by | 7 October 2005 · 9:58 pm

Bush and Deng Strike an Oil Bargain, 1977

On the business front, the trip with [George H.W.] Bush [in 1977] was more of a success. Hugh Liedtke, the chairman of Pennzoil, met with Minister of Foreign Trade Li Qiang, and during a meeting with Deng Xiaoping at which Bush and I were present, Bush made significant headway in persuading Vice Premier Deng to allow American oil companies to work in China. At that point in 1977, Deng, who had been restored to his posts earlier in the year with the help of powerful backing in the military, was about a year away from introducing his initial plans for economic reform in China. An old oil man himself; Bush “sold” Deng on the concept of a “risk contract” in which U.S. companies would assume the significant costs of exploration for oil in places like the South China Sea and then share the proceeds from production if oil were discovered. Deng liked the idea because it would allow China to bring into the country free of charge the technology and capital needed to exploit oil resources and then still share in the profits. Deng also knew that his own oil people had oversold him on their capabilities, leaving China with semi-submersible rigs that no one knew how to use and jack-up rigs that had turned over in the Gulf of Bo Hai in northeast China. The concept of “risk contracts” became the basis for joint ventures in oil exploration between the United States and China.

Bush’s meeting with Deng built on the acquaintance they had formed during his posting in China and laid the foundation for future meetings, including two more in the next three years that I would also be privileged to attend. In spite of their diminished political statures in 1977–Bush being out of power and Deng having just returned to his government posts from being temporarily purged–I believe that Bush and Deng sized each other up as future leaders. Just as former President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had forged personal ties with Deng’s predecessors, Mao and Chou En-lai, Bush was developing a relationship with Deng that eventually became critical in sustaining U.S.-China ties in troubled times and advancing them in better times. When the two men ascended to the tops of their respective governments, their personal connection facilitated a blending of American and Chinese interests into a workable formula. This congeniality of leaders at the highest levels is, I believe, one of the keys to managing the Sino-American relationship.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 203-204

Maybe not just the Sino-American relationship.

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by | 7 October 2005 · 9:26 pm

A Council of War in Afghanistan, 1996

[A] high-level secret meeting brought together some of the most radical of groups and nations, who accused the West then in 1996, a full five years before the September 11 attacks, of waging a war against Islam. The participants urged a counteroffensive and spoke of attacking the United States and the West. They spoke of their hatred for the West and their revulsion for governments in the Middle East that sympathized with the West.

Fundamentalist organizations in Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and other Gulf states were represented, as were militant groups from Pakistan, Algeria and Sudan. They sat beside dissidents who lived in London, Tehran, and Beirut. They had come together to plot a war against American and Western interests.

Convinced that the West had already begun a war against Muslims, they wanted to retaliate, go on the offensive, and take the battle to the enemy on their own terms. This was not their first gathering. There had been at least one earlier meeting in Iran to lay the ground for this gathering, to settle religious and ideological differences that would allow these men to come together to wage a single war against a single enemy–the West….

The men talked for another two hours until Osama bin Laden joined the gathering. At his side was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. It was Sayyaf who spoke first. Bin Laden listened. Sayyaf shared bin Laden’s revulsion for U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. He praised the violent bombing one month earlier in al-Khubar in Saudi Arabia that had killed more than twenty U.S. servicemen, for which al Qaeda had been held responsible. Sayyaf’s small brown eyes seemed to glow as he recounted the bombing. He reveled in the description of it, saying it should be a lesson to America to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia. He likened it to the 1981 and 1983 bombings in Beirut of the U.S. Embassy and its military compound that had killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and led to the American withdrawal from Lebanon.

Sayyaf’s speech inspired an Iranian to call for an all-out offensive against America. He was frenzied. He warned that the Muslim world was facing its gravest conspiracy. It wasn’t clear whether he had been sent by the government or whether he represented a jihadi group. Another speaker joined in, this time from Bahrain. His words were angry, his voice rising as he spoke: “We are enduring coercion and humiliation in our own country.” Then an Egyptian spoke. He castigated his own government for spurning an offer from Syria to mediate its differences with Iran….

In this way, in mid-1996, high in the lawless tribal lands of northern Pakistan, the terrorist networking began…. Sayyaf’s men had been among those who had welcomed bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996, along with others from that mujahedeen government who had also been returned to power by the United States in 2001. The same men had encouraged and allowed terrorist training camps when they were in power from 1992 until 1996. They had lied to the CIA in September 1996 when the agency had requested their help in finding bin Laden. The CIA’s intelligence was so flawed that it wrongly said that the Taliban brought bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996 and that the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, knew bin Laden before he came to Afghanistan in 1996. He didn’t. It was Abdul Sayyaf, America’s “ally,” who had welcomed bin Laden.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. xvi-xviii

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by | 6 October 2005 · 8:47 pm

The Inspirational Abdul Rasul Sayyaf

In 1992-96, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was a “factional leader who controlled interior ministry, whose soldiers committed atrocities, operated training camps and welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan from Sudan” under the U.S.-supported Mujahedeen warlord government that drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Nowadays, the same Abdul Rasul Sayyaf serves as a key advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

One August day in 2004, when I was having breakfast with Hamid Karzai on the lush green lawns of the presidential palace in Kabul, he described Sayyaf as an ideologue in a way that sounded complimentary. But Sayyaf is a vicious man, whose followers have carried out unspeakable atrocities and horrific massacres of Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazaras.

Abdul Rasul Sayyaf inspires violence in others: Abu Sayyaf, a Philippine terrorist organization, was named for him by its founder, Abdurajak Janjalani. Janjalani was a disciple and a student of Sayyaf’s who received military training from him. The Indonesian Mohammed Nasir Bin Abbas, alias Solaiman, who was arrested in Indonesia in April 2003, was trained under Sayyaf between 1987 and 1991. Bin Abbas used the terrorist training he received from Sayyaf to set up Camp Hodeibia in the Philippines, according to Maria Ressa’s account in Seeds of Terror (New York: 2003). This camp was later taken over by Umar Patek, an Indonesian who has been implicated in the 2002 bombing on the resort island of Bali in which more than 200 people were killed.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. ix-x, xv

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by | 5 October 2005 · 7:40 pm

Impearls on Entrepreneurism and Its Enemies

Impearls is back to blogging more regularly in his trademark long and thoughtful essays with footnotes. His latest post bemoans the derision of all corporate entrepreneurism by too many on the political left.

It’s been obvious and has disturbed me for some time the way in which supposed “liberals” demonize private enterprise and those institutional vehicles which comprise it — companies and corporations — as the veritable Princes of Darkness.

The whole essay is worth reading, but I’ll cite just a couple of his supporting quotes.

Andrew Sullivan:

Thank God for the evil pharmaceutical companies. One day, when the history of this period is written, I have a feeling we will look back with astonishment as we recognize that advances in medical science, particularly pharmaceuticals, were arguably one of the most significant developments of this era. And yet the people who pioneered these breakthroughs were … demonized and attacked. Baffling and bizarre. I’m merely grateful the attacks haven’t stopped the research progress. They’ve merely slowed it.

Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America:

On the left bank of the Ohio work is connected with the idea of slavery, but on the right with well-being and progress; on the one side it is degrading, but on the other honorable; on the left bank no white laborers are to be found, for they would be afraid of being like the slaves; for work people must rely on the Negroes; but one will never see a man of leisure on the right bank: the white man’s intelligent activity is used for work of every sort. […]

The white man on the right bank, forced to live by his own endeavors, has made material well-being the main object of his existence; as he lives in a country offering inexhaustible resources to his industry and continual inducements to activity, his eagerness to possess things goes beyond the ordinary limits of human cupidity; tormented by a longing for wealth, he boldly follows every path to fortune that is open to him; he is equally prepared to turn into a sailor, pioneer, artisan, or cultivator, facing the labors or dangers of these various ways of life with even constancy; there is something wonderful in his resourcefulness and a sort of heroism in his greed for gain. [emphasis added –Imp.]

Virginia Postrel notes related ironies in a recent article in Forbes on Criminalizing Science.

U.S. scientists and their supporters tend to assume biomedical research is threatened by know-nothings on religious crusades. But as the Canadian law illustrates, the long-term threat to genetic research comes less from the religious right than from the secular left. Canada’s law forbids all sorts of genetic manipulations, many of them currently theoretical. It’s a crime, for instance, to alter inheritable genes.

Where do these truly evangelical beliefs of the secular left come from? Medieval agrarian repulsion at urban corruption (like the Moravian Brethren)? High-born disdain for the commoners who produced the surplus wealth that funded noble endeavors? A combination of both?

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by | 4 October 2005 · 9:32 am

Cambodian Gen. Lon Nol’s Worst Enemy: Vietnam

During a meeting with one of our agents in a safe house [in Hong Kong], we obtained information that told of huge Chinese arms shipments going through Cambodia and into South Vietnam to help the Viet Cong. We also learned that the head of Cambodia’s armed forces, Lieutenant General Lon Nol, was overseeing the shipments and taking a cut of the arms for the benefit of himself and his own army. In the late 1960s at the time when the arms shipments were at their highest levels, Lon Nol was a favorite of Peking. He was said to have a big picture of Chairman Mao over his desk in Phnom Penh. But we knew that Lon Nol was also a Cambodian patriot. Like their Laotian neighbors to the north, the Cambodians were strongly against Vietnam, whom they saw as the regional bully. Lon Nol was particularly upset that, in their effort to prosecute the war in South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Army had occupied areas of eastern Cambodia. Our source told us that when the Cambodian Defense Minister traveled to Peking in the fall of 1969, he made a strong appeal to the Chinese to help him get the Vietnamese out of Cambodia. Lon Nol said he was willing to help supply the Viet Cong, but he insisted that Vietnamese troops belonged in Vietnam, not in Cambodia. The Chinese demurred. In Peking’s eyes the North Vietnamese were fighting a war of national liberation against the American imperialists, and it was China’s socialist duty and in the country’s own interest to support its communist brethren.

The tiff between Lon Nol and Peking turned out to pay off, at least temporarily, for the U.S. Just six months after visiting Peking, in March 1970 General Lon Nol, in part bitter and disappointed at being rebuffed by the Chinese, staged a coup along with First Deputy Premier Sisowath Sirik Matak against Prime Minister Sihanouk and seized power. From Hong Kong we reported to Washington the first signs of a coup when we picked up information that commercial flights from Hong Kong to Phnom Penh were being canceled because the Phnom Penh Airport was closed. Once in power, Lon Nol turned from a supplier to the communist cause in Southeast Asia into an adversary. In an attempt to hinder the Vietnamese communists in their fight to take over South Vietnam, he tried to cut weapons supply lines through Cambodia to Vietnam. Then he cooperated with the U.S. military in its incursion into Cambodia in the spring of 1970, which hurt the North Vietnamese but did not drive them out. In this backdrop to the war next door in Vietnam, thanks in part to the reporting from our source, the U.S. briefly gained the upper hand at China’s expense.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 149-150

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by | 4 October 2005 · 9:00 am

Half a Life as a Haafu

AP Writer Natalie Obiko Pearson describes her life as a “haafu” in Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun.

I’ll always remember the feeling of liberation upon arriving in America. My appearance drew no attention, I spoke English with the neutral American inflections picked up at the international school — I could pass.

Then came the pitfalls of my complete unfamiliarity with America: I knew none of the references to popular culture; I wasn’t used to interrupting people so I never got a word in edgewise. I thought a Subway sandwich was something sold in the subway.

In Australia and the United States, countries of immigration built on diversity, I can pass as a native. In Japan I can only do it over the phone. The game is up the moment they see my face or hear my name — Pea-ya-son, as it’s pronounced in Japanese.

Trapped in a culturally ambiguous haafu land, I find kindred spirits in people who have grown up as immigrants or so-called “kikoku shijo” — Japanese partially raised abroad who don’t carry an ounce of foreign blood, yet are marginalized once they return.

Still, the fact that such people exist in Japan means there’s an end in sight — the makeup of the country is changing.

Many here believe that Japan, with its rapidly graying population, has no choice but to open its doors to a massive influx of foreign labor within the next couple of decades. Japanese society will doubtless endure some painful teething. But, frankly, I can’t wait.

via Japundit

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by | 3 October 2005 · 10:09 am

The CIA Role in the Laotian Elections, 1967

One of my biggest operations involved ensuring a “favorable” outcome in the elections to the National Assembly in 1967. With more attention being focused on the war in Southeast Asia and with the National Assembly in Laos starting to play a larger political role in the country, we thought it was important for Vang Pao to have more of a say in the political governing of the country. We figured out whom to support without letting our fingerprints show. As part of our “nation building” effort in Laos, we pumped a relatively large amount of money to politicians who would listen to our advice. In the election, “friendly” politicians won fifty-four of fifty-seven seats. Ambassador Sullivan referred to me as Mr. Tammany Hall, an allusion to New York City’s prodigious Democratic vote-getting machine of the late nineteenth century.

With the CIA’s mission expanding so rapidly, our intelligence gathering and reporting efforts boomed. As CIA personnel, we had better access to parts of Laos than our State Department colleagues. In fact, few Foreign Service officers were even allowed to visit places like Long Tieng. The major exception was Ambassador Sullivan, who oversaw the whole military effort in Laos. But other than him, during my time in Laos, only a handful of State Department personnel made it up to Long Tieng. Sometimes, we were in the awkward position of “outreporting” our State Department colleagues in the embassy, who were supposed to be the experts in designated fields such as the Lao economy, politics, and culture. In some cases, their best sources for information turned out to be our paid agents. We had to be discreet in handling such touchy situations. Since I had worked with many of the Foreign Service officers at other posts in Asia, I was given the job of smoothing ruffled feathers. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I failed.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), p. 120

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by | 3 October 2005 · 9:57 am

Ethnic Museums: Educating Others or Preserving Selves?

I used my ten days on Hokkaido to examine my idea that Ainu museums present Ainu ethnicity to a larger public, and are run with the goal of asserting Ainu ethnic identity in a way that challenges the majority Japanese conception of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation. This is when the emphasis of the Ainu on preserving their culture and participating in Japanese life as Ainu became clear to me. Ainu-run museums did in fact try to combat popular ideas about the Ainu (such as that there are no Ainu left, that the Ainu language is dead, that the Ainu are particularly hairy, etc.) through signs and information in brochures. At the Shiraoi Poroto Kotan (Ainu Village), guides also tried to make visitors aware that the Ainu are both Ainu and Japanese. For instance, a younger guide (dressed in Ainu clothing) tried to explain that the Ainu aren’t entirely different from the Japanese today, but that they still have a special culture, by saying “I’m the same as everyone else. I only wear these clothes from 8 to 5. Do you know any Ainu? These foods came from the Ainu…these place names are Ainu names….”

However, a researcher at the Shiraoi Poroto Kotan museum explained to me that of necessity, Ainu museums can only go so far in trying to explain Ainu ethnicity as well as traditional (and no longer existing) Ainu culture. She agreed with my feeling that it’s impossible to attempt to show Ainu culture and history in the same way that Japanese history is portrayed, because there are no records of Ainu history from the Ainu point of view. She also pointed out the impossibility of exhibiting a culture or identity that is currently in the process of being re-defined, and explained that “Ainu culture today is changing. People have a Japanese lifestyle, and they can no longer do things like take bears from the mountains, and it is unclear to them how to include their own feelings and lives in the ceremonies.” As a result, she informed me, the main goal of the museum was not to teach others about Ainu culture; instead, it was to focus on cultural preservation for the Ainu themselves.

The emphasis on cultural growth was the most common theme I encountered in Ainu-run museums. I had not realized the extent to which Ainu and Okinawans are currently engaged in re-defining their cultural identities for themselves, or that this concern would dominate other concerns about fitting into a larger Japanese society. Museums did not present this concern to tourists in displays; rather, it was only obvious when I looked at the way space was allocated in museums and talked to people working there. At the Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Memorial Museum, for instance, I was lucky enough to see the most famous contemporary Ainu musician (Oki) practicing for a music competition in the museum’s rehearsal hall, and the success of his rehearsal was the main concern of the museum staff. Ms. Fujita explained that she worked at a tourist village (the Gyokusendo Kingdom Village) in Okinawa because she wanted to learn about making Okinawan pottery: it was an apprenticeship, a place where crafts could be taught not only to casual visitors but to those interested in making the practice of those crafts a part of their life. There was also space at the Kingdom Village, as at the Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Memorial Museum, for local dance or music groups to rehearse.

SOURCE: The Myth of Japanese Ethnic Homogeneity, by Catherine Williams, September 1999

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by | 2 October 2005 · 11:13 am

The Hong Kong Listening Post in the 1950s

Hong Kong was the best listening post into “Red China.” It was, as the long-distance telephone ad used to say, “The next best thing to being there.” The island-colony was roiling with action in 1953. Unlike on Taiwan, there were many trade and transportation links to the mainland, and because of its location, Hong Kong was a crossroads for Chinese of all stripes. It was a base for agents from China and Taiwan and, therefore, served as one of the few places where the two sides could rub elbows, and, if the situation called for it, pass on communications to each other’s governments. Wealthy capitalists from Shanghai sought refuge in Hong Kong after the Communist revolution and spent much of their time trying to find a way off the island. Furthermore, refugees were streaming in from the mainland. Since 1949, more than one million Chinese had arrived in the city and its surrounding territories. There were an estimated 300,000 squatters in Hong Kong and its territories. Most of the refugees, the majority of whom were farmers and laborers from southern China, came in search of work and a better livelihood. Amazingly, with its improving economy and free enterprise methods, Hong Kong was able to accommodate most of them….

I started out working with the Pao Mi Chu, Taiwan’s intelligence apparatus. I worked under “deep cover,” meaning that I kept my true identity a secret from the Chinese people with whom I worked. I used aliases when I contacted agents or met with counterparts in Taiwan intelligence. The one I used most often was “John Wright.” I would meet with agents in hotel rooms or in safe houses, apartments that had been scouted beforehand to make sure they were not under surveillance by the Communists’ huge underground apparatus in Hong Kong. We debriefed refugees and travelers to China, placed agents on ships going to Chinese ports, and helped establish a base in Macao to take advantage of the flow of Chinese between Macao and the mainland….

In the course of my work, I was learning that we could accomplish far more by debriefing travelers or people returning from China than we could by planting frightened resident agents in the country. The resident agents naturally tended to be fearful of getting caught. Travelers, on the other hand, moved more freely and without that fear. Using debriefings, I started to gather useful information for the CIA about what was going on in China. Unfortunately, in those days CIA was obsessed with the idea of a resident agent with a radio no matter what the level of his access or his ability to survive. They focused on process over substance.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 84-86

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by | 2 October 2005 · 5:42 am

What Constitutes "Ethnicity" in Japan?

This summer I traveled to Japan as a World Fellow in order to study issues of Japanese ethnic identity first-hand. I was interested in the concept of Japanese ethnic homogeneity and wanted to gain a better understanding of the challenges to this concept that the Ainu and Okinawan peoples in Japan represent. In order to do this, I spent a total of two and a half weeks based in Tokyo, staying with a Japanese family and visiting important “majority” Japanese tourist destinations as well as museums that dealt with both majority Japanese culture and Japan’s ethnic minorities. In the middle of this homestay, I spent two weeks traveling through Hokkaido (where most Ainu live) and Okinawa in order to examine the way that the Ainu and Okinawans present themselves to the outside world and assert their separate identities.

The question of ethnicity in Japan turned out to be much harder to address than I had imagined. I planned to look at tourism as a means of cultural exchange between different groups in Japan, and I wanted to understand the way majority Japanese sites are experienced by tourists (who are mainly majority Japanese) in order to understand what a Japanese tourist might expect or be surprised by at a minority Japanese site. I visited popular tourist destinations that are important historically or culturally to the Japanese, such as Nikko, a famous temple complex that is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Japan; Hiraizumi, home to another famous temple complex; the Tokyo National Museum; the Asakusa Kannon temple which is the oldest temple in Tokyo; and the Imperial Palace where the emperor and his family still reside….

My host family also constantly reminded me that “ethnicity” is not just the symbols or places that express “Japanese-ness”; to be Japanese is also to live the daily life of a Japanese person. This trip was my first attempt at studying an intellectual construct (ethnicity) by looking for it in the everyday lives of real people and by asking them to help me find it there. During the homestay portion of my trip, I realized that scholarship on Japanese ethnicity paints an incomplete picture. Scholarship focuses on revivals of nationalist fervor or on contrasting pairs of stereotypes (geishas vs. salarymen, calligraphy v. technology, etc.). However, there is more to Japanese ethnicity than revering the emperor or being an expert at flower arranging.

For instance, when I asked for suggestions of where to visit, my host mother urged me to visit my host sister’s middle school, and the afternoon I spent there including ceremonial tea with the principal, dropping in on six, seventh, and eighth grade classes in all subjects for several hours, participating in English lessons, and finally having coffee in the principal’s office again was one of the most memorable of my time in Japan, and not only because of the myths it shattered about the Japanese educational system. My host mother’s suggestion reminded me that although “ethnicity” might not be formally recorded or presented as daily life for majority Japanese, it is still thought of as being important in defining “being Japanese”. This was reinforced by an afternoon I spent with a Japanese woman and her two children, who are half Australian. To the oldest child, being Japanese included celebrating birthdays and Christmas in a Western style (as these holidays are not really “every day” events), but also required using his mother¹s Japanese maiden name in school. His younger brother, less conscious of fitting in and being Japanese, was perfectly happy to use his English first and last names in school. Thus the homestay portion of my trip revealed that while tourist destinations on Honshu might focus mainly on a “high culture,” the “daily life” portrayed in Ainu museums is also a recognized part of Japanese ethnicity.

SOURCE: The Myth of Japanese Ethnic Homogeneity, by Catherine Williams, September 1999

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