“There are five kinds of spies,” Yu Qiangsheng explained to Tom one morning in the sticky, windless heat of Hong Kong. And, perhaps, the agency didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But the agency’s counterintelligence staff warned that he might be a dangle, a provocation meant to trick the CIA into revealing its secrets. He had been dropping a hanky, passing tidbits of information, for two years. Truly, he knew all the secrets.Īnd now, Yu declared, he despised China and wanted to escape. He had been adopted after his father’s death by a ruthless man who became head of China’s secret police. Yu had survived the Cultural Revolution to become the head of foreign operations of the Chinese spy service. His father had been hiding with Mao Zedong in the caves of Yan’an his father’s first wife had run off to become Mao’s mistress. He was too good to be true: a son of the revolution no, more than that, a prince. Yu had the face of a mandarin: thin lips sharp eyes a high forehead dark hair going to gray, without the usual black dye. End of carouselĬrane’s first assignment was to babysit Yu Qiangsheng while the agency decided whether to bring him to America. Have feedback on this story or format? Tell us here. They had hoped their son would become a missionary, too, but he had joined the Central Intelligence Agency, which was entirely different and also in some respects the same. His parents had been missionaries in Henan and Shandong provinces, and he spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese. He demanded bottled water from Europe and a food taster to make sure he wasn’t being poisoned.Įvery day that first week, Yu received a young, well-mannered American visitor. His stomach hurt, and he complained about the food at every meal. He wanted to be gone, but he was still in Beijing’s reach worse, he was in a colony. Yu paced the rooms of the safe house the first few days, sleepless and depressed. Britain controlled Hong Kong back then, and the apartment was safe from the Chinese agents who would have killed Yu if they knew where he was hiding. Guards from the CIA’s Office of Security kept watch from a nearby flat and from across the street.
The week after Yu Qiangsheng defected from China, he was closeted in a safe house in Repulse Bay, facing the sea. But the characters in this story inhabit the world of imagination. And, certainly, the starting point of Yu’s defection is accurate. This isn’t a “true” account of what happened in the spy wars between the CIA and the Chinese Ministry of State Security over the past few decades. The spy world, as people so often say, is painted in “shades of gray,” and its facts are embossed with fiction. They create “legends” for their operatives to document an imaginary past. Intelligence agencies give their real-life assets invented names, as in a novel. China’s spymasters gradually regained their balance and a decade ago, they shattered the network of CIA informants inside the country, killing or arresting more than two dozen people. But it is the nature of intelligence that nothing is what it at first appears. When Yu Qiangsheng, a top official of the Ministry of State Security, stole across the border to Hong Kong in November 1985, he left behind a fragile Chinese intelligence service that seemed ready to collapse.
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