Sara Castro: Mission to Mao

Mission to Mao: US Intelligence and the Chinese Communists in World War II by Sara B. Castro tells the story of the “Dixie Mission,” a group of US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officers sent to China from 1941 to 1947 to gather intelligence for the war effort against Japan. Read on for a Q&A with the author on her new historiographical approach to the topic and the ultimate failures of the Dixie Mission.

Why did you choose to reexamine the Dixie Mission? In other words, what led you to this research topic?

Books focused on the Dixie Mission are now decades old, with the most recent studies having been published in the 1990s. Most recent studies of US-China relations have either omitted discussion of the Dixie Mission or addressed it only very briefly. Meanwhile, scholarship about US-China relations during World War II has undergone significant historiographic revisions in the past twenty years, with today’s historians challenging the way that past scholars perceived the relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and General Joseph Stilwell in particular. The Dixie Mission’s history was overdue for a retelling that centers the story on the actors involved and examines their actions as US military and intelligence officials relative to the new historiography of Sino-American relations during the 1930s and 1940s.

Your book takes a new approach to the Dixie Mission by creating a social and cultural history in which you aim to put the perspectives of everyday US officials at the forefront. Why is this social turn important to your book and what other ways does your book offer a new perspective of the mission?

Mission to Mao is a social history of the Dixie Mission as an interagency US intelligence project during World War II. My approach to this historical case emphasizes the extent to which intelligence is a human activity and brings the recent developments in the subfield of intelligence history into the history of US-China relations during World War II. The 1940s was a time of great change, both in the relationship between the United States and China and in the way the United States performed global intelligence work. Focusing on the individual officials who staffed the Dixie Mission reveals how their personalities, career histories, biases, rivalries, relationships with one another, and the cultures of the institutions of which they were a part of ultimately shaped the work that they did and the image of the United States that they projected to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders. The result illuminates hidden aspects of the origins of the modern postwar US intelligence regime and the history of US relations with the CCP.

What was your experience like with the archives for this project, particularly working with the personal papers of members of the Dixie Mission?

Because Mission to Mao examines the US intelligence operations with and on the CCP leaders from the interactions between US officials and CCP leaders in Yan’an all the way through the CBI staff and executive branch offices to the White House, this project relied on a long list of archival collections. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to many US archivists. Chinese archives were unfortunately not available to me for this project—to my great regret. To incorporate the Chinese side of the story, I supplemented US records I found with published official CCP documents and memoirs. I hope that someday I can get access to Chinese archival materials about the Dixie Mission. For now, I focused on retelling the American side of the story, with help from a rich collection of records about, and in many cases produced by, the US officials who traveled to Yan’an between 1944 and 1947. These Americans had bold personalities, and the remoteness of the American offices in China meant that they typically communicated in writing, and much of their correspondence has been preserved. Dixie Mission officials saved their own notes, diaries, photographs, and various artifacts from their time in China. One official even saved a sample of the rough toilet paper distributed at Yan’an—a mercifully unused sample—that ended up in his archival collection. The Dixie Mission officials’ careful record keeping and natural affinity for reflection on their circumstances helped bring their stories alive to me.

You ultimately arrive at the argument that it was the inadequacy, or hubris, of US intelligence that shaped the Dixie Mission. Why did you find it important to reject anti-Communism as a sole explanation in favor of an exploration of American ideologies of imperialism?

From a social and cultural historian’s approach, which focuses the lens of inquiry on individual US officials implementing American strategic goals in China during World War II, the story of the Dixie Mission is a tale of the US government and military getting in its own way as it faced administrative growing pains from the expansion in intelligence functions that the war required. Interagency rivalries, duplication of efforts, and logistical complications were the order of the day when it came to US intelligence operating in remote and unfamiliar terrain like China. US officials in China in the 1940s were anti-Communist, but their feelings about this ideology was 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. Lacking clear norms and facing evolving administrative procedures, individual US officials shaped their actions based on their own perceptions that the United States had an obligation to support a Chinese state that many of them viewed as backward. Using intelligence collected in collaboration with Chinese leaders to win the war against Japan outweighed ideological concerns about China’s domestic political scene through 1945.

How do you see your book shaping the broader field of US intelligence history in China?

I hope that Mission to Mao brings the case of the Dixie Mission and its intelligence activities into the broader history of US-China relations in the twentieth century. Similarly, examples of US intelligence actions in China have been peripheral to the broader field of US intelligence history for far too long. With Sino-American relations on the minds of many readers and scholars right now, intelligence history is a largely untapped approach for illuminating how this important bilateral relationship has developed.