Typhoon

32

All that remained of TYPHOON was four Uighur men living 2,000 miles apart, on opposite sides of China. A terrorist cell. A time bomb.

Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary lived and worked in Shanghai, but were never seen together in public. Abdul was married with a son and worked fourteen-hour days packaging parts for children’s toys at a factory in Putuo district.

Ansary had no girlfriend, nor any blood family to speak of. He had a part-time job as a waiter at a Uighur restaurant on Yishan Lu. Both men, under the guidance and tutelage of Professor Wang Kaixuan, had been responsible for carrying out low-level terrorist attacks against Han targets between October 1997 and late 2001. On Wang’s advice, they had curtailed their activities as TYPHOON disintegrated in 2002. Miles Coolidge had recruited them back two years later.

The third member of the cell was a twenty-nine-year-old Kazakh named Memet Almas who had bombed four Beijing taxis in successive weeks in 2000 using explosives shipped into China by the Macklinson Corporation. In January 2001, to the CIA’s dismay, Almas was arrested on unrelated charges of petty theft and sent to Beijing Second Prison for two years. In the circumstances, it was the best thing that could have happened to him. While he languished in jail, nine Uighur radicals, with whom he would almost certainly have been linked, were arrested and executed by the Chinese authorities. Upon his release in 2004, Memet met Miles Coolidge during a football match at the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing and was instructed to move to Xinjiang and await further instructions. The cell, Miles told him, would perform only one or two large-scale terrorist attacks in China over the course of the next five years. Those attacks, he said, would draw unprecedented attention to the Uighur cause. Memet bided his time working on a clothing stall at a market in Kashgar. He was regarded as a quiet, hard-working man with little interest in religion or politics. His wife, Niyasam, was a schoolteacher who knew nothing about his revolutionary past. They did not have children. Ansary, Abdul and Memet were all practising Muslims, but Miles had forbidden them to attend mosque for fear of drawing the attention of the authorities. They were also ordered to shave off their beards.

The leader of the cell, and its oldest member, was Ablimit Celil. As a teenager in the 1980s, Ablimit had been arrested and imprisoned for stealing a Kalashnikov rifle from police headquarters in his home town of Hotan. In prison, he came under the influence of a Uighur imam who developed both his Islamic faith and his hatred of the ruling Han. Later Ablimit joined an underground group which bombed train lines, office blocks and other “soft” targets in Xinjiang. He took part in the Baren riot of April 1990 and fled into the Kunlun mountains alongside hundreds of other activists as Chinese troops poured in. Many of these activists, as well as villagers sympathetic to the separatist cause, were subsequently rounded up and imprisoned. However, Ablimit evaded capture and, two years later, planted a bomb on an Urumqi bus packed with Han revellers celebrating the Chinese New Year. Six people were killed when the device exploded. In 1997 he had been responsible for the deaths of eight soldiers and four catering staff at an army barracks in Turpan when a bomb he had planted in a store cupboard blew up during the evening meal.

Shortly before 9/11, Ablimit Celil made the first of two journeys to an al-Qaeda training camp in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan. A more devout Muslim than the other members of the cell, he managed to obtain permission to undertake the Haj, and it was at Mecca that he was recruited as an agent of the CIA by Josh Pinnegar, who was posing as an American newspaper reporter.

The cell was unusual in that its four members were deliberately kept apart. Ablimit, a widower, lived in Urumqi where he worked as a doorman at a five-star hotel catering to foreigners and rich Chinese businessmen. Whenever he visited the city, Miles always stayed at the hotel and was able to communicate with Ablimit simply by passing him messages in the form of tips. Typically, these would be written on Chinese and American banknotes using inks visible only under ultra-violet light. Shortly after the Madrid bombings of March 2004, Ablimit informed Miles that he was keen to move with Memet to Shanghai and to team up with Abdul Bary and Ansary Tursun. The atmosphere between Hans and Uighurs in Urumqi, he said, had deteriorated dramatically. September 11th had handed the Chinese authorities carte blanche to clamp down on the minority Muslim population and to treat them with a previously unimaginable contempt. Informers now operated at every level of society. Black-clad anti-terrorist police roamed the streets. Where once Han and Uighur had lived contentedly side by side, the two ethnic groups were now divided by fear and mutual suspicion. Passports belonging to thousands of Muslim citizens had been confiscated by the authorities. All travel now had to be approved by a Chinese government paranoid that its oppressed minorities would join militant groups in Chechnya and Pakistan and return to the Motherland, planning to wreak havoc. Only a Madrid-style incident in either Shanghai or Beijing would be sufficient, Celil said, to accelerate the cause of an in depen dent Eastern Turkestan.

Ablimit’s theory chimed with Miles, who had concluded that small-scale mainland attacks, most of which went unreported in the West, were of no strategic value to the United States. He had learned this lesson from TYPHOON’s earlier incarnation. The ultimate goal of the group of individuals in Washington with tactical control of Miles’s operation was an American-sponsored catastrophe at the Beijing Olympics. Yet that event was so far off that Miles had not disclosed the objective to any member of the cell. Instead, he told Ablimit that he would begin to consider targets in Shanghai for a possible operation in the summer of 2005. Memet told his wife that he was going to Shanghai to look for work in the construction industry. Ablimit found himself a job in the kitchens of a hotel belonging to the same chain for which he had worked in Urumqi.

There was one complication. The cell had briefly had a fifth member. Enver Semed had fought alongside the Taliban at ToraBora and had been captured by American soldiers in December 2001. He was taken to Guantanamo Bay where he was held alongside twenty-two other Uighur fighters with alleged links to alQaeda. In early 2004 Semed had his detention analysed by the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which determined that he was no longer an “enemy” of the United States. There was a simple reason for this: the CIA had recruited Semed as a double agent. Repatriated to China on false documentation, he reported to Josh Pinnegar, who passed control for Semed to Kenneth Lenan. Lenan, under pressure from the MSS because of his links to Macklinson, gave him up almost immediately. Two months later Semed was arrested on charges of belonging to ETIM and executed at a gulag in Qinghai. It was the news of Semed’s demise that Lenan was bringing to Coolidge on his final visit to Shanghai.