My story starts in Moscow. I was a revolutionary orphan, and I grew up in Moscow. I went to Moscow in 1931, at the age of four, and when I came back home I was already twenty; that was in 1947. While in Moscow I studied wireless technology, and when I returned to the motherland the Party sent me to Unit 701. To begin with I was just doing the most basic kind of radio interceptions, but then because my Russian was so good I was transferred to intelligence gathering and data compilation. In 1957, the Party sent my wife, Xiaoyu, and me back to Moscow: she was seconded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the embassy, while I studied cryptography at the Centre for Code Research at the Department of Mathematics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. That changed my life: afterwards every success and every failure, every reward and every punishment, all my good luck and bad was determined by cryptography. Even now, the fact that I live retired and out of sight is a consequence of that. My supervisor Anderov used to say that cryptography isn’t a job, it’s a conspiracy – with a plot concealed inside that conspiracy. It is damaging to both mind and body to do this kind of dark, secret and difficult work for any length of time. As time goes on you change imperceptibly, until in the end you find that you can no longer live an ordinary life.

I was supposed to graduate in July 1960, but at the beginning of March of that year I was suddenly informed by the Party that I would have to return home as soon as possible. It was a comrade with the code-name Aeroplane who told me; a woman from Changchun, very tall, with the bright red skin of a professional swimmer: a very healthy colour. She was my handler the whole time that I was in Moscow. Officially I was an overseas student, but I was also an undercover agent – to put it in plain words, a spy: my job was to gather intelligence about American military ciphers cracked by the Soviets. My supervisor at the university was Lev Anderov, who was both a world-famous mathematician and a cryptographer who gave the Americans a lot of headaches. The Party sent me to him in order to use his position to get access to Western military intelligence. During the three years that we worked together we became very friendly; he wasn’t just my teacher and my supervisor, he was the person who introduced me to a whole new world. Later on I changed my name to An Zaitian as a sign of my respect. When I knew that I had to leave, I really did not want to go, particularly as I had not yet finished my studies. Having to leave all of a sudden without even being able to graduate is something that I regret very much.