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.