Typhoon

27

Well spoken, patrician, reluctant to suff er fools, David Waterfield was a British spy of the old school. When working in London he invariably wore a suit cut by Hawkes of Savile Row, brogues from John Lobb, a tailored shirt by Turnbull and Asser and socks from New and Lingwood. He would lunch frequently at his club on Pall Mall, spend every third weekend at a cottage in Dorset and occasionally attend meetings of the Countryside Alliance. In the summer, for three weeks, he and his wife holidayed at a luxurious farm house in the Portuguese Alentejo, courtesy of a former SIS colleague who had made it big at Cazenove’s. Retirement, when it came, would probably involve a brief stint working for the National Trust, with the odd lecture at IONEC thrown in. Indeed, David Waterfield conformed so readily to a certain Foreign Office stereotype that as he emerged from platform 16 at Waterloo to make his way across the crowded station concourse, it occurred to the waiting Joe that he was exactly the sort of upper-class gentleman spook who had given MI6 a bad name. They were too easy to lampoon, a cinch to satirize. Yet Joe also knew that the image was completely misleading: beneath Waterfield’s public-school bonhomie lurked an intellect as sharp and as persuasive as any in the Service. Joe was fascinated to discover how he was going to try to talk him round.

From Waterloo they made their way north towards the river, discussing the broad impact of Butler and reflecting on the old days in East Asia. Waterfield had stayed in the newly minted Hong Kong SAR until 2000, before a three-year stint in Beijing. Their paths had crossed only twice while Joe had been based in Malaysia and Singapore, but the two men had renewed their professional friendship while working together at Vauxhall Cross.

“Tell me,” Waterfield said as they descended, side by side, a spiral staircase attached to the Festival Hall. “What do you remember about Kenneth Lenan?”

Of all the questions Joe had been expecting, that wasn’t one of them. As far as he was aware, Lenan had quit the Office in early 1998 to work for an American construction company in China. What relevance would his story have to Joe’s uncertain future with SIS?

“He left shortly after I moved to KL, didn’t he?” he said. “Got a big offer from Halliburton or Bechtel to work in Gansu province.”

Perhaps there was a cautionary tale in Lenan’s subsequent behaviour.

“The job was with the Macklinson Corporation,” Waterfield corrected. They had emerged onto the wide, pedestrianized path which runs from the London Eye to Tate Modern, heading east in the direction of Blackfriars Bridge. “He did six weeks in Lanzhou, then moved to Urumqi on a more or less permanent basis.”

A teenage boy on a skateboard rattled past, ducking under the concrete overhang of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Hearing the word “Urumqi,” Joe was beginning to forge a vague, uncertain link in his mind between Lenan and Professor Wang Kaixuan when Waterfield said, “And what do you remember about Kenneth’s relationship with Miles Coo lidge?”

Gulls were swooping low over the slate-grey waters of the Thames. Joe felt the past rushing up behind him like a flood tide.

“I remember that I didn’t trust him,” he said. “I remember that there was some trouble over Professor Wang.”

“Now why was that?”

“It’s a long story.” Joe sensed that Waterfield already knew most of it.

“We’ve got lots of time.”

A set of railings near by looked out over the Thames. Joe walked towards them. It was a crisp September morning, not a cloud in the sky. As if it would help to trigger his memory, Joe lit a cigarette and began to relate, as best he could recall, the events of that frustrating week seven years earlier: Lenan’s sudden appearance in the small hours; Lee’s fumbling lies at the safe house; Miles’s inexpert denials of a CIA conspiracy, uttered in the depths of a Wan Chai nightclub. Waterfield listened as his eyes followed the boats on the river, the trains on Hungerford Bridge.

“And that was the last you heard of it?” he asked, when Joe had finished. “Neither Miles nor Kenneth ever mentioned Wang again?”

“Never.”

They turned and began walking east. Another skateboarder rumbled past and Waterfield cursed under his breath. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “Coffee.”

The cafe of the National Film Theatre is spacious, glass-fronted. Waterfield and Joe might have been father and son ordering cappuccinos and cakes at the counter. Joe found them a table in the window looking out over the booksellers who ply their trade under Waterloo Bridge. As crowds of passers-by hovered around the stalls of old maps and paperbacks, Waterfield removed his heavy winter coat and settled down to business.

“Have you ever, at any stage in your career, come across the name

TYPHOON?”

Joe said that he had not.

“TYPHOON was the cryptonym for a CIA operation to destabilize the Xinjiang Autonomous Region which was abandoned after 9/11. Miles Coo lidge ran it with assistance from, among others, Kenneth Lenan.” Joe was eating the milk and powdered chocolate from the surface of his cappuccino. He was astonished by the revelation, but force of habit concealed his reaction. “During the early stages of your interview with Professor Wang, Miles telephoned Garden Road and discovered that you were using a shared safe house. Kenneth Lenan confirmed in a subsequent phone call that you were involved in an interrogation of a Han national from Urumqi who was antagonistic towards Beijing. Miles began listening to a live feed at the consulate and moved on it immediately. He and Kenneth had been involved in several little schemes before, some of which I knew about, some of which I didn’t. You might call it a mutually beneficial relationship, particularly for Kenneth, who managed to squirrel away enough American money for ten retirements. To cut a long story short, Miles had been looking round for ways of developing operations in Xinjiang. Wang looked just the ticket. Miles convinced Kenneth to hand him over to the Cousins and to use SIS channels to spirit the professor out of Hong Kong and back to mainland China. Wang was subsequently recruited and trained in Taiwan as an agent of the CIA with instructions to put together a network of radicalized Uighur youth who would cause chaos on the streets through bombings, riots and anti-communist demonstrations.”

“Jesus Christ,” Joe said. “And you say you knew nothing about it? I spent six weeks worrying that I’d failed to identify Wang as MSS.”

“That’s what Miles told you?”

“They both did. Insisted he was a Chinese intelligence officer known to the Cousins who had been involved in an operation that had led to CIA expulsions.”

“And you believed this?”

“Not exactly. But I was young. I was inexperienced. I was too far down the food chain to make a fuss.”

Waterfield’s body language suggested that he accepted the broad logic of this. He took a bite of his cake and spent the next ten minutes outlining Macklinson’s role in TYPHOON. Joe was still reeling from the revelation that Wang Kaixuan, the benign, idealistic intellectual he had interviewed in Tsim Sha Tsui, had somehow been transformed, almost overnight, into a patriarch of terror. For seven years Joe Lennox had been privy to intelligence reports coming out of China about terrorist incidents in Xinjiang and beyond. It was hard to believe that Wang, with American help, might have been responsible for orchestrating some of them.

“How big was TYPHOON? What sort of scale are we talking about?”

“Initially limitless. Of course Langley kept the sharp end of things to a minimum. Any weapons and explosives found their way to a small group of extremists-some of them under Wang’s control, some of them not-who continued to blow up buses and supermarkets in places like Lanzhou and Kashgar. But the softer propaganda tools-video cameras, pro-democracy documents, briefcases of cash-went to a much wider circle of student intellectuals and fledgling democracy types. TYPHOON began as an operation aimed at bringing about independence for Eastern Turkestan, but very quickly spread into a generalized, American-sponsored pro-democracy movement all across Han China.”

“How did the Yanks think they were going to get away with this?”

“God knows. And the short answer is that they didn’t.” Waterfield scratched the side of his neck, producing a raw red mark above the collar of his shirt. “The one thing the Cousins understood only too well was Beijing’s fear of massed, organized rebellion in the provinces. That’s what they were trying to catalyse. Da luan. ‘Big chaos.’ But at the same time they had very little understanding of the situation on the ground. You don’t just walk into a country like China and start fomenting peasant rebellion. By all means fund and supervise a small network of pseudo-Islamist radicals, but don’t get ideas above your station. Informants operate at every level of Chinese society. You’re going to get caught. You’re going to get found out.”

“And that’s what happened?”

“Of course it is.” If Waterfield sounded frustrated, it was only because he was still flabbergasted by the naivety of TYPHOON’s conception. “In the spring of 2000, one of the Macklinson shipments was intercepted by Chinese customs in Dalian. A barn stuff ed with copying machines and anti-communist literature was discovered shortly afterwards about fifty miles outside Shihezi. At least three cells with TYPHOON fingerprints were penetrated by the MSS between 1999 and the spring of 2001, with as many as nineteen Uighur separatists subsequently tortured and executed for splittist activities. Four so-called Macklinson employees, all of them in reality CIA, were expelled from China for ‘undermining the security of the Socialist Motherland through acts of subversion and sabotage.’ It was a total bloody disaster.”

“How come we didn’t get to hear about it?”

“Good question. Essentially because the Chinese and the Yanks came to an arrangement.”

“What sort of an arrangement?”

“The sort that got people killed.”

For a strange and exhilarating moment, about which Joe would later feel ashamed, he wondered if Waterfield was about to tell him that Miles Coo lidge had been executed by the PLA. A waitress approached and cleared away their plates and cups.

“Here’s the situation,” Waterfield said. He flicked a speck of dust from the sleeve of his suit. “Three weeks ago, Kenneth Lenan’s body was pulled out of the Huangpu River. His tongue had been cut out. Every tendon in his body had been sliced open. The Chinese authorities claim that they have no idea who did this to him. We don’t exactly believe that.”