893.105/96: Telegram
The Chargé in China (Atcheson) to the Secretary of State
[Received 6:40 p.m.]
1671. It is widely reported that the notorious Tai Li, head of the Generalissimo’s principal secret political and military police and intelligence organization, has been relieved of his post as a result (a) of the accumulative effect of arbitrary kidnappings, executions, et cetera, of agents and employees of highly placed persons, including the execution in the autumn of 1942 of Ling Hsu Liang, head of the Transportation Department of the Central Trust, who instead of using his trucks to evacuate Government supplies from Burma to China allegedly employed them to bring in “luxury” goods for highly placed persons; (b) of conflict with the corrupt interests of highly placed persons arising from the organization’s corrupt “smuggling prevention” activities; (c) of bitter rivalry engendered in the Kuomintang’s secret police whose main function is the overlapping field of “dangerous thoughts”; (d) of the reported breakdown of Tai Li’s intelligence organization in occupied China due to successful Japanese [Page 113] counter-espionage; and (e) of the criticism of Tai Li and his Gestapo which Mme. Chiang heard in the United States and her impression gained there that Americans believed that Tai Li rather than the Gissimo31a actually controlled China through his ruthless utilization of Nazi and Japanese political police methods.
According to a personal friend of Tai Li, the latter has not been dismissed but has been ordered henceforth to restrict himself to the more legitimate phases of the organization’s activities—military and political intelligence in the occupied areas and counter-espionage—and that his former political police activities will hereafter be directed by Mao Chin Hsiang, brother-in-law of the Gissimo by his first marriage.
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… Tai Li boasts that he has agents even in Japan and it is not unlikely that he maintains a considerable organization in the United States as probably the Kuomintang Secret Service does also.
- Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.↩