The Realist; As a spy and diplomat, James Lilley was always the China hand.(China Hands)(Book Review)

Byline: Andrew Nagorski

Born in 1928 in Tsingtao, China, where his father worked for Standard Oil, James Lilley has returned repeatedly to the Middle Kingdom, discovering traces of his family's past even as he charted his own path as a CIA officer and later as a top-ranking U.S. diplomat. "China Hands" (417 pages. Public Affairs ), the memoir that he wrote with his son Jeffrey, skillfully weaves together the personal and the political, leaving no doubt of the impact the two had on each other.

Lilley is still haunted by the memory of his talented older brother, Frank, who, as the dedication reads, "died young and pure so that we could carry on." Frank committed suicide in 1946 while on assignment for the U.S. Army in a devastated Japan, and after serving as a military instructor for the Chinese nationalists during their vicious civil war with Mao's communists. He was a pacifist and idealist at heart, who had plunged into a fatal depression. As a result, his younger brother concluded it was better to eschew "romanticism and excessive emotion," and pursued a steadfastly pragmatic career in public service.

In the early days of the cold war, the newly created CIA recruited heavily through its old boys' network at Yale. Lilley got the pitch from a professor who described intelligence work as "a growth industry." In his first postings in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he worked on covert operations against China, almost all of which failed. Agents parachuting into China promptly disappeared, and Lilley concedes that the CIA was swindled by overseas Chinese who claimed to have reliable informants on the mainland. In reality, ...