Fires of the Dragon

Henry Liu: journalist, U.S. citizen, father of three, spy. Murdered in October 1984 in the privacy of his California home by agents of an important American ally. Who, exactly, was Henry Liu, and why was he killed? Fires of the Dragon takes as its starting point the death of Henry Liu, but it is more than one man's story. Liu's life - and death - is the window through which renowned investigative reporter David E. Kaplan unveils, for the first time ever, a dramatic and disturbing tale of international intrigue. Since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when Mao Tse-tung's Communist forces swept to victory and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) fled to the island of Taiwan, the Communists and the KMT have waged a brutal battle for control of the world's most populous people. As Kaplan reveals, this war has been exported to more than a dozen countries - and nowhere has this struggle proved more intense than in the United States. In this remarkable expose, Kaplan unmasks forty years of espionage and dirty tricks directed against America by its Taiwanese ally. Among the book's many revelations are how KMT spies infiltrated the State Department and FBI, sabotaged the nation's foreign policy, and recruited the Mafia to steal America's nuclear bombs. While U.S. officials turned a blind eye, Taiwan's agents wreaked havoc in America, terrorizing its Chinese students and emigres and making a mockery of the U.S. Constitution. Henry Liu's life provides a compelling framework for the telling of this story. Born in a small Chinese village, Liu endured firsthand the devastation of the civil war. At seventeen, his father murdered and his family stripped of all its possessions, he joined the KMTArmy in its humiliating flight to Taiwan. After eighteen years in exile, disillusioned with the KMT, he moved to the United States to create a new life. But like millions of other Overseas Chinese, Liu remained torn between his loyalties to China, Taiwan, and his new home abroad. This division was to prove fatal, for as his fame as a Chinese author and journalist spread, Liu was drawn into the world of espionage, ultimately becoming tied to spy agencies from each of his three homelands. To unearth Liu's story, David Kaplan launched an extraordinary three-year investigation that took him from village elders in rural China and crime bosses in Taipei to the CIA's top China hands in Washington. Moving easily from the search for Liu's murderers into the larger, more troubling drama at work, Kaplan draws in the historical forces that made Liu's murder inevitable. With its masterful blending of plot, personalities, and probing questions, Fires of the Dragon is a mesmerizing and incisive work of historical discovery. More than a groundbreaking history of U.S. - China relations, it is a timely parable for the end of the Cold War, a story of how nations react when enemies become friends - and friends become enemies.