by Ted Gup
But neither U.N. recognition nor U.S. trade was of great interest to Mao. One month after the Washington meeting, China’s Nationalist president, Chiang Kai-shek, resigned. The next day Communist forces took Beijing. On May 25 the Communists took Shanghai. Director Hillenkoetter was correct in only one regard. Six months after the meeting, there was no mistaking Mao’s intentions—he had taken it all.
On the evening of February 12, 1949, Mackiernan sat down with his old Remington portable, slipped a page of white paper in the cylinder, and typed the words “My Darling baby.” It was a letter to Pegge and it was one of the few letters that would reach her. The others, Mackiernan surmised, were either intercepted or censored in their entirety. Only two of her letters had reached him in Tihwa in the three months since she and the twins had been forced to evacuate China and return stateside.
In the letter Mackiernan spoke of what he called the “rather peculiar” political situation around him: the Chinese and the Soviets were growing closer, trade between the two was expanding markedly, Chinese newspapers had taken a decidedly anti-American tilt, the staff at the Soviet consulate was increasing, and Soviet influence in the region was spreading.
“To counter this,” he noted, “there is the rumor that the Moslems of Sinkiang, Kansu, Chinghai and Ninghsia are joining forces to prevent the spread of Communism into the NW [Northwest] . . . My personal opinion is that the Sovs will continue strong in Sinkiang, and that the Moslems will form a sort of anti-Communist island in Kansu, Chinghai, and Ninghsia . . . In the event of a Tungkan (Moslem rebellion) life would be rather difficult.”
What Mackiernan did not and could not reveal in the letter was that he was more than a passive observer of the events that he described, and that a key part of his mission was to embolden and advise the very resistance about which he had just speculated in such detached terms.
By then, Tihwa was so isolated that the only route for supplies was by water to Chungking, and then by truck to Tihwa, a three-month odyssey. And even the water route was now closed till May due to drought. None of this deterred Mackiernan from inviting his wife and twins to join him. “As far as food for the infants is concerned,” he wrote, “I am convinced you can get everything you need here. Sugar, milk, oatmeal (Quaker Oats in sealed tins), vegetables are all plentiful and cheap . . .”
“So to sum it all up I am planning to try to get you all up here in March or April, provided of course that the Dept. will permit it . . .” Mackiernan asked Pegge to ready herself and the twins so that if China’s airline resumed a regular flight to Tihwa they would be prepared to leave at once. But while the invitation seemed earnest enough, there was also a sense that it was Mackiernan’s way of coping with the separation and of marking time. Mackiernan had already sacrificed one marriage and the pleasures of fatherhood to his work during the war. In six years of marriage he could have counted the time together in months, not years. Now again he faced the possibility of an interminable separation from the woman and the children he had only just begun to know.
Threading its way through his letter were unspoken anxieties about the deteriorating situation in China. If it became necessary to leave Tihwa, he said, the only route would be to India. That would be a tortuous journey. Mackiernan asked Pegge to send him through the diplomatic pouch two books, the “ ‘List of Stars for the 60 deg. Astrolabe,’ by W. Arnold (the big brown book) and the 1949 and if possible the 1950 American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac.” Both tomes would be of service should he be forced to plot a route of escape using the stars as navigational reference points. Mackiernan also noted that a new jeep was slowly making its way by truck from Chungking. Within a month or so it would arrive in Tihwa, still in its crate. This could provide him with a means of escape.
“So much for business,” he wrote. “How are you now and how are Mike and Mary . . . I’ll bet I wouldn’t recognize them now. Give them both a kiss from me and tell them they will be up here soon.” Mackiernan asked for a recent picture of the twins. The only one he had was of himself cradling son Mike as a newborn.
Mackiernan could be playful, self-effacing, and romantic. “I am sporting a beautiful (to me only probably) curly black beard and as soon as I get my photo stuff set up will send a picture of me in my hirsute glory,” he wrote. “Have sworn a great swear not to shave it off till you arrive, so hurry before I have to braid the thing (like a Sikh).”
“Well honey bunch,” the letter went on, “I will close this down now since they are sealing the pouch. Remember that I love you my darling, and only you, and that I want you up here close to me as soon as possible. Keep writing and soon we will be together again. Give my love and kisses to Mike and Mary, and all my love for you darling sweetheart. Good night for now, darling . . . All my love—Doug.”
Two months later, on April 13, 1949, Mackiernan formally asked the State Department to grant his wife and twins permission to join him in Tihwa. Two weeks later came the reply: “Regrets conditions China make impossible authorization Mackiernans family proceed Tihwa this time.” A month later, undeterred, Mackiernan informed his wife of the bad news but offered up an alternative plan: “Peggy return through China out. Trying India. No mail service now. Love, Doug!”
At her end, Pegge was trying to persuade the State Department to allow her to return to China. On June 8, 1949, she wrote Walton Butterworth, director for Far Eastern Affairs: “My husband, vice-consul at Tihwa, Sinkiang, has written me an urgent letter to make every effort to return to China, if need be through India . . . Doug and I are parents of twin infants. I would intend to take them with me . . . I realize the undertaking at first consideration seems quite complicated. Offsetting this is my own personal knowledge of Sinkiang, the Russian language, the problems presented—and the fact that my husband has just begun his tour in China. It is worth all the difficulties and hardships to keep our family together . . .”
Two weeks later, on June 21, 1949, Pegge sent a cable through the State Department’s Division of Foreign Service Personnel: “Please cable my husband following: PAA [Pan American Airlines] Calcutta every Saturday planning arrival when you can meet us impossible navigate alone advise supplies love Pegge.” But the State Department refused to send the cable: “I regret that it is my unpleasant duty to inform you that the Department cannot at this time approve of your proceeding to Tihwa with your twin infants.”
Desperate to see her husband, Pegge turned to the influential Clare Boothe Luce, whom she had come to know during her days as a reporter. She asked if Luce might intervene on her behalf and have her husband reassigned to a less perilous environment. On July 7, 1949, Luce wrote back: “I cannot possibly promise to get your husband moved to a consulate a little more accessible to a mother and twins than Chinese Turkestan—but I just might be able to get him transferred to a spot as wild and woolly but a little more on the flat for an approaching caravan with cradles!”
Luce acknowledged that as a Republican during a Democratic administration, her influence was limited. “My bridges, tho’ not burned, are badly bent!” she wrote. The letter closed, “With a sound buss for Mike and Maryrose [the twins], Cordially Clare Boothe Luce.” But nothing more came of Luce’s offer.
Two weeks after the Luce letter arrived, on July 24, 1949, the minister-counselor of embassy in China sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dean Acheson acknowledging that it was wise to close the embassies in China. But Tihwa, he suggested, should remain open. “It seems to me Tihwa, properly staffed, could be most valuable listening post and should be retained as long as possible. Withdrawal should always be possible by some route other than China.”
Four days later the ambassador to China disagreed and recommended the immediate evacuation of Tihwa’s personnel. The country’s collapse was certain. “Tihwa even more isolated and bloody history of Sinkiang counsels that staff be removed before breakdown of law and order become imminent. Difficulty obtaining Soviet visa makes unlikely exit via USSR in event emergency, leaving only difficult mountain
route to India or Afghanistan.” On July 29 Secretary of State Acheson ordered the Tihwa embassy closed, its staff to leave “as rapidly as possible . . . while safe exit remains.”
Bits and pieces of news were seeping out of China, all of it worrisome to Pegge Mackiernan. On August 23 she sent a telegram to the State Department: “Can you confirm NY Trib article Tihwa consulate closing and my husband coming out extremely anxious for news please telegraph collect.” The next day the State Department responded that the consulate was closed but that her husband was staying behind to dispose of U.S. property.
The next morning Mackiernan sent a telegram to Acheson informing him that the consulate had been closed to the public and that all employees had been discharged. In his haste to depart, Tihwa’s consul, John Hall Paxton, had left everything behind. Mackiernan told Acheson he would “destroy archives, cryptographic material and motion picture films.” The only thing he would spare was a radio and enough OTPs, “one-time pads,” to communicate with Washington.
The one-time pads were notebooks that provided a system of encryption that could be used only one time for each message. The code was known only to the recipient of the message who possessed the corresponding pad and code. OTPs were standard issue in the diplomatic corps as well as in the ranks of the CIA’s clandestine service.
The situation deteriorated rapidly. On the morning of August 31, 1949, Mackiernan sent a telegram to Acheson reporting that many of the potential overland escape routes from Tihwa were now closed due to banditry. Corridor cities, he reported, were crowded with refugees. Food was scarce. White Russians and Chinese officials were fleeing. One hour later Mackiernan sent a second telegram: “Situation Sinkiang very grave.” Resistance to the Communist troops, he predicted, would crumble. There would be no meaningful opposition.
While Mackiernan worked feverishly to destroy sensitive documents and to plan his own escape from Tihwa, Washington’s eyes were focused elsewhere—on the Soviet Union. At 10:36 A.M. on September 23, 1949, White House reporters were summoned by Truman’s press secretary and handed a brief statement from the president: “We have evidence,” it said, “that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” American B-29s taking high-altitude air samples had confirmed that the Soviets had detonated a nuclear device at its Semipalatinsk testing facility. So began the arms race, as a generation of American and Soviet war planners dedicated their lives to preparing for what each government unconvincingly called “the unthinkable.”
For the CIA, the Soviet bomb was a stinging rebuke to its intelligence apparatus. Just three days before Truman’s chilling announcement, the Agency had provided a top secret memorandum in which it estimated that the Soviets would be in no position to detonate such a device before mid-1950. Agency experts had predicted “the most probable date is mid-1953.” President Truman’s confidence in CIA estimates had to have been rattled.
Two days after Truman’s announcement, on the morning of September 25, Mackiernan sent a telegram notifying the State Department that the provincial government of Xinjiang had accepted the authority of the Chinese Communist government in Beijing. It was to be Mackiernan’s last official telegram from Tihwa.
Two days later, on September 27, Communist soldiers seized Tihwa and posted sentries at each of its four gates, watching all who attempted to enter or leave. Schoolchildren chanted “Long live Mao Zedong!”
That evening Mackiernan prepared to flee. It was a perfect night— dark and moonless. At his house he and Vassily gathered classified papers and carried them to the small detached summer kitchen, tossing them by the armful into the fireplace. Vassily put a match to them. Then came the packing: ammunition, a radio to communicate with Washington, stacks of one-time pads, his Leica camera, army air force maps of the region, a compass, an aneroid barometer, and a sheath of personal documents containing, among other papers, his divorce decree and photos of the twins.
He also packed several kilos of gold bullion with which to barter for whatever might be needed along the way. Then, as now, gold was sometimes provided to CIA officers facing unknown perils in the field.
Mackiernan also packed two machine guns, several army sleeping bags, and a large tent. From his bedroom he removed a radio with keys for transmitting and receiving encrypted messages sent in Morse code.
Virtually everything in Mackiernan’s sparsely furnished residence pertained to his tradecraft as a spy. In addition to his Leica camera he had a Minox miniature camera, chemicals needed to develop and print film, binoculars, a portable Geiger counter, a shortwave radio, and a cowhide briefcase with a lock. His bookshelves were lined with dozens of specialized books, many of them purchased in the famous Vetch Book Shop in Beijing. Among the titles: Old Routes of W. Iran, The Thousand Buddhas, Innermost Asia (four volumes with maps), Peking to Lhasa, and Peaks and Plains of Central Asia.
Mackiernan had gone over the escape plan with his tiny band of men. There was Frank Bessac, a twenty-eight-year-old Fulbright scholar and former paratrooper who had wandered into Tihwa only weeks earlier. A prodigious reader, Bessac was nearly blind without his glasses. And there were the three White Russians who had worked with the U.S. consulate: in addition to Vassily Zvonzov were Stephani Yanuishkin, thirty, and Leonid Shutov, twenty. From Wussman Bator, the Kazakh leader and resistance fighter, Mackiernan had purchased twenty-two horses and provisions to last several months. One of Wussman’s men was to meet Mackiernan east of Tihwa and lead them overland to a place where they might be safe before beginning the arduous—some would say impossible—trek to India over the Himalayas.
Mackiernan had his .30-caliber revolver in a holster on his belt. Over his shoulder he slung a carbine. Shortly before midnight, he and Bessac drove through the main gate in a battered jeep. Exiting the city was not the problem—exiting the country was. Meanwhile, Zvonzov and his two companions, who knew that they would be executed for their anti-Communist activities if they were caught, scaled the city walls under cover of night and lowered themselves by rope to the other side. Three hundred kilometers away they rendezvoused with Mackiernan, Wussman Bator, and Wussman’s “Kazakh Hordes,” as Mackiernan would write in his log that would carry a stamp of “Top Secret.” So began a two-week trek eastward to Lake Barkol, closer to the Mongolian border.
Fifteen miles east of Tihwa, Mackiernan stopped the caravan just long enough to bury two of the embassy’s radios, rather than risk having them fall into Communist hands. Three days after Mackiernan set out from Tihwa, on October 1, Mao Zedong stood triumphantly above the gate to the Forbidden City in Beijing and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China.
But that was half a continent away. For two weeks Mackiernan and his men—Bessac, the White Russians, and the Kazakh guides—encamped in yurts on the southwest shore of Lake Barkol. Who could blame Mackiernan for being reluctant to leave the relative safety and comfort of the lake? The journey that lay ahead of him, even under the best of circumstances, was grim. Between Lake Barkol and the Chinese-Tibetan border lay a no-man’s-land, more than one thousand hostile miles of the Taklimakan desert, known as White Death.
On October 15 they soberly set out “marching at night to avoid being seen,” Mackiernan penned in his log. All along the way he would record landmarks, latitudinal and longitudinal readings, and the availability of game and water. It was a carefully detailed escape route for those who might come later. As a check against his compass, Mackiernan converted a camera, long since ruined by sand and grit, into an octant.
Seldom were there roads. Mostly they crossed open desert, their feet crunching through the salty crust of its surface, sinking six inches or more into the powder-fine sands. It was an exhausting routine that repeated itself day after day. The monotony was broken only by the occasional sighting of a gazelle or lone wolf eyeing their tedious progress. Their course was set for south-southwest. With each passing day the elevation increased. Among themselves Mackiernan and his men spoke an odd mix of languages—Russian, Chinese, and Kazak
h—but little English.
In the midst of the desert Mackiernan and his men and horses went three days without even a swallow of water. Then they came upon a brackish well and fell upon their bellies unable to resist. Like wild animals, they gulped down the warm waters. For hours afterward they and the horses were racked with diarrhea and abdominal cramps.
The one constant of their odyssey was Mackiernan’s insistence on stopping to radio his position to Washington. Each time, Zvonzov would set up the radio antennae while Mackiernan sent or received encrypted messages. No sooner completed, the message would be burned on the spot. Zvonzov never asked and was never told the content of those messages.
The rigor of the trek occasionally yielded to unexpected comforts. Mackiernan’s log records that on November 14, at an elevation of 9,850 feet, they put in with desert nomads and feasted on mutton. Mackiernan traded gold for additional horses and camels, observing that the traders would likely spend it buying opium from the Kazakhs at one ounce of bullion per six ounces of opium.
But the journey was already taking its toll. Increasingly Mackiernan was being felled by gastrointestinal pains and diarrhea. At each stop along the way they would put in with Kazakhs who shared their yurt with them and fed them biscuits called bursak—a favorite of Mackiernan’s—and thick fried steaks of bighorn sheep. Most of these nomadic peoples had never before seen a foreigner.
By late November, as the temperature began to drop, the terrain had become even more hostile. “Cold as hell—no water, no grass, no fuel,” wrote Mackiernan in his log. “Country absolutely barren. Many skeletons of men, horses, and camels.” It was not until the morning of November 29 that Mackiernan reached a place known to him as Goose Lake, where he and his men received “a royal welcome.” His Kazakh hosts had prepared for Mackiernan and his men the largest yurt they had ever seen, and set aside a dozen sheep for them to consume. And there Mackiernan would spend the long winter, waiting for the mountain passes to clear.
