How to End Up in Chinese Prison for Tibet in the Middle of the Olympics
In the corner of the small, private banquet room stood a glass case with a pedestal that was otherwise empty. Clearly it was meant to hold a vase. A few feet from it hung a photograph of an old army officer being honored in a ceremony. They were handing him a very large vase. It took hours for these two objects to coalesce in my mind, but given the circumstances — I’d been up all night being interrogated by a roomful of Beijing police investigators — I cut myself some slack.
“Do you think the vase in the picture came from there?” I asked, pointing at the case. They looked confused. Apparently they were more interested in me.
I hadn’t planned on getting myself into this. Not yet, anyway. It was August, 2008, and I was in Beijing doing human rights activism for Tibet during the Olympics. It was a major international operation spearheaded by Students for a Free Tibet (SFT), meticulously planned for years. There were 75 of us in Beijing over the two weeks of the Games, divided into separate teams performing separate direct actions, plus scores more supporting and monitoring us from cities around the world.
We knew at least most of us would get caught while performing our action, and after being held for interrogation for a day or two, we would simply be deported. It wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant, but it was fine. We’d been trained on what to expect. Only my team’s arrest was different. The action I was organizing wasn’t until the next night. We hadn’t actually done anything yet. And they’d been waiting for us.
Our plan was to project “digital graffiti” with the words “Free Tibet” glowing in the night. James had been rigging it up. His code name was Genius, as in Real Genius, the ’80s Val Kilmer-with-a-laser movie. I’d been scouting locations for the action (or what we’d coded as “party”), trying to find the right landmark on which to shine our projection; the right sightline from which to project it; a separate position safely away for our first documentarian team to get dramatic images and video of the projection, which would be sent to the press; a position for a second team to document Genius while he was doing it; and somewhere, hidden in the crowd, from which I could coordinate the whole thing.
Each potential party had a name. There was “Bob,” as in Marley, a public test projecting the words “One Love.” But we scrapped it in case we’d never get a second shot at doing it for real. There was “CNN,” the new CCTV building, a gleaming monster of leaning towers jutting awkwardly together like an Imperial Walker from Jedi with its legs too far apart. But when Genius looked closely at my scouting shots, he realized the surface was too reflective for the laser. There was the suicidal “Uncle Ho.” It would be used only as an encore if Genius had somehow survived the main event. He’d tag Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen, then wait to be taken down.
Then we had the target I coveted. The Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium, right below the torch. It was a long-range precision shot. I named it “JFK.” We’d hit it from a parking lot across from the Olympic complex, which became the Grassy Knoll. But we didn’t have the same laser scope as we’d had in our tests back in Brooklyn, where Genius and I had met in the middle of the night by the East River and projected “NSA” on the Verizon building all the way across in Manhattan, the eerie green beam shooting over the river, tagging the side of the building like the Bat Signal from over a mile away.
But there was a second, closer target that we could hit from the Knoll, the Beijing Digital Building. It loomed adjacent to the aquatic center Cube like a giant circuit board designed by the monolith from 2001. This became the party plan. I mapped out everyone’s positions and made an encrypted call on a special cell phone to Earth Mouse, my handler operating out of Seoul. We hammered out the final details.
The night before our action, six of us met at Passerby Bar in a trendy hutong in Dongcheng district. It was around 11:00 p.m. on Monday, August 18, the second week of the Games. The bar featured a bland, overpriced Western menu and was therefore very popular with white people, and so it would be a safe place to be seen together in public. There was Tom, code name Tyler, as in Tyler Durden from Fight Club. He was providing high-level support across all the teams. His uncle had an apartment by one of the outer ring roads, where Genius had set up shop. Tyler brought his friend Jeff, or Jelly (like Indiana Jones, he was named after his dog), who worked on a separate team. There was one of my documentarian teams, Brian and another Jeff, collectively known as Wolverine, as in Red Dawn. I came after final recon at the Grassy Knoll. Genius came in last.
Or we thought our group at the bar was only the six of us. Later we discovered we had many more friends. Some sat at the surrounding tables filled with Chinese people, odd for a Western bar, dressed like businessmen and overacting outrageously drunk. Many more gathered outside.
Genius had come straight from finalizing the laser rig at Tyler’s apartment. He’d done a close-range test across one of the rooms, but we’d need serious distance when we did it for real. So he gave it one try out the window, leaving the beam on for just long enough to snap a photo. He showed me the picture at the bar, bright green letters emblazoned on the side of a building, shining the glorious exhortation, “Free Beer.” He smiled. He’d be changing the second word when it became time.
Brian had been feeling sick, so he was the first to leave. Around 1:00 a.m., exhausted, I decided to do the same. Our action was the next night, and it would be a long day. “Get home safe,” Jelly said. I walked by myself down the dark, narrow alley to the main road. First I was alone, jumping into a cab, and then I was surrounded. They swarmed me. More than a dozen police jumped out of the darkness, some in uniform and some plain-clothed, and there were video cameras and flashes going off in my face. Before I knew what had happened, I was in the back of a police car handing over my passport and two cell phones.
The driver explained in perfect English that this was a routine visa check, nothing to be worried about. I had no idea how much they knew so far, but this was no routine check. Since I’d been alone, I didn’t know yet who from our group they’d connected together. But as the car looped around I saw Tyler getting placed in a cruiser. At least that meant I knew what happened to him. But I wished he’d seen me in the back of the car passing by, so that someone, anyone, knew what had happened to me.
As we drove across Beijing I scanned for anything I could recognize, trying to track where they were taking me. We pulled into at a hotel somewhere central. A group of Russian athletes in their team jackets walked out as the cops guided me in through the hotel restaurant and to a small, private banquet room down the stairs. I sat at the round dinner table with a few guards and different policemen coming hectically in and out, not seeming to know the plan yet themselves, until soon they led me back into the hall. The door to the next room was open and Tyler looked up at just the right time; we locked eyes as I passed. In the following room I saw Jeff, shell-shocked and despondent, though he didn’t see me. They placed me alone in another banquet room down the hall.
It must have been around 2:00 a.m. I wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.
An hour or two into the interrogation, deep in the middle of the night, they handed me a stack of six passports, my first confirmation they’d picked us all up. Clearly they’d been staking us out. At some point later in the morning, when our whole team missed the first of our two daily check-ins to an anonymous voicemail system monitored by Mamma Bear, from Support Hub on a house boat in San Francisco, when none of us tweeted or logged into our encrypted IM or email platforms or responded to a single message or voicemail, they’d know. Messages would start pinging around our machinery across the globe. From Mamma Bear in San Francisco to Earth Mouse in Korea, to our press team in Bangkok and operational centers in India and London, to headquarters in New York. They’d have no information on the specific details of what was happening to us, but they’d conclude we all went down. Protocols would press into action — calls to the embassy and State Department, to the media and our individual Senators and Congresspeople, and the hardest calls, to our families. I concentrated on that moment when I’d be meant to check in, still hours ahead, when I knew they’d figure it out. It was all I had in the middle of the night. Whatever happened, and for however long, I’d make it through. We had people on the outside. Soon enough they would know.
“We know you belong to a secret, rich organization!” they started. Damn, I thought. That would be nice.
The first few hours of interrogation were exhausting but predictable: They used the kinds of Interrogation 101 techniques you saw on Law and Order, and I lied. “It is illogical!” they’d shout through young interpreters. “No! You lie!” “Your friends are confessing and tell us what you do!” They’d frequently follow any answer I’d give them with a probing, “Are you sure?” But the interpreters didn’t always know when to properly throw it in. At one point after they barked it after some completely innocuous question about myself, I had to laugh. “What’s funny?” they asked, genuinely confused. “Of course I’m sure,” I said. “I’m me.”
For a long time the interrogation went around in circles. I came to travel their beautiful country and enjoy the Olympic excitement. They threw around words like “separatist,” and “territorial issue” and asked about “material gain.” “How would you like it if we came to U.S. and said the people of Indiana should be separate?” they asked. It seemed complicated to explain I wouldn’t care. They asked how I got my local SIM card, how I knew the other guys, how we found each other in Beijing, who gave us our orders, how we were funded, what would happen to us if we failed. “Who is Earth Mouse?” they asked again and again. Earth Mouse was safe in Korea, so I didn’t need to worry about him. They fished around, took wrong turns, but accused me of serious things, which was cause for real concern. I didn’t know what I could prove against what they were saying, how much of it was them stabbing in the dark versus what they really thought I’d done. I insisted my concern was human rights, not secession. But when they asked, “What does ‘two parties, one night’ mean,” I blanched. That was some code I’d spoken that night at the bar. They’d been listening.
“Why did Genius call you after test?” They’d been listening on the phone, too.
“I didn’t even know about the test until the photo.”
“What did photo say?”
You know exactly what, I thought. “Free Beer,” I said, doing nothing to contain my smirk.
“What does ‘Free Beer’ mean?!” they screamed. “What does ‘Free Beer’ mean for human rights?!”
I shook my head. There were certain moments in life you could never imagine happening. Explaining to Chinese investigators while being interrogated in the middle of the night that there was no secret connection between free beer and human rights would be high on this list. I’d have to thank Genius for this. If I ever saw him again.
Whenever the main investigators would leave to compare notes, the young interpreters let down their guards. They started asking about New York City and characters on Friends. One asked about Prison Break, talking about the characters Sarah and Michael as if they were people he knew. He started listing out American cable channels. I mentioned HBO. “Home Box Office,” he nodded reverently. I asked if he liked The Sopranos. Apparently that hadn’t made it to China.
As the night went deeper, things turned into a fog. Questions grew harder to answer. Lying took work; so did half-truths. I had to constantly repeat myself. I didn’t know when I could breathe for a moment during a pause, or when the next round of grilling would begin. Eventually they grew impatient. “You give very bad answers,” they warned. “You do not cooperate.” They threatened to bring new interrogators. They threatened prison and trial. “Things can get very serious,” they said. “You could be in China very long time. This is up to you. Take a few minutes to think.”
The room emptied to leave me alone. This had all been so choreographed, but knowing that made it no less serious.
I’d been lying out of self-protection, but also to figure out how much they really knew. They’d picked me up as part of one group, but SFT still had other groups in Beijing, people I was involved with, people I needed to keep safe. I didn’t know who or what else they’d been able to connect us to. Only by what they asked about, and what they never mentioned at all, could I piece together what information they were working with. Now I had to give them something. I’d been trying to determine how much.
When they returned, I said I was ready. I still lied about certain things, but after hours of confusion and subterfuge, telling the truth was a huge relief. I told them only about our planned action with the laser; they’d already stopped it, so what more could that risk. But I minimized my role, distanced the others, claimed ignorance about the overall organization and any other plans. I knew I could pin anything I had to on the anonymous Earth Mouse, whom they could never get to in Seoul. With what little dawning light crept in through the window, the atmosphere finally shifted. Instead of exhaustion, I felt grounded again.
My chief interrogator praised my new attitude. “You give good answers now, but not great. There are still things you hide. But I think this is your nature.” He went on long, philosophical tangents. He admitted the Chinese had to improve in Tibet, but they were bringing it to the modern world, he insisted. “It will always be part of China.”
“Democracy is majority rule,” he told me. “But in China, if you do something, one billion people must agree. You hurt the feelings of one billion people.” He seemed almost wistful about it.
He said I wasn’t a bad person. I began to like him, really. He spoke softly and slowly and waited patiently when I’d pause to figure out what I wanted to say. He concentrated hard with a tilted chin when gathering his thoughts or listening to the Chinese interpretation. We maintained direct eye contact when we spoke to each other, even though we couldn’t understand without waiting for the interpreters. We’d been up all night together, enduring each other’s shifts in attitudes. We began to develop an understanding.
For lunch they brought me KFC. The younger cops were fascinated by us now. I made faces with a policewoman with a nest of hair who kept passing by in the hall. At one point she came in. I’d been trying to build up James as just an artist, nothing more. She said she’d heard of similar digital graffiti in Tokyo, and was thrilled when I said that was also him. I told stories of funny interactions he’d had with police in the Netherlands and Australia. They listened raptly and laughed along, especially, for some reason, at the phrase, “then some cops came up.” They repeated the words to each other in English and asked what else we called the police back home. I said mainly that or sometimes “fuzz.” I thought better of mentioning “pigs.”
My interrogator said if I answered more questions, we could chat about tourist sites he wanted me to see — as if I’d ever be set free within the country again. Images flashed by of us making each other laugh at famous spots around town, putting food in each other’s mouths or trying on funny hats together; a montage from some bad sitcom about a Beijing police investigator and his American charge going on wacky misadventures throughout the city.
“Do you think Beijing Police is better than NYPD?” he asked. “Beijing Police have better record,” he said. “Make more arrests.” He took evident pride. “We have very advanced techniques.” Operating in a totalitarian police state with no rights or privacy had indeed allowed for very sophisticated surveillance techniques and amazing breakthroughs in citizens spying on each other, I had to silently concede.
Not having slept more than 45 minutes stretched out on the floor, night somehow crept back in, with long stretches of waiting while the guards nodded off in their chairs. Finally the interpreter read back a translation of my statement they’d composed, 24 pages of interrogation greatest hits. I had no way of knowing what it actually said in Mandarin. They handed me a pen which I flipped around, admiring the meticulous Chinese lettering it had created. They had me sign each page of my confession, dotting them with a red fingerprint. Then I pocketed the pen.
It seemed like they’d be deporting us soon and this would all be over. But then they took my wallet away. It was after midnight again. For the first time in nearly 24 hours, they led me outside of that room, into a van with the rest of the guys. We hadn’t seen each other since the bar. But Tyler was still missing. He had the deepest involvement across the most amount of teams, and he had that apartment and his uncle around. They were holding him longer, asking him more, and that couldn’t be good.
Quickly we made sure everyone else was okay, then traded information. “This isn’t right,” I said. “They wouldn’t take us to the airport in the middle of the night. There aren’t any flights.” Jelly said if we turned north on the 5th Ring highway, that was the direction of the airport. At the 5th Ring highway, we turned south. Soon we were out in the countryside, though still within the sprawling city limits of Beijing. We turned down a long road surrounded by fields. A giant gate swung open at the end of the road, and we drove into some kind of a police complex. Surely they were just keeping us here for the night and we’d be off to the airport first thing in the morning. Then came the health examination and strip-search. They took away our clothes and issued red uniforms, two worn blankets and a plastic dish.
Nobody was going home in the morning.
We were way off script.
(Read Part Two, ‘Best Spa in Beijing: My Six Days in Chinese Prison for Tibet’, by clicking here.)
