Russian Espionage on China by Konstantin Preobrazhensky

More articles by former KGB Lt. Colonel Konstantin Preobrazhensky

Russian Espionage on China

By Konstantin Preobrazhensky

Konstantin Preobrazhensky, a former Lt. Colonel in the KGB who defected to the United States in 1993, is an intelligence expert and specialist on Japan, about which he has written six books. His newest book Russian-American, A New KGB Asset will be published in late 2007. This article was first published by "American Review of China Studies", Volume eight, Spring 2007, p.35-41.

1. Communists’ friendship

Russia is a country with an indeterminate social order. Officially split from Communism, it still makes its foreign policy decisions under pressure from the mighty Communist lobby. This lobby doesn’t even bother to hide itself. It encompasses the leadership of the Army, of the security services and, of course, the Foreign Ministry.

This lobby is promoting a strategic partnership with China. This is a partnership that would forge cooperation between not only the Chinese and Russian armies, but between their intelligence agencies as well. It is already under way.

After President Putin’s ascension to power in 2000, the signs of Russia’s return to a totalitarian communist state became clear. It has encouraged the supporters of Communist China. But still the Chinese Communists don’t regard Russians as their “Party-mates” anymore. Moreover, they consider them traitors to Communism. But Russian generals don’t understand this.

Russian military magazines on strategy never call China a possible military enemy, even though the USA and NATO, and even tiny Estonia and Georgia, are considered enemies.

Before I left the KGB in 1991, I worked as the advisor on China for the Head of the Scientific and Technical intelligence division (Directorate “T”) of the KGB, and such a partnership doesn’t seem a matter of question to me. Currently, every series of talks and negotiations between Russia and China includes on its roster a representative of those countries’ respective intelligence agencies.

Getting things going in such a joint effort could be easy. After all, both intelligence agencies grew from the same root. Right up to the beginning of the 1960s, the leading posts in Chinese intelligence were held by Soviet KGB intelligence officers from Lubyanka. Relations cooled, and the Soviets went home. But the same people who were trained by the Soviets then are in power in China to this day.

Cooperation between Russian and Chinese intelligence is easy from a psychological point of view as well. After all, the Chinese spies are Communists. The Russians are all former members of the Communist Party, and they maintain great nostalgia for Communist times, when their pay and their prestige were higher. They don’t hide their Communist sympathies. In Russia, the Stalin-era form of address, “Comrade”, still exists in the Army and intelligence. It would be very easy for Russians to find a common language with the Chinese. At the same time, Russian spies don’t like America at all, and blame it, as the bulwark of world capitalism, for all the misfortunes that befell Russia after the dissolution of the KGB.

The American punctiliousness with regard of the law irritates many Russian officials. These “bosses” much prefer the methods of China, where the Party bureaucracy dictates the law. It makes them wax nostalgic.

Furthermore, Russian espionage against China is carried out half-heartedly. China, after all, is the last bastion of Communism, and many of Russia’s spies and paymasters, being Communists themselves, don’t want to give China too hard a time.

Interestingly, it wasn’t like this at all during Soviet times. The KGB worked hard against China. KGB operatives all over the world participated in this spy mission, recruiting informants not only in China, but in many other countries as well. For example, I recruited Chinese scholars in Tokyo. Such far-flung operations were explained by the fact that Peking had very strong counterintelligence operations in place. Every Soviet spy in the city was tailed by literally hundreds of Chinese spies. It was impossible to get away from them. Because of this, Yury Andropov, a former spymaster himself, ordered the KGB to develop its position against China from abroad.

At times, such an approach looked absolutely ridiculous. For instance, as soon as a Russian agent would walk up to a Chinese student on the streets of Stockholm and speak to him in Chinese, the student would understand immediately he was being recruited to spy and would run away.

Some, however, would agree to work. They would go with the Russian agent to restaurants, accept the agent’s money and give him virtually worthless intelligence. Then, at the end of their business trips or school exchange programs, these contacts would return to China and disappear.

Sometimes the KGB succeeded in finding them in the lists of Chinese scholars, invited for some international congresses in Europe or America. But this effort brought nothing but disappointment. The Chinese agents were not glad at all to meet their old KGB friends. They were cold and cautious. They used to ask the Russians for their KGB telephone number, causing the officers to run away for fear of a spy scandal.

In the end, spying on the Chinese was one of the most difficult operations for the KGB. It wasn’t just the hopelessness of the Chinese citizens as agents, but the striking similarity of the Russian and Chinese intelligence communities that made it that way. They were like twin brothers. Nearly everything coincided – their methods, their thoughts and even the number of departments. That made it hard for the Russians to deceive them.

It was especially eloquent for Mongolia, which also had been turned into one of the bastions for spying on China.

Mongolia was the closest satellite of the Soviet Union. It depended greatly on its economic aid. The KGB felt there at home there. The KGB Office in the Soviet Embassy numbered more then hundred of people. It controlled the Mongolian Ministry of Security. The heads of all its departments had their Soviet counselors, placed in adjoining rooms. Those people were the actual department heads. It was especially good for the Department of Intelligence. It was staffed by Russians and aimed entirely at spying on China.

But all the Mongolian officers there were of Chinese origin! They sabotaged all the activities of the KGB. One of my friends, who had served there, used to tell, that there was only one lady typist in the Mongolian Intelligence Department, and even she was of Chinese origin too. She was a Lieutenant of the Mongolian Ministry of Security and used to pass copies of secret documents to Chinese intelligence.

The KGB couldn’t cope with the Chinese lobby in Mongolia and did its best to hinder the formation of such a lobby in the USSR. There is no strong Chinese lobby in today’s Russia yet.

In the Soviet period China was spied upon from Soviet territory too. The regional KGB directorates in the Far East, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyz managed this. The work they did was called “spying through the green border”. It meant the following:

Some of Chinese refugees, who fled in great numbers, were recruited by the KGB and illegally sent back to China. They secretly crossed the Soviet-Chinese border under the guidance of the Frontier Troops, which were all KGB Intelligence. Some of them would come back in a few days after studying the situation near the border on the Chinese side. Others needed months to get to Peking, spy there and come back.

The most difficult work for the KGB began after the Chinese agents had returned to Russia. It was to learn, on whom these Chinese actually spied: on China, their motherland, or on Russia. Whose agents they were: Russian or Chinese? Their sincerity was checked by lie detectors and other KGB special techniques. A lot of them turned out to be double agents, of course.

All of the huge KGB of Soviet Kazakhstan was oriented exclusively on China. It’s eloquent, that at the end of 1980s, the Chairman of the Kazakh KGB was transferred to Moscow and appointed Head of the 6^th Department of the First Chief Directorate (Intelligence) of the KGB. The 6^th Department managed spying on China.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan became an independent state, managing its own policy about China. It still allows Russian intelligence to spy on China from its territory, but with a sort of reluctance.

Pro-Russian Kyrgyz is ready to help Russian intelligence too. Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, is still used as a place for secret meetings and operations of both Russian and Chinese intelligence services.

The Soviet Union used to spy on China also through the “green border” from the territory of Burma. Its border with China could be easily crossed and the KGB would send its agents there. Those agents were recruited from among the local Chinese. Some of them worked also for Taiwan intelligence. They managed to penetrate Chinese territory very deeply.

The counter-intelligence regime in Burma was very soft, so the KGB could afford to use the most risky methods to check the reliability of agents after their return from China. The KGB utilized lie detectors. They were rather bulky, but still the KGB succeeded in transporting them to Burma with the diplomatic luggage directly from Yasenevo, the headquarters of Russian intelligence in Moscow.

Checks using the lie detector were run at the homes of Soviet diplomats in Rangoon. Officers who asked the Chinese control questions in their native language were teachers of Chinese at the Intelligence Institute (The Red-Bannered Institute of the KGB, now called the Academy of Foreign Intelligence Service).

Also the KGB used a psychotropic substance for this purpose. They called it “the medicine of truth”. It was considered affordable for usage in Burma.

The KGB officers used to invite the Chinese collaborator for dinner and serve him a glass of wine, into which “the medicine of truth” had been added. The Chinese lost his self-control and blurted out all he knew. But sometimes it damaged their health. In the winter of 1990, one of the Chinese agents visited a KGB officer in Rangoon, Colonel Victor Papushin, and shouted in indignation:”Yesterday I had a dinner with you and today my legs are hard to move! What’s going on?”

Immediately the Soviet spy rushed to the airport and boarded a plane for Moscow. If it had occurred in some Western state, it would be a great scandal!

Recently Russia’s foreign policy has become clearly anti-American and pro-Chinese. The FSB, Federal Security Service (Counterintelligence), never provokes spy scandals with Chinese intelligence officers. This approach is contrary to that with the CIA and other western intelligences. The FSB very eagerly organizes spy scandals about them.

Nevertheless, sometimes the FSB arrests people for spying on behalf of China, but only Russians. They are engineers or merchants, illegally accused of passing some secret information to China. But not a single Chinese recipient of such information has ever been arrested. It shows FSB’s duplicity. It accuses innocent people of espionage in order to make its record look good.

This false accusation of spying for China matches the pattern of the spy case of Gregory Pasko, a military journalist and ecologist. In 2002, he was sentenced to jail for espionage on behalf of Japan. Actually he had disclosed some data about radioactive pollution of the Japan Sea by the Russian Navy. But not a single Japanese journalist, to whom Pasko had passed this information, has ever been accused of espionage. Moreover, they witnessed the accusation during the court hearings!

2. Slippery recruitment of the Chinese

In the KGB, they used to call recruitment of Chinese agents “slippery”. Because you didn’t know, when your long-time Chinese collaborator would betray you and confess to the counterintelligence of his motherland. The Chinese have extremely strong feelings of ethnocentrism and patriotism.

I understood this from the very beginning of my own recruitment activities among the Chinese. In 1980-85, I worked at the Tokyo KGB station. My official cover was the position of a Correspondent of TASS, Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. I was ordered to recruit Chinese, stationed in Japan.

In 1983, I met a Chinese student, studying in Tokyo. Being a citizen of Hong Kong, he was good for recruitment. As usual, the first stage was devoted to the establishment of friendly relations. I took the student to restaurants, chatted with him. I knew, that the Chinese are mostly interested in one and only one thing: China. I devoted hours to discussions about Chinese art, history and cuisine.

Once I mentioned the cunning method of the Chinese diplomacy, known from ancient times as “merchandising air and water.” “Which method do you mean?” exclaimed the student. He became wary. The method is the following: first, the Chinese diplomats state some unacceptable requirements to their counterparts, and then surrender, but require the counterpart to surrender too. The Chinese utilize this method nowadays too.

The student became angry: I had disclosed a Chinese secret! This injured him, though he was a citizen of the British Empire, and Hong Kong wasn’t friendly to Mainland China at all! I stopped meeting him.

Japan used to be a base for Russian spy activity against China, so I continued to meet a lot of other Chinese students there. I have invented a new method of recruitment: under the guise of hiring them as private teachers of the Chinese language.

I made the appointments for the lessons at luxurious restaurants and suggested having dinner before the lesson began. The students from Communist China were rather poor and enjoyed themselves with food and drink. Afterwards, they were relaxed and seemed reluctant about teaching. Then I used to say the following: “ Let’s postpone our lesson for the next meeting. But as today you have spent your precious time for me, I’ll pay you 100 dollars!”

As soon as he students accepted money, they were recruited. Because they understood that by taking money for nothing from a foreigner they had done something unacceptable. But the money was so desirable, and the atmosphere of the restaurant so pleasant!

I had more then ten such Chinese teachers. With each of them, we never made much progress, just studying Chinese numbers from 1 to 10. But we made great progress in espionage!

Step by step, my tasks became more delicate. I asked the students to compose a list of members of the Communist Party Committee of the Chinese Embassy. From the point of view of Japanese counterintelligence, there was no espionage in this request, because such sort of information there was not secret. But in China it was! And in the USSR too.

The Communist Party activities at the embassies of the Communist states were kept secret. Their diplomats even had to conceal their membership in the Communist Party. It was rather stupid, because only the Party members were allowed to work abroad. I used the similarity of the Communist regimes of China and the Soviet Union. I urged the Chinese to commit actions, which was allowed for the citizens of democratic countries but considered criminal in the Communist ones.

After receiving the list of Communists from the Chinese student and paying him money, I checked the names. The criterion for veracity was the following: there should be mentioned the names not only of the high-ranking diplomats, but also of technical staff; i.e. gardeners, managers, and sports’ organizers. Usually such posts were utilized as the cover for Communist Party bureaucrats, who were the actual heads of the Communist Party Committee. It was common both for the Chinese and Soviet Embassies.

I wonder if the CIA used this method to recruit Soviet diplomats. But once, a Japanese journalist used it on me. He was Yoshiteru Oka, the military observer of the “Sankei Shimbun” newspaper. He asked me once if I was a member of the Soviet Communist party.

I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say. It would be stupid to say, “No” and criminal to say “Yes”. I murmured “Yes” and decided to stop contacting Mr. Oka, though initially I had planned to recruit him.

My further tasks for the Chinese students became more and more risky. I asked them to denounce their friends by reporting who of them were informants for Chinese counter-intelligence or, oppositely, were hesitant about the Communist ideology.

The tradition of denouncing is widespread in Communist China. There are not only the concealed informants of security services, but also the open ones! People respect them. For example, in even the smallest unit of the Chinese Army, two people openly denounce their soldier-friends to the security organs. They are called “Activists” and “Political Informants”. This all was copied by China from Stalin’s Russia.

Sometimes the readiness of the Chinese to denounce each other looked grotesque. It was in the 1980s, when thousands of Chinese refugees illegally entered the Russian Far East. Some of them really escaped from repression, but others were ordered by Chinese intelligence to spy on Russia. It was extremely difficult for the KGB to determine, who was who. They settled the Chinese refugees in isolated villages and recruited informants among them.

But those informants disclosed themselves the very next day. Somehow they had obtained Russian police uniform hats and visited the homes of their compatriots one by one. They used to say the following, “If you pay me 10 rubles a month, I’ll report positive data about you. If 5, only half-positive, and if you refuse to pay at all, I will tell the KGB to arrest you”.

The KGB officers became nervous upon learning this. But maybe those Chinese were members of the “Triads” - Chinese mafia - and were simply running a money racket. Nowadays the “Triads” actively cooperate with the Russian mafia in the Far East.

Sometimes my Chinese agents denounced me to Chinese intelligence. I immediately understood it from their behavior, as they were not professional spies. They became very serious and strained and didn’t say a word while meeting me in the restaurant. It was clear to me that a small tape recorder was hidden in their jackets and they were afraid to be reprimanded by the Chinese intelligence for some mistake.

But the first sign, which clearly let me know that they were working for Chinese intelligence, was the following: they tried to pay for the dinner, which had never occurred before. It meant that they were attempting to recruit me.

They took out a small bill, equal to 10 dollars or less, and stared at me in silent supplication: maybe, I’ll still pay myself?

Of course, I did so with the KGB money. The Chinese used to put the money back into their pockets with a sigh of relief. It was obvious, that they had no intention of returning the money to Chinese intelligence.

But still not all of my Chinese counterparts betrayed me. That became clear after a great scandal about my spy activity in Tokyo exploded in July 1985.

At that time, the Japanese police caught me recruiting a Chinese scholar, Guan Fuhua. As there was no law against espionage in Japan, I was released in two hours, being ordered to come to the Tokyo Central Police Office the next day. The KGB prohibited me from doing so and forcibly sent me back to Moscow.

The scholar I had recruited was an intern at the Tokyo Technological Institute. I discovered him in 1983 using the method the KGB calls “free search”. Being a journalist, I was visiting Tokyo universities one by one. In each of them, I went to the local foreign students’ society and tried to get acquainted with Chinese students. In fact I was hunting for interns, not young students. The interns were mature scholars in their forties and were of great value to Russian scientific and technical intelligence.

At the Tokyo Technological Institute, I finally met Guan Fuhua, who was a specialist in photochemistry, which was good for making weapons. His laboratory at the Institute of Photochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Peking, was inventing a new medicine to cure radiation exposure.

It was created on the basis of Chinese traditional medicine. And live people were used in the experiments! Prisoners in the Peking jails were exposed to a laser weapon and then cured by the Chinese medicine.

By delivering this secret to me, Guan Fuhua brought not only technological, but also moral harm to his country. It made him an ideal candidate for KGB recruitment.

It took me two years to persuade him to become a Soviet agent, until finally Guan Fuhua signed a letter to cooperate with the KGB in spying on China. He wrote it in Russian, which made an especially good impression in Moscow. (The Russian language was taught at Chinese schools at that time.) Guan Fuhua’s obligatory note was sent to Moscow by secret diplomatic mail.

It was regarded as a great success. I received the personal gratitude of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the Head of the First Chief Directorate (Intelligence) of the KGB.

In the late 1980s, President Mikhail Gorbachev appointed him Chairman of the KGB. But Kruchkov betrayed him and organized a Communist coup in August 1991. After the coup failed, Kruchkov was imprisoned, but was soon pardoned without any court hearings. Now he shows himself to be a Communist hard-liner and works as the key intelligence adviser to President Putin.

I was not only bribing Guan Fuhua with money, but also did him a favor: I did his English homework. Not by myself, of course, as I had no time. I delivered his assignments to the Translations’ Bureau for $100USD each. Though Guan Fuhua was fluent in Japanese, his English was very poor. It made him feel very much obliged to the KGB.

Guan Fuhua had provided me not only with Chinese data, but with Japanese data too. In particular, he stole for me a sample Japanese catalyst, which was in great demand by the Russian chemical industry. Perhaps, since that time Japanese police began to follow him. Anyway, he was immediately sent back to China as soon as they arrested me.

There was one more reason for my spy scandal. It was the vainglorious desire of Vladimir Kryuchkov, Head of the KG Intelligence, to embellish the success. He decided to present Guan Fuhua to Victor Chebrikov, the Chairman of the KGB, as a super-spy, though in fact he was only an armchair scholar.

I was ordered to teach Guan Fuhua KGB radio ciphers. This was done in order to allow him to send secret information to Moscow from Peking in the future. But what kind of information could be sent by radio? The chemical formulas? Nobody cared about them in the KGB. It was pure bureaucratic manipulation, nothing more. But it ruined my career.

After I had completed teaching Guan Fuhua the radio ciphers, Moscow KGB headquarters began to send radio broadcasts to Tokyo, composed specifically for him and aimed at checking his ability to use radio ciphers. These broadcasts were nothing but a long row of characters pronounced in Russian.

They were very dull. The male voice was pronouncing:” Seven, five, three, eleven etc”. Guan Fuhua had to catch those figures and write them down. After that, I used to send his notes to Moscow. They were always correct.

The voice came from a small radio-set, which I bought in Tokyo. In order to run the radio drills, I used to take Guan Fuhua to the park, where nobody could hear us. But Japanese radio counterintelligence located us immediately! Our broadcasts became clear evidence of espionage, though in fact they were nothing but its bureaucratic imitation.

Ironically, the leaders of the Scientific and Technical Intelligence of the KGB failed to foresee it. And I didn’t know until now, who Guan Fuhua was in fact: victim or traitor?

3. How China spies on Russia

Contrary to Russia, China doesn’t consider itself to be Russia’s strategic partner. Nor any other country’s either. China regards itself as a special world, whose politics are independent.

The Chinese Army, intelligence and other institutions began their activities thousands years ago, when Russia didn’t yet exist. Also the Chinese can’t forgive Russia its national humiliation of 1940s and 50s, when the Soviet Union called China its junior brother.

Chinese intelligence is still utilizing ancient methods. For example, they used to attach a tiny feather to a letter of neutral content. It symbolizes the sender’s intention to go, to run away, to disappear. Also a thousand years’ experience has made Chinese intelligence keen in human psychology.

They knew, that ordinary Soviet people disliked the Chinese, thanks to the massive anti-Maoist propaganda. The very idea of being recruited by the Chinese was unbearable for them. That is why Chinese intelligence officers used to introduce themselves to Russians as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz or people of other nationalities, living in the USSR. Sometimes they were genuine Kazakh or Kyrgyz – but of Chinese origin.

In the Communist period, Chinese intelligence suffered from a great lack of money, but managed to find a witty way out. They knew, that a lot of industrial workers in Russia were inclined to alcoholism and always needed money to buy vodka. The Chinese spies managed to bribe workers at the secret weapon plants not with money, but with hundreds of bottles of vodka. It was much more impressive for low-paid workers, who could not even dream of such an amount of vodka, the cost which in fact was not so high. And they paid the Chinese with parts of new missiles and jets.

Also Chinese intelligence runs illegal espionage in Russia. They use Chinese officers of Russian origin. They are descendants of Russian families, living in China for generations. But still they must have a drop of Chinese heritage to be considered reliable. Such officers used to be trained for spying from their childhood.

The strategic target of Chinese intelligence today is rejoining the vast territories of Siberia and the Far East to China. They are securing the mass emigration of the Chinese there. For these purposes, they bribe local Russian officials, who are extremely corrupt, or make them marry Chinese women. Their children would become Russian citizens, in fact devoted to China.