell us anything.”

  “By design,” Jonathan said. “The NCS doesn’t g
ive information to DI analysts that could identify sources.”

  Kyra shook her head and threw the highlighter across the desk. “So how can you tell if two reports are from the same source?”

  “Call a reports officer and offer to buy him a beer.” Jonathan kept his focus on the paper. “Not much fun to be on the other side of the divide, is it?”

  “It’s necessary,” she answered quietly. She saw his point.

  Jonathan studied Kyra for a moment before speaking. The girl had gone on the defensive, but not in a hostile way. Interesting. “So why only the one report from the human source?” he asked. “If he was in position to report on the project in the first place, why not task him to follow up?”

  No dig at the Dark Side of the house? She’d made herself a target and he’d passed up a chance to take a rhetorical shot at point-blank range. Maybe the man had a soft side after all. Or maybe he’d been testing her and had seen what he’d wanted. She wasn’t going to ask. “Maybe they did,” Kyra said, suspicious. “Maybe the project never went anywhere. Sometimes the assets report data that’s not worth writing up.”

  Jonathan considered the idea, turning it over in his mind. “You don’t change military doctrine to accommodate ‘new’ weapons if those weapons are just more of what you already have.” He leaned forward and stared at the paper. “Look at the timeline. Jiang Zemin orders the project in ninety-seven, NSA grabs a flurry of reports about one project that peters out almost immediately, and then nothing until ninety-nine, when the PLA starts writing again about changing war plans. The idea didn’t just go away.” He put the hard copy down on the desk and pushed it back toward the young woman. “And it’s a given that the various shashoujian projects are run at multiple facilities and involve different groups of personnel.”

  “Meaning what?” Kyra asked.

  “You were a case officer. Think about it.”

  A puzzle. Kyra was good at puzzles. She leaned back in her chair and tilted her head to think. Multiple facilities, different groups, one asset. She smiled. “There’s a compartment of Assassin’s Mace reports that we don’t have.”

  “I agree.” For the first time, she noted, Burke smiled back. “Your reasoning?”

  She rolled the facts around inside her mind, reordering them. It was funny, she thought, how the mind could hold random thoughts simultaneously but struggled to catalog them so a person could verbalize them, which was a linear process. “There’s an asset in a position to report on a change in war planning. That means the asset likely had access to the underlying technology driving the change. But if that technology was part of a black program, then we would have to separate that intelligence from the rest of the report because a leak could identify the asset. So the NCS would publish the report”—Kyra waved the paper in the air—“minus the good bits about the technology. But this asset is reporting on a change inspired by an Assassin’s Mace technology, which is just one part of a bigger program, so the asset likely has access to other Mace information. The more Mace projects he can report on, the faster the Chinese could triangulate on him if the information is leaked. So the NCS would pull out the stops to keep that from happening, which means that somewhere around here is a nice, fat compartment of Mace reports.”

  Jonathan nodded. “Just because a reporting stream is new doesn’t mean the activity being reported is new,” he said. “And just because a reporting stream dies doesn’t mean the activity died. Sometimes it just vanishes into a classified compartment.”

  Kyra narrowed her eyes and studied the man. He’d agreed with her several times over the last few hours and it seemed . . . wrong. She’d only known him for a few days but she could read a man. Any case officer worth her salt could. And Burke was a thinker—

  Then she saw it. “You’re just saying that to butter me up because you want me to go get that compartment,” Kyra said. It wasn’t a question.

  “You’re perceptive,” Jonathan said, smiling. “Much more enjoyable than having to explain everything.”

  Another dig. She enjoyed this one.

  It took Kyra an hour to find the phone numbers. The National Clandestine Service refused to publish a phone directory, citing the possible security risk of a foreign power stealing it. After pleas to Deity, enough curses to negate her prayers, and repeated calls to the Agency’s telephone switchboard, Kyra finally reached an officer who didn’t plead ignorance on China. The words assassin’s, mace, and compartment in the same sentence worked like a wizard’s incantation. The officer begged off and hung up, and the return call came a half hour later from a senior NCS manager several pay grades higher who agreed to talk in person readily enough to leave Kyra suspicious.

  George Kain’s initial manner bordered on sycophantic. Kyra had been trained to evaluate character on short notice, Kain’s voice on the phone had disturbed her, and she had been appalled to find her evaluation more than accurate. Kain took precisely one question from Jonathan regarding information on any Assassin’s Mace project and switched from fawning to filibuster. He prattled without pause, talking over all attempts to interrupt, offering nothing useful, and staring out the window at the New Headquarters Building. Kyra was sure he hadn’t made eye contact with her once in the last hour.

  She looked around the Red Cell vault for a wall clock and didn’t find one. How long? she mouthed silently to Jonathan. He didn’t move his head and said nothing, instead curling his hand on his leg into a fist, then sticking out two fingers. Kain didn’t see it. The man was in his own world.

  Two? She mirrored his sign with her own fingers. Hours?

  Jonathan nodded, barely.

  Way past time to end this. For the first time, Kyra was ashamed to have been a case officer.

  She made her own covert gesture at the mini fridge. Jonathan saw the motion, smiled slightly, then nodded again.

  Kyra walked to the mini fridge, retrieved a bottled water, then walked back to her seat. She offered the plastic bottle to Kain. “You must be thirsty.”

  For the first time in hours, Kain paused. “Thanks.” He uncapped the bottle, took a swig, and then saw the tactical error too late.

  “You’ve tried very hard not to answer the question,” Jonathan said as soon as Kain’s mouth filled with Dasani water. “Stop wasting our time. We’re not idiots.”

  Kain swallowed. “If we have anything worth reporting, you’ll have to wait until we publish it in finished intel channels.”

  “The reports we’re looking for could be more than ten years old. They’d already be in finished intel channels if you were ever going to release them,” Kyra observed.

  “Not my problem,” Kain said. “If there is any reporting being held back in a compartment, I’m not going to second-guess the decision not to release it.”

  “This tasking came from Director Cooke—,” Jonathan said.

  “I don’t care if it came from the president,” Kain interrupted. He drew another swig from the bottle. “If there’s something we think the president needs to know, we’ll tell him. We don’t need the DI to do it for us, not that your little fantasies even qualify as analysis. And we certainly don’t need a pair of failed wannabe operators turned analysts to do it for us.” Kain smirked at Jonathan, then frowned at Kyra, stood, finished the bottle, and took his time dropping it in the nearest garbage can. “Thanks for the water,” he said. He then strode out of the vault.

  “You should have let me choke him,” Kyra said.

  “You thought I would have stopped you?”

  “He should run for the Senate,” Kyra said. “He wouldn’t be the first case officer to become a politician.”

  “The two professions do share a disturbing number of skills,” Jonathan agreed. “Good move with the water.”

  “I should’ve done it an hour earlier,” Kyra said. “Now what?”

  “I suspected that was coming,” he admitted. “Some cooperation would have been nice, but I didn’t expect it. Still, we had to make a good faith effort to request access before w
e ask Cooke to start twisting arms.”

  “I hope there really is a compartment,” Kyra said. “I’d hate to pick a fight just to find out they don’t have anything worth fighting over.”

  “They do. Despite what you might think, an NCS manager doesn’t take two hours out of his day to belittle analysts just for fun,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be back.” He marched out of the vault and disappeared into the stairwell across the hall.

  Kyra stared at the back of his head until the stairwell door closed and then let out a long breath. It was apparent where he was going. She wondered just how close Jonathan and Cooke really were. Real close, she hoped. The bureaucratic games were starting to get under her skin.

  CIA DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

  Barron’s composure had limits, and Cooke’s account of Kain’s sandbagging had pushed him close to them. Some things he expected to be handled below his pay grade. Hearing about them from one of the very few people he answered to always lit his very short fuse. But he expected that had been Burke’s intention. Sometimes it really did take a trip to the director’s office to make the case officers and analysts stop acting like children protective of their toys.

  “They were asking about Pioneer’s compartment?” Barron asked. The question was almost redundant. There was no other sets of files that fit the bill Cooke had just described.

  “They were,” Cooke confirmed. “George Kain stonewalled them. Sat in their space for two hours and treated them like they were complete idiots.”

  “I’ll go talk to him about it. I understand his reasons, but his tactics were faulty, to say the least.”

  “How many people have access to Pioneer’s reporting?” Cooke asked.

  “If you count the two of us, still fewer than a dozen,” Barron replied.

  “Has he fed you anything on the Assassin’s Mace lately?”

  “No.” Barron frowned and took a deep breath. “He’s the guy who told us about it in the first place back after the ninety-six Taiwan Strait crisis. By ninety-seven it was clear the project wasn’t going anywhere, so we put him on other targets. Every once in a while he still sends us something on the project, but it’s just not a high priority. We’ve been more worried about the Russian equipment the PLA’s been buying.”