Wei Daming was born in 1907 in Shanghai. In 1921 he entered Shanghai Telegraph School to study radiotelegraphy. During the Northern Expedition (1925–28), when Chiang Kai-shek led the Nationalist Revolutionary Army to fight with regional warlords in an attempt to unify China, Wei joined Chiang and started to create modern China’s first cryptographic network for the nascent Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang, or KMT) regime. In March 1933, Wei became a key member of the Military Intelligence Bureau under the leadership of Dai Li, Chiang Kai-shek’s spymaster. For the following four decades, Wei headed the cryptographic technical field of the Nationalist Chinese secret service, where he was a leading figure in modern China’s (and post-1949 Taiwan’s) signal intelligence, cypher cryptology, and code-breaking technology. In the early 1960s, Chiang Kai-shek’s son and political heir apparent Chiang Ching-kuo undertook to reform the cryptographic section of Taiwan’s secret service. Chiang and Wei seriously disagreed with each other over the future direction of signal intelligence. In August 1965, Wei was thrown into jail, allegedly for corruption. Wei was deeply convinced he was purged by Chiang Ching-kuo for his uncooperative manner. After being released in 1970, Wei devoted his time to writing his autobiography. He died in Taiwan in 1998.
The personal papers of Wei Daming include a lengthy manuscript about Wei’s decades-long career in the Nationalist Chinese secret service, as well as other published materials related to the Wei family. They reveal astonishing inside stories about the KMT’s intelligence war with the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Union in the 1940s and the 1950s, Taiwan’s cooperation with the United States, Japan, Britain and West Germany on secret intelligence, and the uneasy buildup, reform, and reorganization of Nationalist Chinese (and post-1949 Taiwan’s) signal intelligence establishment.
intelligence, decrypted by Wei Daming’s team during the civil war (1946–49).
