Sino-American SIGINT posts in China during the Cold War

[gillan1220]

When the U.S. and China were quasi-allies from 1972 to 1992, a lesser known chapter of military cooperation had the CIA operate SIGINT posts in Xinjiang with their MSS and PLA counterparts to observe Soviet nuclear tests in Central Asia. Not much is known about this obscure yet significant period of "better" Sino-American relations.

I was only able to collect two articles of this on The New York Times. Unfortunately, the third one is on a pay wall.

I originally posted this on What OTL Things Are ASB?

Here is the first article.
----
U.S. AND PEKING JOIN IN TRACKING MISSILES IN SOVIET
By Philip Taubman, Special To the New York Times
* June 18, 1981
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

The United States and China are jointly operating an electronic intelligence-gathering station in China to monitor Soviet missile tests, according to senior American officials.
The facility was opened last year in a remote, mountainous region of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China, near the Soviet border. Two key Soviet missile-testing bases are at Leninsk, near the Aral Sea, and at Sary-Shagan, near Lake Balkhash. Leninsk is 500 miles from the nearest point on the Chinese border, Sary-Shagan 300 miles.
The establishment of the listening post involved a far deeper level of military cooperation between Washington and Peking than either Government had publicly acknowledged.

Sensitive Military Relationship
In Peking yesterday, at the conclusion of talks with Chinese leaders, Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. announced that the United States had decided in principle to sell arms to China. The United States had previously sold China only nonlethal military equipment.

Operation of the facility, which was not mentioned by Mr. Haig, brought the two nations into a sensitive, secret military relationship during the Carter Administration.

Officials said the post has filled a ''critical'' vacuum created when similar stations in Iran were abandoned during the Iranian revolution two years ago. They described the facility as one of Washington's most sensitive and important intelligence operations.

Shared by the Two Nations
Intelligence collected by the station is shared by the United States and China, officials said. The facility is furnished with American equipment and is manned by Chinese technicians. Advisers from the Central Intelligence Agency periodically visit the station.

American officials sought to keep the existence of the station secret, fearing that disclosure could adversely affect relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, and heighten tensions between the Soviet Union and China. In recent days, however, information about the operation has begun circulating openly here.

Soviet leaders, American officials said, are already seriously troubled by the growing relationship between Washington and Peking. They said the Soviet Union may already know about the facility but had not felt it necessary to respond because its presence was not a public embarrassment to them.

Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador, in a meeting with American officials at the State Department today, condemned United States plans to lift restrictions on the sale of arms to China.

Disclosure of the monitoring post, officials here said, could also unsettle internal affairs in China, where moderate leaders may be vulnerable to charges that they made secret deals with the United States.

According to information pieced together from officials in the last eight months, the idea to set up listening posts in China was first proposed to the Peking Government in 1978, before the establishment of diplomatic relations. Initially, the Chinese were reluctant to agree, apparently concerned about cooperating too closely with the United States.

The idea was pressed again after the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi in January 1979. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, raised the issue with the Chinese in April 1979 when he led a Senate delegation to Peking. At the end of the visit, Senator Biden said that Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, appeared sympathetic to the introduction of United States intelligence equipment into China, provided it was operated by the Chinese.

Formal agreement between the two Governments followed later in 1979, with the Chinese insisting that their technicians man the facilities and that operations be conducted in obsolute secrecy.

Surveys for Two Sites Made

Surveys for two facilities were made. The Chinese eventually agreed to permit only one, officials said. The site in western China is close to ideal, officials said, because it allows monitoring of Soviet missile tests from launch through flight over Siberia to dispersion of warheads. It does not permit monitoring of the final stages of flight, including the reentry of the warheads.

The monitoring of missile tests is critical to the verification of Soviet compliance with key provisions of strategic arms agreements. It permits the United States, for example, to detect whether new missiles are being developed.

The performance characteristics of missiles are detected in a number of ways, including tracing the missile with radar and monitoring data transmitted by radio signals.

Test Range Over Siberia

Typically, the United States would be seeking to determine the number of warheads the missile being tested can carry, its range, and the accuracy of re-entry vehicles that carry the warheads. Analysis of the information can show whether the missile is a new or old model or a variant.

The Soviet test base at Leninsk is used for testing intercontinental ballistic missiles, officials said. The test range extends out over Siberia, with re-entry over the Kamchatka Peninsula or the western Pacific.

The base at Sary-Shagan is used for testing antiballistic missile systems, according to officials. The listening post in China can track tests from both sites, beginning with the launch.

Since normalization of relations between the United States and China in January 1979, the two nations have moved swiftly to forge a close friendship, marked by expanding trade and military cooperation.

The operation of a joint intelligence facility targeted on the Soviet Union, however, goes beyond any declared military cooperation.

[gillan1220]

The Soviet-Chinese Spy Wars in the 1970s: What KGB Counterintelligence Knew, Part IV

Along the same lines, they state that in 1981 the US government provided China with spying equipment for the surveillance of Soviet missiles and radio communication which was positioned along the border in Xinjiang.

[gillan1220]

Sixty Years of China Foreign Affairs, p. 147

(4) Intelligence cooperation. Sino-US cooperation in the field of military intelligence was first carried out in military diplomacy. In 1980, the United States established two electronic stations tracking the Soviet missile test in Xinjiang. From 1984 to 1987, China and the US strengthened cooperation in intelligence sharing, constructing some new monitoring stations.

It should be noted that the normalization of of Sino-US relations was based on common strategic interests against the Soviet hegemony, and, with an enormous difference in the overall strength and ideology, the strategic foundation of bilateral cooperation was very fragile. Thus, as the US imposed sanctions against China in 1989, military cooperation was first to be affected.

[gillan1220]

China Helping U.S. on Soviet Missile Detection - The New York Times, April 4, 1987 (Sadly hidden behind a paywall)

[stevep]

Jan 4, 2022 8:51:50 GMT gillan1220 said:

Sixty Years of China Foreign Affairs, p. 147

  gillan1220,

  Good to see you active again.  Hopefully this means you have power reliably again and things are getting better now for all.

  On this it come up with a blank page with the message "You have either reached a page which is unavailable for view or reached your viewing limit for this book"  Scrolling down a bit I can see page 149 so assuming its the former issue.  Next page I can see is 151-153.  Was there anything in particular on p147 that you can see and I can't and if so can you summarize please?

  Then scrolling back up p 147 is suddenly visible again.  Weird??:

  Steve

[gillan1220]

Jan 4, 2022 15:48:17 GMT stevep said:

Jan 4, 2022 8:51:50 GMT gillan1220 said:

Sixty Years of China Foreign Affairs, p. 147

  gillan1220 ,

  Good to see you active again.  Hopefully this means you have power reliably again and things are getting better now for all.

  On this it come up with a blank page with the message "You have either reached a page which is unavailable for view or reached your viewing limit for this book"  Scrolling down a bit I can see page 149 so assuming its the former issue.  Next page I can see is 151-153.  Was there anything in particular on p147 that you can see and I can't and if so can you summarize please?

  Then scrolling back up p 147 is suddenly visible again.  Weird??:

  Steve

Google Books is only a limited preview unfortunately.

[gillan1220]

INTELLIGENCE TIES ENDURE DESPITE U.S.-CHINA STRAIN
By George Lardner Jr. and R. Jeffrey Smith
June 25, 1989

Trucks with highly classified tapes from two U.S.-built listening posts are still traveling from remote sites in western China to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, despite a steadily worsening relationship between the two nations' governments, according to informed sources.

At the same time, Chinese scientists have assured their U.S. counterparts that they will continue to furnish unique information on Soviet nuclear tests and other seismic disturbances recorded at nine other stations built by the United States in China, other sources said.

In short, they said, the Chinese government has not allowed its public anger over the sanctuary provided to dissident Fang Lizhi at the U.S. Embassy or the U.S. cutoff of military sales and diplomatic contacts to interfere with a secret partnership that began more than a decade ago.

The existence of this continuing web of intelligence connections between the United States and China appears to be one of the factors that has muted the Bush administration's response to the Chinese government's brutal suppression and executions of pro-democracy demonstrators in recent weeks.

Current and former U.S. officials were reluctant to discuss the topic, fearing that publicity could pressure one or both governments to break off the covert relationship. "If nobody says anything about it, it probably won't go away," said a former senior intelligence official.

However, a senior administration official, speaking on condition that he not be identified, said in an interview last week that intelligence-sharing has been part of a substantial U.S. "investment" in China since President Richard M. Nixon's historic 1972 visit opening new ties to the West.

The official said both countries had profited from this investment and "it is that which we have to balance against our current, justified outrage" over recent Chinese actions. A number of diplomats, legislators and officials said they think the U.S.-China intelligence connections are relatively secure, barring a full-scale trade embargo or a break in diplomatic relations.

"The relationship has been mutually useful," said one retired U.S. diplomat. "Both sides have taken care to isolate that cooperation from the ups and downs" of political ties. Knowledgeable sources, who assert that the United States gains more than China does from the intelligence ties, praise President Bush for his relatively low-key reaction to the executions in China and his emphasis on maintaining the U.S.-China "strategic relationship."

They said a less measured response could jeopardize the arrangements. But several congressional sources familiar with the ties contend that they are not important enough to muzzle official U.S. criticism of Beijing's behavior, partly because the United States in recent years has developed alternative sources for some of the information.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), for example, declined to discuss any aspects of the partnership but said, "Whatever military or intelligence arrangements may or may not exist, they cannot add up to a sufficient rationale for failing to act swiftly and on principle with the Chinese government."

It was Biden's 1979 conversation with senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping during a visit to Beijing that showed Deng's willingness to permit the U.S.-equipped listening posts to help monitor Soviet compliance with the proposed SALT II arms limitation treaty. Deng, The Washington Post reported at the time, made clear that the monitoring stations would have to be run by the Chinese and that Beijing would share the collected data with Washington. The tapes are analyzed in the United States.

White House and State Department spokesmen have declined in recent weeks to comment directly on the status of the listening posts or other intelligence ties. At a news conference June 5, however, Bush characterized U.S. Ambassador James R. Lilley as "one of the best listening posts we have in China." Lilley, an old friend of Bush, was the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in China in the mid-1970s when Bush headed the U.S. liaison office there. Several sources indicated that U.S. experts are working at the stations in tandem with their Chinese counterparts and that there now may be more than two stations.

"It depends on how you count them," a longtime intelligence expert said. And a former defense official said, "It may very well be that there are principal stations and lesser stations." The intelligence expert said the Chinese "may be doing the low-tech while we do the high-tech" functions.

He added: "They might tell us to get out. We have lost facilities in other countries because of political change. But I think it would be one of the last relationships {with China} to go. It was one of the first to arrive." U.S. intelligence-sharing with China goes back to 1971 when Henry A. Kissinger, then White House national security adviser, secretly flew to Beijing to pave the way for Nixon and showed "internal {U.S.} studies" to Premier Zhou Enlai.

That sharing flowered with the establishment of formal diplomatic relations in 1979, when aides to President Jimmy Carter began to share with Chinese leaders broad assessments of Soviet political aims and weaponry. The electronic listening posts, at Qitai and Korla in Xinjiang Autonomous Region, were set up in 1980 after the loss of two in Iran. CIA Director Stansfield Turner nailed down some final details on a secret visit to Beijing, complete with disguise, shortly before leaving office.

The stations produce better information than those in Iran did concerning Soviet missile tests at Tyuratam and Saryshagan, the sources said. John Pike, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, characterized the Saryshagan weapons research center roughly 700 miles to the northwest as "right across the street, electronically speaking." The Reagan administration, despite initial tensions over Taiwan, extended its cooperation to arms sales and dual-use technology.

The sources said that China, meanwhile, began selling the CIA most of the small arms it needed for the Afghan rebels. U.S. officials declined to say whether the Bush administration has been holding up its end of the intelligence-sharing relationship since the Tiananmen Square massacre of students three weeks ago. But a knowledgeable source stated without hesitation that "I don't have a high level of concern" about a possible halt in cooperation because of recent official U.S. criticism.

"That's not a front-burner issue between our governments and nothing has happened {so far} to push it there," said the official, who is privy to current intelligence reports on the subject. U.S. intelligence-sharing and military ties with China developed slowly, in part because of the Watergate scandal that engulfed Nixon. But before that took place, the White House in November 1971 set up a "back channel" to China through the Chinese delegation to the United Nations in New York.

From that point until May 1973, Kissinger traveled secretly to New York about 20 times for talks with the head of the delegation, Huang Hua, later foreign minister. They usually met, Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, "in a CIA-provided 'safe house' in mid-Manhattan, a seedy apartment whose mirrored walls suggested less prosaic purposes." In the fall of 1972, Chinese military officials in New York, sources said, initiated another important contact, with Michael Pillsbury, a Mandarin-speaking U.N. bureaucrat who soon joined the Rand Corp. to work on highly classified research for the Air Force and Defense Department. He kept up his contacts with approval from the think tank and high-level U.S. officials, a fact that sources say had to be established at one point for skeptical FBI agents who kept watch on the Chinese delegation. Pillsbury met regularly with the Chinese -- a three-star general and his aides -- until 1976, sending a stream of still-classified memos to a select circle of U.S. officials, including Kissinger's office. According to Asia affairs expert Banning Garrett, who uncovered details of Pillsbury's work, the Chinese showed interest in advanced U.S. military and intelligence technology and in U.S. intelligence studies on the Soviet Union. Despite Pillsbury's reports, most China experts inside the government rejected the notion that China would abandon its policy of strict "self-reliance."

But in 1975, Pillsbury stirred debate with an article in Foreign Policy magazine -- actually a declassified version of a secret study he did for Air Force intelligence -- advocating U.S. military ties with China, including intelligence exchanges to help deter the Soviet threat and encourage pro-American attitudes in Beijing. Pillsbury's classified report, meanwhile, prompted further studies within the government, according to Garrett, including a CIA review under the direction of now-Ambassdor Lilley, who was then national intelligence officer for China. Before leaving office as secretary of state, Kissinger took the first steps toward sharing, persuading President Gerald R. Ford in 1975 not to veto a $200 million British deal with China for military jet engines and in 1976 secretly approving a U.S. sale of two advanced computers with military applications.

The Carter administration at first put China on the back burner, but national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski kept pressing for closer ties and scored a breakthrough on a 1978 visit to Beijing, assuring Deng that the United States would accept Chinese conditions for severing relations with Taiwan.

On that same visit, sources said, Morton Abramowitz, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, and a Pentagon colleague gave a senior Chinese defense official what amounted to a highly classified briefing on Soviet troop deployments along the Chinese border, reportedly pulling out top-secret reconnaissance photographs at one point. This appears to have been the first sharing of intelligence at the defense ministry level, but according to a knowledgeable source, "Clearly when Henry was there, there was some sharing, too."

Shortly after diplomatic relations were established Jan. 1, 1979, Deng played "the American card" with an invasion of North Vietnam, a step he told Carter about two weeks ahead of time. Carter tried to dissuade Deng, but Brzezinski said in his memoirs that "I felt the Chinese action in some respects might prove beneficial to us." The Chinese were worried that the Soviets might invade while they were busy in Vietnam, and Brzezinski helped reassure them.

Throughout the three-week crisis, sources said, the Chinese ambassador to Washington was ushered into the White House each day to be given, by Brzezinski, the freshest U.S. intelligence on Soviet deployments along the Sino-Soviet border. Soviet-U.S. relations worsened in December 1979 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, on the eve of a projected trip to China by Defense Secretary Harold Brown. Deng had already made his public offer of Chinese-operated listening posts and, sources said, Brown picked up the discussion on his arrival in January 1980.

Another goal of Brown's visit was to win what one official described as a "significant acceleration" in Chinese shipments of arms and military equipment to the Afghan rebels, shipments that continued to grow under President Ronald Reagan. Washington considered the shipments of Soviet-style arms highly valuable because they afforded "deniability" for what was then a largely covert U.S. operation.

Both China and the United States bought small arms for the rebels, sources said. They said the United States initially paid to transport China's supplies of arms to rebel bases in Pakistan, and beginning around 1983, the CIA began purchasing most of its own supplies directly from Beijing. The two governments agreed to establish the seismic monitoring posts as part of an "earthquake prediction" program supervised by the U.S. Geological Survey, but funded largely by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

A 1986 Pentagon budget document said the stations would improve identification of underground Soviet nuclear blasts and estimates of their explosive force. Construction of five primary stations, including one that is closer to the Soviet test site than any other in the world, and four secondary stations began in 1984. The construction was completed by 1987. Tapes are mailed every two weeks from the $3 million stations to Beijing, where they are copied by the Chinese and carried to the embassy for transport to a research center in Albuquerque under diplomatic seal.

The Chinese were wary when Reagan was elected, in light of his pro-Taiwan comments during the campaign. But few remembered that in the 1976 campaign, candidate Reagan, after prepping by the ubiquitous Pillsbury, stated publicly that he thought U.S. arms sales to mainland China would be "a natural development" in view of common interests the two nations had in dealing with the Soviet Union.

"I am convinced that we must strengthen this relationship with China to maintain a balance of power with Russia," Reagan said in a fall 1975 letter to Pillsbury. U.S.-China ties picked up again in 1983 following a compromise communique on Taiwan.

By October 1984, they were warm enough for White House aide Oliver L. North to sit down at the Cosmos Club with a senior Chinese military official and urge that China proceed with a sale of missiles and missile launchers to the contra rebels in Nicaragua. The intelligence relationships, however, remain a tightly held secret in both governments.

Garrett, a Defense Department consultant who goes to China each year to talk with leading Chinese foreign policy experts about strategic issues, said, for example, that he has "never run into anybody who knows anything about the intelligence cooperation." Said a knowledgeable U.S. official: "That's because they make sure he doesn't talk to anybody on 'the access list.' " Some experts said they think the Chinese could move closer to the Soviet Union as China emerges from its recent political turmoil. If that happens, said Richard Thornton of George Washington University's Sino-Soviet Institute, "the listening posts could be a good bargaining chip."

Robert W. Sutter, the Congressional Research Service's senior China specialist, said the Chinese "have a bit more flexibility to maneuver between the U.S. and the Soviet Union" since Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Most China specialists, he added, have overlooked the fact that China had "a significant military relationship" with the Soviets even before Gorbachev came to power. According to calculations by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, China purchased $310 million in arms from the Soviet Union in the 1982-86 period -- almost four times its purchases of $80 million from the United States.

Staff researchers Bruce Brown and Mary Lou White contributed to this report.

[gillan1220]

Found a recent article:
How CIA & Chinese PLA joined hands in secret Cold War op to snoop on Soviet Union nukes
In a stunning revelation, journalist Jane Perlez has brought to light new details on Project Chestnut — an extraordinary Cold War operation that brought together the CIA and the PLA.
PRAVEEN SWAMI
24 February, 2022 08:00 am IST

New Delhi: Every fortnight, in the summer of 1989, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) trucks trundled out of a dust-blown base near Qitai in Xinjiang, beginning a 3,000-kilometre journey to Beijing. Inside, there were hundreds of magnetic-tape spools, loaded with intercepted radio signals and seismic information — all headed to Albuquerque in the United States.

Analysts there used the data to piece together the state of the erstwhile Soviet Union’s nuclear-missile programme.

Earlier that year, China had massacred hundreds — perhaps thousands — of protesters at Tiananmen Square, leading the United States to clamp an embargo on military sales and cut back diplomatic contact. Amid furious public posturing, both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the PLA continued to cooperate quietly.

In a stunning revelation, journalist Jane Perlez has now brought to light new details on Project Chestnut — an extraordinary Cold War operation that brought together the CIA and the PLA.

In 1979, Perlez reports, China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, made a secret, late-night visit to the CIA’s headquarters in Washington to review exactly where Project Chestnut’s stations would be located.

Even when nation states appear to be in implacable opposition, the story shows, intelligence services can still cooperate against common adversaries.

Project Chestnut

The story of Project Chestnut dates back to the autumn of 1970 when, declassified documents show, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger began exploring opening dialogue with China through Pakistan’s military ruler, General Yahya Khan. The conversation led on, in the summer of 1971, to a now-famous secret visit by Kissinger to Beijing.

A formal visit by President Richard Nixon followed in 1972 — just a few years after American generals had drawn up nuclear war plans to obliterate China as a “viable society”.

Late in 1972, a new Beijing-Washington military back-channel built up, involving diplomats from China’s mission to the United Nations, and the Mandarin-speaking scholar Michael Pillsbury.

n 1975, Pillsbury published an article in the magazine Foreign Policy — in essence, a declassified version of his military research and memos to the government — calling for Washington to “reject the current blind public policy of blanket prohibition of defence technology transfer and intelligence sharing with Peking [Beijing]”.

Kissinger, that year, acted on Pillsbury’s advice, by persuading President Gerald Ford to make the United Kingdom sell advanced jet engine technology to China. The next year, the US itself sold two advanced computers, with military applications, to China.

Then, in 1979, after the US lost its espionage outposts in Iran because of the revolution in that country, it went to China with the idea of establishing spy stations there to monitor the Soviet missile programme.

China agreed — but only after formal diplomatic relations were established. The night visit Deng made to CIA headquarters came in the course of his visit to the US to mark the resumption of diplomatic relations.

The making of new best friends

Final arrangements were made to send US technicians to set up and operate the facilities when a little-known senator — Joe Biden — met Deng in 1979, the Washington Post reported, in one of the few public accounts of Project Chestnut.

“American technicians would fly to Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang province,” Perlez writes, “before boarding a tiny plane to a little airport near the Soviet border, followed by a drive on a bumpy, country road through the mountainous desert, before they finally reached the remote spy stations.”

“The Americans almost always went in pairs in part because the stations were so isolated, the CIA worried about their mental health if they went alone. The spy stations were stocked with beer and Spam, a favourite snack of the Chinese posted there.”

America’s new listening stations at Qitai and Korla gathered reams of data on Soviet missile tests in Central Asia — most notably at Tyuratam and Saryshagan, in Kazakhstan. The quality of data gathered from these tests is said to be superior to that generated from Iran, because of geographical proximity.

For years afterwards, intelligence cooperation between the US and China continued to flower. Among other things, the PLA supplied Chinese-made weapons to the CIA, for the anti-Soviet Union mujahideen (Islamic guerrillas) in Afghanistan.

The two Cold War partners shared the threat from Soviet Union, but after the USSR collapsed, they turned bitter enemies. Eighteen CIA assets in China were reported to have been hunted down and killed or imprisoned by Chinese counter-intelligence from 2010 to 2012 alone. PLA-funded hacking networks have successfully targeted the US on several occasions.

America, in turn, has stepped up the resources it spends on targeting China — but is reported to be frustrated by the lack of success it has had in penetrating the country’s top leadership.

(Edited by Manoj Ramachandran)

[gillan1220]

A few days back:
Shared secrets: How The U.S. and China worked together to spy on the Soviet Union
February 18, 2022
By Jane Perlez and Grace Tatter

It was the second day of President Richard Nixon's visit to China in February 1972, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger was having a serious meeting with a Chinese general, General Ye Jianying.

Kissinger was sharing top-secret information from the CIA about the Soviet military — and no one but Nixon and the people in the room knew what he was divulging.

Ye was like a kid in a candy shop, thrilled at the level of detail Kissinger was sharing, down to the exact kilotons in nuclear warheads.

This was just a taste of bigger things to come between the CIA and China.

New leaders, same enemy
In the years following Nixon's big trip, both countries underwent substantial changes in leadership.

In 1974, Nixon left the White House in disgrace. Two years later, Mao Zedong died, a huge event on the world stage.

Through all of this upheaval, China and the United States' common enemy stayed the same: the Soviet Union.

The new leader of China was Deng Xiaoping. Deng was more open to reform than Mao – and shared the U.S.’ anti-Soviet sentiment.

By the late 1970s, the Soviets had almost as many nuclear weapons as the Americans, and the U.S. was looking for means to confirm that the Soviet Union was abiding by arms control agreements.

U.S. intelligence officials determined that one of the best places to spy on the Soviets is from high on the mountains of Western China, not far from the Soviet border and close to an important Soviet test site.

China and the U.S. tentatively agreed in 1979 to operate joint spy stations, run by the CIA and by the intelligence arm of the Chinese military.

But even though Nixon’s trip was so successful, the Americans still hadn't established formal diplomatic relations with China — and China wouldn’t commit to building spy stations with the Americans until they did.

Finally, in January of 1979, President Jimmy Carter announced that the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China had agreed to recognize each other and establish diplomatic relations.

A secret visit
Three weeks later, Deng traveled to Washington, D.C., to celebrate — the first time a Communist Chinese leader had ever been to the U.S. He was welcomed warmly at the White House and The Kennedy Center.

But before Deng left Washington, he made one more stop — one that’s never been reported before.

Deng asked to visit the CIA headquarters in Virginia, a substantial request for a man representing a country that the U.S. hadn't even officially recognized until a few weeks before. Few foreign leaders had ever been invited into the inner sanctum of American intelligence.

For decades, no one knew about this trip. The Great Wager host Jane Perlez confirmed the information through CIA sources and in an interview with Former Defense Sec. Robert Gates.

Through her reporting, Perlez discovered that after Deng asked for the meeting, the CIA worked to arrange for a time when no American official would notice what Deng was doing. They scanned his schedule for “white time” — time Deng was scheduled to meet with his own Chinese officials, away from Americans. They found some on Deng’s last night in Washington.

He arrived at the headquarters in the dead of night. Everyone had gone home. CIA headquarters was basically empty.

Deng’s first stop was the command center. Intelligence officials let him see maps from American satellites, detailing the places where the U.S. and China planned to put the spy stations.

Deng then went up to the seventh floor, the inner sanctum, where he was greeted by the new director of the CIA, Stansfield Turner. Turner was a reformer, who had overhauled the CIA since the days of Nixon. Still, when it came to China, he was staying on the path that Nixon had forged.

Turner and Deng met for about 45 minutes — a relatively short meeting when you take into account time for interpreters. Still, the meeting marked a turning point in the U.S.-China relationship. Deng and Turner agreed that their two countries would build and run spy stations in Western China to spy on the Soviet missile program, allowing the Americans to keep tabs on the Soviets, and for the Chinese to get technology they’d never had access to before.

But before the CIA supplied the Chinese with the high-tech gear for the stations, they wanted even more confirmation to ensure that the Chinese would follow through on the agreement.

A few months after Deng’s visit, a delegation from Congress traveled to China. Among them was Joe Biden, then the junior senator from Delaware.

Fox Butterfield was The New York Times correspondent in China, the paper’s first to have access to the mainland run by the Communists. He recalls how Biden reached out and grabbed Deng’s hand to shake it.

“I think that Deng was very perplexed, if not horrified,” Butterfield said. “But Biden grabbed his hand and flashed a big smile and somehow got through.”

Biden asked Deng whether he’d really build the joint stations. And he got the confirmation the CIA needed: The stations were a go.


Project Chestnut
The exact details of the project, called Chestnut, remain top secret. Perlez’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act to the CIA and the state department are still unanswered. But she was able to confirm some details through her reporting.

Soon after Biden’s answer, giant American C-141 aircraft landed at Beijing airport, full of American equipment for the spy stations.

About two dozen American military technicians from the National Security Agency settled into Northwest Beijing to train the Chinese in how to operate the American computers, transmitters and radar.

Sensitive antennas were set up in concrete buildings out on the mountains in the Xinjiang region in Northwest China.

By the end of 1980, CIA Director Turner was ready to inspect the stations himself. He was joined by an entourage of aides, including Robert Gates, a Soviet expert at the CIA, who would later become the head of the CIA himself, and, after that, secretary of defense.

“My role on the trip was to brief the Chinese side on what the Soviets were doing militarily and politically,” Gates said. “My whole presence there in a way symbolized the anti-Soviet nature of the entire arrangement.”

The trip, like the spy stations themselves, was a secret. Gates remembers that Turner grew a mustache for the trip and donned a Polish worker’s cap.

“We tried not to be too obvious, but in some ways, I think that made us all the more obvious,” Gates said.

The CIA had considered China the enemy for more than two decades — and now they were sitting down with each other.

“To be a CIA officer and not feel like we were about to get arrested in the middle of Beijing was a pinch-me moment for sure,” Gates said.

Turner met Deng at a rundown house in the central part of Beijing, where they could meet unnoticed.

The visit catalyzed a decade or so of a successful intelligence partnership. An American CIA technician who visited the stations from time to time recalled what the spy stations were like.

The American technicians would fly to Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, before boarding a tiny plane to a little airport near the Soviet border, followed by a drive on a bumpy, country road through the mountainous desert, before they finally reached the remote spy stations. The Americans almost always went in pairs in part because the stations were so isolated, the CIA worried about their mental health if they went alone.

The spy stations were stocked with beer and SPAM, a favorite snack of the Chinese posted there. Being so close to the testing sites, they could see the lights from the Soviet missiles, a reminder of their common enemy and their bond.

In some ways, it was the realization of Nixon’s vision: a relationship that disadvantaged the Soviets and solidified America's upper hand in the Cold War. His wager had paid off. China was a friend, and the U.S. was reaping the intelligence benefits.

But what would happen after their shared rival, the Soviet Union, disappeared?

To answer the question in the last line, China became the threat. In 1992, it was remarked by the STRATCOM as the OPFOR.

How times have changed and how this has aged poorly. Project Chestnut it not even known by majority. Even both Washington and Beijing want this plugged down the memory hole, possibly because of the scandal and PR disaster this would occur if the details would be declassified.

[gillan1220]

simon darkshade what are your thoughts on this joint Sino-American intelligence op?

[lordroel]

Apr 22, 2022 16:40:42 GMT gillan1220 said:

simon darkshade what are your thoughts on this joint Sino-American intelligence op?

gillan1220, you know the rules, do not tag members just to get their responds if they have not posted in the thread before.

[simon darkshade]

Lordroel is correct. It is ancient stuff and I don’t give a darn. They were onside then, but things have changed to the point where one day soon they’ll have a go and get nuked.

[gillan1220]

Apr 22, 2022 16:52:02 GMT simon darkshade said:

Lordroel is correct. It is ancient stuff and I don’t give a darn. They were onside then, but things have changed to the point where one day soon they’ll have a go and get nuked.

Where Americans actually aware about this? It seems only The Washington Post and NYT reported about this. No doubt Washington and Beijing want this plugged down the toilet to avoid a huge scandal.

[simon darkshade]

It isn't a scandal nor a PR disaster. Whatsoever. Your notion that it would be is incorrect.

It was an op in the 1970s. Everyone who made the decisions are now dead. It was a completely different world.

[gillan1220]

Someone tried to request the CIA regarding Project Chestnut under the Freedom of Information Act. The request was filed on March 24, 2021 but was unfortunately rejected on July 8, 2021 due to existing laws the prevent classified material from being disclose.