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TLDR; The CIA poured cash into a plot for a secret army from Taiwan to invade southern China from Burma — and accidentally financed the birth of the Golden Triangle, a heroin empire which killed huge numbers of people . Chapter 1: THE CHOICE US PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN had a gut feeling that he should stay out of Taiwan. “The United States Government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China,” he wrote on 5 January, 1950. But the C.I.A. felt differently: their modus operandi was to choose one side and covertly arm it. - People on the mainland, as socialists, were more organized, more serious, and surprisingly good at spycraft. But they were commies! - The nationalists on Taiwan island had a reputation for being tricky and unpredictable. But they were capitalists. CIA leaders made their fateful choice. . Chapter 2: THE SECRET ARMY THE CIA LEARNED that the Taiwan-based nationalists had assembled a secret army in Burma to “recover” China from the communists. Led by General Li Mi of the Kuomintang, or KMT, the attack force communicated with Taipei through a confidential radio office in Bangkok. The CIA used its own planes to add more soldiers from Taiwan, plus weapons from an arsenal on Okinawa—and plenty of cash. The operation was coordinated by CIA men Alfred Cox in Hong Kong and Sherman Joost in Bangkok. In May 1951, Li Mi’s secret army invaded China from the south, accompanied by CIA officers. . Chapter 3: SPYCRAFT IT WAS A DISASTER. The Chinese seemed to be waiting for them in Yunnan province—and picked them off wherever they turned. In less than a month, the effort was in full retreat. A second incursion, in July, went even more badly, with the Chinese chasing them out in a week. What the KMT didn’t know until much later was that the Chinese had quietly replaced the nationalist radio man in Bangkok with one of their own operatives — they were good at spycraft, as mentioned. . Chapter 4: EMBARRASSMENT AT CHRISTMAS IN 1951, Beijing complained in public that the United States had ferried Nationalist soldiers and weapons to Burma to create conflict. The controversy was raised at the United Nations. US diplomats lied, saying on the record that the US had no involvement whatsoever. But Washington was embarrassed when an 11 February 1952 New York Times report quoted witnesses in Burma who had seen Li Mi’s soldiers proudly showing off their brand-new American weapons. That summer, Li Mi led yet another invasion of China. On 2 August, some 2,100 Nationalists got less than 100 km into the country before being driven out. But despite the supply of arms and cash, and even US training, the latest operation was not progressing. As time passed, it became clear to the CIA that the secret army was busy with something else. . Chapter 5: THE TWIST During their years’ hiding in mountains of northern Burma, the KMT’s secret force had made two discoveries. One was that an extremely valuable crop, opium, was grown in those mountains, and the other was that they liked southeast Asian women. Their capitalist urges trumped their political ones. They married the women and became wealthy opium plantation owners and drug distributors. By 1953, Washington’s official line was to ask Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei to remove the men from Burma. That year, 7,000 troops were airlifted to Taiwan—but at least that number insisted on staying, and thousands more decided to remain in neighboring Thailand. The CIA saw the “Golden Triangle” drug trade as a positive, potentially making their covert armies self-financing. “The U.S. use of the drug traffic from the KMT troops in Burma had momentous consequences for the whole of Southeast Asia,” said historian Peter Dale Scott in the Asia Pacific Journal. . Chapter 6: RICH AND ARMED BY THE EARLY 1960s, the Burmese were desperate to get the KMT out, and the CIA was intrigued to discover that the PLA, China’s army, had agreed to help. But even they couldn’t eradicate the rebels, who were rich, strong, and well-armed, and now controlled 90 percent of Burmese opium—and “almost a third of the world’s opium supply”, according to CIA Far East operative Richard Stilwell. In 1961, the leaders in Taipei cut off all payments to their people in Burma. But the KMT secret army responded that this just made the drug trade more crucial: they had to expand it to cover their soldiers’ salaries. . Chapter 7: A WIN AND A LOSS IN TRUTH, the secret army had lost all interest in invading China. And they found themselves under fire in their new profession. In 1967, the drug operation had spread into Laos and Vietnam, and the KMT were soon fighting a war against rival warlords. The Taiwanese eventually defeated their main opponent Khun Sa, a Burmese, but during the fighting, a Lao general confiscated a large amount of opium and supplied it to multiple users across East Asia. . Chapter 8: PEACE The 1967 opium war ended the Burma KMT’s 15-year control of the region’s main heroin distribution routes, although their business continued. The CIA had spent a fortune over many years supporting the plan to “recover China” and had nothing to show for it. In 1969, Henry Kissinger defunded many of the CIA operations in and around China. In 1971, he flew secretly to Beijing to make peace. . EPILOGUE And what happened to the secret army that Taiwan and the US had secretly funded for years? “The Nationalists maintained forces in Burma no longer under CIA control. These later grew to as many as twelve thousand and continued their drug trafficking right into the 1980s,” wrote historian John Prados. For the US, the experience “helped institutionalize what became a CIA habit of turning to drug-supported off-the-books assets for fighting wars wherever there appeared to be a threat to America’s access to oil and other resources,” wrote Peter Dale Scott. But as so often happened, the CIA’s lawless antics harmed all sides—including the US itself. The opium grabbed by the Lao general was turned into heroin and secretly sold in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the buyers were American troops fighting in South Vietnamese jungles, young men desperately stressed out after being commissioned to win an unwinnable war. * Sources: American War Machine by Peter Dale Scott; The Search for Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence; Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner; Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA by John Prados.