What the Heroes of Chinese Communist Intelligence History Tell Us About Today's Operations

Poster for the Chinese spy film Night of the Gold Mausoleum, based on the true story of "The Three Heroes of the Dragon's Lair"

What are the failings that make people who know secrets vulnerable enough to betray them?  The old acronym used by American intelligence is MICE: money, ideology, compromise, ego, or a combination of the above.  Some recent thinking points in other directions: that "insider" spies go through stages of disillusion, betrayal, regret, and surrender (see NOIR4USA).  These spies are "agents" who are "run" by a professional intelligence officer.

There are also insider spies who are first trained by their sponsors, perhaps as professional officers, perhaps as "agents," and then inserted into a target organization.  They gather and report the secrets they learn, with the hope of eventual exfiltration "home," and a more normal life.  Viewers of the FX series The Americans or the Tom Hanks film Bridge of Spies will be familiar with this model.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence history includes many examples of the two broad categories above.   Because Chinese intelligence officers today are taught to learn from past operations and to study their own history, there are useful lessons for corporate security professionals, HR executives, and others.

A prominent legendary operation is "The Three Heroes of the Dragon's Lair" (龙潭三杰, Longtan Sanjie), the earliest penetration (1930-31) by CCP intelligence of their mortal enemy, the government of Nationalist China.  A CCP member from the same hometown as a prominent Nationalist official, who spoke his dialect, managed to make friends with the target.  The communist agent became the target's confidential secretary just as he was in line to become a senior intelligence official.  Through personal introductions, he brought in two other comrades.  Their work in April 1931 may have saved the CCP from extinction, arguably a historic watershed.

Among the lessons: personal connections can produce poisonous introductions, and are no substitute for a good background check.  Also, the secrets stolen by the Three Heroes were not locked up every night.  If laptops are left out after hours in your business, you may be as vulnerable as was this UK firm.

The controversial film Lust Caution (色戒, Se Jie), set mostly in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II, is a story based on two actual cases, with lots of entertaining elements added, of course.
- The first true case: the young female Chinese model, Zheng Pingru, was recruited by Nationalist Chinese intelligence to assassinate a traitorous puppet government intelligence chief Ding Mocun.
- The second true story was of a Communist female agent, Guan Lu, sent to become the family friend of the traitor intelligence chief's deputy Li Shiqun, and help him courier Japanese secrets to the CCP.

Among the lessons from the second case: MICE isn't the whole story when considering why a person with secrets betrays their employer.  Li Shiqun, simply stated, saw which way the wind was blowing (Japan would lose WWII) and decided to help his previous friends, the CCP.  His was a set of motivations more complicated than money, ideology, compromise and ego.  He looked toward the future, and how he would fit in it.