Spy Balloons Evoke Bad Cold War Memories for China
Covert U.S. intrusions into Chinese airspace were common for decades.
With the spy balloon commanding nonstop cable news coverage much of last week, I found it difficult—even as a historian of Cold War espionage between the United States and China—to resist laughing out loud at the whole affair. There’s something inherently ridiculous about balloons and the series of bad decisions and misplaced rhetoric, from whatever possessed China to float a gigantic blimp over the U.S. heartland to the partisan hysterics unleashed in the U.S. media as a result.
Laughter can be the best medicine for an international crisis in the making—at least involving incidents where no one gets hurt. But after a weekend spate of the United States shooting down objects floating in the stratosphere over North America—and Beijing reporting its own “mystery object” over the Yellow Sea—serious questions are emerging about surveillance technologies and the proper diplomatic or even military response. Seen in the larger history of U.S.-China relations, does the spy balloon take on any greater meaning, and what lessons might be learned from the past?
Having recently published a book, Agents of Subversion, about a spy plane sent into China during the height of the Korean War, I could not help but be struck by the profound historical irony of the spy balloon frenzy. It has been a kind of farcical reversal of what Communist China faced for decades after its founding in 1949: unrelenting efforts by the United States to spy on—and even subvert—their country.
In perhaps the most brazen clandestine mission, the CIA recruited anti-communist agents in the then-British colony of Hong Kong, flew them to the Pacific island of Saipan for paramilitary training, and then dropped them from unmarked transport planes over northeast China in 1952. Once on the ground, agent teams were expected to foment a counterrevolution to overthrow then-Chinese leader Mao Zedong, relying on occasional resupply drops from CIA planes. Operation Tropic took place at the height of the Korean War, when the United States was desperate for means to weaken the Chinese war effort without publicly taking the war onto the mainland—thus the reliance on activities that could be “plausibly denied.”
Even after the Korean War armistice in 1953, the CIA continued to carry out or support an array of aerial clandestine activities directed against mainland China. The major platform for these operations was the island of Taiwan, then under the aggrieved rule of Chinese Communist Party nemesis and military dictator Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Party.
Chiang needed to sustain the hope—or maintain the illusion—that one day he would vanquish Mao and reconquer the mainland. So he was game to carry out covert missions across the Taiwan Strait, sending his planes on leaflet-dropping missions over mainland cities or launching unmanned balloons with anti-communist propaganda materials. But beginning in the mid-1950s, the Americans shifted their emphasis from subversion to surveillance.
This change was both a concession to the apparent staying power of Mao’s communist regime as well as a result of revolutionary technological breakthroughs: first, high-altitude aerial photography (the famous U-2 spy plane), and then, satellite imagery (codenamed Operation Corona—you’re welcome, conspiracy theorist YouTube!). The United States trained Taiwanese pilots to fly U-2 missions and lent the coveted aircraft to Chiang, who lost a number of these so-called Dragon Lady planes to Chinese surface-to-air missile defense systems in the 1960s. In fact, visitors to the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution in Beijing can see the remnants of a downed U-2 plane still on display today.
All this snooping did yield some intelligence coups. U-2 overflights allowed the Americans to scour the Tibetan Plateau from above at a time when the CIA was training anti-communist Tibetan agents in Colorado for infiltration, mostly by parachute, back into Tibet. CIA support for the Tibetan uprising in 1959 was an important exception to the general trend away from armed subversive activities. High-altitude surveillance over the far northwest of China in the 1960s also gave Washington ways to monitor the progress of China’s nuclear weapons program.
But the 1960s was a decade marked by intelligence-related diplomatic fiascos, from the upending of then-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s summitry with then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev due to the Soviet capture of U-2 pilot Gary Powers in 1960, to the CIA’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba the following year at the start of John F. Kennedy’s presidency, to then-U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s manipulation of intelligence around a nonexistent “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin to get a blank check from Congress (the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964) that helped sink the country deeper into the tragic mire of the Vietnam War. The Cold War is replete with cautionary tales about how the United States abused its power to spy and subvert on a global scale—in ways that eventually came back to sting America and its allies.
In some ways, the United States and China have been here before, and it wasn’t pretty. From the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 until then-U.S. President Richard Nixon’s trip to Beijing in 1972, the relationship between the two countries was overwhelmingly hostile and, almost by definition, mostly covert. The two governments refused to recognize each other and rarely allowed their diplomats to meet, and the United States maximized its military and technological advantage to spy on China—if not subvert it.
Yet despite their technical capabilities to keep an eye on China from above, Americans had a very poor understanding of what was actually going on in Mao’s China—from the halls of power to villages across the country. Ignorance of China left the United States vulnerable to colossal intelligence failures, like being blindsided by massive Chinese intervention in Korea in 1950 or underestimating the depth of the Sino-Soviet split (visible by 1960) and its impact on Chinese support for Hanoi during the Vietnam War. American ignorance was made worse by the McCarthyist purges of the government’s best China experts in the early 1950s on unfounded allegations of being communist sympathizers. And the biggest windfall by far in U.S. intelligence on China was when then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger simply started talking to his Chinese counterparts. The same was probably true for then-Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and Chinese understanding of the Americans.
Today, covert aspects are once again threatening to become drivers of U.S.-China relations, similar to the period before normalization a half century ago. Room for political dialogue and civic engagement narrows as outrage over espionage and suspicion about “influence operations” intensifies. Paradoxically, strategic intelligence is likely to suffer on both sides in proportion to the increase in mutual surveillance.
One difference between now and the early Cold War is that China’s power and reach have expanded exponentially. Ironically, Beijing now faces the temptation to make use of the kind of global capabilities to spy on others that China has long complained the United States deployed. Americans should know their own history of surveillance and subversion to maintain a degree of humility while calling out Beijing for violations of sovereignty and lack of transparency. Chinese might study the same historical record for cautionary lessons about what happens when superpowers spy more than they ought to.
John Delury is the author of Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China.