Spying

08 Intelligence Department

To Lu Peng, the incident on Taiping Road was like letting a cooked duck fly away. What made it worse was that it had first been discovered by the Second Department of the Ministry of National Defense, plunging him into an even more awkward position.

The relationship between the Confidentiality Bureau and the Second Department of the Ministry of National Defense had always been delicate. Two years ago, during the military intelligence reorganization, part of the Second Department had actually been split off from the Confidentiality Bureau. Yet, this move undeniably shrank the Bureau’s authority, especially in the realm of domestic and foreign military intelligence.

On the personnel front, ever since Zheng Jiemin stepped down as both the head of the Second Department and the director of the Confidentiality Bureau, Director Hou—who had no background in the Military Intelligence Section—was promoted from deputy to full director. Meanwhile, Director Mao sought to revive the glory of the days under the leadership of "Boss Dai." As two intelligence agencies, they became locked in a power struggle between those with Military Intelligence Section roots and outsiders, between those with rough-and-tumble origins and those with military academy pedigrees. As the saying goes, promotions and dismissals are never just simple personnel changes.

In this environment, Lu Peng found himself straddling both sides yet pleasing neither. At the Confidentiality Bureau, he wasn’t a protégé of Boss Dai, so the position of Operations Division chief shouldn’t have fallen to him. However, Mao Renfeng, wary of the former chief vying for power, had transferred him to serve as a regional intelligence station head. After Lu Peng took over, he was torn between proving himself and holding back—afraid of appearing incapable of commanding respect, yet equally afraid of drawing too much attention and facing suppression.

At the Second Department, Office Director Li Helin had been his instructor at the Central Military Academy. But even back then, Li had disapproved of Lu Peng joining the Military Intelligence Section, dismissing it as an organization with too much of a rogue ethos—one that, as a government agency, often lacked procedural justice. Lu Peng thought Li was somewhat hypocritical, putting on airs with foreign jargon just because he had studied in Japan for two years before the war. They were soldiers, not scholars.

Now, Li Helin was the director of the Second Department of the Ministry of National Defense, while Lu Peng was the chief of the Second Division of the Confidentiality Bureau. Li made no secret of his disdain for the Bureau’s so-called "counterintelligence" work, dismissing it as nothing more than a cat-and-mouse game in a closed room. What truly influenced the course of the war, he believed, was military intelligence. Yet, in reality, even he couldn’t defy the highest authority’s favor toward the Confidentiality Bureau. At the national intelligence station representatives’ meeting (held on the anniversary of Dai Li’s birth, no less), the leader reiterated: "The Second Department and the Confidentiality Bureau must cooperate wholeheartedly, without distinction between yours and mine."

Soon after, the Confidentiality Bureau cracked a major Communist spy case involving a division-level officer. Lu Peng had been smug at first, but during his report to higher-ups, he realized the implications for the Ministry of National Defense. Not only did it embarrass the First and Second Departments, responsible for personnel and intelligence respectively, but some senior officials in the implicated departments were more concerned about their subordinates or protégés—those they worked with daily—being branded as Communists. (The Nationalist Party had always emphasized mentor-student relationships, a tradition perhaps dating back to President Chiang’s days as head of the Whampoa Academy.) Some even suspected the Confidentiality Bureau of framing colleagues to earn merit, stirring up trouble where none existed.

When Li Helin learned that Qiao Mingyu had died of a "sudden heart attack" in the interrogation room, he confronted Lu Peng directly: "Qiao was awarded the Loyalty and Bravery Medal during the War of Resistance. How can you be sure you haven’t fallen for a Communist scheme, turning your blade against the heroes of the Party and the nation?"In person, Lu Peng still respectfully addressed Li Helin, who was only seven or eight years his senior, as "Teacher." He explained that they had retrieved military meeting records from Qiao Mingyu's office that should have been destroyed long ago. This proved that Qiao had indeed abused his authority to report Nationalist military secrets to the Communist Party. Moreover, judging by the outcomes of several battles he had directly participated in, he had even proposed battle plans favorable to the Communist forces. However, Lu Peng did not reveal why Qiao Mingyu had been singled out from the beginning.

"Using intelligence without exposing its source—Teacher, you emphasized this in class back then."

Li Helin was momentarily at a loss for words.

But the Communist underground radio station, which Lu Peng had deliberately maintained as usual, suddenly malfunctioned at this critical moment. The newly established intelligence source was lost just like that. What had they even gathered these past few days? Weather reports? Land reform updates? Propaganda slogans? Nothing useful. To avoid giving critics ammunition, he urgently needed to take further action to make up for the lapse.

After another failed attempt at extracting a confession, he summoned the two special agents assigned to tail Lan Youyin and asked where she had been on the evening of the incident on Taiping Road. The answer disappointed him.

That day, due to an unexpected high-level personnel decision, the First Department had been busy until late. Lan Youyin had remained in the Ministry of National Defense until after 8 p.m. and had not left. In fact, not just that day—ever since Lu Peng had ordered them to follow her, they had observed that aside from going to work, buying groceries, and returning home, she never went anywhere else.

"Oh, right. The day before yesterday, she went to the Intelligence School in Xiaoying during work hours. But we checked—it was official business. The ministry is hiring new personnel, so she went to collect the graduates' personnel files."

"What new personnel? How come I didn’t know about this?"

"The Second Department has been talking about expanding its staff. Director Li mentioned some foreign management training system—on-the-job training."

Lu Peng’s gaze shifted to the window as he muttered to himself, "This teacher of mine really has... quite the repertoire."

"Chief, should we continue the surveillance?"

The agents assigned to tail her didn’t quite understand—if the chief suspected Lan Youyin, why not just arrest and interrogate her directly? With Qiao Mingyu’s identity as a Communist spy confirmed, it would only be natural to list his wife as a suspect. But what exactly was the chief worried about?

The phone on the desk rang. Lu Peng picked up the receiver, uttered a curt "Hello," paused, then said, "Put it through."

As luck would have it, it was Li Helin calling from the Second Department. But what was the purpose of his call?

Lu Peng greeted his teacher with the same respectful tone, only to hear Li Helin say the last thing he wanted to hear at the moment: "I heard someone used the radio you seized a few days ago to send a message to the Communist area."

Though it wasn’t surprising that Li Helin had found out, Lu Peng thought to himself, He didn’t have to rush in to lecture me so soon.

"It’s nothing major. No need for Teacher to trouble yourself over it."

But Li Helin ignored his deflection and pressed on, "What was the content of the message?"

Suppressing his impatience, Lu Peng replied, "Just notifying the Communist area to stop transmitting to this radio. But this station wasn’t handling anything critical anyway—just the usual Communist propaganda."

There was a pause on Li Helin’s end before he said, "So, the Confidentiality Bureau deciphered that message.""No, wasting time on predictable content is pointless. We should focus on finding the sender instead."

"If it's just meant to serve as an obvious signal, why encrypt it? Why not use plaintext or a random string as a warning? But that didn’t look like random noise."

Lu Peng froze.

"If they used encryption, it means they wanted to keep something secret. Have you found the sender yet? Have you considered that the cipher might be hiding his true identity?" Li Helin's voice traveled through the phone line, striking the listener like a sudden winter thunderclap—yet he himself remained perfectly calm. "If you want to find him, you first need to figure out what exactly he was transmitting."

Lu Peng, a colonel and department head in his thirties, had been trained in combat, weapons, and explosives. He had even been deployed behind enemy lines to sabotage infrastructure and carry out assassinations. There was no denying he was skilled in covert operations. But nowadays, was brute force and cruelty really enough to deal with the Communists? Having once been his instructor, Li Helin believed he understood more. When the Americans intercepted Yamamoto Isoroku, they didn’t rely on torturing a few captured Japanese foot soldiers.

Both men hung up the phone, each lost in their own thoughts.

Lu Peng turned to his subordinates and said, "Keep tailing Lan Youyin, but downgrade the surveillance to Level C. Further instructions will follow."

As for Li Helin—

A knock came at his office door. He called out, "Come in," and his secretary ushered in several nervous young men—graduates selected from the Intelligence School, reporting for duty today.

This was part of the intelligence talent cultivation plan he had proposed to the director half a year ago—the Second Department’s own future backbone. Though nominally separate from the Confidentiality Bureau, their work overlapped, and many former Military Intelligence Section personnel had been assigned to various offices during its formation. Li Helin hoped that by cutting redundancies and bringing in fresh blood, he could gradually dilute the influence of the old Military Intelligence system on the Second Department—and send a message to the Confidentiality Bureau that their outdated methods of intelligence-gathering were no longer effective.

Li Helin shook hands and saluted each of the "new recruits" he had personally selected, well aware of their individual strengths: Feng Tian from Shandong excelled in physical combat and subduing targets, Zhao Jialiang from Gansu was skilled in psychological warfare, Xu Jingchu from Hunan spoke multiple foreign languages, and the only woman among them, Shen Tong, possessed a photographic memory. He outlined their rotation schedule across different sections of the Second Department, speaking warmly and encouraging them to work boldly without being hindered by their junior status—

"I’ve heard our current enemies, the Communists, don’t care much for hierarchy. That has its pros and cons, but we can take the best of it—all in the name of working more efficiently."

To the wide-eyed new trainees, the man before them was not quite what they had imagined a deputy intelligence chief to be.

Leaving aside how much of what he said could be taken at face value, the mere fact that he dared to openly acknowledge—in a professional setting—that the Communists had something worth learning already set Li Helin apart from his peers in the Ministry of Defense.

But clearly, such differences could also invite trouble.News arrived from the Central China Theater that Communist forces under Liu Bocheng had captured Kaifeng, the provincial capital of Henan. The Ministry of National Defense's various departments held one strategy meeting after another, with unverified battle reports—some true, some false—often devolving into mutual accusations between departments. This time, Li Helin found himself under interrogation by Liu Kangjie, director of the Third Department, due to inaccurate pre-battle intelligence.

"At the beginning of the month, our intelligence indicated Liu Bocheng would feint an attack on Zhengzhou while actually directing his main force toward Xinyang. Yet now Xiangyang and Fancheng are under siege—Director Li, what are your thoughts on this?"

Li Helin, who had remained silent until now, slowly raised his head and studied Liu Kangjie before responding, "Director Liu, by calling on me, are you genuinely seeking discussion, or is there another implication?"

"Naturally, I sincerely seek Director Li's counsel. Our frontline troops rely on your Second Department for intelligence beyond their thirty-mile reconnaissance radius. But how often has your intelligence been accurate?" Liu Kangjie grew increasingly agitated as he spoke, pulling out a prepared newspaper from the conference table. "This is a Beiping newspaper from months ago, disclosing the marching plans of the Shanxi Relief Corps. Look at the timing—the 94th Corps hadn't even reached Xibaipo then! How is it that Communist newspapers are better informed than our intelligence agencies?"

"That can only mean there are Bandit spies within the departments formulating battle plans," Li Helin said coldly.

"You—!" Liu Kangjie's face flushed red, while other department directors—recently implicated in Communist spy scandals—winced at the jab but couldn't refute it. Finding no support, Liu Kangjie pressed on, "Who's to say the Second Department doesn't have Bandit spies? Feeding us false intelligence to disrupt military operations—perhaps it's a case of the watchdog stealing the sheep. Investigating yourselves yields nothing."

"Director Liu, you'd better have evidence for such claims."

"You, Li Helin, are the evidence! Your pro-Communist rhetoric is the evidence! I say you're the biggest Bandit spy in the entire Ministry of National Defense!"

"Old Liu, that's going too far," a third voice finally interjected to mediate. "We understand your urgency, but we shouldn't turn on our own..."

Thus, yet another solemn conference concerning the survival of the Party-state ended in chaotic arguments and interventions.

Rubbing his temples, Li Helin left the contentious scene. So distracted was he that he nearly missed the man standing at attention saluting him at the stairwell.

"Professor. Just finished the meeting?" It was Ren Shaobai.

Li Helin focused his gaze, recognizing a former student from his teaching days at the Central Military Academy—likely the 17th class—now handling military logistics in the Fourth Department. Their offices being on different floors meant little interaction. Occasional mentions of Ren Shaobai's name often came with remarks like, "If not for his lackadaisical discipline, Fourth Department's Ren Shaobai might actually be competent." He'd also played a role in quietly containing the recent Bandit spy incident within headquarters before it became a scandal.

"Ah, Shaobai," Li Helin acknowledged. "I haven't had the chance to congratulate you on your promotion to section chief."

"No, no," Ren Shaobai demurred hastily. "This student remains your most disappointing one."It was rather strange. Despite his usual casual demeanor in front of others, he was exceptionally respectful towards this former teacher of his. Perhaps it was because he had indeed failed to live up to Li Helin's expectations back then. Seeing the weariness on his teacher's face now, likely from encountering difficulties during the meeting, he couldn't help but ask, "If there's anything this student can assist with, please don't hesitate to entrust it to me."

Though it was the kind of polite offer one heard every day, Li Helin looked at this student—one he had truly placed high hopes in—and after a moment's consideration, said, "As it happens, there is something. Help me look into this matter."