The changes in our own country were in many ways as deep and disruptive as those we had observed in China. Since we had been away, President Kennedy had been killed, President Johnson had turned the Civil Rights Movement into law, feelings against the Vietnam War had exploded, forcing Johnson’s decision to leave the presidency, Martin Luther King had been shot and Washington burned, the feminists were transforming women’s rights, Robert Kennedy was dead, and the campaign to choose the next president was in full and turbulent swing. The country was going through a revolution of its own, less violent but in many ways as profound as the one that we had covered in China. It was time to go home and relearn the country we represented.
6
Signs and Signals
Signs of Change
My first chore as junior man on the Mainland China desk at State was to chronicle the achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s China policy. Every bureau in the executive branch was given an equivalent task during the waning months of LBJ’s presidency. The result, a slim volume at best, was revealing. Digging into the files since 1964, I found that every initiative to improve relations with Beijing—proposals for exchanges in journalism, sports, education, and culture, as well as ideas to resume trade and new approaches to the talks in Warsaw—had only gotten as far as Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s inbox before being returned without action. The Chinese, embroiled in the Cultural Revolution and dominated by radicals, would not have been interested. Neither, apparently, was Secretary Rusk.
After President Nixon took office in early 1969, the office of the new Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, called for new China initiatives. We dusted off the previous proposals and sent them forward. This time they were not returned but disappeared, apparently sent to the White House for consideration. The change was striking. Something was up. We had all noted the 1967 Nixon article in Foreign Affairs calling for a new approach to China, but had no inside knowledge of the new President’s thinking.
The “bifurcated airgram” from Hong Kong had made my reputation as a China analyst. In March 1969, I was asked to head the division in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) that covered the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and, later, other countries in Northeast Asia. My new boss, once again John Holdridge, left shortly after I arrived to join Dr. Henry Kissinger ’s staff at the National Security Council, another sign of White House interest in China. Happily, I was able to persuade another old mentor from Hong Kong, Bill Gleysteen, to replace Holdridge in INR.
Our “watching” in Hong Kong had focused purely on what was happening in China. In Washington, our analyses’ main purpose was to help decision makers deal with policy issues. The most important among these were
—developments in the heated Sino–Soviet dispute and
their significance for U.S.-China relations;
—the evolution of China’s leadership after the violent
phase of the Cultural Revolution;
—China’s attitudes toward Taiwan; and
—the growing momentum of the campaign by the People’s Republic to replace Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China at the United Nations.
My office also prepared background material for sessions of the Warsaw talks, which resumed quietly in early 1970, another sign of changing attitudes in both Washington and Beijing.
I was now a boss, supervising the work of five analysts and two secretaries. The analysts ranged from crusty, learned senior civil servants like Edward Jones to young Foreign Service officers just starting to specialize in Asian affairs. Lynn Pascoe, later ambassador to Indonesia and UN undersecretary general, was a feisty new star. We were a tiny publishing company, producing papers on demand from senior officials, including Secretary Rogers and Assistant Secretary Marshall Green, participating in preparing larger policy papers like National Security Study Memoranda (NSSM), and representing the State Department on the interagency intelligence community committees that produced National Intelligence Estimates. I was a combination writer, editor, briefer, and salesman for our products around the bureaucracy. In addition, I was expected to maintain my academic contacts in the China-Watching community, and project State Department thinking in public speaking appearances around the country.
Putting a human face on intelligence analysis struck me as a good idea. I enjoyed not being hidden. More important, I found that I could make a more cogent analysis to the policy makers once I had explained our thinking in terms understandable to public audiences. Regional Councils on Foreign Relations, specialist audiences at universities, and the different War Colleges were eager for speakers, and I welcomed the chance to travel the country after six years away. I also taught a seminar at my old graduate school, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, called “Communist China: The Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution” during the fall semester in 1969.
I also had secret duties. The first of these was to interview the highest-ranking Chinese defector to the United States, the number two man from the PRC embassy in The Hague, who had changed sides in late January 1969. The intelligence community was intensely curious about what he knew. The State Department wanted its own access and sent me to have a talk.
Five minutes of conversation in the suburban Virginia safe house where the diplomat was hidden confirmed that the answer was zero. He was too far removed from Beijing to hear even gossip about Chinese leadership attitudes and moves or anything else of priority interest. So we spent the rest of our time together comparing notes on how Chinese and Westerners got their information about China and its leaders. I was fascinated and even comforted to learn that a Middle Kingdom bureaucrat read the People’s Daily the same way I did, focusing on the first and last pages (in villages and city streets, these are the ones posted on the public walls), searching editorials for unfamiliar formulations, analyzing who stood where in photographs, and other tricks of the trade.
Sino-Soviet Hostility Changes the Game
During my years in INR, 1969–71, the Nixon White House laid the groundwork for its opening to China. My office covered the growing alarm in Beijing over Soviet actions and attitudes, which forced a major shift in PRC strategic policy and which the president and Dr. Kissinger were quick to note and secretly exploit.
March 1969 saw the beginning of violent armed clashes between the Chinese and the Soviets along the Ussuri River that formed the boundary between the two countries. Tank battles and artillery exchanges across the frozen river marked a new stage in an ideological rivalry that had become national and personal. Bizarre photographs, like the one showing a horde of Chinese swarming over a Soviet armored personnel carrier and beating at it with sticks, demonstrated the depth of Chinese fear and, we concluded, sent a calculated message to Moscow: If you attack us, we will drown you in the sea of people’s war. The incidents spread, occurring as far west as the border between Xinjiang and Kazakhstan. The Soviet buildup in Mongolia and other areas along the frontier grew from twelve poorly equipped divisions in 1964 to forty divisions in full readiness.
The result was “an atmosphere of war panic in China,” Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Marshall Green wrote later. “Air raid shelters were built on a massive scale. A CIA estimate of October 1969 placed the chances of a Soviet effort to knock out China’s nascent nuclear weapons factories at about 1 in 3.”6 As the State Department representative on the interagency committee that produced the intelligence estimate, I remember a lengthy debate on whether the Soviets could really perform a “nuclear castration” of China. The conclusion was no. China, as one analyst put it, had at least “eight balls,” and these were not clustered in one place.
Four broad options were under discussion within the administration as to how the United States should position itself in response to Sino-Soviet hostilities, I told a Council on Foreign Relations audience in Chicago at the end of September 1969. I spoke off the record. Stewart E. Hoyt of the Milwaukee Journal reported my talk without attribution: