Having reached this point, a thought suddenly occurred to him: the original English letters should remain in his possession. I therefore opened the file and began to separate the English originals from the translations. It was then that I saw a record of a telephone conversation on top of the file — someone named Qian Zongnan had telephoned. The note seemed to serve as a foreword to the case files. There were only a few sentences:
Liseiwicz was employed as a high-level military intelligence analyst for X country. I saw him four times, the last in the summer of 1970. Later I discovered that Liseiwicz and Fan Lili were put under house arrest at PP military base, reason unknown. Liseiwicz died in 1978 at PP base. In 1981, the military authorities of X country released Fan (Lili) from house arrest. In 1983, Fan (Lili) arrived in Hong Kong in search of me, hoping that I would assist her in making arrangements for her to return to China. Assistance refused. In 1986, it was reported that Fan (Lili) was in her home town of Linshui county, C City, contributing funds to establish an engineering project. By all accounts, she is still resident in Linshui county.
Director Zheng told me that this person, Qian Zongnan, was at that time an informant, a comrade charged with keeping tabs on Liseiwicz in X country. Upon being handed the file, I had thought that this man would be crucial for helping me to come to a better understanding of the role played by Jan Liseiwicz in these events. I was therefore very sad to be informed that he had died the year before. Still, the record did make mention of Fan Lili, Liseiwicz’s Chinese wife. If I wished to understand him, then she was without a doubt the best person to talk to.I was ecstatic.
4
Since I lacked a specific address, I had at first mistakenly believed that finding Fan Lili would entail great deal of effort and be fraught with complications and setbacks; the actual experience was anything but. Making initial enquiries at the Linshui County Education Bureau, it seemed as though everyone in the building knew her. As it turned out, several years ago not only had she succeeded in establishing three primary-level Hope Schools,* she had also donated tens of thousands of yuan worth of textbooks to the local middle schools. You could say that those on the frontlines of education in Linshui, without exception, knew who she was and respected her. However, when I found her at Jinhe Hospital in C City, my original ambition went cold, for there she was, lying in bed with her larynx removed. Gauze was tied about her neck and head in a rough fashion, making it seem as though she possessed two skulls. She was suffering from throat cancer. The doctor said that even though the surgery was successful, there was no way that she could speak unless she practised making sounds through her lungs. Because the surgery had just taken place recently, her condition was still very poor. It would be impossible for me to interview her. Therefore, I said nothing and instead pretended that I was another of the numerous senior people from Linshui county who had come to pay their respects. I left her flowers and my best wishes, and took leave. Later, over the course of the next few days, I visited her in the hospital three more times. On each visit she would write her responses to my questions. Altogether, she wrote several pages and each one astonished me!
To tell you the truth, if she hadn’t written these answers, no one would ever have grasped the truth about Liseiwicz. We would never have realised his true identity and position, his sincere desires and shame, his indisputable pain and sorrow. In a very real sense, Liseiwicz’s departure for X country was far from being all there was to that story. The entire tale was something truly mind-boggling, a genuinely freakish combination of events.
* Translators’ note: Hope Schools, or xiwang xiaoxue, refer to privately run primary and elementary schools set up in poor rural areas of China. The schools are funded primarily by wealthy Hong Kong and Taiwanese social organizations.
To be honest with you, Fan Lili’s words demand patience in order to be appreciated and valued.
I give them to you below, word for word. The first time:
1. He (Liseiwicz) was not a code-breaker.
2. Since you already know that he wrote those letters in order to mystify you and put you on the wrong track, why do you still believe what he said? Those words were all lies — him a code-breaker? He created ciphers; he was the enemy of those who decipher them.
3. PURPLE was his creation!
4. This will take some explaining. It was the spring of 1946. A man had come looking for Liseiwicz, a fellow student from Cambridge. At that time, it seemed that this man was preparing to take charge of a very important post for the government of Israel. He took Liseiwicz to a church on Gulou Street, and in front of God and in the name of the millions of Jewish compatriots, requested him to devise a cipher for the State of Israel. Liseiwicz took more than a year to construct the cipher, but his sponsors didn’t seem to care; they were ever so pleased. Since the time he was a small child, Liseiwicz had grown up surrounded with adulation: his ego was very strong and it wouldn’t let him fail. But because he didn’t have enough time in which to work on it, it was somewhat rushed — at least for him — and he began to feel that there were many flaws within it; so he took it upon himself to devise a new cipher to take its place. This was when he was hopelessly drawn deeper and deeper into the bewildering world of cryptography. Finally, after nearly three years of work, he succeeded in devising a cipher he could be satisfied with. That cipher was PURPLE. He then requested that the Israeli authorities replace his previous cipher with this new one. They decided to experiment with it, but the result was not what he expected: PURPLE turned out to be too difficult; there was no way that they could use it. At the time, the famous cryptanalyst Klaus Johannes was still living. It was said that after he saw a secret telegram encrypted with PURPLE, he remarked. ‘I would like to have three thousand similarly encrypted telegrams come across my desk, all waiting to be deciphered, but in the current situation,* I will probably only see a thousand.’† The meaning of this statement was clear — in however many years he had left, he would not be able to crack this cipher. Once X country got wind of this, they immediately thought of buying PURPLE, but at that time we had not yet decided to leave N University. What is more, considering the strained relationships between X country and China, we decided that it was best not to respond to this proposal. What happened later was as you described it: in order to rescue my father, we used PURPLE to make a deal with X country.
5. Yes, he believed that Rong Jinzhen would sooner or later decipher PURPLE, and so he made every effort to impede his progress.
6. In the entire world, there was only one person he admired and that was Rong Jinzhen. He believed that concentrated within Jinzhen was the sum of all Western knowledge and wisdom, something only seen once every hundred years. 7. I’m tired, another day.The second time:
1. This, using the words of a military intelligence analyst, is for external dissemination. In fact, he (Liseiwicz) was still engaged in the development of ciphers.
* At the time, World War II had ended and there was no large-scale conflict taking place.