Typhoon

26

Nobody really knows what happened to Josh Pinnegar. Nobody knows if it was accident or design. The incident is still talked about in the bars and restaurants of San Francisco, although in Chinatown itself enquiries are met with a wall of silence. More than a year after his murder, no witnesses from the local community have come forward to describe Pinnegar’s assailants, nor to confirm specific details of the attack. FBI efforts to prove that the Triad gang responsible were hired by the MSS have fallen on predictably fallow ground. Pro-Chinese newspapers in the San Francisco area-the Singtao Daily, China Press, Ming Pao — blame a simple case of mistaken identity. Others argue that the tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party extend across the Pacific Ocean into every facet of Chinese life in the United States of America. The government in Beijing, they claim, uses Triad gangs to intimidate ethnic Chinese overtly critical of the regime back home. It follows, therefore, that they would find it all too easy to bankroll an assassination of this kind.

These are the facts.

In the early winter of 2004 Josh Pinnegar received a coded message at Langley from a dormant source in the Chinese military who had briefly provided information to the CIA during TYPHOON. The source arranged for Pinnegar to meet him at a well-known bar on Grant Avenue, in the Chinatown district of San Francisco. Further investigations revealed that the source was scheduled to fly into LAX on 10 November in order to attend a wedding in Sacramento on the 13th. He never boarded the plane.

On the night in question, Pinnegar made his way to the bar and waited at a table by the window for two hours. The bar was pop ular with students and tourists and it was a busy Friday night. One member of staff recalls that Pinnegar looked somewhat out of place as “a thirty-something male reading a novel and drinking soda,” while all around him young Americans were “sinking beers and playing pool.”

Towards 10 p.m. Josh became convinced that his contact was not going to show up. He asked for his cheque and left a ten-dollar tip. He went to the bathroom, collected his coat, and then left the bar by the main entrance on Grant Avenue.

The two members of the Triad gang approached on foot from across the street wielding meat cleavers that had been dipped in excrement to cause immediate septicaemia. The first strike severed Pinnegar’s right arm at the shoulder. A second hit a cellphone in the pocket of his trousers, causing a shallow cut to his upper thigh. There were at least seven eyewitnesses, six of whom were Chinese. A passing law student from Yale, who spoke to the police on condition of complete anonymity, heard a woman scream and somebody else shout out “Call the police!” as the attack continued. As far as she could recall, Pinnegar made no sound whatsoever as the blows rained down upon him.

Within seconds, he had lost at least two pints of blood. The wounds to his head and torso are too hideous to describe. Josh Pinnegar was pronounced dead on arrival at San Francisco General. The assailants fled on motorbikes which were later found abandoned, and torched, in Redwood Park.