Confessions of a fake Marxist

Pieter Boevé, a.k.a. Comrade "Chris Petersen"

As leader of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, Pieter Boevé was fêted by the world’s communist dictators for 40 years. What they didn’t know was that he was an undercover agent. Finally unmasked, he tells all to Stephen Castle There was one catch: the leader of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands wasn’t really a communist at all. Stephen Castle reports

Enver Hoxha, gesturing, meets Pieter Boeve, right, in Tirana, Albania.

Once Pieter Boevé called the masses to the barricades. Today, he waggles his walking stick at his local train station in the Netherlands. As the founder of a political party for the elderly, he is calling for an escalator to be installed. There’s no stopping some people. For Mr Boevé spent much of the Cold War preaching the word of Mao and Marx in the West. He was fêted in Beijing, toasted in Moscow and met the leaders of the Communist world.

Once Pieter Boevé called the masses to the barricades. Today, he waggles his walking stick at his local train station in the Netherlands. As the founder of a political party for the elderly, he is calling for an escalator to be installed. There’s no stopping some people. For Mr Boevé spent much of the Cold War preaching the word of Mao and Marx in the West. He was fêted in Beijing, toasted in Moscow and met the leaders of the Communist world.

Yet now, Mr Boevé peruses a menu at a café in the Dutch seaside town of Zandvoort. He muses over a Chinese option – “Chicken Beijing Lunch” – and rejects it. And then he confirms a secret that fooled the Communist world for generations. He was no lover of the red flag. He was, in fact, a spy all along.

Through the years of the Cultural Revolution and Nixon’s visit to China, he made regular trips behind the bamboo curtain. The then Mr Petersen skilfully navigated his way through the ideological lurches of his Communist hosts and visited places off limits to almost everyone else in the West as the leader

of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands (MLPN). Mr Boevé’s incredible story has made him something of a celebrity in this town of 17,000, where he is greeted in the supermarket as the “James Bond of Zandvoort”.

Over 35 years Mr Boevé met Nikita Kruschev in Moscow, Enver Hoxha in Tirana, and shook hands with Chairman Mao. But the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands he led was a sham, staffed mainly by Dutch agents.

The revelation of his extraordinary life has left left-wing activists across Europe wondering whether their comrades through the 1970s and 1980s were all they seemed to be. As a 25-year-old student and part time mathematics teacher, Mr Boevé was always an unlikely recruit to the cause of Communism. True, he was a political campaigner but his allegiance was to the Dutch liberal party, the forerunner of today’s centre-right VVD, which was instinctively capitalist in outlook.

As an increasingly confident Soviet Union sought to project its image in the West, the authorities in Moscow began preparations for a youth festival to be held in the country’s capital in 1955. Bizarrely, a request for candidates to go to Moscow for the token price of 150 guilders was sent to the Dutch liberals among other political parties. A friend in the party who worked for the Dutch secret service (BVD) approached Mr Boevé and asked if he would be willing to go to Moscow and report back to the service. Yes, said Mr Boevé, not knowing that he was embarking on a 35-year adventure of deceit and double-dealing that would give him access to some of the most senior figures of Communist Cold-War politics.

Even now, 50 years on, sipping a cola next to the fire in the Café Neuf in Zandvoort, Mr Boevé seems a little vague about why he opted for such a life. He was, he insists, never paid by the BVD though it later provided a car big enough to transport reams of Communist propaganda, and stepped in to make up his salary when he took time off between jobs to attend a lengthy indoctrination course in Beijing.

He says he retained a strong aversion to the Communist system and believes he helped, in some small way, to win the Cold War. But Mr Boevé’s main motivation may have been the intoxicating excitement of leading such an exotic double life. At one point in our conversation he turns to me and says: “Wouldn’t you have liked the chance to do something like that?” Multilingual and, by his own admission a good actor, Mr Boevé managed to blag his way into becoming the leader of the Dutch organising committee for the Moscow youth festival, vetting those who applied to go to Moscow. His BVD controllers could not believe their luck as a list of Communist sympathisers fell in their lap.

While the rest of the 700 Dutch delegation took the train to Moscow, Mr Boevé was flown there, met Mr Kruschev (“a nice man”) and made a broadcast in Dutch on Radio Moscow. In 1958, China organised its own youth festival and Mr Boevé was invited. Initial Chinese suspicious of the young Dutch liberal were overcome and he embarked on a five-day journey from Amsterdam to Beijing.

That was followed by regular visits to the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands which led to an invitation to shed his “bourgeois ideas” and join the Dutch Communist Party. As a teacher, membership of the CP was impossible, so Mr Boevé’s new political allegiance was a secret to everyone except the BVD. Then came the Sino-Soviet split which also divided Communist sympathisers. Dutch intelligence saw a chance to split the far left and prompted Mr Boevé to help set up the MLNP to follow Beijing’s line. Its propaganda may have been funded by the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands, but the organisation was controlled by seven or eight BVD agents including Mr Boevé, who adopted the pseudonym Chris Petersen.

By 1963 he was back in Beijing, this time for a formal Communist education. He was put up at the best hotel and treated as a VIP but the hospitality came with a price tag: lengthy study of the thought of Mao. “I learnt how to think in the Chinese way. It even became possible for me to make a speech in a Mao style,” he recalls. Meanwhile, Mr Boevé held down a job as director of a technical school in Schoonhoven near Rotterdam.

With financial backing from the Chinese, what became known as Operation Mongol did not even cost any money. “In fact it made a profit”, says Mr Boevé. “The Chinese always paid in dollars.” By virtue of his party position and links with the Chinese, Mr Petersen was introduced to Communists in a host of countries, travelling extensively around Europe and beyond. The Albanian embassy in Paris fixed up a visit to Tirana where Mr Boevé met Mr Hoxha (who “seemed a nice man though we know he was not” and who spoke “excellent French”).

More trips to Bejing followed with audiences with Deng Xiaoping, Chou En-lai (a “clever, educated man who spoke German and French”), and even Mao himself. Though this was only a handshake, it afforded much celebration at the BVD, which had never had any agent so close to the Chinese leader.

Back at home, Chinese diplomats in the Netherlands were told the MLPN had a membership of about 500 but the party was really made of “about 25 agents and about 15 people stupid enough to join us”, says Mr Boevé.

The Chinese were not the only ones to be fooled: one Dutch academic even donated 20 per cent of his salary to the party, money he now wants refunded by the BVD. Meanwhile, Dutch secret service agents became experts in Maoist ideology, denouncing the evils of their capitalist government. Although the Chinese knew Mr Petersen’s real name, they did not bother to monitor his movements or, if they did, failed to spot regular meetings with a BVD controller. Other clues were overlooked, including one occasion when Mr Boevé spoke publicly about how to manage the tax system in order to pay less – not usually a Maoist preoccupation.

Mr Boevé told his wife (from whom is he now separated) and two sons about his double life and seems phlegmatic about the risks. He says: “I was told, ‘if you make a mistake. If you are put in prison and you admit that you are an agent, we cannot help you. You will be on your own, and you know what that means in those countries.’ But I was never afraid, I was so sure that everything was so well organised here.”

Didn’t all the lying and deceit get him down? On the contrary, he says: “I am a little proud of what I have done. I have led a good life and I have added something to humanity.” Mr Boevé only revealed his role after being exposed in a book written by a former BVD agent, Frits Hoekstra. The revelation has placed the spotlight on his new political party for the elderly. But he still faces a struggle to make a group of three local councillors into a real political force.

But all that time in Beijing has left him prepared for the battle to come. He might just get his escalator. As Chairman Mao once put it: “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”

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Dutch math teacher admits fake communist party scam that fooled Mao Zedong

The Guardian
December 4, 2004
Jon Henley

A 76-year-old retired Dutch math teacher described yesterday how for more than 25 years he was feted by communist leaders around the world as the inspired head of a radical Marxist-Leninist party that never, in fact, existed.

As Chris Petersen, head of the supposedly 600-member Marxist-Leninist party of the Netherlands, Pieter Boevé travelled to Beijing more than two dozen times and met Mao Zedong. He was also welcomed with open arms in Albania by Enver Hoxha, and in the eastern bloc capitals of Europe.

“In fact we had at most a dozen members, none of whom had the faintest idea of the truth,” Boevé said on Friday from his home in the seaside resort of Zandvoort. “The whole thing was a hoax, set up by the secret services to learn all they could about what was going on in Marxist Peking.”

The Mao regime was so impressed by the revolutionary zeal of Petersen/Boevé and his MLPN that it gave him regular briefings on the chairman’s latest thinking at the Chinese mission in The Hague. Beijing even funded the non-existent party’s newspaper, De Kommunist, which was written entirely by Dutch secret service (BVD) agents.

“We took everybody in,” Boevé said proudly on Friday. “As far as I know, the MLPN was the only wholly fake radical party to have existed, and certainly the only one to have really worked. We passed inside information on every Maoist policy nuance to all the western intelligence forces. It was a wonderful adventure.”

Boevé was first recruited by the BVD in 1955 when he visited a World Student Congress in Moscow. Soon after, he was invited to China, then still the Soviet Union’s ally, for a similar communist youth junket. After the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, the Chinese began courting western communists and, egged on by the BVD, Boevé played along.

“I was invited to Peking for a month-long course on the wisdom of Chairman Mao,” he said. “It was quite a baptism of fire. I hadn’t read a great deal of Marx or Lenin at that stage, let alone Mao. But I soon got very proficient. I could spout for hours.”

The foundation of the MLPN was announced by De Kommunist in 1969. Its main role was to undermine the official Dutch Communist party, the KPN, by denouncing its deviant beliefs and unreliable conduct, and to garner information on – and gain access to – the Maoist elite in Beijing.

In the latter task, it was successful beyond the BVD’s wildest dreams. “They adored us,” Boevé said. “I was invited to all the big events – Army Days, Anniversaries of the Republic, everything. 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.”

Most European Maoist groups, unable to keep up with an endless string of purges and policy about-turns, had lost faith by the mid-1980s, and the MLPN gradually began winding down its activities. But as late as 1989, after the Tiananmen student uprising, Boevé was invited to Beijing to praise the regime’s crackdown.

The existence of Project Mongol, as it was dubbed by the BVD, was successfully kept secret until this September, when another former agent, Frits Hoekstra, published a book about the service’s glory days. It caused something of an uproar in the Netherlands, a country where a fair few genuine former radicals now occupy leading positions in public life.

Boevé, who was never a salaried spy and who, despite his extra-curricular activities, rose to become headteacher of a top Dutch grammar school, said he was at first unwilling to have his name revealed. “My family knew, but no one else,” he said. “As far as my friends and former colleagues were concerned, all my travel was to do with educational exchanges.”

Since the revelations about his former life as one of the west’s most productive spooks, Boevé said reactions have varied from shock and disbelief – “How can we ever trust you again?” – to mild amusement. “My fellow members of the Zandvoort town council call me 007,” he said. “I don’t mind. I’m satisfied with what I’ve done with my life. I’ve travelled the world at someone else’s expense, and I feel did my bit. And it was certainly fun.”

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Comrade ‘Chris Petersen’ Was Big in China and Albania; ‘Project Mongol’ Tell-All

The Wall Street Journal
December 3, 2004

In From the Cold: He Was a Communist for Dutch Intelligence

By ANDREW HIGGINS
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
December 3, 2004; Page A1

ZANDVOORT, Netherlands – As secretary-general of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, Chris Petersen traveled the globe during the Cold War, wowing Communist leaders with his revolutionary zeal and anti-capitalist diatribes.

“I could make speeches for hours and you would think that Mao Tse-tung himself had been my teacher,” recalls the now-retired party chief.

The Chinese Communist Party was so impressed, it regularly gave the ranting Dutchman the full red-carpet treatment in Beijing: banquets in the Great Hall of the People, an audience with Mao, envelopes stuffed with cash and tributes in the People’s Daily. Albania’s Communists were also big fans.

Now, with communism all but dead, the Dutchman has decided to come clean: Both he and his party were a sham.

He says he was never a Maoist but an opera-loving math teacher moonlighting for Dutch intelligence. His name, his politics and his party, he says, all were concocted in a plot to penetrate militant Marxist subculture.

“Nothing was real,” says the ex-Mr. Petersen, who now lives under his real name, Pieter Boevé, here in Zandvoort, a seaside resort town west of Amsterdam. The only genuine part of a revolutionary career that lasted decades, he says, was a fondness for Chinese food: The Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Boevé recalls, had excellent cooks.

The Central Intelligence Agency, which got regular updates on the mock Maoist movement, dubbed it “Operation Red Herring,” according to Dutch intelligence. (The CIA won’t comment.) The Dutch called it “Project Mongol.”

The unmasking comes at an uncomfortable time for Dutch security services, now under fire for post-Communist bungling. Having infiltrated Maoist groups with gusto, they lost track of an Islamic radical blamed for the murder last month of filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Mr. Boevé, who appeared on television in a recent documentary about the Dutch secret service while wearing a fake beard and Groucho Marx plastic nose and glasses, says his past exploits provide tips that could help con Islamist extremists, but he doesn’t envy anyone who might try: “It’s very dangerous,” he says.

In a country where erstwhile Maoists and other radicals have become pillars of the establishment, the exposure of the phony Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, or MLPN, has caused dismay and embarrassment. Frits Hoekstra, a former high-ranking security official, shocked former colleagues in September by publishing a book that described Project Mongol and other escapades. The interior minister ordered an investigation into whether state secrets were divulged. Former Maoists are aghast.

“I totally wasted 12 years of my life,” says Paul Wartena, an ex-MLPN member who was so dedicated to the cause he used to donate 20% of his salary to the fake party. He says he “had some doubts now and then” about the MLPN but stayed loyal because “I was very naive and Mr. Boevé was such a good actor.” Now a researcher at a university in Utrecht, Mr. Wartena wants Dutch intelligence to pay him back for all his donations.

Mr. Boevé, now 74, scoffs at his acolyte: “He was an idiot.”

Mr. Boevé says he, too, is upset that his caper leaked but that Mr. Hoekstra’s book forced him in from the cold.

Conning so many people, says Mr. Boevé, was “not the most beautiful thing,” but it was a great adventure. He visited China about 25 times, made frequent trips to Albania and duped radical leaders in the West. After each journey, he went to a safe house in Amsterdam to pass on tidbits of information.

Set up and run by spooks in 1969, his party, the MLPN, had its own newspaper, De Kommunist, written and edited by the secret service. As well as Mr. Boevé playing Chris Petersen, the secretary-general, it had a chairman (another fraud) and a Central Committee stacked with secret agents. To add authenticity, the party let Mr. Wartena and a handful of other true believers join its otherwise nonexistent ranks, telling them that they were part of a network of underground cells.

Mr. Boevé first started working as an informant for the Dutch secret service, then known as the BVD, in the late 1950s and started using a fake name. Invited to Moscow for a youth festival in 1957, he attended a reception hosted by Nikita Khrushchev and briefed Dutch intelligence.

Mr. Hoekstra, a former head of counterintelligence against Soviet-bloc countries and author of the recent book, says Mr. Boevé’s recruitment wasn’t at first seen as a big deal, but, rather, as part of routine tracking of local Communists.

Shortly after the Moscow festival, however, Mr. Boevé got an invitation to China, then still aligned with the Soviet Union. While in China, he kept hearing Chinese officials curse Moscow, which had just cut funding to Beijing. The move marked the start of the Sino-Soviet split – and of Mr. Boevé’s role as an unlikely prize agent.

Desperate for allies against Moscow, China searched out Communists in Europe and elsewhere. Mr. Boevé, encouraged by the BVD, offered his services. He visited China in the early 1960s for a six-week course on Mao Tse-tung Thought. He says he got good at mimicking Chinese propaganda. The main difficulty, he says, was keeping up with the wild zigzags of Chinese politics: his hosts kept getting purged.

Chinese diplomats in Holland invited the man they knew as Chris Petersen to their mission in The Hague and gave money to help finance a Maoist newspaper secretly edited by the BVD. The result was De Kommunist. Mr. Hoekstra, the former spy and now a business consultant, says he once wrote a screed against the Dutch government. “As a civil servant, it was very satisfying,” he says.

After a year, De Kommunist announced with fanfare in 1969 the foundation of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands. “In order to limit as far as possible the danger of penetration by enemy elements,” it explained, “the MLPN organization shall be based largely on the cell system, obliging all members to the greatest possible secrecy.”

For the next decade, the fake party helped the Dutch secret police divide Holland’s legitimate Communist movement, keep tabs on Maoist groups and gain access to China’s elite. “Petersen” issued regular communiques – all drafted by the BVD – denouncing real Communists as sellouts and urging voters to reject them.

Mr. Hoekstra, the former intelligence officer, said the facade of Maoist fervor did sometimes wobble. On one occasion, he says, “Petersen” started talking in public about how to take advantage of tax deductions, not something a Maoist is supposed to worry about. He says there was concern the Chinese might smell a rat, but that faded. The Dutch, he says, had the Chinese embassy bugged and heard diplomats singing “Petersen’s” praises. “We could hear everything,” says Mr. Hoekstra.

By the 1980s, purges and ideological U-turns had exhausted most Maoists in Europe, and the BVD began to lose interest in the ruse. China was no longer an enemy but a big trading partner. De Kommunist shut down. The MLPN fizzled.

Mr. Boevé, though, kept going. In 1989, when troops shot dead hundreds of protesters around Tiananmen Square, he issued a statement praising the resolve of the Communist Party in restoring order. Shortly afterward, he was back in Beijing, hailing the party and its leaders.

In a small apartment crowded with an electric organ and piles of books, Mr. Boevé rustles through plastic shopping bags full of yellowing MLPN tracts and other mementos. One is a copy of a photograph of himself meeting Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Communist dictator from 1944 until his death in 1985.

Advancing age has finally slowed Mr. Boevé down. He walks with a cane and can’t climb stairs. His involvement with China is limited to visits to a local Chinese restaurant. He draws giggles by humming the “East is Red,” a Maoist anthem. “It’s a very nice tune,” he says.

His political horizons have shrunk to Zandvoort. He sits on the local council and lobbies for better housing for the elderly. He has even set up yet another party: It represents old people. It doesn’t have many members, but, says Mr. Boevé, “This time they are all real.”

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