Chapter 158 Dai Li's defense measures

However, losing control of the Anti-Smuggling Agency to the administration did not defeat Dai Li's entire functioning.That alone speaks for itself: He quickly made sure his trump card -- military necessity -- trumped Kong's reliance on the Ministry of Finance's wartime surveillance of smuggling. In July 1943, General Dai placed the tax police office directly under the Military Commission and renamed it the "Special Action Team". Its 11 columns were scattered in various theaters of the Kuomintang-controlled area, and were ordered to monitor all ground transportation. Second, Dai Li brought the transportation and communications departments of the Kuomintang army under a unified command, responsible for ground patrols, regional monitoring stations, post and telecommunications, and even aircraft communications.In the same month, the Inspection Bureau of the Transportation Control Bureau of the Military Commission was changed to the Unified Inspection Division of Water and Land Transportation of the Military Commission, and Dai Li's subordinate Ji Zhangjian was appointed as the head of the division.Later, in 1945, the scope of the traffic inspection department was expanded to communications and aviation (formerly the business of the third department of Dai Lijun), and it was put under the leadership of the post and aviation inspection department, with Liu Fan as the director.

Finally, another way for Dai Li to resist the eager attempts of Kong Xiangxi and the administration officials to take over the anti-smuggling supervision is to expand the Sino-US cooperation organization within the Ministry of Finance. During 1944, Huang Ronghua was the director of the Transportation Division of the Wartime Freight Transportation Bureau of the Ministry of Finance.Huang Ronghua, who has lived in the United States for many years, is also the head of the Transportation Department of the Sino-US Cooperation Institute.He was in charge of managing about 1,000 trucks operating throughout South China, delivering weapons to the frontline guerrillas and bringing back supplies procured from puppet companies in the occupied areas.

By 1944-1945, the loading of these vehicles was completely under the control of Dai Li, who actually held the title of Director of the Freight Transport Bureau of the Ministry of Finance.This is as Melles explains: It can be seen from this that the American leaders of SACO directly knew and even appreciated Dai Li's smuggling kingdom. When Japan surrendered, this kingdom had already been established on the basis of the pre-war drug trade and the supply and transportation resources of the United States during the war.It made huge profits for a while, but the social factors nourished by these profits either promoted the upper-level corruption of the Kuomintang authorities, or promoted the equally harmful high-handed politics of secret agents, which undermined the government's legitimacy on the eve of the civil war.Years later, historians were quick to see a connection between smuggling and secret agents, not least because of the link between the CIA and the illegal drug trade in the Vietnam War.But the forces that formed this intersection in Southeast Asia existed long before American covert forces supported Li Mi's Kuomintang 93rd Division's opium trade in the Golden Triangle.During the height of SACO's anti-Japanese guerrilla warfare, with Dai Li's support, these relationships intertwined for the first time in China.