Typhoon (25 page)

Matters came to a head in the autumn of 2004. At a dinner party in Tufnell Park, Joe ran into an old university friend named Guy Coates who was looking to recruit a fluent Mandarin speaker to set up a representative office in Beijing for Quayler, a niche pharmaceutical company which was hoping to expand into China. Offices of this kind need be no more than a desk and a fax machine, but they allow Western companies to promote and market their products on a limited scale in advance of being registered as a fully fledged business by the Chinese government. At a lunch in the City three days later, Coates offered Joe a five-year contract worth about £90,000 a year, with an apartment in Sanlitun and a small amount of equity thrown in. Joe was tempted, not least by the salary, which was more than twice what he was earning at SIS. I also played a part in trying to lure him back to the East. By coincidence, SIS had just pulled some strings to secure me a job in Beijing with an American news organization and I reckoned my social life would be greatly enhanced if Joe was on the scene. “It’ll be just like the old days,” I told him on the phone. “Besides, you need to get the hell out of London.”

Joe was in a dilemma. Stay with SIS and risk a three-year posting to an Asian backwater, or jump ship to work in the Chinese capital during a period which would coincide with the run-up to the 2008 Olympics? Joe had never been motivated by money, and the Far East Controllerate might have more interesting options than, say, North Korea, but he felt compelled to discuss the situation with his line manager at Vauxhall Cross. Disheartened that Joe might pull the plug at a difficult time for the Service, and anxious not to lose one of their best and most experienced officers, SIS dispatched David Waterfield in a last-ditch effort to talk him round. After all, the interventions of Joe’s mentor had succeeded before. There was no reason to suppose that they could not succeed again.

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.

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 café 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.”