FTR#1261 Bong-Bong and the Marcos Continuum

Explor­ing a deep polit­i­cal, his­tor­i­cal and eco­nom­ic dynam­ic, this pro­gram sets forth fun­da­men­tal aspects of what the late, bril­liant Ster­ling and Peg­gy Sea­grave called “The Mar­cos Dynasty.”

This pro­gram excerpts two of their excel­lent books–which Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly rec­om­mends. There are links pro­vid­ed with each text excerpt to facil­i­tate the acqui­si­tion of the books, which, again, Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly rec­om­mends.

Recent­ly elect­ed pres­i­dent of the Philip­pines (with close rel­a­tives of for­mer pres­i­dent Duterte as aides), Fer­di­nand Mar­cos, Jr.—nicknamed Bong-Bong—has net­worked with U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Antony Blinken and renewed an invig­o­rat­ed, anti-Chi­na alliance.

Essen­tial for an under­stand­ing of the Bong-Bong/Blinken liai­son is aware­ness of Mar­cos, Jr.’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in his dic­ta­tor father’s phe­nom­e­nal­ly lucra­tive recov­er­ies of Gold­en Lily war gold secret­ed in the Philip­pines dur­ing World War II. 

This sub­ject is cov­ered in the land­mark text Gold War­riors by Ster­ling and Peg­gy Sea­grave.

(FTR #‘s 427, 428, 446, 451, 501, 688, 689, 1106, 1107 & 1108 deal with the sub­ject mate­r­i­al of that con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant book.)

Fer­di­nand, Sr.’s rise was aid­ed by his “god­fa­ther,” Judge Chua, who was his bio­log­i­cal father in an out-of-wed­lock liai­son. This was rel­a­tive­ly com­mon in the Philip­pines and not stig­ma­tized as in many oth­er soci­eties.

Judge Chua’s posi­tion in the Chua fam­i­ly gave him great influ­ence. In turn, the clan asso­ci­a­tions of Chi­nese in the Philip­pines were fun­da­men­tal to the pro­fes­sion­al and social under­tak­ings of mem­bers of that com­mu­ni­ty.

Of great sig­nif­i­cance is the strong affil­i­a­tion of the clans with the Kuom­intang of Chi­ang Kai-shek, impart­ing a fas­cist ide­o­log­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion to them. This was a major deep polit­i­cal influ­ence on Fer­di­nand Mar­cos, Sr., the out-of-wed­lock son of the influ­en­tial Judge Chua.

Next, we present the deep polit­i­cal back­ground that shaped Fer­di­nand Mar­cos and an explo­ration of the man­ner in which eco­nom­ic class con­sid­er­a­tions shaped alliances dur­ing the Japan­ese fas­cist occu­pa­tion of the Philip­pines and its after­math.

In FTR#‘s 905, 970, among oth­er pro­grams, we explored how the U.S. reha­bil­i­tat­ed and resus­ci­tat­ed the Japan­ese fas­cist infra­struc­ture from that nation’s World War II impe­r­i­al state.

We have spo­ken of promi­nent Japan­ese fas­cists Sasakawa Ryoichi and Kodama Yoshio in numer­ous pro­grams.

Com­bined with Chi­ang Kai-shek’s reac­tionary stance, those reha­bil­i­tat­ed Japan­ese fas­cists con­sti­tut­ed the crit­i­cal foun­da­tion of America’s Cold War in Asia.

The MacArthur team in the Philip­pines dur­ing the Cold War was culled from the col­lab­o­ra­tionist milieu who worked with the Japan­ese dur­ing the occu­pa­tion. This includ­ed the head of the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion gov­ern­ment, Jose Lau­rel, as well as Benig­no Aquino Sr. and Manuel Rox­as.

Fol­low­ing the ouster of Fer­di­nand Mar­cos, Sr. the Philip­pine gov­ern­ment was head­ed by Cory Aquino, the wid­ow of slain CIA agent Benig­no Aquino, Jr. and Sal­vador Lau­rel, the son of Jose Lau­rel.

Col­lab­o­ra­tor Manuel Rox­as was MacArthur’s “favorite son” to man­age post­war Philip­pine gov­ern­ment.

FTR#1226 and FTR#1227 Microcosm, Parts 1 and 2

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FTR#1214 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 21

This pro­gram con­cludes the series.

Intro­duc­ing the expan­sion of Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence with Chi­ang and his Kuom­intang fas­cists into U.S. Cold War pol­i­cy in Asia, we present Ster­ling Seagrave’s rumi­na­tion about Stan­ley Horn­beck, a State Depart­ment flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far East­ern Divi­sion. . . .”

Horn­beck “ . . . . had only the most abbre­vi­at­ed and stilt­ed knowl­edge of Chi­na, and had been out of touch per­son­al­ly for many years. . . . He with­held cables from the Sec­re­tary of State that were crit­i­cal of Chi­ang, and once stat­ed that ‘the Unit­ed States Far East­ern pol­i­cy is like a train run­ning on a rail­road track.  It has been clear­ly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whis­tle stops along the way at Peking, Que­moy, Mat­su, and the Yalu Riv­er. . . .”

Next, the pro­gram high­lights key aspects of the career of Ching-Ling Soong, aka Mme. Sun Yat-sen.

Sis­ter of Ai-Ling (aka Mme. H.H. Kung), Mae-ling (aka Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek) and T.V., T.A. and T.L. Soong, she had a long and remark­able career. 

For the pur­pos­es of this descrip­tion, we re-print mate­r­i­al from FTR#1202.

The fate of the Third Force or Third Option formed by Mme. Sun Yat-sen (nee Ching-ling Soong) and Teng Yen-ta, a per­sis­tent crit­ic of Chi­ang Kai-shek, was pre­dictable.

Dis­il­lu­sioned with Com­mu­nism after a sojourn in Moscow, Mme. Sun Yat-sen part­nered with Teng Yen-ta, who rec­og­nized Chi­ang’s fas­cism and, yet, felt that the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (at that point in time) was over­ly loy­al to Moscow and was­n’t doing enough for the Chi­nese peas­antry.

Both Ching-ling and Teng Yen-ta sought an alter­na­tive to both Kuom­intang fas­cism and the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.

Find­ing the demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism pro­posed by Ching-ling and Teng Yen-ta unac­cept­able, Chi­ang had the British and Amer­i­can police author­i­ties arrest him in the Inter­na­tion­al Con­ces­sion in Shang­hai, after which he was tor­tured for many months.

Ching-ling was report­ed to have vis­it­ed Chi­ang to plead for Teng Yen-ta’s release. Chi­ang had  already dealt with him in char­ac­ter­is­tic fash­ion: “ . . . . Days ear­li­er, on Novem­ber 29, 1931, near­ly a year after his arrest, Ten Yen-ta had been tak­en from his cell at Chiang’s com­mand and was slow­ly stran­gled with a wire. The exe­cu­tion­er was said to be famous for keep­ing vic­tims alive for half an hour while he tight­ened his grip. In his office, Chi­ang had remained silent while Ching-ling plead­ed for a man already dead, enjoy­ing the spec­ta­cle of her momen­tary vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. . . .”

Next, we recount Mme. Sun’s encounter with a Kuomintang/Green Gang agent.

After rebuff­ing his polit­i­cal approach, Mme. Sun Yat-sen demol­ished his  polit­i­cal per­sona.

. . . . “Soong: ‘There is only one way to silence me, Mr. Tai. Shoot me or imprison me. If you don’t then it sim­ply means that you admit you are not wrong­ly accused. But what­ev­er you do, do it open­ly like me, don’t . . . sur­round me with spies.’

Tai: ‘I shall call again upon my return from Nanking.

Soong: ‘Fur­ther con­ver­sa­tions would be useless—the gulf between us is too wide.’

As Tai Ch’i‑tao and his wife left, the old man turned and—his tongue flick­ing over dry lips (he was a very ner­vous man)—hissed out a part­ing bit of ven­om: ‘If you were any­one but Madame Sun, we would cut your head off.’

Ching-ling smiled. ‘If you were the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies you pre­tend to be, you’d cut it off any­way.’. . .”

Infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed by Ster­ling Seagrave–of which Mr. Emory was not pre­vi­ous­ly aware–indicates that the CCP is more nuanced than Amer­i­cans have been led to believe.

Although resist­ing mem­ber­ship in the Com­mu­nist Par­ty and attempt­ing to re-start the Third Option on the eve of Chi­ang’s capit­u­la­tion and flight to Tai­wan, Mme. Sun Yat-sen was installed as one of three Vice-Chair­men of the gov­ern­ment.

Again, this is not some­thing of which Mr. Emory was aware until read­ing this book.

“ . . . . Ching-ling sold many of her remain­ing pos­ses­sions to sup­port pro­grams of the Chi­na Wel­fare League she had found­ed. In 1948, with the Chi­ang regime ready to flee and the Com­mu­nists on their way to vic­to­ry, she took part in a last attempt to orga­nize an alter­na­tive to both com­mu­nism and fascism—a new ver­sion of the Third Force. It was called the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Com­mit­tee, and Ching-ling was named its hon­orary chair­man. Its con­stituen­cy was the pow­er­less. . . .”

“ . . . . When the People’s Repub­lic came into exis­tence, Ching-ling became one of the three non-Com­mu­nist polit­i­cal lead­ers cho­sen as Vice-Chair­men of the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment in Peking. . . .”

Mme. Sun (Ching-ling Soong) man­i­fest­ed a strong­ly inde­pen­dent ide­o­log­i­cal stance, which, while anti-fas­cist and anti-impe­ri­al­ist, sought (as we have seen) a “Third Force” or “Third Option” between Com­mu­nism and Chi­ang’s nar­co-fas­cism.

That inde­pen­dence of mind, demon­strat­ed through decades of social strug­gle, plus out­right jeal­ousy on the part of Madame Mao led to defama­tion and per­se­cu­tion dur­ing the dis­as­trous Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, with Mme. Sun nar­row­ly escap­ing the rav­ages of the Red Guard.

“ . . . . Dur­ing the Red Guard ram­pages of the 1960’s, the job of pro­tect­ing Madame Sun became nerve-rack­ing. Posters appeared denounc­ing her, and it was not safe for her to go any­where. . . .”

“ . . . . In the sum­mer of 1966, Pre­mier Chou En-lai was forced to warn the Red Guards to cease their ver­bal attacks on Madame Sun, and to stop putting up posters accus­ing her of being a bour­geois reac­tionary. On Sep­tem­ber 21, 1966, in Shang­hai where the Red Guard move­ment fre­quent­ly got out of con­trol, a mob stormed Ching-ling’s house on the Avenue Jof­fre and loot­ed it. Ching-ling was not in Shang­hai at the time. She let the inci­dent pass with­out com­ment. Her chief adver­sary was the wife of Chair­man Mao, who appar­ent­ly resent­ed the fact that Ching-ling was always men­tioned as the woman of high­est rank in Chi­na.

“ . . . . When the Red Guard move­ment abat­ed, and Madame Mao and the cel­e­brat­ed Gang of Four were tried in a people’s court as coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, Ching-ling’s life set­tled back into a tran­quil twi­light. . . .”

“ . . . . On May 16, 1981, Soong Ching-ling was named hon­orary Pres­i­dent of Chi­na. . . . She suc­cumbed to leukemia on May 29, 1981, in her Peking home. . . . But, in an inter­view once with writer Han Suyin, Ching-ling put into words the lega­cy she had learned most bit­ter­ly from the time of the Soongs:

The Soong Dynasty con­cludes with an epi­logue which is note­wor­thy in sev­er­al respects. The prose is of a char­ac­ter that one does not see any­more. Elo­quent, poignant, pas­sion­ate and yet, at the same time, bit­ing­ly, iron­i­cal­ly humor­ous, Seagrave’s writ­ing is remark­able in, and of, itself.

Beyond the prose, the epi­logue is remark­able for the elab­o­rate his­tor­i­cal metaphor that it presents: dis­cus­sion of the cor­rup­tion and bru­tal­i­ty of the late Manchu Dynasty and the Dowa­ger Empress, whom Sea­grave refers to as “The Old Bud­dha.” (He lat­er pub­lished a vol­ume about her reign titled The Drag­on Lady.)

Seagrave’s dis­cus­sion of the Dowa­ger Empress’s intrigues and bru­tal mur­der of the Pearl Con­cu­bine con­sti­tutes a metaphor for the lethal, con­sum­mate­ly cor­rupt gov­ern­ment of Chi­ang Kai-shek and his pup­pet mas­ters, the Soongs.

As for­eign armies were approach­ing Peking dur­ing the Box­er Rebel­lion, “The Old Bud­dha” made arrange­ments to flee the palace known as The For­bid­den City, don­ning a dis­guise and tak­ing the Emper­or with her.

When the Emper­or sought to remain in Peking to nego­ti­ate with the for­eign armies and enlist­ed the assis­tance of his favorite consort—the Pearl Concubine—in order to per­suade the Dowa­ger Empress.

The Pearl Con­cu­bine had resist­ed con­form­ing to the will of the Dowa­ger Empress, and “The Old Bud­dha” took this occa­sion to elim­i­nate this ele­ment of resis­tance to her palace intrigues, a long­time obsta­cle to her polit­i­cal orders.

“ . . . . The Pearl Con­cu­bine had been a thorn in the Dowager’s side, inter­fer­ing with palace intrigues by giv­ing inde­pen­dent advice to the Emper­or. It was time to dis­pose of her. The Dowa­ger bel­lowed orders. Two eunuchs seized the Pearl Con­cu­bine. In ter­ror, the Emper­or went to his knees and begged for her life. But the eunuchs car­ried the strug­gling girl to the nar­row well by the Palace of Peace and Longevi­ty, turned her upside down in her shim­mer­ing cocoon of silks, and flung her shriek­ing into its maw. Because the well was so nar­row, the eunuchs jumped on her to force her down. . . . .”

Ster­ling Sea­grave then sets forth the mur­der­ous nature of the late Manchu rule of the Dowa­ger Empress—a metaphor for the bloody cor­rup­tion of Chiang’s fas­cist gov­ern­ment.

“ . . . . The For­bid­den City is a grave­yard of souls, drowned, behead­ed, throt­tled, flayed alive, to silence them in the inter­ests of state. Here, mur­der was not an act of pas­sion but an instru­ment of rule. Judi­cial mur­der. Impe­r­i­al mur­der. Silence by assas­si­na­tion. To sti­fle those who would inter­fere, who would object, who would ques­tion, who would say no. . . .”

Ster­ling Sea­grave then piv­ots to the Soong fam­i­ly: “ . . . . The oth­ers passed through life like a team of pick­pock­ets through a car­ni­val crowd, doing what they did best, while the rubes watched geeks bite heads off live chick­ens. There are those who insist that May-ling remained inno­cent through­out by virtue of her tun­nel vision. It is not for me to say, except that these peo­ple also believe in vir­gin birth.

“They were a fam­i­ly that could stand togeth­er in front of a mir­ror (Ching-ling miss­ing from the group by choice), all cast­ing reflec­tions except Ai-ling. She cast no reflec­tion at all. What medieval con­clu­sion can we draw? . . . .”

Sea­grave con­cludes with a ref­er­ence to Har­ry Truman’s launch­ing of an FBI inves­ti­ga­tion of the Soong fam­i­ly. (We dis­cussed this in FTR#1205 .)

“ . . . . Of all the peo­ple who might have act­ed, I won­dered why Har­ry Tru­man did noth­ing. . . . . Per­haps he con­clud­ed that so many promi­nent peo­ple were involved it would not be good for the nation as they say. So near­ly every­one stayed silent. Nobody spoke for the vic­tims. Who, then, will speak for the con­cu­bine in the well? . . .”

The pro­gram reviews the death threats and intim­i­da­tion that the authors of Gold War­riors received over the pub­li­ca­tion of this and oth­er books.

“. . . . Many peo­ple told us this book was his­tor­i­cal­ly impor­tant and must be published—then warned us that if it were pub­lished, we would be mur­dered. An Aus­tralian econ­o­mist who read it said, ” I hope they let you live.” He did not have to explain who “they” were. . . .

“. . . .

We have been threat­ened with mur­der before. When we pub­lished The Soong Dynasty we were warned by a senior CIA offi­cial that a hit team was being assem­bled in Tai­wan to come mur­der us. He said, ‘I would take this very seri­ous­ly, if I were you.’ We van­ished for a year to an island off the coast of British Colum­bia. While we were gone, a Tai­wan hit team arrived in San Fran­cis­co and shot dead the Chi­nese-Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Hen­ry Liu.

When we pub­lished The Mar­cos Dynasty we expect­ed trou­ble from the Mar­cos fam­i­ly and its cronies, but instead we were harassed by Wash­ing­ton. Oth­ers had inves­ti­gat­ed Mar­cos, but we were the first to show how the U.S. Gov­ern­ment was secret­ly involved with Mar­cos gold deals. We came under attack from the U.S. Trea­sury Depart­ment and its Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice, whose agents made threat­en­ing mid­night phone calls to our elder­ly par­ents. Arriv­ing in New York for an author tour, one of us was inter­cept­ed at JFK air­port, pass­port seized, and held incom­mu­ni­ca­do for three hours. Even­tu­al­ly the pass­port was returned, with­out a word of expla­na­tion. When we ran Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion queries to see what was behind it, we were grudg­ing­ly sent a copy of a telex mes­sage, on which every word was blacked out, includ­ing the date. The jus­ti­fi­ca­tion giv­en for this cen­sor­ship was the need to pro­tect gov­ern­ment sources, which are above the law.

Dur­ing one harass­ing phone call from a U.S. Trea­sury agent, he said he was sit­ting in his office watch­ing an inter­view we had done for a Japan­ese TV network—an inter­view broad­cast only in Japan­ese, which we had nev­er seen. After pub­lish­ing The Yam­a­to Dynasty, which briefly men­tioned the dis­cov­ery that is the basis for Gold War­riors, our phones and email were tapped. We know this because when one of us was in a Euro­pean clin­ic briefly for a med­ical pro­ce­dure, the head nurse report­ed that “some­one pos­ing as your Amer­i­can doc­tor” had been on the phone ask­ing ques­tions.

When a brief extract of this book was pub­lished in the South Chi­na Morn­ing Post in August 2001, sev­er­al phone calls from the edi­tors were cut off sud­den­ly. Emails from the news­pa­per took 72 hours to reach us, while copies sent to an asso­ciate near­by arrived instant­ly. In recent months, we began to receive veiled death threats.

What have we done to pro­voke mur­der? To bor­row a phrase from Jean Ziegler, we are “com­bat­ing offi­cial amne­sia.” We live in dan­ger­ous times, like Ger­many in the 1930’s when any­one who makes incon­ve­nient dis­clo­sures about hid­den assets can be brand­ed a “ter­ror­ist” or a “trai­tor. . . .”

Despite the best efforts of the Amer­i­can and Japan­ese gov­ern­ments to destroy, with­hold, or lose doc­u­men­ta­tion relat­ed to Gold­en Lily, we have accu­mu­lat­ed thou­sands of doc­u­ments, con­duct­ed thou­sands of hours of inter­views, and we make all of these avail­able to read­ers of this book on two com­pact discs, avail­able from our web­site www.bowstring.net [no longer online–D.E.] so they can make up their own minds. We encour­age oth­ers with knowl­edge of these events to come for­ward. When the top is cor­rupt, the truth will not come from the top. It will emerge in bits and pieces from peo­ple like Jean Ziegler and Christophe Meili, who decid­ed they had to ‘do some­thing.’ As a pre­cau­tion, should any­thing odd hap­pen, we have arranged for this book and all its doc­u­men­ta­tion to be put up on the Inter­net at a num­ber of sites. If we are mur­dered, read­ers will have no dif­fi­cul­ty fig­ur­ing out who ‘they’ are. . . .”

Ster­ling’s fears about Opus Dei and his and Peg­gy’s prox­im­i­ty to Spain–the seat of that orga­ni­za­tion’s pow­er  turned out to be pre­scient. On Christ­mas Day of 2011, he nar­row­ly escaped assas­si­na­tion while return­ing home. He felt that the attempt on his life may well have been moti­vat­ed by the pub­li­ca­tion of the Span­ish lan­guage edi­tion of Gold War­riors.

. . . . Sea­grave will be remem­bered warm­ly by Ver­so staff for his live­ly cor­re­spon­dence. In a 2011 email, he described an attempt on his life that fol­lowed the Span­ish pub­li­ca­tion of Gold War­riors: 

“A hired thug tried to mur­der me on the ser­pen­tine road lead­ing up to our iso­lat­ed house on the ridge over­look­ing Banyuls-sur-Mer, and near­ly suc­ceed­ed.  (We’ve had sev­er­al seri­ous death threats because of our books.) The road was very nar­row in places, with tar­mac bare­ly the width of my tires. At 10 pm Christ­mas night, in 2011, after vis­it­ing Peg­gy at a clin­ic in Per­pig­nan, as I turned the final hair­pin, I clear­ly saw a guy sit­ting on a cement block path lead­ing up to a shed for the uphill vine­yard. He was obvi­ous­ly wait­ing for me because we were the only peo­ple liv­ing up there on that moun­tain shoul­der.  He jumped up, raised a long pole, and unfurled a black fab­ric that total­ly blocked the nar­row­est turn ahead of me. I tried to swerve to avoid him (not know­ing whether he also had a gun), and my right front dri­ve wheel went off the tar­mac and lost trac­tion in the rub­ble.

The car teetered and then plunged down through a steep vine­yard on my right side, rolling and bounc­ing front and rear, 100 meters into a ravine where it final­ly came to rest against a tree. Thanks to my seat­belt and air bag, I sur­vived. I don’t know how many con­cus­sions I got on the way down, but I man­aged to squeeze out the driver’s door and fell onto the rub­ble. I got up on my left hand and knees, but my right shoul­der caved in. (Turned out lat­er that I had frac­tured my right shoul­der, and all the lig­a­ments there had torn loose.) I passed out and remained uncon­scious for 14 hours.  After 12 hours, a vigneron dri­ving up the next morn­ing saw my wrecked car and body.

 He called the Gen­darmerie on his portable, and I was hoist­ed out uncon­scious by a chop­per and flown to an old Vic­to­ri­an-era hos­pi­tal in Per­pig­nan where they did noth­ing but keep me doped on mor­phine for two weeks — no X‑rays or seri­ous med­ical care.  Final­ly, friends in Banyuls got me (and Peg­gy) trans­ferred to a clin­ic on the beach there, where Peg­gy and I shared a room while we both recov­ered. I got my right shoul­der lig­a­ments fixed by an excel­lent sur­geon in Per­pig­nan.  (Peg­gy did not know it then but she had an ear­ly stage of can­cer.) I still have a hair­line frac­ture in my right shoul­der.

I attribute the event to stay­ing too long in one place, so the spooks even­tu­al­ly tracked me down.  We had been liv­ing for years on a sail­boat, mov­ing from Hol­land to Britain to Por­tu­gal to Spain and final­ly to France, where we found — in Cat­alo­nia — an ide­al vil­lage at the Mediter­ranean end of the Pyre­nees. In ret­ro­spect, I’m sor­ry I agreed to move ashore for Peggy’s sake, and sold the beau­ti­ful 43-foot boat I had  built from a bare hull. It was very com­fort­able, but Peg­gy want­ed a house. We nev­er did find the right house in Banyuls — so we spent 18 years restor­ing a 13th cen­tu­ry Tem­plar ruin on the shoul­der of the moun­tain.  Made me an easy tar­get. Def­i­nite­ly a bad deci­sion. I think it was the Span­ish edi­tion of Gold War­riors that made me the easy tar­get. 

In FTR#‘s 1107, 1108 and 1111, we set forth the high­ly sus­pi­cious cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the death (and prob­a­ble mur­der) of author Iris Chang. A ring­ing endorse­ment by Ms. Chang graces the cov­er of Gold War­riors.

Ms. Chang’s sig­na­ture work–The Rape of Nanking–detailed one of the ini­tial events in Japan’s loot­ing of Chi­na dur­ing World War II, an act which the U.S. signed off on and prof­it­ed from in the post­war years.

At the time of her alto­geth­er sus­pi­cious death, she was work­ing on a book about the Bataan Death March, at the very time that sur­vivors of that event and oth­er Japan­ese World War II atroc­i­ties were suing Japan­ese zaibat­sus that had employed U.S. POW’s as slave labor.

The suit was rebuffed by U.S. courts.

When Mr. Emory inter­viewed Ster­ling Sea­grave in 2009, he declined to dis­cuss Ms. Chang’s death, which he, too, believed to be mur­der.

FTR#1213 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 20

This pro­gram under­takes a spec­u­la­tive look at the life and fam­i­ly his­to­ry of Barack Oba­ma, ana­lyzed in the con­text of the Amer­i­can Deep State.

It was under Oba­ma that the “piv­ot to Asia” took place, with his then Vice-Pres­i­dent Joe Biden now pur­su­ing the anti-Chi­na pol­i­cy with a con­sum­ing vig­or.

(We note, also, Avril Haines, who was Oba­ma’s Deputy Direc­tor of Cen­tral Intel­li­gence, then worked as a paid con­sul­tant for Peter Thiel’s Palan­tir firm, was a key par­tic­i­pant in Event 201, served as a key mem­ber of Biden’s tran­si­tion team and, ulti­mate­ly, became Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence, a posi­tion from which she helped ini­ti­ate the momen­tum to legit­imize the “Lab-Leak The­o­ry” of the ori­gin of Covid.)

The cen­tral ele­ment in our analy­sis is the pro­fes­sion­al and polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the Oba­ma fam­i­ly’s involve­ment in Indone­sia in the imme­di­ate after­math of the slaugh­ter.

The avail­able infor­ma­tion sug­gests that the benign inter­pre­ta­tion of the Oba­ma fam­i­ly’s cir­cum­stances is not accu­rate. 

Those cir­cum­stances are encap­su­lat­ed: Key Points of Dis­cus­sion nd Analy­sis Include: Lolo Soe­toro’s work as a civil­ian employ­ee of the Indone­sian Army at the East-West Insti­tute in Hawaii (head­ed up at the time by Howard Jones, for years U.S. Ambas­sador to Indone­sia); Soe­toro’s meet­ing of (Stan­ley) Ann Dun­ham at the East-West Insti­tute; Soe­toro’s return to Indone­sia in 1966; Soe­toro’s work for the Indone­sian army fol­low­ing the coup; Soe­toro’s work for Uno­cal and Mobil, two of the key oil com­pa­nies in Indone­sia that faced pos­si­ble nation­al­iza­tion by Sukarno; Ann Dun­ham’s work for USAID and Ford Foun­da­tion in Indone­sia (both com­mon cov­ers for CIA work abroad); Soe­toro’s account of hav­ing seen a man killed in “bloody” fash­ion; the dubi­ous nature of claims by the Oba­ma clan that Ms. Dun­ham learned of the slaugh­ter that had just tak­en place through qui­et asides and innu­en­do (numer­ous press accounts avail­able through U.S. media out­lets had report­ed the mas­sacre); Ann Dun­ham’s sub­se­quent work for the Ford Foun­da­tion in Indone­sia, under Peter Gei­th­n­er (whose son Tim­o­thy Gei­th­n­er became Oba­ma’s Sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury); Barack Oba­ma’s work for the Busi­ness Inter­na­tion­al Cor­po­ra­tion between col­lege and grad­u­ate school (the com­pa­ny has, in the past, served as a “cor­po­rate cov­er” for CIA employ­ees); Oba­ma’s bio­log­i­cal father’s meet­ing of Ann Dun­ham in a Russ­ian lan­guage class at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawaii in 1960, after enter­ing the U.S. under a joint CIA-State Depart­ment pro­gram ini­ti­at­ed under the aus­pices of Tom Mboya in Kenya (lat­er assas­si­nat­ed because of his perceived/alleged links to CIA).

We are of the opin­ion that Oba­ma is part of a Deep State, trans-gen­er­a­tional intel­li­gence net­work and his stew­ard­ship of the “piv­ot to Asia,” Avril Haines key posi­tion in the events sur­round­ing the full-court press against Chi­na, and “Delaware Joe” [Biden]‘s pur­suit of a vig­or­ous anti-Chi­na pol­i­cy are part of the straight rail­way line of Asian pol­i­cy described by Stan­ley Horn­beck: “.  . . . the doyen of State’s Far East­ern Divi­sion. . . . [Horn­beck] had only the most abbre­vi­at­ed and stilt­ed knowl­edge of Chi­na, and had been out of touch per­son­al­ly for many years. . . . He with­held cables from the Sec­re­tary of State that were crit­i­cal of Chi­ang, and once stat­ed that ‘the Unit­ed States Far East­ern pol­i­cy is like a train run­ning on a rail­road track.  It has been clear­ly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whis­tle stops along the way at Peking, Que­moy, Mat­su, and the Yalu Riv­er. . . .”

The pro­gram begins with dis­cus­sion of the for­ma­tion of the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League in Tai­wan under Chi­ang Kai-shek.

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: Chi­ang Kai-shek’s Kuom­intang and their sup­port for the Indone­sian coup, includ­ing stag­ing attacks on the Chi­nese embassy in Jakar­ta; Tai­wan as the site for the merg­ing of the Asian Peo­ple’s Anti-Com­mu­nist League with the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations to form the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League; the role of Adri­an Zenz in the fab­ri­ca­tion of the Uighur geno­cide meme; Zen­z’s asso­ci­a­tion with the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, a deriv­a­tive of the Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee, a sub­sidiary of the OUN/B and deeply involved with the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations; the role of ele­ments of the Azov Bat­tal­ion and Pravy Sek­tor in the “pro-democ­ra­cy” move­ment in Hong Kong; the adop­tion by the “pro-Democ­ra­cy move­ment” of a per­mu­ta­tion of the “Glo­ry to Ukraine, Glo­ry to The Heroes” salute of the OUN/B; review of the net­work­ing between Ruzy Nazar and the Pan-Turk­ist and Nazi deep polit­i­cal forces at work in Xin­jiang province; review of Nazar’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the ABN at WACL’s con­fer­ence in Dal­las, Texas.

Fol­low­ing dis­cus­sion of the for­ma­tion of WACL, the pro­gram high­lights the impor­tance of the Indone­sian oil com­pa­nies to the U.S. and their Indone­sian satraps. 

FTR#1212 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 19

Intro­duc­ing the expan­sion of Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence with Chi­ang and his Kuom­intang fas­cists into U.S. Cold War pol­i­cy in Asia, we present Ster­ling Seagrave’s rumi­na­tion about Stan­ley Horn­beck, a State Depart­ment flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far East­ern Divi­sion. . . .”

Horn­beck “ . . . . had only the most abbre­vi­at­ed and stilt­ed knowl­edge of Chi­na, and had been out of touch per­son­al­ly for many years. . . . He with­held cables from the Sec­re­tary of State that were crit­i­cal of Chi­ang, and once stat­ed that ‘the Unit­ed States Far East­ern pol­i­cy is like a train run­ning on a rail­road track.  It has been clear­ly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whis­tle stops along the way at Peking, Que­moy, Mat­su, and the Yalu Riv­er. . . .”

This pro­gram chron­i­cles the U.S. coup in Indone­sia. In our land­mark series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio, we not­ed that Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion put the rail­way described by Stan­ley Horn­beck back on sched­ule in Indone­sia, as it had been put back on sched­ule in Viet­nam. 

“ . . . . The Unit­ed States was part and par­cel of the oper­a­tion at every stage, start­ing well before the killings start­ed, until the last body dropped and the last polit­i­cal pris­on­er emerged from jail, decades lat­er, tor­tured, scarred, and bewil­dered. . . . the U.S. gov­ern­ment helped spread the pro­pa­gan­da that made the killing pos­si­ble, and engaged in con­stant con­ver­sa­tions with the Army to make sure the mil­i­tary offi­cers had every­thing they need­ed, from weapons to kill lists. . . . know­ing full well that the method being employed to make this pos­si­ble was to round up hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple around the coun­try, stab or stran­gle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. . . . Up to a mil­lion Indone­sians, maybe more, were killed as part of Washington’s glob­al anti­com­mu­nist cru­sade. The U. S. gov­ern­ment expend­ed sig­nif­i­cant resources over years engi­neer­ing the con­di­tions for a vio­lent clash, and then, when the vio­lence broke out, assist­ed and guid­ed its long­time part­ners to car­ry out the mass mur­der of civil­ians as a means of achiev­ing US geopo­lit­i­cal goals. . . .”

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: The John­son Administration’s deter­mi­na­tion to wage a “major war against Indone­sia; the inabil­i­ty of U.S. strate­gic plan­ners to com­pre­hend  Indonesia’s sta­tus of non-align­ment in the Cold War out­side of the “either with us or against us” oper­a­tional par­a­digm that was insti­tu­tion­al­ized in U.S. for­eign and nation­al secu­ri­ty under the Dulles broth­ers dur­ing the Eisen­how­er admin­is­tra­tion; Pakistan’s ambas­sador to Paris sent a let­ter to for­eign min­is­ter Zul­fikar Ali Bhut­to: “ . . . . West­ern intel­li­gence agen­cies were orga­niz­ing a ‘pre­ma­ture com­mu­nist coup.’ Indone­sia, the NATO offi­cer told him, ‘was ready to fall into the West­ern lap like a rot­ten apple.’. . .” The enthu­si­as­tic cov­er­age of the Indone­sian slaugh­ter in the West­ern press, exem­pli­fied by The New York Times’ C.L. Sulzberg­er, who penned the piece “When a Nation Runs Amok”; the cul­tur­al chau­vin­ism tinged with racism of the West­ern press cov­er­age, embod­ied by Sulzberger’s piece: “ . . . . the killings occurred in ‘vio­lent Asia, where life is cheap . . . . hid­den behind their [Indone­sians] smile is that strange Malay streak, that inner, fren­zied blood-lust which has giv­en to oth­er lan­guages one of their few Malay words: amok . . . .”; The fact that the main point of irri­ta­tion in the U.S. about the PKI (Indonesia’s Com­mu­nist Par­ty) was not that they were unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic or try­ing to seize pow­er through sub­ver­sion, but that they “were pop­u­lar;” the role of U.S. plan­ta­tion man­agers and cor­po­rate per­son­nel in sub­mit­ting names to the Indone­sian army and its allies for liq­ui­da­tion; His­to­ri­an John Roosa’s encap­su­la­tion of the results of the slaugh­ter: “ . . . . Almost overnight the Indone­sian gov­ern­ment went from being a fierce voice for cold war neu­tral­i­ty and anti-impe­ri­al­ism to a qui­et, com­pli­ant part­ner of the US world order. . . .”; New York Times colum­nist James Reston’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the coup and result­ing slaugh­ter as “A Gleam of Light in Asia” that out­weighed U.S. set­backs in Viet­nam; he—by now—longstanding and well-rec­og­nized Amer­i­can tac­tic of “mak­ing the econ­o­my scream;” Suharto’s delib­er­ate engi­neer­ing of hyper­in­fla­tion in order to restrict the sup­ply of fun­da­men­tals need­ed by peo­ple to sus­tain their lives; “The U.S. gov­ern­ment was inten­tion­al­ly desta­bi­liz­ing the econ­o­my;” Robert Kennedy’s crit­i­cism of the Indone­sian coup; U.S. cor­po­ra­tions find­ing Indone­sia “open for busi­ness”; a busi­ness con­fer­ence spon­sored by James Linen, Pres­i­dent of Time-Life (it was Time-Life that was–to a con­sid­er­able extent–the eyes and ears of the U.S. on both Chi­ang Kai-shek and the assas­si­na­tion of J.F.K.; The slaugh­ter that took place on the island of Bali, some­thing of an icon­ic trop­i­cal par­adise; analy­sis of the sig­nif­i­cance of machetes being used in the slaugh­ter of scores of thou­sands on the beau­ti­ful Bali beaches–the machete is not a blade used by the Bali­nese, who use a thin­ner, domes­tic cut­ting tool caused the kle­wang; Chi­ang Kai-shek’s Kuom­intang and their sup­port for the Indone­sian coup, includ­ing stag­ing attacks on the Chi­nese embassy in Jakar­ta; Tai­wan as the site for the merg­ing of the Asian Peo­ple’s Anti-Com­mu­nist League with the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations to form the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League.

Epit­o­miz­ing and encap­su­lat­ing the coup was the butch­ery that tran­spired on the Island of Bali and its after­math in the con­tem­po­rary lux­u­ry resort econ­o­my that pre­vails there:

” . . . . Then he [Wayan Badra] heard what was hap­pen­ing on the beach­es. They were bring­ing peo­ple from the city to the east to kill them on the sand. It was pub­lic prop­er­ty there, and emp­ty at night. The bod­ies were aban­doned there. . . . they found a field of bod­ies. . . .They began look­ing through bones, pick­ing up skulls. . . . There were just ‘too many skulls, too many skele­tons. . . . In total, at least 5 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thou­sand peo­ple . . . .”

” . . . . Wayan Ban­dra, the Hin­du priest, lives on the street where he grew up, in Semi­nyak, South­west Bali. But the neigh­bor­hood has changed dras­ti­cal­ly. The same beach he used to walk on for forty min­utes every morn­ing, as he head­ed to school down in Kuta, is cer­tain­ly not emp­ty. It’s packed wall to wall with lux­u­ry resorts and ‘beach clubs,’ a very com­mon type of busi­ness on the island, where for­eign­ers can sip cock­tails all day, and take a dip in a pool, right on the sand. It’s the same sand, of course, where the mil­i­tary brought peo­ple from Ker­obokan, a few miles east, to kill them at night. . . .”

” . . . . . . . . Over the years, Wayan Badra and his neigh­bors have found bones and skulls in the sand . . . . As the elder priest for this vil­lage, he takes it upon him­self to give the bod­ies a prop­er Hin­du funer­al. . . .”

FTR#1207 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 14

Con­tin­u­ing our series on the regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek–all but beat­i­fied dur­ing the Cold War–we draw still more on a mag­nif­i­cent book–The Soong Dynasty by Ster­ling Sea­grave.

Although sad­ly out of print, the book is still avail­able through used book ser­vices, and we emphat­i­cal­ly encour­age lis­ten­ers to take advan­tage of those and obtain it. Sev­er­al lis­ten­ers have said that they were able to obtain the book because it is still in print!

I hope so! PLEASE buy it, read it, and tell oth­ers about it, either through con­ven­tion­al means and/or through social media. (Mr. Emory gets no mon­ey from said pur­chas­es of the book.) It is appar­ent­ly avail­able from Ama­zon on Kin­dle.

We also draw on anoth­er, alto­geth­er remark­able work by Peg­gy and Ster­ling Seagrave–Gold War­riors.

When the fail­ures of Chiang’s regime led to scorn toward, and piv­ot­ing away from the Nation­al­ist Chi­nese cause, the amal­gam of cor­po­rate, crim­i­nal, jour­nal­is­tic and polit­i­cal inter­ests that had empow­ered the Kuom­intang coun­ter­at­tacked: “ . . . . the Chi­ang gov­ern­ment poured mil­lions of dol­lars into a coun­terof­fen­sive. Zeal­ous Amer­i­cans who joined the pro-Tai­wan cru­sade became the fund-rais­ers, the orga­niz­ers, the tele­phon­ers, the leg­men, the gofers, the pub­li­cists, the con­gress­men, the tycoons, the hosts and host­esses of the shad­owy soci­ety called ‘the Chi­na Lob­by.’ Its man­age­ment, its direc­tion, and its pri­ma­ry finances were not Amer­i­can. The Chi­na Lob­by belonged to the Soong clan and the Nation­al­ist Chi­nese gov­ern­ment. The peo­ple involved thought they were work­ing for the greater glo­ry of God, or for ‘the sur­vival of the demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem.’ They were real­ly work­ing for a Chi­nese pub­lic-rela­tions cam­paign. . . . the Kungs and Soongs remained the pri­ma­ry pipeline con­nect­ing Amer­i­can spe­cial inter­ests with Tai­wan. Ai-ling and H.H. Kung, T.V. Soong and May-ling Soong Chi­ang devot­ed con­sid­er­able ener­gies to the lob­by and some­times gath­ered for strat­e­gy ses­sions at the Kung estate in Riverdale. . . .”

The domes­tic polit­i­cal result in the U.S. was summed by Ster­ling Sea­grave: “  . . . . Small won­der that a large seg­ment of the Amer­i­can pub­lic believed that Chi­ang was the essence of virtue and his cause was a joint one. Sim­i­lar amounts were spent dur­ing the Kore­an War and the peri­od­ic crises over the defense of the For­mosa Strait. Guess­es at the grand total spent by Tai­wan to stu­pe­fy Amer­i­cans ran as high as $1 bil­lion a year. . . .”

The unique nature of the man­i­fest Chi­na Lob­by was summed up: “ . . . . Mar­quis Childs wrote ‘. . . . Nation­al­ist Chi­na has used the tech­niques of direct inter­ven­tion on a scale rarely, if ever, seen.’ Part of the cam­paign was to pour gaso­line on the McCarthy witch hunts. . . .”

The com­po­nent ele­ments of the Chi­na Lob­by:

1.–“ . . . . Chiang’s gov­ern­ment used exist­ing Amer­i­can cor­po­ra­tions head­ed by men who shared its view­point. . . .”
2.–“ . . . . it hired adver­tis­ing agen­cies . . . . Allied Syn­di­cates count­ed among its clients the bank of Chi­na (with H.H. Kung as direc­tor). . . . Hamil­ton Wright, worked for six years as a reg­is­tered agent for Nation­al­ist Chi­na, writ­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing sto­ries, news arti­cles, pho­tographs, and movies to cre­ate a favor­able image of Chi­ang Kai-shek and his regime. . . .”
3.–“. . . . T.V.’s wartime Uni­ver­sal Trad­ing Cor­po­ra­tion was list­ed in 1949 as a for­eign agent work­ing for the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, with assets of near­ly $22 mil­lion. The Chi­nese News Ser­vice based in Tai­wan estab­lished branch­es in Wash­ing­ton, New York, Chica­go, and San Fran­cis­co. . . .”
4.–“ . . . . Tai­wan exer­cised a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong influ­ence on Amer­i­can news­pa­pers. . . .”
5.–“ . . . . ‘Hen­ry Luce now saw the most grandiose project of his life­time in dan­ger of ruin. Wrapped up in the ruin was not only the fate of Chi­na and of Chris­tian­i­ty and the Asian hege­mo­ny of the Unit­ed States, but also his own peace of mind and rep­u­ta­tion. Chi­ang-in-Chi­na was to have been the crown­ing of a decade and a half of plan­ning in the Chrysler build­ing and Rock­e­feller Cen­ter and of count­less thou­sands of words of Luce­press pro­pa­gan­da. The night­mare rise of Mao-in-Chi­ina brought a pow­er­ful Luce counter-strat­e­gy.’. . .”
6.–“ . . . . News­cast­er Robert S. Allen report­ed, . . . . Luce has been pro­pa­gan­diz­ing and agi­tat­ing for anoth­er two-bil­lion dol­lar U.S. hand­out for Chi­ang for a long time. . . . And in Wash­ing­ton, prac­ti­cal­ly the whole Luce bureau has been work­ing full blast as part of the Chi­ang lob­by.’. . .”
7.–“ . . . . Many of the activists in the lob­by were peo­ple whose fam­i­lies had worked in Chi­na as mis­sion­ar­ies, and now thought their her­itage was being thrown away. Among them were the direc­tors of the Amer­i­can Chi­na Pol­i­cy Asso­ci­a­tion and the Com­mit­tee to Defend Amer­i­ca by Aid­ing Anti-Com­mu­nist Chi­na . . . . .”
8.–“ . . . . These groups were peri­od­i­cal­ly sup­port­ed by cam­paigns waged on Chiang’s behalf by the exec­u­tive coun­cil of the AFL-CIO, the Amer­i­can Legion, the Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, the Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive Union, and Young Amer­i­cans for Free­dom. To many con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions, Tai­wan became syn­ony­mous with anti-Com­mu­nism. In the atmos­phere of the 1950s, the fear of Red Chi­na kept nor­mal­ly sen­si­ble peo­ple from won­der­ing where all the mon­ey was com­ing from. . . .”
9.–“ . . . . As prin­ci­pal direc­tor of the Bank of China’s New York City branch, H.H. [Kung] was dri­ven to Wall Street two or three days a week . . . . Colum­nist Drew Pear­son, one of the few jour­nal­ists who main­tained an inter­est in the Soongs after they went into exile, called the Bank of Chi­na the “nerve cen­ter of the Chi­na Lob­by . . . .”
10.–“ . . . . ‘Dr. Kung’s knowl­edge of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics is almost as astute as his knowl­edge of Chi­nese finance, and well before he entered the Tru­man cab­i­net, Kung picked Louis John­son as his per­son­al attor­ney. It may or may not be sig­nif­i­cant that, lat­er, when John­son became Sec­re­tary of Defense, he was one of the staunchest advo­cates of Amer­i­can sup­port for For­mosa. . . .”
11.–“ . . . . [From a Drew Pear­son column—D.E.] A move by a Chi­ang broth­er-in-law. . . . to cor­ner the soy­bean mar­ket at the expense of the Amer­i­can pub­lic . . . The broth­er-in-law is T.L. Soong, broth­er of For­eign Min­is­ter T.V. Soong, who for­mer­ly han­dled much of the three and a half bil­lion dol­lars worth of sup­plies which the Unit­ed States sent to Chi­na dur­ing the War. The soy­bean pool net­ted a prof­it of $30,000,000 and shot up the cost to the Amer­i­can con­sumer $1 as bushel [much more mon­ey in 1950 than now—D.E.] One of the strange things about the soy­bean manip­u­la­tion was that its oper­a­tors knew exact­ly the right time to buy up the world’s soy­bean supply—a few weeks before the com­mu­nists invad­ed Korea. . . .”
12.–“ . . . . Louis Kung [son of Ai-ling and H.H. who had become a Dal­las oil man—D.E.] had become one of the busiest mem­bers of the clan. Dur­ing Richard Nixon’s 1950 sen­a­to­r­i­al cam­paign, Dad­dy Kung dis­patched Younger Son to Los Ange­les to give the sen­a­tor dona­tions and encour­age­ment. . . . Louis took an active role in the Soong-Kung petro­le­um hold­ings, with oil prop­er­ties across Texas, Okla­homa, and Louisiana. At the (Nation­al­ist) Chi­nese embassy in Wash­ing­ton in 1956, Louis orga­nized the Cheyenne Oil Com­pa­ny. . . . If one of Louis’s wells (leased for exam­ple, to John Daly, then vice-pres­i­dent for news of the (ABC Net­work), did poor­ly, Louis guar­an­teed that Daly would have his invest­ment back; if the well turned out to be a suc­cess, then the prof­its were divid­ed with Daly. . . .”

Pre­sent­ing an overview updat­ing the oper­a­tions of T.V. Soong, Ster­ling Sea­grave recounts his ascent to the pin­na­cles of pow­er, his cor­po­rate largesse in Amer­i­ca derived from clever invest­ment and his major par­tic­i­pa­tion in the crim­i­nal under­world of Kuom­intang nar­cotics traf­fick­ing and klep­toc­ra­cy and his pur­loin­ing of mas­sive amounts of U.S. aid to Chi­na dur­ing World War II.

Note, T.V.’s role in the Chi­na Lob­by: “ . . . . Although T.V. avoid­ed Tai­wan, and devot­ed most of his atten­tion to his expand­ing finan­cial empire, he did back the Chi­na Lob­by finan­cial­ly because it was in his inter­est to do so. The levers of the Chi­na Lob­by could be worked in many direc­tions. . . .”

Note, also, his grav­i­tas with the lethal, pow­er­ful Chi­nese orga­nized crime milieu in the U.S.: “ . . . . It was not so much implied that T.V. him­self was dan­ger­ous but that the slight­est word from him could bring about ter­ri­ble con­se­quences from the Chi­nese tongs or syn­di­cates, the Chi­nese banks, and name­less oth­er objects of fear. . . .”

The remain­der of the pro­gram recaps infor­ma­tion from FTR#1142 about some of the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the out­break of the Kore­an War.

This is pre­sent­ed as con­text for T.L. Soong’s remark­ably pre­scient cor­ner­ing of the soy­bean mar­ket on the eve of the out­break of that con­flict: ” . . . . The soy­bean pool net­ted a prof­it of $30,000,000 and shot up the cost to the Amer­i­can con­sumer $1 as bushel [much more mon­ey in 1950 than now—D.E.] One of the strange things about the soy­bean manip­u­la­tion was that its oper­a­tors knew exact­ly the right time to buy up the world’s soy­bean supply—a few weeks before the com­mu­nists invad­ed Korea. . . .”

In FTR#1142, we detailed the lit­tle-known involve­ment of Chi­ang Kai-shek and Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek in the 1943 con­fer­ences at Cairo and Teheran. (Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek was the sis­ter of T.V. Soong, one of Chi­ang’s finance min­is­ters and the rich­est man in the world at one time.)

This low-pro­file involve­ment appar­ent­ly gave them con­sid­er­able grav­i­tas in help­ing to shape the post­war geopo­lit­i­cal agen­da.

In that con­text and in rela­tion to the ongo­ing series on Chi­ang Kai-shek’s nar­co-fas­cist gov­ern­ment, it is worth not­ing the deep polit­i­cal agen­da that was gov­ern­ing U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty pol­i­cy by Sep­tem­ber 2, 1945–the day on which the treaty end­ing World War II in the Pacif­ic was signed on board the deck of the U.S. S. Mis­souri. 

While in Oki­nawa dur­ing Japan’s sur­ren­der in World War II, Colonel L. Fletch­er Prouty was wit­ness to the ear­ly com­mit­ment of deci­sive mil­i­tary resources to the wars that were to take place in Korea and Indochina/Vietnam. ” . . . . I was on Oki­nawa at that time, and dur­ing some busi­ness in the har­bor area I asked the har­bor­mas­ter if all that new mate­r­i­al was being returned to the States. His response was direct and sur­pris­ing: ‘Hell, no! They ain’t nev­er goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and sup­ply at least a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand men, is going to Korea, and the oth­er half is going to Indochi­na.’ In 1945, none of us had any idea that the first bat­tles of the Cold War were going to be fought by U.S. mil­i­tary units in those two regions begin­ning in 1950 and 1965–yet that is pre­cise­ly what had been planned, and it is pre­cise­ly what hap­pened. Who made that deci­sion back in 1943–45? . . . .”

In FTR#1142, we high­light­ed the 1951 “Peace” Treaty between the Allies and Japan, an agree­ment which false­ly main­tained that Japan had not stolen any wealth from the nations it occu­pied dur­ing World War II and that the (already) boom­ing nation was bank­rupt and would not be able to pay repa­ra­tions to the slave labor­ers and “com­fort women” it had pressed into ser­vice dur­ing the con­flict.

In the con­text of the fan­tas­tic sums loot­ed by Japan under the aus­pices of Gold­en Lily and the incor­po­ra­tion of that wealth with Nazi Gold to form the Black Eagle Trust, that 1951 treaty and the advent of the Kore­an War raise some inter­est­ing, unre­solved ques­tions.

One of the prin­ci­pal fig­ures in the loot­ing of occu­pied Asia dur­ing World War II was the remark­able Kodama Yoshio. Net­worked with the pow­er­ful Yakuza Japan­ese orga­nized crime milieu, the Black Drag­on soci­ety (the most pow­er­ful of the patri­ot­ic and ultra-nation­al­ist soci­eties), the Impe­r­i­al Japan­ese mil­i­tary and the Roy­al fam­i­ly of Emper­or Hiro­hi­to, Kodama loot­ed the Chi­nese under­world and traf­ficked in nar­cotics with Chi­ang Kai-shek’s fas­cist nar­co-dic­ta­tor­ship.

We can but won­der about Kodama Yosh­io’s pres­ence along with 1951 “Peace” Treaty author John Fos­ter Dulles at nego­ti­a­tions in Seoul on the eve of the out­break of the Kore­an War.

As dis­cussed in numer­ous pro­grams in an inter­view with Daniel Junas, the Kore­an War was a huge eco­nom­ic boom for Japan, and gen­er­at­ed con­sid­er­able prof­it for Ger­man firms as well. Thyssen, for exam­ple, won lucra­tive con­tracts for mak­ing steel for the war effort. Is there some con­nec­tion between the Kodama/Dulles pres­ence in Seoul on the eve of the out­break of war linked to the Gold­en Lily/Black Eagle/1951 “Peace” Treaty nexus and/or T.L. Soong’s cor­ner­ing of the soy­bean mar­ket on the out­break of the war?

Inter­est­ing­ly, and per­haps sig­nif­i­cant­ly, John Fos­ter Dulles made a star­tling­ly pre­scient speech in South Korea, augur­ing North Kore­a’s inva­sion short­ly there­after.

It would be inter­est­ing to know if Dulles and Kodama had been involved in delib­er­ate­ly lur­ing the North Kore­ans to invade, in a man­ner not unlike that in which U.S. Ambas­sador to Iraq April Glaspie appears to have bait­ed Sad­dam Hus­sein into invad­ing Kuwait.

Note, also, Dulles’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Syn­g­man Rhee and Chi­ang Kai-shek as Chris­t­ian gen­tle­men. Chi­ang Kai-shek’s Chris­t­ian cre­den­tials are record­ed in detail in the ongo­ing series.

Fos­ter Dulles’s role in the 1951 Peace Treaty with Japan, his curi­ous pres­ence in Seoul with Kodama Yoshio on the eve of the out­break of the Kore­an War, his pre­scient fore­shad­ow­ing of the con­flict just before the North Kore­an inva­sion and the role of these events in shap­ing the post World War II glob­al eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal land­scapes may well have been designed to help jump­start the Japan­ese and Ger­man economies.

“. . . .  A sub­stan­tial infu­sion of mon­ey into this new Fed­er­al Repub­lic econ­o­my result­ed from the Kore­an War in 1950. The Unit­ed States was not geared to sup­ply­ing all its needs for armies in Korea, so the Pen­ta­gon placed huge orders in West Ger­many and in Japan; from that point on, both nations winged into an era of boom­ing good times. . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with the obit­u­ary of gen­er­al Paik Sun-yup of Korea, whose ser­vice in the Impe­r­i­al Japan­ese Army dur­ing World War II has been a focal point of con­tro­ver­sy in South Korea. Gen­er­al Sun-yup embod­ied the ongo­ing con­tro­ver­sy in Korea over Japan’s occu­pa­tion and the sub­se­quent unfold­ing of events lead­ing up to, and includ­ing the Kore­an War. “. . . . In 1941, he joined the army of Manchukuo, a pup­pet state that impe­r­i­al Japan had estab­lished in Manchuria, and served in a unit known for hunt­ing down Kore­an guer­ril­las fight­ing for inde­pen­dence . . .”

FTR#1205 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and The Kuomintang, Part 12

Con­tin­u­ing our series on the regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek–all but beat­i­fied dur­ing the Cold War–we draw still more on a mag­nif­i­cent book–The Soong Dynasty by Ster­ling Sea­grave. Although sad­ly out of print, the book is still avail­able through used book ser­vices, and we emphat­i­cal­ly encour­age lis­ten­ers to take advan­tage of those and obtain it.

Sev­er­al lis­ten­ers have said that they were able to obtain the book because it is still in print! I hope so! PLEASE buy it, read it, and tell oth­ers about it, either through con­ven­tion­al means and/or through social media. (Mr. Emory gets no mon­ey from said pur­chas­es of the book.)

We also draw on anoth­er, alto­geth­er remark­able work by Peg­gy and Ster­ling Seagrave–Gold War­riors.

The Rape of Nanking–the sub­ject of Iris Chang’s best-sell­ing, non­fic­tion book, saw the begin­ning of the Gold­en Lily oper­a­tion.  The loot­ing of Chi­na (as well as the rest of Asia) by Japan and the sub­se­quent Amer­i­can fus­ing of the Japan­ese war loot into the clan­des­tine U.S. econ­o­my is undoubt­ed­ly a major irri­tant to the Chi­nese.

The loot­ing of Chi­na by Japan–and by exten­sion the U.S.–manifests on top of the cen­turies’ old loot­ing of that coun­try by Britain and the rest of the Euro­pean colo­nial pow­ers, the U.S. as a whole, the Chi­ang Kai-shek/­Green Gang alliance and the over­lap­ping Soong clan.

Chi­nese insis­tence on access to tech­nolo­gies devel­oped by firms estab­lish­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing con­cerns on their soil may be seen as an his­tor­i­cal reac­tion to what the coun­try was sub­ject­ed to at the hands of the above inter­ests.

In the pas­sage below, note the intel­lec­tu­al and cul­tur­al plun­der­ing of Chi­na by Japan, as well as the loot­ing of their eco­nom­ic wealth–a phe­nom­e­non of which the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion forces were aware and with which they ulti­mate­ly col­lud­ed.

Loot­ing of Chi­na was com­pound­ed by joint U.S. and Kuom­intang secret­ing of gold from soon to be Com­mu­nist-occu­pied Chi­na in the post-World War II peri­od (over­lap­ping the Chi­nese civ­il war.) This episode could be seen as an exten­sion of Chi­ang’s loot­ing of the gold of pri­vate investors from the Bank of Chi­na (with the active col­lab­o­ra­tion of the Green Gang) just before the Gen­er­alis­si­mo decamped for Tai­wan.

” . . . . As Chair­man Mao’s forces advanced through Chi­na in 1948 . . . Britain and the U.S. dread­ed the prospect that one of the world’s largest stocks of gold–worth $83-bil­lion at cur­rent prices–would fall into com­mu­nist hands. So it was decid­ed to extract the gold reserves from Chi­na before the com­mu­nists could seize them. The CIA pro­vid­ed the means for this bul­lion res­cue mis­sion . . . .”

Note that the joint U.S./Kuomintang loot­ing of gold from post­war Chi­na was done with the col­lab­o­ra­tion of ele­ments of CIA, as well as the Strate­gic Air Com­mand.

The Fed­er­al Reserve Notes and Fed­er­al Reserve Bonds were to be giv­en to Chi­nese finan­cial inter­ests hold­ing the gold in order to con­vince them to part with the bul­lion.

” . . . . These two CAT [Civ­il Air Transport–a CIA air­line lat­er renamed Air Amer­i­ca] B‑29s, loaded bil­lions of dol­lars’ worth of FRNs and FRBs, were on their way to Malaysia on a round­about route to South­west­ern Chi­na by way of Thai­land and Bur­ma. . . .”

Note, also, that one of the air­craft in a U.S. flight that was downed in the Philip­pines by a typhoon was car­ry­ing ura­ni­um for pos­si­ble use in a “dirty bomb” attack on Chi­na.

” . . . . The B‑50, which had recent­ly been built by Boe­ing to car­ry nuclear weapons for the Strate­gic Air Com­mand (SAC), had a car­go of 117 can­is­ters of Ura­ni­um. At this time, Wash­ing­ton was seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing drop­ping “dirty bombs” on Red Chi­na and North Korea. . . .”

As not­ed above, Chi­ang Kai-shek and Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek (nee Mae-ling Soong) were aware of the oper­a­tion and prof­it­ed from it: ” . . . . He [CAT and for­mer Fly­ing Tiger pilot Eric Shilling] gold us Gen­er­alis­si­mo and Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek were ful­ly informed of the flights . . . . Shilling was invit­ed to the pres­i­den­tial palace where Mme. Chi­ang praised him, telling hi: ‘I did not go to bed until i knew that you had land­ed safe­ly. . . .”

One can but guess if Mme. Chi­ang’s con­cern for Shilling’s well being was ground­ed in the fact that she and Chi­ang ben­e­fit­ed great­ly from the FRNs that were involved in the oper­a­tion: ” . . . . A CIA friend told me that these FRNs were all over the world, not only in the Philip­pines. He said Chi­ang Kai-shek’s fam­i­ly owned large quan­ti­ties. . . .”

Next, we review the fact that T.L. Soong—T.V.’s younger broth­er: “ . . . . who had been in charge of Lend Lease dur­ing World II, and whose Amer­i­can roots were in New York City, became some­thing of an enig­ma. Sources in Wash­ing­ton said T.L. worked as a secret con­sul­tant to the Trea­sury Depart­ment in the 1950’s, engaged in what they would not say. Trea­sury claims it has no record of a T.L. Soong what­ev­er. . . .”

Was T.L. Soong’s Trea­sury con­sul­tan­cy exe­cut­ed in con­junc­tion with the CAT gold extrac­tion mis­sion described above?

The pro­gram con­cludes with exam­i­na­tion of the results of an inves­ti­ga­tion ordered by Pres­i­dent Tru­man into the affairs of the Soong fam­i­ly and their klep­to­crat­ic asso­ciates in what became known as the “Chi­na Lob­by.”

An FBI probe into the family’s doings (and, by exten­sion, those of the Kuom­intang) yield­ed a report that was still heav­i­ly redact­ed in 1983 when the Sea­graves obtained a copy of it.

Pres­i­dent Tru­man summed up the find­ings of the inves­ti­ga­tion into the Soongs, the Kungs and their asso­ciates: “ . . . . ‘They’re all thieves, every damn one of them. . . . They stole sev­en hun­dred and fifty mil­lion dol­lars out of the [$3.8] bil­lion that we sent to Chi­ang. They stole it, and it’s invest­ed in real estate down in Sao Paulo and some right here in New York. . . . And that’s the mon­ey that was used and is still being used for the so-called Chi­na Lob­by.’ . . . .”

Truman’s gaug­ing of the Soong family’s ill-got­ten gains was under­es­ti­ma­tion: “ . . . . In May of 1949, a few months after May-ling’s vis­it [May-ling Soong, aka Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek], Tru­man heard of alle­ga­tions made by bank­ing sources to mem­bers of Con­gress that the Soongs and Kungs actu­al­ly had $2 bil­lion salt­ed away in Man­hat­tan. . . .”

We note that even the FBI was dealt with in a less than can­did fash­ion by some of the banks that held Soong and Kung fam­i­ly deposits: “ . . . . ‘It would appear,’ an FBI agent not­ed lacon­i­cal­ly, ‘that high bank offi­cials had pre­pared a flat state­ment for issuance to the Bureau in this mat­ter.’. . .”

Even Fed­er­al gov­ern­ment agen­cies were also less than enthu­si­as­tic about coop­er­at­ing with the FBI inves­ti­ga­tion: “ . . . . The FBI was reluc­tant to ask Trea­sury for a copy [of bureau­crat­ic forms sub­mit­ted by the Soong fam­i­ly] because it believed that senior Trea­sury offi­cials were close to T.V. and might reveal the inves­ti­ga­tion to him. [Recall that his broth­er T.L. may well have been a con­sul­tant to the Trea­sury Department—D.E] . . .”

 The FBI also ran across evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries that may well have run from the clan­des­tine loot­ing of Chi­nese gold reserves described in the sec­ond major ele­ment of this pro­gram. “ . . . . On the West Coast, oth­er agents dis­cov­ered the cold trail of a Chi­nese plot to fly huge quan­ti­ties of gold from Chi­na to an out-of-the-way pri­vate air­port in the Los Ange­les sub­urb of Van Nuys. . . .”

Inves­ti­ga­tion of the digs of H.H. Kung’s fam­i­ly yield­ed some of the most sor­did infor­ma­tion. [H.H. was mar­ried to Ai-ling Soong, elder sis­ter of Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek and sis­ter to the Soong brothers—T.V., T.L. and T.A.]. “ . . . . Accord­ing to the news­pa­pers, sev­er­al Chi­nese ser­vants in the sum­mer had been brought from Hong Kong osten­si­bly to work in the Chi­nese Embassy found them­selves vir­tu­al pris­on­ers of the Kungs in Riverdale. [At that point in time, the Chi­nese Embassy would have been that of the Tai­wan-based Kuom­intang.] . . . . In des­per­a­tion, they escaped togeth­er, but were cap­tured and brought back. . . . the hap­less ser­vants were taught a les­son when they were hung from the ceil­ing and whipped. . .  H.H. Kung . . . did not deny any of his ser­vants’ . . . charges. . . .”

FTR#1204 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 11

Con­tin­u­ing our series on the regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek–all but beat­i­fied dur­ing the Cold War–we draw still more on a mag­nif­i­cent book–“The Soong Dynasty” by Ster­ling Sea­grave. Although sad­ly out of print, the book is still avail­able through used book ser­vices, and we emphat­i­cal­ly encour­age lis­ten­ers to take advan­tage of those and obtain it.

(Mr. Emory gets no mon­ey from said pur­chas­es of the book.)

We begin with fur­ther dis­cus­sion of the influ­ence of Time Inc.–the Hen­ry Luce pub­lish­ing empire–on Amer­i­can per­cep­tions of Chi­ang Kai-shek’s regime. Theodore White, who wrote for Time mag­a­zine had this obser­va­tion on the jour­nal’s edi­to­r­i­al pol­i­cy: “ . . . . Theodore White post­ed the fol­low­ing sign in the shack that served as the Time office in Chungk­ing: ‘Any resem­blance to what is writ­ten here and what is print­ed in Time Mag­a­zine is pure­ly coin­ci­den­tal.’ This reflect­ed his increas­ing­ly pes­simistic atti­tude about his abil­i­ty, if not to change the course of China’s des­tiny, at least to keep the Amer­i­can pub­lic informed of the events as he and observers like [Gen­er­al Joseph] Stil­well, [State Depart­ment Offi­cer Jack] Ser­vice and [State Depart­ment offi­cial John Paton] Davies saw them . . . .”

When White lodged his com­plaints with Hen­ry Luce, the for­eign news edi­tor for Time was Whitak­er Cham­bers, best known as the accuser of Alger Hiss in the pro­ceed­ings which helped ele­vate Richard Nixon’s polit­i­cal career.

(In AFA#1, we not­ed that Cham­bers dis­played a life-size por­trait of Adolf Hitler in his liv­ing room. In AFA#2, we high­light­ed vehe­ment crit­i­cism of Cham­bers from a for­mer writer for Time, who spun sto­ries from reporters in the field to the far right, mak­ing sto­ries of the lib­er­a­tion of Euro­pean coun­tries by Allied sol­diers look like a creep­ing Com­mu­nist man­i­fes­ta­tion. The com­men­tary was in a let­ter protest­ing Ronald Rea­gan’s award­ing of a medal to Cham­bers. Rea­gan also ele­vat­ed Albert C. Wede­mey­er to a posi­tion of spe­cial mil­i­tary advi­sor.)

Dur­ing the last year of the war, Chi­ang Kai-shek retreat­ed into a world of debauch­ery, Green Gang cama­raderie and ide­o­log­i­cal delu­sion. The deba­cle cre­at­ed by Chi­ang is embod­ied in the star­va­tion of his own army con­scripts and his refusal to believe accounts of what was tak­ing place: “ . . . . So total­ly removed from real­i­ty did Chi­ang become that he was struck with dis­be­lief one day by rumors that his own sol­diers were drop­ping dead of star­va­tion in the streets. Cor­rup­tion was keep­ing them from being fed the barest rations. He sent his eldest son, CCK, to inves­ti­gate. When CCK report­ed back that it was true, Chi­ang insist­ed on see­ing for him­self. CCK showed him army con­scripts who had died in their bedrolls because of neglect. . . . The star­va­tion deaths con­tin­ued. In August 1944, the corpses of 138 stared sol­diers were removed from the streets of Chungk­ing. Chi­ang did not come out again to see. . . .”

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and analy­sis include: Cham­bers’ com­plete per­ver­sion of a sto­ry writ­ten by Theodore White about the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the removal of Gen­er­al Stil­well (dis­cussed in FTR#1203); T.V. Soong’s con­tin­ued pres­ence in Chi­na, the only mem­ber of the fam­i­ly to remain in the coun­try after a failed “palace coup” dis­cussed in FTR#1203; T.V.‘s effec­tive con­trol of Chi­ang Kai-shek’s pub­lic per­sona and state­ments; T.V.‘s use of his posi­tion as Pre­mier to manip­u­late the dis­po­si­tion of Amer­i­can aid to his own ben­e­fit.

The scale of the cor­rup­tion char­ac­ter­iz­ing Chiang’s regime and the Soong clan that con­tin­ued to con­trol it was enor­mous. In addi­tion to the pirat­ing of Amer­i­can Lend-Lease mate­r­i­al shipped to Chi­na by the Soong fam­i­ly, as well as Chi­ang and his gen­er­als (who sold much of what they did not keep for them­selves to the Japan­ese invaders), post war Unit­ed Nations Relief suf­fered a sim­i­lar dis­po­si­tion.

“ . . . . After T.V. [Soong] was named Pre­mier, he cre­at­ed a spe­cial agency, the Chi­nese Nation­al Relief and Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (CNRRA) to over­see the dis­tri­b­u­tion of UN relief goods. The deal he struck with the U.S. gov­ern­ment and the Unit­ed Nations was that UNRRA would relin­quish all title to sup­plies the moment the goods touched down on  any Chi­nese wharf. . . . The wharfs where most of these goods land­ed, the ware­hous­es where the goods were stored and the trans­porta­tion com­pa­nies that moved them (includ­ing Chi­na Mer­chants Steam Nav­i­ga­tion Com­pa­ny) were owned by Big-eared Tu [Tu Yueh-sheng]. This was a sit­u­a­tion ready-made for abuse. . . .”

Like many oth­er for­eign regimes, as well as domes­tic ele­ments of the pow­er elite, the Chiang/Soong/Green Gang klep­toc­ra­cy used the fear of Com­mu­nism to bilk the U.S. out of vast sums: “ . . . . Chi­ang was using the fear of a Com­mu­nist takeover to obtain mil­lions from the Unit­ed States. Fear served him well. . . .”

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: The mon­u­men­tal rip-off of Chi­nese investors and finan­cial insti­tu­tions engi­neered by T.V. Soong with a scam launch­ing a gold-backed cur­ren­cy; the pan­ic that gripped Shang­hai and much of the rest of Chi­na as a result of the “gold yuan” scam; the gob­bling up of much of that wealth by the Soong and Kung fam­i­lies.

When Chi­ang made a woe­ful­ly belat­ed anti-cor­rup­tion drive—headed up by his son, CCK made the mis­take of arrest­ing David Kung (son of H.H. Kung and Ai-ling [Soong] and the nephew of Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek [nee Mae-ling Soong]) and the M.I.T.-educated stock bro­ker son of Green Gang boss Tu Yueh-sheng: “ . . . . The son of Big-eared Tu, a grad­u­ate of the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, was tried and sen­tenced by CCK so fast that it was all over before any­one was dim­ly aware even that he had been arrest­ed. . . . He did not serve time, for that would have been press­ing his father a bit much. . . .”

Pre­sag­ing Hong Kong’s emer­gence as an aug­ment­ed epi­cen­ter of high-lev­el intrigue, Tu Yueh-sheng moved his assets there after the war: “ . . . . It was hard to con­cen­trate on reor­ga­niz­ing the old Shang­hai oper­a­tions when the reds were steam­rolling across Manchuria and mov­ing ever south­ward. Tu began shift­ing his assets to Hong Kong. . . .”

In the case of David Kung, Mme. Chi­ang inter­vened on his behalf and his Yangtze Devel­op­ment Corporation—a major focal point of corruption–moved to Flori­da: “ . . . . Pru­dent­ly, Mae ling hur­ried David onto a plane for Hong Kong, with con­tin­u­ing con­nec­tions to Flori­da. He was not to come back. Yangtze Devel­op­ment Corporation’s offices in Chi­na were closed down overnight and reopened in Mia­mi Beach. . . .”

Chi­ang then decamped to Tai­wan, where he sub­dued the island’s inhab­i­tants with char­ac­ter­is­tic bru­tal­i­ty: “ . . . . The island did not wel­come the KMT. It was dri­ven into sub­mis­sion by ter­ror. . . . Chi­ang forced Tai­wan to heel. There were mas­sacres; in the first, ten thou­sand Tai­wanese were slain by KMT troops in riots in down­town Taipei. Twen­ty thou­sand more were put to death before Chi­ang was firm­ly estab­lished. . . .”

FTR#1203 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and The Kuomintang, Part 10

Con­tin­u­ing our series on the regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek–all but beat­i­fied dur­ing the Cold War–we draw still more on a mag­nif­i­cent book–“The Soong Dynasty” by Ster­ling Sea­grave. Although sad­ly out of print, the book is still avail­able through used book ser­vices, and we emphat­i­cal­ly encour­age lis­ten­ers to take advan­tage of those and obtain it.

(Mr. Emory gets no mon­ey from said pur­chas­es of the book.)

We begin by resum­ing analy­sis of the polit­i­cal and pro­fes­sion­al destruc­tion of U.S. mil­i­tary and State Depart­ment ele­ments that cor­rect­ly gauged Chi­ang Kai-shek and the [inevitable, down­ward] tra­jec­to­ry of his regime.

Just as Gen­er­al Still­well was removed as top mil­i­tary offi­cer in the China/Burma the­ater because of his appro­pri­ate, accu­rate, vehe­ment crit­i­cism of Chi­ang Kai-shek’s pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of fight­ing the Com­mu­nists over fight­ing the Japan­ese, State Depart­ment offi­cers who accu­rate­ly fore­cast the deci­sive ascent of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty over the KMT were pun­ished for their stance.

(Stilwell’s replace­ment by Gen­er­al Wede­mey­er was noteworthy—particularly in light of the back­ground and behav­ior of Wede­mey­er.

In addi­tion to being part of a polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary milieu that infused iso­la­tion­ist ori­en­ta­tion toward involve­ment in World War II with pro-fas­cist sen­ti­ment, Wede­mey­er appears to have presided over an act of con­sum­mate treason—the leak of the Rain­bow Five Amer­i­can mobi­liza­tion plan for World War II to anti-FDR pub­lish­er Robert J. McCormick, of the Chica­go Tri­bune.)

The Chi­na watch­ers’ advice was not only ignored, but cast as “sub­ver­sive” dur­ing the anti-Com­mu­nist witch hunts of the McCarthy peri­od.

“ . . . . The eyes and ears of the U.S. Gov­ern­ment in Chunk­ing were a hand­ful of old Chi­na hands . . . . The Chi­na watch­ers’ mes­sage essen­tial­ly was that no mat­ter how much Wash­ing­ton want­ed Chi­ang Kai-shek to ‘run’ Chi­na, he was about to lose it to the Com­mu­nists. . . . The observers in Chungk­ing were accused of being in favor of what they predicted—in favor of com­mu­nism. In fact, they were only warn­ing their gov­ern­ment of a course of events that now seemed cer­tain. . . . Wash­ing­ton react­ed with deep sus­pi­cion and hos­til­i­ty and insist­ed on nail­ing the Amer­i­can flag the more tight­ly to the mast of Chiang’s sink­ing ship . . . .”

As we shall fur­ther explore, the cog­ni­tive per­cep­tion of Chi­na in this coun­try was shaped by the Soong fam­i­ly.

The Chi­na watch­ers’ advice was not only ignored, but cast as “sub­ver­sive” dur­ing the anti-Com­mu­nist witch hunts of the McCarthy peri­od.

“ . . . . Amer­i­can pol­i­cy was thus based upon the per­son­al­i­ties of the Chi­angs, the Soongs and the Kungs, rather than upon the events, the nation or the peo­ple. This was a trib­ute to the Soongs’ extra­or­di­nary stage­craft. . . .”

Ster­ling Sea­grave filed a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request, which obtained an FBI report on the Soongs. Heav­i­ly redacted—even in 1985—it revealed the Soongs machi­na­tions on both sides of the Pacif­ic.

“ . . . . The Soong fam­i­ly . . . . ‘prac­ti­cal­ly had a death grip.’ The Soongs ‘have always been mon­ey mad and every move they made was prompt­ed by their desire to secure funds.’ . . . . ‘there was a gigan­tic con­spir­a­cy to defraud the Chi­nese from mate­ri­als they would ordi­nar­i­ly receive through [Lend-Lease] and to divert con­sid­er­able of this mon­ey to the Soong fam­i­ly.’. . .”

After dis­cussing the extreme mar­i­tal dif­fi­cul­ties of Chi­ang Kai-shek and Mme. Chi­ang Kai-shek (the for­mer Mae-ling Soong, whose mar­riage to Chi­ang had been arranged by H. H. Kung and his Machi­avel­lian wife Ai-ling—the for­mer Ai-ling Soong), the infor­mant iden­ti­fies Mrs. Kung as the sin­is­ter, dead­ly and manip­u­la­tive fig­ure that she was.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the scale of the treach­er­ous, cor­rupt prac­tices of the clan was a diver­sion of Lend-Lease aid: “ . . . . The infor­mant then told the FBI that one of the ways T.V. divert­ed Lend-Lease funds into his own pock­et was illus­trat­ed by reports reach­ing Chunk­ing that a freighter car­ry­ing six­ty new Amer­i­can bat­tle tanks and oth­er very expen­sive war materiel fur­nished by Lend-Lease had been sunk. As a mat­ter of fact this ‘freighter nev­er left the West Coast with any tanks; the tanks were nev­er made . . . . this is a pos­i­tive illus­tra­tion of the man­ner in which the Soongs have been divert­ing funds from Lend-Lease inas­much as the mon­ey was allo­cat­ed for the 60 tanks. . . .”

Again, a key fac­tor in the polit­i­cal clout wield­ed by the Soongs was their extreme wealth, great­ly aug­ment­ed by insti­tu­tion­al­ized cor­rup­tion, includ­ing (and espe­cial­ly) T.V. Soong’s appro­pri­a­tion of much of the Lend-Lease mate­r­i­al des­ig­nat­ed for Chi­na.

In addi­tion to the out­right theft of Lend-Lease mate­r­i­al by Chi­ang Kai-shek’s Green Gang gen­er­al staff and their sale of much of that to the Japan­ese ene­my they were sup­pos­ed­ly fight­ing, T.V. Soong—using his broth­er T.L Soong’s admin­is­tra­tive con­trol of the Lend-Lease pro­gram for China—maneuvered hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars’ worth of U.S. aid into the pri­vate cof­fers of the Soong fam­i­ly.

As the KMT regime decayed and rela­tions between the Soongs and Chi­ang fol­lowed suit, T. V. increas­ing­ly turned his ener­gies to the Amer­i­can side of the Pacif­ic, and appoint­ed T.L. to over­see the Amer­i­can side of Lend-Lease! “ . . . . T.V. used his posi­tion as For­eign Min­is­ter to issue his broth­er T.L. Soong a spe­cial diplo­mat­ic pass­port, and sent him hur­ried­ly to New York. T. L. was actu­al­ly being whisked out of Chi­na to take over as chief pur­chas­ing agent and admin­is­tra­tor of all U.S. Lend-Lease sup­plies before they left for Chi­na. Since the very begin­ning, T.L. had been in charge of Lend-Lease at the Chi­nese end. . . .”

Next, we review the fact that T.L. Soong—T.V.’s younger broth­er: “ . . . . who had been in charge of Lend Lease dur­ing World II, and whose Amer­i­can roots were in New York City, became some­thing of an enig­ma. Sources in Wash­ing­ton said T.L. worked as a secret con­sul­tant to the Trea­sury Depart­ment in the 1950’s, engaged in what they would not say. Trea­sury claims it has no record of a T.L. Soong what­ev­er. . . .”

Next, we review the fact that T.L. Soong—T.V.’s younger broth­er: “ . . . . who had been in charge of Lend Lease dur­ing World II, and whose Amer­i­can roots were in New York City, became some­thing of an enig­ma. Sources in Wash­ing­ton said T.L. worked as a secret con­sul­tant to the Trea­sury Depart­ment in the 1950’s, engaged in what they would not say. Trea­sury claims it has no record of a T.L. Soong what­ev­er. . . .”

The con­clud­ing seg­ments of the pro­gram are drawn on anoth­er mag­nif­i­cent work by the Sea­graves: Gold War­riors.

Before wind­ing up the broad­cast, we “dol­ly out” to syn­op­size the rela­tion­ship between the Japan­ese invaders of Chi­na, the Green Gang gang­sters, the Kuom­intang regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek which front­ed for the Green Gang and col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Japan­ese, Japan­ese cor­po­ra­tions and Japan­ese colo­nial inter­ests in Korea and Tai­wan.

This overview fore­shad­ows the polit­i­cal con­sor­tium that—in the post­war peri­od, became the Asian Peo­ples’ Anti-Com­mu­nist League, a key com­po­nent of what was to become the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League.

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: Green Gang boss Tu Yueh-sheng’s con­trol of Shanghai’s boom­ing gam­bling and over­lap­ping broth­el busi­ness­es; syn­op­tic review of the rela­tion­ship between Tu Yueh-sheng and the Green Gang and Chi­ang Kai-shek; Chiang’s sanc­tion­ing of Tu to con­trol the KMT’s drug traf­fick­ing; the sym­bi­ot­ic, coop­er­a­tive rela­tion­ship between the invad­ing Japan­ese and the Green Gang, cement­ed by Gen­er­al Doi­hara and Kodama Yoshio on the side of the invaders and Green Gang/KMT oper­a­tives the Ku broth­ers (one of whom was Tu’s har­bor boss in Shang­hai and the oth­er of whom was a top KMT gen­er­al); review of the Japan­ese devel­op­ment of the nar­cotics busi­ness in Manchuria; the Japan­ese use of their Manchuri­an nar­cotics enter­prise to sub­vert Chi­na by increas­ing the population’s addic­tion rate; review of Chi­ang Kai-shek’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Manchurian/Japanese nar­cotics enter­prise; the role of Japan­ese zaibat­su and oth­er col­o­nized areas in the Japan­ese nar­cotics busi­ness.

“ . . . . The [opi­um] was con­vert­ed into mor­phine and hero­in at fac­to­ries in Manchuria, Korea and Tai­wan, then smug­gled direct­ly across the strait on motor­ized junks, to main­land ware­hous­es owned by Mit­sui, Mit­subishi and oth­er con­glom­er­ates. An army fac­to­ry in Seoul that pro­duced over 2,600 kilos of hero­in in 1938–1939 was only one of sev­er­al hun­dred fac­to­ries in Manchuria, Korea, Tai­wan, and in Japan­ese con­ces­sions in main­land cities like Han­kow. . . .”

We con­clude the pro­gram with analy­sis of pow­er broker–Kodama Yoshio who helped insti­tu­tion­al­ize the col­lab­o­ra­tion between Chi­nese KMT, Kore­an and Japan­ese fas­cists. Note­wor­thy, as well is Kodama’s close rela­tion­ship between with the CIA and the Japan­ese Impe­r­i­al fam­i­ly in the postwar/Cold War peri­od.

Kodama Yoshio epit­o­mizes and embod­ies the oper­a­tional and ide­o­log­i­cal struc­ture of the Asian Peo­ple’s Anti-Com­mu­nist League, the Asian branch of what was to become the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League.

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: Kodama’s accu­mu­lat­ed for­tune of 13 bil­lion dol­lars in World War II dol­lars; Kodama’s close rela­tion­ship with Japan­ese Emper­or Hiro­hi­to, who allowed him to stash some of his wealth in the Impe­r­i­al Palace; Kodama’s dom­i­nant posi­tion in the nar­cotics traf­fic, dur­ing and after World War II; Kodama’s dona­tion of 100 mil­lion dol­lars to the CIA (equiv­a­lent to 1 bil­lion dol­lars in today’s cur­ren­cy); Kodama’s con­tin­ued dom­i­nance in the glob­al nar­cotics traf­fic, dur­ing the time he was on the CIA’s pay­roll; Kodama’s cozy rela­tion­ship with Prince Higashiku­ni, Emper­or Hiro­hi­to’s uncle, who facil­i­tat­ed Kodama’s oper­a­tions, includ­ing his close rela­tion­ship with the U.S.

FTR#1202 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 9

Con­tin­u­ing our series on the regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek–all but beat­i­fied dur­ing the Cold War–we draw still more on a mag­nif­i­cent book–The Soong Dynasty by Ster­ling Sea­grave. Although sad­ly out of print, the book is still avail­able through used book ser­vices, and we emphat­i­cal­ly encour­age lis­ten­ers to take advan­tage of those and obtain it.

(Mr. Emory gets no mon­ey from said pur­chas­es of the book.)

Tack­ling Amer­i­can ide­o­log­i­cal delu­sion vis a vis Chi­ang Kai-shek and the Kuom­intang, the broad­cast resumes analy­sis of the embrace of Chi­ang by the State Depart­ment and the allied U.S. press and the schism with the War Depart­ment (lat­er the Depart­ment of Defense.)

Chi­ang’s anti-Com­mu­nism endeared him to ele­ments of State, even–as we have seen–his obses­sion with fight­ing the CCP instead of the invad­ing Japan­ese was cor­rect­ly fore­cast by T.V. Soong, among oth­ers as dri­ving the Chi­nese peo­ple into the arms of the com­mu­nists.

” . . . . Washington–not as rep­re­sent­ed by Chief-of-Staff George C. Mar­shall but as typ­i­fied by FDR’s advi­sor Har­ry Hopkins–increasingly shared Chi­ang’s fix­a­tion with the post­war threat of Com­mu­nism. To please the Gen­er­alis­si­mo and his sup­port­ers in Amer­i­ca, the Wash­ing­ton of Hop­kins and the Depart­ment of State was pre­pared to sac­ri­fice any num­ber of its own peo­ple. . . .”

Fur­ther devel­op­ing the cir­cum­stances lead­ing to the replace­ment of the skilled, hero­ic Amer­i­can Gen­er­al Joseph Stil­well and the polit­i­cal defen­es­tra­tion of the State Depart­men­t’s best “Chi­na Watch­ers,” we note the role of the con­sum­mate­ly pow­er­ful Soong fam­i­ly in shap­ing U.S. ide­o­log­i­cal delu­sion con­cern­ing Chi­ang Kai-shek.

It is a con­sum­mate irony that the dog­mat­ic anti-Com­mu­nists allied with Chi­ang and the Soongs were the ones who “Lost Chi­na,” as the McCarthyites and the Chi­na Lob­by put it. (Of course Chi­ang and the KMT them­selves were the prin­ci­pal agen­cies involved in said loss.)

The War Depart­ment as embod­ied by Chief-of-Staff Gen­er­al George C. Mar­shall did not share the infat­u­a­tion with Chi­ang, and sided with Chi­ang’s neme­sis, Gen­er­al Joseph Stilwell–the top U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cer in the China/Burma the­ater.

” . . . . Amer­i­ca failed to under­stand the trap it was falling into because the State Depart­ment was not lis­ten­ing to its Chi­na Watch­ers. Very few of their secret reports actu­al­ly reached the Sec­re­tary of State, because the rest were being inter­cept­ed by par­ti­sans inside the depart­ment hier­ar­chy. . . . Accord­ing to infor­ma­tion gath­ered by the FBI at the time, some­one high in the depart­ment was pass­ing this secret infor­ma­tion straight over to Chi­na Defense Sup­plies, to be read by T V. Soong and to be act­ed upon as he saw fit. So the Amer­i­cans sent to Chi­na to watch Chi­ang’s regime were report­ing to the Soong fam­i­ly, not to Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt. . . . At the War Depart­ment, the sit­u­a­tion was quite dif­fer­ent. Gen­er­al Mar­shall was sus­pi­cious of Chi­ang, and lis­tened to Stil­well’s warn­ings. . . .” 

Key ele­ments of analy­sis and dis­cus­sion include: Joseph Alsop’s role as a Chiang/Soong par­ti­san; Alsop’s World War II role as the Chungk­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Lend-Lease pro­gram; Intro­duc­to­ry dis­cus­sion of T.L. Soong (younger broth­er of T.V.) and his role as first, admin­is­tra­tor of U.S. Lend-Lease in Chi­na and, lat­er, admin­is­tra­tor of Lend-Lease in the U.S. (this will be dealt with at greater length lat­er in the series); Alsop’s post­war career as a not­ed jour­nal­ist, close­ly linked to the CIA; Gen­er­al Claire Chen­nault’s hatred of Stil­well; review of Chen­nault’s role as leader of the Fly­ing Tigers (the Amer­i­can Vol­un­teer Group); Chennault’s asser­tion to FDR that his Four­teenth Air Force could use for­ward bases to dec­i­mate Japan­ese ship­ping; Stilwell’s cor­rect counter-asser­tion that the Japan­ese would sim­ply destroy the for­ward air bases upon which Chen­nault based his asser­tions; the 1944 Japan­ese offen­sive known as Oper­a­tion Ichi­go; the resound­ing suc­cess of the Japan­ese offen­sive; review (from our pre­vi­ous pro­gram) of KMT Gen­er­al T’ang En-po’s dis­as­trous com­mand of the Chi­nese forces oppos­ing the Japan­ese Ichi­go offen­sive; the view of the State Department’s Chi­na watch­ers and Vice-Pres­i­dent Hen­ry Wal­lace that Chi­ang Kai-shek could not suc­cess­ful­ly rule post­war Chi­na; the War Department’s tem­po­rary ele­va­tion of Gen­er­al Stil­well to com­mand the KMT armies in Chi­na; Chiang’s fierce and suc­cess­ful resis­tance of Chi­ang to Stilwell’s ele­va­tion; Chiang’s insis­tence on a quid-pro-quo for agree­ing to allow U.S. observers into the Com­mu­nist-con­trolled areas of China—an agree­ment that fea­tured the replace­ment of Stil­well with Major Gen­er­al Albert C. Wede­mey­er; Chiang’s insis­tence on the replace­ment of Ambas­sador Clarence Gauss; the deci­sive appoint­ment of Major Gen­er­al Patrick J. Hur­ley as Roosevelt’s per­son­al rep­re­sen­ta­tive to Chiang—an appoint­ment which led to Stilwell’s replace­ment with Wede­mey­er.

Stilwell’s replace­ment by Gen­er­al Wede­mey­er was noteworthy—particularly in light of the back­ground and behav­ior of Wede­mey­er.

The pro­gram recaps infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed in AFA#11.

In addi­tion to being part of a polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary milieu that infused iso­la­tion­ist ori­en­ta­tion toward involve­ment in World War II with pro-fas­cist sen­ti­ment, Wede­mey­er was a chief sus­pect in an act of con­sum­mate treason—the leak of the Rain­bow Five Amer­i­can mobi­liza­tion plan for World War II to anti-FDR pub­lish­er Robert J. McCormick (of the Chica­go Tri­bune.) (As cel­e­brat­ed anti-fas­cist jour­nal­ist and researcher George Seldes has doc­u­ment­ed, the “iso­la­tion­ist” Amer­i­ca First orga­ni­za­tion received financ­ing from the Abwehr [Ger­man intel­li­gence dur­ing the Third Reich.])

Key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis include:

1.–Wedemeyer’s back­ground: “ . . . . he him­self had been edu­cat­ed in part at the Ger­man War Col­lege, in Berlin. He rent­ed his apart­ment from a mem­ber of the Nazi Par­ty, Ger­hard Ross­bach, and dur­ing his sojourn became a great friend of Gen­er­al Lud­wig Beck, chief of the Ger­man Gen­er­al Staff. . . . (Ross­bach was, in fact, the num­ber two man in the SA behind Ernst Rolm. As dis­cussed in AFA#11, Ross­bach went to work for the CIA after the war.–D.E.) . . . .Right­ly or wrong­ly, he was regard­ed by the Ger­man embasssy in Wash­ing­ton as part of the pro-Ger­man mil­i­tary clique in teh War Depart­ment. . . .”
2.–Wedemeyer’s asso­ci­a­tion with key per­son­nel on the Ger­man Gen­er­al staff: ” . . . . His intro­duc­tions to Beck were arranged by Lieu­tenant Gen­er­al Friedrich von Boet­tich­er, Ger­man mil­i­tary attache in Wash­ing­ton. He cor­re­spond­ed reg­u­lar­ly withy his Ger­man con­tacts until the advent of World War II in Europe. . . .” 
3.–The Third Reich’s devel­op­ment of a Fifth Col­umn with­in its Amer­i­can coun­ter­part: ” . . . . The numer­ous mem­o­ran­da of Hans Thom­sen and Boet­tich­er to Berlin at the time indi­cate that a series of con­tacts had been estab­lished in this group held meet­ings at the home of for­mer Amer­i­can mil­i­tary attache in Berlin Colonel Tru­man Smith. Although pro-Ger­man and a sym­pa­thiz­er of Amer­i­ca First, Smith had the ear of Gen­er­al Mar­shall. . . .”
4.–The theft of the Rain­bow Five man­u­script by a U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cer. ” . . . . On the night of Decem­ber 3, 1941, an office attached to the War Plans Divi­sion decid­ed on his own account to con­sult some of the doc­u­ments at home. It was a sim­ple mat­ter to unlock the steel cab­i­net and remove the large expand­ing fold­er of sev­er­al hun­dred pages. That he was not autho­rized to do so is indi­cat­ed by the fact that he found it nec­es­sary to wrap the file in heavy brown paper, to make it look like a par­cel for mail­ing. . . .”
5.–The fact that Wede­mey­er under­lined the same pas­sages in his copy of the man­u­script as even­tu­al­ly found their way into the Chica­go Tri­bune piece: ” . . . . . Back in his office, Wede­mey­er faced a very unpleas­ant sit­u­a­tion. [J. Edgar] Hoover had dis­patched his num­ber-one man, Edward Tamm, to the office, and Tamm was stand­ing by an open fil­ing cab­i­net while Wede­mey­er’s sec­re­tary was sob­bing into her hands. One of Tam­m’s men was hold­ing a copy of the Vic­to­ry Pro­gram. The same pas­sages were under­lined in red by Wede­mey­er as appeared in the news­pa­pers . . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at the fate of the Third Force or Third Option formed by Mme. Sun Yat-sen (nee Ching-ling Soong) and Teng Yen-ta, a per­sis­tent crit­ic of Chi­ang Kai-shek.

Dis­il­lu­sioned with Com­mu­nism after a sojourn in Moscow, Mme. Sun Yat-sen part­nered with Teng Yen-ta, who rec­og­nized Chi­ang’s fas­cism and, yet, felt that the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (at that point in time) was over­ly loy­al to Moscow and was­n’t doing enough for the Chi­nese peas­antry.

Both Ching-ling and Teng Yen-ta sought an alter­na­tive to both Kuom­intang fas­cism and the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.

Find­ing the demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism pro­posed by Ching-ling and Teng Yen-ta unac­cept­able, Chi­ang had the British and Amer­i­can police author­i­ties arrest him in the Inter­na­tion­al Con­ces­sion in Shang­hai, after which he was tor­tured for many months.

Ching-ling was report­ed to have vis­it­ed Chi­ang to plead for Teng Yen-ta’s release. Chi­ang had  already dealt with him in char­ac­ter­is­tic fash­ion: “ . . . . Days ear­li­er, on Novem­ber 29, 1931, near­ly a year after his arrest, Ten Yen-ta had been tak­en from his cell at Chiang’s com­mand and was slow­ly stran­gled with a wire. The exe­cu­tion­er was said to be famous for keep­ing vic­tims alive for half an hour while he tight­ened his grip. In his office, Chi­ang had remained silent while Ching-ling plead­ed for a man already dead, enjoy­ing the spec­ta­cle of her momen­tary vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. . . .”