Nearly a decade after the Sino-Soviet split, Victor Louis, a Russian correspondent for the London Evening News who reputedly had KGB connections, visited Taiwan for ten days. In meetings with Nationalist officials, principally Defense Minister Chiang Ching-kuo, he proffered Soviet cooperation for a joint attack on mainland China. Louis's visit in October 1968 and his subsequent contacts with Taiwan have been widely reported upon and analyzed by scholars, but until very recently certain key details had never been revealed.
What were the terms of cooperation under consideration by Russia and Taiwan? To what extent was Chiang Kai-shek, president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, personally involved in this episode? And perhaps most important, why did Chiang ultimately decline to exercise the Russia option in his long struggle with the Chinese Communists?
Many of the answers lie in portions of Chiang Kai-shek's diaries, housed at the Hoover Institution, that were released in July 2009. These volumes, which cover Chiang's final collection of entries (1956–72), provide for the first time detailed information on this highly intriguing Cold War engagement.
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