Half a century ago, the world’s newspapers had choice words for the scandal enveloping the Alpine nation. Headlines blared “Bern: the spy center of Red China in Europe” and “Chinese diplomats train in Switzerland.” Yet the government consistently denied the claims: as late as 1965, the public prosecutor’s office stated that the “fairy tale” about a Chinese spy school in Switzerland had most likely been inspired by the James Bond film Goldfinger.
Files from the Federal Archives, however, paint a different picture. Chinese secret agents set up dozens of international spy networks in the 1950s and 1960s – all of them from their base in Switzerland.
