Fan Lili
DecodedFan Lili is the name the book uses for Liseiwicz’s Chinese wife, and her written testimony changes the meaning of his life in the story. Gravely ill and unable to speak after surgery, she sets down what she knows about his secret identity, the creation of the PURPLE cipher, and his relationship with Rong Jinzhen. Her account replaces the public image of Liseiwicz as a codebreaker with that of a cipher creator, while revealing the private cost of a career built around secrets.
Identity and circumstances
Fan Lili’s identity enters the account through a file assembled by an investigator tracing Liseiwicz’s role in events surrounding Unit 701. A telephone note records that Liseiwicz worked as a high-level military intelligence analyst for X Country and that he and Fan were placed under house arrest at a military base there. The note says the reason was unknown. It records that Fan was released in 1981, and that in 1983 she came to Hong Kong seeking the investigator’s help to return to China; the request was refused. By 1986, reports placed her in her home county of Linshui, in C City, contributing funds to an engineering project. The note says she was still living there.
The investigator’s search for Fan initially seemed likely to involve difficulty, but inquiries at the Linshui County Education Bureau quickly showed that she was widely known and respected. She had established three primary-level Hope Schools and donated tens of thousands of yuan worth of textbooks to local middle schools. This public work contrasted with the tightly constrained private history the investigator hoped to learn: Fan was not merely a surviving link to Liseiwicz, but a person whose own actions had earned lasting recognition in Linshui.
When the investigator found her in Jinhe Hospital in C City, Fan had recently undergone an operation in which her larynx was removed. She had throat cancer, and the doctor said she could not speak unless she practised producing sounds through her lungs. Her condition was poor, making an interview impossible. The investigator first left flowers and best wishes without raising questions, then returned three more times over the following days. Fan answered in writing, filling several pages. The physical limits on her speech shaped the form of her testimony, but did not prevent her from correcting the record in detail.
What Fan reveals about Liseiwicz
Fan’s first and most decisive correction is that Liseiwicz was not a codebreaker. The letters he had written to Jinzhen were designed to confuse and misdirect their reader, she explained, and should not be trusted as straightforward evidence of his role. Liseiwicz created ciphers; he stood on the opposite side from those who deciphered them. In particular, PURPLE was his creation.
Her account describes how Liseiwicz became drawn into cryptography after being asked to develop a replacement cipher. He worked for nearly three years before producing PURPLE, which satisfied him. The authorities in Israel tested it but found it too difficult to use. Fan recounts the significance of this difficulty through the reaction attributed to the cryptanalyst Klaus Johannes: the cipher seemed to present more encrypted messages than he could expect to solve in the time available to him. X Country later considered buying PURPLE, but the proposal was not pursued while Liseiwicz and his colleagues remained at N University, amid strained relations between X Country and China. Fan connects the eventual transfer of PURPLE to a later bargain made to rescue Liseiwicz’s father.
Fan also explains Liseiwicz’s role in the development of BLACK, the reserve cipher created after X Country adopted PURPLE as a high-level cipher. Such a cipher, she says, ordinarily required an understudy. But PURPLE’s essential character came from Liseiwicz himself, and he could not create two ciphers at once. Although he was taken into the BLACK project after arriving in X Country, his role was that of an observer and guide, not a direct researcher. He helped the team understand what made PURPLE distinctive and steered them away from simply reproducing it; the researchers themselves had to determine how BLACK would work. Fan presents this division as a limit on individual authorship as well as a technical distinction: one person could create one high-level cipher, but could not simply duplicate that achievement in another.
Jinzhen, admiration, and artificial intelligence
Fan confirms that Liseiwicz believed Jinzhen would eventually decipher PURPLE and made serious efforts to obstruct his progress. This did not mean that he held Jinzhen in contempt. On the contrary, Fan says that Jinzhen was the only person Liseiwicz admired, and that he regarded him as possessing an extraordinary concentration of Western knowledge and wisdom. The obstruction and the admiration coexist: Liseiwicz tried to prevent his student from solving the cipher even as he recognized Jinzhen as the person most capable of doing so.
Fan further rejects the interpretation that Liseiwicz’s efforts to persuade Jinzhen to leave China served a political agenda imposed by others. She says he wanted Jinzhen to remain overseas so that the two could work together on artificial intelligence, a project Liseiwicz had long hoped to pursue. His theory concerning the binary nature of mathematical constants, she adds, was important to the development of computer technology. Fan links this intellectual ambition to his limited role on the BLACK team: as an observer rather than a direct participant in the research, he had time and energy for other work.
She also reveals that Liseiwicz was Weinacht. At the time, he was a member of the Secret Service, and his public identity as a mathematician concealed the nature of his actual work. Fan argues that the two roles could not simply be treated as separate occupations: his obligations and professional ethics as an intelligence officer constrained what he could openly do. Her disclosure reframes both his mathematical reputation and his letters to Jinzhen as parts of a life in which public identity, intelligence work, and genuine intellectual aspiration overlapped.
Surveillance and the years of testimony
The history Fan provides was learned in conditions of enforced closeness and restricted movement. She says that after PURPLE was cracked, she and Liseiwicz were followed whenever they went out, their telephone was monitored, and their lives were subject to numerous restrictions. Once BLACK was also broken, they were placed under strict house arrest in the second half of 1970. The earlier shadowing and telephone surveillance had already made their lives resemble partial confinement. Their shared days under house arrest became the occasion for Liseiwicz to tell her what she had previously known little about.
That account complicates the suspicion that Liseiwicz had leaked secrets. PURPLE and BLACK were both deciphered, and Jinzhen, his student, was responsible for breaking them in succession and with remarkable speed. Because such results seemed extraordinarily unlikely without a leak, suspicion fell on Liseiwicz. Fan records the suspicion without claiming to settle every circumstance around it; her testimony instead gives the reader access to the private history that could not be inferred from the cipher breakthroughs alone. The letters that seemed to be stratagems may have contained further riddles, but their apparent misdirection is no longer enough to define their author.
The record supplied to the investigator and Fan’s own account differ over the year of Liseiwicz’s death. The earlier note says he died at the military base in 1978; Fan’s written testimony says that he died of illness in 1979. The account does not reconcile the discrepancy. It does establish that the couple’s confinement preceded his death and that the period of house arrest was when he disclosed much of the history she later conveyed.
Final illness and the limits of the record
Fan’s testimony was gathered near the end of her own life. During one hospital visit, she indicated that she knew her cancer had spread and believed she had only a few months left. She asked the investigator to leave rather than say goodbye to someone about to die, wishing the visitor a happy and peaceful life. A few months later, the investigator heard that Fan had undergone open skull surgery; a few months after that came news of her death.
According to the investigator, Fan’s will asked that the real names of her and her husband not be used in the book, because they wished to rest in peace. The names Fan Lili and Liseiwicz are therefore aliases. The investigator explains that the choice to honor this request overrode his usual writing criteria. Fan’s importance to the narrative rests not only on the secrets she discloses, but also on the ethical limit her final wish places on disclosure. She makes Liseiwicz’s history legible while insisting that the people behind that history retain some protection from it.
