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27 March 2023 (Monday)
1955 Assassination of Gen. Yu
Cloak and Dagger Mystery in Cold War Hong Kong
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - My interest in Cold War cloak and dagger mysteries have long fascinated me.
The 1955 murder of Lt. Gen. Yu Chengwan in Hong Kong is one of those intriguing Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries.
Was it Communist agents or KMT agents or just kidnappers looking for ransom money?
Yu was one of KMT General Li Mi’s (李彌) right-hand men until a falling out with the KMT over loyalty issues.
Yu is considered to have been the hero of the epic 1944 Battle of Changde.
The below article is from the front-page of the English-language China Post (Taipei) of 28 August 1955. I collected this article from the archives of a Taipei library in 1993 while doing research on KMT intelligence operations during the Cold War.
It is unclear why Yu remained in Hong Kong after arriving there in 1950.
According to various websites, Yu had an impressive career:
Ranks:
1936-02-05 Major-General
1944 Lieutenant-General
Service:
1940-1944 Commanding Officer 57th Division, 74th Army - Battle of Changde
1944 Deputy Commanding Officer 74th Army
1946 Deputy Commanding Officer 74th Division
1947 Commanding Officer Eastern Guangdong Division Area
1948 Commanding Officer 26th Army
1949 Director of Yunnan Pacification Headquarters
1950 Leaves for Hong Kong
1955 Assassinated
It is quite possible either side could have killed Yu and there is a theory that old subordinates of the deposed KMT Army killed him in revenge.
According to an autobiography by a CIA officer based in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (1978), the flow of refugees from China was massive and KMT agents sent from Taiwan would infiltrate returning refugees to China after expulsion by British authorities.
This gave Taipei the only real intelligence on what was happening beyond the Bamboo Curtain. Yet none of it was shared with the CIA, according to CIA veteran Ralph McGhee (Taipei 1959-1961) in his autobiography Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (1983).
The KMT was also involved in a variety of nefarious activities in Hong Kong, including the 1955 bombing of an Air India flight taking Communist Chinese delegates from Hong Kong to the Bandung Conference in Indonesia (I Was A CIA Agent in India by John Discoe Smith).
From Peer de Silva’s memoir:
“The Kuomintang Party [KMT] of the Nationalist Chinese in Taipei were active in running agents through Hong Kong where, being ethnic Chinese, they could mingle with their countrymen and from time to time slip into the meager legal Chinese traffic into and out of Kwangtung [Guangdong] Province to Canton [Guangzhou city] and perhaps from there up the coast to Shanghai and Peking [Beijing]. As often as not, these agents from Formosa [Taiwan] were uncovered, not by the Communist Chinese authorities, but by the Special Branch of the Hong Kong police. Invariably, the captured KMT (Kuomintang) agents would be incarcerated for a week or so and then unceremoniously shipped back to Taiwan. Because the British in charge of the Special Branch of the Hong Kong police knew that the CIA was in direct contact with the Nationalist Chinese intelligence organizations in Taiwan, they came to me to complain about the actions of such KMT agents, which was simply an unproductive embarrassment to Her Majesty’s Government. As such they were an embarrassment to the CIA and certainly to me personally.
The simplest solution for the British was to send the suspected KMT agent back to Taiwan and push the suspected Chinese Communist agent back across the border at Shum Chum River into Kwangtung Province and hope for the best. Altogether it was a never-ending burlesque, except that people did die performing it.”
END
This is my grandfather. My mom was his eldest child as the brother who preceded her died. She was matched with a fourth gen Chinese American with some grad degrees because he was afraid of what might happen in not supporting either the GMD escaping to Taiwan nor the Communists who had come down from the north after the war. So he wanted to marry her to an American so that the rest of the family could come over. And she for make that possible for all of her younger siblings and his extended fam including his siblings and their children as well. Soon after she was matched and then married to my father, my grandfather was assasinated.