Spying

07 The Silkworm Keeper

Ren Shaobai had won his gamble.

Just as Lu Peng grew increasingly frustrated by the endless arrests of Communist Party members and continued torturing the detained "bandit spies," in the liberated areas of Hebei, the Central Social Affairs Department of the Communist Party, responsible for intelligence, was organizing efforts to crack the mysterious string of coded messages.

It was early June 1948. From a later historical perspective, an astonishing coincidence emerged between the Nationalists and Communists, who had already been locked in civil war for two years. Around the same time that Gu Zhutong replaced Chen Cheng as the Nationalists' Chief of the Army General Staff and Bai Chongxi assumed command as the Director of Bandit Suppression in Central China, Mao Zedong, stationed in Fuping County, decided to send Chen Yi to the Central Plains, with Su Yu temporarily taking over Chen Yi's role as commander of the East China Field Army.

An old saying goes that changing commanders before battle is a military taboo. Yet, when applied to the Nationalist and Communist forces, this adage yielded vastly different outcomes.

Of course, these were all events to unfold later. Returning to the present, where Ren Shaobai was desperate to reestablish contact with the Party, his reckless transmission of that coded message stemmed from the fact that he was no prophet. All he could see was how the Confidentiality Bureau had dismantled the Communist Party's covert operations within the Ministry of National Defense.

He waited anxiously for a response to his signal.

For several days, the codebreakers in the Social Affairs Department ruled out cipher keys currently or previously used by underground radio stations across war zones and cities. They tried conventional decryption methods and even brute-force cracking based on recent developments in Nanjing—building "a skyscraper from flat ground"—but to no avail.

The only clue they could glean from the cipher itself was that the radio station must have been seized by the Nationalists. Under normal circumstances, the sender would have used the original cipher. Therefore, this unfamiliar encryption wasn't meant to thwart them but rather the Nationalist intelligence codebreakers.

Someone then suggested: Could they first identify the sender?

Since the cipher was unfamiliar, it was possible the sender hadn't received their standard radio training but was desperate to contact them. In Nanjing, given this motive and such an elaborate method, there were two possibilities: either a previously recruited informant or a Nationalist insider seeking to defect.

"There's a third option," someone proposed. "This could be a trap."

The head of the codebreaking team pondered for a moment before saying, "That's not impossible. But until we know for sure, we must exhaust all efforts to decrypt it. We can't dismiss the chance that someone genuinely awaits our response."

Two more days passed. The deputy director of the Social Affairs Department came across the strange cipher in a report from the Chief of Enemy Cipher. He immediately sought out the latter and showed him his annotations on the report. The Chief of Enemy Cipher noticed that the deputy director had circled two possibilities—"informant" and "Nationalist member"—and written beside them: Perhaps both?

The Chief of Enemy Cipher caught on at once. "An informant embedded in the Nationalist government?"

"Someone who's gone dark still counts, doesn't it?"

"You know who this is? Who?"

"One-Two-Zero-Seven—"Before the deputy minister could finish speaking, the head of the cipher group burst through the door in a flurry: "Director, that code has been deciphered!" Only then did he realize there was more than one person in the room. He quickly stood at attention, about to salute the deputy minister, but the veteran intelligence officer—one of the "Three Heroes of Longtan"—casually waved him off.

"Are you talking about that unfamiliar telegram from the other day? It’s been decoded?"

"Yes. The telegram consisted of nine sets of numbers representing nine characters, but the first four characters were encrypted one layer less than the last five. We were stuck in our usual thinking and didn’t realize the first four characters were numbers themselves."

At this, the confidential director and the deputy minister exchanged a glance and urgently asked, "So what’s the result?"

The cipher group leader replied, "1207 calling for the Silkworm Keeper."

The codename "Silkworm Keeper" had long disappeared.

Before 1944, he had served as a Business Commissioner at the Zhengzhong Bookstore in Chongqing. Under the cover of the Kuomintang-operated publishing house, his other identity was that of an underground operative directly under the leadership of the CCP’s Yangtze River Bureau. As a secret intelligence officer, one of his tasks was to recruit informants, identify potential spies, and even cultivate contacts within the Kuomintang who could provide intelligence.

1207 was one of his recruits.

Of course, back then, the young Ren Shaobai was just a military academy graduate and hadn’t yet given himself this enigmatic numerical codename.

To the Silkworm Keeper, people became spies for different reasons—ideology, values, financial gain, or various forms of coercion.

When someone from the semi-public Eighth Route Army office contacted him to approach a Kuomintang second-generation officer named Ren Shaobai from the Ministry of Military Affairs, the Silkworm Keeper was skeptical. While young people often sided with the underdog, could mere sympathy for the Communist Party really make someone switch sides and change allegiances?

Such doubts were practical. Ren Shaobai had a Whampoa background, his father was an old Kuomintang member who had fought in the Northern Expedition, and he himself had no financial troubles. He might have expressed dissatisfaction with the authorities on occasion, but he surely hadn’t considered what it truly meant to become an underground Communist operative.

Their first meeting was at an Army Club banquet. The Silkworm Keeper knew someone from the Central Party Department’s adjutant office, and through this connection, he was introduced to many military and political figures, including Ren Shaobai. The group chatted about everything except the war, and someone mentioned how the recent public performance of Thunderstorm by Central University students in Shapingba had been interrupted by the Military Intelligence Section because the play contained strong leftist themes.

"If they’d cut out the worker’s scenes, it might’ve been watchable," one man remarked.

Those around him nodded thoughtfully in agreement.

"Pfft—"

A sudden laugh broke the air. The Silkworm Keeper looked up to see Ren Shaobai, his face full of mockery.

Noticing everyone’s eyes on him, Ren Shaobai quickly composed himself and said with feigned seriousness, "I never imagined a certain official was a fan of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School, enjoying love stories between stepchildren and stepmothers, or brothers and sisters."

Later that evening, the Silkworm Keeper continued discussing books and other topics with him. Finding common ground, they agreed on a time and place to meet again before the banquet ended.I'll give you a copy someday."

They also smoked a brand of cigarettes popular among American troops. Ren Shaobai eyed the green-packaged Lucky Strike with red lettering in the Silkworm Keeper's hand, thinking to himself that American aesthetics still left something to be desired.

During their first two meetings, Ren Shaobai hadn't realized he was facing an underground Communist operative. He was still young, far removed from notions of cunning and calculation, so he unwittingly laid bare his entire life story.

A native of Zhejiang, he had dropped out of Central University. Unable to wait for graduation, he applied to the Central Aviation School but was rejected during the vision test—a humiliating discovery of his long-undiagnosed nearsightedness. Having already boasted about his plans at school, he switched to the Central Military Academy instead.

After graduation, he had intended to join frontline units, but his mother made a call to Soong Mei-ling—"The Generalissimo must leave an heir for the Ren family!"—resulting in his assignment to the Ministry of Military Affairs handling military supplies. Though he never set foot on a battlefield, he enjoyed preferential treatment due to his father's heroic sacrifice during the 1933 Great Wall Campaign, when Japanese and Manchurian forces expanded southward, triggering several battles along the Great Wall line. Yet despite this, he remained discontent in government circles, finding his colleagues and superiors more preoccupied with networking and privilege-seeking among the elite than with national affairs.

The Silkworm Keeper reported his situation to higher-ups and received encouragement to cultivate him. But nurturing progressive ideals in a Kuomintang member was entirely different from turning him into a Communist spy embedded within the KMT.

The Silkworm Keeper later joked that recruiting an underground operative from the opposing camp was like courtship—it required distance and uncertainty. If one side cooled off, the other's desire would only intensify. After six months of intermittent contact, filled with probing, push-and-pull, and strategic retreats, underground operative 1207 was secretly born.

Given his position deep within KMT institutions, Ren Shaobai was assigned a high security clearance. After reporting his case to the Communist Yangtze River Bureau, the Silkworm Keeper became his sole handler—a wise arrangement, as Ren's name never appeared on lists of Communist affiliation suspects even after the Silkworm Keeper's arrest in late 1943. Moreover, his background granted him an impeccable cover of least suspicion.

When decrypted messages aligned with archival records, the Central Social Department convened a small emergency meeting. They concluded that recent intercepted telegrams most likely originated from 1207—the very operative the Silkworm Keeper had once cultivated.After the Silkworm Keeper's death, he entered the dormant period as per protocol. At that time, the war of resistance had reached its later stages, and after the victory, there had been peace talks between the Nationalists and Communists, so Agent 1207 was never reactivated. Now that he had taken the initiative to send out a signal at great risk, it still couldn't be ruled out as a potential trap. But with their spy network deployed in the Nationalist Defense Ministry severely compromised, they wouldn't have even known their underground radio stations had been seized if not for this encrypted telegram.

The current conflict had already entered its third year. Though they were prepared to fight for two more years or even longer, if they could regain the initiative behind enemy lines in Nationalist territory, it would be worth attempting no matter what.

Moreover, who was to say the other side hadn't been waiting desperately in the darkness to be summoned again? Such perseverance could not be betrayed.