“He was depressed, for sure. He said I was a troublemaker. Something like that. He said he had lost face and now he had nothing. He said some Chinese words, like he was ‘looking for death.’ Or ‘looking for trouble.’ I wasn’t sure which he meant. I thought he was exaggerating. He was pissed at me for betraying him.”
“Betraying him how?” Winkle had his hand cupped to his ear.
“Because I’m Chinese. He thought we were on the same team. I told him that was bullshit. I was an American. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Winkle pondered a second too long. “He thought you were on the same side. That’s typical Chinese bullshit.”
“Exactly.” Chang waved his hand dismissively. He had three generations of American-ness in his bank account. But it was never enough.
“Ma was ashamed,” said Chang. “He said he had lost face. He had no face. Something like that. He was afraid of what would happen to his family. Everything he said is on the tapes. But I don’t think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
Another call came in for Winkle. It was the ops chief again, passing along a clarification from the officer at the hotel. The target had rummaged around in his bed, looking for something, probably his notebook, before he went into the bathroom to kill himself.
“Un-huh,” said Winkle into the phone. “Tossed the bed. No book. Cries out. Then sayonara. Sad case. What a waste.”
Winkle closed the phone and turned to Chang. He stuck out his hand to the shaken case officer. It was a soft handshake, there-there, which made Chang feel even worse.
“You’ll excuse me, Harris. I have to clean shit up. You finish writing your cable. It will be shorter now, without the future agent-handling stuff. But they need to know about the penetration now. I’ll write up the mijian so Vandel has it by close of business. And I’ll call him personally, in a minute, and tell him we shot the pooch.”
“Maybe Vandel knew this would happen,” said Chang quietly.
“Maybe. But probably he doesn’t care, one way or another. He plays a long game. He’s got everything he wants. In any event, it’s not your problem, Harris. You should take the rest of the night off.”
Winkle walked away leaving Chang alone at the desk, his cursor twinkling on an unfinished operations report about a newly recruited asset who was now dead. What had he done wrong?
Chang would ask himself the question a hundred times in the hours and days to come. But the answer would remain the same: Nothing. It had been a perfect operation except for one thing: Some people cannot live with betrayal and ambiguity. They don’t feel the exhilaration of a double life, only the shame. They escape the only way they can.
6.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
“You need to give me a free hand on my China operation,” John Vandel told the Director. They were sitting in his private dining room eating breakfast. The Director had ordered Raisin Bran, mixed with All Bran, and skimmed milk. Vandel had requested scrambled eggs and bacon, but he barely touched his food while he made his pitch. He gesticulated when he talked, extending his loose-jointed arms and pointing his long fingers for emphasis: The Director should scrap the agency’s new organization chart, with its mission centers and overlapping roles, and let Vandel run the search for the Chinese penetration agent. Vandel would create a special compartment under his sole authority, and he would take all the blame if anything went wrong.
The Director backed away slightly from the table as Vandel talked. The steward brought him a decaffeinated cappuccino. Through the doorway, a forty-year-old oil portrait of Richard Helms gazed down at them, a limpid, skeptical look on his face.
“Can you promise me you’ll catch the Chinese mole, if that’s what it is, if I do it your way?”
“No, Mr. Director, I cannot. Nothing is ever one hundred percent. What I can promise is that if you turn it over to Amy Molinari and her mission center, and to the FBI counter-intelligence division, you’ll have a public mess on your hands.”
“What do I say to the White House?”
Vandel reflected a moment, scratched his head, while the Director chewed his bran. That was the issue, always, for any director. Political risk. Would the national security adviser go along? Would there be blowback from other agencies? Would Congress complain that it hadn’t been notified? The trick with intelligence policy was making it seem to fit with what the president had already decided to do, so that everyone assumed it had been approved and kept their mouths shut.
“Tell the White House that it’s about protecting America’s edge in quantum computing,” Vandel offered, leaning across the table toward the Director’s long, lean face. “That’s the flavor of the month downtown. Tell them the CIA has its own secret pathway to building a quantum computer. Tell them that if this operation works, we will destroy China’s effort to steal our breakthrough quantum technology. They’ll like that.”
“Is that true, about protecting a secret pathway?” asked the Director.
“Absolutely,” said Vandel. “If people knew all the details of this case, they would give you a medal. This is like completing the Manhattan Project and catching the Rosenbergs, all at once.”
The Director took a sip of orange juice and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. There was just a hint of a smile under the white linen.
“The president is obsessed with quantum computing, that is a fact,” said the Director. “He doesn’t understand it, but he has briefers from Yale and MIT stacked up over the West Wing like airplanes over Dulles. They all tell him the same thing: Quantum computing is a paradigm shift. It’s like Galileo and Newton. He listens to these professors, and then he tells everyone around the table in the Sit Room: ‘This will change everything.’ He may not know a lot, the president, but he loves the idea of winning a race. Is that true, by the way? Will it change everything?”
“Beats me. I’m just a spy. But, yeah, that’s what everyone says about a real quantum machine. It will own digital space.”
Vandel had been hearing the agency’s gearheads talk about this super-super-computer for twenty years: Problems that would take the lifetime of the universe to solve with a conventional computer could be computed in a few hours with a quantum machine. Networks that were manipulated every hour of every day by bad people would become safe, thanks to quantum encryption. Impossible miracles of science, like designer drugs to cure any disease, would become routine.
“And your breakthrough, will it do everything that these professors are swooning about?”
Vandel smiled. He wasn’t a professor. He stole secrets for a living.
“Probably not. What we’re working on is a kind of backdoor version. It cuts some corners, maybe. But we think it will actually work, while all the fancy stuff is just equations on somebody’s whiteboard.”
“Will it stop all these damned hacks? The Russians and WikiLeaks are making us look ridiculous.”
“Maybe. Quantum computing can help us dominate cyber again. And if China gets it first, it will make the Russia problem seem puny by comparison.”
“Approved,” said the Director. He wrote an eyes-only memo later that morning for the national security adviser to cover himself. The rest, he didn’t want to know. The Director was a former member of Congress. Letting the staff do the dirty work was a way of life.
One day after Harris Chang returned home from Singapore, John Vandel convened the restricted-access compartment he had created to handle the case of Dr. Ma Yubo, deceased, and related matters. He gave it the obscure, anodyne name of “DDO Small Group,” and it had no electronic existence in the agency’s central computers. The information drawn from Dr. Ma’s debriefing and his secret notebook was held personally by the DDO in a server in his office that didn’t connect with anyone or anything.
Vandel turned over logistics of this special compartment to Kate Sturm, the deputy director for Support. Sturm had the unobtrusive, tight-lipped competence of the agency’s best managers. She had come up in the blue-collar Support directorate,
starting as armed protective agent with the Global Resource Staff and then being promoted to manage air transport, administration of covert real estate, and then finally, the entire housekeeping system on which the CIA’s operations depended. She was a big, broad woman, habitually dressed in a black pants suit, and she was as close to universally respected as anyone in the agency.
Chang spent his one free day back home sleeping and reading Anthony Trollope. Vandel had opined once in a staff meeting that nobody could understand how Washington works unless they read the Palliser novels, chronicling the political machinations of nineteenth-century Britain. Chang was now dutifully on the fourth, Phineas Redux. He wanted to identify with Phineas Finn, the mildly nonconformist Irish-born outsider making his way in the capital. But that was silly. Harris Chang was a Chinaman from Flagstaff. He spent his spare time on cross-fit training, not fox hunting.
The members of the “DDO Small Group” gathered in an office building in the Courthouse section of Arlington that the agency used for sensitive business. It had a big picture window that looked out across the suburban skyline toward the Potomac and the low-rise maze of Washington, a few miles downriver. It was fall, and the trees were shedding their acid-bleached leaves, falling in piles of dull tan and yellow, rather than the blazing red and gold of the pre-carbon age. Vandel closed the shades.
The mole hunters took their seats around a small conference table. Warren Winkle joined by an encrypted satellite audio link. He had remained behind in Singapore to take care of any fallout after the discovery of Dr. Ma’s body and to avoid arousing the suspicions of Amy Molinari, the China mission manager.
Vandel wrapped his elastic frame into a chair. He had gotten a haircut, down almost to stubble. With his sallow, scarred face, he might just have been released from a Russian prison.
“So, you know the joke about the guy who has good news and bad news, and really bad news,” Vandel began. “Well, that’s us. The good news is that we recruited a Chinese agent. The bad news is that he told us his service is running a penetration inside the agency. The really bad news is that our agent is dead, and their mole is alive.”
“Ha, ha,” said Winkle.
“Shoot me now,” said Sturm.
Chang was silent, staring down at the table.
“Okay, all joking aside,” continued Vandel. “Harris hit a home run in Singapore, as far as I’m concerned. It would be nice to have had a live agent in place in Beijing, but frankly, it would also have been a pain in the ass running him, and we’ve got what we really needed. Which is confirmation that the agency has been penetrated. Hats off to Harris for eliciting this information on a cold pitch.”
Vandel fastened those pewter eyes on Chang and gave him a wink. Maybe he had planned it this way, so the agent would be self-terminating, maybe he hadn’t. He certainly didn’t seem unhappy with the way things had turned out.
“Now comes the hard part,” Vandel continued. “Good intelligence is like a piece of ripe fruit that’s been around a week. If you don’t eat it quickly, it rots. Meanwhile, the MSS rodent at Langley is still feeding and covering his tracks. Needless to say: We have to find him soon. People’s heads are exploding about this quantum computing thing. If they knew someone was stealing our secrets, they would eat us alive.”
Heads nodded. They knew they had to move quickly and keep their mouths shut. Amy Molinari had been told that the attempt to recruit Dr. Ma had failed, and that the Chinese scientist had committed suicide because of personal financial difficulties. That version seemed to be holding up in the corridors on the Third Floor, where Molinari’s Asia team had its offices. But it wouldn’t keep forever.
The Chinese embassy in Singapore had collected the body, after it was “discovered” by the hotel, and shipped it back home. The Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a brief statement expressing condolences to the family of Academician Ma Yubo, Doctor of Science in Electronic Engineering, who had died in an accident while preparing to attend a scientific convention overseas. It was in everyone’s interest to pretend that everything was okay for the moment, but this wouldn’t last, either.
“Let’s start with the golden notebook, my friends,” said Vandel. “It’s a mystery why these guys write all their secrets in their datebooks, but they do, and this may be the most perishable stuff we have. Warren, walk us through what was in this man’s diary.”
“Dr. Ma loved his mijian!” snorted Winkle. He voice sounded tinny on the satellite line, and there was a slight echo.
“He must have thought it would be his insurance policy,” Winkle continued. “He kept dirt on a dozen of his colleagues at the Ministry of State Security, alongside their business contacts. The juiciest morsels I’ve found are a hotel group linked to the Ministry and two investment companies that laundered hot money for MSS officers.”
“Nice,” said Vandel.
“Ma also wrote a careful chronology of an incident involving the fatal crash of a Ferrari coupe in Beijing and the deaths of some hookers who were on their way to a party hosted by one of his MSS colleagues. Next to that, he put the name of a man who was on the Politburo Standing Committee until recently, with a little star. Isn’t that cute?”
“The MSS is rotting from the inside out,” said Vandel.
“There’s other nasty stuff. Who’s sleeping with whom; how much someone’s real estate is worth; parts of it are like ‘Real Housewives of Beijing.’ ”
“Why did he keep all this?” asked Vandel. “Any chance that it’s fake?”
“Probably he wanted protection. Maybe blackmail. Maybe he wanted to make sure that other people were even more corrupt than he was. Who knows? But this was one scared puppy. Am I right, Harris?”
“He was vulnerable,” said Chang. “He liked his nice clothes and his fancy travel. He liked having his forty million dollars in Luxembourg. He was sweating the moment I walked in the door. He wasn’t a tough guy; he was a scientist. He was caught, and he knew it.”
“Why did he kill himself?” asked Sturm. “Was that our fault?”
“Maybe,” said Chang. “Probably we could have done a better job of babysitting him. But I don’t think he would have made a very good agent in place. He didn’t have the nerves for it.”
“Nobody screwed up,” said Vandel, emphatically. “Understood?”
Chang and Sturm nodded. From the audio speaker, Winkle’s gruff voice muttered, “Tell that to the Senate Intelligence Committee.” Then he added: “Agreed.”
“So, friends, we have two items of business,” said Vandel. “The first is what to do with the information in the notebook. The second is how to identify the person the Chinese have code-named Rukou. Let’s take the second problem first.”
Vandel looked around the table, waiting for dissent, and hearing none, he continued.
“Going over Harris’s cable, there are three facts that could help us identify this ‘Rukou.’ Ma told us, first, that the asset is a relatively senior person with access to the agency’s technology programs across directorates. Second, the asset travels outside the United States, at least occasionally, to meet with a handler from the MSS, who is also a senior person. Third, the asset has a relative who works for the agency. That’s basically it. Right, Harris?”
“Yes, sir,” said Chang. “He may have known more, but that was all he said.”
Vandel opened a locked briefcase and removed three folders, each containing four sets of computer printouts. He handed the folders to Sturm and Chang, who began leafing through the pages while he talked.
“So here’s what I’ve done,” Vandel continued. “I’m not Mr. Organization, so I turned it over to Kate. She had the Office of Security collect data about our esteemed workforce and then we sliced and diced. The first set of printouts lists everyone with access to IARPA, In-Q-Tel, Digital Innovation, and S&T programs. That turns out to be just over four hundred people, too many, if you ask me, but there it is. The second printout lists people who have a close relative currently working at the agen
cy. That’s a disturbingly large eleven hundred people, listed in attachment two.”
“Ha!” came a crackling voice from the audio speaker. “The Central Nepotism Agency. We’re like one of those back hollows in West Virginia where everyone is related. No wonder we’re so dysfunctional.”
“Speak for yourself, Warren.” Vandel suppressed a smile and continued.
“The next thing I did was to run List 1 against List 2. That is, who has the necessary access and also has a current relative at the agency. That pares the list down to just over eighty people, who are identified on attachment three. The final thing I did was to run that merged list against a roster of agency employees who have traveled overseas in the last year. That cuts it by more than half, to thirty-four people. That’s attachment four. Warren, a copy should be in your queue. Open it now. The rest of you, take a look at the last item in the folder.”
The thirty-four names were laid out on seven pages, five names on a page: jobs, clearances, career histories, brief summaries of fitness reports, educational backgrounds.
“So, friends, I would submit to you that somewhere on this list is the name of the Chinese penetration. It’s not a very big haystack. Ideally, I’d like to narrow this down to a half-dozen people and check them out, in-house, before we take anything to the Bureau. Let’s go through the list together and see if we can discard any names or highlight ones that deserve closer attention.”
Vandel called out each name in turn, starting with “Anderson” and “Applewhite,” “Bellinger,” “Borowitz,” and so on through the letters. Some names fell off by common consent. Applewhite, for example, was an administrative officer who knew a lot about renting safe houses but wouldn’t have a clue about occupying one. Same with Borowitz, an agency psychiatrist, who had high clearances and a brother who was a longtime Latin America analyst, but who was a very unlikely technology wrangler for a foreign power.
More than a dozen names were dropped that way; the group agreed that they were implausible as penetration agents for a foreign intelligence service.
The Quantum Spy Page 6