As Chinese police cars surrounded the building, Mr. Wang slipped U.S. diplomats the cellphone number of an accomplice, according to several people familiar with what happened. It would lead to evidence, he said, implicating the wife of Bo Xilai, one of the most senior leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.
During a 30-hour standoff, U.S. officials weighed the information he claimed to have against the damage that granting him asylum could do to U.S.-Chinese relations. In the end, diplomats said Mr. Wang didn't formally seek asylum, and he left the consulate and was taken into Chinese custody.
But the drama didn't end there. In a previously undisclosed development, the U.S. handed the cellphone number over to British diplomats and gave them instructions on how to track down the information from Mr. Wang's mysterious accomplice. The instructions included setting up an email account under a designated name with a popular Chinese email and messaging service. The British set up the account and texted the cellphone number. People involved gave conflicting accounts of the timing and whether the accomplice responded. For reasons that are unclear, the British never received the promised documents.
On Tuesday, Mr. Wang will stand trial in the city of Chengdu on charges of defection, abuse of power, bribery and "bending the law for selfish ends," according to an official at the trial court. An indictment accuses Mr. Wang, the former police chief of Chongqing, of shielding Mr. Bo's wife from a criminal investigation, taking "massive" bribes and illegally using surveillance technology, according to state media.
The revelation that he claimed to have an accomplice who may still be prepared to spill secrets could complicate China's efforts to dictate the narrative about Messrs. Wang and Bo. The new details about Mr. Wang's stay in the consulate and its aftermath also shed light on how U.S. and British authorities responded to the unusual episode that triggered China's worst political crisis in more than two decades. Mr. Wang was a potentially valuable intelligence source with inside knowledge about senior Chinese leaders, but also was someone accused by human-rights activists and legal experts of widespread abuse of police powers.
The accounts of Britain's actions raise questions about whether it could have acted faster to procure the documents from Mr. Wang's associate. In the U.S., some politicians initially questioned the Obama administration's decision not to treat Mr. Wang as a valuable intelligence source and candidate for asylum.
Lawyers and Communist Party insiders say Mr. Wang almost certainly will be found guilty and given a stiff sentence, potentially the death penalty. Mr. Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was given a suspended death sentence after her Aug. 20 conviction for Mr. Heywood's murder, which means she could spend life in prison.
Mr. Wang's trial is expected to produce the first official account of his flight to the consulate, which triggered a series of events that have thrown Chinese politics into disarray in advance of a once-a-decade leadership change expected this fall. Communist Party leaders see the trial as a next step in their efforts to limit the scandal. Soon after it ends, China likely will announce whether Mr. Bo—a former political highflier who was sacked from his party posts and placed under investigation in April—will face criminal charges, according to party insiders, political analysts and diplomats.
But the story prosecutors present is unlikely to address many of the unanswered questions about the episode, such as what other secrets Mr. Wang knew about Mr. Bo and what prompted his flight to the consulate.
That means it is unlikely to convince domestic skeptics, especially China's microbloggers, many of whom were deeply suspicious of the official story presented at Ms. Gu's trial. Many appear unsure about whether to view Mr. Wang as a hero or a villain.
"Wang Lijun did a lot of bad things, but he also saved China inadvertently," said Hu Xingdou, a popular microblogger and political economist at the Beijing Institute of Technology. "I don't think the authorities will fully explain what he did. But if they don't, that will only increase people's suspicions and lack of trust in the government."
The first sign of the brewing crisis in Chongqing came on Feb. 2 when a notice on the local government website announced that Mr. Wang had been replaced as police chief the previous day and given new responsibilities as vice mayor.
Soon afterward, he requested a meeting with the British consulate in Chongqing, but he failed to appear, according to people familiar with the episode.
Around the same time, he arranged a meeting at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu on the pretext that he wanted to discuss issues relating to his new post, people with knowledge of the meeting said. He drove the 200 miles from Chongqing to Chengdu and, on Feb. 6, approached the consulate, located in a leafy area of the city center surrounded by high walls.
U.S. diplomats, not realizing the political storm about to erupt, took him to the consulate's library rather than a safe room designed to block Chinese surveillance, according to people familiar with the events. Mr. Wang appeared agitated and fearful for his safety, but he didn't seem to have a preconceived plan, these people said. He told U.S. diplomats that he had fallen out with Mr. Bo, his boss in Chongqing, and gave them an account of the evidence against Ms. Gu, they said.
Among other evidence, Mr. Wang said he could provide a toxicology report proving that Mr. Heywood had ingested cyanide, although he said there were also traces of another poison that local authorities had been unable to identify. He also said that Ms. Gu had confessed to him that she murdered Mr. Heywood.
Early accounts from people briefed on the incident had suggested that Mr. Wang brought the evidence with him. But two people with more direct knowledge of the episode said more recently that he didn't have the documents with him.
At one point, Mr. Wang offered to bring in an associate who had documentary evidence, according to someone with direct knowledge of the incident, but that wasn't possible because the consulate was surrounded by Chinese police.
There are various theories about what motivated Mr. Wang to approach U.S. authorities.
One explanation from several people with close links to the party leadership is that well before Mr. Heywood's death, Mr. Wang was under investigation for alleged abuses of power in China's northeast and in Chongqing.
Some party insiders have said Mr. Wang was implicated in a corruption investigation into his successor as police chief of Tieling city in China's northeast, which was reported by state media in February. These people said Mr. Wang had been relying on political protection from Mr. Bo but became convinced his boss no longer was willing to shield him.
On or around Jan. 28, in an attempt to put pressure on Mr. Bo, Mr. Wang had confronted him over his wife's involvement in Mr. Heywood's murder, according to several people familiar with that incident. But Mr. Bo refused to give Mr. Wang what he wanted and replaced him as Chongqing's police chief three days later, they said.
Inside the U.S. consulate, Mr. Wang asked for shelter from Mr. Bo. Peter Haymond, the U.S. consul general in Chengdu, was out of town but hurried back. Stunned diplomats also informed the embassy in Beijing, which contacted the State Department in Washington. Members of the National Security Staff were informed, but President Barack Obama wasn't briefed while Mr. Wang was at the consulate, according to administration officials.
It was a tricky situation for U.S. diplomats. Although Mr. Wang was a potential fount of confidential information, he didn't necessarily qualify for asylum given the allegations of power and rights abuses that surrounded him. Moreover, offering him protection would have outraged the Chinese on the eve of a planned U.S. visit by Xi Jinping, the man expected to take over as China's top leader in the fall. U.S. government officials appear to have decided early on that he wasn't a sufficiently valuable intelligence asset to risk the political fallout, according to people familiar with the matter.
The U.S. officials explained to Mr. Wang that it wasn't possible to apply formally for asylum in the consulate, and that it would be extremely difficult to arrange his departure from China, according to people with knowledge of the events. After some discussion, Mr. Wang agreed that his best option was to hand himself to central-government authorities, who could protect him from Mr. Bo's security forces. Using three or more mobile phones he brought with him, Mr. Wang spent several hours negotiating with central authorities.
Mr. Wang agreed to be taken away by officials from the Ministry of State Security, who flew with him back to Beijing, where he has been kept at an undisclosed location for the past few months.
Before Mr. Wang left the consulate on Feb. 7, some 30 hours after he entered, U.S. officials briefed British diplomats on his allegations, according to people familiar with those discussions. The next day, the Americans gave the British the cellphone number and told them of the plan for obtaining documents from his associate via the email account.
British diplomats set up the email account and texted the mobile phone number with confirmation that the account was ready, according to two people familiar with the efforts, who gave differing accounts of the timing and whether there was a response.
One of the people said British diplomats texted and called several times starting Feb. 9, but never got an answer. Another said the British didn't set up the email account until later and did receive two text messages from the accomplice, which outlined Mr. Wang's allegations but contained no evidence.
A spokesman for the British Embassy said: "We made every effort to establish whether additional information existed."
William Hague, Britain's foreign secretary, has said he was informed about the matter on Feb. 7 and the British embassy first asked the Chinese government to investigate Mr. Heywood's death on Feb. 15.
Also on Feb. 15, a text message outlining Mr. Wang's allegations and using a Chinese approximation of Mr. Heywood's name was sent to Chinese journalist Chu Chaoxin, according to a message Mr. Chu posted on his microblog in March. Mr. Chu, who works for the Southern Weekend newspaper, said in his microblog posting that the message came from one of Wang Lijun's "one way communication" cellphone numbers. He didn't explain what that meant, and the posting was quickly deleted. He recently declined to comment.
Some party insiders, diplomats and political analysts believe Mr. Wang had laid plans for what would happen if Chinese authorities took him into custody. "I think it's clear that Wang was not working alone," said one Western official following the case.
On March 26, The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that the British government had asked Chinese authorities to investigate Mr. Heywood's death, and to describe his links to the Bo family as well as Mr. Wang's allegations.
During Ms. Gu's murder trial on Aug. 9, prosecutors alleged that she told Mr. Wang about her plan to kill Mr. Heywood, and she originally had schemed with Mr. Wang to have the Briton framed as a drug smuggler and shot dead resisting arrest, according to observers of the trial. Prosecutors said Mr. Wang backed out of that plan and Ms. Gu went ahead with her own scheme to poison Mr. Heywood, the observers said. Mr. Wang met Ms. Gu the day after the murder and secretly recorded her confessing, the observers quoted prosecutors as saying.
Ms. Gu didn't contest the charges against her, but her defense team sought to discredit Mr. Wang's testimony, according to the observers. "They really seemed to be trying very hard to undermine Wang Lijun," noted one.
Lawyers and political analysts say that doesn't bode well for Mr. Wang. But they say he should escape execution if he has provided evidence against others, possibly in relation to the crackdown on organized crime he oversaw, which critics say was used to seize assets from local entrepreneurs.
Wang Yuncai, a lawyer and old friend of Mr. Wang, said she was allowed to meet him in Chengdu last month but had no sense of what penalty he might face.
"It's hard to say if the situation is optimistic or not. There is simply no way to judge it," she said. As for his physical and emotional condition, she said, "it's very difficult to say whether it's good or not."
WSJ
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