By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI — Almost 40 years ago, a young American missionary couple, Milo and Judith Thornberry, were eyewitnesses to history and played an important role in Taiwan’s march towards democracy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the two Americans met democracy activist Peng Ming-min and played a key role in his secret escape to Sweden during Taiwan’s martial laws days. Three years ago, Thornberry sat down at his home in Oregon to write down his memories and what a tale he does weave.
Thornberry and his wife, a fellow Methodist missionary, were deported from Taiwan in March 5, 1971, accused of being ”terrorists” and worse. A front page article in the Washington Post by Selig S. Harrison
broke the story in America, followed by the New York Times. Harrison, then the East Asia bureau bhief
for the Post, had tried to see Thornberry in Taiwan the day he and his wife were put under house arrest and came face to face with the reality of martial law.
“When Selig approached our house — which was surrounded by jeeps, motorcycles, and agents — the military police told him that we weren’t at home,” Thornberry recalls. “We heard him, we shouted to him to get his attention, and then he got roughed up trying to get closer. My sense was — then and now — that when you do that to a bureau chief of a major U.S. newspaper the story is likely to get on page one. We are not sure what the authorities plans were once they arrested us, but his breaking the story in the Washington Post made the authorities move to get us out of the country. They sent us to Hong Kong.”
Thornberry and his wife, acting as a team, became convinced at some point that the secret police in Taiwan were going to arrange an “accident” to kill a Taiwanese friend of theirs, the democracy activist Peng Ming-min, and the couple decided that they would
become part of a team to help Peng get out Taiwan before the worst might happen.
How did they do it? “We had read a story in Time magazine about the way East Germans were being smuggled out to the West,” he says. “Someone from the West crossed into East Germany, gave their passport to the person to come out, and after the person was out,
they reported to their embassy that their passport had been stolen. In short, that is what we did in Taiwan. Peng flew out of the country on Saturday night — January 3, 1971 — and the next day he was safe in Sweden.”
Thornberry says today that Peng’s getaway was so successful that when U.S. President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai met in Beijing in 1973 and wanted toknow how Peng got out, neither of their intelligence systems could say. Even Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek went to his grave without knowing that a group of non-government novices managed to get Peng out of the country undetected.
“I am reasonably sure that the authorities in Taiwan, China, and the U.S. never knew what role my wife or I played in all this. I’ll tell you
why: First, in a declassified verbatim account of the meeting between Nixon, Chou En-lai, and Henry Kissinger, Chou clearly suspects that the U.S. government got Peng out. Nixon and Kissinger protest that they had no idea how he got out, a claim that is consistent with declassified State Department correspondence about our arrest. They had a lot of items on their list of real or imagined offenses, but Peng’s escape was not among them. The account of the interrogation and torture of our colleague Hsieh Tsung-min at the same time as our arrest indicates that while the authorities suspected Hsieh of being involved in the escape, they never linked me or my wife to the escape. He wasn’t. He and Wei T’ing-chao had not been out of prison long when we got Peng out. We knew they would be suspected and so never involved them in the escape at all. His torturers did their best to get him to link us to crimes they suspected we might have committed, but Peng’s escape was not one of them. None of the list of unofficially-released charges against us by the R.O.C. when we were arrested a year later ever mentioned a connection with Peng’s escape.”
Thornberry lives in Oregon today, far from the bustling democratic nation of Taiwan, with its colorful population of 23 million people. But he remembers his time there as if it happened yesterday.
“We got involved, and here’s how: A Presbyterian missionary in Taiwan had known Peng before his arrest in 1964 [for publishing the
”Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation”] and dared to visit his family while he was in prison. In 1966, soon after we had arrived, this Canadian missionary feared that Taiwan wouldn’t allow him back into the country when he went back to Canada that summer. For reasons best known to him, he decided to introduce us to Peng. We went to dinner at Peng’s home while he was still under informal house arrest. We didn’t know about this informal house arrest when we went. When we left the house, we had our first
direct experience with the police state. A police jeep tailed our taxi until we got to the crowded movie district in Taipei and
quickly got our of the cab and walked out of view.”
What Thornberry and his wife did in Taiwan in the late 1960s and early 1970s wasn’t always legal and they risked going to jail if caught. They developed and distributed an educational packet for foreigners to learn more about Taiwan under martial law, and under martial
law, such activities were a capital crime, as was their risky actions smuggling money into the country to give to families of political prisoners. And, of course, helping Peng escape to Sweden was also a capital crime.
Finally, the law caught up with them, When police showed up at their door on March 3, 1971, they became the first missionaries arrested since the Chinese Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek took over the island in 1945. Although the party leaked a panoply of charges to explain the arrest and deportation, Thornberry says that Peng’s escape and their other activities were not among them. Instead, officials in Taiwan reported them as terrorists. The line in Beijing was that they were CIA agents.
“The list of charges unofficially released later to the press and to the U.S. State Department included terrorism, importing explosives, bombing the USIS in Taiwan in 1970 and bombing the Bank of America in Taipei in February 1971, plotting to overthrow the government, and others,” he recalls. “We weren’t terrorists. We didn’t import explosives. We didn’t bomb the USIS or Bank of
America. And while we wished for it, we didn’t plot to overthrow the government. U.S. State Department communiqués make it clear that while the ROC made these charges, the ROC refused to show any proof to the US.
Deported to Hong Kong, with his photo on the front page of a Hong Kong tabloid, Thornberry was safe but not at ease.
“Once out of Taiwan, I knew that two of my best Taiwanese friends were in prison in Taiwan and were suffering torture of all kinds. One was able to get a letter out about what was happening to him, and we were able to get it published as an op-ed piece in the New York Times in April 1972. Peng was in exile. I learned that whenever one of my former Taiwanese students at one of the seminaries
I taught at there came to the US to study, they were interviewed about me by the FBI. They wanted to know if I was a ‘bomb thrower.’ I was a liability to my Taiwanese friends and I reluctantly cut off nearly all contact with them. Knowing what my friends in
Taiwan had to endure while I was simply sent out of the country was and is the hardest thing. I did not write my memoir of those days earlier in my life because I didn’t want those friends to get hurt again. Even after the end of martial law, I didn’t know what would happen in Taiwan.”
The heroic role Thornberry and his wife played in Peng’s escape in 1970 was not revealed until 2003 when the couple, now divoced and remarried, were invited back to a democratic Taiwan where they were honored for their human rights activities. But how did this information finally come out, when even the the CIA and the intelligence agencies of the ROC and China did not know?
“The Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, created earlier in 2003, sponsored a week-long event in 2009 that included several days of panel presentations and a trip around the island nation. We discussed Peng’s escape on one of the panels. But was only in 2009 that Peng and I uncovered the true reason for my arrest 38 years earlier.”
So what was it? Thornberry says the entire story is in his memoir. He recently told this reporter in an email: “The true reason for our
arrest will surpriseeveryone in Taiwan and overseas — as it did Peng and me. My book tells all.”
I couldn’t pry it out of him. I guess I’ll have to read the book.
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Dan Bloom is a freelance writer in Taiwan.