CHINA HANDS

A diplomat’s memoirs recount a lifetime’s experiences in China and adjacent lands.

Born in 1928 in Tsingtao, the son of a Standard Oil executive, Lilley had to be repatriated so that he and his China-born siblings could be “Americanized.” By his account, they lived in something of a bubble in China, safe in European compounds, tended to by amahs and houseboys; Lilley clearly feels some nostalgia for that comfortable time, and indeed for the prewar era in general. (Against all current convention, though unapologetically, he insists on rendering Beijing as “Peking,” which lends his words a musty feel.) On returning to the US for college, Lilley was recruited into intelligence work and served in Asia for many years in the CIA, involved in operations in places such as Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War era. Relocated to CIA headquarters, he recalls, he soon found himself missing the field (“I couldn’t help feeling as if the CIA bureaucrats in Langley didn’t know what was going on in the field. And now I was one of those bureaucrats”), but he was rescued when Henry Kissinger started wheels turning “toward projecting a fresh U.S. relationship with China,” in Lilley’s bureaucratic phrase. Though closely identified with the CIA—and known to government officials on all sides as such—Lilley managed to make the jump to the State Department, and eventually to serve as ambassador to South Korea from 1986 to 1989 and ambassador to China from 1989 to 1991. Though on the ground for the Tiananmen Square massacre, Lilley sheds more light on doings back in Washington, which included thwarting Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s ambitions to align the US with Communist China at the expense of Taiwan, even to the extent of “considering the sale of sophisticated arms” to the Communist government.

Overall, though, Lilley doesn’t provide much news, leaving this primarily for US-Asia completists.