by James Church
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“Straight lines are way overvalued,” he said.
“So far we’ve been dealing with a lot of different threads. Some of them have crossed, some of them haven’t. I think it might be good to start at the beginning, at the point of origin.”
My uncle took a piece of wood from his pocket. “It’s elm,” he said. “Good for the concentration. Want a piece? Go ahead, pull a thread.”
“My predecessor—his true name, as you probably know already, was Lu Xin, but we found out subsequently that the North Korean Operations Department called him ‘Y’—had a central role in creating this mess. Lu wanted to come home, but he didn’t know how to do it. For sure, his employers in Pyongyang wouldn’t let him go with all that he’d learned about their operations. We already know what happened when he finally did leave. They kept him on a leash as best they could. He bided his time and pretended to be content.”
“No, he didn’t just bide his time. He got word to Fang Mei-lin at least a year ago.”
“Ah,” I said. This filled in a gap in my hypothesis, sort of like an avalanche can fill in a small valley.
“They used to be lovers, but she got tired of him. I won’t give you all of her complaints.”
“Ah.” Another valley of doubt disappeared. “That helps with a few loose ends. She told you this, that he got word to her?”
“Knowing him a little, and knowing her a lot, I’m willing to bet he used her to deliver the news to MSS Headquarters that he was ready to come home.” My uncle smiled. “I only bet on sure things.”
“Then it isn’t gambling, is it? Not to rake over old coals, but whom did she leave the note with? The one you claimed you didn’t have and never saw.”
“As a matter of fact, I never did see it, but there are two excellent possibilities. She might have given it to your Lieutenant Li, who apparently lived a life of intrigue beneath his dull, loyal exterior. Or she gave it to that old crook Gao. That would explain why she went there, I suppose. But Gao worked for Mike, you might object. Sure, Gao worked for Mike, and he worked for Pyongyang, and he no doubt worked for your Third Bureau, but most of all, he worked for himself. He would have calculated where Mei-lin’s note would give him the most advantage, and if putting it in two places at the same time looked like a good way to double his profit, he would have done that.”
“Shall I continue with my hypothesis?”
“I wish you would.”
“Lu Xin, we might suppose, judged the time was ripe to try to move when he learned that Beijing had put in play an elaborate operation to discredit the South Koreans and clear the way for China to take control of most, if not all, of Mongolia’s resources—rare earth deposits, coal, uranium, and timber.”
My uncle’s eyebrows went up.
“Just wanted to make sure you were listening. Except for the trees, this is pretty much your theory, but it fits, and I’ll buy the whole thing from you.”
“Consider it a gift.”
“The key was a phony ROK government seal—made by the now-deceased Du, an expert Chinese forger working for a Fujian gang, which for some reason assumed this was a North Korean operation, exactly as Beijing hoped. At this point, we don’t know who Beijing employed to put a North Korean gloss on the operation, but it wouldn’t have been that hard to do. Like that Kazakh woman said to me, people believe what they want to believe. When Lu Xin got wind of the operation—and that’s why this is still a hypothesis, because I don’t know how he would have done so—he decided the storm it would produce, especially if the seal were to disappear for a short time, could supply cover for his own plans. With a few minor alterations, using a storm in the east to move in the west is standard MSS procedure. It probably goes back a few thousand years to some smart scholar in the Three Kingdoms, but who cares? The question was, how to create the storm?”
“Maybe when he learned that the gang had ‘lost’ the seal before handing it back to MSS, he made up a story and somehow passed the word to MSS that the seal had been moved to Mongolia, where the North Koreans intended to use it to embarrass Beijing.”
“You’re telling me you think he never had the seal?” If I’d been wearing a hat I would have taken it off to my uncle. “How’d you come to that conclusion, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“It fits nicely in the hypothetical bag, that’s all. Also fits with what you call standard operating procedure.”
“Three Kingdoms, almost certainly.”
“I’d guess there might be a hole or two in your overall theory, but nothing ever fits perfectly in these episodes. Leave that aside for now. How do you suppose he passed word to MSS about the Mongolian angle?”
I had already thought about that. “Madame Fang.”
“No, no, not likely.” My uncle waved the thought away impatiently. “He might have used her to pass on to Beijing his plea to come home, but he wouldn’t give her anything that sounded too operational. For this to work, it would have to get to MSS through a believable reporting channel, an existing agent with a record. It couldn’t be traceable to him; otherwise they’d wonder why he was giving this sort of information to them at the same time he said he wanted to come home.”
I groaned. Mrs. Zhou’s missing pages. I knew where they were. “Handout. He must have been working Handout for all of these years, saving him for the right moment. Lu Xin is the one who originally recruited Handout. When he got to Pyongyang, he must have figured out a way of keeping in touch with Handout. He took all of the relevant information in the case file with him, except for the fact that he was the one who recruited Handout.”
“I thought you told me that Fu Bin controlled Handout.”
“I never told you anything of the sort. Where did you hear that?”
“Who can remember where one hears things these days? So much information piling up.”
“How much do you know that you aren’t telling me?”
“Probably as much as you know that you are holding back. Want to put some cards on the table?”
”I thought you said gambling rots the mind.”
“It does. Nevertheless, if we are going to get something believable back to Miss Du before she bulldozes your house and we’re left with nowhere to live, we need to understand one or two more minor points.”
“Like how her father ended up working for Dr. Mike?”
“Among other things.”
The thought of my house in rubble overcame my training in security. Besides, we were sitting on a bench in North Korea. “At some point, Handout also became a Third Bureau bird. That may explain why Fu Bin disappeared so quickly once Handout passed him the message about the counterfeit seal. If there was ever a review of this seal fiasco, Third Bureau didn’t want to be anywhere around. That’s probably also why Li Bo-ting didn’t want me to get rid of Handout right away; someone in MSS wanted to keep him in play a while longer.”
My uncle didn’t reply, other than to pocket the piece of elm that he’d been smoothing. Finally, he sighed. “I’ll admit, I badly underestimated Y. He gave MSS just enough information to get them worried, but not enough for them to know exactly where to move next. He always seemed an odious type to me.” That little bomb exploded on target. My uncle gave me a moment to recover. “You knew, of course, that he’d been working for Pyongyang for a long time before coming over.”
“Ah, actually, no. I didn’t know that.” Things were starting to unravel faster than I could gather the threads up again.
This gave my uncle a shot of energy. He seemed reinvigorated at the idea of piling on surprises. “In 2007, someone tipped off your man Lu that a special investigating team sent by Beijing had discovered that he had helped Pyongyang to identify and kidnap a team of four South Korean military intelligence agents on the border. That episode went back to 2005 or 2006, when this particular agent team was setting in place a plan to entice North Korean generals to defect. Beijing obviously didn’t care what happened either to North Korean
generals or ROK agents, not in the abstract, anyway, but it didn’t like the idea of Seoul using Chinese territory as a playground. It liked even less the chief of Yanji Bureau helping out North Korean counterintelligence.”
“And?”
“And after a rough couple of weeks of interrogation, the North executed three of the four South Koreans, along with several high-ranking army officers who had been in touch with them.”
“Number four?”
“The fourth signed a confession and was moved to a safe house where he was kept in isolation for a year or so. Eventually he became an instructor for the army’s Reconnaissance Bureau. He was very effective, from what I heard, until he developed a drinking problem.”
I’d heard almost more than I could absorb. I stopped talking and watched the ship being loaded at the pier. The cranes lifted the shipping containers from the train, swung them over the open hold in the ship, and lowered them.
“You know a lot that you’ve been holding back. We need to put all the pieces together. Not a few, not some, but all of them.”
“In that case, I don’t know any of this, and I’m not telling it to you.”
“Fortunately, I never listen to a word you say.”
“You should have already figured out that when Lu or Y—”
“Or K.”
“Or whatever we decide to call him realized that he was about to be arrested, he disappeared with two briefcases of files filled with the coded names of agents and operations against the North. These were from files from your office, need I remind you. Didn’t anyone do an inventory?”
“I wasn’t there for the year after he left. I didn’t do the damage evaluation. My own headquarters didn’t even tell me any details about the defection until recently.” I hadn’t known anything, but Lieutenant Li did, and so, I’d wager with no fear of losing, did Mrs. Zhou.
“When he bumped into me in Pyongyang and announced he was defecting, we actually already knew each other slightly. In those days, I went through Yanji once in a while on liaison trips. Lu always turned up at whatever restaurant I wandered into and struck up a conversation. He was a desultory conversationalist, had a limited number of topics and didn’t make those very interesting. I waited, but he never made a recruitment pitch. Didn’t even buy me a drink. Anyway, as I told you, I tried to get him to go home when he showed up in Pyongyang, but he wouldn’t budge. Of course, at the time I didn’t realize he had such a persuasive reason for staying.”
“According to you, your paths never crossed again until you saw him in the doctor’s office.”
“Our paths didn’t exactly cross, no.”
“But you heard things.”
“It’s hard not to hear things in Pyongyang. With this sort of incident, no one is authorized to tell anyone anything, which means everything is a rumor, even if it’s accurate.”
“And you heard what?”
“I’ll summarize what I remember, as long as it’s understood that I don’t remember as well as I used to.” He stared far off into the distance. “Funny, I could still tell you details about Mei-lin when we first met, how she lit a fire in me that to this day hasn’t died down.” He stopped. “Well, you want to know something else. This is everything I can summon out of the library that used to be my memory. I don’t need it taking up space anymore.”
“Go ahead.”
“After a thorough debriefing that lasted six months, Pyongyang faced the problem of what to do with Lu. His knowledge of MSS operations was extremely useful at first, but without constant refreshment, they knew it would become dated. A decision was made to park him at a desk and use him to concoct ways to engage the MSS from a distance, sniff out Chinese operations in the North, and string them along. By watching how MSS handled his bait, Pyongyang figured it could determine how much and in what way Chinese operations had been modified, new techniques employed, and technology integrated.”
“Which brings us to Handout.”
“On that I can’t help you, because I don’t know anything about operations or agents.”
I didn’t laugh in his face, much as I wanted to. He knew plenty about operations, though for once he might be telling the truth—he might not know about Handout.
“Very well, then I’ll tell you what must have happened. Interrupt me if you find yourself in possession of a stray fact that bears on the discussion.” I thought back to what I’d read in Handout’s file, those sections that had remained in the file in the office. “While still in China, Lu had recruited an agent, Handout, to work against the North Koreans. Handout had volunteered, but there’s no record of the reason. Lu either kept it to himself or expunged it from the files before he skipped out. When he defected, he withheld knowledge of Handout from your interrogators. It wouldn’t have been too hard to do; Handout wasn’t a very useful agent and even in a six-month debriefing would have been at the bottom of the list of things your boys would have asked about. And he wouldn’t have answered anything about which he wasn’t specifically asked.”
“Three Kingdoms again?”
I shrugged. “More like common sense. I’m sure your side does the same. You certainly do.”
Silence.
I continued with my review. “Once he was settled into his desk job, he could carefully explore the North Korean files to look for signs of Handout, little footprints that had been part of their previous operations. He couldn’t be sure who on the Chinese side would pick up handling Handout once he left; for a while he could be sure that no one would trust Handout, who would certainly be put on a shelf by MSS until he could be vetted all over again. I say all over again, but I’m not sure how thoroughly it was done the first time through.”
“He certainly would never have checked out if he’d been one of ours. The agent of a defector coming out clean in the wash? Ha!”
“I thought you didn’t know anything about operations.”
“Common sense.”
“Lu would also have been alert to the possibility of Handout stumbling into Pyongyang’s counterintelligence nets. If he ever did get tangled, Lu must have steered suspicion away, making sure his boy never came to the full attention of the North Koreans. At the same time, he filled Handout’s reports with as much straw as he could get away with so that Handout was never too valuable to the Chinese. That way, in case the North had another line into MSS, one that Lu didn’t know about, Handout wouldn’t be high on the list of Pyongyang’s candidates for elimination.” I hadn’t considered the last thought until I said it, but it sounded all right on first hearing. I wasn’t sure my uncle would agree. “Plausible?”
“Elementary. To this point, everything you’ve got in your bag is very simple. Tell me when it is about to become complicated.”
“Thank you, I will hold up one finger.” I smiled sweetly and demonstrated. “By this time, Lu had become, even in his own mind, Y. The plan became more complicated the more he thought about it, befitting a man who had nothing much to do all day long but plot. When the time came, he decided he had to reinvent himself as K, and as such use Handout to establish contact with the Tumen office of the MSS. Why? He already knew from North Korean reporting that his successor was Inspector O’s nephew, and so he calculated that would be the ideal place to set things in motion. It was convoluted, with a lot of dark corners and loose ends. Exactly for that reason he figured that he could get away with it long enough to skip out of North Korea and back to his native land. He knew it wouldn’t take anyone very long to figure out K was Y, but he didn’t need it to last forever. Having a ghost image in the picture would keep information in separate files for a few months. That would create a gap big enough for him to slip through.”
“What if someone had cross-filed the information? It would have become obvious almost immediately that they were the same person.”
I smiled. “Cross-filed? Does anyone bother to do that anymore? Everyone is drowning in information these days. Who can afford to take the time to cross-file? Does Mrs. Zhou cross-file
everything? We’d run out of file space in a week.”
“Very risky, very convoluted,” my uncle said. “I would never have done it that way.”
“Ah, but you see, uncle, you’re Korean, while Lu is Chinese.”
“And never Mark Twain shall meet.”
“What?”
“I said, I can’t get over how similar in some ways this is to the Blue Sparrow case.”
“Not now, not here. Sitting in enemy territory is not the best place for storytelling.”
“Enemy territory?” My uncle looked taken aback, something I rarely saw from him. “Enemy territory? This is Korea; this is your homeland. Your father’s grave is here, as is his father’s and his father’s before him. How can it be enemy territory?”
“I didn’t mean that. You know what I meant.”
“All I know is what I see and what you say. It baffles me sometimes, I have to admit.”
“Go ahead, this is a pleasant spot, no one around.” I needed to make amends, quickly. “What about the Blue Sparrow?”
“You sure you want to listen?”
I closed my eyes. “You have my complete attention.”
“To review: The case got more convoluted the more we sank into it. We tried and tried to come up with another bag for our working hypothesis. We knew we had to. Several of us worried that things fit together in the investigation too neatly almost from the beginning. As you’ll recall, it was a woman’s ear that the vice minister of railways found on his doorstep.”
“Right ear.” I opened my eyes. “With a pearl earring.”
My uncle looked at me suspiciously. “The vice minister was a loud-talking man so we suspected, but weren’t sure, there might a connection between the ear and his brusque style.”
“You made that point already. Maybe it wasn’t the ear, maybe it was the pearl.”
Another look. “That’s unlikely. Did I also tell you that he was built like an East German boxcar gone to seed? We learned that it annoyed some people simply to be in the same room with him.”