Hurley’s negotiation was the most visible and conspicuous American initiative in China but far from the only one. The others were less visible and less conspicuous. Many American agencies operated in China in the last stages of the war, including several different intelligence agencies. Among these was, for example, the innocuous Office of War Information (OWI), which collected Chinese and Japanese written materials and disseminated American government propaganda to the Chinese press. It was headed for much of the war by John K. Fairbank, the Harvard historian who had first gone to China in 1932 and had an unparalleled network of contacts among Chinese intellectuals, many of whom had studied in the United States. Another important group was known as AGFRTS, for Air and Ground Forces Resources and Technical Staff, which had been put into operation in the spring of 1944. Based in Kunming, it collected information on the weather and on the movements of Japanese planes, troops, and ships—information indispensable for Chennault’s 14th Air Force, aka the Flying Tigers, with its many airfields scattered about unoccupied China from which it attacked Japanese targets.
AGFRTS was staffed mostly by agents seconded from the Office of Strategic Services, among them Julia McWilliams, who later became the famous cookbook writer and television personality Julia Child. Another highly regarded AGFRTS agent, a man who set up a dozen or so information-gathering centers behind enemy lines, was an impressive, highly capable captain named John Birch, who, as we will see, would later command a dangerous and fateful mission in Communist-held territory in Shandong Province.
Groups like OWI and AGFRTS were, as Davies later wrote, “among the more civilized elements of OSS.” But, Davies continued, “there were others not so nice,” and among these first and foremost was a secret organization headed by Captain Milton Miles, the American naval attaché in Chungking. Miles fought constant turf battles with other American agencies in China, especially the OSS, which tried and failed to put him under its command. He was the American closest to one Tai Li, a former cadet at the Whampoa Military Academy who had been a close and trusted aide of Chiang Kai-shek’s ever since. In the early 1930s, Tai was made head of a clandestine outfit known as the Blue Shirts, which had been created by another of Chiang’s former Whampoa cadets, Ho Ying-chin, whom Chiang made his chief of staff and then minister of war after the Japanese invasion. The name Blue Shirts suggests that they were inspired by the Brown Shirts and the Black Shirts, the paramilitary enforcers used by the rising fascist leaders of Italy and Germany to intimidate their opponents, but it was also a kind of traditional Chinese secret society formed by the Whampoa clique that supported their leader, Chiang, to whom they took an oath of loyalty. When war broke out, Tai Li was named head of Chiang’s secret police, officially and euphemistically called the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, or BIS, the most feared institution in China.
The association between American intelligence and Tai is one of the troubling aspects of the Sino-American relationship, precisely because it was close and cordial. William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the corporate lawyer who was the founding head of the OSS, came to China twice, in 1943 and 1945, and had cordial meetings with Tai that were followed by epistolary exchanges so fulsome as to seem almost parodies of themselves. “Your Honor, General Donovan,” Tai wrote in one, “my ever longing for you through the stretching distance is like the endless rolling billows and floating clouds in the sky.”
His maudlin efforts at ingratiation notwithstanding, Tai was a tough and exceedingly unsentimental operator who insisted on total control over American intelligence operations in his territory. His closest American associate was Captain Miles, who was known as Mary, because when he was at the Naval Academy, class of 1922, Mary Miles Minter was a famous Broadway star. “Mary” Miles was a gregarious and charming naval officer who had been sent by Admiral Ernest King, the chief of naval operations and a close Roosevelt adviser, to China as the attaché at the American embassy in Chungking, charged initially with monitoring Japanese shipping on the China coast and collecting information for an eventual American landing there. Fairbank recalled him as “a youngish man in khaki shorts and shirt” whose “face was not only handsome but actually rather pretty, producing two dimples when he smiled.”
Miles, whether pretty or not, enjoyed the backing of the powerful Admiral King, and this gave him a bureaucratic status that enabled him to expand his operations from uncontroversial information gathering to very controversial forms of cooperation with Tai. He was uncontrolled either by the American embassy or by the American military commander, Stilwell first, then Wedemeyer. The ambassador before Hurley, Clarence Gauss, once complained that Tai was the head of a Chinese “Gestapo,” and he wanted the embassy to be “freed of all official relationship to Army and Navy officers who may have connections with General Tai,” by which he specifically meant Miles. But King, knowing of the State Department’s unhappiness with Miles, had him promoted to commodore and made him the head of the new U.S. Naval Group, China, which would be directly under King’s command. This made Miles free to do what he wanted, and together with Tai, he established a new organization for “special measures in the war effort against Japan.” It was known as SACO (pronounced “socko”) for Sino-American Cooperative Organization, among whose thirty-four separate areas of activity were sabotage, assassinations of Japanese and puppet officials, and a school for intelligence agents—Fairbank called it a “sabotage training center”—at a secret location known, with more than a touch of irony, as Happy Valley, about twelve miles west of Chungking along the Jialong River. “It’s a tight little kingdom,” one naval intelligence officer, Lieutenant Charles G. Dobbins, wrote of Happy Valley, “where at every entrance and cross path sentries armed to the teeth stand twenty-four hours a day.”
The creation of SACO was the kind of thing that happens in war. It was aimed at helping to defeat Japan, not at becoming involved in internal Chinese matters. But Miles’s close association with Tai, who was the director of SACO, with Miles the deputy director, put the United States on intimate terms with a man known to the expanding cohort of Americans in China as J. Edgar Himmler. His BIS had tentacles reaching into Japanese-occupied cities. He had an extensive network of guerrillas in south and east China that operated behind enemy lines and escorted American intelligence officers on clandestine trips to the coast, where they watched Japanese shipping.
But BIS was known also to keep tabs on Chinese dissenters and, worse than keeping tabs—or so many Americans believed—to arrest and execute them. Tai and the BIS were in this sense the counterparts of Kang Sheng and the Communist intelligence network, though the Americans in China had much less awareness of Kang than they did of Tai. The two services competed against each other in a vicious, ongoing undercover war that began in the late 1920s and continued in the early 1930s, when the KMT, having split with the Communists, tried to wipe them out, and the Communists strove to survive.
In February 1942, Tai Li discovered that a seven-member Communist espionage ring had penetrated his organization, including the man in charge of the radio sets used by Tai’s agents throughout China. “This Special Party Branch served as a dagger, stabbing right into the heart of Tai Li’s Bureau of Investigation and Statistics.… The secret tasks of several hundreds of radio stations and several thousands of operators were all in the hands of our party,” according to an official Communist biography of the head of the ring, Zhang Luping, a young and attractive woman.
Captain Milton “Mary” Miles reviews Chinese trainees at Happy Valley, the headquarters of SACO, the Sino-American Cooperation Organization, outside Chungking. (illustration credit 7)
The discovery of these moles inside the BIS alarmed Tai and is one of the incidents that impelled him to seek cooperation with the Americans, who were presumably more expert in counterespionage. All seven Communist agents were arrested, tortured, and, two years later, executed. The Communists only admitted in 1983 that the BIS spy ring had even existed; previously, Mao hadn’t wanted to give credibility to
the accusations of KMT intelligence.
There is some uncertainty about just how repressive Tai actually was. The conventional wisdom among Americans in China was that he was responsible for a great deal of wrongdoing. Davies’s word for him was “unsavory.” Davies said that Tai’s “main function was to hunt down individuals suspected of being anti-Chiang, though he also had networks in Japanese-occupied territory where he mainly tried to keep track of the Communist underground.” Joseph Ralston Haydon, a former chairman of the political science department at the University of Michigan who rose to the senior ranks of the OSS, warned Donovan against being associated with Tai Li because his methods were “assassination by poison and dagger and subtler methods.” Even Wedemeyer, no bleeding heart when it came to Chiang’s domestic methods, found the Miles-Tai relationship troubling. He practically pleaded with the War Department to withdraw from SACO and terminate Miles’s relationship with Tai. Tai Li, Wedemeyer wrote,
is mainly preoccupied with collecting information on Chinese and on foreigners within unoccupied China. His interest in the Japanese is purely secondary. His methods of operations closely parallel those of the Gestapo and the OGPU [the Soviet secret police]. Continued association and connection with him and his organization by the US has injured America in the eyes of liberal, right-thinking Chinese and has raised doubts as to our motives and the sincerity of our expressed purposes in fighting this war.
And later, with SACO and Miles still in operation, Wedemeyer wrote again:
If the American public ever learned that we poured supplies into a questionable organization such as Tai Li operates, without any accounting, it would be most unfortunate indeed. Miles has been Santa Claus out here for a long time.
Lieutenant Dobbins, who compiled a report on Tai for the American Military Intelligence Division, wrote, “Hundreds of Tai Li’s victims have been killed, thousands languish in prisons and concentration camps not knowing why they are there or for how long.”
What is curious is a certain abstract quality to these summaries of disappearances, tortures, and executions that are alleged to have taken place during the war. Some victims of KMT repression are known—including, for example, Ma Yinchu, an American-trained economist and a regular critic of Chiang. Ma was kept for much of the war under house arrest, which, of course, was a repressive measure, but he was not killed, nor was he sent to a concentration camp or a harsh prison; as we will see, when he was released from house arrest, he immediately began making heated anti-KMT speeches. Before the war, in the 1930s, Tai’s Blue Shirts carried out several assassinations, including those of at least two liberal critics of the KMT regime, Yang Xingfo and Shi Liangcai, the editor of the Shanghai newspaper Shi Bao. In addition, a Blue Shirt publication boasted of the executions of some forty “traitors” in Wuhan, that is, Chinese who were collaborating with the Japanese enemy—this in the years between the Mukden Incident in 1931 and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident six years later. There were also executions of Chiang’s rivals for power, including members of a group of young generals whom Tai Li suspected of plotting to arrest Chiang late in 1943. In 1944 Chiang had one of his favorite generals, Zhang Deneng, shot when, instead of defending Changsha against the Japanese, Zhang evacuated the city with trucks allegedly crammed with his own possessions. Chiang, as Jay Taylor has written, would not have stopped himself from ordering large numbers of executions if he had felt his regime was threatened, but there is no clear evidence that he actually did.
The KMT secret police and Tai most assuredly did not observe the niceties of due process. It can be assumed that beatings and torture of prisoners were common in China then, as they are in China now. But the BIS was neither the Gestapo nor the OGPU, not in its efficiency, its thoroughness, or its documented wholesale murderousness. China under the KMT was not a democracy, nor was it a fascist regime meriting comparison to Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia; indeed, given the conditions of the war, the atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue, the existence of a rival puppet government, and a Communist opposition, the surprise may be not that its misdeeds were many but that they weren’t more. The reports on Tai compiled by Americans in China contain virtually no names of anti-Chiang dissenters who were executed or who disappeared, and this absence of specifics suggests the possibility that some of the reports of abuses by BIS and Tai were based on hearsay, or stemmed from a tendency, encouraged by Tai’s reputation as a kind of Nationalist Fu Manchu, always to believe the worst that was said about him.
There were Americans on the scene at the time who believed this. Captain Miles defended Tai, arguing in a memoir that his malfeasance was simply assumed, more imaginary than real. Similarly, in January 1946, an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) report by one J. C. Metzel noted that ONI had received “numerous adverse reports on Tai Li,” but all of those that Metzel investigated, he wrote, “have proved to be misleading, most of them being false and the others distorted.”
The chief of ONI, Thomas B. Inglis, writing about Tai Li at the end of the war, concluded that Tai, while tough, had to be judged by the practices of China, not America. “As head of the National Police in wartime, it has been his duty to deal with traitors and criminals under laws and customs definitely cruel and barbarous by our standards,” Inglis wrote. Tai’s secret police function, he continued, had “made his name feared in broad elements of Chinese society, not only among the actual criminal classes, traitors and collaborationists, but among the multitude who are basically loyal and respectable.” These were the people “who are loud in complaints about his power to arrest and detain without warrant, and his description as hatchet man for the political reactionaries,” but Inglis concluded, Tai had “simply carried out wartime duties by methods customary in his country.”
The problem, however, was that Tai appeared to be an unscrupulous thug in the mold of Himmler or Beria, Stalin’s secret police head, even if the comparison was exaggerated. Tai Li’s secret police had the outward attributes of a Gestapo or an OGPU, operating in the shadows in a secret guarded compound and answerable only to one man with the peremptory title Generalissimo. It was known to exist, and therefore it inspired fear, and since nobody knew exactly what it was doing, it inspired even more fear.
By contrast, as we’ve seen, the sprawling Yenan regime also had its secret police and its shadowy commander, Kang Sheng, who was answerable only to the man known as the Chairman. And yet the observers at the time, the Americans and even the Chinese, seem never to have compared Tai to Kang, and this is telling. The CCP’s security apparatus was so entirely closed, so utterly opaque, that it did not come to widespread public notice, and therefore it inspired hardly any fear at all, except among those who, like Wang Shiwei, fell under its boot and disappeared, with no brave reporter to reveal to the world what had become of him.
The lesson is this: The party that stands caught between dictatorship and liberal democracy gives away a strategic advantage to the parties that stand solidly in either one camp or the other. The KMT, whose faults could be known, fell under a certain inescapable and damaging opprobrium; the Communists, whose faults were hidden by distance and propaganda, were given the benefit of the doubt.
Conspiracy theorists would see in such a thing as SACO proof of the underlying goal of the United States, which, as the Communists believed of the American “reactionary clique,” was to keep China safe for imperialist exploitation. But notable about the operations of the various intelligence agencies in China in the weeks and months around the end of the war was how ad hoc they were, how uncoordinated and unattached to any central plan or central strategic concept. Miles and SACO, while officially approved by the American government, operated almost independently of any central control. Nobody was in charge of everything, not even Wedemeyer, though he gradually tried to put the espionage activities under his control. “One outstanding weakness in Allied war efforts in China is the fact that there are so many different agencies operating independently and uncoordinated, running at cross purposes,” W
edemeyer wrote to Marshall in a top secret cable at the end of 1944.
Thus Hurley was only one of the American protagonists of the Chinese drama. He was ignorant of some of the activities of the others, which would have grave consequences, as we shall see. Hurley’s focus, his obsession, remained the attempt to forge a KMT-CCP deal, and he was constantly optimistic about succeeding in this endeavor despite the accumulating evidence that he wasn’t and probably couldn’t. For a while, after Chiang’s rejection of the Hurley-Mao five-point plan, he seemed willing to blame the national government for the ensuing impasse. On November 13, he told Davies that he thought the plan was reasonable, adding that he suspected that the KMT’s intransigence was coming from T. V. Soong, whom, to Davies, he called a “crook.” Chiang, he declared—this to Davies’s great surprise; it was the first time he’d heard of it—had promised to make a deal with the Communists in exchange for the dismissal of Stilwell, and now, he believed, Soong was sabotaging that arrangement.
China 1945 Page 20