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.