MCLC: Bo spied on top officials

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Bo spied on top officials
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Apologies for my glee, but this story just keeps getting better and better.

Kirk

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Source: NYT (4/25/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/world/asia/bo-xilai-said-to-have-spied-on
-top-china-officials.html

Ousted Chinese Leader Is Said to Have Spied on Other Top Officials
By JONATHAN ANSFIELD and IAN JOHNSON

BEIJING ‹ When Hu Jintao, China¹s top leader, picked up the telephone last
August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing,
special devices detected that he was being wiretapped ‹ by local officials
in that southwestern metropolis.

The discovery of that and other wiretapping led to an official
investigation that helped topple Chongqing¹s charismatic leader, Bo Xilai,
in a political cataclysm that has yet to reach a conclusion.

Until now, the downfall of Mr. Bo has been cast largely as a tale of a
populist who pursued his own agenda too aggressively for some top leaders
in Beijing and was brought down by accusations that his wife had arranged
the murder of Neil Heywood, a British consultant, after a business
dispute. But the hidden wiretapping, previously alluded to only in
internal Communist Party accounts of the scandal, appears to have provided
another compelling reason for party leaders to turn on Mr. Bo.

The story of how China¹s president was monitored also shows the level of
mistrust among leaders in the one-party state. To maintain control over
society, leaders have embraced enhanced surveillance technology. But some
have turned it on one another ‹ repeating patterns of intrigue that go
back to the beginnings of Communist rule.

³This society has bred mistrust and violence,² said Roderick MacFarquhar,
a historian of Communist China¹s elite-level machinations over the past
half century. ³Leaders know you have to watch your back because you never
know who will put a knife in it.²

Nearly a dozen people with party ties, speaking anonymously for fear of
retribution, confirmed the wiretapping, as well as a widespread program of
bugging across Chongqing. But the party¹s public version of Mr. Bo¹s fall
omits it.

The official narrative and much foreign attention has focused on the more
easily grasped death of Mr. Heywood in November. When Mr. Bo¹s police
chief, Wang Lijun, was stripped of his job and feared being implicated in
Bo family affairs, he fled to the United States Consulate in Chengdu,
where he spoke mostly about Mr. Heywood¹s death.

The murder account is pivotal to the scandal, providing Mr. Bo¹s opponents
with an unassailable reason to have him removed. But party insiders say
the wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities. It
revealed to them just how far Mr. Bo, who is now being investigated for
serious disciplinary violations, was prepared to go in his efforts to
grasp greater power in China. That compounded suspicions that Mr. Bo could
not be trusted with a top slot in the party, which is due to reshuffle its
senior leadership positions this fall.

³Everyone across China is improving their systems for the purposes of
maintaining stability,² said one official with a central government media
outlet, referring to surveillance tactics. ³But not everyone dares to
monitor party central leaders.²

According to senior party members, including editors, academics and people
with ties to the military, Mr. Bo¹s eavesdropping operations began several
years ago as part of a state-financed surveillance buildup, ostensibly for
the purposes of fighting crime and maintaining local political stability.

The architect was Mr. Wang, a nationally decorated crime fighter who had
worked under Mr. Bo in the northeast province of Liaoning. Together they
installed ³a comprehensive package bugging system covering
telecommunications to the Internet,² according to the government media
official.

One of several noted cybersecurity experts they enlisted was Fang Binxing,
president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who is
often called the father of China¹s ³Great Firewall,² the nation¹s vast
Internet censorship system. Most recently, Mr. Fang advised the city on a
new police information center using cloud-based computing, according to
state news media reports <http://cqhtg.com/xmzs.php?tid=14>. Late last
year, Mr. Wang was named a visiting professor at Mr. Fang¹s university.

Together, Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang unleashed a drive to smash what they said
were crime rings that controlled large portions of Chongqing¹s economic
life. In interviews, targets of the crackdown marveled at the scale and
determination with which local police intercepted their communications.

³On the phone, we dared not mention Bo Xilai or Wang Lijun,² said Li Jun,
a fugitive property developer who now lives in hiding abroad. Instead, he
and fellow businessmen took to scribbling notes, removing their cellphone
batteries and stocking up on unregistered SIM cards to thwart surveillance
as the crackdown mounted, he said.

Li Zhuang, a lawyer from a powerfully connected Beijing law firm, recalled
how some cousins of one client had presented him with a full stack of
unregistered mobile phone SIM cards, warning him of local wiretapping.
Despite these precautions, the Chongqing police ended up arresting Mr. Li
on the outskirts of Beijing, about 900 miles away, after he called his
client¹s wife and arranged to visit her later that day at a hospital.

³They already were there lying in ambush,² Mr. Li said. He added that Wang
Lijun, by reputation, was a ³tapping freak.²
Political figures were targeted in addition to those suspected of being
mobsters.

One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing information obtained
from a colonel he recently dined with, said Mr. Bo had tried to tap the
phones of virtually all high-ranking leaders who visited Chongqing in
recent years, including Zhou Yongkang, the law-and-order czar who was said
to have backed Mr. Bo as his potential successor.

³Bo wanted to be extremely clear about what leaders¹ attitudes toward him
were,² the analyst said.

In one other instance last year, two journalists said, operatives were
caught intercepting a conversation between the office of Mr. Hu and Liu
Guanglei, a top party law-and-order official whom Mr. Wang had replaced as
police chief. Mr. Liu once served under Mr. Hu in the 1980s in Guizhou
Province.

Perhaps more worrisome to Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang, however, was the increased
scrutiny from the party¹s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection,
which by the beginning of 2012 had stationed up to four separate teams in
Chongqing, two undercover, according to the political analyst, who cited
Discipline Inspection sources. One line of inquiry, according to several
party academics, involved Mr. Wang¹s possible role in a police bribery
case that unfolded last year in a Liaoning city where he once was police
chief. 

Beyond making a routine inspection, it is not clear why the disciplinary
official who telephoned Mr. Hu ‹ Ma Wen, the minister of supervision ‹ was
in Chongqing. Her high-security land link to Mr. Hu from the state
guesthouse in Chongqing was monitored on Mr. Bo¹s orders. The topic of the
call is unknown but was probably not vital. Most phones are so unsafe that
important information is often conveyed only in person or in writing.

But Beijing was galled that Mr. Bo would wiretap Mr. Hu, whether
intentionally or not, and turned central security and disciplinary
investigators loose on his police chief, who bore the brunt of the
scrutiny over the next couple of months.

³Bo wanted to push the responsibility onto Wang,² one senior party editor
said. ³Wang couldn¹t dare say it was Bo¹s doing.²
Yet at some point well before fleeing Chongqing, Mr. Wang filed a pair of
complaints to the inspection commission, the first anonymously and the
second under his own name, according to a party academic with ties to Mr.
Bo.

Both complaints said Mr. Bo had ³opposed party central² authorities,
including ordering the wiretapping of central leaders. The requests to
investigate Mr. Bo were turned down at the time. Mr. Bo, who learned of
the charges at a later point, told the academic shortly before his
dismissal that he thought he could withstand Mr. Wang¹s charges.

Mr. Wang is not believed to have discussed wiretapping at the United
States Consulate. Instead, he focused on the less self-incriminating
allegations of Mr. Bo¹s wife¹s arranging the killing of Mr. Heywood.

But tensions between the two men crested, sources said, when Mr. Bo found
that Mr. Wang had also wiretapped him and his wife. After Mr. Wang was
arrested in February, Mr. Bo detained Mr. Wang¹s wiretapping specialist
from Liaoning, a district police chief named Wang Pengfei.

Internal party accounts suggest that the party views the wiretapping as
one of Mr. Bo¹s most serious crimes. One preliminary indictment in
mid-March accused Bo of damaging party unity by collecting evidence on
other leaders.

Party officials, however, say it would be far too damaging to make the
wiretapping public. When Mr. Bo is finally charged, wiretapping is not
expected to be mentioned. ³The things that can be publicized are the
economic problems and the killing,² according to the senior official at
the government media outlet. ³That¹s enough to decide the matter in
public.²

Edward Wong contributed reporting.