Intelligence Service

The Intelligence Service is the government body whose senior officials give the cipher struggle its national-security scale. The novel places it beside Unit 701’s secret work without fully defining the boundary between the two: its deputies attend a major conference on BLACK, while the precise departmental status of Unit 701 remains unknown even to people inside the compound. This combination of visible authority and institutional opacity makes the Service a force felt through orders, security, and the allocation of responsibility rather than through a complete organizational chart.

Institutional Presence and Uncertain Boundaries

The Intelligence Service appears at the highest levels of the BLACK effort. Four of its deputy heads attend the conference jointly organized by Unit 701 and the General Headquarters. An elderly senior official hosts the opening; the introduction identifies him as the first director of the research section, while private accounts describe him as the first secretary and military adviser for official XX. The text does not settle those descriptions into a definitive account of the Service’s hierarchy. Instead, the gathering conveys the weight of an institution whose authority is evident even when its structure is not.

That uncertainty extends to Unit 701 itself. An account of movement through the compound describes three security checkpoints before the most secure area: an armed police post, a People’s Liberation Army post with rifles and a barbed-wire perimeter, and a plainclothes guard carrying a walkie-talkie. Yet the narrator remains unsure whether Unit 701 belongs to the military, the police, or local government; inquiries bring the answer that this is not a question to ask and that the people asked do not know. These details establish the surrounding apparatus of control, but do not prove that every checkpoint or procedure is administered directly by the Intelligence Service.

Command, Security, and the Handling of Information

The Service’s authority is also suggested by the role assigned to its head. Within Unit 701, senior personnel travelling beyond the compound are accompanied by Vasili, a formidable bodyguard whose imagined equipment includes a special permit handwritten by the head of the Intelligence Service. The permit’s association with the agency’s highest official links its authority to the controlled movement of people in possession of sensitive information. The account presents this as part of Unit 701’s security culture, rather than as a full description of the Service’s chain of command.

Information is controlled not only by guarding space but by regulating communication. At Unit 701, even personal mail is inspected. When Jan Liseiwicz’s letter to Rong Jinzhen arrives in English, the surveillance team treats the unfamiliar language as a reason for heightened caution, reports it to its head, and requests a translation from the relevant authorities. The episode shows how ordinary correspondence can become an intelligence matter: a private message is not presumed private simply because it is personal.

The recruitment of Rong Jinzhen into Unit 701 makes the same logic visible in a more personal encounter. After being taken away from the university at dawn, he discovers that the journey has carried him beyond the city and asks where he is going. He is reminded that he has already breached the oath he swore and is told to repeat its first part. The oath turns secrecy into an obligation imposed at the threshold of his new work. The scene identifies his companion as the head of Unit 701’s cryptography section, who will become his immediate superior; it does not identify that man as the head of the Intelligence Service.

The National Stakes of Decryption

At the conference, the elderly host distinguishes among the many purposes for breaking ciphers: battlefield advantage, demonstration of military superiority, protection of a national leader, diplomacy, or professional pride. He then presents BLACK as a different order of problem, arguing that the cipher deployed by X Country threatens the integrity of the nation and that its rapid decryption is the necessary response. The speech makes the Service’s institutional perspective explicit: cryptanalysis is not merely a technical contest but work assigned a direct bearing on national security.

The urgency is sharpened by the danger surrounding the cryptographers themselves. Travel from A City to Beijing takes three days and two nights by train, while air travel is avoided because of the risk of hijacking. The concern is not presented as abstract: after Rong Jinzhen cracked PURPLE, an unnamed low-ranking cryptographer from Y Country was abducted by agents from X Country. For a cryptographer carrying top-secret documents, transport and personal protection become part of the intelligence problem. The account therefore connects the Service’s security concerns to the vulnerability of the specialists on whom its work depends.

Operational Limits and the Costs of Secrecy

The Intelligence Service’s campaign against BLACK rests on painstaking analysis rather than a simple command to produce results. The described conventional method begins with intelligence agents collecting relevant material, from which cryptographers develop hypotheses and test possible keys. The process is laborious, but is presented as especially safe and effective against high-level ciphers. Rong Jinzhen’s later failure to find errors in BLACK is attributed partly to the caution prompted by the earlier breaking of PURPLE: the adversary had learned to guard against the slips that might expose a cipher.

The danger of a compromised secret reaches into personal relationships. Jan Liseiwicz had understood Rong Jinzhen’s decrypting ability and may have helped the creators of BLACK prepare countermeasures. Their former closeness is set against the political and ideological gulf separating them. The narrative does not establish that the Intelligence Service itself caused that rupture, but its world of surveillance and divided loyalties gives the rupture institutional consequence: suspicions of leakage attach to Liseiwicz, and Unit 701’s account says that he and his family were shadowed when they went out and had their telephone monitored. After BLACK was broken in the second half of 1970, they were placed under strict house arrest. In this portrayal, intelligence work protects the state by enclosing both information and the people connected to it, at a lasting cost to privacy and freedom.