CHOOSING SIDES may have been a dilemma for people in Europe, but in the Far East that quandary was multiplied a thousandfold. In China cooperation between Nationalist and Communist parties broke down soon after the defeat of Japan; Jiang Jieshi and Mao Zedong merely resumed their interrupted competition for power. All over Asia the Cold War proved especially pernicious. Religious and nationalist movements recast China, India, and Southeast Asia as actors in a global ideological struggle; dominion hung in the balance.
The United States participated in the struggle from the beginning. After abortive efforts to mediate between Chinese factions, President Truman aligned the United States with Jiang Jieshi against the Communists. Mao Zedong’s field armies nevertheless swept through mainland China. The Nationalist collapse climaxed in 1949 when the Chinese Communists overran Beijing and south China despite American military and economic aid to Jiang, and at precisely the time when U.S. covert action capabilities were coalescing within the CIA and the Pentagon.
Washington soon considered exploiting the still tenuous Communist control of the mainland, using new Nationalist bases on islands off the coast. The Korean War injected tremendous momentum into the program; in turn this expansion eventually created a headache for the secret war managers. But, aside from their policy implications, the clandestine campaigns enjoyed only indifferent success. More important, the intelligence buildup that occurred greatly expanded CIA capability for, and interest in, covert actions of all sorts.
Driven from the mainland, Jiang Jieshi’s* nationalist forces established themselves on the islands offshore, chiefly Taiwan. The Chinese Communists had no navy to speak of and no experience with amphibious war. Only small vessels, mostly junks, were even available to be commandeered. Mao’s armies made one great effort, in early 1950, to fight their way onto Hainan, the next-largest island to Taiwan. They succeeded after ten invasions and considerable casualties when, as had so often happened on the mainland, the morale of the Nationalist troops broke. Superior force was no guarantee against defeat; Jiang ordered the Nationalist survivors back to Taiwan. Although there were fears the Communists would follow, an invasion of Taiwan was a much more difficult proposition and was not attempted.
Proposals for covert action predated Nationalist defeat in the civil war. Jiang had gone to Taiwan in early 1949, resigning the presidency in favor of his vice president, General Li Tsung-jen, who tried to negotiate with Mao. That spring Claire Chennault, a retired American officer who had commanded the Flying Tigers during the Sino-Japanese war and afterward organized the private airline called Civil Air Transport (CAT), which initially operated in China, went to Washington with a proposal for U.S. support to a Nationalist bastion in southern China plus covert aid to guerrilla forces loyal to Li Tsung-jen. Chennault’s airline had fallen on hard times, and he sought help for it as well.
The State Department was not much interested in the Chennault plan, so the former general pursued his other agenda. Chennault went to Thomas Corcoran, his business partner in Civil Air Transport. Corcoran put Chennault in contact with CIA officers, culminating in a series of meetings during the summer of 1949. By August Chennault was talking to Col. Richard G. Stilwell, chief of the Far East Division of OPC. Wisner’s Wurlitzer thought an airline like Civil Air Transport could provide an important covert asset, and it had an interest in military aid as well. President Truman simultaneously directed the State Department to reexamine the feasibility of Chennault’s plan.
Before these deliberations could be completed, Nationalist resistance on the mainland disintegrated, forcing a shift to operations mounted from outside China. Civil Air Transport acquired greater prominence. In early October the CIA received an analysis of the Chennault plan from George Kennan which took no position on the project but nevertheless allowed Wisner to contend that State had approved it. Civil Air Transport was enlisted in the secret war, flying its first CIA mission on October 10, 1949. Tommy Corcoran, on behalf of CAT, and Emmet D. Echols of CIA’s Office of Finances signed a formal agreement on the 1st of November.
Meanwhile, on October 28 a detailed proposal for covert operations in China from Gen. John Magruder went to the secretary of defense. Magruder, citing his experience as chief of the Strategic Services Unit, advocated active operations. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson forwarded the proposal and an accompanying memorandum from Wisner to the president. Harry Truman expressed interest, but the collapse of resistance on the mainland temporarily halted the project.
This became a defining moment for Civil Air Transport. Founded in 1946 by Chennault and Whiting Willauer, CAT had made its living flying troops, supplies, and dignitaries in the Chinese civil war. The airline’s performance in 1948 was impressive: 34 million ton-miles; almost a quarter-million passengers carried; about 90,000 tons of cargo consigned. By mid-1949, however, runaway inflation in China plus the Nationalist disintegration brought CAT face-to-face with disaster. The CIA put a half-million dollars in hard currency into CAT, $200,000 of it up front. The airline used the cash to relocate to Taiwan with corporate headquarters in Hong Kong, ending the chaos of existence on the mainland. (Chennault’s friendship with Jiang Jieshi meant the end of CAT domestic air service once the Communists took over.) But CIA money did not solve the underlying market problems for Civil Air Transport, which would be forced to go back to the agency again and again until the spooks virtually owned the airline.
Access to a fleet of transport aircraft became a great boon for the CIA. In Europe air missions had to be run ad hoc or through the U.S. and British air forces. Missions required delicate interagency discussion, sometimes a little horse trading too. In Asia with CAT, the Office of Policy Coordination could dispense with politics. Occasionally there came a question whether CAT crews would volunteer for flights, but since Willauer’s pilots flaunted their skills and can-do attitude, this rarely became a problem.
The first arms request came from Gen. Ma Pu-fang, a Muslim leader in northwest China, thought to have fifty thousand troops. Aid to Muslims is the only covert action known to have been specifically mentioned by President Truman at a November 1949 meeting on assistance to anti-Communist Chinese. But before shipments could be organized, General Ma went down in defeat. Gathering his fortune of $1.5 million in gold bars, Ma Pu-fang escaped on a CAT plane, then left on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Recruits for missions to the mainland had to be found. This was not difficult because the Nationalists ardently wished to return; Jiang sounded the keynote in a speech in which he promised to go “back to the Mainland,” a theme he dwelt on throughout the 1950s, adopted as a slogan by the pro-Taiwan “China Lobby” in the United States.
Yet there were difficulties in Asia, not unlike those the CIA encountered in Europe. Among the Nationalists were factions, all of them hoping to corner U.S. aid. Alfred T. Cox, the OPC officer sent to Hong Kong to represent CIA at Civil Air Transport headquarters, worked as a sort of broker between the United States and the squabbling factions. Li Tsung-jen, whose “Third Force” resistance based itself in Hong Kong, hoped to become CIA’s exclusive Chinese ally, but the agency dealt with every group it could find.
Chinese politics embarrassed Washington from the beginning. Immediately upon leaving the mainland in December 1949, sixty-year-old acting president Li went to New York for medical treatment. Invited by President Truman for an official visit, Li Tsung-jen claimed to have almost 200,000 guerrillas loyal to him, mostly in southwest China. In a memorandum of February 22, 1950, he proposed a four-point program, including guerrilla warfare; underground activities; penetration of overseas Chinese; and mobilization of liberal elements dissatisfied with both the Communists and the Nationalists. As acting president of China, Li Tsung-jen stayed at the official Blair House residence. President Truman planned a formal reception for Li, a luncheon to be held on March 2. But the day before, in Taiwan, Jiang Jieshi suddenly declared himself ruler of China and resumed the presidency. Instantly deprived of power, Li remained in the United States, competing with Jiang for influence among ethnic Chinese. This political competition continued for decades.
Despite internal struggle, OPC officers continued to think Li Tsung-jen offered a viable alternative, his Third Force untainted by either communism or the corruption of the Nationalist government. The OPC Far East Division chief of operations, James G. L. Kellis, worried that backing both factions only robbed the United States of sincerity. Because Jiang Jieshi controlled the offshore islands—the potential bases for secret war—there was ultimately no choice but to support him if the CIA wanted a secret war against Mao.
The China campaign was masterminded by the Far East Division. The unit, a microcosm of the early CIA, was itself a forest of cliques. One came from the army’s World War II Ninetieth Infantry Division, another from the OSS in Burma. Wisner’s Far East Division chief, Richard G. Stilwell, on detached service from the army, had headed the Ninetieth Division’s operations staff. His China branch chief, William E. Depuy, his primary logistics officer, Gilbert Strickler, and the commanders of the CIA detachments on two different offshore islands critical to the campaign, Edward S. Hamilton and Lon Redman, were all Ninetieth Division veterans. Jim Kellis had been with OSS in Turkey and Greece. Ray Peers, the chief of the OPC station on Taiwan, had fought with OSS Detachment 101 in Burma during the war. Stilwell’s deputy, Desmond FitzGerald, another former officer who served in Burma, had been an adviser to the Nationalist army. The president of the CIA proprietary company set up to furnish cover for the Chinese project, Charles E. Johnston, had spent World War II in China. Robert J. Delaney, deputy and eventual successor to Peers; Rodney Gilbert, the psywar chief on Taiwan; and such case officers as Frank Holober and Philip Montgomery all had had wartime experience in either China or Burma, where Chinese Nationalist forces had also fought. These were small circles, bands of CIA brothers looking out for one another.
Korean hostilities reinvigorated the China programs, especially after the November 1950 People’s Republic of China intervention in the war. Decisions in Washington sharpened the Far East command problem by expanding the scope of covert activities. In early 1951 a National Security Council policy paper endorsed a vigorous program of covert operations to aid anti-Communist guerrilla forces. Late that year Truman asked what more could be done to hurt Beijing. Disruption of Chinese supply lines became an explicit goal in an NSC directive that the president approved at the end of the year.
Having kept its options open, the CIA began to put in place the elements for a secret war against China. The cover would be an ostensible private company, in reality owned by the CIA—Western Enterprises Incorporated (WEI), a legal entity in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Frank Brick, a lawyer who happened to be another Ninetieth Division veteran, filed the papers. An office opened on Taiwan in early 1951, with the first CIA officers arriving that March. Claire Chennault met them at the airport, and senior people were put up at the Grand Hotel. Some called headquarters the Guest House, others referred to WEI as Western Auto. New agency people passed through Pittsburgh to process their WEI paperwork, with corporate head Charles Johnston acquiring the moniker “Pittsburgh Charlie.” Training and operational bases followed in southern Taiwan and on other offshore islands.
Western Enterprises became the bailiwick of Ray Peers, a first-rate organizer. Peers missed few tricks, including bringing along his former OSS mess sergeant, a chef apprentice at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, whose genius with food made the Guest House a destination for American diplomats, military officers, and all manner of visiting spooks. The good relations thus created served when Peers needed help himself. Western Enterprises soon acquired a fleet of a half-dozen boats, mostly junks but also some fast patrol craft. Civil Air Transport furnished flight services both to forward bases and for the parachute training of Chinese guerrillas. The unit soon began putting out tentacles to small islands off the mainland, most importantly Xiamen and the Tachen Islands. Detachments of Western Enterprises were placed in these forward positions. The CIA also created a network of coast-watchers to detect and follow ships transiting the Taiwan Straits.
Shipping activities most resembled the old OSS derring-do. In December 1950 Washington began a total embargo of trade to China. Several hundred items were prohibited—more than for the Soviet Union—and placed on a contraband list. Although the State Department opposed the move as likely to increase Chinese dependence on Russia, the Pentagon and CIA likened it as cutting into Chinese capabilities. A big part of enforcement would be Nationalist naval patrols from Taiwan, but the CIA carried on its own secret campaign using the Western Enterprises fleet. Air scouts, CIA coast-watchers, and Nationalist intelligence reports alerted agency marauders, who took to their own patrol boats or junks to intercept. The coast-watchers worked in small teams which landed on uninhabited islands and stayed out of sight, occasionally collecting information from friendly fishermen.
China had little merchant shipping of its own at the time, but there were extensive imports. At least one Polish and two Russian tankers were stopped at various times, and the CIA collected its first sample of Soviet jet fuel from one of these boardings. There could also be diplomatic headaches. Great Britain and France, though allied with the United States, recognized Communist China and traded with it. Agency marauders stopped British ships just like others, handing them over to the Nationalists, who seized cargoes with aplomb. British warships countered by occasionally escorting their own merchantmen bound for mainland ports. On at least one occasion a British destroyer forced a CIA attack boat to abandon its attempt to halt one of these merchant craft.
Project Stole was a covert attempt to block Indian medical supplies from reaching Mao’s China. The aid, including makings for three full field hospitals, was packed on a Norwegian freighter. Stole proposed to stop the shipment at all costs, and the CIA earmarked a million dollars for the effort. Hans Tofte met with other OPC Far East station chiefs in Tokyo to plan the heist. At one point in Hong Kong, Al Cox made sabotage preparations under the noses of British authorities for when the Norwegian vessel docked there. The freighter bypassed Hong Kong. Tofte went through WEI to approach Jiang Jieshi, who happily lent his patrol boats, which intercepted the freighter on the high seas. Cox and his CIA agents were hidden below deck when the Nationalist gunboats commandeered the cargo.
After the Korean War began, President Truman declared the Taiwan Straits neutralized. He started a U.S. naval patrol there with a cruiser and a couple of destroyers. In principle the patrol aimed to close the straits both to Chinese Communist attacks on Taiwan and to Nationalist forays onto the mainland. While this complicated the CIA mission, it increased the value of the islands since these were already on the mainland side. Thus in practice the island bases leapfrogged the blockade, enabling the Nationalists to hit the mainland in spite of the supposed neutralization. By the end of 1950 there were 65,000 Nationalist troops on the offshore islands. These garrisons shielded the CIA detachments as they trained guerrilla units on these same islands.
To accomplish its aims the CIA’s secret warriors obviously needed to work with the Nationalists. This meant Chinese intelligence agencies. Useful to this purpose was that Western Enterprises boss Ray Peers had gone into China immediately after World War II to liaise with Chinese intelligence. By now the legendary Chinese spy chieftain Tai Li, whom Peers had known, had passed from the scene. His successors competed intensely against one another. The official resistance unit, the Continental Operations Department (Ta-lu Kung-tso Ch’u), answered to Tai Li’s successor, Gen. Cheng Kai-min. But, from the CIA’s point of view, this unit controlled few critical assets. Both the bases on the offshore islands and the remaining forces on the mainland—cavalry in the wilds of western China—were under the primary Nationalist intelligence entity, the Secrets Preservation Bureau (Pao-mi Chu) of Gen. Mao Jen-feng. Not only did General Mao, who had close ties with Madame Jiang Jieshi, head the intelligence unit, Jiang appointed him a member of the Political Action Committee, the Chinese equivalent of Washington’s Special Group, which coordinated Nationalist intelligence under Jiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo. Peers found himself dealing with both senior generals as well as Ching-kuo and Madame Jiang. In fact Madame Jiang appeared among the spooks so often, from hosting dinners to participating in inspections, that she should be credited with her own role in the secret war. Beyond simple competition between spy services lay an additional layer of sensitivity—Chiang Ching-kuo competed with Madame Jiang as chief lieutenant to the generalissimo and guardian of Jiang’s legacy, and to position himself as rightful heir. Meanwhile American ambassador Carl Rankin felt that all these spy games among the offshore islands were simply diversions from the real business of running Taiwan. Ray Peers needed all his diplomatic skills for the job.
Another challenge in those early days was the cleavage between CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination and its Office of Special Operations. Under navy cover, Robert J. Myers headed the OSO station on Taiwan, and his organization considered OPC schemes to land troops on the mainland as delusional. At the same time Peer’s officers felt OSO intelligence support of their paramilitary effort to be pathetically inadequate. Yet even as OSO denigrated the campaign, Myers dabbled in it, visiting different offshore islands with Chinese spy chiefs, making Western Enterprises people suspicious of OSO competitors. The OSO helped OPC’s Larry St. George set up the first coast-watcher networks, but tension continued between the CIA elements.
The American military became one more source of competition. A U.S. military advisory group went to Taiwan after Truman neutralized the straits. In May 1951 the group numbered only four hundred, and the flow of U.S. weapons and training had just begun. But soon the Americans were supplying destroyers, amphibious ships, jet aircraft, and much else, and the number of advisers reached into the thousands (an additional reason why CIA found it easy to disguise its officers under navy cover). The Nationalist military soon found they could play off the military advisers and Western Enterprises against each other.
After CIA secret warriors took up their places on the offshore islands, they began to recruit troops. The units were distinct from the Nationalist armies. Although called “guerrillas,” these formations had standard infantry training, equipment, and organization. Edward S. Hamilton, among the Ninetieth Division stalwarts, headed the OPC detachment on Xiamen, where the CIA formed two battalions of guerrillas. Special scout troops received parachute training under Lou Rucker. Frank Holober handled intelligence for mission planning. The initial operation went off in September 1951 when a Nationalist guerrilla unit went ashore on the mainland to create a base inland where supplies and more troops were to land to expand the cleared area. Instead the Nationalists sought out a fight. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) concentrated forces and wiped out the interlopers.
Western Enterprises went on recruiting guerrillas and achieved a psywar coup by inserting anti-Communist leaflets into letters captured by a patrol, after which the letters were put back into the mail system from Hong Kong. Chinese commanders carried out some operations on their own while Hamilton plotted a fresh mission. That came in October when raiders landed on a small island lightly held by the Chinese Communists. With that mission under their belts, a more ambitious raid took place on December 7 on the island of Nanri Dao, not far from Fuzhou. The operation proved completely successful except that the Nationalist general leading it was shot in the head as he peered over a rock. Island targets were the most desirable since the Communists themselves had difficulty sending reinforcements to the points under attack.
In early 1952 the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the navy to provide the CIA with ships and facilities for coastal landings on the mainland in addition to Korea. Joint planners at the Pentagon, in deference to the loyalties commanded by Li Tsung-jen, argued that the United States should support all anti-Communist Chinese. That February the Joint Strategic Planning Committee recommended a $300 million budget for covert operations onto the mainland. Regarding CIA’s association with Jiang Jieshi’s faction, the military planners warned, “Covert activity within China would be unlikely to overthrow the Chinese communist regime in the absence of an effective counter revolutionary movement, a political program, a clear-cut organization and competent leadership, none of which the Chinese Nationalists appear capable of providing at this time.”
In the summer the raiders returned to previous targets for a new round of attacks. Against strict instructions, CIA radioman Roger McCarthy went ashore on one of these raids. Among several others, the most successful took place in October, the target again Nanri Dao. The Nationalists conducted their largest naval action since retreating to Taiwan, using warships given them by the United States, and sent along four thousand regular troops plus a thousand guerrillas. Western Enterprises supplied little but intelligence backup, and CIA people stayed home when the raid was carried out. The Nationalists not only reached their goals, they stood back and took on a wave of Communist reinforcements, inflicting many casualties and capturing almost a thousand prisoners. Jiang Jieshi’s propagandists announced that they had conducted fifteen raids on the mainland that year and gave glowing accounts of results.
When the CIA created its unified Directorate for Plans, China operations came under new pressures. Ray Peers returned to the army, replaced by another detached military officer, his deputy, Lt. Col. Robert J. Delaney. Total CIA personnel on Taiwan at this time were estimated at six hundred. The long-standing animosity between DO elements expressed itself with the intel boys fearing the paramilitary specialists were getting in the way of collecting real information, and the knuckle-draggers scoffing at OSO concerns. But in the DO merger the Far East Division went to OSO—its boss Lloyd George became chief of the unified division. Dick Stilwell went back to the army.
The CIA established a North Asia Command to consolidate control over its various operations against the Chinese run from Japan, Korea, the offshore islands, and Thailand. By then Frank Wisner had created an international network including elements in Singapore and Burma, and on the Pacific island of Saipan, all serviced by CAT, with navy cooperation on sea transport. George went off to be deputy chief of the command under Adm. Leslie Stevens. They issued a plan to stand down the paramilitary effort in favor of intensified intelligence collection plus support to non-CIA Nationalist Chinese efforts. George Aurell took over the DO Far East Division.
Meanwhile separate programs to aid Manchurian guerrillas not loyal to Jiang continued under CIA. This operation, known as Tropic to Civil Air Transport pilots, used CAT crews flying out of Japan at night in unmarked C-47s. The Yale College class of 1951 was heavily recruited for the program, recalls John T. Downey, who joined the CIA after graduation. Assigned to set up resistance in Kirin province, Downey visited Saipan in 1952 to select a four-man unit, Team Wen, parachuted into Manchuria in July. That November 29, Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, with the CIA only five months, plus a CAT flight crew, were forced down in China while attempting to recover an agent sent to observe the team at work. The failure of this flight and capture of Downey and Fecteau by the Communists essentially brought a halt both to the Manchuria program and to many China operations. The CIA, extremely concerned that others might also be vulnerable to capture, renewed its strict instructions that American officers were not to participate in incursions. The two CIA men were eventually brought before the same Chinese show trial that judged the psywar B-29 crew captured months later. Downey remained imprisoned in China until 1973 and Fecteau until 1971.
Along the Chinese coast, arguments among CIA officers were very different. Rather than struggling over phasing out the paramilitary mission, the men at the front debated whether the raids ought to be small-scale or racheted up to major quasi-conventional operations. A new CIA detachment leader on Tachen, Robert H. Barrow, a Marine seconded to the agency, held out for the big missions. Subordinate Robert Dillon objected that Western Enterprises would be hard-pressed to supply the needed landing craft or artillery, and that Jiang Jieshi’s government had not shown the requisite determination. Dillon asserted that as a civilian he could understand both the military and political aspects—he intended to transfer to the Foreign Service and might one day be an ambassador.
“Yeah,” Major Barrow guffawed, “and I’m going to be commandant of the whole damn Marine Corps!”
In fact both men were right. Robert Barrow went on to become commandant of the Marine Corps. Dillon proved correct when the Nationalists mounted a really big raid and it flopped. By now Dwight Eisenhower had come to office and unleashed the Chinese Nationalists by ending the neutralization of the Taiwan Straits. The raid involved not only the guerrillas but every Nationalist armed service, coordinated by the “other” Nationalist spy service, the Continental Operations Department. Robert Barrow participated as Ed Hamilton supervised and Frank Holober watched for Western Enterprises chief Delaney. A paratroop drop and a guerrilla landing on Dongshan were supposed to drive the Chinese Communists into the arms of Nationalist regulars. Madame Jiang attended the dress briefing. In the actual operation the airdrop miscarried as a number of its planes were forced to abort due to mechanical failures. The amphibious landing by regular troops turned into a nightmare when the tide, supposed to be coming in, was not. Landing craft never got closer than a mile from the beach, leaving hapless invaders to wade or slog ashore through mud. The CIA guerrillas hit the beach in fairly good order but found the Communists responding much more rapidly than in the past and quickly marshaling forces to quash the landing. The Nationalists managed to withdraw and took some prisoners, but there was no victory. This landing was more akin to the Baltic or Albanian CIA failures than the heroic Normandy invasion.
Psychological warfare also remained active. Balloons carried by prevailing winds gave way to leaflet drops from aircraft. The experience of Colonel Arnold and his air force B-29 are but one example. Some flights were made by Civil Air Transport, others by the Nationalist air force. According to one account, in 1953 leaflet flights averaged thirty a month, and 300 million pieces of Nationalist or CIA propaganda were loosed over mainland China.
In accordance with the CIA reorganization plan, detachments on White Dog, Baiquan, and Xiamen progressively pulled back. Western Enterprises disappeared in 1953. Charles Johnston, the original “Pittsburgh Charlie” himself, came to close down the mission. Americans shifted to using cover with a new Naval Technical Training Center, a variant of the naval cover assignments that OSO officers had sported from the beginning of the program. Beijing, still concerned about bases on the offshore islands, launched a succession of international crises beginning in late 1954 at Mazu. A couple of months later U.S. warships and Nationalist craft evacuated more than six thousand troops and civilians from Mazu, among them the final CIA contingent. At Xiamen the People’s Liberation Army began an “Artillery War” that endured for years, the first of almost half a million cannon shells falling on the island, disrupting guerrilla bases at any hour. It became even more difficult to raid the China coast.
Training for the agency’s special missions remained a perennial concern. Both Chinese and Korean recruits went to a secret CIA base for advanced instruction. Located in the mid–Pacific Ocean, on the island of Saipan, the facility provided a secluded and secure location. Actually, by using the island, the United States violated international law, since Saipan was technically a United Nations dependency, part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, merely administered by the United States. When supervision of the trust went from military to civilian hands in 1951–1952, the navy successfully fought a Department of the Interior plan to place trust headquarters on Saipan, preserving CIA’s security.
The CIA used a military designation, Naval Technical Training Unit, for its cover. Cost of the base is estimated at $28 million. Recruits arrived by night, flown in on C-47 aircraft like those of Civil Air Transport. New arrivals were blindfolded on arrival, then driven to the base. But the CIA facility had been built on the highest mountain on the island, with surroundings plainly visible to the trainees. The standard of living and style of construction on the rest of the island bore little relation to the concrete barracks and tract houses of the CIA base, and there were periodic emergencies when the “Naval Technical Training Unit” had to be quickly sanitized and closed before visits of UN trusteeship commissioners. The estimate of Chinese recruits is imprecise—only some “hundreds” are cited. After training, the recruits returned to operating bases for their missions. These included commando raids, sabotage, and liaison with local anti-Communist resistance groups. John Downey’s choice of the team for his Manchuria mission is typical of the practice. Later in the decade the Saipan base would come in handy again in the CIA’s Tibetan covert operation. In 1960 the secret warriors considered using Saipan to train some of their Cuban exile fighters.
The United States continued hiding the Saipan base from public view, very probably due to the international legal violations inherent in its use. As late as 1967 the White House responded vapidly when a University of Illinois professor asked about CIA training on Saipan.
One of the largest CIA operations in China began in early February 1951. Known to Civil Air Transport as Project Paper, it was nothing less than an invasion by Nationalist guerrillas based in the Shan states of northern Burma. This paramilitary effort was carried out in the face of the Burmese government and created an unnecessary international controversy. It also led to organized Nationalist Chinese involvement in heroin traffic that continues to this day.
Project Paper relied upon Li Mi, another of Jiang Jieshi’s many generals. He escaped when his army disintegrated in battle and made his way in disguise to Yunnan province, where Li took command of the Nationalist Eighth Army at Kunming. During 1950 Li slowly retreated toward the border as the PLA approached.
About fifteen hundred of Li Mi’s troops withdrew into Indochina where the French disarmed the lot and interned them. But the French had an army there while Burma (now Myanmar) had few military forces, and those were fully occupied against revolting Keren tribesmen. Li Mi headed for Burma and easily crossed the border with more than two thousand men from the Nationalist 97th and 193rd Divisions. The general himself went to Hong Kong but soon rejoined his troops. In Burma the Chinese built a base camp, drafting Shan tribesmen for labor and to fill their ranks, and contacted local Chinese smugglers. Despite clashes with the Burmese army that forced a few hundred more Nationalists into French internment in Laos, before the close of 1950 Li almost doubled his strength. A World War II–vintage airstrip at Mong Hsat, refurbished by the Nationalists, became Li Mi’s new base, graced with a huge portrait of Jiang Jieshi, bamboo barracks, and a hilltop headquarters of imported wood and concrete. Within a year the Li Mi forces had almost doubled again.
Project Paper intended to reequip Li Mi’s band for a return to Yunnan. Civil Air Transport, using three planes to begin with, parachuted instructors and weapons to the Chinese in northern Burma. Soon CAT had a regular supply flow. Aircraft flew from a CAT detachment at Bangkok, with personnel shuttled from Taiwan and weapons from a CIA depot on Okinawa. Soon planes were landing at Mong Hsat. The whole operation was coordinated by Alfred Cox, OPC’s chief of station at Hong Kong, and Sherman B. Joost in Bangkok. The Burmese government learned of this support when its own intelligence officers, watching the Chinese, witnessed five of the supply drops.
The CIA ingeniously provided cover through a parallel project to train and equip paramilitary forces for Thailand. In Miami the CIA chartered a company just like WEI, the Overseas Southeast Asia Supply Company—Sea Supply as it was familiarly known—with a $38 million government contract to support the Thai. Its cable address, “Hachet,” gave commercial cover to CIA officers working with both the Thais and Chinese. Before the end of 1953 Sea Supply had two hundred employees, and about eighty more Americans in the embassy in Thailand worked overtly as advisers. By then almost five thousand Thai soldiers had been trained and equipped. Whatever happened to Li Mi, the Thai did very well from the bargain. Assistance to Li Mi and the existence of Sea Supply were open secrets in Bangkok. Sherman Joost, as a team leader with the OSS in Burma during the war, did not much mind the attention. It was a welcome change from the frustrations of Taiwan-based China operations, from which he had been reassigned to Paper.
Meanwhile Li Mi began calling his forces the Yunnan Province Anti-Communist National Salvation Army. A first invasion of Yunnan occurred in May 1951, in two columns with two thousand men, accompanied by CIA officers and regular supply drops. The Nationalists advanced a few dozen miles into Yunnan but were out again within a month. Li Mi’s column, defeated, retreated precipitately, while the second force, hearing this news, fell back as well. In July Li Mi sent subordinate Liu Kuo-chuan on a second incursion, which was driven off by local Communist Chinese units. This time the Communists needed just a week.
The failure should have occasioned a critical review of the Li Mi operation. Indeed Li returned to Taiwan for consultations with the Nationalist government, but the outcome was a decision to strengthen the effort. David M. Key, U.S. ambassador to Burma, reported from Rangoon that the Burmese knew of Americans in the area and of the use of U.S. equipment by the Nationalists. He concluded that “this adventure has cost us heavily in terms of Burmese goodwill and trust.” Nevertheless, at the CIA Richard Stilwell insisted that support to Li Mi had been insufficient. Ambassador Key resigned.
The CIA brought in a new logistics director, James A. Garrison, to manage the now substantial arms flow to Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma. American engineers were sent in to improve Mong Hsat airstrip. Then CAT began an even larger airlift no longer confined to parachute drops. Some seven hundred Nationalist troops from Taiwan reinforced Li Mi, whose strength by 1952 had grown to twelve thousand.
Open controversy erupted in late December 1951 when Beijing publicly charged the United States with ferrying Nationalist soldiers from Taiwan to Burma. The charges were repeated by Soviet diplomats in a United Nations political committee. The controversy bubbled despite several U.S. denials, including one by Secretary Dean Acheson, and a statement by an American UN delegate that the Nationalists had simply failed to honor their pledge to remove troops from Burma. The Burmese UN delegate agreed that Li Mi was receiving outside aid; Nationalist denials were countered by copies of actual orders from Jiang Jieshi to Li Mi that had been captured by the Burmese army. In the midst of the controversy, the New York Times reported on February 11, 1952, that witnesses had seen Li Mi’s soldiers brandishing brand-new American weapons. Two months later Burmese sources reported that Americans, including ex-military fliers, were the ones smuggling arms to Li Mi. The Burmese army broke up a seaborne shipment of more men and arms to the Nationalists but could never discover whether this had been a Jiang Jieshi or a CIA maneuver. In 1952 the government declared martial law for northern Burma and opened large-scale military operations against the Nationalists.
Still, the United States persisted in its denials. To lessen the visibility of the issue, Jiang asked Li Mi to return to Taiwan. To explain the Nationalists’ arms, reports were leaked that Li Mi’s men had sold opium to finance their activities. It is not clear whether the United States at this stage encouraged the drug trafficking to preserve cover for the CIA operation, but Chinese sales of drugs from Burma have been an important source of cash ever since and a pernicious practice that cost America far more than it gained from any Nationalist military activities.
No matter how threadbare the cover story, denials continued. The true facts were so closely held within CIA that the agency’s analysis branch was not told of them. Nor, by and large, was the State Department. The U.S. ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, received CIA assurances that there was no American aid to Li Mi. As Asian governments increasingly refused to accept these claims, Bowles was reduced to arguing that no American administration could afford to halt the arms flow during an election year for fear of being accused of coddling communism. Meanwhile when several white men with the Li Mi troops were killed in battle with the Burmese army, their bodies yielded diaries and notebooks with home addresses in Washington and New York City.
Passing through Washington en route to his new assignment as ambassador in Rangoon, the diplomat William J. Sebald received similar assurances that Li Mi was receiving no U.S. aid. When Sebald attempted to repeat the disclaimer at a diplomatic reception, Burmese army chief of staff Ne Win replied, “Mr. Ambassador, I have it cold. If I were you, I’d just keep quiet.”
In the summer of 1952 Li Mi returned to Burma to lead a second invasion of Yunnan. That August 2,100 Nationalists marched 60 miles into China before being driven out. This became the last of the remarkably inept invasions. Instead the Nationalists turned against the Burmese government. Li Mi guarded his Burma base with more troops than he used in his Yunnan incursions. Now he forged links with anti-government Keren tribesmen and even the Burmese Communist Party. In the fall of 1952 Li crossed the Salween River in a major offensive against the Burmese army. His drug trafficking soared.
Not only would Li Mi be ineffective, his ventures led to the ruin of U.S. relations with Burma for most of the decade. Whereas in 1952 the Burmese refused to demand a UN investigation, believing that neither superpower would accept its conclusions, the next year Rangoon tabled a resolution branding the Chinese presence an act of aggression. When the United States opposed the motion, Prime Minister U Nu unilaterally terminated all American aid programs in his country. The Nationalists hardly disguised their connection to the Li Mi forces—in 1955 Jiang Jieshi sent his former commander of forces on Mazu Island to Burma as Li Mi’s deputy.
The Li Mi operation had been dear to some CIA officers, a special favorite of Desmond FitzGerald, deputy chief of OPC’s Far East Division. When Stilwell returned to the army, FitzGerald soldiered on under his replacement, Lloyd George. With the OSO-OPC merger and creation of the Directorate for Operations, George Aurell succeeded to the top job at the Far East Division. He left the decisions mostly to “Des.” Subordinates felt that Aurell avoided going out on a limb while his deputy, like Frank Wisner, sparked an idea a minute. Educated at private schools and Harvard College—at Groton he had been a classmate of Tracy Barnes—the forty-two-year-old FitzGerald often served as a conduit for project proposals. He pursued Cold War confrontation with romantic fervor, preventing cancellation of Project Paper following Li Mi’s 1951 debacle. A year later, with nothing to show but failure, plus an international uproar over the intervention, FitzGerald had little alternative but to acquiesce in dismantling the activity, a headache for FE/4, the branch of Far East Division that handled both Burma and Thailand.
This evaluation of the Li Mi operation was given to Chester Bowles by an Indonesian cabinet minister in April 1953:
What could be more ridiculous than to allow American arms to be used to build up the power of a renegade group totally incapable of inflicting any damage on the Communist Chinese, but fully capable of thwarting the democratic Burman government’s effort to crush her own communist rebellion and bring order to a troubled nation?
Six years later, in May 1959, intelligence officers would tell a U.S. president that the Chinese Nationalists in Burma caused “nothing but difficulty.” They embarrassed a government that Washington by then considered more favorably, and gave the Chinese Communists a pretext for intervention in Burma. “In short,” according to the synopsis furnished to President Eisenhower, “they make trouble for our friends but do not have sufficient capability to even tie down significant ChiCom forces.”
William J. Donovan, wartime chief of OSS and Eisenhower’s appointment in 1953 as ambassador to Thailand, oversaw the attempt to clean up the Li Mi mess. This repatriation of Chinese Nationalists from northern Burma came at the express wish of the Burmese government. Li Mi returned to Taiwan in October 1952, but his soldiers stayed. A four-power conference in Bangkok among Burma, Thailand, Nationalist China, and the United States agreed to remove them. This led to Operation Repat, a Civil Air Transport airlift of Chinese who crossed from northern Burma to Thailand and were then flown to Taiwan.
An initial group of 50 Nationalist soldiers entered Thailand on November 8, 1953, with no weapons but bearing a seven-foot portrait of Jiang Jieshi. Flights began the next day; CAT used C-46 aircraft with extra fuel tanks flying at maximum range. In an initial phase almost 2,000 troops and several hundred dependents reached Taiwan. In the second phase, February–March 1954, another 3,000 Nationalists with 500 dependents departed. People flown out later brought the total to about 5,600 soldiers and more than a thousand dependents. Each one cost the United States $128 paid to a CIA proprietary.
Something of a farce, Repat included evacuees who were Shan and Lahu tribesmen, not Chinese, and dependents swelled the numbers without ameliorating Burma’s security problem. In addition, the many troops brought out many fewer weapons—a thousand rifles, sixty-nine machine guns, and twenty-two mortars—some of them antique pieces, not the modern arms the CIA had given Li Mi. Numerous evacuees contrived to return to Burma. The Nationalists maintained forces in Burma no longer under CIA control. These later grew to as many as twelve thousand and continued their drug trafficking right into the 1980s.
Significant changes now occurred in the Taiwan Straits. The Seventh Fleet had had orders to bar the straits to forces of both sides. Eisenhower changed the order to block only Beijing, freeing Jiang to attack the mainland. In early 1953 the United States gave the Nationalists their first jet aircraft (F-84 fighters) and sanctioned an expansion of the Nationalist Marine Corps to three brigades, tripling Jiang’s amphibious force.
In connection with the jet deal the Nationalists agreed not to use their American weapons, particularly aircraft, on offensive missions without first consulting with the United States. But Jiang sought no approval several months later, in July 1953, when he committed the planes to support a Nationalist raiding force. Jiang’s chief of staff apologized, claiming dire emergency: the raiders were being driven into the sea and needed to buy time for an orderly withdrawal. The Nationalists promised it would not happen again, but in June 1954 Jiang’s navy used its American-supplied destroyers to seize a Soviet tanker on the high seas between Luzon and Formosa. The Eisenhower administration assumed a posture of studied neutrality.
Overall, apart from its creation of a support network, the CIA’s paramilitary campaign against China produced paltry results. There had been some military impact in Korea, though this was limited because the large partisan units materialized only after the most active, mobile phase of the war. Agency operations in Manchuria and Yunnan were almost totally ineffective. Moreover they prompted stringent Communist security measures, so may even have impeded the CIA’s developing intelligence sources in China. As in the Burma project, some CIA efforts proved positively detrimental to larger U.S. foreign policy interests, and those along the China coast contributed to the inception of the series of crises in the Taiwan Straits that repeatedly brought America near war with China during the 1950s. Covert action irritated the Chinese without producing any American advantage in the Cold War.
Among the important covert operations of the period in Asia is one that combined political action with psychological warfare and limited military involvement to defeat an armed resistance and put a pro–United States leader in power. This took place in the Philippines. Again the initiative would be antithetical to stated U.S. principles in support of democracy.
The Philippines became independent at the end of 1946. At the time there were a number of partisan groups that had actively fought Japanese occupiers with U.S. help during World War II. One, the Hukbalahap (called Huks), an amalgam of peasant-based groups and Filipino Communists, formed a National Peasants Union and then a coalition group, the Democratic Alliance, to contest the 1946 elections. There the Alliance won all the congressional seats for key parts of the island of Luzon, but President Manuel Roxas alleged fraud and refused to seat the delegates. The Huks resumed fighting under wartime leader Luis Taruc. In 1947 the United States signed a military base agreement with the new Republic of the Philippines, providing for naval and air bases in exchange for U.S. foreign aid and military assistance. Military advisers naturally were concerned about the Huk uprising and spent much time and effort to bring the Philippine army a victory over the guerrillas. The government called its strategy the “mailed fist.” This approach did little to defuse the resistance. Newly elevated president Elpidio Quirino (formerly the vice president) enticed the Huks into negotiations in 1948, but these proved abortive.
Enter the CIA. The agency had a station in Manila, of course, and a base at Subic Bay, which had become a major U.S. Navy installation. The OPC station chief, a detailee from the air force, Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, had a natural affinity for political psychological warfare. He became the darling of psywar experts. The major’s background had been in advertising—product lines like soft drinks and blue jeans—and he had lived in Hollywood, attending UCLA. Lansdale had served with the OSS, returned to the army, and transferred to the air force. In the Philippines the forty-three-year-old psywar whiz found a perfect vehicle in Ramon Magsaysay, the Filipino defense minister appointed by Quirino in the summer of 1950.
Magsaysay, a Filipino congressman and wartime guerrilla fighter who came from a poor part of Luzon, had a more evolved view of the resistance. He began a land redistribution program financed through a government corporation to wean the peasants away from the Huks. Magsaysay also benefited from internal fissures in the rebellion—a split between Taruc and the Philippine Communists, many of whose top leaders had been captured in Manila police raids. Lansdale began promoting Magsaysay using all the resources of the Wisner Wurlitzer, eventually making the Filipino a larger-than-life figure.
In the conflict Lansdale added psywar to the standard military protection measures. He used massive sound amplifiers on airplanes to saturate Huk areas with prerecorded messages or simply noise that capitalized on peasant superstitions to instill fear. The land program was adapted to encourage defections from the Huks. The CIA also installed a New York political operator, Gabe Kaplan, to create a movement to influence voting, beginning with the Philippine congressional elections of 1951. Lansdale engineered a supposedly grassroots movement to draft Magsaysay for the presidential election. George Aurell worried about the CIA’s growing involvement in nation-building, but Des FitzGerald forged ahead with gusto. Ramon Magsaysay won the 1953 elections, but that proved only the beginning. The CIA remained a player in Filipino elections through the rest of the decade. Magsaysay died in a plane crash four years later, and by the time of the 1957 election George Aurell had become station chief in Manila. The CIA could not decide who to support in that contest. John Richardson replaced Aurell in time for the next congressional elections, and this time there were CIA favorites.
Manila became an important agency base for Far East operations, particularly its China Mission, which transferred there from Japan in 1955. Led by Desmond FitzGerald, who had desperately wanted a field assignment, the mission purported to be a theater command for actions aimed at Beijing. It never succeeded. The barons at headquarters disliked having anyone come between them and their station chiefs, while the latter wanted to operate, not deal with some supernumerary, and they wanted to go to the highest level at headquarters, which meant the Far East Division chief. The China mission became moribund, much as had the Psychological Strategy Board. FitzGerald finally returned to Washington, succeeding Tracy Barnes as head of the DO’s Political/Paramilitary Staff, slightly reorganized after Guatemala.
Meanwhile the Huk rebellion sputtered on but came close to disappearing. By 1954 almost ten thousand persons had died, half that number were prisoners, and a couple of thousand more were wounded. An almost equal number had been induced to give up by land offers and other measures. Luis Taruc himself surrendered in May 1954, about the same time Edward Lansdale was promoted for his work in the Philippines. But no grass grew under Lansdale’s feet. He had already moved on to a new secret war.
Vietnam became another theater for the CIA. Known as French Indochina, after World War II the countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were caught up in revolution. France had ruled them as a colony from the late nineteenth century, but independence movements steadily evolved, and with the end of the war they openly opposed the restoration of French colonial rule. In Vietnam the Communist party’s Viet Minh front formed a government in August 1945 and issued a declaration of independence remarkably similar to that of the Americans in 1776. Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh sent letters to President Truman soliciting aid for his fledgling reach toward nationhood. Americans of the OSS and other military intelligence units briefly worked in Indochina then, and these Americans had high expectations for Vietnamese self-government. The Viet Minh ran the country for seventeen months before French armies and the Vietnamese began warring over the new Vietnam. France proved quite successful at painting the Viet Minh as little more than satraps of monolithic Russian communism while the United States also worried about the weakness of France in the post-1945 world. The result was that when U.S. involvement in the Far East burgeoned, French Indochina became one scene of the action. What seemed to some as new American initiatives in the Cold War inevitably appeared to others as U.S. support of French colonialism—the opposite of slogans about democracy and self-determination.
The Central Intelligence Agency first sent people to Vietnam as part of the U.S. legation that opened in Saigon in the summer of 1950. Two years later the agency’s presence expanded to northern Vietnam, with an officer heading a base in Hanoi. Jurisdiction fell to the same branch of the Far East Division that handled Li Mi in Burma. In mid-1951 Truman approved a policy for cooperating with friendly governments in operations against guerrillas, the kind of warfare central to the Indochina conflict. About that time the agency suggested to the French commander-in-chief that he form partisan units behind Viet Minh lines, following much the same formula the CIA had applied in Korea. The French were not enthusiastic. The issue came up again in mid-1952 when the French applied for more aid to create Vietnamese light infantry battalions. French generals continued to resist the CIA proposals; more precisely, the French created a mixed airborne commando force unilaterally, with no U.S. participation.
A widening U.S. paramilitary effort began with secret discussions in 1953. Strapped for money and facing the escalating cost of their war, the French asked for additional military aid, including for “special warfare,” and the new Eisenhower administration agreed. Ike’s condition was that the French agree to U.S. help on secret warfare. Ed Lansdale participated in the military group that surveyed Vietnam in the course of these deliberations. The French ran the partisan units behind enemy lines in the north. In the south there were two religious movements or “sects,” the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, and also a band of river pirates, the Binh Xuyen, private armies financed by French intelligence. There is evidence that the French, in briefing a senior CIA officer about their activities in Saigon in December 1953, offered the CIA a role in control over these forces in return for additional aid money. The briefing was repeated for another CIA official in March 1954, but the offer was rejected. Nevertheless there were Saigon rumors of American contacts with the private armies, especially after late 1953, when two women connected with the U.S. embassy were found dead in a jeep on a rubber plantation close to Cao Dai headquarters. In another incident, also hushed up for diplomatic reasons, a consul at the embassy, stopped for an identity check at a bridge, was found to have plastic explosives in his car trunk. But Joe Smith, a young Far East Division officer, believes that Saigon station agents refused to contact the religious minorities because they were Catholics and considered the groups blasphemous.
American special warfare experts were also active in northern Vietnam. In the north the French had about ten thousand partisans in nineteen separate bands. This increase over previous levels was encouraged by the Americans. Beginning in December 1953 two U.S. Army officers were permanently assigned to the French special warfare command to handle requests for equipment. Obscurely titled Detachment P of the 8533rd Army Attaché Unit (Special Foreign Assignment), another U.S. covert office appeared in Hanoi to furnish combat intelligence for the partisan operations. Maj. Roger Trinquier, the French commander, visited Korea to observe American-organized partisan activities there. By February 15, 1954, the American ambassador to Vietnam was reporting that “we are already making [a] contribution to increased French practice of ‘unconventional warfare.’ ”
President Eisenhower was not satisfied with the progress. In a June 1954 letter to friend and fellow general Alfred M. Gruenther, then serving in France with NATO, Ike complained that the French had rebuffed most American offers of the kind “that would tend to keep our participation in the background, but could nevertheless be very effective. I refer to our efforts to get a good guerrilla organization going in the region.”
Early agency involvement included Civil Air Transport as well. The CAT action flowed from the military aid program, which loaned the French some C-119 “Flying Boxcar” transports. Twenty-one CAT pilots familiarized themselves with the C-119 at the air force base at Ashiya, Japan. The whole class went to Indochina, where they actually outnumbered the French crews given C-119 orientation at Clark Air Force Base. The CAT people brought everything they needed, down to their own refrigerator and supply of bottled beer. The first CAT flight in Indochina was a supply lift to an entrenched camp in Laos on May 6, 1953. Within the year a gaggle of two dozen CAT pilots would be caught up in the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu. The CAT crews performed combat missions while a full squadron of U.S. Air Force C-119s—its pilots often moonlighting with CAT—flew ostensibly less dangerous flights to support the French. The air force people, housed at a hotel in Haiphong, got help from the CIA base chief in Hanoi. For a time their messages moved on CIA radio circuits. At least one of the air force pilots, Allen Pope, resigned to join CAT, which paid a lot more for essentially the same work.
Beginning in late 1953 the French tried to break the Viet Minh by tempting them to attack a strong mountain camp at Dien Bien Phu. Squaw II became CAT’s name for its Dien Bien Phu airlift (Squaw I having been the Laotian mission in the spring). In all the CIA proprietary flew 684 times to the mountain camp. Chief pilot Paul R. Holden was wounded by anti-aircraft fire on his fifth mission. The top flier was A. L. Judkins with 64 flights, next was Steve A. Kusak with 59. Pilots recall the flak over Dien Bien Phu as being as heavy as anything they encountered in World War II. Kusak himself was flying a mission alongside James B. McGovern on May 6, 1954, when McGovern was shot down in his C-119. Nicknamed “Earthquake Mc-Goon” after a popular comic strip character, McGovern died just hours before the final collapse of the French at Dien Bien Phu, one year to the day after CAT had first flown in Indochina. McGovern’s body and other artifacts were discovered in 2002 at a crash site in Laos, almost five decades after his plane went down, by Americans searching for those still missing in action from the U.S. war in Vietnam.
At one point in the Dien Bien Phu crisis the French asked Washington for the loan of some B-29 bombers. The United States discussed encouraging the French to add an air component to their Foreign Legion, which could be given B-29s, and which American crews could then be encouraged to join. But the option was impractical given the immediacy of the crisis.
The Eisenhower administration was nevertheless so impressed with CAT performance that it considered creating an entity to fly combat aircraft and help the French. At the request of the NSC Operations Coordinating Board, the staff of Gen. Graves B. Erskine, assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations, prepared a plan. The concept provided for an International Volunteer Air Group (IVAG) that could be “sponsored” by France or some Asian government. The unit would have several squadrons of F-86 jet fighters, and there was talk of giving it B-29s as well. Only eight months would be necessary to set up IVAG, officials were told, at an initial cost of $130 million and an annual operating cost of $200 million.
Although first discussed in the context of Indochina, IVAG could possibly have had much wider covert applications, and this potential was clearly perceived by the Pentagon special warfare planners: “such a unit will always be useful as a ready striking force in the event of renewed aggression in any part of the Far East. Without it no air striking force exists which can be employed on short notice in circumstances where it is undesirable to employ official U.S. air power.” In the event of a declared war the IVAG could be “officially inducted into the U.S. Air Force as an additional wing,” a clear allusion to Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers.
Pentagon planners believed that “creation of an IVAG is consonant with and within the framework of U.S. national policy” but felt the project required “NSC affirmation” and an opinion from the attorney general that confirmed the legality of enlistment by U.S. civilian and military volunteers.
The original plan called for creation of the unit before the end of the 1954 rainy season in Indochina, but the National Security Council made no decision. The United States considered a private firm, Aviation International Limited, to recruit American aircraft mechanics to assist the French air force in Indochina, but used military personnel over the short term. The first Indochina war ended soon after.
The OCB recommendation to form an International Volunteer Air Group was nevertheless taken up that summer. The NSC approved it on August 18, 1954. Although the end of the Indochina war briefly shelved the IVAG plan, it became the responsibility of the CIA with the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations. Proponents of a “foreign legion” air force were never able to work out the problems of cover or basing, however, and these finally scuttled the plan. Nevertheless this exercise established an NSC-approved role for the kind of covert air force the CIA had just utilized in Guatemala and would again resort to in the Far East.
French defeat at Dien Bien Phu led to a negotiated settlement at Geneva which provided for a temporary division of Vietnam into two “regroupment zones” which became known, respectively, as North and South Vietnam. The partisans in the North ended up being taken over by the CIA after all. In June 1954 an agency special unit, ten men under Col. Edward G. Lansdale, arrived under cover as the “Saigon Military Mission.” They worked independently of John Anderton’s Saigon station. Geneva provided for a two-year hiatus after which elections were to be held to reunify the nation. Lansdale’s mission, specifically for operations, had that much time to prepare the ground.
Lucien Conein, the mission’s deputy for the North, took on the partisans. He managed to smuggle a few shipments of weapons and explosives into North Vietnam under cover of the French withdrawal, and carried out some psywar actions, but he had no capability for long-term support. By 1956 the last of Conein’s projects had failed.
The secret warriors were more successful in South Vietnam. There Lansdale established a close friendship with the politician Ngo Dinh Diem. When President Eisenhower sent a new U.S. envoy to Saigon in late 1954, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, he received a briefing from Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, and Pearre Cabell advising him to make full use of Lansdale in the struggle for power in the South. Later Allen Dulles secretly visited Saigon and was squired about town by Lansdale, reminding him of the excitement of wartime Switzerland. Beginning in January 1955 the CIA stopped giving the French cash to pay for the political-religious sect armies. Instead Lansdale funneled the money to Diem, who took over the sects and made them his first power base. The tab amounted to tens of thousands of dollars a month and increased steadily. Several additional CIA subsidies went directly to Diem’s palace contingency fund, used to pay off politicians and for similar purposes. A visiting agency officer saw so much cash passing through the station he told a colleague in Singapore that this kind of money in Malaya could have ended the entire Communist movement simply by handing every ethnic Chinese radical a first-class airline ticket to China.
Diem consolidated his power in Saigon by neutralizing first the pro-French army, then the powerful sects. Lansdale stood with him every step of the way, privately visiting sect leaders, enlisting them in key coups, carrying Diem’s messages and money, and contriving stumbling blocks to obstruct French maneuvers. Lansdale advised Diem, often daily. But the Saigon leader failed to deliver on promises of political reforms he made to the Americans. Eisenhower’s envoy and friend, General Collins, finally decided to end U.S. support, at which point Lansdale used a CIA back channel to alert his bosses. In Washington, Allen and Foster Dulles conspired to undercut the Collins policy. It was Collins, not Lansdale, who would be replaced. Lansdale also convinced Diem to claim nation status for the southern regroupment zone. In October 1955 Lansdale was awarded the National Security Medal, as Kim Roosevelt had been before him.
The Geneva settlement provided for all-Vietnam elections in July 1956, which Eisenhower feared would reunify the country under North Vietnamese leadership. The administration encouraged South Vietnam to reject the elections. While Diem thus cast the die for a second Indochina war—in which both special warfare and the CIA would play a large part—the United States saw its new Southeast Asian ally in Cold War terms. Thus American planners designed the South Vietnamese army against a conventional military threat. The basic strategy embodied in U.S. 1955 war plans set the CIA to retard an enemy advance through Laos while the U.S. Pacific Fleet made coastal raids with special warfare units to harry a Communist advance down from North Vietnam. But when war returned to Vietnam it took the form of an internal uprising against Ngo Dinh Diem. The Americans prepared themselves and the South Vietnamese for the wrong threat. All this was of a piece with the evolution of the CIA’s secret wars in Asia, which grew far beyond the Korean conflict. True to expectations, Dwight Eisenhower greatly expanded the playing field. Covert operations in East Asia proceeded with exuberance, an exuberance matched elsewhere by the Central Intelligence Agency.
* Since the era of these covert operations, China has changed its written language. The new rendering, called pinyin, is intended to be more phonetic than the traditional. In a historical account such as this, however, the new system can generate confusion. In general this narrative will render place names, with which readers may be familiar, in the modern form while retaining the traditional rendering for historical figures, with the exceptions of the major figures well known to history. Thus Mao Tse-tung will be Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek will be Jiang Jieshi, Peking will be Beijing, and Fukien appears as Fujian—but Li Tsung-jen remains in the traditional form.