Tong was sentenced to the firing squad, but on the day of his scheduled execution, rumors came out of the prison that he had escaped with inside help. To enhance the ruse, prison officials ordered several guards shot the next day for their “collaboration.”
The 14K Triads, the largest and most powerful underworld organization in Hong Kong, and the largest Triad in the world, took K. K. Tong in weeks later. He rebooted the army of civilian hackers that he had cultivated, and he reacquired his botnet army, and within months he was generating money for the Triads by using tens of thousands of nodes from his botnet to swindle credit card numbers with phishing e-mails.
Tong then started a new endeavor. With the 14K’s blessing, though without any understanding of what he was really up to, Tong purchased hundreds of computers and recruited top-level hackers from the mainland and Hong Kong to operate them, bringing them slowly into Hong Kong and into the fold of his new operation.
K. K. Tong adopted the handle “Center” and called the physical hub for his new worldwide operation, his nerve center, the Ghost Ship. It was housed on the eleventh through the sixteenth floors of a Triad-owned office building in Mong Kok, a gritty high-density and lower-income portion of Kowloon, well to the north of Hong Kong’s lights and glamour. Here the Triads watched over Tong and his people night and day, although they remained oblivious of his true mission.
Tong employed dozens of the best coders he could find, mostly men and women from his earlier hacker “armies.” The rest of his employees he called controllers — these were his intelligence officers, and they all used the handle “Center” when dealing with their assets. They operated from workstations on the operations floor of the Ghost Ship, and they communicated via Cryptogram instant messaging with the hackers and physical assets who unknowingly worked for them around the world.
The controllers used cash payments, coercion, and false flag trickery to co-opt thousands of individual hackers, script kiddies, criminal gangs, intelligence operatives, government employees, and key tech-industry personnel into a massive intelligence organization the size and scope of which the world had never seen.
Tong and his top lieutenants patrolled the hundreds of Internet forums used by Chinese hackers, and from here they found their army. One man and one woman at a time were discovered, vetted, approached, and employed.
The Ghost Ship now had nearly three hundred employees working in the building itself, and thousands more working on its behalf around the world. Where language was a problem they posted in English or used high-quality language-translation software. Tong recruited foreign hackers into his network, not as Ghost Ship operators but as proxy agents, none knowing they were working for the Chinese government but many certainly recognizing that their new employers came from Asia.
The physical agents came last. Underworld organizations were recruited to work on “meat space” ad hoc projects. The best of these received regular assignments from Center.
The Libyan organization in Istanbul was an example of this, although their controller saw almost immediately that natural selection would work against the fools, especially their communications officer Emad Kartal, a man who did not follow his own security protocols.
The controller overseeing the cell in Istanbul had discovered that a group of Americans who worked for the company Hendley Associates was conducting surveillance on the Libyans. With Dr. Tong’s blessing the controller allowed the assassination of the entire five-man cell, all for the objective of planting a virus on the closed network of Hendley Associates so that the Ghost Ship could learn more about them. The plan had failed when the masked Hendley Associates gunman took the entire computer with him instead of doing what the controller had hoped, pulling media off the machine and returning to the States to place it on his own network.
Still, Tong’s controllers had already been working other avenues to learn about the true nature of the curious organization Hendley Associates.
Other criminal organizations hired by Center included Triad groups in Canada and the United States, as well as Russian bratvas, or brotherhoods.
Soon Tong began active recruitment of more high-level espionage professionals to work as field assets. He found Valentin Kovalenko and decided he would be perfect for this task, used one of his Russian bratvas to get him out of prison, and then used blackmail to retain the strong-willed ex — assistant rezident.
As with many other spies, Center started Kovalenko out slowly, monitored his success and his ability to keep himself undetected, and then he began giving him more and more responsibility.
Tong also had another type of spy unwittingly under his command.
The converted spy.
These were turned employees in government agencies around the world, in businesses like telecommunications and finance, and in military contractor and law enforcement positions.
None of these co-opted members of the organization had any idea they were working on behalf of the Chinese government. Many of these assets felt the same as did Valentin Kovalenko, that they were conducting some sort of industrial espionage on behalf of a large and unscrupulous foreign technology concern. Others were convinced they were in the employ of organized crime.
Dr. K. K. Tong was in control of the entire operation, taking directives from the Chinese military and intelligence communities, and so directing his controllers, who then directed their field assets.
It helped, perhaps more than anything else, that Dr. K. K. Tong was a sociopath. He moved his humans across the earth much as he moved 1’s and 0’s across the information superhighway. He had no more regard for one than the other, though the failings of human beings caused him to look with more respect at the malicious code he and his hackers developed.
After two years of Ghost Ship activity, it became clear to Tong that his near-omnipotent control was not enough. Word was getting out about brilliant new viruses, worldwide networking of cybercrime, and successful penetrations of industry and government networks. To combat the spread of information, Tong told the PLA and MSS leadership that in order for his cyberoperations to have maximum effect, he would need additional kinetic assets, a unit of soldier-spies in America, not duped assets but men dedicated to the Communist Party of China and completely beholden to Center.
After argument, deliberation, and finally the involvement of senior military officials, the computer operations man Tong was given command authority over a team of PLA special-operations officers. Everything Tong did worked, they reasoned. His two years of running proxy assets around the world had greatly empowered the PLA and strengthened the Chinese cause. Why not allow him a small unit of additional deniable forces?
Crane and his team, eight men in all, came from Divine Sword, a special-operations unit of the Beijing Military Region. They were highly trained in reconnaissance, counterterrorism, and direct action. The team sent to the United States to follow the instructions of Center was given additional vetting for bravery, pure ideological thought, and intelligence.
They were infiltrated into Vancouver Triad crime for a few months before making their way south over America’s porous border with Canada. Here they lived in safe houses rented or purchased by Ghost Ship front companies, and they had documentation, thanks to Center and his ability to generate resources of all types.
Crane and his cell, if captured or killed, would be explained away as a team of Triad gangsters from Vancouver, working for computer criminals somewhere in the world. Certainly not at the behest of the CPC.