Thread by @alexjoske

With Spies and Lies coming out today, I wanted to share some more on the story behind this photo of Bob Hawke at the China Institute of Strategy and Management, surrounded by undercover Chinese intelligence officers and their assets. 1/

https://twitter.com/alexjoske/status/1577374423572692994

I first started paying attention to CISM after hearing about a suspected Chinese intelligence officer using it as cover to run operations in Japan. Imagine my surprise when the group's homepage featured a photo of Bob Hawke, who was named its first foreign advisor in 1993. 2/

I spent weeks trawling through online information about CISM and honed in on several of its members. One senior figure was "Yu Enguang", who's wearing shaded glasses in the centre of the picture above. Outwardly, he was a member of China's National People's Congress.. 3/

But Yu Enguang was not a real person. It was a fake name used by MSS vice minister Yu Fang as he sought to influence foreigners and operate undercover as a Xinhua journalist in DC and London 4/

To show they're the same person, on the left is a photo of Yu Enguang from around the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On the right is a photo from the same period of the MSS's Yu Fang, after he retired. Same glasses, hair, belt etc. 5/

Specifically, Yu Enguang oversaw the 12th Bureau of the MSS, which was directly tied to the two other key figures in that photo of Bob Hawke. Qin Chaoying, shaking hands with Hawke, set up a company with Hawke while also a member of a 12th bureau front organisation 6/

Qin Chuan, former editor in chief of the People's Daily and father of Qin Chaoying, is the dark-haired man sitting next to Yu Enguang. At the time, he was chairman of a publishing company that was established and staffed by MSS 12th Bureau officers. 7/

In fact, the handlers of Katrina Leung, unmasked in the early 2000s as an MSS asset when the FBI thought she was their person, often used Qin Chuan's publishing company as cover to travel to California to meet her and other clandestine agents. 8/