Sara B. Castro is an associate professor of history at the US Air Force Academy and the author of the new book: Mission to Mao, which details a US intelligence mission to the Chinese Communist Party during World War II.
Prior to receiving her PhD from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Castro worked as an intelligence analyst on East Asia for the CIA. We recently sat down to talk about her new book, the early history of American intelligence, and the current state of US-China relations. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Institute for Future Conflict (IFC): Your book is about what is known as the “Dixie Mission” to China during World War II. Can you briefly explain what the mission was and what it aimed to accomplish?
Castro: The Dixie Mission was a US Army-led military observer mission to the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Yan’an China that lasted from 1944 to 1947. This group of American intelligence officers were the first US personnel to meet with the leaders of the CCP in an official capacity. The mission earned the nickname “Dixie” as a codeword for US intelligence officials. It was coined with an analogy to the US Civil War because it referred to the denied “rebel” area of the CCP leaders. The “Dixie” codename was also a reference to a popular song at the time called “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?” (To hear this song and others that were popular with the Dixie Mission crew, check out a playlist I made.)
During their time in Yan’an, the members of the Dixie Mission observed CCP leadership intentions and the military capabilities of CCP guerrilla fighters. They also collected intelligence on Japanese troop locations and capabilities, Japanese POWs, and weather reports.
IFC: The Dixie Mission, as you write in the book, was the first contact between the US and the Chinese Communist Party. This, however, came at a time when the US recognized and was broadly allied with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party. How did the US balance its support for the nationalists with its desire to reach out to and aid their domestic enemies, the communists?
Castro: The Dixie Mission was always controversial, even when it was just getting started. Chiang Kai-shek protested the establishment of the mission to President Roosevelt. It took the direct intervention of Vice President Wallace during his June 1944 visit to China to gain begrudging approval from the Chinese leader. The mission was a pet project of General Joseph Stilwell who was frustrated by Chiang’s resistance to some of the US ideas.
Gen Stilwell was shut out of the meaningful intelligence operations led by Chiang’s powerful spy master Dai Li, so Stilwell’s staffers turned their attention toward the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders and guerrillas.
The group was also an Army-led interagency mission that included officials from various Army branches, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the State Department, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. The diverse interagency composition appeased other leaders from the US side who could have opposed Stilwell’s plans. Stilwell also required all officials in the first cohort of Dixie Mission participants to have excellent Chinese language skills. This eliminated the need for Chiang Kai-shek to send translators, who would double as as spies and minders. Very quickly, Chiang Kai-shek regretted the legitimacy that the Dixie Mission afforded the CCP leaders, but he was unable to prevent the mission’s establishment through his negotiations.
IFC: One of the things that comes out in your book is what it’s like to live in the Yan’an area of China. I’m curious as to what it was like for the people on the Dixie Mission. I know there were no women allowed there although they attempted to go. Can you paint a picture of what it was like to live there at this time?
Castro: This wasn’t an easy part of China for people to live. The CCP leaders end up in Yan’an there for that exact reason. It is very dusty, and not a lot of crops grow there. Water is sparse. At the time, most people lived in caves in the mountains especially during the war because of the lack of lumber. Winters and summers were extreme. There was no heating in the caves, so they would bring in iron pots full of coal that would release carbon monoxide, which came close to killing a few personnel. The Americans basically had to fly all of their supplies in and live without plumbing in these caves.
IFC: Did the Americans feel isolated from the rest of the war that was taking place in the Pacific?
Castro: They definitely felt isolated. Many of the Americans had grown up as missionary kids, the sons of Christian missionaries in China. But this was kind of their bag. They would go to rural areas and set up a school or a hospital and many of them were used to living in China. Headquarters by contrast, didn’t have this background, so this results in an operational disconnect. The net result was strong group cohesion amongst the Dixie men. This enables them to lean forward a little bit on plans that ended up not being acceptable back home.
IFC: Why no women?
Castro: This was a common practice, especially for the Army and OSS during World War II. They thought these missions were simply too isolating for women. They were worried about the transportation to and from, and they thought women couldn’t handle it.
Still, there was significant pushback from the people on the mission because there were other women in this area. For example, some of the most famous foreign journalists who covered the CCP were women; journalists like Agnes Smedley and Anna Louise Strong endured the Yan’an area.
IFC: One of the things that often stands out in many histories of intelligence operations of WWII is how the OSS was essentially a group of well-meaning but largely incompetent amateurs. Your book however is more critical of what you call the United States’ “immature intelligence system.” Do you think the problems the Dixie Mission ran into were largely systems problems?
Castro: It was definitely a system problem more than a people problem. They collected the best group of people that they could for the mission. The people, especially at the mission start, were definitely the most capable people that they could have sent.
Cross-agency communication was the biggest problem. This led to vast inefficiencies: repeating efforts; stepping on each other’s toes; sabotaging one another sometimes in in the name of rivalries. None of these behaviors are particular to the Dixie Mission. This is the reality for all intelligence operations across the war. When you look at other cases of these joint missions or OSS missions you see these same errors. World War II was an ad hoc time for intel.
IFC: Is there any way the US could have done this any better given how the intelligence system at that time was set up?
Castro: I think it would have been really hard for them to do a better job under the timing and the conditions. The war becomes this transition period between most policymakers and public intellectuals in America thinking that having a standing intelligence service is a bad idea and it’s unamerican that’s the sentiment before the war. Then after the war it is viewed as a necessary evil. So in those short few years pre-war intelligence goes from zero to a desperate need.
IFC: Unlike most historians, who write on the topic, you have experience in the intelligence community. I’m curious how that impacted your writing of this book. Did it make you more sympathetic to the agents in the field, more critical of them?
Castro: Intelligence work holds considerable mystique with the public and in popular culture right now, but the truth is that this work is a fundamentally human activity. It is much more art than science.
From my perspective it was interesting to look at this mission because I could see the source of some of dysfunction today. Interagency rivalries remain common obstacles for agents. Intelligence agencies have their own institutional cultures. Each agency has its own way of doing things and its own priorities.
As a person who was involved with intelligence work for a number of years, I definitely approached both the Dixie Mission participants and their headquarters handlers with a great deal of empathy. The job they faced was difficult and dangerous. It was thankless work and there were constant opportunities to fail. Recognizing and attempting to circumvent their own biases was nearly impossible. All of these characteristics hold true for today’s intelligence officers, even with all of the developments that have occurred over the last eighty years to make US intelligence collection and analysis more streamlined and efficient.
IFC: Another thing that stands out in your book is the value of cultural knowledge and language skills when collecting intelligence, but you also write in your conclusion that “the longer the initial Dixie Mission members stayed at Yan’an, the more the CCP won them over.” How does the US solves this problem of what is often termed “going native?”
Castro: It is important to note that the respect that some of the Dixie Mission participants developed for CCP leaders and Communist guerrilla fighters was not ideological, and I found no credible evidence that any of the men held Communist sympathies, during or after the war. US officials in China in the 1940s were anti-Communist, but their ideological commitments were only one factor among those influencing their actions in their alliance with the Chinese government.
In the records I reviewed for Mission to Mao, the existential stakes of the war against Japan took priority over ideological concerns as Americans pursued intelligence activities that were new to them and often performed in an evolving or ad hoc fashion. In the remote location of the Dixie Mission, US officials bonded with CCP leaders over the difficulty of their shared conditions and the importance of defeating their shared enemy.
Sympathy and bonding between people serving in forward-deployed field conditions is common, for military operations and intelligence operations. The US intelligence systems were too new during World War II to have fully developed effective headquarters-to-field management systems, such as standard intelligence asset validation systems, that exist today.
IFC: In the post-World War II era, when the CCP was fighting Chiang Kai-shek, how much did the US lean on members of the Dixie Mission and the knowledge they had gained?
Castro: The US mostly did the opposite. The initial cohort of Dixie mission officers were inspired by the guerrilla success of disinformation, and psychological operations that were pretty new to the US, they were so inspired by that they wanted to cooperate and that led to questions in the rear areas: people who understood less about what this mission was about or who understood less about Chinese domestic politics maybe. Those people had a lot of questions about the loyalty of these Americans. And that is mostly what their story ended up being. These people that had this close contact to the CCP mostly came under the scrutiny of McCarthy, some of them the state department—particularly, it was career ending for them.
IFC: So, we had these people with this level of expertise, and we just did not utilize them? They had the knowledge, we confuse them having the knowledge about a particular group with loyalty and affinity for that group?
Castro: Yes.
IFC: That seems like a problem.
Castro: Yes, and that’s what my next book is about.
IFC: Excellent, so, tell us about your next book.
Castro: The next book is about technophilia and this close relationship, a parallel relationship, between the Air Force and CIA. They’re sort of sister organizations; they get created in the same law. After the war Americans were still hesitant about human espionage. But it will become really difficult to operate during the Cold War without espionage. There are denied areas, it is highly dangerous, and people aren’t convinced it’s going to be useful. So, the investments that the US makes is in things like overhead surveillance and satellites and these big technical tools.
The book is about the strengths and weaknesses of that approach, and this idea of an American way of doing Intel that is very similar to the way of doing the Air Force—where it’s ingenuity, designing the right tools, reducing the risk to human life because you have these tools.
IFC: Fast forwarding to the present, which you describe as “the point of greatest tension” you have observed between the US and PRC, what if any lessons does the Dixie Mission have for our current moment?
Castro: The Dixie Mission can offer at least two helpful lessons, especially to American readers. First, diplomacy and person-to-person dialogue matters; it can make or break bilateral relationships. The US and China are both sophisticated nations with large governments and complicated economies. But they are also comprised of human actors who serve in leadership roles. Direct interaction between diplomats, government officials, and leaders can significantly influence relationships, in positive or negative ways.
It is also true that the history of the Dixie Mission is a cautionary tale of US officials naïvely assuming that a foreign ally would eventually want to emulate the US. The Dixie Mission members’ confidence in American moral, ethical, and political values reinforced a deep-seated belief that post-war China required American help, whether Chinese leaders wanted it or not. One early member of the Dixie Mission characterized it as the problem of Americans trying to “make the world in their own image.”
Lacking clear norms and in the face of evolving administrative procedures, individual US officials serving in Yan’an shaped their actions based on their own perceptions that the US had an obligation to support a Chinese state that many of them viewed as backward.
This view tended to undermine the agency of foreign counterparts such as the CCP leaders in person-to-person diplomatic engagements. It is a kind of paternalism that is not absent from present foreign relations, but it is often more difficult to for current actors to recognize in themselves. Looking back eighty years at the Dixie Mission’s first meetings reveals this trend clearly, which offers a powerful lesson for today’s diplomats and leaders.
IFC: Thank you so much.