THE revelation that a suspected CIA spy has been caught in the upper ranks of China’s state security ministry has injected a fresh destabilising element to the country’s power struggle.
Chinese analysts called it a well-planned leak in the United States that threatened the careers of two ambitious Communist party figures and dug up a long-buried tale of treachery at the heart of the party elite.
It is the latest in a series of perfectly timed leaks of intelligence material that helped to bring down a rising star, Bo Xilai, and undermined Zhou Yongkang, the state security supremo.
The hardline security and intelligence apparatus is in disarray and on the political defensive, analysts in Hong Kong said. The first word on the arrest of an unnamed aide to a vice-minister in the ministry, which runs home and foreign intelligence operations, came in a Chinese newspaper in America.
Then details of a “honeytrap” that ensnared the 38-year-old official with a female CIA asset in Hong Kong emerged in a Hong Kong magazine.
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Both China and the US had sought to keep the matter secret. Diplomats said China feared the reaction among its people and the US State Department feared more tension after two crises over Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist who escaped house arrest, and Wang Lijun, the policeman in the case of murdered Briton Neil Heywood. Both fled to US diplomatic premises.
But Chinese censors unblocked access to internet reports on the spy case yesterday, putting key officials in the line of fire. One is the minister of state security, Geng Huichang. A colourless bureaucrat, he is not top leadership material.
But his counterpart, the minister of public security, Meng Jianzhu, is a hardliner tipped to take over the security portfolio on the nine-man standing committee that rules China. The spy scandal weakens the power of the security autocrats. It also affects another candidate for the committee, the Shanghai party leader Yu Zhengsheng.
The state media do not mention the fact that his brother, Yu Qiangsheng, was the last CIA spy to be exposed inside the security ministry. Yu Qiangsheng defected to the US in 1985, leading the Americans to unmask China’s top double agent, CIA analyst Larry Chin Wu-tai, who later killed himself in prison.
Yu vanished into a protected witness programme but rumours among Chinese journalists say he let down his guard to travel to Latin America, where Chinese agents murdered him on a beach.
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In a poisonous political climate, the disclosures of the past week have suddenly made the prospects of Shanghai party leader Yu and minister Meng very shaky indeed.