The Enemy Inside

SEVENTEEN

Lang-Jian Cheng sat behind the large ornate desk in his office at the Central Military Commission in Beijing. Wrinkled and bald, with a fringe of gray that wrapped his head above the ears, General Cheng was a career soldier in the People’s Liberation Army.

He was head of Second Bureau, China’s overseas foreign intelligence unit, where he was known as “the Creeping Dragon” by subordinates. He was renowned for his practiced patience, his willingness to wait for just the right moment before acting, often to the consternation of younger and more aggressive officers.

This morning, Cheng was busy reading the latest intelligence communiqués along with the daily briefings from the bureau’s burgeoning overseas offices and operations.

He smiled after reading one of them. There were reports that an American CIA station in Central California had christened Cheng “Long John,” apparently in reference to the pirate in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island. It tickled his fancy, since he had earned this alias by thoroughly penetrating America’s high-tech industries in Silicon Valley. The place was believed to have so many of Cheng’s spies working there, gathering information and sending it back to Beijing, that some in the US intelligence community now referred to it not as “Chinatown,” but as “Cheng’s Town.”

For a moment he considered framing the report for his wall, and then thought better of it. He put it facedown on the pile of documents already read and reached for his coffee.

If the truth be known, they would realize that Cheng’s network was far more pervasive, so much so that it had drilled into the very core of the American government in Washington.

The FBI didn’t know it because it was wielded through a Western intermediary, a man Cheng knew he could not always trust. But then, Cheng wasn’t sure he could always trust his own children, let alone his subordinates, such was his nature and the nature of the Chinese power structure. Trust was a weakness he couldn’t afford.

He sipped his coffee as he considered the man code-named “Ying.” He was not in the strictest sense what you would call a “Chinese asset,” a spy who was handled by agents out of the Chinese embassy in Washington or one of its consulates in the far-flung United States. In fact, Cheng’s people knew only his code name and nothing more. Because of his unique position Cheng protected him and dealt with him directly.

Their dealings were grounded not in ideology, but pragmatic common interest-the seeds of which were money and power. The money came from Chinese investments made through the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges. These were certain coveted military-industrial stocks normally not made available to Western investors by the Chinese government. Profits taken from these were deposited in Ying’s numbered accounts in private banks in Hong Kong, none of which were accessible to American taxing authorities or law enforcement. There was nothing they could do.

As far as Cheng was concerned, the Americans had no one to blame but themselves. Their open society was riddled with leaks, leakers, and unlocked safes. If it continued, China and Russia would have to erect walls just to keep out the growing number of disgruntled American defectors with their computerized mountains of top-secret information.

American technology, which had exploded in the 1980s with the personal computer, had grown so fast and in such a turbulent fashion that US industrial security was a joke. America’s ineptitude invited other enterprising powers to steal everything that wasn’t locked down. Even their own government didn’t know how many priceless jewels they possessed. Under such a system, how could anyone protect them?

He picked up the next report and began reading. Before he had completed three lines of Mandarin characters Cheng was reminded that the West and, in particular the United States, had far deeper problems than industrial or even military espionage.

America’s greatest dilemma was not with China, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, or the stateless terrorists of the Middle East. Its most serious problems were internal, part of the nation’s own political genetics.

Reflections of this could be seen in the partisan divisions and the take-no-prisoners domestic political warfare that had become part of the daily news cycle in modern America. This constant infighting was largely intended for the acquisition of personal power by a handful of political celebrities fawned over by the American media. The process consumed vast financial and political resources, none of which took the country any closer to a single perceptible national goal. In Cheng’s view a sound dictatorship was far more efficient.

To American politicians partisan disputes were a purely domestic matter. It was no one else’s business, and certainly beyond the purview of any foreign power. Yet, what they failed to realize were the foreign intelligence implications of this conduct, the toxic opportunities that it afforded to America’s adversaries abroad.

As far as Cheng was concerned, democracies started wars they could not finish because they lacked the long-term political will that would allow them to complete what they had started. A war begun in one regime would result in failure and defeat when the troops were withdrawn in the next. The Fates often hung on the whim of voters who had no idea of the consequence of their votes and whose actions were often rooted in lies from ambitious politicians willing to deceive in order to attain higher office. But in Cheng’s mind, democracy was not a rational method for making sound policy.

In modern China, lies, as an instrument of maintaining power, were unnecessary because there was no one to lie to. The people had no power, as long as they were controlled by the government. And once you fell from power, lies were futile.

In America, politicians and the media, including the news outlets that pretended to cover government affairs, downplayed this near full-time exercise in deceit by calling it “spin.” This seemed to excuse it from the more serious lies committed by ordinary citizens who would pay dearly if they tried to deceive the state.

Cheng found the justification for this American anomaly interesting. The rationale was that if you punished those in power with prison every time they lied, no one would run for public office. Cheng found it surreal that in the United States, supposedly the gold standard of modern law and justice, with its hundreds of thousands of lawyers, millions of statutes, and armies of judges, there was not a single penal law punishing officials who intentionally and repeatedly lied to their people on important issues of state.

You could no longer shock the average American, no matter the scope of the scandal or the damage that it caused. They had come to expect this from their leaders.