CIA activities in China

Main article: CIA activities in Asia and the Pacific

Republic of China (Taiwan)

Chiang Kai-shek, President of the Republic of China on Taiwan, believed the Americans were going to plot a coup against him. In 1950, Chiang Ching-kuo became director of the secret police, which he remained until 1965. Chiang also considered some people who were friends to Americans to be his enemies. An enemy of the Chiang family, Wu Kuo-chen, was kicked out of his position of governor of Taiwan by Chiang Ching-kuo and fled to America in 1953. Chiang Ching-kuo, educated in the Soviet Union, initiated Soviet style military organization in the Republic of China Military, reorganizing and Sovietizing the political officer corps, surveillance, and Kuomintang party activities were propagated throughout the military. Opposed to this was Sun Li-jen, who was educated at the American Virginia Military Institute. Chiang orchestrated the controversial court-martial and arrest of General Sun Li-jen in August 1955, for plotting a coup d'état with the American CIA against his father Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. The CIA allegedly wanted to help Sun take control of Taiwan and declare its independence.

China 1962

Tension between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union was such that the United States did not expect the PRC would get Soviet help on nuclear weapons development.

A facility at Lanzhou was judged incomplete, and it was unclear if it was a gaseous diffusion plant for producing weapons-grade uranium. If so, it could not be ready before 1966. It was estimated that a plutonium-producing reactor could be ready by 1962. The editors at the National Security Archive made reasonable inferences, in spite of excisions from the document, that the Central Intelligence Agency had made considerable progress in using sophisticated collection methods—satellite photography and U-2 flights by Chinese Nationalist pilots… CIA did not know that the installation at Lanzhou was in fact a gaseous diffusion plant that would soon be ready for operations.

China 1964

The first Chinese nuclear test was in 1964.

China 1996

Intelligence analysis

According to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, a CIA intelligence memorandum dated 14 September 1996, entitled "China and Pakistan Discuss US Demarche on Nuclear Assistance", prepared by ---- said,

1. Chinese officials -- probably from the China Nuclear Energy Industry Corporation (CNEIC) -- recently met with Ghulam Kibna, Pakistan's nuclear and missile procurement officer in Beijing, to discuss the 30 August US demarche on China's sale of diagnostic equipment and a furnace to unsafeguarded nuclear facilities in Pakistan, according to an intercepted message. Kibna said Chinese personnel were already in Pakistan to install the equipment, which an intercept in August indicated was to be delivered on 2 September.

• A Chinese nuclear official informally told our Embassy on Wednesday that the equipment was sent late last year or early this year, but he claimed not to know the final end user at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.

• The Pakistanis' expectation of the 2 September delivery, however, indicates either that the Chinese shipment scheduled in January did not occur or that it may have been only a partial shipment.

2. In the aftermath of CNEIC's ring magnet sale to Pakistan and China's 11 May commitment not to provide assistance to unsafeguarded nuclear facilities, senior-level government approval probably was needed for this most recent assistance. The Chinese told Kibna they needed end user certificates for the sale and all future dual-use shipments and other equipment for Pakistan's unsafeguarded facilities and vowed to discuss the certificates only with a "third party" -- apparently the US -- probably to demonstrate that Beijing is complying with its May commitment.

3. The PAEC's chairman told Kibna any decision to share documents with others would require the approval of Pakistan's President or Prime Minister. Kibna suggested possible language for the false end user certificates to make it appear that one item -- possibly the diagnostic equipment -- was intended for the safeguarded Chasma nuclear power plasm which Chinese firms are building.

• The intercept indicates Kibna also suggested to the Chinese that all remaining contracts, apparently for unsafeguarded facilities, be canceled and new ones drawn up naming unobjectionable end users.
• Kibna claimed the Chinese reacted positively to the idea, but added this kind of agreement is "dangerous." Such a subterfuge probably would require the approval of senior Chinese Government leaders