In the Dark, page 2
Since no one now lived on the mountain, it had been left untouched by humans for so many years that the trees were completely overgrown and birds and animals lived there undisturbed. When driving on the single road leading through the valleys it was not uncommon to see birds flying about or animals walking across before they vanished into the wilderness. The road that wound its way through the mountain had a nice tarmacked surface, but it was very narrow with many hairpin bends, really testing the skills of the driver. I was told that there was a tunnel cut right through the mountain, to allow people to get from one work unit to another at top speed. The second time I visited the intercepts division, I asked Director Qian if it would be possible for me to see the tunnel. The old man glared at me and ignored what I had said, as if it were a completely unreasonable request.
Perhaps it was.
To tell you the truth, in my dealings with people at Unit 701, including the Director, I could clearly sense that their attitude to me was somewhat complex: they appeared to be worried about having anything to do with me, but in actual fact they were hoping that I would talk to them. If they had really been too scared to get involved, how could this book ever have been written? It would have been impossible.
Thank God for that hope.
And of course, thank God for the annual ‘Declassification Day’, that very special occasion.
5
I can tell you that being a special unit, the unique features of Unit 701 were everywhere to be seen, but some of them you probably cannot imagine. One example of this was the annual special day that everyone who worked there called Declassification Day.
The people who worked for Unit 701 placed national security above all other considerations, and the strict secrecy that their profession demanded resulted in them losing even the most basic of personal freedoms: they did not even have the right to send mail. It was only after being thoroughly investigated that a decision would be made as to whether the letter should be delivered to the intended recipient. If you wrote a letter to them, whether or not the person you posted it to would be able to read it would depend entirely on what you had written; if it aroused the slightest suspicion, there was no chance of them being able to look at it. Even if they were lucky enough to be able to get the letter, they would only be allowed to read it once, after that it would be returned to the archives, for the individual concerned had no right to keep it. If you go back twenty years, supposing that you were so fortunate as to receive a letter from one of them (and that possibility was very remote unless you were a close relative) you might have wondered why the letter was always a carbon copy. The fact is that there was nothing to be surprised at in this, because the original of any letter that they sent would have to go to the Party. In the days before photocopying machines, the best way to make multiple copies was to use carbon paper. An even more unimaginable intrusion into their lives was that when they left the unit, they would have to hand over all written material, including such things as private diaries, to be kept by the archives department, until the day when their contents were no longer deemed to compromise national security, at which point they could go back to their original owner.
That day was their Declassification Day.
That day, old secrets finally came out into the open.
Originally there had been no such thing: it started in 1994, three years after I first bumped into the two men from my old home town. That was the year that Director Qian finally retired, and I first got the idea of writing this book. As I am sure you understand, I wrote this book not because I got to know the two men from the plane, but because they held the first ever Declassification Day in the history of Unit 701. Because of that Declassification Day, I had the right to go to the mountain and walk round the valleys, seeing what there was to see. Thanks to Declassification Day people from Unit 701, or rather it would be more correct to say people who were no longer deemed to hold secrets vital to the nation’s interests, were allowed to be interviewed by me.
You do not need to be told that without Declassification Day, this book could never have been written.
6
Who I am isn’t important; like I say, the people here all call me Specs. My name is Mai Jia, as I have already told you. I have also mentioned that it is a perfectly normal thing to bump into someone unexpected or to have some unusual experience. In my opinion some of these encounters are a regular part of life, an experience that adds a bit of spice to things; they do not change your life in any meaningful way. Some encounters on the other hand change you root and branch. I am sad to say that my meeting with the two men from my home town belongs to the second kind, and changed me enormously. Writing has now become my greatest pleasure. I am proud of my work but I also suffer for it; writing is everything to me. I don’t think this is a good thing, but there is nothing that I can do about it. That is my fate and I cannot change it.
As for this book, I really think that it is not at all bad. Mystery, suspense, sex, unfamiliarity; it describes classic emotions in a contemporary context. You also get to feel something of the bitterness and helplessness that these people felt in the face of their destiny. My only regret is that Director Qian, the biggest supporter of my writing project, died before it went to press. His death made me realize how insubstantial life can be: just like love, it is here today and gone tomorrow. Once it is gone, it is gone – life becomes death, love becomes hatred, the things that you have are the things that you will lose. It is my greatest wish that the publication of this book should allow his soul to rest in peace.
This book is dedicated to Director Qian and all the other members of Unit 701.
WIND LISTENERS
* * *
Thanks to the special permit I received from the Director, not only was I received with courtesy and politeness on my secret mission, but I enjoyed unprecedented support and everybody looked at me with new eyes. Only one thing escaped me and that was ordinary, everyday luck. I may have had a special permit, but that didn’t make me lucky.
Blind Abing
I first learnt of Abing’s story from Director Qian. It was the first story, in fact, that I ever heard about Unit 701. When I was told the tale, Qian was still the man in charge; still in the service; still a ‘man in the know’. He actually related the story to me before official declassification, and even now it is still classified. According to conventional practice, declassification of Unit 701 documents normally takes place about ten years after the agents in question have officially retired. If I were to calculate according to this practice, the story I am about to tell you would probably have to wait until next year before finally coming to light. As a result, I do not know all of the specific details. I must therefore be very careful not to speculate about what happened and most definitely not to engage in flights of fancy. This hasn’t got anything to do with being brave or cowardly of course; it’s just common sense, really. Those who make mistakes in the face of common sense aren’t brave, they’re just stupid.
Well, how is it then that Director Qian dared to tell me this very story about Abing before it was declassified? I’ve thought about that for quite some time. Probably it was because he knew that official declassification was imminent and that Abing’s files would be amongst the first batch of released documents (which has turned out to be true). You could perhaps say that Director Qian possessed a certain boldness, a certain foresight. He was audacious. Since at that time he was in charge of everyone else at Unit 701, it is natural that he would usually be the first to know what was going on. But to my mind, this wasn’t the main reason for him to tell me this story in advance. To be honest with you, there is perhaps no concrete reason for him to have told me, only possible ones. First, he was the primary person involved in it, the sole authority. Secondly, I suspect that he had misgivings about his future. When we spoke, he seemed overly preoccupied with the very real possibility that in the very near future, on any given day, he might find himself summarily dismissed from his post. I guess he thought that telling me in advance was his best option. Later, as he expected, he was indeed retired with very little advance notice. On that night then, it must have seemed to be best to telephone me, to speak of the past; perhaps he felt that to sleep would mean to never wake up. I shall relate to you the story that he told me, serving as his medium, as it were; his voice.
What follows is the old man’s verbal record …
1
My long-dead parents, my wife, my three daughters and my son-in-law knew nothing of my life as an operative of Unit 701. It was my secret. But first and foremost, it was a national secret. Of course, every country has its secrets, its clandestine organizations, classified weaponry, covert agents, secret … there is really no end to the numbers of secrets kept by a nation. It’s hard to imagine a country with no secrets. I wonder what such a nation would be like. But perhaps that’s just fantasy; such a country cannot exist, just like an iceberg would cease to be without its hidden mass lurking beneath the waves. Indeed, how can things exist independently of what is concealed beneath the surface? Sometimes I think that such secrets are terribly unfair, especially to those closest to the person keeping them. But if things weren’t like this, quite possibly the country I call home would have long since disappeared, or at least be under threat. You just have to let this unfairness continue to be unfair.
But having secrets does not mean one is some kind of criminal. Throughout the whole of my secretive life, I’ve never done anything I am ashamed of. You know my position: I wasn’t part of some frightening organization, I was part of a very important information-gathering agency, tasked with listening to the airwaves and decrypting ciphers. This type of agency exists in every country’s armed forces; so we can perhaps say that the existence of all these secrets is, in fact, an open secret. The real secrets are those surrounding the location of these agencies, the operatives who staff them, their methods, their frustrations and results – these types of things are what I would not tell you even if you beat me to death. These are the things that are more important than my life.
In Unit 701, people like Abing who intercepted communications across the airwaves are called ‘Wind Listeners’. Their ears put food on their plates; they serve as their weapons and their rice bowls; they are also the source of their stories. It goes without saying that to engage in the surveillance profession Unit 701 requires persons of singular auditory abilities. They must be able to hear that which the rest of us cannot, as well as distinguish between minute auditory inflections that pass beyond the notice of common folk. This is why most people hail them as having ‘preternaturally good hearing’. Such ears are said to go with the wind. Wherever the wind blows, their ears follow; there is nothing they do not hear, nothing they are unaware of. However, in that one year, in that single moment, all of us Wind Listeners were rendered silent by our enemies, for we all went completely deaf.
This is how it happened. In the spring of that year, the military chatter of X Country that we were responsible for monitoring simply stopped broadcasting for a total of fifty-two hours. Across its entire broadcast range, every radio station, without exception, went silent. In the history of covert radio communications there had been no record of anything like this happening before. If you were to say that this silence came about because of a tactical military need, then this would have to be considered an unprecedented strategy. To tell you the truth, it would be no strategy at all, it would be madness. Think about it: in those fifty-two hours, how many world-altering events could have occurred? In truth, anything could have happened! Our enemy’s actions were downright insane.
Yet, despite their lunacy, they were victorious. Over the course of those fifty-two hours, nothing at all happened. That was their first triumph. You could say that was a piece of luck. As for their second victory, it was the amount of energy we expended in trying to find them; they forced us to work incredibly hard. During those fifty-two hours our enemy was able to change everything – their equipment, radio stations, radio times, call signals, all of it. What does this mean? It means that over the course of those fifty-two hours, all of the listening we had carried out for the previous ten years, all the sweat and toil, the accumulated intelligence, the experience, the tricks of the trade we had learnt, the techniques, everything, was wiped clean: we were back to zero. That was how they left us far behind them. In that moment, all of our agents, our technology, our equipment, the whole lot, was useless. In the language of the trade, Unit 701 had been blinded.
Thinking back: in those chaotic years when war could have broken out at any moment, it was completely terrifying.
2
News of the situation soon reached the upper levels of command, which resulted in a terse response: we do not relish the prospect of war, but we like being beaten by the enemy even less.
The meaning was plain: this situation had to be remedied, and fast.
Yet it would be impossible for Unit 701 to overcome this situation in a short period of time. Perhaps with a view to setting up a future scapegoat, headquarters hastily promoted a former lower-level agent to handle the operation. Of course, this entailed a huge amount of risk, and the amount of intelligence that could be gathered in this way was strictly limited, so it could only be an interim solution. We needed to fix things, but except for getting our intercept agents to scour the airwaves for traces of the enemy stations, we had no other option. In our efforts to quickly identify the enemy frequencies we had lost, Unit 701 was temporarily transformed into a recruitment station with agents scurrying about in all directions, trying to find new talent. We were put under the direct command of Bureau Chief An Zaitian, with Radio Surveillance Chief Wu giving orders. Below these two men were seven other agents. I was the first of those seven, the assistant chief.
With the help of headquarters, we managed to get an additional twenty-eight agents from other branches of the intelligence service to assist in our task. We became a ‘special operations group’. Every day, relentlessly, we combed the airwaves in search of the enemy broadcast stations. We redoubled our efforts, but our reward was not forthcoming. Our concern grew, but things only went from bad to worse. In our special operations group, in spite of all those agents being added to our regular staff and despite everyone being hard at work twenty-four hours a day, at the end of one week, all we had to show for our work was merely fleeting snippets of broken signals scattered across forty-five different frequencies.
You have to understand that military usage of the airwaves is entirely different from civilian use. Civilians do not change frequencies. The military, on the other hand, shift frequencies at least three times a day: once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and then once more at night; three days equals one cycle. This means that the lowest-density military broadcast station has nine sets of different frequencies (three frequencies times three days). Generally, these radio stations have anywhere from fifteen to twenty-one sets of frequencies, but certain special stations’ cycles could be as long as a month, or even a year. Some do not even have cycles, meaning that they never use the same frequency twice.
To our certain knowledge the opposition had at least a hundred broadcast stations in active use. In other words, we needed to identify a hundred different stations before we could even begin to grasp the situation in the enemy’s camp, and before we could accurately deploy strategic countermeasures. If one station on average had eighteen sets of frequencies, then 100 × 18 = 1,800 sets of radio frequencies. After one week, we had identified only forty-five frequencies, about 2.5 per cent of the total. At that rate, we would need an additional thirty-five weeks before we could identify all of the enemy frequencies: about nine months before we could implement a new systematic surveillance plan. The problem was that headquarters had given us only three months to complete the mission.
It was quite obvious that we were in dire straits.
3
Strangely, even though we worked in the same building – he was the officer in charge and I his immediate subordinate – we never really worked closely together, despite the fact that we should have. It was really odd. His name was Tie, Chief Director Tie. Of course we had met briefly once or twice; we had exchanged nods, looks of recognition. But the impression I took away from these encounters was that his position was much above mine. His physique was imposing. He was quite handsome, but emotionally detached. He had the face of a leader: stern; like a guerrilla fighter materializing out of the jungle. Almost everyone in Unit 701 feared him, wary that at any moment he would break the silence with an explosion. It was for this reason that he earned the nickname ‘Landmine’, meaning that he was someone you wanted to leave well alone. On that day, while I was on the telephone, he suddenly burst into my office. Without saying a word he was standing there in front of me. He grabbed the receiver from my hand and slammed it down. Then he cursed. ‘I’ve been trying to call you for over half an hour, but the line has been busy. Tell me, what have you been nattering about? If it wasn’t about work, I am going to fire you on the spot.’
Luckily Chief Wu was there to bear witness. I was indeed on the phone for work reasons, talking to other agents working on intercepts: nothing he could criticize me for. If I hadn’t been, I would have been on my way out. It was quite clear that he had earned his nickname of ‘Landmine’.
Once things had settled down, Director Tie criticized our efforts to recruit new talent. He felt that we were beating about the same old bushes. He believed that at best all we had accomplished was to enlist a number of high-quality intercept agents, and that was it. But Unit 701’s surveillance division needed something more than this. At this juncture, we needed people of unusual abilities – prodigies, maybe even geniuses. The only advice he proffered was for us to break through the circle we had been trapped in and to strike out on a new path. He suggested we make our way into society, into the masses, to find that person of sublime listening talent.
