BEIJING — When Hu Jintao, China’s top leader, picked
up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official
visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by
local officials in that southwestern metropolis.
Until now, the downfall of Mr. Bo has been cast largely
as a tale of a populist who pursued his own agenda too aggressively for some
top leaders in Beijing and was
brought down by accusations that his wife had arranged the murder of Neil
Heywood, a British consultant, after a business dispute. But the hidden
wiretapping, previously alluded to only in internal Communist Party accounts of
the scandal, appears to have provided another compelling reason for party
leaders to turn on Mr. Bo.
The story of how China’s
president was monitored also shows the level of mistrust among leaders in the
one-party state. To maintain control over society, leaders have embraced
enhanced surveillance technology. But some have turned it on one another —
repeating patterns of intrigue that go back to the beginnings of Communist
rule.
“This society has bred mistrust and violence,” said
Roderick MacFarquhar, a historian of Communist China’s elite-level machinations
over the past half century. “Leaders know you have to watch your back because
you never know who will put a knife in it.”
Nearly a dozen people with party ties, speaking
anonymously for fear of retribution, confirmed the wiretapping, as well as a
widespread program of bugging across Chongqing.
But the party’s public version of Mr. Bo’s fall omits it.
The official narrative and much foreign attention has
focused on the more easily grasped death of Mr. Heywood in November. When Mr.
Bo’s police chief, Wang Lijun, was stripped of his job and feared being
implicated in Bo family affairs, he fled to the United States Consulate in Chengdu,
where he spoke mostly about Mr. Heywood’s death.
The murder account is pivotal to the scandal, providing
Mr. Bo’s opponents with an unassailable reason to have him removed. But party
insiders say the wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central
authorities. It revealed to them just how far Mr. Bo, who is now being
investigated for serious disciplinary violations, was prepared to go in his
efforts to grasp greater power in China.
That compounded suspicions that Mr. Bo could not be trusted with a top slot in
the party, which is due to reshuffle its senior leadership positions this fall.
“Everyone across China
is improving their systems for the purposes of maintaining stability,” said one
official with a central government media outlet, referring to surveillance
tactics. “But not everyone dares to monitor party central leaders.”
According to senior party members, including editors,
academics and people with ties to the military, Mr. Bo’s eavesdropping
operations began several years ago as part of a state-financed surveillance
buildup, ostensibly for the purposes of fighting crime and maintaining local
political stability.
The architect was Mr. Wang, a nationally decorated
crime fighter who had worked under Mr. Bo in the northeast province
of Liaoning. Together they installed
“a comprehensive package bugging system covering telecommunications to the
Internet,” according to the government media official.
One of several noted cybersecurity experts they
enlisted was Fang Binxing, president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
who is often called the father of China’s
“Great Firewall,” the nation’s vast Internet censorship system. Most recently,
Mr. Fang advised the city on a new police information center using cloud-based
computing, according to state news
media reports. Late last year, Mr. Wang was named a visiting professor at
Mr. Fang’s university.
Together, Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang unleashed a drive to
smash what they said were crime rings that controlled large portions of Chongqing’s
economic life. In interviews, targets of the crackdown marveled at the scale
and determination with which local police intercepted their communications.
“On the phone, we dared not mention Bo Xilai or Wang
Lijun,” said Li Jun, a fugitive property developer who now lives in hiding
abroad. Instead, he and fellow businessmen took to scribbling notes, removing
their cellphone batteries and stocking up on unregistered SIM cards to thwart
surveillance as the crackdown mounted, he said.
Li Zhuang, a lawyer from a powerfully connected Beijing
law firm, recalled how some cousins of one client had presented him with a full
stack of unregistered mobile phone SIM cards, warning him of local wiretapping.
Despite these precautions, the Chongqing police ended up arresting Mr. Li on
the outskirts of Beijing, about 900 miles away, after he called his client’s
wife and arranged to visit her later that day at a hospital.
Political figures were targeted in addition to those
suspected of being mobsters.
One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing
information obtained from a colonel he recently dined with, said Mr. Bo had
tried to tap the phones of virtually all high-ranking leaders who visited
Chongqing in recent years, including Zhou Yongkang, the law-and-order czar who
was said to have backed Mr. Bo as his potential successor.
“Bo wanted to be extremely clear about what leaders’
attitudes toward him were,” the analyst said.
In one other instance last year, two journalists said,
operatives were caught intercepting a conversation between the office of Mr. Hu
and Liu Guanglei, a top party law-and-order official whom Mr. Wang had replaced
as police chief. Mr. Liu once served under Mr. Hu in the 1980s in Guizhou
Province.
Perhaps more worrisome to Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang, however,
was the increased scrutiny from the party’s Central Commission for Discipline
Inspection, which by the beginning of 2012 had stationed up to four separate
teams in Chongqing, two undercover, according to the political analyst, who
cited Discipline Inspection sources. One line of inquiry, according to
several party academics, involved Mr. Wang’s possible role in a police bribery
case that unfolded last year in a Liaoning
city where he once was police chief.
Beyond making a routine inspection, it is not clear why
the disciplinary official who telephoned Mr. Hu — Ma Wen, the minister of
supervision — was in Chongqing. Her
high-security land link to Mr. Hu from the state guesthouse in Chongqing
was monitored on Mr. Bo’s orders. The topic of the call is unknown but was
probably not vital. Most phones are so unsafe that important information is
often conveyed only in person or in writing.
But Beijing
was galled that Mr. Bo would wiretap Mr. Hu, whether intentionally or not, and
turned central security and disciplinary investigators loose on his police
chief, who bore the brunt of the scrutiny over the next couple of months.
“Bo wanted to push the responsibility onto Wang,” one
senior party editor said. “Wang couldn’t dare say it was Bo’s doing.”
Yet at some point well before fleeing Chongqing,
Mr. Wang filed a pair of complaints to the inspection commission, the first
anonymously and the second under his own name, according to a party academic
with ties to Mr. Bo.
Both complaints said Mr. Bo had “opposed party central”
authorities, including ordering the wiretapping of central leaders. The
requests to investigate Mr. Bo were turned down at the time. Mr. Bo, who
learned of the charges at a later point, told the academic shortly before his
dismissal that he thought he could withstand Mr. Wang’s charges.
Mr. Wang is not believed to have discussed wiretapping
at the United States Consulate. Instead, he focused on the less
self-incriminating allegations of Mr. Bo’s wife’s arranging the killing of Mr.
Heywood.
But tensions between the two men crested, sources said,
when Mr. Bo found that Mr. Wang had also wiretapped him and his wife. After Mr.
Wang was arrested in February, Mr. Bo detained Mr. Wang’s wiretapping
specialist from Liaoning, a
district police chief named Wang Pengfei.
Internal party accounts suggest that the party views
the wiretapping as one of Mr. Bo’s most serious crimes. One preliminary
indictment in mid-March accused Bo of damaging party unity by collecting
evidence on other leaders.
Party officials, however, say it would be far too
damaging to make the wiretapping public. When Mr. Bo is finally charged,
wiretapping is not expected to be mentioned. “The things that can be publicized
are the economic problems and the killing,” according to the senior official at
the government media outlet. “That’s enough to decide the matter in public.”