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

  Wayne and Jane McKeel were the first foreigners we recruited to help. Because Wayne was a State Department employee, they had access to the U.S. Military PX. They not only agreed to purchase the machine from the PX—where it would not have to be registered with the ROC government—they also paid the two hundred dollars for it themselves and donated it to our cause. They also bought the paper at the same place and contributed that as well. Jane helped us type the stencils.

  As far as we know, the first time these papers got into the hands of a U.S. intelligence agency was in Tainan, three hundred miles south of Taipei. In early 1967, while I was still in language school, Bishop Werner and Dr. Billingsley agreed that I would be appointed as associate professor of church history at Taiwan Theological College just outside Taipei and visiting professor at Tainan Theological College in the south. Once a month, I would ride the “tourist train” for the six- or seven-hour trip to Tainan, where I would spend a couple of days teaching specially scheduled classes.

  These monthly trips allowed me to maintain contact with some missionary colleagues we had recruited for our project—Sid and Judy Hormell and Rowland and Judy Van Es. They both had a few sets of the papers and were to distribute them to interested foreigners as they saw fit. Their explanation about the source of the papers, like ours, was that they didn’t know who produced them.

  Sid was in his early thirties and slightly balding. He had a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Illinois and was teaching mass communication at the seminary. He had once been a radio announcer in Sitka, Alaska. He had also done a Howdy Doody-style children’s radio program. Sid loved to embellish his stories, usually acting them out as he told them. He was also one of the brightest people I have ever known.

  At a Christmas party for Americans—from the government, military, church, and private sector—Sid got into a conversation with a person he thought was a civilian. The conversation led to talk about the “situation in Taiwan.” The man appeared quite interested, so Sid decided to give the man a set of the papers.

  Later that night, there was a knock on Sid and Judy’s door at the seminary. Wearing his bathrobe, Sid opened the door and saw the man to whom he had given the papers. Another man was standing behind him.

  The men identified themselves as U.S. military intelligence. Telling the story to me later, he swore that the two men really wore trench coats and hats just like in the movies.

  “We’re sorry to bother you this late at night, and we wouldn’t if it were not important. Where did you get the papers you gave me tonight?”

  “I told you at the party. They were given me by a tourist who visited the seminary,” Sid said.

  “You don’t remember the name of the person?”

  “No. It was at a social gathering here at the seminary. I had never met him before.”

  “I don’t think you are telling us the truth,” said the second man. “You could get into serious trouble for lying to us.”

  “Look, guys,” Sid said, waving his hands as he always did when he talked, “why wouldn’t I tell you the truth? We’re on the same side, you know.”

  The questioning continued with the same questions and the same answers. Getting nowhere, they left.

  A couple of days later Sid received a call from the commander of the U.S. air base near Tainan. Sid had preached a time or two at the base chapel and had met the commander.

  “Could you come out to the base this afternoon?” the commander asked. Before Sid could respond, he added “I’ve taken the liberty of sending a car for you so you won’t have to take a taxi.”

  “I guess so,” Sid stammered, “but I have to be back for a class at three o’clock.”

  “You’ll be back in plenty of time,” the commander said and hung up.

  The car dropped Sid off at the base in front of the building that housed the commander’s office.

  “I’m here to see the commander,” he said

  “There must be some mistake,” the secretary said after checking the appointment book in front of her. “I do not see an appointment for you.”

  “That’s probably because he just called me to come half an hour ago,” Sid said.

  The secretary picked up the phone and asked someone about the appointment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “The commander is tied up until four o’clock.”

  “I’ve got to get back to the seminary for my class,” Sid muttered as he went out the door. Going down the hall toward the exit, a side door opened and the commander himself reached out and pulled Sid into his office. He sat Sid down on a chair in the middle of the room, turned on a radio in the corner, and sat down on another chair almost knee to knee with Sid.

  “I thought you would like to know what they’ve learned about the papers you gave one of our men the other night,” he said in a near whisper.

  “The documents were sent to Washington for appraisal. We were afraid that they were being produced here on the island. We don’t need that kind of trouble. The good news is that Washington has determined that the papers were from the United States,” he said, “printed on a U.S. mimeograph machine and on U.S. paper.”

  “Really?” Sid said.

  “In all likelihood, they were produced by a Taiwanese independence group in the States. I thought you would want to know this,” the commander said, smiling.

  The two exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes and then Sid was excused through the same side door.

  “Was this for real,” Sid asked Rowland and me the next time I was in Tainan, “or was it just what they wanted me to think?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Later experience with U.S. intelligence agency personnel led us not to automatically assume “intelligence.” The dress and demeanor of the agents who turned up at our friend’s door and the behavior of the commander would have been comical if they hadn’t scared us. Assuming he was being watched by his own government’s agents, Sid got rid of the other sets he had and didn’t give out anymore.

  Like the incident after dinner at Dr. Peng’s house, Sid’s encounter meant that, like a burning match between the toes of an elephant, we had touched powerful forces and they had responded. A review of our operating procedures resulted in three decisions.

  First, while we would all take greater care with whom we gave packets to, we wouldn’t stop. We didn’t want the packets to get into the hands of Chiang’s security agencies or those of the U.S., but we knew it was bound to happen. It was up to the four or five people who had packets to decide whom to give them to and then, like Sid, to be ignorant if caught.

  Second, we needed a secure way to get send and receive international mail. A former colleague at Stony Point now appointed for work in Hong Kong, Bud Carroll, agreed to set up a post office box there. Because his work put him in regular contact with people coming from and going to Taiwan, he chose foreigners he thought reliable and asked them to hand deliver mail to us. We asked foreigners to take mail out and mail it in Hong Kong or Japan. We and Dr. Peng (and later Wei and Hsieh) had contact with the outside world that didn’t go through the postal security system set up by the Kuomintang government. Our route wasn’t without risks, but had far fewer than the regular system had.

  The third thing we did was give Dr. Peng an English name so that we would not refer to him by his real name at home or with involved colleagues. Our encounters with government agencies suggested that the time might come when even our home would be bugged. Dr. Peng agreed. I’m not sure why we suggested the name “Peter.” With Christian backgrounds and training in theology, we knew that Peter had been the name of the head of Jesus’ disciples and had been derived from the Aramaic word cephas, meaning “rock.” That might or might not have been a consideration. Peng agreed to the name, and from that time until now, Peng has been Peter to us.

  Chapter Eleven

  Somebody Listens

  Hope has two lovely daughters, Anger and Courage: Anger at what is, but must not be; and Courage, so that what must b
e, will be.

  —Augustine (354-430)

  “Aren’t you dangerously close to committing hubris?” asked a blond graduate student in Chinese studies that Fox Butterfield had invited to his apartment with some other American graduate students to discuss our project.

  “The idea that you can actually change people’s minds with these articles…” her voice trailed off without finishing the sentence, presumably leaving us to see the futility of such an enterprise.

  She had a point. Who did we think we were? We were a couple of people who until a year or two before knew little of Taiwan’s sordid past and present. Almost by chance we had developed a close friendship with Dr. Peng. It had been from him and from Taiwanese and Mainlander dissidents to whom he had introduced us of a reality that, save for the aftermath of dinner at his home and the experience of Sid in Tainan, we could only try to imagine. We certainly were idealistic and naïve, but the evening was an exercise in shedding my naiveté in believing that if Americans only knew, they would want to be involved, at least among this group of budding East Asian scholars. Both we and Peter had been excited beforehand about the meeting because we were meeting with graduate students, presumably fluent in Chinese and knowledgeable about the situation in Taiwan. We left aware that we weren’t going to receive any help from them and only hopeful that the risk we took in bringing Peter to the meeting wouldn’t come back to bite us.

  “The young woman’s statement,” Peter assured us afterward, “was her rationalization for not getting involved. I think you will find that for many ‘scholars,’ our history and culture are simply objects to study and mean getting a degree and a career in the field. They see themselves as ‘objective observers’ with no moral or political responsibility for what they learn.”

  We had already heard this from the Kagans, but it was something else to hear it from someone who had been at the peak of academia. The view Peter characterized appeared to be the polar opposite of the “missionary view” that missionaries came believing that they had the Truth and were coming to deliver it to the unsaved of the island. Both parties, it seemed to me, came with their own sense of cultural superiority and moral irresponsibility.

  Once we began distributing the materials, we often didn’t fare any better than with the graduate students. After all the trouble and risk we took to print the collection of articles, we found that many of the people didn’t take time to read them. Who could blame them? Most were on vacations or business trips and were more interested in shopping and seeing the sights than in spending intellectual energy on understanding a different view of the reality in Taiwan.

  Some, we discovered, had such commitments to the Cold War mentality that they had difficulty understanding how any power that was anticommunist could be criticized. The emotions of such folks were exacerbated by the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the polarizing of opinion in the U.S. around that involvement.

  While it is true that in Taiwan we were somewhat removed from the ever-enlarging currents of conflict swirling in the United States, we were being politicized by not unrelated events in Taiwan. Wei T’ing-Chao and Hsieh Tsung-Min were nothing if not resourceful. From prison they found ways to get information out to Peter. They began to send Peter lists of political prisoners somehow smuggled out of prison on extremely thin parchment. In a party as corrupt as the KMT, there were always holes in the security system. Dispirited Mainlander soldiers who didn’t want to be in Taiwan any more than the Taiwanese people wanted them there opened many of those holes, not because they sympathized with the Taiwanese but because they just didn’t care. However they managed it, Wei and Hsieh began to get out regular reports on who was inside and on what charges.

  With actual names of prisoners, their locations, and what they were charged with, Peter used our new communications system through Hong Kong to make contact with Amnesty International and give the names to them. To get on one of the published lists and have them inquire about a particular prisoner, Amnesty International wanted assurance that the prisoner was indeed a political prisoner and was not jailed because of violent actions. Peter remembered that just being remembered and having a member of AI write to him while he was in jail boosted his spirits. While it was impossible for someone like Peter to be made to disappear forever from prison, the same was not true for hundreds or thousands of other political prisoners. Being on Amnesty International lists, which were published around the world, was one small lever to keep some of the prisoners alive.

  Although what Wei and Hsieh were able to learn about political prisoners in other prisons was nothing short of remarkable, they admitted they had no idea how many prisoners there were on the island. Years later as a legislator, Hsieh would do a study of the White Terror period from 1949 to 1987, the longest period of sustained martial law in world history, he would conclude. In that time 29,407 cases were brought to the martial courts, involving over 140,000 people, with 3,000 to 4,000 being executed. These, he pointed out, did not include those who were murdered by the government outside the judicial system, those who committed suicide to escape torture, or the ones who were warehoused in psychiatric hospitals.

  While in 1967 we had no idea of the extent of the White Terror, we rightly suspected that it was far beyond the numbers we were uncovering. All of us knew someone who had a friend or family member disappear without a trace. While he was writing the introductory article for the packet, a friend of Fox disappeared:

  A friend whom I shall call Chang used to remark over the dinner table: “The KMT is a peculiar combination of Fascism, Communism, and traditional despotism, with Chiang Kai-shek the Emperor. Our government isn’t any more democratic than the Manchus were 100 years ago. One out of five people on Taiwan is probably a paid police informer.” Chang’s chances under this system were poor. And then finally last month Chang disappeared. At first his family hoped he might have gone to visit a friend in the countryside, but after two weeks they gave up. Chang, a big rather chubby young Mainlander, was bright and articulate. He had unorthodox ideas on how to improve Taiwan. Like many people who dare to express such ideas, even in private, he has probably been taken to one of the political prisons and will never be heard from again.

  One did not have to criticize the government to disappear. The reasons were as capricious as absolute power invites. Hsieh told the story of Liu Ming, a local industrialist who was a benefactor of cultural groups. His crime was owning a luxury Ford sedan, of which there were only two on the island, that was desired by a particular government official. One of Mr. Liu’s staff was tortured into confessing that he was a Communist spy, and then Liu was accused of harboring an enemy of the KMT. Liu was not only taken to Green Island, where he was tortured repeatedly, but the KMT also took his property, and his family was left destitute.

  The fate of Liu’s family was not unique. In a practice that combined the old Chinese “bao jia” system and the Stalinist-structured secret police agencies of the KMT, these families were systematically cut off from financial help—e.g., relatives who acted to help them were visited by special police and warned not to help. They weren’t jailed. Their persecution was more subtle but no less real. Employers were told to fire family members. Landlords were warned not to rent to family members. Even less immediate family members and distant relatives were warned not to help. The results were near catastrophic. Families were not only deprived by having the primary breadwinner in jail but they also found themselves unable to get jobs and have places to live. Wives and daughters were often forced into prostitution. Few in Taiwan suffered more than the families of political prisoners.

  In our weekly meetings with Peter, we talked about how we might help these families. Through our post office box in Hong Kong, we were able to exchange ideas with the Kagans, now back in Cambridge. We talked about the possibilities of supplying sewing machines and other equipment for cottage industries so the families could support themselves. Soon enough, we learned how naïve that idea was. The neediest of these familie
s were in a survival mode without the luxury of setting up such businesses or even of carting the equipment from one place to another. The one way we could help them was with cash—if we could get it into the country.

  In the fall of 1967, when the decision about my appointment to Taiwan Theological College had been made, I had been in full-time language study for a year and a half. I was to begin teaching at the seminary in January and attending language school part-time. Eventually, the seminary expected us to live in their housing on campus. The fact that none were currently available was a benefit. We rented a small house in Shih-lin, a suburb north of Taipei in the valley on the way to the seminary. The house, made of concrete blocks, was not more than 850 square feet and located at the end of a lane ending in a rice paddy. All of the houses were surrounded by six-foot walls. Across from the rice paddy was a bus stop where we could catch buses to Taipei or up the mountain to the seminary. We had the mimeograph machine tucked away in a closet and printed the first edition of the papers here.

  Except that the residence of the Generalissimo and Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek lay on the other side of the rice paddy and main road, the location of our new home suited us fine. Our neighbors were all either Taiwanese or Mainlanders. There were no other foreigners in the neighborhood.

  One of our first dinner guests in Shih-lin was J. Harry Haines, who had earlier been promised by the Methodist Board of Missions that he would teach church history at the seminary in Taipei. The promise was not fulfilled and the door opened to me when, in January 1966, Harry was appointed head of the Methodist Committee on Overseas Relief (MCOR). Harry was a native of New Zealand and former missionary in China and Malaysia. He had also been on the staff of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.