Perilous Missions: Civil Air Transport and CIA Covert Operations in Asia (review)

Insiders often portray the 1950s as a "golden age" for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first successful Soviet nuclear test in 1949 precluded a direct American clash with the U.S.S.R. and inaugurated two generations of conflict by proxy. In this frequently covert struggle, the Agency became an instrument of choice for the U.S. government. Fortified by an influx of veterans from its wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), it embarked upon a broad covert campaign against communists and perceived communist sympathizers. From the literary salons of Paris, to the grizzled brotherhood of international mountaineers, the CIA's influence came to permeate almost every avenue of human endeavor. In the field of clandestine military operations, however, it is increasingly clear that the Agency's record during the early Cold War years was almost entirely disastrous. The reissue of William Leary's meticulously researched study Perilous Missions: Civil Air Transport and CIA Covert Operations in Asia helps underscore the limitations of secret warfare.

Civil Air Transport (CAT) was incorporated in postwar China as a privately held air cargo company. Its founders, Major General Claire L. Chennault, former commander of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force, and Whiting Willauer, an American lawyer, were motivated by a combination of altruism and economic self-interest. They hoped the airline would help foster China's industrial development and make them a fortune in the process. When the Chinese Civil War entered its critical phase during 1947 and 1948, however, Chennault's old friendship with Chiang Kai-shek, and CAT's business interests, thrust the company into an increasingly active partnership with the Kuomintang regime. At great personal risk, CAT's American pilots ferried Nationalist troops, delivered supplies to besieged cities, and even bombed communist positions. Leary aptly compares the "CAT spirit" of the late 1940s to that of sixteenth-century Elizabethan privateers: brave, adventurous, and unscrupulous (p. 53).

This buccaneering ethos, and CAT's idle fleet, prompted the CIA to rescue the airline from bankruptcy after the Nationalist defeat and flight to Taiwan in 1949. The transaction left Willauer, Chennault, and the other original shareholders considerably richer, and saddled the Agency with an airline that it had no idea how to run. Although Leary chooses to downplay the issue, CAT clearly became a major sinkhole for government cash. For Frank Wisner and other Agency mandarins, however, this was beside the point: the CIA now had the transport it needed to conduct a major program of covert operations in Asia.

Over the next decade, CAT formed the logistical backbone of the CIA's secret campaign in the Far East. Perilous Missions details several of these projects (in Korea, China, and French Indochina), but the book shows its age in this area. Since its original publication in 1984, historians have uncovered CAT's involvement in the CIA attempt to supply Tibetan guerrillas during the late 1950s, the Indonesian coup of 1957, and various other paramilitary operations in South and Southeast Asia (see Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002]). The new introduction to the Smithsonian edition mentions these developments, but does not examine the subject in depth.

Leary shies away from exploring why the CIA continued to fund large-scale covert operations in the region, despite a record of almost unmitigated failure, and his analysis of the political calculus undertaken in Washington is incomplete. Cold war ideological imperatives helped bolster CAT and the Agency's enterprises in Asia. Attempting to divorce politics from the study of military history may, as Clausewitz suggested long ago, be futile.

These qualms aside, Perilous Missions is a worthy reissue. Almost twenty years after its first...