How the CIA Accidentally Became the Angel Investor for China’s Best Spy

You want to know about The Broker of Hong Kong? *Pah*. Of course you do. Westerners love these ghost stories. But this is not ghost story. This is what happens when you send children to do man’s work.

It is 1978. CIA station in Hong Kong—a real ‘best and brightest’ posting for all the Ivy League boys who were too dumb for Moscow and too sweaty for Saigon—decides to clip a local Triad boss trafficking in, I don’t know, bad *pao* and American military secrets. The plan, as told to me by a sad little MI6 man over too much gin, was a masterpiece of pointless complexity. It involved a briefcase full of cash, a fake rendezvous at the Star Ferry pier, and, presumably, a sternly worded memo. The target was a fat man in a white suit. Problem is, Hong Kong in the ’70s was practically overflowing with fat men in white suits. It was the uniform of a certain kind of asshole.

So, the Agency cowboys snatch their guy. Except it’s not their guy. It is Colonel Wei of the People’s Liberation Army Second Department. A very clever, very quiet man who was in town to do… something. We never knew what. But Wei, he does not panic when pasty, sweating Americans grab him. He sees a briefcase full of money. He sees an escape route. And he takes it. He leaves the CIA holding not a Triad boss, but some poor, terrified noodle vendor they grabbed by mistake twenty minutes later. Meanwhile, Wei is gone. With the briefcase. One million U.S. dollars in crisp, untraceable bills.

This is where it gets funny—funny if you are not the Langley budget committee. Wei was a patriot, but he was also a pragmatist who saw the writing on the wall under Deng. He didn’t run. He didn’t hide. He *invested*. He used the CIA’s seed money to build his own private intelligence service right there in Hong Kong, playing everyone against everyone. He sold information to the British, then sold the fact he sold it to the MSS, then sold *both* their reactions to the KGB, all while Langley was still running a task force to find “the Asian mastermind who stole our operational funds.”

They were hunting a ghost they had created, funded, and set loose. Wei—The Broker—became a legend. He had the best sources, the best tradecraft, and for a decade, the best-funded balance sheet of any private intelligence network in Asia, all thanks to a bunch of overeager Yale graduates who couldn’t tell one Chinese man from another. Sometimes, I miss the Cold War. The stupid, it was so pure.