CIA Failures in China From 1951 to 1960 and how to do it better

Starting in 1951 and ending by roughly 1960, the CIA conducted a series of infiltrations by parachute. They all failed miserably, and their objectives could’ve been achieved for a lot less money in a more simple low profile less action-movie kind of way. 

Operation HOTFOOT, for example, was focused on establishing covert networks to support anti-communist activities by parachuting commandos into mainland China. However, a lack of local support networks, exacerbated by the adverse weather conditions and the inability of the agents to blend into local communities, made successful infiltration almost impossible.

BONESETTER, launched in 1952, was concentrated on gathering intelligence about Chinese military activities by parachuting commandos into mainland China. A majority of agents were caught, interrogated, and executed. This operation was particularly handicapped by the lack of fluency in local dialects among the agents, making it hard for them to convince locals of their authenticity.

SWALLOW, commenced in 1954, aimed at embedding agents into China’s social fabric for long-term intelligence-gathering operations by parachuting commandos into mainland China. Unfortunately, despite an emphasis on recruitment of individuals with some local knowledge, the agents’ lack of recent cultural understanding, coupled with their inability to accurately emulate local behaviors and dialects, often led to their exposure. (Spotting a theme here?)

Lastly, Operation UNION in 1958 was focused on gathering intelligence on Chinese nuclear facilities by, you guessed it, parachuting commandos into mainland China. Unfortunately, the Chinese counterintelligence apparatus was very effective during this time, and the operation was deemed a failure due to factors like inadequate intelligence, poor planning, and the horrifying death of almost everyone involved.

In some cases, agents were even 2nd or 3rd generation children of Chinese immigrants, or in other cases not even Chinese at all. When they were Chinese, they were often dropped without consideration for which part of China their family came from, which meant that they still lacked context for the culture and customs of the local areas they were assigned to, in addition to being unfamiliar with the years of cultural developments that had taken place in their absence.

The vast majority of these agents were intercepted, interrogated, and killed. The cost of training them, of procuring their specialized equipment, and flying them into China was extreme. The payoff was practically nonexistent.

The title promises a better strategy, so I’ll get right to it: Recruit agents who were already organically part of mainland Chinese communities via neighboring territories engaged in trade activity-in particular Hong-Kong.

As a trade hub with frequent transit to and from the mainland, but nominally under British control, Hong-Kong was one of the few places where Mainland Chinese of both high and low status could make contact with US intelligence. Mainlanders who regularly had to go to and from China for work reasons would have been the ideal candidates for recruitment, and much less likely to be immediately intercepted by Chinese Counter-Intelligence.

The CIA may very well have done this, and perhaps that’s why we don’t hear about it. That’s great, but if they did, they’d have been a lot better served cutting the entire acid trip fueled action movie re-enactment budget and dumping it into the Hong-Kong shoe salesman recruitment budget.

Not just shoe salesmen, either. Lots of important people came and went to and from Hong-Kong in that era, and so did their disgruntled aids and poorly paid delivery drivers who ferried Western and Chinese goods back and forth. Why go to all the trouble of training elite commandos and air dropping them in when you can spend one thousandth of that cost recruiting a freight bike driver?

These fresh local recruits, not externally trained individuals unfamiliar with the areas they were supposed to manage, would then go on to create their own networks using CIA funding. The networks would all have to be totally unaware of each other, and would either thrive or die based on the personal success of the agent involved.

This model would have drawn far less initial attention, allowing the CIA to establish existing intelligence and insurgency networks in China before attempting riskier missions like parachute insertions.

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