Shortly before 9/11, Ablimit Celil made the first of two journeys to an al-Qaeda training camp in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan. A more devout Muslim than the other members of the cell, he managed to obtain permission to undertake the Haj, and it was at Mecca that he was recruited as an agent of the CIA by Josh Pinnegar, who was posing as an American newspaper reporter.
The cell was unusual in that its four members were deliberately kept apart. Ablimit, a widower, lived in Urumqi where he worked as a doorman at a five-star hotel catering to foreigners and rich Chinese businessmen. Whenever he visited the city, Miles always stayed at the hotel and was able to communicate with Ablimit simply by passing him messages in the form of tips. Typically, these would be written on Chinese and American banknotes using inks visible only under ultra-violet light. Shortly after the Madrid bombings of March 2004, Ablimit informed Miles that he was keen to move with Memet to Shanghai and to team up with Abdul Bary and Ansary Tursun. The atmosphere between Hans and Uighurs in Urumqi, he said, had deteriorated dramatically. September 11th had handed the Chinese authorities carte blanche to clamp down on the minority Muslim population and to treat them with a previously unimaginable contempt. Informers now operated at every level of society. Black-clad anti-terrorist police roamed the streets. Where once Han and Uighur had lived contentedly side by side, the two ethnic groups were now divided by fear and mutual suspicion. Passports belonging to thousands of Muslim citizens had been confiscated by the authorities. All travel now had to be approved by a Chinese government paranoid that its oppressed minorities would join militant groups in Chechnya and Pakistan and return to the Motherland, planning to wreak havoc. Only a Madrid-style incident in either Shanghai or Beijing would be sufficient, Celil said, to accelerate the cause of an in depen dent Eastern Turkestan.
Ablimit’s theory chimed with Miles, who had concluded that small-scale mainland attacks, most of which went unreported in the West, were of no strategic value to the United States. He had learned this lesson from TYPHOON’s earlier incarnation. The ultimate goal of the group of individuals in Washington with tactical control of Miles’s operation was an American-sponsored catastrophe at the Beijing Olympics. Yet that event was so far off that Miles had not disclosed the objective to any member of the cell. Instead, he told Ablimit that he would begin to consider targets in Shanghai for a possible operation in the summer of 2005. Memet told his wife that he was going to Shanghai to look for work in the construction industry. Ablimit found himself a job in the kitchens of a hotel belonging to the same chain for which he had worked in Urumqi.
There was one complication. The cell had briefly had a fifth member. Enver Semed had fought alongside the Taliban at ToraBora and had been captured by American soldiers in December 2001. He was taken to Guantanamo Bay where he was held alongside twenty-two other Uighur fighters with alleged links to alQaeda. In early 2004 Semed had his detention analysed by the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which determined that he was no longer an “enemy” of the United States. There was a simple reason for this: the CIA had recruited Semed as a double agent. Repatriated to China on false documentation, he reported to Josh Pinnegar, who passed control for Semed to Kenneth Lenan. Lenan, under pressure from the MSS because of his links to Macklinson, gave him up almost immediately. Two months later Semed was arrested on charges of belonging to ETIM and executed at a gulag in Qinghai. It was the news of Semed’s demise that Lenan was bringing to Coolidge on his final visit to Shanghai.
33
After almost seven weeks in China, Joe was ready to accelerate the operation. Every one of his counter-surveillance exercises-carried out with metronomic regularity, whether he was working at the office, travelling by cab to a restaurant, walking around the French Concession or using the gym at the Ritz-Carlton-convinced him that he was being neither bugged nor followed. In an encrypted email to Vauxhall Cross, sent from a randomly selected internet cafe on Shanxi Road, he told Waterfield that, in his opinion, RUN was clean. Neither the Americans, nor Chinese liaison, had the first clue what Joe Lennox was up to.
London responded a day later with the text message that Joe had been waiting for: “Tony wants to meet for drinks at six on Monday. Bring your book about Spain.” This was simple, prearranged code. “Tony” was the operational name for Zhao Jian, a Han Chinese SIS asset who lived and worked in Shanghai. Jian and his two younger brothers were secretly on the British embassy payroll and had been following Miles since Christmas, documenting his movements in preparation for Joe’s arrival. “Meet for drinks” meant that Joe should make contact with Jian at the branch of Starbucks on the north side of Renmin Park. “Six on Monday” meant simply five o’clock on the following Sunday afternoon. The “book about Spain” was a hardback copy of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s novel The Queen of the South, which Joe was to make visible at an outdoor table as a signal that the meeting could proceed. Joe had committed half a dozen similarly innocuous phrases to memory. “Ring your sister,” for example, meant that we were to contact one another immediately, using clean mobile phones. “Dad has found your stolen car” was an emergency instruction to abort the operation and to return to London on a pseudonymous passport.
On the late Sunday afternoon of his first meeting with Zhao Jian, Joe made his way down to the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, shared a joke with the doorman-after almost two months at the hotel, he was on friendly terms with most of the staff-and stepped into a cab. The driver was overweight and overtired and did not bother to acknowledge Joe until he was instructed, in impeccable Mandarin, to head for the Park Hotel, whereupon he asked where Joe was from and embarked on an animated discussion of the circumstances surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Joe, sitting in the back of the cab, pressed himself against the perspex separator in which the driver was encased and reassured him that, to the best of his knowledge, the People’s Princess had not been murdered by MI6.
The air conditioning in the cab was broken and Joe wound down the window, breathing hot, polluted air that tasted of sulphur. He was wearing a white linen shirt, cotton trousers and a pair of worn Campers, because it was a humid day and he knew that Jian would want to walk some distance prior to their meeting to ensure that neither of them had picked up a tail.
Approaching the park, the driver indicated to pull over and Joe turned in the baking back seat to check for unusual movements in the vehicles behind them. Having paid the fare, he handed his Quayler card to the driver-“Look out for our products!”-and went into the lobby of the hotel to draw any possible surveillance off the street. A minute later he left by an obscure side exit which he had discovered three days earlier. Joe continued to observe the exit from a phone booth on Fenyang Road for about ninety seconds. When only a kitchen porter emerged to empty a bin during that period, Joe was satisfied that he was not being followed.
The branch of Starbucks which is situated across Nanjing Road from the park is one of dozens of franchised outlets which have opened up across China in recent years, selling lattes and muffins and cinnamon teas indistinguishable from those available in Sydney and Paris and Washington. Joe later wrote in his report that he entered the cafe using the Nanjing Road entrance at approximately 4:40 p.m. With a mug of cappuccino, he headed for the back and found an outdoor table looking south over Renmin Park. Joe’s fellow customers were mainly Western tourists and a few wealthier Chinese, and he smoked a cigarette while the smog-screened sun warmed his face. A previous occupant of the table had left a copy of That’s Shanghai, the weekly English-language listings magazine, on the chair beside him. Joe opened it, flicked his way backwards through the contents and read a review of a new lounge bar which had opened up in Pudong. Shortly before five o’clock he removed The Queen of the South from his rucksack and placed it on the table. He was neither nervous nor particularly apprehensive. He had done his preparation and this sort of work was second nature to him.