![]() ![]() But beginning in the mid-1950s, the Americans shifted their emphasis from subversion to surveillance. So he was game to carry out covert missions across the Taiwan Strait, sending his planes on leaflet-dropping missions over mainland cities or launching unmanned balloons with anti-communist propaganda materials. The major platform for these operations was the island of Taiwan, then under the aggrieved rule of Chinese Communist Party nemesis and military dictator Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Party.Ĭhiang needed to sustain the hope-or maintain the illusion-that one day he would vanquish Mao and reconquer the mainland. Operation Tropic took place at the height of the Korean War, when the United States was desperate for means to weaken the Chinese war effort without publicly taking the war onto the mainland-thus the reliance on activities that could be “plausibly denied.”Įven after the Korean War armistice in 1953, the CIA continued to carry out or support an array of aerial clandestine activities directed against mainland China. Once on the ground, agent teams were expected to foment a counterrevolution to overthrow then-Chinese leader Mao Zedong, relying on occasional resupply drops from CIA planes. ![]() In perhaps the most brazen clandestine mission, the CIA recruited anti-communist agents in the then-British colony of Hong Kong, flew them to the Pacific island of Saipan for paramilitary training, and then dropped them from unmarked transport planes over northeast China in 1952. It has been a kind of farcical reversal of what Communist China faced for decades after its founding in 1949: unrelenting efforts by the United States to spy on-and even subvert-their country. Having recently published a book, Agents of Subversion, about a spy plane sent into China during the height of the Korean War, I could not help but be struck by the profound historical irony of the spy balloon frenzy. Seen in the larger history of U.S.-China relations, does the spy balloon take on any greater meaning, and what lessons might be learned from the past? But after a weekend spate of the United States shooting down objects floating in the stratosphere over North America-and Beijing reporting its own “ mystery object” over the Yellow Sea-serious questions are emerging about surveillance technologies and the proper diplomatic or even military response. Laughter can be the best medicine for an international crisis in the making-at least involving incidents where no one gets hurt. heartland to the partisan hysterics unleashed in the U.S. There’s something inherently ridiculous about balloons and the series of bad decisions and misplaced rhetoric, from whatever possessed China to float a gigantic blimp over the U.S. With the spy balloon commanding nonstop cable news coverage much of last week, I found it difficult-even as a historian of Cold War espionage between the United States and China-to resist laughing out loud at the whole affair. ![]()
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