With a head of grey hair and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, the casually dressed Chen Fu-men looks like a grandfather next door. But in intelligence circles on the two rival sides of the Taiwan Strait, he is a well-known figure.

Chen’s involvement in the killing of a Taiwanese-American author 35 years ago shocked the United States, which angrily demanded that the self-ruled island hand over Chen and two others to the American justice system. The assassination also became one of the triggers for democratisation on the self-ruled island, which had been under authoritarian rule by Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo since 1949.

The author, Henry Liu, 51, a Taiwanese journalist who moved to the United States in 1967 and later became an American citizen, had published an unflattering biography of Chiang Ching-kuo and was an outspoken critic of Taiwan’s ruling party. Powerful officials in Taipei also believed that he was spying for the mainland.

In 1984, vice-admiral Wang Hsi-ling, the head of the island’s Military Intelligence Bureau, ordered his deputy Hu Yi-min and his top aide Chen to kill Liu, according to Chen.

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Chen asked the leader of Taiwan’s notorious Bamboo Union gang, Chen Chi-li, to eliminate the journalist. In October, he and two other gangsters gunned down Liu in the garage of his northern California home.

The murder rocked the US, and its relations with Taiwan dropped to their lowest point after a furious State Department accused Taipei of sending killers to assassinate an American citizen. The FBI was involved in the search for suspects, and through a tapped phone traced a conversation between Wang and Chen Chi-li. Taiwanese authorities later arrested the gang leader and his aide.

Threatening to cut off arms sales to Taiwan, Washington demanded that Chiang Ching-kuo’s government extradite the suspects to face trial in the US. The Chiang government finally allowed the FBI to question the three intelligence officials in Taiwan.

In early 1985, the three officials and the two killers were given jail terms in Taiwan. Wang, the gang leader and his aide were sentenced to life, and the two officials got six-month terms for their roles in the killing. Wang and the two gangsters were released six years later, while Chen Fu-min and Hu Yi-min were freed in late 1987.

The bureau officials’ collaboration with gangsters proved an embarrassment to Chiang, and his government grew concerned that the US might reappraise its policy of helping defend Taiwan. Though Washington had switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979, it also enacted the Taiwan Relations Act to supply arms to Taiwan in its defence against Beijing. Beijing has threatened to use force to bring the island back into the fold since Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist, or Kuomintang (KMT), forces retreated to Taiwan after losing a civil war to the Chinese Communists in 1949.

“I was just doing my job,” said Chen, 79, a former deputy director of the Military Intelligence Bureau unit responsible for gathering intelligence about China since 1949 and keeping track of Taiwanese activities in the US.

In an interview with the South China Morning Post, he said they decided to “bring justice” to Liu because they had solid evidence that he was spying for Beijing while also receiving monetary rewards from the bureau.

“It had nothing to do with the book critical of Chiang,” he said, adding when the FBI sent its agents to Taiwan to question them separately, he realised Liu also was an FBI informant. He said at the time that what Liu did was considered an act of treason by the bureau, which had a long-time practice of executing people considered to be traitors without needing the permission of top authorities.

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