China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (28 page)

Similarly, Hurley must have felt that the KMT would welcome a chance to compete peacefully with the Communists in American-style political contests, in which everybody has his say, the party with the most votes wins, and the losing party will wait for another chance to win in the next election. But what was simple for the Americans was infinitely complex for Chiang. Chiang’s power rested on a
network of personal relations among China’s military chieftains that went back to his days as commander of the
Whampoa Military Academy and, in some key instances, to his days in Japan when he was a young military academy cadet. The armed forces were not simply an army; they were a network of power bases, some loyal to Chiang and others (often the more effective of them) independent of him, potentially even rivals to him. Chiang needed to keep commanders loyal to him in charge of their armies, even if it meant tolerating the way they padded their rolls with nonexistent soldiers so as to receive their salaries from the central government, even if they lined their pockets by trading strategic materials with the Japanese, even if they were ineffectual commanders. Chiang
refused to fire the commanders who owed allegiance to him. Moreover, during the war, he refused to supply able commanders in combat who did not owe allegiance to him, because in China’s quiltwork of personal military relations, they were not part of his personal network.

Chiang faced a similar problem when it came to political reform, a rather abstract, shorthand phrase whose practical meaning was allowing the Communists into the government as a legal party and then competing with them for popular favor. For the United States, political reform would give the Chinese government legitimacy, broaden its popular support, and quell the incubating dissatisfaction and disillusionment among students and intellectuals. The coalition would give Chiang the stronger portfolios, and he would continue to be commander in chief of the armies, an ally of the United States, and the president of his country.

Chiang, however, was convinced that political reform is what would destroy him. For him, the Americans, with all their goodwilled naïveté and gullibility, failed to take into account the reality of Chinese political culture, in which to be conciliatory, to be forced to grant legal status to an erstwhile bandit gang, would be interpreted as weakness, and to be seen as weak was to invite defections to the other side. The Communists themselves would enjoy a tremendous surge in popularity, prestige, and stature. This was the reason for Davies’s prediction that many of Chiang’s senior officers would desert him once the Communists had an American imprimatur, because in China’s winner-take-all political system there is no profit in sticking to a loser. Centuries ago, Machiavelli warned that the prince who invited powerful rivals into his principality, hoping to disarm them and weaken them, was paving the way for his own loss of power. Chiang Kai-shek probably didn’t read Italian Renaissance political theory, but he nonetheless understood that his own power depended not on making a deal with the vigorous and durable Communists but on not making a deal with them and, instead, on destroying them, lest they destroy him.

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,