A Time for War Read Online Free PDF

always appear in pairs, signifying the propagation of the Chinese civilization, and are thought to have mystic properties that ensure survival.
    Sixty-one-year-old Jing Jintao was nothing like the Shishi . He was a short, prim man with close-cropped, graying hair, a relaxed expression with a natural smile, and pale, penetrating eyes. The expression put people at ease; the eyes were invisible but missed nothing. He was the perfect diplomat: observant, perceptive, and expert at gentle flattery and small talk that revealed nothing.
    To guests and even to his staff, Jintao seemed to be a man in repose. But unlike the Shishi whose bared but ineffective teeth greeted him every day, Jintao was constantly in motion, both mentally and by quietly and efficiently directing the movements of others. His personal thoughts were not informed by the past. He was a man of action, not philosophy. He knew only one direction and he pursued it with a single-mindedness that would have been the envy of any Khan.
    Born in 1952 in Wuhan, the capital of the Hubei Province, he attended the School of International Studies at Beijing University and worked his way up through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For years he had steadily progressed through increasingly more challenging posts—all of them in regions like Hong Kong and the Middle East where sensitive intelligence was collected, reviewed, and sent to the Ministry of State Security in Beijing.
    Jintao was responsible for coordinating data from the many countries in which he had served to help spearhead a pair of cyber attacks on world computer systems. On March 28, 2009, he was part of GhostNet, a massive assault on government, corporate, and personal computers in 103 nations. The targets ranged from the U.S. Department of Defense to the Dalai Lama. He recruited talent in Europe, Asia, and the United States to launch a second cyber attack in December of that year. Operation Aurora targeted two dozen major corporations, including Google, raiding sensitive files and crippling operations. Investigating the operations, the U.S. National Security Agency discovered—alarmingly—that Beijing was taking a page from the jihadist playbook: talking to the loyal ethnic population in other countries and encouraging them, for pay, to help fight what Beijing called “imperialistic designs against the homeland with the goal of assimilating its population and culture.”
    Expatriates are reluctant to attack their new home, Jintao reflected, but a few are willing to defend the old one. The art of turning a displaced national was to locate those few, the outspoken in lunch spots and bars, in barbershops and in parks. It did not matter what they were saying, only that they were speaking their mind. The next step was to get close to them, speak in their native language, build trust, nurture a sense of injustice about their adopted country, make them believe that eavesdropping or applying for a job in a sensitive facility or allowing agents to live with them were vital and valid responses to some misdeed.
    Agents, Jintao thought as he looked at the manila folder on the desk in front of him. A secretary had brought it to him with his morning tea. Beijing had hundreds of operatives in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Many were trained to infiltrate the transplant communities and disseminate information without the knowledge of the FBI or CIA plainclothes operatives who spied on virtually every embassy and consulate, both electronically and with eyes on the front door and carports. Messages were passed with cash after Chinese checkers matches in the park or in swapped iPods that were actually filled with photographs, scanned data, and other intelligence. No transmissions were done over the Internet or by cell phone—except for disinformation designed to make the Chinese seem plausibly naïve, tying up the electronic surveillance teams in nearby office buildings and mail trucks. None of