Seven is a strange number; it seems to have a black aura about it. Black is not the most beautiful of colours, but it is certainly not vulgar. It can be serious, secretive, brutal, aggressive, independent, mysterious, even mystical. To my knowledge there are many countries in the world whose national security organizations are connected with the number seven; Britain’s MI7 in the First World War, the seven main administrations of the Stasi in former East Germany, the seven intelligence agencies that advise the President of France, the seven directorates of the KGB in the former Soviet Union, the Japanese Unit 731, the United States Seventh Fleet, and so on. In China there was Special Unit 701, an intelligence-gathering organization modelled upon the seven directorates of the KGB, which was ‘special’ both in terms of its organization and its remit. In particular, it had three main divisions:

Intercepts

Cryptography

Covert Operations

The intercepts division was primarily responsible for detecting enemy communications, the cryptography division was in charge of decrypting ciphers, while the covert operations division was of course about undertaking operations in the field – that is, going out and spying upon people. Interception involves listening to unearthly sounds, to noiseless sounds, to secret sounds. Cryptography involves cracking codes, whereby you have to read runes and understand hieroglyphs. In covert operations you set off in disguise to venture into the tiger’s den, standing firm against the storm. Within the unit, everyone called the people working on intercepts ‘Wind Listeners’, while those working in cryptography were called ‘Wind Readers’, and the spies were called ‘Wind Catchers’. When you get right down to it, people who work in intelligence have to have a sense for which way the wind is blowing; it is just that the different divisions go about it in a different way.

Of the two mysterious men from my old home town, one was then the head of Unit 701, and his surname was Qian. To his face people called him Director Qian, but behind his back he was known as the Big Boss. The other man was a very experienced spy from the covert operations division, a man named Lü, who many years before had been part of the Communist Party underground in Nanjing. People called him ‘Old Potato’, meaning that he had been in the underground. Both had joined the Revolution before the Liberation, and with the passing of the years they were now the only ones of their generation left in Unit 701. Later on I got to know both of these men well, to the point where gradually I was able to become a special visitor to the Unit, and was allowed to wander round the mountain.