Typhoon (29 page)

Anyway, give me a call and fill me in. Better still, tell your newspaper you have to come down to do a story. We all want to know the truth about Joe Lennox . . .

Love Tom

Tom probably won’t thank me for reproducing his private correspondence, but I’m fascinated by these letters for what they reveal about Joe’s tradecraft. “Droning on” about Quayler, for example, would have been a deliberate tactic that he employed to prevent people digging around in his cover. The purpose behind it was simple: to bore anyone who happened to be listening to the edge of coma. Believe me, once you’d heard Joe’s ten-minute monologue about the future of niche pharmaceuticals—
China has twenty per cent of the world’s population but only one point five per cent of the global pharmaceuticals market . . . The sector is growing by sixteen per cent a year, largely because drug use is rising among the Chinese middle classes
 . . . – you never wanted to ask him about his work ever again.

There are other details from the Westin letter that interest me: offering to pick up the bill; taking the time to talk to the elderly cleaning lady in the lobby; demonstrating a fluency in Mandarin. All of these things would have been premeditated tactics designed to impress upon Tom the idea that Joe Lennox was a generous, intelligent man, experienced in Chinese affairs, but without airs and graces, who would be worth cultivating as a friend. It’s also interesting that Joe was “three-quarters of the way through a bottle of champagne” not long after sitting down for brunch. Joe rarely drank alcohol during the day, but he must have intuited that Tom was the sort of person for whom booze was a semi-religion, and acted accordingly. Sipping mineral water wouldn’t have conveyed the right image. You can also guarantee that when Joe was supposedly “sleeping off a hangover at the Ritz-Carlton” he was in reality investigating the police and media reports into Kenneth Lenan’s murder and further waterproofing his cover. His decision to reveal that he had quit the Foreign Office on moral grounds would also have been intentional. If anything was designed to set off a firestorm of rumour and half-truth, it was that. I had told Joe that Tom Harper was one of the epicentres of Shanghai gossip, but I had no idea that he was going to give him so much to work with.

Then, of course, there is that mysterious line in the second letter: “I don’t know what his story is as far as women are concerned.” For some reason, Joe wasn’t telling anybody about his relationship with Isabella. This may have been tactical—he didn’t mention Miles by name to any of Tom’s friends, either—but neither was he responding to the myriad sexual opportunities which are part and parcel of life in Shanghai. The slight possibility of reconciliation with Isabella was one of the principal catalysts which drove Joe’s work in China. He told me later that summer that he had dreaded what he described as “the Zhivago moment,” when, passing in a bus or taxi, he might catch sight of Isabella on a busy Shanghai street or, worse, find himself standing in front of her at a party and seeing only vague recollection in her eyes. Despite all this, the hold she exerted over him continued to be unhealthy. I told him as much, of course, but he wouldn’t listen. When it came to Isabella Aubert, Joe was closed and distant, seemingly hell-bent on a collision between the two of them which I was convinced would end in tragedy.

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.

After almost seven
weeks in China, Joe was ready to accelerate the operation. Every one of his counter-surveillance exercises—carried out with metronomic regularity, whether he was working at the office, travelling by cab to a restaurant, walking around the French Concession or using the gym at the Ritz-Carlton—convinced him that he was being neither bugged nor followed. In an encrypted email to Vauxhall Cross, sent from a randomly selected internet café on Shanxi Road, he told Waterfield that, in his opinion, RUN was clean. Neither the Americans, nor Chinese liaison, had the first clue what Joe Lennox was up to.

London responded a day later with the text message that Joe had been waiting for: “Tony wants to meet for drinks at six on Monday. Bring your book about Spain.” This was simple, prearranged code. “Tony” was the operational name for Zhao Jian, a Han Chinese SIS asset who lived and worked in Shanghai. Jian and his two younger brothers were secretly on the British embassy payroll and had been following Miles since Christmas, documenting his movements in preparation for Joe’s arrival. “Meet for drinks” meant that Joe should make contact with Jian at the branch of Starbucks on the north side of Renmin Park. “Six on Monday” meant simply five o’clock on the following Sunday afternoon. The “book about Spain” was a hardback copy of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel
The Queen of the South
, which Joe was to make visible at an outdoor table as a signal that the meeting could proceed. Joe had committed half a dozen similarly innocuous phrases to memory. “Ring your sister,” for example, meant that we were to contact one another immediately, using clean mobile phones. “Dad has found your stolen car” was an emergency instruction to abort the operation and to return to London on a pseudonymous passport.

On the late Sunday afternoon of his first meeting with Zhao Jian, Joe made his way down to the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, shared a joke with the doorman—after almost two months at the hotel, he was on friendly terms with most of the staff—and stepped into a cab. The driver was overweight and overtired and did not bother to acknowledge Joe until he was instructed, in impeccable Mandarin, to head for the Park Hotel, whereupon he asked where Joe was from and embarked on an animated discussion of the circumstances surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Joe, sitting in the back of the cab, pressed himself against the perspex separator in which the driver was encased and reassured him that, to the best of his knowledge, the People’s Princess had not been murdered by MI6.

The air conditioning in the cab was broken and Joe wound down the window, breathing hot, polluted air that tasted of sulphur. He was wearing a white linen shirt, cotton trousers and a pair of worn Campers, because it was a humid day and he knew that Jian would want to walk some distance prior to their meeting to ensure that neither of them had picked up a tail.

Approaching the park, the driver indicated to pull over and Joe turned in the baking back seat to check for unusual movements in the vehicles behind them. Having paid the fare, he handed his Quayler card to the driver—“Look out for our products!”—and went into the lobby of the hotel to draw any possible surveillance off the street. A minute later he left by an obscure side exit which he had discovered three days earlier. Joe continued to observe the exit from a phone booth on Fenyang Road for about ninety seconds. When only a kitchen porter emerged to empty a bin during that period, Joe was satisfied that he was not being followed.