Chapter 145 SACO

After World War II, Saco's American veterans—the "tigers" of the "Rice Field Navy"—prouded Chinese guerrilla instructors, and they traveled to Taiwan as guests of the Nationalist Military Intelligence to commemorate their "rear The Duke and the Everlasting Captain" Milton Mellors' intimate relationship with "Big Boss Dai Li".Most people seem to be ignorant of the institution's murky history, which was repeatedly brought up in propaganda by progressive journalists during the Pacific War and during the Korean War.Just as General MacArthur was portrayed as a foreign devil in Chinese cartoons in the 1950s, the local training site of SACO was described as an American invasion of China, where people raped Chinese women and slaughtered China's best and brightest The savage animal of enlightened progressives.

A few miles northeast of Hu County, near Xi'an, is the SACO training course, co-hosted by China's "Himmler" Dai Li and the Americans.Since 1945, patriots captured in Xi'an have been brought here blindfolded or in big sacks.Peasants well remembered the tearing cries of tortured patriots.The place has always been guarded with heavy guns.No one dares to approach it.After the county was liberated, it was discovered that all the prisoners had been brutally killed by Kuomintang agents and left piles of bones. The most notorious site was Geleshan, where the Communist Party later built a museum containing a pit of 94 corpses in shackles made in Springfield, Massachusetts.

According to Geleshan tour guides, Melles sat next to Dai Li on the bench during the "trials" of progressives at Geleshan—judgments sometimes based on coerced confessions by Americans who Use polygraphs on prisoners under interrogation, or inject pentathol into blood vessels to make prisoners lose control and tell the truth.This mansion with 20 houses is said to have belonged to Bai Juyi, a poet of the Tang Dynasty.The main interrogation center is located in a series of caves behind the Bai mansion (which is said to contain a sink). According to one of the sixteen survivors of the SACO concentration camp, the Bai mansion is a palace of hell, where unfortunate prisoners live. Li "withstood seven of the forty-eight criminal laws".

In 1943, the Sino-American Cooperation Institute was established, and the Bai Mansion was changed into the third guest house of the Sino-American Cooperation Institute. It was necessary to find a new location to detain the "prisoners" in the Bai Mansion.Shen Zui, director of the General Affairs Department of the Military Command, personally drove a jeep to look around, and finally chose Zhazidong. "Zhazidong" was originally a small coal kiln, so it got its name because there is more slag and less coal.Later, the military commander killed the mine owner and occupied the coal mine. Since 1938, it has been transformed into a secret prison by the Kuomintang secret service, which is specially used to detain and persecute revolutionaries. Many heroic and tragic stories happened here.Zhazidong is divided into inner and outer courts. The inner court has 16 men's prisons on the first floor and the ground floor, and two bungalows for women's prisons. The outer court is the secret service office and torture room.On the eve of liberation, Kuomintang agents set fire to Zhazidong, only forty-five imprisoned revolutionaries escaped, and the rest died unfortunately.

In December 1947, Zhazidong, which had been closed for more than half a year, was re-closed as the second detention center of Chongqing Xingyuan No. 2.The sources of detainees mainly include the "key criminals" arrested in the "June 1st" mass arrest in 1947, the persons arrested in the "Jianjinbao" case and the "Little Civil Revolution" case.The number of insurgents arrested after the failed armed uprising in eastern Sichuan and Xiachuan reached more than 300 at most.Jiang Zhuyun, Xu Jianye, Yu Zusheng and other martyrs were imprisoned here.In order to mentally disintegrate the fighting spirit of the revolutionaries, the spies deliberately wrote on the wall of the inner courtyard of Zhazidong, "Youth is gone forever, think carefully, recognize the time and place, and don't be obsessed.", "The maze is boundless." , turn back and be shore", the slogan of "peace and patience, no complaints and no worries".The outer courtyard is the secret service office and the torture room.On the wall of the outer courtyard, there is a slogan instructing the secret agents, "What the officer cannot see, think, hear, or do, we must see, think, hear, and do for the officer."

Dai Li's handwriting was written on the lintel of Zhazidong: "Your youth will pass and never return. Think about your situation, how much time you have left." In reply, the prisoners wrote on the walls of their cells: As the People's Liberation Army's Second Field Army approached Chongqing, advancing at a speed that no KMT commander had expected, guards at Geleshan Prison were ordered to shoot all the prisoners.Prior to this, there had been continuous shootings in the Bai mansion: the prisoners were taken downstairs and were machine-gunned. On the night of November 27, 1949, prisoners were taken downstairs to their cells as guards burned SACO documents in the courtyard.According to one of the survivors:

Although formally defunct by that time, Sino-American cooperation was perpetuated by Communist stories of the final massacre at Geleshan. On November 27, 1949, the eve of the arrival of the People's Liberation Army, SACO trained and armed police officers shot and killed the prisoners in two prisons, and then burned their bodies along with the files of the SACO.As Shanghai newspapers put it during the anti-American upsurge during the Korean War: "The headquarters of the fascist secret service organization Sino-American Cooperation, jointly led by the US Navy's Melles and China's 'Himmler' Dai Li, is based on an American-invented Known for torture and massacres."

SACO's training program also set a precedent for similar covert espionage activities later funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).After all, the way the CIA operates is to train secret police all over the world, especially in Latin America in the sixties.At least some echoes of the police training programs run by the Agency for International Development and the School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone resonate with the experience of the US wartime SACO Paddy Navy in China.