China.

At the end of WW2, the situation in China was this: there were Nationalists who had control of Peking, and there were Communists who had popular support across the country. The US liked the Nationalists because the Nationalists were more likely to give them what they want whereas the Communists would more likely make China independent.

Japan had just surrendered to the US in WW2, so the US placed surrendered Japanese troops along with 50,000 US Marines to man key sites across China for the Chinese Nationalists. The US also helped the Chinese Nationalists to move 500,000 of their troops across China. If the US did not get involved, the revolution would have been over in a matter of days.

By 1946, a year after WW2 had ended, there were 100,000 US troops in China supporting the Nationalists. The explanation back home was that the troops were there disarming and repatriating the Japanese – this may have been sufficient explanation for the troops themselves had they not been manning the strategic sites with the still armed Japanese troops – awkward.

The US tried to mediate in this civil war – apparently forgetting that it was quite obviously on one side of the conflict – and attempted to call a truce and install a Coalition government. The Communists would have none of it – you can’t unite a dying oligarchy with a rising revolution. Instead, the US continued providing the Nationalists with $2B in cash and a further $1B in military hardware. This was a Band-Aid on a broken leg – whole divisions of the Nationalist forces were defecting to the more popular Communists. The Nationalists had to get out.

Their defection from China would need to be prepared in advance, and the US did just that by killing up to 28,000 native Taiwanese people in preparation. Many of the Nationalist troops then defected to Taiwan, and the US position on Taiwan moved from Taiwan being part of China to Taiwan being China. The US couldn’t believe that the Chinese could actually want Communism, so held that it was a Soviet conspiracy. This would make sense except that it didn’t because the Soviets were in support of the Nationalist – awkward again. Communist leaders requested aid and friendship from the US and the US responded by attempting to assassinate them on several occasions.

Apart from newly vacated Taiwan, Nationalist troops also went to Burma, much to the Burmese government’s dismay. The CIA aided the Nationalists by shipping in troops from Taiwan, building airstrips and supplying arms. With an army now 10,000 strong, the Nationalists battles with the Communists in the Yunnan province was successful in the American’s new objective – diverting resources from Communist battle lines in Vietnam and Korea. The Nationalists also came to control opium trade in the Golden Triangle with the help of CIA pilots.

The CIA began to phase out of Burma, but the Burmese were still unhappy with the Nationalists’ presence. They lobbied the UN and US government to get the Nationalists out, the US told the Nationalists to get out, but the Nationalists didn’t want to and so threatened the CIA to reveal their covert operations. At this point, the US wanted the communists to invade so that the Burmese would hide behind Western shields and stop complaining. Instead, in a great power move, the Burmese teamed up with the Communists and drove the Nationalists away themselves.

Tibet was another way for the CIA to torment the Communist revolutionaries. In the mid-50s, the CIA recruited Tibetan refugees, exiles of neighbouring Nepal and India as well as members of the Dalai Lama’s guard. They shipped this ragtag bunch back to the Colorado mountains for paramilitary training at a similar altitude. This was kept entirely secret to the public, but in 1961 the New York Times caught wind of the operation. On the Pentagon’s instruction, they kept quiet – freedom of press seems also to be freedom to forget.

This last claim is the scariest to me – bacteriological warfare. Between January and March 1952, the Chinese claim that the Americans dropped bacteria and bacteria-laden insects over Korea and China. The Chinese presented the detailed testimony of 38 captured pilots who went into detail about the operation. There is evidence that these pilots were made to make these statements under force, but there is also evidence that the US was developing this technology.

By August, an International Scientific Committee found that China and Korea had in fact been subjected to bacteriological weapons that seemed to be developments of Japanese WW2 technology. It is known that Japanese scientists captured by the US in WW2 were given immunity for providing technical information about bacteriological weapons used by the Japanese against the Chinese. It is also known that the US used developments made by the Nazis and were manufacturing thousands of gallons of Sarin (chemical used by Nazis) during the Korean war. There is even evidence of the US conducting experiments like this on its own people, with a strain of the Whooping Cough released into the open air in Florida in 1955 and another toxin released on New York City subways in 1956.

Sometimes fiction seems far less insane than reality itself.