The survey of Kuomintang-Communist relations, sketched in Part I of this Introduction, and the account of the spectacular "Case of the Six" given in Part II are intended to make as intelligible and meaningful as possible the many pages of these volumes. The preceding parts of the Introduction are to be regarded, therefore, as background for personal study of the recovered Amerasia papers themselves. ... (The following) That analysis comprises the third and concluding part of this introduction.
To begin with, something more needs to be said concerning the much misunderstood matter of the actual size of the cache of "documents" recovered by OSS and FBI agents in 1945. The total number of separate papers seized that spring may have been as many as 1,700, the figure most often quoted in the press at the time, and subsequently during the congressional inquiries. Any total figure, however, would necessarily include every copy of every paper found, and some items were found in duplicate, triplicate, and even quadruplicate copies. The figure of 1,700 is not, therefore, repeated here as an "official" figure, since no official figure was ever announced by the Department of Justice. Ten years later, in 1955, the Justice Department was asked by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to deliver the Amerasia materials. Since the collection was made up chiefly of wartime documents which had never been declassified, the Justice Department undertook to arrange declassification before surrendering them to the subcommittee. In 1956-57, in several installments, the department delivered some 1,260 items to the subcommittee. Of these, 340 had been designated "P" by the department, presumably to indicate that they were in no sense "documents" of the United States government but were instead merely the "personal" papers (letters, memoranda, etc.) of the Amerasia people. These "P" items do not, therefore, show up in the listing of deliveries to the subcommittee ... but a few of the most interesting of them have now been picked out for inclusion. Of the remaining 923 documents surrendered by the Justice Department, more than a third are published. Each has been chosen for at least one special reason—its source, its classification when known, its innate interest of content or its diplomatic significance. The last reason is, of course, the most important. Among the 315 different documents published, therefore, the hundred-odd items from the pen of John Stewart Service that were recovered in the Amerasia seizures are by far the most vital. Only a few of these documents have hitherto been made public.
The sources, or agencies of origin, of the Amerasia materials were of remarkable diversity within the vast network of the United States government. The basic fountainheads were the Department of State, the Office of Strategic Services and the Department of War. Of the 923 official or quasi-official papers eventually turned over to the Internal Security Subcommittee, some 640 had the Department of State as their source; some 150 had come from the Office of Strategic Services; and some 130 bore the imprimatur of the Department of War. Subsidiary sources included the Office of War Information, the Federal Communications Commission and apparently also the Office of Naval Intelligence, although the subcommittee received no such documents from the Justice Department. (The presence of ONI documents was mentioned repeatedly in the press and in the congressional hearings.) The places of origin were equally diverse. The editors of Amerasia had obtained copies of documents, and even some originals, written not only in Washington and in China but also in India and even in Moscow.
The documents also varied greatly in type. There were copies of memoranda and correspondence belonging to the Secretary of State, the Vice President and even the President of the United States. There were diplomatic notes, dispatches, and instructions of every sort from both low-ranking Foreign Service officers and top-ranking ministers and ambassadors. There were intelligence reports of every description from the U.S. Military Attaché at Chungking, the American Embassy at Chungking, the Joint Intelligence Collection Agency of the China-Burma-India theater, the Forward Echelon Headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces in the China-Burma-India theater, the U.S. Army Observer Section at Yenan, the American Intelligence Mission at Yenan, the Classified Message Center of the Department of War and the Military Intelligence Service and Military Intelligence Division of that department. There were press clippings, press releases and weekly propaganda directives from the Office of War Information; reports of interviews with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Soong and other leaders of the Chinese National Government; reports of interviews with Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Chu Teh, Madame Sun Yat-sen and others identified with the Chinese Communist Party; and many translations of basic doctrinary pronouncements of the Chinese Communists and editorial comments from their newspapers. There were even a few reports of interviews with Japanese prisoners of war, Koreans and other Asiatics—including some Chinese in the United States—seemingly sympathetic to Communism. In other words, the Amerasia editors were receiving grist of every sort, size and texture for the mill they were operating in New York.
Beyond what has been said in Part II regarding the matter of classification of documents, a further word is necessary. Certain documents, including a few originals, were dated 1942, 1941 and even 1940, which meant that they were several years old at the time of recovery by OSS and FBI agents. Whether or not such documents, as well as the hundreds of others recovered, were highly classified wartime "secrets" of the United States government is, of course, the ticklish question which was repeatedly answered in the negative during the congressional hearings by the Justice Department officials in charge of the prosecution of the Amerasia case. But to dismiss the recovered documents as "teacup gossip", to quote again the very words of one official, is to overlook a central and most important point. Documents were found in Jaffe's office that were four or five years old. There is no way of telling how long these items had been in the illegal possession of Amerasia, but the fact that they were still there raises the key query: Was Jaffe's access to the files of the United States government so smoothly developed, so watertight and so extensive that original copies of documents could be lifted and delivered to him for permanent possession? This question was asked at different times during the congressional hearings but was never really answered. It is asked again now because its implications are so serious.
The documents recovered from the offices of Amerasia bore every type of security classification from "Top Secret for Eyes Only" down to "Restricted". The classifications of "Secret" and "Confidential" were commonplace in the collection. Many items, of course, were unclassified, such as Office of War Information press clippings and news releases, for the obvious reason that these were not subject to any governmental classification. Upon receiving the Amerasia materials from the Department of Justice in 1956-57, the staff of the Internal Security Subcommittee discovered several documents bearing the following stamped classification:
This document contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the Espionage Act, 50 USC 31 and 32 as amended. Its transmission or the revelation of its contents in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by law.
This is worthy of note for a number of reasons. It points again, for instance, to the question of why the "Case of the Six" was not prosecuted more vigorously in 1945. But the story does not end here. Before the Amerasia materials were released to the subcommittee, the originating agencies declassified most of them in various and rather peculiar ways. On some, the classification mark was routinely rendered invalid with a stamp reading "Declassified by the Authority of — Agency" or "Classification changed to Unclassified by authority of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2". On others, the classification mark was simply obliterated with black ink, while on some it was actually cut out entirely by scissors or razor blade. The subcommittee staff counted no less than 17 items bearing carefully painted-out blocks which appeared to be of the same size as the stamped classification stating that transmission or revelation of contents was a violation of the Espionage Act. These 17 were sent back to the Justice Department for FBI laboratory analysis. Director J. Edgar Hoover reported as follows to Jay G. Sourwine, chief counsel of the subcommittee:
Dear Mr. Sourwine:
In response to your request of Mr. Nichols, our laboratory has examined the 17 documents which you submitted in connection with the Amerasia case. You requested that the laboratory determine the phraseology that had been blocked out. The phraseology on all 17 documents is identical and reads as follows:
"This document contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the Espionage Act, 50 USC 31 and 32 as amended. Its transmission or revelation of its contents in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by law."
The decision of the Internal Security Subcommittee to publish a selection of the recovered Amerasia papers was made some years ago, and since that time the subcommittee staff has pondered the peculiar problems of arrangement implicit in the diversity of materials. Because more than one hundred of the 315 items selected from the collection were written by John Stewart Service, it was at first thought best to separate these and print them as a group under their own subheading. Upon further consideration, however, this seemed unwise. Startling as the Service documents were, the grouping of them might tend to divert attention from the manifest importance of other documents and from the central fact that Amerasia had a wide network of sources within the U.S. government. It was decided, therefore, to array the 315 selected papers in a strict chronological order—each item according to the date that it carried on its face—so that the reader might achieve a fuller understanding of the rich variety of materials that Amerasia editors received during World War II from their secret sources within the Federal government. In no way, of course, does the date of a document indicate just when the Amerasia people first saw it, but it may properly be assumed that the earliest items were perhaps among the first to be pilfered. ...
While it has been emphasized that the hundred-odd documents from the pen of John Stewart Service comprise the most significant segment of the 315 items published ... many other documents (ate) highly important not only because of their official source but because of their content as well. Herein will be found, for instance, many State Department documents containing first-hand criticism, either overt or indirect, of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, his government, and his party. Such authoritative anti-Kuomintang comment was exactly what the editors of Amerasia wanted, and through their mysterious network they were able to gather a handsome variety of it. Beyond the Service documents, which contain perhaps the shrewdest and most blatant of all such comment, Amerasia was deriving similar grist for its mill from some of the dispatches of the U.S. ambassador at Chungking, Clarence E. Gauss, to the Secretary of State, and from some of the communications to the embassy sent by junior American diplomats in the field. A few of these assorted State Department documents might be noted here.
On March 27, 1944, for instance, Ambassador Gauss sent a "strictly confidential" dispatch from Chungking to the Secretary of State containing a speech by Dr. Sun Fo, president of the Legislative Yuan, on "Democratization of the Government and Planned Economy". Ambassador Gauss noted that Dr. Sun Fo's speech was "the first instance that has come to the Embassy's attention of outspoken semi-public criticism by a Kuomintang and government leader of the Fascist tendencies of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Government". Chiang Kai-shek was said to be "displeased" by these statements because they were similar to current American criticism of "non-democratic tendencies in China". The Generalissimo was quoted as having recently asked, "What is there about China that the Americans do not like?"134 A month later, in a dispatch marked "Secret—Not for Distribution", Ambassador Gauss discounted a letter just received from General Ho Ying-chin, the Generalissimo's chief of staff and minister of war, which was strongly critical of Chinese Communist war policies. This document came to Amerasia for the apparent reason that in it the American ambassador was brushing aside as "obvious untruths" and "slightly ludicrous" propaganda a high-ranking Nationalist official's opinion of Communist efforts to prolong the war. What must have been even more palatable at Amerasia was the comment of Ambassador Gauss on the "political naivete" of the American military authorities in China to whom General Ho's letter was ad dressed.135 In still another dispatch, dated May 22, 1944, the Amerasia staff must have been quite pleased to read Ambassador Gauss' sharp criticism of an out-spoken anti-Communist, Father Shanahan, who had recently been removed as editor of the Catholic magazine China Correspondent for his "too slavishly pro-Kuomintang" views.136
Perhaps equally as interesting to the Amerasia editors were some of the reports to the Chungking embassy in China. Writing from Tihwa on December 14, 1943, Consul O. Edmund Clubb predicted, for example, that the Chinese Nationalists would soon make a deceitful gesture to "repair the damage previously done to Sino-Soviet relations by their own ineptness with a view to ... stimulating other United Nations [i.e., the U.S.] to increase their aid ... in the assumed fear that Soviet Russian influence might gain an ascendancy in China". Clubb thought it unlikely, however, that the Soviets could be "led unwittingly to play a Chinese game".137 Criticism of the internal policy of the Nationalists was coming in regularly. On March 28, 1944, Vice Consul Rutherford wrote from Kunming that the National Government "may be attempting to extend its authority at the expense of local autonomy".138 On June 15 Consul Arthur R. Ringwalt at Kweilin forwarded a strong letter from a group of Chinese intellectuals to Vice President Wallace, then on his Asiatic mission, declaring "China's present weakness" to be "a direct result of the Kuomintang dictatorship".139 According to J. K. Penfield, second secretary of embassy, writing from Chengtu three days later, the Young China Party and other "small parties" were far more important than the Kuomintang was willing to acknowledge; these parties, declared Penfield, were "the only organized political groups in the country (with the exception of the Communists) which are pledged to the establishment of a more democratic form of government", and their leaders were hoping for a chance to meet Vice President Wallace.140
Consul-General William R. Langdon, in a communication from Kunming on July 14, reported "genuine bitter opposition to Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang leadership among Chinese liberals", some of whom were saying that "there is no hope for governmental change so long as the Generalissimo lives" and that "the United States is now in a position, which may never return, of being able to aid in bringing about needed internal reform in China in such a way that a more liberal and representative government can arouse the full support of the people and contribute more than a negligible and negative share to the defeat of Japan".141 These were welcome words indeed at Amerasia.
Of all the U.S. Foreign Service officers on station in China, none was more caustic in criticism of Chiang Kai-shek personally and the National Government generally than John Paton Davies Jr., second secretary of embassy on assignment as political adviser to General Joseph W. Stilwell, American commander in the China-Burma-India theater. Davies continued to be active in his opposition to the Chinese Nationalists, and outspoken in his admiration of the Chinese Communists even after Stilwell had been succeeded by General Albert C. Wedemeyer late in 1944. One of Davies' confidential reports from Yenan, dated November 7, 1944, ended up in the offices of Amerasia. To Editor Jaffe it must have been like pure gold. "The Chinese Communists are so strong between the Great Wall and the Yangtze," Davies wrote, "that they can now look forward to the postwar control of at least north China. ... They have survived and they have grown. ... And they will continue to grow. The reason for this phenomenal vitality and strength is simple and fundamental. It is mass support, mass participation. ... If the GSMO [Generalissimo] neither precipitates a civil war nor reaches an understanding with the Communists, he is still confronted with defeat. Chiang's feudal China cannot long coexist alongside a modern, dynamic popular government in North China. The Communists are in China to stay. And China's destiny is not Chiang's but theirs".142
The fact that Amerasia received, through its network, an incredible variety of governmental papers is no better illustrated than by a glimpse at some of the widely diversified documents bearing the State Department designation. An unsigned and undated "Memorandum for the Vice President", probably prepared at the Chungking embassy late in June of 1944, is one of these. In it Henry A. Wallace, then on his Asiatic mission, was briefed on the ticklish question of whether to send official U.S. observers to North China to establish contact with the Communists in order to gather accurate intelligence on the progress of the war in that region. "This information," the writer insisted, "cannot be obtained from the Central Government. It can only be obtained by the actual presence of American observers in the Communist areas. The Communists welcome such observers.... The Central Government has bluntly refused us permission to send them".143 (A few weeks later, of course, John Stewart Service went to Yenan with the U.S. Army Observer Section.) Scarcely safer was the very correspondence of the President of the United States, as the presence of a letter to President Roosevelt from Mao Tse-tung, dated November 10, 1944, manifestly demonstrates.144
Another State Department item of peculiar interest is the "Informal Report on Various Matters Dealing with Current China", a secret document written at Chungking on August 15, 1944, and submitted to Robert E. Sherwood of the Office of War Information. The author, Richard Watts Jr., had reached the conclusion that "the Kuomintang is in a bad way.... The corruption, inefficiency, and general ineptitude of the government are now so notorious that it seems at last as if something will have to be done about them, whether violently or not".145 Still another secret State Department document which ended up at Amerasia was a communication, dated January 24, 1945, to John Carter Vincent of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs from C. M. Chen of the Chinese Embassy in Washington. Chen had sent Vincent a translation of a resolution recently adopted by the Chinese Communists which read: "The Chinese Communist Party welcomes American emissaries, extends good feelings to the United States and accepts. the demand to establish military bases in the northwest. But these activities should not be taken to mean that the party does not continue to regard the United States as a capitalistic and imperialistic nation. On account of the fact that we inherit the orthodoxy of Marx and Engels to launch a class revolution ... we oppose all forms of imperialism." Vincent forwarded this resolution to the American Embassy at Chungking with the notation that it had been received at his desk with the "greatest reserve".146 Doubtless it was received at Amerasia in much the same way.
Beyond the documents of State Department origin, many of those from the Department of War, the Office of Strategic Services and other sources will be found to be of unusual interest. A few examples will suffice. To begin with, the reader's attention is called to the fact that Amerasia was receiving such remarkable materials as an intelligence report from the Office of the Chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps entitled "Airports in the Far East", dated December 8, 1941—the day after Pearl Harbor—and a Military Intelligence Service report of a year later entitled "Order of Battle of the Japanese Army".147 Perhaps less spectacular as wartime secrets but no less interesting are the numerous Military Attaché reports from China such at Capt. Roy P. McNair's "Vital Economic Problems in China" written on May 18, 1944. Captain McNair's remarks, based on his personal observations, were mildly critical of the National Government. Whatever the degree, all such negative comment on the Generalissimo's regime was certainly welcome at Amerasia.148
The accidental discovery of an Office of Strategic Services document in the pages of Amerasia magazine was, it will be recalled, the very first episode in the "Case of the Six." It will also be recalled that the nocturnal raid on Jaffe's headquarters by OSS agents revealed the presence of a shocking quantity of pilfered OSS documents. Much of the recovered OSS material published will be found to be of particular interest and significance even though some of it probably was not very pleasing to Jaffe and his associates. An OSS report of October 8, 1943, for instance, was sharply critical of Communism. Based on an interview with a former Chinese official, it read: "Subject states that we in America haven't the slightest conception of the true meaning of Communism as it is practiced in China and Russia; that the Communists in China are a very serious threat to the Central Government in spite of any paper reports we might read saying that the importance of the Communists in China has been exaggerated".149 More palatable at Amerasia was an OSS report of January 19, 1945, based on "off-the-record talks" at Chungking with the Kuomintang critic Dr. Sun Fo and others. In those localities which the Communists had penetrated, Dr. Sun remarked, "life in general is much easier for the common people".150
One of the most interesting of the OSS documents was a question-and-answer interview with Mao Tse-tung in mid-1944. Some of Chairman Mao's statements are classic in their falsehood. "There has been in the past and there is now," he declared, "no connection between the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. In the past, there was a relationship with the Communist Internationale, but this no longer exists." Then, when asked if he was in favor of "multi-party rule", the chairman answered affirmatively for his followers. Finally, when asked if the Communists considered Chiang Kai-shek to be president of China, he replied: "Naturally the Generalissimo will be President of China. We have and will continue to stick to our promises, which are namely (1) not to overthrow the Kuomintang, (2) not to confiscate land, (3) to consider our government ... as a local government under the National Government, and (4) to place our Army under ... the National Army. We would welcome an American mission to cooperate in the military and economic fields and to understand our political cooperation".151
From the samplings already given, it will be seen that the characterization of the Amerasia documents by Justice Department officials as "innocuous" and "a little above the level of teacup gossip" is grossly misleading. Many of the pilfered documents were of vital diplomatic and military importance in wartime, just as their original classifications indicated. How such documents could be dismissed with a wave as "teacup gossip" remains a mystery to the Internal Security Subcommittee—and may continue to puzzle students of American history for years to come. The source of the term "teacup gossip", however, will no longer perplex the public. Used in the congressional hearings and much quoted by the press, this term evidently derives from an Office of War Information document dated January 30, 1945, and entitled "Current Political Gossip—Teacup Report No. 1". Its author, Theodore Herman, described the paper as "the first of what we hope will be a series of weekly reports . . . based on the local gossip in Chung- king". "Our method," Herman explained, "is to sit down, over the teacup as it were, review the happenings of the past week as published in the local press, and let the stream flow from there."152 What Herman was reporting early in 1945 may indeed have been gossip, and as such his report carried no classification. Its significance can hardly be compared, however, with that of many of the documents already cited, and certainly not with those of John Stewart Service. A review of the content of the hundred-odd Service documents in the Amerasia collection will make this perfectly clear.
At the time of the Amerasia arrests in the spring of 1945, John Stewart Service was only 36 years old. Yet four years before, in the critical months leading up to American participation in World War II, Service already was known to his superiors at the Department of State as one of the "old China hands" of the diplomatic corps. Born in China of missionary parents and fluent in the language since a boy, he was widely traveled in his native land—and, in fact, had been away from its good earth only long enough to attend high school and college in the United States. For most of the decade preceding Pearl Harbor, he had been on station as a junior diplomatic officer at such diverse places as Kunming, Peking, Shanghai and Chungking. By the time he was assigned to Chungking early in 1941 as third secretary of the U.S. Embassy, this young careerist was one of America's most seasoned oriental diplomats; by the time he was returned to the United States in the spring of 1945, Service had proven himself to be, as the sheer quantity of his writings demonstrate, one of the most energetic men ever to receive a U.S. Government paycheck in the Far East. But, as the documents to be viewed here also will show, he was not serving the exclusive interest of the United States. Instead, his "brilliant political reporting", as one admirer described his wartime work, did much to advance the cause of the Chinese Communists—with whom the United States had no official relationship at all—at the expense of America's ally, the National Government of the Republic of China. To reduce the matter to fundamentals, Service simply put his personal predilection ahead of all else. "Thinking" Chinese rather than American, he put what he fondly imagined to be China's best interest ahead of the declared official policy of the nation he was representing.
The basic American wartime policy toward China, as expressed repeatedly by the President and the Secretary of State and clearly understood in Washington and throughout the nation, was to uphold in all possible ways the Central Government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and to support his armies in the field against Japan. Officially, the United States recognized only one government in China as long as the war lasted. After the Japanese surrender, however, the United States became officially involved in China's internal strife—and, as it proved, on behalf of Mao Tse-tung's Communists and in opposition to Chiang's regime. As Dr. Stanley K. Hornbeck, a leading Far Eastern expert of that time, has said, this was the turning point. In response to an inquiry from Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk early in 1950, he specified December 15, 1945, as the date on which American policy in China underwent its calamitous "change". Writing just a few days before the outbreak of the Korean War, Dr. Hornbeck declared:
... there is urgent need that the Government of the United States give solicitous attention to the question: Must the United States follow to the bitter, tragic, and discrediting end the downward path, in relations with China, on which its feet were set in the fateful year of military victories and diplomatic vagaries and vitiations, 1945?153
The change of policy described here by Dr. Hornbeck was ardently advocated by John Stewart Service during the war years in his voluminous reporting from China. Service looked upon Chiang's regime as totalitarian, reactionary, inefficient and corrupt; he looked upon the Communist as democratic, progressive, effective and honest. He saw no hope for China under the Kuomintang; the only hope, then, was in the triumph of the Communists. In the fall of Chiang's Nationalists he saw the salvation of the Chinese people, and he found a thousand ways to condemn the Kuomintang by comparing its actions and programs unfavorably against those of the Communists.
Service's writings had a remarkably wide and diverse circulation. As the historian Herbert Feis has summarized, copies went to many desks:
The regular official circulation was in itself wide. Copies were sent to the commanding general's headquarters in China, to the American Embassy at Chungking and to Davies' headquarters in New Delhi. In each of these places they were well read, circulated and passed on. American military headquarters sent them on to the War Department. The Embassy at Chungking sent them on the State Department, where, either in full or in summary, they had an assortment of readers. A few—thought to be novel or important—were sent directly by letter or messenger to Harry Hopkins in the White House, who now and again drew the President's attention to one. Nor was this the whole range of official distribution. Extracts were transmitted to American diplomatic missions in other countries. Selected reports, in whole or part, were sent by the State Department to the Treasury, Office of War Information and Office of Strategic Services. In sum, the written work of this group of advisers was widely read within the authorized circle which was a loosely formed one.154
In order to measure with any accuracy the impact of what Service was saying, it is necessary to study his reporting cumulatively and to weigh his words in that sense. A closely detailed analysis will now be offered; therefore, of the Service documents in the Amerasia collection. ...
The earliest of Service's writings to turn up among the Amerasia materials was a confidential memorandum to Ambassador Gauss, dated November 27, 1942, in which the third secretary of embassy offered some details on Chinese supplying of strategic materials to the Japanese enemy. Service had observed a lively trade in wool, cotton, tung oil and tungsten while on an extensive four-month tour of the northwestern provinces with a party of Nationalist engineers and journalists. In this report he did not specifically criticize the National Government other than to note that it was apparently unable to control such illicit trade.155 Within a month Service was taking a leave in the United States, and as it happened, he was the first person from the Chung-king embassy to visit Washington since Pearl Harbor. Then, upon returning to China in the spring of 1943, he was soon assigned to the staff of General Stilwell—upon the specific request of Stilwell, whom he had known for some years—as one of four political advisers on loan from the State Department. (The others were Raymond P. Ludden, John K. Emmerson and John Paton Davies Jr., who acted informally as supervisor of the group.) 156 It was in this capacity as a special consultant to the American commander of the China-Burma-India theater, therefore, that Service subsequently wrote most of the reports which were to have been seen by the editors of Amerasia.
On February 13, 1944, Service sent two memorandums to Army G-2. One, which was highly classified and sent by express letter, dealt with "Secret Kuomintang Orders for Undercover Anti-Communist Work". With it Service forwarded a full translation of a paper just delivered to Him by the Communist office in Chung-king purporting to be a recent plan of the Kuomintang for a campaign against the Communists. Among its interesting features, Service thought, was the differentiation between traitors (Communists) and puppets" made by the Kuomintang and "the clear priority given to combating the Communists".157 The second memorandum enclosed two magazine articles, written for Time by the foreign correspondent Theodore D. White which had just been rejected by Chiang Kai-shek's Minister of Propaganda as unsuitable for release. After reviewing the articles and amending a few points which he felt were weakly made by White, Service dismissed the detailed criticisms of the Minister of Propaganda as "revealing the sorry result of China's effort to perpetuate abroad a falsely optimistic picture of conditions" and "so far divorced from reality that they deserve no comment".158
Five weeks later, on March 20, Service was ready to make a blast at Chiang Kai-shek directly. His secret memorandum of that date to General Stilwell, entitled "The Reported Views of Generalissimo", was actually a collection of Service's own views on the Generalissimo. Knowing full well the depth of Stilwell's personal hostility to Chiang, Service loaded his cannon with heavy shot and opened fire without trepidation. It is note-worthy that Ambassador Gauss, with whom Service filed a copy of this paper, forwarded it to the Secretary of State on March 26 with a routine "summary" of its contents but without evaluation or comment of any kind. What Service communicated to his superiors in this remarkable document is important enough to quote here at length:
China is in a mess. ... Internal unrest is active and growing. Relations with all her allies are estranged. China is still Chiang Kai-shek. Although we may have to deal with others—H. H. Kung or Ho Ying-chin—we must recognize them as substantially only yesmen. We are, it is true, partially to blame for adding to China's economic problems. But for the sorry situation as a whole Chiang, and only Chiang, is responsible.
And more:
That under these serious circumstances Chiang should be acting as he is seems incredible. ... The answer to the apparent enigma lies in Chiang's background and limitations. ... Chiang's experience as a young man in Shanghai is important to an understanding of his methods. As a broker he learned to push his luck when things seemed to be going his way. From his contact with the gangster underworld he learned the usefulness of threats and blackmail. ... Chiang shows these traits in everything he does. He has achieved and maintained his position in China by his supreme skill in balancing man against man and group against group ... and by reliance on a gangster secret police. ...
And still more:
Chiang believes that by bluff and by taking advantage of our weakness . . . he can evade American efforts to jolt him out of this course. He believes that we are so committed to him that he can "have his cake and cut it too". ... The words of the Ambassador carry little weight—because the State Department has not taken a strong policy and because it does not, in any event, speak for the White House.
And finally:
Until the President determines our policy, decides our requirements and makes these clearly and unmistakenly known to Chiang, Chiang will continue in his present ways. The President can do this directly or through fully authorized and completely supported representatives. ... This may mean taking an active part in Chinese affairs. But unless we do it, China will not be of much use as an ally. And, in doing it, we may save China.159
The memorandum made no mention of the Chinese Communist Party. Service did not dilute his message by suggesting for whom China was to be saved.
Having discharged a devastating broadside of personal opinion against Chiang Kai-shek, Service quickly followed through with a sampling of the Generalissimo's own words in an attempt to substantiate such opinion. A few days later he had ready a six-page "summary of differences" between the first and revised editions of Chiang's book, China's Destiny, the "Bible" of the Kuomintang Party. Despite some correction of "certain obvious factual errors", Service thought that the revised edition would continue to be considered "unsuitable for consumption abroad" because "there has been apparently only slight attempt to meet the strong and well-founded Communist criticism" of the work. "There remains unchanged a bitter anti-Communist bias," Service wrote, "and the flat assertion that only the Kuomintang can lead China to salvation." The book was a "bigoted, narrow, strongly nationalistic effort," he asserted, and it proved that "the Generalissimo remains convinced of the rightness of his own views".160
No sour note of this kind accompanied Service's communications regarding the formal writings of the Chinese Communists. On May 14, for instance, he forwarded a summary and a translation of New Democracy, an "authoritative" booklet written late in 1940 by Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the "acknowledged ideological leader" of the Chinese Communist Party. The translation, he noted, was "supplied by Communist sources" and unchecked against the original, but was "the only full one in English available". Before proceeding to his summary, Service took pains to call attention to the change in attitude on the part of the Chinese Communists since the German attack on Russia and the American entrance into the Pacific War. "Since then," he wrote, "they have consistently upheld the United Nations strategy . . . have pled for the United Front in China . . . and have argued the vital importance of American aid in winning the war against Japan, in assisting China toward political democracy, and in rebuilding the bourgeois-democratic economy of China which they believe is a necessary first step before the eventual socialist revolution." Then, on May 26, he sent to General Stilwell's office a Communist booklet entitled Economic Reconstruction in the North China Anti-Japanese Bases, which he found "quite pardonably" optimistic, and another called Abundant Clothing; Sufficient Food, which comprised two articles by Chairman Mao in the realm of economic policy. Service observed that Mao, in describing his peasant cooperative as the ideal form of economic organization in China, made a clear distinction between "Collective, mutual-assisting labor, established on the basis of individual economy and private property" and "the Soviet type of collective farm".161
In the seven weeks following June 1, 1944, Service prepared five lengthy documents at Chungking which turned up among the Amerasia materials. The dominant common characteristic of this set of documents is their intense, unremitting denunciation of the National Government, the Kuomintang, and the Generalissimo personally at the very time that Vice President Wallace was visiting China. Only sparing mention was made of the Chinese Communists; the emphasis was on the weaknesses of the Nationalist regime. One has only to read these documents in their entirety to recognize the utter subjectivity of Service's reporting at this juncture.
Service chose, for example, to disbelieve almost everything emanating from Nationalist sources. In commenting upon one such Kuomintang release, Service wrote: "It is well summed up in the statement: 'To the Kuomintang group, the Communist bogeyman is frequently a menace worse than the Japanese aggressor'". He decried the release as "obviously one-sided argument, completely lacking in objectivity. ... For its Kuomintang authors to expect its acceptance without rational analysis or relation to its historical background, is a naive imposition on our credulity". And more:
The Kuomintang, generally speaking, is not reliable on matters concerning the Communist question. ... The quoting of Ho Ying-chin as the ultimate authority that the 'Russians have never given up their idea of world revolution' may cause a few raised eyebrows. Trotsky and Stalin argued this question out a good many years ago. Trotsky, the world revolutionist, lost out. ... At the same time, developments within Russia and the increasing ascendancy of Stalin over the Trotsky school of world revolution led to the abandonment of active support of a Communist Revolution in China.
In retrospect, it would seem that perhaps Ho Ying-chin understood the "historical background" of the whole question of world revolution far better than Service.162
On the immediate question of the probable economic and political effects of a successful Japanese drive in southeast China, Service posed a "legitimate" question of his own—and ventured the answer: "Will the Chinese Government Collapse?" he asked, and then replied: "Its weakness seems likely to grow and its collapse, even though it will not come soon, may become only a matter of time". Forwarding a copy of this report to the Secretary of State, Ambassador Gauss commented: "The Embassy is of the opinion that Mr. Service's memorandum is excessively pessimistic in raising any question as to the probable collapse of the Chungking Government at this time".163 But Service was undaunted. He was soon forwarding to Army G-2 a letter from a Chinese intellectual, Miss Yang Kang, expressing her hope that "America Can Save China by Forcing Democratic Reform". Miss Kang, Service explained, was a journalist who soon would be visiting the United States on a fellowship to Radcliffe College and "emphatically not a Communist".164
The major report which Service wrote on June 24, entitled "Kuomintang China and American Policy", was 13 pages long. It combined a series of devasting criticism of Chiang Kai-shek's regime with a set of specific recommendations on what the official American attitude toward China should now be. "The position of the Kuomintang and the Generalissimo," he began, "is weaker than it has been for the last ten years. ... Morale is low and discouragement widespread. ... The governmental and military structure is being permeated and demoralized from top to bottom by corruption, unprecedented in scale and openness. ... The Kuomintang is losing the respect and support of the people by its selfish policies and its refusal to heed progressive criticism. ... The Generalissimo shows a similar loss of realistic flexibility and a hardening of narrowly conservative views. ... On the internal political front the desire of the Kuomintang leaders to perpetuate their own power overrides all other considerations. ... On the economic front the Kuomintang is unwilling to take any effective steps to check inflation which would injure the landlord-capitalist class. … On the external front the Kuomintang is showing itself selfishly short sighted by progressive estrangement of its allies. ... On the military front the Kuomintang appears to have decided to let America win the war. ... "
All of this, Service summarized, seemed to point to the single conclusion that "we might welcome the fall of the Kuomintang if it could immediately be followed by a progressive government able to unify the country and help us fight Japan". But, he added with underscoring for emphasis, "Democratic reform is the crux of all important Chinese problems, military, economic and political", and the United States government must now decide "whether we can afford passively to stand by" and allow the disintegration of China to continue "or whether we wish to do what we legitimately and practically can to arrest it". Service had the answer. "We need to formulate a realistic policy toward China", he went on, and then implement such a policy in both negative and positive ways. His "negative" recommendations were to "stop our present 'mollycoddling' of China. ... Stop building up 'the Generalissimo and the Kuomintang's prestige internationally and in the United States. ... Stop making unconditional and grandiose promises of help along such lines as UNRRA, postwar economic aid and political support. ... Discontinue our present active collaboration with Chinese secret service organizations, which support the forces of reaction and stand for the opposite of our American democratic aims and ideals".
Among his "positive" suggestions were to "maintain friendly relations with the liberal elements in the Kuomintang, the minor parties, and the Communists" and to "select men of known liberal views to represent us in OWI, cultural relations and other lines of work in China". On the last pages of this lengthy paper he came finally to his purpose in drafting it: "We should continue to show an interest in the Chinese Communists. ... We should consider the training and equipping of provincial or other armies in China. ... We should continue to press—and if necessary to insist—on getting American observers to the actual fighting fronts." In a word, the United States should extend some recognition to the Chinese Communist government in the northern provinces by sending an official delegation up there to "observe" the situation.165
In his big paper of June 24, Service took a passing slap at Chiang Kai-shek by referring to "his growing megalomania and his unfortunate attempts to be a 'sage' as well as a leader—shown, for instance, by China's Destiny and his book on economics". Two days later he struck for the jugular, assembling a packet of 54 pages devoted exclusively to Chiang's writings. Service had recently translated Chinese Economic Theory, a book published early in 1943 by the Kuomintang, and had delivered the translation to an American economist, Solomon Adler, who was in China as a representative of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Adler then prepared a "summary" and a "critical discussion", and Service forwarded everything to Army G-2 with this hostile remark: "The close relationship of this book to the thinking shown in the Generalissimo's China's Destiny, whose publication preceded it by a few months, is obvious. The two books together must be considered an authoritative expression of the mixed Fascism, chauvinism, feudalism and paternalism which characterize the Generalissimo and the conservative leaders around him who now control China." He identified Adler as "a competent economist who desires for obvious reasons that his comments be treated as secret". Adler's comments included a statement that the real author was Tao Hsi-sheng, a graduate of the Imperial University of Tokyo and formerly a professor of economic history in Peking National University, a "mediocrity" who "enjoys the academic reputation of being a somewhat crackbrained dilettante and plagiarist"; another statement that "the book is definitely fascistic in ideological tendency"; another that the author's "whole approach" was "prescientific"; another that the basic idea of the book was "alien to our tradition" and "much closer to the Nazi Blut and Boden philosophy of the social sciences"; and finally that its publication marked the second step in Chiang Kai-shek's "conscious—or better self-conscious—evolution as a sage". Adler's parting shot was that "the Generalissimo's intellectual balloons" served only as "a further manifestation of his messianic complex".166
The next documents from the pen of John Stewart Service to turn up in the Amerasia collection were his field reports, beginning on July 28, 1944, from the Communist capital of Yenan in Shensi province. For more than three months in 1944 Service was at Yenan as a member of the U.S. Army Observer Section. His 50-odd reports from the Communist base ... are by far the most important documents in these volumes. Twenty-one of these documents still carried the "Secret" classification when received by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee; five more were marked "Confidential". These reports deserve to be very closely read, therefore, in light of two compelling questions: (1) How subjective was the writer in advancing the cause of Communism in China? and (2) What was the cumulative effect of his words on those officials of the U.S. government whose responsibility it was to formulate and execute American foreign policy in the Far East?
Before considering these vital questions, the reader must understand how Service got up to Yenan in the first place. The earliest suggestions of stationing an American representative at the Communist headquarters seems to have come from Service himself. According to his account of the conversations with the Communist delegates Chou En-lai and Lin Piao at Chungking about November 29, 1942, the use of "foreign influence" (obviously American) upon the Kuomintang was mentioned by the Communists as "the only force that may be able to improve the situation". Chou En-lai and Lin Piao made five particular recommendations, and Service added a sixth-the sending of an American representative to Yenan. "I have not heard this proposed by the Communists themselves," Service wrote on January 23, 1943, "but there is no doubt that they would welcome such action." He went on to explain the advantages of such a visit:
This visit would have the great additional advantage of providing us with comprehensive and reliable information regarding the Communist side of the situation. For instance, we might be able to have better answers to some of the following pertinent questions: How faithfully have the Communists carried out their united front promises? What is the form of their local government? How Communistic is it? Does it show any democratic character or possibilities? Has it won the support of the people? How does it compare with conditions of government in Kuomintang China? How does the Communism of the people in such matters as taxation, grain, requisition, military service and forced labor, compare with that in Kuomintang territory? What is the military and economic strength of the Communists and what is their probable value to the Allied cause? How have they dealt with problems such as inflation, price control, development of economic resources for carrying on the war and trading with the enemy? How have the people in the guerrilla area been mobilized and aroused to the degree necessary to support real guerrilla warfare? Without such knowledge, it is difficult to appraise conflicting reports and reach a considerate judgment.
Service had ready a recommendation of who ought to be sent north. Possibly he was describing himself and his colleague John Paton Davies Jr., when he wrote:
I suggest that the American representatives best suited to visit the Communist area are Foreign Service officers of the China language service. One or two men might be sent. They should combine moderately long-term residence at Yenan or its vicinity with fairly extensive travel in the guerrilla area. ... There is mail and telegraphic communication between Yenan and Chungking. ... The officers would therefore not be out of touch with the embassy and could, if it thought desirable, make periodic reports.167
A few months later, in the spring of 1943, the idea was advanced again in a cable to the State Department from John Carter Vincent following another conversation with Chou En-lai.168 Nothing happened, however, and apparently the matter rested for the remainder of that year. On January 15, 1944, however, John Paton Davies advised General Stilwell that the time had come to send an "Observer Mission" to Yenan. Anticipating Chiang Kai-shek's resistance, Davies suggested that the President of the United States be prevailed upon to "use the ample American bargaining power" to force the Generalissimo to consent to such a mission.169
A copy of Davies' memorandum was sent to Harry Hopkins at the White House, and after discussing it with General Marshall and Admiral Leahy the President, on February 9, dictated a message to Chiang Kai-shek asking for the cooperation of the Central Government.170 A week later the State Department sought the official opinion of Ambassador Gauss, who replied that the idea was worth a try and suggested that Service might be assigned as a political observer to accompany Army observers on such a mission.171 Chiang's answer to the President, dated February 22, warned of long-range, Soviet-supported Communist designs in China and offered the counter-suggestion that his own intelligence officers could readily obtain the desired information.172 The President responded on March 1 with some advice to Chiang not to do anything that would be detrimental to cooperation among the United Nations.173 On March 20, Davies wrote another memorandum on the matter, this time mentioning Service as ,the diplomat who should accompany the military men, and two days later President Roosevelt sent a second request to Chiang.174 General Stilwell, who felt that the only way to deal with Chiang in this instance was by force, now delayed the departure of a group of Chinese air cadets scheduled to go to the United States for training.175 Chiang was adamant, however, and here the matter remained until the arrival of Vice President Wallace at Chungking in June.
Meanwhile, in May, the Generalissimo did approve a request by the American foreign correspondents at Chungking (Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, Harrison Forman of the New York Herald Tribune and Gunther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor) for permission to visit Yenan. When General Stilwell's office demanded to know why the request of newspapermen was approved while that of the Army was not, the Chinese minister of war replied that the two requests were altogether different in nature and meaning. The American journalists were merely civilians, he pointed out, and their stories would have no official stamp; U.S. Army officers, on the other hand, were representatives of their government, and their presence at Yenan could be taken to mean that the United States was preparing to cooperate directly with the Communist armed forces.176
As it turned out, the stories sent from Yenan by Atkinson, Forman and Stein were glowing in admiration of the Communists and by contrast harshly critical of the Kuomintang.177 It may be assumed that Chiang Kai-shek knew full well that this would be the net result of their visit, but reluctantly permitted the journalists to go north in the hope that there would be no further insistence on the matter from the American government. But more pressure came with the plane bringing Vice President Wallace and his advisers, John Carter Vincent of the State Department and Owen Lattimore of the Office of War Information, and it proved irresistible. When Wallace and Vincent raised the question of an official American mission again in a conversation on June 22, Chiang replied: "Please do not press; please understand that the Communists are not good for the war effort against Japan." The next day the Generalissimo gave his consent.178 Within a month the U.S. Army Observer Section was en route to Yenan in a transport plane escorted by fighters. Colonel David D. Barrett, who had been Military Attaché at Chungking, was in command. There were nine men in the party, all Army officers except John Stewart Service, an early advocate of such a mission, who came aboard as the State Department representative. In explaining the purpose of the mission to the Nationalist minister of war, Colonel Barrett was somewhat less than perfectly frank. He mentioned the need to "investigate air-ground aid and collection of enemy intelligence", 'but he failed to mention that the mission was "also to investigate the needs of Communist forces for arms and ammunition".179
Upon their arrival at the Communist capital on July 22, 1944, the American officials received an even more enthusiastic welcome than that given to the newspapermen some weeks earlier.180 One of the journalists, Gunther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor, reported the general jubilation. "A contagious enthusiasm," he wrote, "soon prevailed among the American officers and G.I.'s as they got the feel of the Yenan atmosphere." It was, he thought, "an invigorating experience, a pleasure second only to going home." Stein was ecstatic:
The active, natural Yenan atmosphere and those cheerful, warm-hearted, practical Eighth Route Army men seemed to charm all the American officers and G.I.'s. They enjoyed every bit of the Communists' simple, unsophisticated hospitality; the unconventional dinner parties at which famous Chinese generals and their wives—in cotton uniforms and pants, without lipstick and society manners, but gay and feminine—sat together with young American lieutenants and sergeants, talking with them about their homes and families back in the States; the theatricals in barnlike auditoriums crowded with animated spectators; and especially those rustic Saturday evening dances where everybody, party leader Mao Tse-tung and Commander in Chief Chu Teh, girls and boys from universities and factories, Eighth Route Army men, and, of course, the ever-ready Americans themselves joined in the breath-taking Yangdo folk dance in waltzes and fox trots. 'Gosh, what a difference from the other side', they used to say, thinking of the rigid prohibition of all dancing by the New Life Movement in the Chungking territories and of their stuffy, frustrated atmosphere.
The Communists were equally enthusiastic about the eager and natural Americans who seemed all so happy, informal and young, whatever their age and rank, and who were so keenly devoted to their tasks.
The Yenan people, too, were mighty glad. Within two months the door to their blockaded, forbidden areas had been opened for the second time. And with all due respect to us, these guests obviously carry more weight than the representatives of the world's most important newspapers. Evidently the United States Army realized that the Chinese Communists had a role to play in the war against Japan. ... At the government Guest House the national flag of the Chinese Republic, the same that flies in Chungking, greeted the first Allied officers to visit Yenan. ... It all seemed somewhat unreal, almost too good to be true.181
From Stein's jaundiced view, all this may have been too good to be true.182 But to the Generalissimo, who had resisted the proposed American mission for the very reason that it would certainly convey an impression of U.S. recognition of the Chinese Communists, it was only the inevitable result of the pressure put upon him.
On July 28, 1944, after six days at Yenan, John Stewart Service was ready with the first of more than 50 reports he was to send from the Communist headquarters in the next three months. He called this paper "First Informal Impressions of the North Shensi Communist Base". When a copy reached the White House on September 6, Harry Hopkins passed it on to the President with the comment: "Here is Jack Service's preliminary report of the Communist situation in North China. Service is a member of the State Department staff. He certainly makes some arresting observation."183 However, "arresting" the observations, Service was careful to disarm skeptical readers at the outset:
My own experience is that one enters an area like this, concerning which one has heard so many entirely good but second-hand reports, with a conscious determination not to be swept off one's feet. The feeling is that things cannot possibly be as good as they have been pictured, and that there must be a "catch" somewhere. ... All of our party have had the same feeling—that we have come into a different country and are meeting a different people. There is undeniably a change in the spirit and atmosphere. As one officer, born and brought up in China, put it: "I find myself continually trying to find out just how Chinese these people are."184
Having thus declared his objectivity, Service was ready to paint an idyllic picture of "this difference in atmosphere" in broad strokes over four pages:
There is an absence of show and formality, both in speech and action. ... Bodyguards, gendarmes and the clap-trap of Chungking officialdom are also completely lacking. To the casual eye there are no police in Yenan. And very few soldiers are seen. There are also no beggers, nor signs of desperate poverty. Clothing and living are very simple. Almost everyone except the peasants wear the same plain Chungshan type uniform of native cotton cloth. ... Women not only wear practically the same clothes (trousers, sandals or cloth shoes, and often a Russian type smock), they act and are treated as friendly equals. ... There are a great number of young people. ... there is generally an air of maturity and seriousness about these students. ... Morale is very high. ... There is no defeatism, but rather confidence. ... There is everywhere' an emphasis on democracy and intimate relations with the common people. …There is no tension in the local situation. ... One hears nothing of banditry or disturbances in the country. ... At the same time there is no feeling of restraint or suppression. No one bothers to lock their rooms. …The leaders make excellent personal impressions. ... Mao has more warmth and magnetism than would be expected from the generally poor pictures of him. ... the general atmosphere in Yenan can be compared to that of a rather small, sectarian college—or a religious summer conference. ... I found myself agreeing with one of the [foreign] correspondents, a man who has been long in China, when he said: "We have come to the mountains of North Shensi, to find the most modern place in China."185
Service's Report No.1, classified Secret, was a smooth piece of work, an admirable preface for the richly detailed: exultations which were now to flow ceaselessly from America's prolific official observer at the Communist capital. It did not take Service very long to put pen to paper again. On the same day, July 28, he got off his next report—an account of his brief conversation with Chairman Mao Tse-tung at a "welcome dinner" the previous evening. The point of Report No.2, also classified Secret, was that Mao had promptly asked whether there was "a possibility of the State Department setting up a Consulate" at Yen an after the end of the war with Japan, i.e., was the United States ready to make some form of diplomatic contact with Communist China? There were "a number of practical difficulties", Service replied, and after a few more leading questions the Chairman gave "a good natured laugh" and remarked that he and Service would soon have an opportunity to "exchange ideas".186
It was to be some days before Service was privileged with such an opportunity. Meanwhile, he made the most of his time by courting the foreign correspondents Gunther Stein, Maurice Votaw and Israel Epstein, each of whom had already interviewed some leading Communists at Yenan. Both Stein and Votaw had talked at length with Mao Tse-tung himself and with General Chu Teh, and E