Deprived of U.S. and British aid, Mihailovich was at a hopeless disadvantage, while the cause of Tito, now sponsored jointly by the USSR, the United Kingdom, and the United States in unbeatable combination, would correspondingly flourish. In 1945, escorted by Russian tanks, Tito entered Belgrade and established a Communist despotism (with plenty of U.S. aid still flowing). Now utterly abandoned, Mihailovich was hunted down by Tito, given a Communist show trial, and put to death. The propaganda campaign of Moscow, Klugmann, Adamic, et al.—with a crucial assist from OSS—had brilliantly succeeded. It would be a model for much that was about to happen elsewhere.
CHAPTER 8
Chungking, 1944
OPINIONS differ as to when the U.S.-Soviet alliance against the Nazis tipped over into the less overt but eventually just as deadly conflict of the Cold War, with its recurring crises overseas and fierce security battles on the home front.
A good case can be made for dating the transition as early as 1943. This was the year of the Nazi retreat from Stalingrad, after which the Soviets knew they were going to withstand the Hitler onslaught and could start planning future onslaughts of their own. Hence the break with the London Poles, acceleration of the anti-Mihailovich jihad, and a newly hostile propaganda blitz against the anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek in China. All this occurred in 1943, causing students of the matter as diverse as Louis Adamic and Joe McCarthy to conclude that World War III had, in effect, been started.1
For our purposes, 1944 provides a somewhat clearer demarcation. It takes two to tango, or have a war, and it wasn’t until 1944 that people in the West—at least some people—realized such a brand-new war was coming. Also, the line is a bit clearer in 1944 for another reason. This was the year of D-Day, the Allied drive to Paris, and General MacArthur’s steady advance across the Pacific on his way back to Manila. Though months of fighting still remained, it was apparent to most observers that the Germans and the Japanese were going to be defeated.
Accordingly, strategists East and West (mostly the former) were laying plans, mustering forces, and jockeying for postwar advantage. And while there would be contests of this type in many places, by far the biggest single prize was China. That this should be the case was, to say no more, ironic. For the United States, China had been the casus belli,*40 as our staunch backing for Chiang Kai-shek and refusal to accept Japan’s conquests in China were main ingredients in the standoff that exploded at Pearl Harbor.
Now, however, the object of our Asian policy was on its way to being lost before the war was over. Having fought Tokyo to rescue China, we saw the country engulfed instead by civil war, and thereafter by a Communist state as despotic as the Japanese and as hostile to our interests. The outlines of this conflict were also tolerably clear in ’44, as the Communist forces of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai had an independent power base at their fastness in Yenan, commanded their own armies, and were visibly preparing for a showdown with Chiang once the Japanese were beaten.2
In this unfolding struggle, some of the most important players were people the general public had never heard of. Three particularly worthy of note were functionaries of the U.S. and Nationalist Chinese governments living and working at the makeshift inland capital of Chungking, where Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) regime had moved to evade the Japanese.†41 This trio would have crucial roles to play in the events that sealed the fate of China.
The three officials were, in order of their eventual fame, the American diplomat John Stewart Service, U.S. Treasury attaché Solomon Adler, and the U.S.-educated Chinese economist Chi Chao-ting, who worked for the KMT ministry of finance. This threesome shared a number of interests and aversions, and at least one colossal secret. Though supposedly on the scene in China to help the embattled Chiang Kai-shek, each detested his regime and had an inordinate fondness for his Red opponents. All would do what they could, which was a lot, to injure Chiang and promote the rebels.
Emblematic of this common mission was the somewhat remarkable fact that Service, Chi, and Adler all lived together at a house in Chungking—Service and Adler as roommates on the second floor, Chi on the floor above them. And while we of course have no idea of what generally went on in this unusual household, we do have some specifics. For instance, we definitely know what Service and Adler were doing in their official roles, as this is plainly spelled out in the record: sending back a stream of reports to the American government reviling Chiang, and arguing with increasing fervor that we dump him and embrace the Yenan comrades.3
As an employee of the Chungking government, Chi Chao-ting would hardly have set forth such views in an official paper. There is no question, however, that he concurred in private. For something else we know is that Chi was a Soviet agent—a henchman of the Comintern apparatus dispatched to do its work in China. We know the same was true as well of Adler. The documentation that goes to show this is extensive, including the further remarkable fact that both Chi and Adler would abscond to Beijing once the Reds were in control there. Thus, John Stewart Service, one of the most important U.S. officials in China, was living and working at close quarters with two case-hardened Soviet agents—a rare distinction, we can but hope, in diplomatic annals.
Service was the only one of our threesome who would later get much notice. Like several other China hands, including his lifelong friend and fellow diplomat John Davies, he was the son of missionary parents, was born in China, spent much of his life there, and was fluent in the language. A career foreign service officer, he had worked on the U.S. Embassy staff at Chungking with Counselor John Carter Vincent (later head of the China desk and Far East division at State) and would become like Davies a political adviser to Gen. Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, wartime commander of U.S. and Chinese forces in the region.
The Stilwell connection was of great significance in the doings of John Service, as “Vinegar Joe” early on conceived a hatred for Chiang Kai-shek, whom he called “the peanut,” and other even more insulting nicknames. Stilwell the admirer of Agnes Smedley also idealized the Chinese Reds, and at a later date would voice his desire to shoulder a rifle in the armies of Chu Teh, the Yenan military leader.4 Stilwell’s attitudes gave members of his staff free rein to be as hostile to Chiang as they might wish, and they would exploit the privilege to the fullest.
By the late summer of 1944, Service had landed a coveted spot as a U.S. “observer” at the Communist GHQ in far-off Yenan, a posting for which he had ardently lobbied. Here, as in Chungking but even more so, he would consort with Chou En-lai, the plausible, wily foreign minister of the Reds, and with the usually less accessible Mao. In this assignment Service would also commingle with journalists who made the pilgrimage to Yenan, including Israel Epstein, Guenther Stein, and a fairly sizable crew of others. All in all, given his many contacts and position uniquely on the spot, John Service was a pivotal figure.
Sol Adler never enjoyed the notoriety of Service but was as important. British-born and Oxford-educated, Adler first came to the United States in 1934, made his way to Chicago, and turned up on the faculty of something called the People’s Junior College. The dean of this institution, conveniently, was the oft-identified Soviet agent Harold Glasser. (Also, repeating a pattern common in this circle, Adler and Glasser were Chicago housemates.) From Glasser’s proletarian college, Adler moved on in 1935 to the National Research Project of the WPA headed by David Weintraub and Irving Kaplan—the same trapdoor through which Whittaker Chambers would gain access to the federal payroll.
From the Weintraub-Kaplan Research Project, it was only a hop and a skip to the Treasury roster, where Adler would move in 1936 to join Harry White and V. Frank Coe, and would eventually reunite with Glasser. Sol Adler was thus a classic study in the ease with which someone having the right (or left) connections could move from one official billet to the next. His smooth upward climb was the more impressive in that, like his countryman Michael Greenberg, he was not yet a U.S. citizen (he wouldn’t be naturalized until 1940).5
In due c
ourse, Sol Adler would turn up in the chronicles of Venona. Also, as reflected in the notes of Adolf Berle, he was one of the people Chambers named in his initial revelations as a member of the Treasury Red nexus. Thereafter he would be named as well by Elizabeth Bentley, who informed the Senate: “Solomon Adler…was a member of the Silvermaster group. He paid his dues through Mr. Silvermaster to me. Most of the time I was in charge of this group he was in China. But he did send reports to various people, including Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, which were relayed to us…. He not only was connected with the Silvermaster organization, he had Communist contacts in China. One of these was Chi.”6
Chi Chao-ting had studied and worked in the United States in the 1930s, taking an advanced degree in economics at Columbia University and obtaining a post as a researcher/writer at the Institute of Pacific Relations. Here he would be yet another confrere of Professor Lattimore, editor of the IPR’s quarterly publication. Like Adler, Chi would come to the notice of U.S. security sleuths in the 1940s, but was never given prominent mention. Relatively full disclosure about his activities would have to wait for several decades, when Chi’s close friend and fellow IPR member Philip Jaffe would recount the story in a memoir.
As Jaffe told it, Chi was a veteran Comintern agent recruited into the Communist Party in the 1920s, thereafter handling assignments in Europe, the United States, and China—ultimately infiltrating the government of Chiang Kai-shek in behalf of the Red insurgents. Along the way, Chi met and married Jaffe’s cousin, Harriet Levine, still another IPR employee (and sometime Lattimore assistant). As Jaffe would recap the story:
It was through Chi Chao-ting, a cousin of mine by marriage, that I accepted the Communist version of Marxism as a guide to the contemporary world…. For a period of more than fifteen years, Chi Chao-ting and I were intimate personal friends and close personal associates…. He would ultimately become the economic adviser to H. H. Kung, the Kuomintang finance minister, while simultaneously working clandestinely as an underground operative for Chou En-lai…. Upon his death in 1963 in Peking [Beijing] he would be given a hero’s funeral.7
Quite apart from their common lodgings, our trio—especially Service and Adler—had many interactions. Among the clearest indications of their joint endeavors are the overlapping and interweaving reports Service and Adler sent back to the United States from China (with Chi assisting on occasion as silent partner). While Service was the more prolific, Adler sounded the same political themes, often in the same phraseology, and geared to the same goal of savaging Chiang while talking up the Yenan rebels.
The Service-Adler memos relentlessly hammered a few main themes: The government of Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt, despotic, and ineffective; the Chinese Reds, by contrast, were paragons of virtue, moderate and democratic, beloved of the people; and—most important in the context of the war—only the Communists were carrying on the battle against Japan, while Chiang and his forces at best did nothing and at worst were collaborationists and traitors.
Among the striking features of these memos is how closely they resemble the material being supplied, not long before this, to U.S. and British authorities about the struggle for the Balkans. Point for point, the Service-Adler papers track the comments of Linn Farish, Klugmann-vetted intelligence reports from Cairo, and propaganda broadsides of Adamic—often with the identical images and charges, and sometimes the identical phrasing. It was the same drill throughout, with Chiang the Mihailovich of China, Mao the surrogate for Tito.*42
Service’s anti-Chiang reports were so voluminous only the merest précis can be offered—though it doesn’t take many samples to catch the meaning. In dispatches totaling 1,200 pages, Service couldn’t find a good word to say about the anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek. What poured forth instead was a steady stream of venom, an exercise in which the major challenge appeared to be finding different ways of making the same damaging charges ad infinitum. Some of the epithets Service used to describe the KMT leader and his government were as follows:
“Corruption, unprecedented in scale and openness,” “the enthronement of reaction,” “growing megalomania,” “dictatorship,” “Gestapo-like organization,” “fascist,” “undemocratic,” “feudal,” “reliance on a gangster secret police,” “threats and blackmail,” “sabotage of the war effort,” “the obvious ineffectiveness of the Chinese army,” “normally traitorous relations with the enemy,” and much more of similar damning nature.8
As there was certainly much to criticize in the ragtag KMT regime, pushed to the limits of financial, physical, and moral endurance by seven years of fighting against Japan and the ravages of wartime inflation, these fierce criticisms might be put down—and often have been—to Service’s status as hard-boiled reporter, just conveying “the facts” as he observed them. The just-the-facts rationale, however, is hard to credit when these abrasive comments are compared with his fervent homage to Yenan.
Here, the hard-nosed reporter turned into a swooning groupie. His descriptions of the Communist forces—again echoing the message from the Balkans—read more like propaganda leaflets for the Red regime than the reports of a detached observer. Now the operative words were “progressive,” “democratic,” “impressive personal qualities,” “realism and practicality,” “objective and scientific orderliness,” “straightforward and frank,” “incorruptibility,” “a real desire for democracy in China,” “aggressive resistance to the Japanese,” “complete support of the local population,” and on and on in endless variations.9
While many aspects of these Service memos might be usefully examined, one in particular is worth a note in passing: the extent to which he presented the Chinese Reds as democratic, nonradical, pro-American, not really Communist, and so on. This point would be important down the line, when there were efforts to exculpate Service and others like him from the charge that they had sugarcoated and helped bring to power the most hideous despotism in global history, measured in terms of total carnage. The charge, as it happens, was entirely true, and well supported by the record.
As with everything else he had to say about events in China, Service would make the same point repeatedly, so there was—and is—no way to miss it. “The Communist political program,” he wrote, “is simple democracy. This is much more American than Russian in form and spirit.” “They are carrying out democratic policies, which they expect the United States to approve and sympathetically support.” “This revolution has been peaceful and democratic…. The common people, for the first time, have been given something to fight for.” The Communists were following “a policy of self-limitation,” marked by their “abandonment of any purely Communist program.” “They have a real desire for democracy in China…without the need of violent social upheaval and revolution.”*43 10
The dispatches of Service’s Soviet-agent sidekick Adler were less expansive on these matters, focusing mostly on economic topics—but were similar in tone and content. Frequently, Adler stressed the Mihailovich vs. Tito angle: the alleged ineffectiveness of the KMT in pressing the war against Japan, if not outright collaboration. “The central government,” said Adler, “survives in its present form only because of American support and influence and Japanese collusion.” Chiang’s regime “has lost any interest it ever had in doing anything effective to fight the Japanese,” “the war effort is more inert than ever before,” “China has done less fighting than any other major ally.”11
The conclusion Adler drew from all this was the need to “get tough” with Chiang—also a refrain of Service. Adler would explain what he meant by toughness in a message to the Treasury’s Harry White in February of 1945. “Our China policy,” he wrote, “should be given teeth. It should be made clear to the generalissimo that we will play ball with him only if he plays ball with us.” To this end, said Adler, we should support Chiang “if and only if he really tried to mobilize China’s war effort by introducing coalition government”—meaning coalition with Yenan. (Emphasis in original.) The way
to get such a coalition, in Adler’s view, was to use the power of the Treasury by withholding financial aid to Chiang, especially a promised loan of $200 million in gold.*44 This strategy, expounded by one Soviet agent to another, would become within a matter of months official U.S. policy toward China.12
The Service-Adler memos were not only congruent in major features, but so drafted as to be mutually reinforcing. In June of 1944, Service would pass along a study of Chiang Kai-shek’s ideas on economics done by Adler, calling it “the best analysis” available of the “mixed fascism, feudalism and paternalism which characterize the Generalissimo and the conservative leaders around him who now control China.” Service stressed that Adler’s role in preparing this report should be “treated as secret” (while indicating that the material had also been worked on secretly by Chi).†45 13
Thereafter, Adler would return the favor. In memos to White, he described the state of things in China—all negative toward Chiang—paraphrasing and quoting Service. These updates included such Service staples as the moderation and democracy of the Yenan Reds, their support by the people, and their valiant efforts to fight Japan, despite lack of help from the worthless Chiang; (“The Communists have successfully resisted the Japanese for seven years…with no active support from Chungking….”) All this came from Service, described by Adler as “the best informed American on internal Chinese politics.”14 Thus, Service quoted Adler as the guru on economic issues, while Adler cited the keen political insights of Service (not pointing out that this drafting of mutual praises in all likelihood occurred over the kitchen table of their flat in Chungking).
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