China Hand, page 15
“He sure is.”
But as class monitor and the dean’s nephew, Rick was not a run-of-the-mill creep any more than I was now just another teacher at the IAU. We were facing off in the unspoken language of espionage. My restraint in choosing silence over sarcasm told me that I might be more suited than I thought for the role that Ed and Lin and unknown others had cast for me.
CHAPTER 26
The next evening, I didn’t feel nearly as confident as I pressed the elevator button to ascend to W&M’s office in the China World Trade Center. Was it really a non-official CIA station in the heart of Beijing? Or a giant trap by China’s counterintelligence agencies to snare American spies, which would now include me?
Ed himself greeted me at the reception. He didn’t offer his customary smile as he ushered me to the SCIF. He closed the door and gestured for me to take a seat.
Owen Edwards slouched in a conference chair across from me. One of his long arms engulfed the back of the seat next to him. But his eyes maintained a steely focus, scrutinizing me as though searching for a loose thread in a Savile Row suit.
“Hello, Andrew.” He leaned aggressively across the conference table. “We’re about to educate you in re-dun-dan-cy.” He hit all four syllables with a hammer’s force. “Do you know what that means in your new line of work?”
“Like, backups?”
“Correct. Putting reinforcing systems into place to ensure mission continuity, control, and security.” He pushed even closer to me. “It’s not something we felt comfortable going into at the café. And to be frank, I wanted to meet you in person first.”
I flinched, feeling uncomfortable at his assessing me.
“You shouldn’t do that. It’s unbecoming and could cost you your life. The point is, I liked what I saw. Since this is a joint operation with our cousins here,” Owen glanced at Ed, “that meeting was necessary. We rarely veto each other’s candidates, but it does happen.”
Ed took over. “We’re both glad to have you. We’re going to explain how we’ll communicate from now on, because it’s not safe to keep meeting in person.”
“This will be our primary means of communication.” Owen pushed a beat-up Lonely Planet China guidebook over to me—a seemingly identical version to the one I had brought to Beijing. He appeared to be holding back laughter.
“What?” I asked.
“Here we are in the age of the information superhighway, and we are about to explain one of the oldest forms of secret messaging. Sometimes life really is too rich for words.” Ed picked up where the amused Owen had left off: “This special edition of the Lonely Planet China includes twenty tearaway inserts which look like innocuous ‘top ten’ lists of things to do in various cities. Hidden in invisible ink on the right side of each ‘activity,’ in what look like blank spaces for taking notes, are small ‘one-time pads.’ These are single-use cipher keys—rows of letters in groups of five—each accompanied by a table to help encrypt and decrypt messages. Pull your chair over.”
I scooted beside Ed. Using a practice pad, he showed me how to reveal the hidden type by brushing the paper with a diluted iodine solution.
“Reminds me of a children’s spy kit,” I mumbled.
“It works,” Ed said.
“It does, indeed.” Owen nodded.
“We will give you a bottle of iodine,” Ed told me. “Keep it in your shaving kit. If you lose it, you can get more at any pharmacy. If questioned, say it’s an antiseptic for first aid.”
He taught me how to encrypt and decrypt messages by using the random letters from the one-time pads and the reciprocal alphabet tables included alongside. “What’s this message say?” Ed tested me with a new one.
“Help!” Owen laughed.
“Let the man concentrate.” The chill in Ed’s voice could have frosted Owen’s grin.
“Arrived,” I answered, after decoding it moments later.
“Nice.” Ed took me through several more examples. “Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so long as you’re still on campus, we will communicate a simple ‘hold,’ ‘abort,’ or ‘go’ message and other critical details in code over short-wave radio at seven fifteen a.m.”
Professor Lin’s “necessities for China” had now taken a new significance.
Ed went on. “The coded letters will be communicated using phonetic alphabet—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and so on. You follow?” I nodded. “Good. We operate on several frequencies between 18.864 and 21.866 megahertz. Listen on headphones to avoid surveillance. You’ll know the message is for you because it will always start with the shorthand for your code name: Charlie-November-Hotel. Chi-Na Hand.”
This suddenly felt much more personal.
“You’ll use the one-time pads one after the other, in order. And every time you decode a message,” Owen tapped the guidebook, “rip out that one-time pad as if you’ve completed that tourist activity, then burn or otherwise destroy it and any other notes you made.” He handed me a Bic lighter. “Eat the papers if you have to.”
“Eat them?” It was hard to know when to take him seriously. “That’s—”
“Old-school?” Owen asked. “Absolutely. A gin chaser helps,” he added, deadpan.
They both smiled.
“What if I miss the transmission?” I imagined myself oversleeping, ruining everything.
“We will know if you receive the instructions to act,” Ed started, “because you will wear a red tie to class that day to confirm you received an ‘abort’ signal and a green tie for a ‘go’ signal. And, from now on, red and green ties are not to be worn at any other time.”
Ed had made it clear they were watching me, but I didn’t realize it was this closely.
“But what if I’m not on campus? Shouldn’t I have a cell phone or beeper—”
“Mobile devices make it too easy for Chinese counter-intelligence to track you, unless you follow proper protocol,” Owen said with lordly impatience. “We try to avoid them.”
“But we are prepared for contingencies,” Ed continued. “If for some reason the short-wave radio signal is jammed or you do not pick it up and it’s time to act, you will receive a phone call on your landline from your ‘Uncle Gary’ in Cleveland.”
I actually had an Uncle Gary in Cleveland.
Ed ran me through the procedures for confirming the caller and conveying the signal to move to the execution phase, or to abort. I thought about how “abort” meant leaving Lily behind, a point they had made painfully clear at the Metro Café.
“In a real emergency,” Ed said. “Someone will find you in person. He will identify himself by asking, ‘Have you ever done the night hike at Simatai?’ You’ll say ‘No, I’ve only been to Jiankou.’ Our agent will then confirm the exchange by saying ‘I hear that’s a tough section.’”
“Simatai and Jiankou, the Great Wall sections?”
Ed nodded. “It’s like your Uncle Gary calling. It won’t sound unusual if anyone’s listening but, seriously, has anyone asked you about a night hike at Simatai?”
They took me through additional eventualities, testing me over and over to ensure I remembered each detail. If I needed them to contact me urgently, I could lower my kitchen blinds—the ones I had never used—or call a phone number scribbled into the Lonely Planet, say nothing, and then, after exactly fifteen seconds, hang up. Or, in an absolute emergency on the road, I could use the last two one-time pad sheets to send an encrypted message to ejl888@hotmail.com from a newly created email account of my own—Hotmail, Yahoo mail, whatever wasn’t blocked by the Great Firewall.
“Email?” It sounded vulnerable.
“Yes,” Ed said. “The Chinese closely monitor all traffic to and from official US government email addresses. We don’t want them to notice the anomaly of your sending an email there from a random Chinese internet café, or wherever you might find yourself. So we’ll both use harmless-looking email addresses. Even in the unlikely event that it’s hacked, you’ll be using a one-time pad, so no one except us will be able to understand your message.”
“And to confirm that it’s you and the pad hasn’t been compromised,” Owen added, “you should end each message with ‘China Hand,’ your code name, which only we know.”
Ed handed me the iodine and battered Lonely Planet. “Be very careful with this. Possessing one-time pads is prima facie evidence of espionage.”
My pulse—already about twenty beats a minute faster than usual—must have doubled as I took in what Ed had just told me.
I gave him my own copy of the book to dispose of. He promised to arrange delivery of the fake passports and other documents closer to our departure.
“We’re very good at what we do. We think you will be, too.”
Suggesting my untested skills might be in the same league as the Agency’s made me question their competency.
The two of them walked me out of the SCIF.
With every departure from W&M, I felt more vulnerable than before. Now I was carrying a Lonely Planet guide with tables of encryption keys written in invisible ink and a bottle of iodine to make them appear. Ed had made the potential consequences crystal clear. How would I ever explain these away to hard-nosed Chinese counter-intelligence officers? And who else would be compromised if I were caught with this incriminating evidence?
The answer—brief and terrifying—was everybody.
CHAPTER 27
I attempted the breezy demeanor of a confident spy as I walked out of the China World Trade Center. My performance was shaken, however, as I thought of my parents and worried about how they would feel if they knew that I was involved in my first spy mission.
First mission?
I realized I liked becoming the “China Hand.” The prospect of earning and keeping that handle sparked more pride than hesitation. And as I hailed a cab, pretending to be nothing more than a teacher, I found myself assuming a much more dangerous persona—like one I’d taken on for a high school play.
But this was not a role I could abandon by stepping off the stage. History itself was eyeing me. A bad performance would have horrendous consequences. I needed to look no further than the incriminating evidence in my hand.
Yet the thrill was irrefutable.
I all but dashed up to my apartment, placing the Lonely Planet in plain sight on my living room bookcase, where my previous edition had been. The iodine and lighter went straight into my shaving kit.
As days and then weeks passed, I dutifully listened to the short-wave radio transmissions. All I decoded each time was “Hold, China Hand,” before incinerating the one-time pads and notes as instructed. My speed at transcribing the messages was improving and my confidence growing. This new routine—and the guidebook that was a fixed reminder of my upcoming mission—brought an edgy awareness to my life that was both frightening and exhilarating, distancing me from the now seemingly trivial concerns of teaching and hosting student movie nights.
Although I thought about Lily a lot, I only had a few opportunities to speak with her on campus. Once, when I ran into her in line at the cafeteria, we had lunch. Although any outward signs of intimacy were clearly off limits, her gaze—and mine—lingered in the few passing moments that felt safe.
The only behavior that might raise eyebrows was Rose’s increasingly open adoration of me in class, and her repeated small gifts. I kept my appreciation to thank-yous.
With December approaching, we experienced little to mark the Western holiday season. Chinese New Year would not come until February 16, 1999, so we found ourselves in the classroom straight through Christmas and New Year’s Day. But we foreign teachers, including the great communist Tom Blum, tried to celebrate.
We ordered “Christmas chickens”—there were no turkeys in China—from a nearby restaurant for another lively dinner in Will’s apartment, then ended the evening with a stroll outside the gates, singing Christmas carols. It almost felt like home as the familiar songs echoed in the wintry air. Confused onlookers halted in their tracks, and the bewildered police didn’t even stop us—maybe the holiday cheer was contagious. We paused only at a hotel to laugh raucously at a nativity scene featuring Snow White and the seven dwarfs.
We needed the comic relief. I felt the homesickness that expats often experienced when they were away for the holidays. International events were also starting to weigh on us. In mid-December, President Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair had launched bombing missions of Iraqi military installations and enforced “no-fly zones” to punish Saddam Hussein for refusing to comply with various UN resolutions on weapons inspections. Those actions triggered an anti-Western backlash in the Chinese media. Because of its own problems with secessionist movements in the northwestern territory of Xinjiang, neighboring Tibet, and of course Taiwan, the Chinese government was especially sensitive to what it viewed as the United States’ meddling in other countries’ internal affairs. Chinese officials argued that if the US could interfere in a civil war or domestic dispute in another nation, it could also intervene in Taiwan.
Will warned me to keep my eyes open. “This anti-American hysteria is coming at a bad time,” he said as we climbed the stairs of the Foreign Experts Building. Lowering his voice, he added, “The economy’s slowing, and the natives are getting restless. The US is giving Beijing just the bogeyman they need, and that includes you and me and everyone else from the States.”
“When in doubt, blame the foreigners.”
“That’s about the size of it, my man.”
I turned on CCTV, where a grim-faced news anchor called the “hegemonic” US the “number one threat to China’s future.” A report from the Foreign Ministry urged the Chinese to “sacrifice now so we can someday stand up to the United States.” The BBC World Service was reporting Westerners regularly being attacked in restaurants and bars.
The uproar over the bombing of Iraq even reached into my classroom. Qianyi criticized me outright: “You are a poisonous element of American cultural imperialism.”
And that’s not all, I told myself in the voice of a game-show host.
Dean Chen himself walked in minutes later to offer his own criticism, in front of the class. “You must stop injecting political color and American values into the classroom. And no more movie nights.”
That week we’d seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
At a school assembly, Communist Party speakers railed against the United States. Dean Chen ended the gathering by urging students to work hard so they could study in the US, gain employment with American companies, and bring back coveted technologies. Steal them, in other words. He was hardly subtle, glaring at his American faculty with undisguised contempt. “Technology will allow China to exact revenge for historical humiliation at the hands of foreigners, especially the United States.” Sneering openly, he quoted Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader during the “reform and opening” period of the 1980s. “We need to ‘hide our brightness and bide our time,’ gradually building our collective strength so that we can destroy America when the time is right.”
In the meantime, his American faculty could serve as a punching bag.
His tirade was cheered wildly by students and Blum. And why not? My communist colleague was in the papers constantly, ranting about how the United States was bent on holding China down. With the dean’s nodding approval, he had announced at a faculty meeting that he’d been invited to the China People’s Congress to advise officials on how best to deal with America’s “imperialist aggression.”
The pressure only got worse. In February, Lily told me that her father would be shuttling back and forth to Washington in the months ahead for the next round of high-stakes economic and military negotiations, so I tensely awaited the go signal at any moment. When she was away for Chinese New Year that same month, all I could think about was the idyllic time we’d had Shanghai, and I longed to be with her again. Instead, I was holed up on campus with Will and the other foreign teachers.
A US-led NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, Operation Allied Force, started in late March, aimed at stopping the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by Slobodan Milošević’s government. The Chinese strongly opposed those bombing raids. Anger continued to throb at the IAU. I saw it spelled out in black and white when Professor MacDonald pointed to the blackboard in his empty classroom. In large, chalked letters someone had revealed the depths of ugliness on campus. “Professor MacDonald = USA; USA = Nazi murderer; therefore, Professor MacDonald = Nazi murderer.”
In my own class later that morning, Rick shouted at me, “How can the US claim to stand up for human rights when you are bombing all those innocent people in Yugoslavia?”
“Doesn’t killing people violate their human rights?” Qianyi piled on.
Hostility from those two was predictable. But then Michael stood up. “How can you claim to defend minorities in other countries when you made Black people into slaves and committed genocide against American Indians? You and all Americans are just hypocrites.”
I couldn’t defend those past American actions, or the current bombing of Yugoslavia, but after months of interacting with my students I’d thought that even at a time like this they would be able to see me as a human being, a friend perhaps, not just an ugly American. I found it all so disheartening.
If the rage had remained in the classroom, that might have become a learning experience for all of us. But Beijing was starting to feel downright unsafe. Strangers on the street were giving me horrid glances and murmuring “hegemonist” as if it were a mantra. Then on the morning of Saturday, May 8, I heard furious voices outside the Foreign Experts Building. I looked out to see dozens of protestors vehemently chanting, “NATO equals Nazi American Terrorist Organization!”
What the hell’s going on? I’d never felt so cornered. And the next short-wave radio communication wouldn’t come until Monday morning.
The phone rang.
Uncle Gary?
But it was Will. “Have you heard?”
