THE long career of the Chinese intelligence operative and diplomat Xiong Xianghui testified to the importance of the often anonymous “man behind the scenes” in the unfolding of decisive political events. A secret member of the Chinese Communist Party from the age of 17, he worked as an aide de camp to one of Chiang Kai-shek’s best generals during the 1930s and 1940s, in which role he kept the party informed of Chiang’s plans to suppress it. On at least one occasion, his prompt action appears to have saved Chairman Mao and other senior party figures from the threat of capture and probable execution.

More than 20 years later, Xiong also played an important role in facilitating the secret visit to China in 1971 of Henry Kissinger, as well as the official visit of President Nixon the following year. The visits were genuine landmarks: though conducted amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, they ended China’s international isolation and constituted its first steps in rejoining the global community.

Xiong was born in Fengyang county, Anhui province, in south China. His father was an eminent judge. Xiong shared with many bright youths of his generation a sense of China’s vulnerability in the face of aggressive foreign powers, and a determination to remedy its domestic weakness, disorder and disunity.

Communism, represented in China by a party formed in 1921 and tempered by survival in the rural fastnesses of south China before being forced on to the Long March to the north, seemed to many the best hope of national salvation. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government was reluctant to fight the Japanese invader in the mid-1930s. The Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong and now safely ensconced in its remote Yanan headquarters, made national resistance its main rallying cry.

In 1936 Xiong enrolled at Qinghua University, in Beijing. He became a secret member of the Communist Party the same year.

Zhou Enlai, then in charge of the party’s intelligence work, instructed Xiong to enrol in the Nationalist First Army, commanded by Hu Zongnan. The latter was impressed by the young Xiong’s enthusiasm and ardour for China’s cause, which by the close of the 1930s looked desperate in the face of Japan’s rapid conquest of all the country’s main cities in the south and east. Xiong quickly became Hu’s confidant and later his personal secretary.

This was of immense strategic value to the Communist Party. Chiang Kai-shek and his intelligence chief, Dai Li, trusted Hu completely. They were happy to share information with him of a kind that they often denied to other generals in the field.

Even more important, Hu, commander of the Eighth War Area based in Xian, was given the task of keeping Communist forces bottled up in their headquarters, just over 100 miles to the north. For the best part of ten years, Xiong kept the party informed of Hu’s military plans, especially in so far as they concerned Chiang’s attempts to destroy his bitter rivals for mastery of China.

His role proved telling on two particular occasions. In the first, in 1943, Xiong advised Communist Party leaders that Chiang had ordered Hu in a telegram to attack Yanan like a “bolt of lightning”. The central party apparatus safely evacuated the area.

In 1947, by which time civil war between the Nationalists and Communists had defied US mediation attempts and was escalating, Hu’s forces attacked and briefly occupied Yanan. Mao, Zhou and other leaders, tipped off by Xiong, again evacuated the area shortly beforehand.

In 1948 Xiong left China to study in the United States, obtaining a masters degree in social science at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland.

He returned to China in 1949, the year in which Communist armies wiped out the remaining significant Nationalist resistance, and Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic.

Xiong’s long experience of intelligence, now made public by a grateful party leadership, equipped him well for diplomatic work on behalf of the new regime, which was at first firmly in the Soviet camp in world affairs. He became head of the Foreign Ministry Information Department, and was in 1962 appointed chargé d’affaires to the United Kingdom. He was summoned back to Beijing in 1967, when the Cultural Revolution was at its height.