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Fires Of The Dragon: Politics, Murder, And The Kuomintang

David E. Kaplan
Reviewed by By Donald S. Zagoria
Winter 1992/93
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David E. Kaplan
Atheneum
1992
589 pp.
$25.00

This is a riveting and well-researched account of the journalist and spy, Henry Liu, a former member of the ruling party of Taiwan, the Kuomintang, who was allegedly murdered by a KMT operative in Daly City, California, a suburb of San Francisco. Liu had written an unflattering biography of former KMT boss Chiang Ching-kuo. The author alleges that the murder of Liu was only one part of the KMT's remarkable intervention in the United States, from the feeding of forged documents to McCarthy era witch-hunters to continued spying and theft of high-tech weaponry.

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