Old Hands, Beware!

Colonel Dave Barrett, now a U.S. military attache in Formosa, is an old China hand known for his plump amiability and his fluency in Mandarin. In 20 years of service in China, he saw the warlords fade, the Japs come & go, the Nationalists driven before the Communists. None of these great events startled easygoing Dave Barrett more than a shrill accusation by Radio Peking last week. Colonel Barrett, said Red China's government, is the ringleader of an "American imperialist" plot to murder Chairman Mao Tse-tung and other high Chinese comrades.

The plot, said Peking, was hatched almost a year ago. On Oct. 1, Red China's National Day, when Mao and all other Red bigwigs would be standing on a reviewing stand before Peking's Heavenly Peace Gate, the plotters had intended to blow them all to kingdom come with a trench mortar. Eight men were accused and quickly convicted: Antonio Riva, wealthy, high-living Italian trader who once boasted he could do business under any kind of Chinese regime, and Ruichi Yamaguchi, a scholarly Japanese bookseller--death; Italian Bishop Tarcisio Martina, 64, longtime head of the Roman Catholic diocese of Yihsien in Hopei province--life imprisonment; four foreign-born old China hands and one Chinese businessman--prison terms ranging from five to ten years.

The executions of Riva and Yamaguchi were carried out immediately after the "plot" was announced. Reported Radio Peking: as the condemned were led to their death, "the streets they passed through were thronged with people who expressed their feelings .. . with shouts of 'Down with imperialism! Suppress counterrevolutionaries! Long live Chairman Mao!'"

Washington called Peking's story "a bare-faced lie." Dave Barrett spoke up from Formosa: "I never at any time . . . attempted to assassinate or contrive the assassination of anyone." The real moral of the story is as plain as Mao meant it to be: outsiders are no longer safe in Red China. Riva and Yamaguchi are the first foreigners to be sentenced to death as counterrevolutionaries, while Bishop Martina is the first Catholic clergyman to be sentenced to life in prison. He is fairly big game, as acting representative in Peking for Archbishop Antonio Riberi, papal internuncio for China, who is under house arrest in Nanking.

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