
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 7, 1993                   TAG: 9311070027
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: D-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

CIA SAID CHINA WOULD TAKE TAIWAN

For more than four decades, Taiwan has managed to survive, prosper and preserve its autonomy under the shadow of one of the world's largest military forces, China's People's Liberation Army.

Ironically, it turns out the United States wrote off the island's chances as hopeless 43 years ago.

According to files recently released by the CIA, American intelligence officials concluded March 20, 1950, that Mao Tse-tung's new Communist regime in Beijing would succeed in conquering Taiwan within less than a year.

"Considering these weaknesses of the Nationalist position on Taiwan and the military potentiality of the Chinese Communists, the latter are estimated to possess the capability for carrying out their frequently expressed intention of seizing Taiwan during 1950, and will probably do so during the period of June-December," the CIA informed the Truman administration.

"An invasion could be expected to precipitate a quick collapse."

The CIA's prediction underscores the fact that Taiwan's current autonomous status is the legacy of the Korean War.

(Today, China continues to claim the island is part of its territory, while the Nationalist government in Taipei maintained for years to be the legitimate government for all of China.)

Within a week after fighting broke out on the Korean Peninsula on June 25, 1950, President Truman moved the U.S. Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits, effectively blocking any Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and, at the same time, blocking the Nationalists from trying to provoke a renewed civil war with the Communists.

Meanwhile, China soon dispatched its troops as volunteers to fight Americans in Korea. And by the time the Korean armistice was signed three years later, American foreign policy had changed; the United States had decided to support and defend Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government.

The CIA's forecast of Taiwan's collapse was contained in documents made public a few weeks ago by the agency's new Historical Review Program, in which the agency is slowly beginning to make public a few of its forecasts and estimates from the 1950s. Scholars say the CIA's forecast of the fall of Taiwan bolsters what was already known about the period.

by CNB