Daniel Asen, "Was Frank Yee a Secret Agent?"

Daniel Asen discusses some of the findings of a biographical study of Frank Yee (Yu Xiuhao), an influential Chinese police educator who was trained in the United States under the famed Berkeley police reformer August Vollmer. While Yee is known primarily for the role that he played in reforming Chinese policing during the 1930s and 1940s, less well understood is his connection to the intelligence organization of Nationalist China's notorious "Spymaster" Dai Li. In this talk, I examine the ties that Yee had to Dai Li and the role that Yee played in the training efforts and operations of Dai's organization. Examples that will be discussed include Yee's involvement with the wartime Sino-American Cooperative Organization, which carried out intelligence-gathering and training efforts against the Japanese military in China, and his alleged role in the assassination of CCP hero Li Zhaolin in 1946. A study of Yee's career reveals the process…