University of Virginia Library

APACL Links Lobby To Taiwan Regime

We reprint here the last in a series of articles
on the Opium trade in Southeast Asia that
recently appeared in Ramparts magazine.

In 1954, Chiang Kai-shek formed the
Asian People's Anti-Communist League
(APACL), which was to become one of
the vital links between the China Lobby
and the Taiwan government. (It was also
in that year that Mr. Nixon urged U.S.
troops to be sent into Indochina following
the French defeat at Dien Bien-Phu - a
proposal which failed because of the lack
of public support for such policy
following the Korean war).

As soon as the APACL was formed,
Chiang announced that it had established
"close contact" with three American
politicians - the most important of whom was
Vice President Richard Nixon.

Over the years the China Lobby has
continued to spring to Mr. Nixon's support. It
was Madame Chennault, co-chairman in 1968
of Women for Nixon-Agnew Advisory
Committee who helped raise a quarter of a
million dollars for the campaign; it was she who
just before the election entered into an
elaborate set of arrangements to sabotage a
White House peace plan.

Within 30 hours of the announced plan,
South Vietnam President Thieu rejected the
new negotiations it proposed - a rejection
Madame Chennault had helped arrange as a
last-minute blow to Hubert Humphrey and the
Democrats.

China Lobby

It is not only his debts, associations and
sympathies to the China Lobby which have
linked Mr. Nixon with Kuomintang
machinations in Indochina and helped plunge
the U.S. deeper into the morass there.

One of his most important foreign policy
appointments since taking office has been the
reassignment of Ray Cline as State Department
Director of Intelligence and Research. Cline,
controversial CIA station chief in Taiwan who
helped organize KMT forays into Communist
China, in 1962 promoted Nixon's old project of
a Bay of Pigs invasion of China.

Intelligence Flights

Within a month of Cline's recent
appointment, the resumption of pilot less
Intelligence flights over mainland China was
approved.

The entire cast of the China Lobby has
relied on one magic corporation, the same
corporation established just after World War II
by General Claire Chennault as Civil Air
Transport and renamed in the 1950s Air
America.

Carrier of not only men and personnel for
all of Southeast Asia, but also of the polices
that have turned Indochina into the third
bloodiest battlefield in American history, Air