When then-President John F. Kennedy heard Congress had ratified legislation that would allow thousands of immigrants on the run from Communist China into the U.S., he said he saw it as a "great humanitarian endeavor." The CIA saw something else entirely: an "exceptional opportunity" to learn about one of the hardest intelligence targets in the world -- but an opportunity for which they were not prepared.
A now declassified 1964 report from the CIA's internal journal called "Windfall From Hong Kong" describes how the agency raced to track down and interview hundreds of refugees who had settled throughout the United States via then-British controlled Hong Kong. The refugees weren't expected to know details of the Communist Party's inner workings or anything so sensitive, but the intelligence community's dearth of information about the most basic information on China at the time meant that just about anything would help fill in a black spot on the intelligence map.
"There is often no substitute for being able to talk to a person who has lived and worked inside a country which can otherwise be approached only through external methods..." says the study, written by Charles Turgeon, then a junior officer who went on to serve in the agency for 30 years. "At a minimum, a refugee can normally contribute a substantial amount of basic intelligence in the economic, political, geographic, and even scientific fields."
The first problem, however, was finding the refugees.
Unlike previous refugee resettlements from areas of Cold War interest like Hungary or Cuba, when refugees came in through a single port of entry and could be screened in mass for intelligence potential, the Chinese refugees came in from all directions and settled throughout the country, though mostly in Chinese communities in San Francisco or New York.
So the CIA turned to federal immigration services. At the time the Immigration and Naturalization Service by procedure would send very basic information to CIA headquarters about every refugee. The CIA office "charged with domestic collection" would get one of its field office personnel to visit immigration services to look at additional information on anyone with potential intelligence value. If it seemed promising, the CIA would get permission to approach the refugee from the FBI, which had the priority if they had their own investigation open on the refugee for any reason.
Then the second problem: How to get the refugee to talk.
The CIA report lists several challenges here, from language barriers, to the subject's fear of deportation, to the refugees’ immigration state-side sponsors not allowing the CIA to talk to them in the first place. There was also the matter of whether to tell the refugee that it was the CIA that had come calling.
"To the Chinese in general, intelligence is a dirty word, and for those who have lived under the police state it is doubly bad," Turgeon writes.
On this point, the report suggested the approaching officer describe himself or herself as "a government research worker seeking generalized, encyclopedic information on the conditions in China."
As of the CIA report's publication, Turgeon writes that the intelligence gathered in the first year of debriefing 170 refugees -- creating 397 intelligence reports -- was "good." But it also reveals just how in the dark the CIA seems to have been at the time about life in China.
"[The reports] contain new data on such varied subjects as the state of medical treatment, the cost of basic commodities, the political climate, the numbers and kinds of newspapers published, the production of electrical power, biographies of important officials, security procedures employed by border guards, town plans, travel regulations, construction projects, farming practices, dental care, research in medicine, physics, and biochemistry, and many others," the study says.
But, Turgeon writes, the CIA was still overwhelmed with the task. The 170 refugees interviewed amounted to only 6 percent of the 3,133 adults "available" -- nearly 900 of which were determined to have "good potential." The agency simply didn't have enough hands.
"The sudden introduction of several thousand new potential contacts into the case-load of the field offices has been too much for their existing staffs... The field officers must not only find time to see the refugees but also arrange for interpreters; and here the manpower shortage is even more critical," the study says. "At the New York office, for example, only two part-time interpreters were available for the 1,961 Chinese refugees in its area."
The study notes that the CIA was attempting to adapt to the problem, potentially by leaning on military interpreters to fill that gap. Turgeon envisioned a more sophisticated screening and control operation that would potentially make contact with sources in Hong Kong to better control travel of likely high-value sources. But he acknowledged such an ambitious program wasn't possible at the time.
Then, he said, there was an unforeseen realization: Sometimes the refugees' sponsors turn out to be better sources than the actual refugees. Many are more established and successful immigrants from China who maintain contacts on the mainland and are more likely to cooperate with the U.S. government.
Either way, the CIA study ended on an optimistic note about the help refugees could provide as the U.S., the Soviet Union and China sunk deeper into the Cold War.
"Thus the Chinese refugee program promises to continue as a unique and productive means of extracting information from a country which is both the most bellicose Communist power at present time and perhaps the most difficult intelligence target," it says.