Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Read online

  We could hardly believe how things were falling into place. With each new letter from outside, the plan became more real, and as it became more real, more decisions were required. In the summer of 1969, we set the target for getting Peter out of the country at the end of the year. We wanted to do it earlier, but with the time communication required with Hong Kong, Japan, and the U.S., we realized that we would be lucky to be ready by then.

  The people in Japan would arrange for who would be involved there and who would know the operational details. Who, besides Judith and I, would be involved in Taiwan? Bud was a part of each stage of the planning from Hong Kong. By this time, Jim and Mary Ella Brentlinger had moved to Hong Kong, but Jim was commuting to Taiwan monthly just as he had to Hong Kong before. He knew nothing of the plan, but his regular trips in and out of the country were critical to its success. The McKeels had gone to their new posting in Bolivia. Gene Ethridge had completed his term with the Presbyterians and returned to Georgia. Jamie and Carol Long, assigned to teach at Soochow for two years and who had participated in some of the early planning for the escape, were finishing their term in August of 1969.

  When the Longs left in August, they carried with them a critical letter from Peter to the people in Japan. They were to find the person in Tokyo and hand deliver it. They couldn’t find the person able to make contact, so they waited until they got to the U.S. and then mailed it back to Japan.

  We decided that we would not involve any Taiwanese in the plan; to do so was a death sentence for them if the plan failed. We continued to work with Wei and then with Hsieh when he got out of prison in September of 1969 to distribute money to families of political prisoners, but we would not involve them in this. We didn’t have any doubts about their competence or dependability; it was our competence and dependability I worried about. Peter had to take the risk with us, but neither Wei nor Hsieh did. At least that was what made sense to us.

  We needed some other colleagues in Taipei that could help us finish the plan and then implement it. Mark Thelin in Taichung and Rowland Van Es in Tainan were too far away. We needed some foreigners the authorities would have no reason to suspect. And we found them. George and Dot Hoover were United Methodist missionaries appointed for work in Singapore doing Chinese language study in Taiwan. They had gone through the Missionary Orientation Center training at Stony Point. Taller than my six–foot-four-inch frame, George towered over most people, especially in Taiwan. He was a community organizer in the Saul Alinsky tradition and politically savvy. Dot was a nurse and, as far as I was ever able to see, feared nobody. After they met Peter and we talked to them about being involved in the escape, they didn’t hesitate for a moment.

  Another couple arrived in Taiwan who had gotten to know the Hoovers at Stony Point. Mike and Judy Heath were on their way to Sarawak as agricultural missionaries, stopping in Taiwan for a year’s language study. They were both from ranch families in Wyoming. Tall and slender, Mike looked every bit the cowboy he was. Judy was red-headed and as even-tempered as Mike. Once they met Peter, they too said they would do whatever they could.

  In addition to the important new perspectives and questions they brought to the plan, their apartments in Taipei gave us new places to have our regular meetings with Peter. In the fall of 1969, there was no indication that Judith or I had gotten the attention of any of the security agencies, but we wanted to take no unnecessary chances.

  The Hoovers and Heaths also lightened Judith’s and my workload. In the fall, both of us were teaching full loads at the seminary, and being named registrar had given me new responsibilities. I had also been assigned to a team to develop a plan to unite the two seminaries. The PCT was under pressure from the government to withdraw from the World Council of Churches because it advocated the recognition of the People’s Republic. The United Methodist Mission Board had finally lost its patience with its “chaplaincy to Mainlanders” and convened a consultation with the Methodist Church in Taiwan with a view to withdrawing its financial support. In addition to being our busiest fall for “missionary work” since our arrival, a new member was about to join our family.

  Given all that was going on in our lives that fall in 1969, we had not planned on an addition to our family. After the birth of Elizabeth, we had applied for the adoption of a child from the Christian Children’s Home in Taiwan. Judith and I had always wanted to adopt, even before we knew that Judith’s giving birth to another child would be dangerous. It didn’t matter if the child was Chinese, Taiwanese, Anglo, or any other race, although given where we lived and the agency to which we had applied, it was most likely that the baby would be Chinese or Taiwanese.

  On Friday, October 17, we received a call from Mrs. Graber at the home in Taichung. She said that she had a baby and wanted us to come down to talk about it. There was, she said, an Eurasian boy (born on Thursday) that we could have if all of the legalities are taken care of—which in this case, she assured us, should be no problem. Since he was premature, however, it would be a few days before we could have him.

  The call could not have come at a more inopportune time, but we didn’t hesitate. If a baby was available, we wanted it.

  The “few days” became ten. On Monday, October 27, Sue Fowler, a volunteer representative for the home, took the baby from the hospital in Taipei to her home, where she waited for the woman to come who would take him down to Taichung to be registered. At her house, we saw the beautiful baby that was to be Richard Lancaster Thornberry. She had to take him down to Taichung to the orphanage so that he could be registered there as “left on the doorstep,” a convenient euphemism to allow birthmothers not be named should that be their choice. And that was Richard’s mother’s choice. On Wednesday we took the train down and picked up our new son. He was so small that we carried him back on the train swaddled in a blanket in a woven peach basket.

  Within two weeks, Richard was losing all of his food through projectile vomiting and losing weight. It took another week to confirm a diagnosis of pyloric stenosis, a congenital condition where muscles in the stomach become enlarged to the point of preventing food from entering the small intestine. Immediate surgery was called for, but because Richard was already so weak, he had to gain some strength. We were referred to an American surgeon, Ben Dykstra. Dykstra, a Reformed Church missionary at the Presbyterian McKay Hospital in Taipei, had studied this very surgery on his last furlough.

  Dykstra operated on Richard November 18, and he came through fine. He was back in the incubator, where he had spent the first ten days of his life outside the womb, for another ten days. Not being able to hold our little baby, who was not a lot heavier now than at his birth, was an emotional drain even though we recognized that the surgeon had saved his life.

  Richard came home and began gaining weight. Some kind of equilibrium returned to our lives, and along with it deep gratitude to the Hoovers and Heaths for meeting regularly with Peter and keeping the preparations for the escape going.

  We wanted to give Richard a Chinese name that included part of Peter’s name. Even though Peter rarely visited our house once we were in the last months of the escape plan, he insisted on coming to see Richard.

  “We want you to name him and for him to have a part of your name,” I said, holding the baby up for Peter’s inspection.

  “He will, of course, have ‘T’ang’ for Thornberry,” he said. “The first character of his given name should be Chih [pronounced jr], meaning ‘a strong will to achieve for a higher purpose.’ Then, we can give him Ming from my name, which means ‘bright’ or ‘clear.’”

  “What would the combination of Chih and Ming mean?” I asked.

  “It would mean someone who can guide others with clarity and understanding,” he said.

  “That’s wonderful!” Judith exclaimed.

  We thanked him profusely and let him get on down the mountain, feeling some guilt that we had violated the protocol we had established by having him visit us at the seminary in the last phase of preparations
.

  When there was a knock at the door a half an hour later, the last person we expected to see was Peter.

  “I got down to Shih-lin,” Peter said, sounding out of breath, “and remembered that we can’t have your baby named Chih-Ming. That’s the Chinese mingdze for Ho Chi-min, the president of North Vietnam. It would not be good to give the same name to a baby in Taiwan.”

  “What are we going to do?” Judith asked.

  “I think we should name him T’ang Chih-Min, using the second character of my given name, which means ‘intelligent’ or ‘alert,’” Peter said. “It means he will be a wise leader. That name will be much better for him in this country.”

  As quickly as Peter had come, he left, as if to mitigate the risk he had run by coming not once but twice to the house.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Countdown

  Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

  — Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

  Even though Judith and I were distracted, we attended the weekly planning meetings with Peter, the Hovers, and the Heaths. Peter was to go out disguised as a Japanese hippie musician, and we would put a picture of him in that disguise in the “lost” passport. During the fall of 1969, he conducted an experiment. For four weeks, he grew a beard with a mustache but did not go out of his house during the day. He still came out after midnight and met with us at either the Hoovers or the Heaths. During this time he didn’t show himself to his watchers. When the beard was as he wanted it, he cut it off, satisfied that in the four weeks immediately before his departure he would grow it again.

  Before he cut off his beard, Peter went to a do-it-yourself passport photo booth and took a number of pictures. The pictures were sent to Munakata Takayuki in Japan. He had found Abe Kenichi, a Japanese national who was willing to come to Taiwan and “lose” his passport. Munakata acquired an embosser made like that used by the Japanese government on passports. With the passport of the man coming in hand, they embossed ten or twelve of the pictures so that one of them would match the picture we would put in place of the original perfectly. Then, they sent the pictures back to us in Taiwan.

  We had all agreed on the disguise and thought Peter looked like the Japanese hippie musician he would pretend to be. What would we do about his arm?

  “How can we keep his arm from being a dead give away?” Mike asked with the simple honesty that we had come to expect of him. We had talked about the question before but not in such blunt terms and not in Peter’s presence.

  “I’ll tell you what I can do,” Dot said. “Instead of hoping that they won’t notice his arm, I’ll wrap it like I’ve done it for serious burns many times in the hospital. They will notice it but what they will see is his arm in a sling with a large bandage from his elbow down. They won’t think about his not having an arm.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “he can even have a story about getting hot soup spilled on him at a restaurant in Taipei.”

  “Maybe I’ll still be angry and considering suing the restaurant when I get back to Japan,” Peter laughed, getting into the spirit of what almost seemed like a joke.

  “I think the bandage will work,” Judith said.

  Peter agreed, and Dot said she would be prepared with the necessary supplies and equipment on the night of departure.

  The date set was for Saturday, January 3, 1970. We were uncomfortable with a Saturday night departure. We thought that the best time was when a lot of people would be in the airport, but Peter wanted to leave at a time where there were the fewest people there. Outside his presence, we talked with the Hoovers and Heaths about the concern we all shared. We concluded that his peace of mind was probably more important in determining when he should make the attempt. So, Saturday night was the time.

  There was another item related to Peter’s peace of mind.

  “Some of you will be at the airport to see that Peter gets onto the plane,” said Judith, knowing only that it wouldn’t be either of us; for security, it would be one of the new couples. “And Bud will be at the airport in Hong Kong. I wish we could have someone on the plane with Peter who can witness whatever happens there.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Peter said. “I would feel better if someone were there, but who do you think would do that?”

  “It should not be anyone associated with the people you are dealing with in Japan,” I said. Everybody nodded in agreement.

  “What about DeWitt Barnett?” I said as the idea popped into my head.

  “I don’t know if he can do it,” said Peter, “but we can ask him.”

  Within days the word was out. In an unrelated but timely visit by DeWitt to Taiwan on December 12 and 13, we had an opportunity to discuss it with him in person.

  “Of course, I will do it,” he said as if it weren’t a question. “Tell me when and on what flight.”

  “Peter will go out on Saturday night, January 3,” I said. “We want you to come in on the JAL flight from Japan and then be on board when Peter gets on in Taipei.”

  “Why don’t I take that flight on Friday night so I can get here and meet with you and know that everything is as planned?” he asked.

  I was about to say that I thought meeting Peter in person was an unwarranted risk, but Peter responded before I could speak.

  “I think it is a good idea,” Peter said. “I would like to see you before I go to the airport.”

  That settled that. Hopefully, when the flight left Taipei, Peter and DeWitt would be on it. If both were, we would have a witness to whatever might happen there.

  In one of the few references to the escape that I recorded in my journal, on December 20 I wrote about word from Bud in Hong Kong: “Word came yesterday. The money is here. We are ready for the last stage.” While we continued to have funds come in from the American Friends Service Committee for aid for families of political prisoners, there was never a question about using any of that money for the escape. All of that money went to the families. Our friends in the U.S. fulfilled their promise. I don’t know if it is true or not, but I heard that Don was able to tap a Presbyterian “church beautification” fund for some of the money. With money in hand, we purchased a ticket for Saturday night, January 3, in the name of Abe, who was coming from Japan on Friday.

  On Saturday night, we sent George and Dot to the airport to observe the departure of the 10:00 P.M. flight on which Peter would depart a week later. We waited for them at the Heaths’ apartment. When they got back around eleven o’clock, both of their faces showed that the news was not good.

  “There was absolutely no one in the airport,” George said. He was as close to losing his cool as any time I had seen him.

  “We went upstairs to the visitors’ observation area that overlooks the whole departure area as well as the tarmac outside,” Dot explained. “Once Peter enters the airport, except for when he leaves the departure area and goes through customs, we will be able to keep him in view until he boards the plane. What we saw tonight was disturbing,” she said in her matter-of-fact way. “This was the last flight of the night. Even the other airline desks were closed, and there was only one clerk for our flight. No one! No one boarded the flight here.”

  “All we could see were security people wandering around,” George said. “I think it is suicidal for you to attempt it on Saturday night, Peter. I think we need to reschedule your departure for midday Saturday or maybe for early the next week.”

  I could see the wheels turning in Peter’s head. There was dead silence, and then he spoke.

  “No,” he said. “Let’s not change the plan or the ticket; I think this is still the best time to try it.”

  Nothing more was said, but the Hoovers’ report sobered us all, including Peter.

  After Peter left that night, we stayed to talk with the others. There was no talk of trying to get Peter to change his mind. The decision had been made. But we moved on to a question that we had all thought about but hadn’t discussed as a group.

  “What do we do if
Peter is arrested at the airport?” I asked.

  “The only thing we will be able to do is to get word to our friends outside to publicize his arrest,” George said in his matter-of-fact manner, now recovered from the experience at the airport.

  “And, hopefully,” I said, “we will be able to do that before we are arrested.”

  “Look,” Judy said, breaking her usual silence at these gatherings, “we can’t afford to have these hung-dog looks around Peter. We can’t do it to ourselves either. We’ve got a plan and it’s going to work!”

  On Friday afternoon, January 2, Peter met Abe somewhere in town and brought his passport to the Heaths’ apartment. It was time for one of the most critical operations of the plan: removing the Japanese man’s picture from his passport and by replacing it with Peter’s embossed photo. The embossed markings were in a circle—about a third of the circle on the bottom left-hand corner of the photograph, the rest on the page. From the article we had read about the escape from East Germany, I had learned that the photo needed to be split so that the base of the original would remain intact. The glue used by the passport agency was such that any attempt to remove the whole picture would result in tearing the paper underneath.

  My task was to split the photo and paste it over the base of the original photo so that the new picture would have the same thickness as the original. In the weeks before, I had practiced using a thin razor blade on other pictures. I had done it enough to see that it could be done.

  On Friday night, I split several of the pictures whose embossing looked like they would match the existing indentions best. We spent a long time deciding on the perfect match. Peter watched some of what was happening on the table but spent most of the time making small talk with those who weren’t kibitzing at the table. After what must have seemed an eternity to Peter, the selection was made and we were ready for the application. Judith took glue, applied it to the base, and then carefully set it in place. The embossing matched perfectly.