Did a Female Chinese Super Spy Wreck CIA Ops?

SpyTalk plumbs Chinese intel history for facts behind David Ignatius's semi-fictional "The Tao of Deception"

The newest work of The Washington Post’s prize winning columnist David Ignatius is a  spy thriller—oddly serialized in the paper’s opinion pages—about the espionage battles between the CIA and China’s Ministry of State Security, or MSS.  The Tao of Deception, as it’s called, features a savvy, U.S.-educated young woman by the name of Ma Wei, who, over the course of the novella, rises from junior recruit to the head of the agency’s North America section—and destroys the CIA’s spy network in China.

In Ignatius’s tale, her years at the University of Wisconsin at Madison give Ma Wei insights into the culture and psychology of Americans, tools which she eventually employs with devastating effect against the CIA. Early in her career, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, when U.S.-China relations were far warmer than today, “Ma Wei was one of the young MSS employees in Beijing sent to attend counterterrorism seminars offered by the CIA for ‘the liaison service,’” Ignatius writes. 

That doesn’t track with what at least one former senior U.S. intelligence official experienced. “There may be some they kept from us, but every contact at the liaison level was a man,” he said on condition of  anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. 

Asked whether Ma Wei was based on a real woman working at the darkest red corner of the Chinese Communist bureaucracy, Ignatius told the SpyTalk podcast this week that, “Yes, there was a very sophisticated senior operations officer who did some real damage to the CIA.” 

If that’s true, who would her real life counterpart be? SpyTalk went looking.