US intelligence and Chinese spies in the civil war

Abstract

Throughout the civil war, US intelligence in China reported on the operations of the Bureau of Information and Statistics (BIS) of the regime of the Kuomintang (KMT) – the ruling Chinese National People’s Party of the Republic of China – the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and Soviet intelligence (the NKVD – later the MBG and its military intelligence counterpart the GRU) in the vast urban centres of Shanghai, Nanjing, Tietsin and Beijing, as well as in key ports and coastal cities. Opponents multiplied in the complex and ruthless world of espionage, and honest allies were hard to find. The descendant of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the X-2 Branch (the surviving counter-intelligence branch of the OSS), Army and Naval Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) and ultimately, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were the key agencies handling secret human sources, witnessing the rapid decay of the KMT regime, the performance of its security apparatus, and the PLA’s secret activities among the urban population. US intelligence also noted the extensive recruitment of Japanese intelligence networks and operators to serve the Soviets, the KMT regime and the Communist Party of China (CPC); only a couple of years earlier Japanese spies were the enemy, and now they were deemed expert intelligence assets, to be employed without hesitation. One could say that in espionage yesterday’s fanatical enemy is tomorrow’s unscrupulous associate.