Mediaboss Marketing

By 1968, global Communism was very much a threat to Western Europe. In Czechoslovakia, a massive invasion of Warsaw Pact forces saw a revolution crushed under the communist boot. Eurocommunist parties were popping up in Spain, Finland, and Italy. In China, Mao Zedong had rejected reforms enacted by Deng Xiaoping and re-enacted the repressive policies that led to the Cultural Revolution there. Unlike the Americans, who faced the spread of global Communism with force, the Dutch decided to found the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands a group with which China cooperated.

The Chinese didn't know its pro-China party in the Netherlands was a run entirely by Dutch spies who just wanted information on Chinese intentions.

Beijing even paid for the party newspaper, also run by Dutch spies.

A Dutch intelligence agent named Pieter Boev set up the MLPN in 1968, gaining the trust of its Chinese Communist allies through the publication of its newspaper. Its timing was also fortuitous, as China and the Soviet Union had long before began to split in their view of what global Communism should look like. Since the MLPN embraced Maoist China and rejected the Soviet Union, that was even better for the Chairman. Using his MLPN, Boev was able to expand his influence deeper into the party in Beijing.

His supposedly 600-member Communist party in a deeply capitalist society was the toast of the Communist world while Boev ran the MLPN. In truth, there were only 12 members, but no one in the party or in the rest of the world knew that. Boev could go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and China welcomed him with open arms so much, Zhou Enlai even threw a banquet in his honor. More importantly, they would brief him on the inner workings of the Chinese mission at the Hague.

The math teacher who outsmarted global Communism.

After attending a Communist youth seminar in Moscow in 1955, Boev was recruited by the BVD, the Dutch intelligence service, to play up his Communist bona fides. He accepted and soon visited Beijing for a similar congress. The Sino-Soviet Split played right into the BVD's hands, and after he embraced Maoism, his fake party practically built itself. The Dutch were able to know everything about China's secret workings inside their country, and the Chinese paid for it, all of it orchestrated by Boev, who was never paid as a spy. He was a math teacher at an elementary school.

"I was invited to all the big events - Army Days, Anniversaries of the Republic, everything," Boev told the Guardian in 2004. "There were feasts in the Great Hall of the People and long articles in the People's Daily. And they gave us lots of money."

The secret was kept until after 2001, when a former BVD agent wrote a book about the agency's secret operations. Boev and his fake party were outed.

From Your Site Articles

Related Articles Around the Web

Read the original post:
How Dutch intelligence agents fooled Communists for almost 40 years - We Are The Mighty