Typhoon

18

Sally-Ann McNeil is nowadays a mother of three children-two boys, one girl-living in a quiet suburb of Maryland, married to a balding, wealthy, not exactly charismatic tax attorney named Gerry. Their house, with its low white roof and its sprinkler on the lawn, is no more than an hour’s drive from the airport and resembles every other house on the anonymous residential street on which they have chosen to make their home. Sally-Ann works part-time at a local real estate office, offers private tuition to dyslexic schoolchildren and plays golf with her friend Mary up to three times a week.

“Bill Marston got me into it,” she says. “If he was still alive today, I could kick his ass.”

It took a while to track Sally-Ann down. Her name has changed through marriage and, in the wake of TYPHOON, she was understandably reluctant to stick her head above the parapet. We spoke one weekday afternoon in 2006 in a warm, plant-filled conservatory at the back of her house when Gerry was away at work and the eldest of their children at school. If she was nervous about talking to a nosey writer, she did not betray it, although the breaking of her long silence was something for which she had clearly been preparing herself for some time.

“To be honest, it was all so long ago. I thought nobody would ever ask,” she said, letting the two-week-old baby she was holding in her arms suckle on a manicured finger. “It was part of my job to be anonymous, to be the note taker, the assistant who fixed coffee. Nobody even seemed to notice I was there.” She looked sideways out of the window and her gaze seemed regretful. “I knew right away that I was carrying a pretty burdensome secret. I’ve never told Gerry a thing, you know? I figured the day that I did would be the day that they came looking for me.”

Sally-Ann now began to relate what Miles had said on the long-distance line as the Washington meeting developed either side of lunch. Her voice was low and steady and I was impressed both by her memory and by her grasp of the political ramifications of the discussion. In common with most Europeans over the previous five or six years, I had tended to underestimate the intelligence of the average Bush-voting American, but Sally-Ann was as lucid and as perceptive as I could have wished.

“What you have to remember is that Bill Marston was a politician first and a businessman second,” she said. “With Mike Lambert it was the other way around.” I was taking notes and my pen ran out of ink. She was still talking as I swapped it for a biro in my jacket pocket. “Both of them had this image of themselves as patriots, when in fact they were just ignorant, ambitious neocons. I guess you’ve seen it a lot in the past few years. Throwbacks from a different era with little or no understanding of how anybody east of New York really behaves. Men of money and power whose sole objective is to make America richer and more powerful than she already is. So when this articulate, seemingly well-informed spy from Hong Kong started to suggest using Macklinson hardware and know-how to get access into mainland China, they both just started to glow. The plan was so crazy, but it was perfect. They were going to conceal explosives, weapons, cellphones, laptop computers, printers, photocopiers, even Korans, in Macklinson freight shipments coming in by air or sea from the United States.

Coolidge knew we had contracts running in dozens of Chinese cities, including four, I think, in Xinjiang itself, and others just over the border in Gansu and Qinghai. He proposed funding the setting up of English-language schools on site, nominally for teaching Chinese-speaking employees how to communicate with their American bosses, but in reality as cover for CIA teachers in Xinjiang and surrounding provinces to recruit disaffected laborers for the creation of civil strife.”

“Some of those teachers got caught,” I muttered.

“Sure,” she replied, as if this wasn’t news to her. “Then they sent out literally hundreds of video cameras for distribution among the peasant underclass so they could record the riots when they took place, with the idea of exerting extra pressure on Beijing through the subsequent outrage of the international community. I think maybe that was one idea that actually worked, right, because I saw a news report on CNN.” I nodded, unsure whether CNN had covered the same riot story as the one picked up by the Washington Post in the summer of 2003, when video footage of a pitched battle between disgruntled peasants and gangs employed by a Chinese electricity company was leaked to the Post by a farmer. The film showed a small group of peasants who had refused to abandon their land being attacked by a gang armed with pipes and shovels. “And then of course they were going to fill Macklinson with deep-cover CIA guys who would nominally be working on road or rail construction projects but would in fact be running agents across the entirety of north-west China. It was all on an unbelievable scale. Coolidge talked about encouraging Saudi funding using ‘well-established channels,’ about the need to identify and fund a Uighur leader at the head of an Eastern Turkestan government-in-exile. They even talked, at that early stage, about recruiting Uighur pilgrims when they travelled to Mecca. It was very imaginative, very persuasive. Yet even as I was listening to it all, with everybody going into detail and new ideas springing up all the time, I remember thinking, How can it be that this morning neither Bill Marston nor Mike Lambert could point to Xinjiang on a map? Yet here they are signing up a publicly listed company to a top-secret CIA project which nearly bankrupted its operations in Asia.”

“Oil,” I said, because, when it came to TYPHOON, oil was the answer to almost everything.

“I guess you’re right.” Sally-Ann’s middle child, a blond-haired toddler called Karl who was watching television in the next room, suddenly waddled in and asked for some fruit juice. She fetched it for him and then returned to the conservatory carrying a plate of apparently home-baked cookies. As if she had been turning the idea over in her mind, she said, “I think Mike was always a lot smarter than Bill, y’know? The top guys at Macklinson were almost always figureheads, former government officials who lent a certain kind of gravitas and credibility to the boardroom. Men like Mike Lambert were the ones making the decisions. He’d been with the company from the age of twenty-two. Now he’s worked his way to the top. And I definitely think you’re right when you say that it was the prospect of the oil and gas in Xinjiang that made him go along with it. That was the quid pro quo with the CIA as far as he was concerned. You scratch our back now and we’ll scratch yours later. You could actually see him envisaging an independent Xinjiang run by a puppet government of the United States. That was how delusional they were. Macklinson sweeping up contracts to build pipelines, refineries, road networks, hotels in the desert…”

Sally-Ann suddenly looked tired and I realized that she had probably been up most of the night feeding her baby. She laid the child in a crib on the floor and I wondered whether this was my cue to leave. We had been talking for several hours.

“What time is Gerry due back?” I asked.

She looked at her watch. “In about a half-hour.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything else you can remember?”

She looked directly at me, as if she knew what I was angling for. The best journalists already know the answers to half the questions they want to ask. A contact had placed Kenneth Lenan in Garden Road on the night of the conference call and I needed that information confirmed.

“Well, there was one last thing,” she said. I picked up one of the cookies and took a bite out of it in an effort not to appear too eager. “Towards about four o’clock, a second man joined Coolidge in the booth and started to take part in the conversation.”

“An Englishman?” I asked, just to help her along.

“Sure, an Englishman. How did you know that?”

“Go on.”

“I can’t remember his name. Only that he had one of those typical British accents, you know? A little bit superior, a little bit upper class.”

“Could his name have been Kenneth Lenan?”

“That’s right.” Sally-Ann’s voice leaped to such an extent that the carefully swaddled baby stirred and moaned. “Kenneth Lenan. Sounded like a member of the British Royal family. Real snooty.”

“That’s the one.” I was smiling to myself. “Lenan was Coolidge’s contact in MI6, the British end of TYPHOON. What happened?”

“Well, he just kind of showed up. Miles was in the middle of talking about some of the terrorist activities that had been happening on Urumqi public transportation and he suddenly announces that somebody else was going to be joining us.”

“Did that surprise Jenson? How did Josh react?”

Sally-Ann appeared to struggle for the memory here, which suggested to me that Lenan’s appearance had been preordained. “No, I think they kind of just ran with it,” she said. “We’d all been there so long it didn’t seem weird that someone should be coming in at that point. I guess we’d lost sight of the fact that it was maybe three or four o’clock in the morning over in Hong Kong and that for somebody from MI6 to be sitting in with Miles was not unusual.”

“So Miles acknowledged that he was from British intelligence?”

“Yup.”

“And what did Lenan say?”

“Far as I can remember, the tone of the conversation became a little bit-how can I put it? — triumphalist. I guess the point was to show Macklinson how serious the Agency was about TYPHOON and how far down the line they already were in terms of planning. Coolidge introduced Lenan and said they were about to run a particular agent into Xinjiang, a professor of something or other who’d just come over from China. It sounded kind of far-fetched to me but Bill was real impressed.”

This astonished me. “They were talking about Wang already, even at that stage?”

“Who?”

“Wang Kaixuan. A Han academic from Urumqi. He was recruited by Lenan and sent back into Xinjiang to organize a network of separatist radicals.”

“ He was the one?” Sally-Ann was frowning. It was all starting to fall into place. She looked down at the baby and said, “Well it certainly sounds like the same person. Coolidge was real excited by it. Said this guy had just fallen into their laps.”

“What about Lenan? What did he say?”

From the front of the house I could hear what sounded like a car pulling up in the drive. It might have been on one of the neighbouring properties, or somebody turning around in the road, but I was concerned that Gerry had returned home early and would now interrupt this last vital stage of our conversation. I had a flight to catch to Beijing the next day and this would be my last chance to talk to Sally-Ann for several weeks.

“He was more measured,” she said, “like he was too superior to get excited about it. You know how a certain type of English person can be like that? A little condescending, like everything is beneath their dignity?” I smiled. “From what I remember Lenan kind of picked up where Coolidge left off. Said he had just gotten back from Taiwan where he’d debriefed the agent and that it ‘was indeed very encouraging news,’ or some shit like that. Said that Wang represented the new China, was a forward-thinking democrat, a man of hope. Kind of thing that made Bill Marston drool. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but in some ways it sounded as though the British guy would have preferred not to be there.” Sally-Ann pushed a twist of hair behind her ear. “Makes me wonder why Miles called him in.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Unless…”

“Unless what?”

I heard the boot of the car slam outside and knew that Gerry would soon be at the front door. Sally-Ann appeared not to have noticed.

“Unless Miles didn’t know about Wang Bin.”

“Who’s Wang Bin?”

“Wang’s son.”

I stopped taking notes. At first, Sally-Ann didn’t seem to notice my surprise. “Maybe Lenan had been to Taiwan and found out what had happened to him,” she said. “When he told us over the conference phone it certainly sounded like it was fresh information.”

“What information? What the hell happened to Wang’s son?”

“You didn’t know?”

“Tell me, Sally.”

“Wang Bin was killed,” she said. “Shot by the Chinese PLA. During some riot in Xinjiang. I guess that was his justification for what he did. I guess that was Wang’s justification for everything.”