‘The Tao of Deception,’ a spy thriller

Below is an excerpt from the first installment of David Ignatius’s serialized work of fiction, “The Tao of Deception,” presented in four parts online. The full version of this abridged piece can be found at wapo.st/ignatius-thriller.

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When Yu Qiangsheng, a top official of the Ministry of State Security, stole across the border to

Hong Kong in November 1985, he left behind a fragile Chinese intelligence service that seemed ready to collapse. But it is the nature of intelligence that nothing is what it at first appears. China’s spymasters gradually regained their balance and a decade ago, they shattered the network of CIA informants inside the country, killing or arresting more than two dozen people.

Spy stories always mix fact and fiction. Intelligence agencies give their real-life assets invented names, as in a novel. They create “legends” for their operatives to document an imaginary past. The spy world, as people so often say, is painted in “shades of gray,” and its facts are embossed with fiction.

So, too, with this narrative. This isn’t a “true” account of what happened in the spy wars between the CIA and the Chinese Ministry of State Security over the past few decades. There are fragments of fact. And, certainly, the starting point of Yu’s defection is accurate. You can look it up. But the characters in this story inhabit the world of imagination. This is a work of fiction.

1985, Hong Kong

The week after Yu Qiangsheng defected from China, he was closeted in a safe house in Repulse Bay, facing the sea. Guards from the CIA’s Office of Security kept watch from a nearby flat and from across the street. Britain controlled Hong Kong back then, and the apartment was safe from the Chinese agents who would have killed Yu if they knew where he was hiding.

Yu paced the rooms of the safe house the first few days, sleepless and depressed. He wanted to be gone, but he was still in Beijing’s reach; worse, he was in a colony. His stomach hurt, and he complained about the food at every meal. He demanded bottled water from Europe and a food taster to make sure he wasn’t being poisoned.

Every day that first week, Yu received a young, well-mannered American visitor. His name was Thomas Crane. His parents had been missionaries in Henan and Shandong provinces, and he spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese. They had hoped their son would become a missionary, too, but he had joined the Central Intelligence Agency, which was entirely different and also in some respects the same.

Crane’s first assignment was to babysit Yu Qiangsheng while the agency decided whether to bring him to America.

Yu had the face of a mandarin: thin lips; sharp eyes; a high forehead; dark hair going to gray, without the usual black dye. Perhaps that was part of his problem. He was too good to be true: a son of the revolution; no, more than that, a prince. His father had been hiding with Mao Zedong in the caves of Yan’an; his father’s first wife had run off to become Mao’s mistress. Yu had survived the Cultural Revolution to become the head of foreign operations of the Chinese spy service. He had been adopted after his father’s death by a ruthless man who became head of China’s secret police. Truly, he knew all the secrets.

And now, Yu declared, he despised China and wanted to escape. The agency at first didn’t trust him. He had been dropping a hanky, passing tidbits of information, for two years. But the agency’s counterintelligence staff warned that he might be a dangle, a provocation meant to trick the CIA into revealing its secrets. And, perhaps, the agency didn’t want to hear what he had to say.

•••

“There are five kinds of spies,” Yu Qiangsheng explained to Tom one morning in the sticky, windless heat of Hong Kong. As he enumerated each variety, he raised a soft, slender finger.

“There are ‘local spies’ who mingle with the enemy; there are ‘internal spies’ who penetrate the enemy’s secret service; there are ‘turned spies’ sent by the enemy but doubled; there are ‘living spies,’ who appear ordinary but hide their deeper purpose. And there are ‘dead spies,’ whose lives are expendable.” “Which one are you?” asked Crane, not just to be polite.

“I am a dead spy, perhaps,” answered Yu. “But that is a decision for your agency. They choose and I accept. The ch’i of trustworthiness is to be correct and calm.”

Correct and calm were usually good words to describe Tom Crane, too. He was nearly six feet, not quite tall. He had a pleasant face, soft brown hair; eyes that held a steady gaze; a mouth that naturally formed an easy smile. It was a face you might look past at a gathering or on a street, and that was just part of what made him a natural intelligence officer.

Crane was good at listening, and the old man liked to talk, so that morning and for many months afterward, Crane received a tutorial in Chinese intelligence. He learned the tradecraft of the Ministry of State Security, the “Tao of deception,” as Yu called it.