Yet it would be impossible for Unit 701 to overcome this situation in a short period of time. Perhaps with a view to setting up a future scapegoat, headquarters hastily promoted a former lower-level agent to handle the operation. Of course, this entailed a huge amount of risk, and the amount of intelligence that could be gathered in this way was strictly limited, so it could only be an interim solution. We needed to fix things, but except for getting our intercept agents to scour the airwaves for traces of the enemy stations, we had no other option. In our efforts to quickly identify the enemy frequencies we had lost, Unit 701 was temporarily transformed into a recruitment station with agents scurrying about in all directions, trying to find new talent. We were put under the direct command of Bureau Chief An Zaitian, with Radio Surveillance Chief Wu giving orders. Below these two men were seven other agents. I was the first of those seven, the assistant chief.

With the help of headquarters, we managed to get an additional twenty-eight agents from other branches of the intelligence service to assist in our task. We became a ‘special operations group’. Every day, relentlessly, we combed the airwaves in search of the enemy broadcast stations. We redoubled our efforts, but our reward was not forthcoming. Our concern grew, but things only went from bad to worse. In our special operations group, in spite of all those agents being added to our regular staff and despite everyone being hard at work twenty-four hours a day, at the end of one week, all we had to show for our work was merely fleeting snippets of broken signals scattered across forty-five different frequencies.

You have to understand that military usage of the airwaves is entirely different from civilian use. Civilians do not change frequencies. The military, on the other hand, shift frequencies at least three times a day: once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and then once more at night; three days equals one cycle. This means that the lowest-density military broadcast station has nine sets of different frequencies (three frequencies times three days). Generally, these radio stations have anywhere from fifteen to twenty-one sets of frequencies, but certain special stations’ cycles could be as long as a month, or even a year. Some do not even have cycles, meaning that they never use the same frequency twice.