Decoded (26 page)

Having reached this point, Director Zheng stopped talking and went silent. It seemed as though he had fallen into a state of mournful melancholy. As I waited for him to speak again, it became obvious that he wasn’t going to continue on with his story but rather to bid me farewell. Even though I had thought of telling him what I had learnt from Yan Shi, I never had the chance. But I was happy with this. I thought, ‘Since I wasn’t really sure if I should tell him or not, not having been given the opportunity to do so worked in my favour, it allowed me to avoid the burden the words would have incurred.’

Before we parted, I had to remind him, ‘Didn’t you say that you had some additional information to give me?’

He was a bit taken aback, but then made his way over to a metal file cabinet and pulled open a drawer. Removing a single file, he asked, ‘Did you know that when Rong Jinzhen was at university he was the student of a foreign professor, a man by the name of Jan Liseiwicz?’

‘No, I hadn’t heard that.’

‘This man went to great efforts to prevent Rong Jinzhen from deciphering PURPLE. This file is the proof. Have a look, and should you need it, we can make copies for you.’

That was how I first heard of Liseiwicz.

Director Zheng admitted that he did not know Liseiwicz and what he had discovered had come by way of hearsay. He said, ‘When he made contact with us here, I was overseas in Y country to learn from their experience in trying to decrypt PURPLE. Even after I returned, I did not come into contact with the Liseiwicz correspondence; only the special task force assigned to cracking PURPLE had any firsthand knowledge of these letters. At the time, Headquarters was taking direct charge of things – perhaps they feared we would fight over it, fight to see who could produce the desired outcome. As a result, they kept us in the dark about the whole affair. It was only much later on that I met a senior official from Headquarters who was prepared to let me see the letters. They are all in English, but accompanied with Chinese translations.’

Having reached this point, a thought suddenly occurred to him: the original English letters should remain in his possession. I therefore opened the file and began to separate the English originals from the translations. It was then that I saw a record of a telephone conversation on top of the file – someone named Qian Zongnan had telephoned. The note seemed to serve as a foreword to the case files. There were only a few sentences:

Liseiwicz was employed as a high-level military intelligence analyst for X country. I saw him four times, the last in the summer of 1970. Later I discovered that Liseiwicz and Fan Lili were put under house arrest at PP military base, reason unknown. Liseiwicz died in 1978 at PP base. In 1981, the military authorities of X country released Fan (Lili) from house arrest. In 1983, Fan (Lili) arrived in Hong Kong in search of me, hoping that I would assist her in making arrangements for her to return to China. Assistance refused. In 1986, it was reported that Fan (Lili) was in her home town of Linshui county, C City, contributing funds to establish an engineering project. By all accounts, she is still resident in Linshui county.

Director Zheng told me that this person, Qian Zongnan, was at that time an informant, a comrade charged with keeping tabs on Liseiwicz in X country. Upon being handed the file, I had thought that this man would be crucial for helping me to come to a better understanding of the role played by Jan Liseiwicz in these events. I was therefore very sad to be informed that he had died the year before. Still, the record did make mention of Fan Lili, Liseiwicz’s Chinese wife. If I wished to understand him, then she was without a doubt the best person to talk to.

Since I lacked a specific address, I had at first mistakenly believed that finding Fan Lili would entail great deal of effort and be fraught with complications and setbacks; the actual experience was anything but. Making initial enquiries at the Linshui County Education Bureau, it seemed as though everyone in the building knew her. As it turned out, several years ago not only had she succeeded in establishing three primary-level Hope Schools,* she had also donated tens of thousands of yuan worth of textbooks to the local middle schools. You could say that those on the frontlines of education in Linshui, without exception, knew who she was and respected her. However, when I found her at Jinhe Hospital in C City, my original ambition went cold, for there she was, lying in bed with her larynx removed. Gauze was tied about her neck and head in a rough fashion, making it seem as though she possessed two skulls. She was suffering from throat cancer. The doctor said that even though the surgery was successful, there was no way that she could speak unless she practised making sounds through her lungs. Because the surgery had just taken place recently, her condition was still very poor. It would be impossible for me to interview her. Therefore, I said nothing and instead pretended that I was another of the numerous senior people from Linshui county who had come to pay their respects. I left her flowers and my best wishes, and took leave. Later, over the course of the next few days, I visited her in the hospital three more times. On each visit she would write her responses to my questions. Altogether, she wrote several pages and each one astonished me!

To tell you the truth, if she hadn’t written these answers, no one would ever have grasped the truth about Liseiwicz. We would never have realised his true identity and position, his sincere desires and shame, his indisputable pain and sorrow. In a very real sense, Liseiwicz’s departure for X country was far from being all there was to that story. The entire tale was something truly mind-boggling, a genuinely freakish combination of events.

To be honest with you, Fan Lili’s words demand patience in order to be appreciated and valued.

I give them to you below, word for word. The first time:

1. He (Liseiwicz) was not a code-breaker.

2. Since you already know that he wrote those letters in order to mystify you and put you on the wrong track, why do you still believe what he said? Those words were all lies – him a code-breaker? He created ciphers; he was the enemy of those who decipher them.

3. PURPLE was his creation!

4. This will take some explaining. It was the spring of 1946. A man had come looking for Liseiwicz, a fellow student from Cambridge. At that time, it seemed that this man was preparing to take charge of a very important post for the government of Israel. He took Liseiwicz to a church on Gulou Street, and in front of God and in the name of the millions of Jewish compatriots, requested him to devise a cipher for the State of Israel. Liseiwicz took more than a year to construct the cipher, but his sponsors didn’t seem to care; they were ever so pleased. Since the time he was a small child, Liseiwicz had grown up surrounded with adulation: his ego was very strong and it wouldn’t let him fail. But because he didn’t have enough time in which to work on it, it was somewhat rushed – at least for him – and he began to feel that there were many flaws within it; so he took it upon himself to devise a new cipher to take its place. This was when he was hopelessly drawn deeper and deeper into the bewildering world of cryptography. Finally, after nearly three years of work, he succeeded in devising a cipher he could be satisfied with. That cipher was PURPLE. He then requested that the Israeli authorities replace his previous cipher with this new one. They decided to experiment with it, but the result was not what he expected: PURPLE turned out to be too difficult; there was no way that they could use it. At the time, the famous cryptanalyst Klaus Johannes was still living. It was said that after he saw a secret telegram encrypted with PURPLE, he remarked. ‘I would like to have three thousand similarly encrypted telegrams come across my desk, all waiting to be deciphered, but in the current situation,
*
I will probably only see a thousand.’
†
The meaning of this statement was clear – in however many years he had left, he would not be able to crack this cipher. Once X country got wind of this, they immediately thought of buying PURPLE, but at that time we had not yet decided to leave N University. What is more, considering the strained relationships between X country and China, we decided that it was best not to respond to this proposal. What happened later was as you described it: in order to rescue my father, we used PURPLE to make a deal with X country.

5. Yes, he believed that Rong Jinzhen would sooner or later decipher PURPLE, and so he made every effort to impede his progress.

6. In the entire world, there was only one person he admired and that was Rong Jinzhen. He believed that concentrated within Jinzhen was the sum of all Western knowledge and wisdom, something only seen once every hundred years. 7. I’m tired, another day.

1. This, using the words of a military intelligence analyst, is for external dissemination. In fact, he (Liseiwicz) was still engaged in the development of ciphers.

2. A high-level cipher is like the main actor in a play: there has to be an understudy. When developing a high-level cipher, generally two are created: one for use, the other in reserve. But the essence of PURPLE was derived from Liseiwicz’s very own character; it was impossible for him to simultaneously create two ciphers. Furthermore, when he was constructing PURPLE he never once thought that it would become a high-level cipher. When he created it, it was as though he had researched and developed an entirely new language, a language that itself required considerable precision. But once X country decided to use PURPLE as a high-level cipher, they immediately determined that a reserve cipher would have to be created; this understudy was none other than BLACK.

3. Correct, as soon as he set foot in X country he was immediately whisked away to participate in the development of BLACK. But to be precise, he served as an observer of the work.

4. Strictly speaking, one man can only create one high-level cipher. His participation in the development of BLACK was as an observer, meaning that he was not directly engaged in the research. His role was to highlight clearly the special characteristics of PURPLE, to work in tandem with the researchers, to guide them away from making a simple replica of PURPLE. Sort of like a navigator. For instance, if PURPLE set its gaze upon the sky, then he would ensure that BLACK directed its attention towards burrowing into the ground. How it was to in fact burrow into the ground was for the actual researchers to determine.

5. Before they learned that Jinzhen had cracked PURPLE, the underlying structure of BLACK had already been completed – the two ciphers were about the same level of difficulty. Making them difficult is the primary aim of creating high-level ciphers; why else would the field of cryptography gather in the most talented and erudite of people if not because everyone wishes to confound and baffle their opponents? But, after learning that Jinzhen had deciphered PURPLE, he became adamant about the need to make revisions to BLACK. He had the distinct feeling that since Jinzhen had been able to crack PURPLE, he could do the same with BLACK. He knew this because he knew Jinzhen: he knew the type of person he was, and he appreciated his innate talent, a talent that only became more excited and aroused when confronted with a difficult and seemingly impenetrable problem – more determined to solve it. Nothing would stop him, not even death. If death would not stop him, then the only remaining option was to devise some means to thoroughly baffle and confuse him, to introduced manoeuvres that would challenge his entire way of thinking: this was the only way to defeat him. As a result, BLACK was revised, but not in a traditional manner. Rather, the cipher had become almost absurd; certain sections were extremely impenetrable, whilst others were incredibly easy: it was neither fish nor fowl but something nondescript. To use Liseiwicz’s own words, it was like a man who on the outside appears absolutely refined and exquisite, but underneath is wearing neither underpants nor socks.

6. You’re absolutely right,* but Jinzhen understood Liseiwicz’s mind too well. You could say that cracking PURPLE was akin to him and Liseiwicz sitting down to play a game of chess; he would not be distracted by Liseiwicz. Since he couldn’t be distracted, it was possible for him to go on to crack other ciphers. But BLACK was not broken in this manner.

7. I don’t agree with what you said:† after all, even if such a person existed there would have been no way that he could have accomplished everything himself, he must have relied upon what Jinzhen wrote in his notebook.

8. If you can, could you please tell me exactly what happened to Jinzhen?

9. I suppose what Liseiwicz said was correct.

10. He said, ‘Our lives were ruined by Jinzhen, but in the end he still destroyed himself.’

11. Jinzhen – this kind of person – could perhaps only be destroyed by himself; no one else would be able to accomplish it. Actually, both of them, Liseiwicz and Rong Jinzhen, were cursed by their fates: fate killed them. The only difference was that Jinzhen’s fate was not independent of itself; his fate was tied up with Liseiwicz’s destiny. But from Jinzhen’s perspective, Liseiwicz was simply his gifted teacher and that is all.

12. Let’s talk more again another day. When you come, please bring along the letters Liseiwicz wrote to Jinzhen. I would like to see them.

1. Yes, Liseiwicz was Weinacht.

2. This much is clear. At the time, he was a member of the Secret Service; how could he use his real name to play the role of a mathematician? A mathematician is someone in the public eye, but the nature of his real work would not allow for that. Besides which, in terms of professional ethics it would not be permitted. What kind of organization would allow you to take a high salary and then just carry on doing your own job?

3. Because he was only an observer on the team developing BLACK, he had the time and energy to engage in other research. In truth, he had always dreamt of working on artificial intelligence and I should say his theory on the binary nature of mathematical constants was of great importance in the development of computer technology. Why did he hope to persuade Jinzhen to leave China? It wasn’t because he was acting at the behest of certain people with certain political aims. No, he hoped that Jinzhen would remain overseas so that the both of them could collaborate on this artificial intelligence project.

4. You will have to think about this problem yourself;* I can give you no answer. In short, Liseiwicz was a scientist: in terms of politics, he was terribly naïve and so it was very easy for him to be wounded; it was also easy for him to be used. As for what you just mentioned – that he was a virulent anti-communist – that is a complete fabrication; I am sure that he harboured no such feelings.

5. Some of the circumstances are clear.† Both of these highlevel ciphers (PURPLE and BLACK) were cracked one after the other. The first, he (Liseiwicz) had created solely by himself, the second he had been a participant in. What is more, the person responsible for deciphering them both was his student. I was there. He did write so many letters – although to look at them they seemed to be an assortment of stratagems aimed at misleading their reader, in truth, who knows whether or not those riddles contained yet more secret information hidden inside them? The probability of deciphering a highly sophisticated cipher is extremely low, and now to see one person crack two of these ciphers in succession and do so incredibly quickly – well, ordinarily that would be impossible. The only way it could have happened was if someone were leaking secrets. But who? The greatest suspicion fell on him, on Liseiwicz. 6. We were put under strict house arrest after it was discovered that BLACK had been broken: that was in the second half of 1970. But even before then, starting around the time when PURPLE was cracked, we were being shadowed whenever we went out. Our telephone was also being monitored, and there were so many restrictions. In truth, it was as though we were under partial house arrest already.

7. In 1979, Liseiwicz passed away due to illness.

8. Ah yes, that was while we were still under house arrest. Every day we were together, every day we had to find things to talk about. That’s how I came to know so much about these things; it was during our period of house arrest that he told me everything. Before that, I knew very little.

9. I’ve been thinking: why has God cursed me with this disease? Perhaps it’s because I know too many secrets. It’s funny really – now that I have no mouth I can talk about these things. Before, when I had a mouth, I couldn’t.

10. I don’t wish to carry these secrets to my grave: I want to die in peace. In my next life I want to be a normal, average person. I don’t want glory, I don’t want secrets, I don’t want friends or enemies.

11. Don’t lie to me, I know how sick I am. The cancer has already spread: I have maybe a few months left.

12. You don’t want to say goodbye to a person about to die, that’s bad luck. Go, I wish you a happy and peaceful life!