History Class: Antonio Riva

In November 1950, an Italian was taken to the execution ground, and with the sound of a gunshot, the man fell to the ground, ending his life of sin, and he was also the first foreigner to be executed by new China. What crimes were committed? The Italian was named Antonio Riva, and because his parents were doing business in Shanghai, China, he was born in Shanghai and took the Chinese name, Lee Andong. Later, he returned to Italy to study, and after the outbreak of World War I, joined the Italian Air Force, obtained a fighter that shot down 7 enemy aircraft, and can be said to be an ace pilot. After the end of the First World War, he began the arms business, mainly with warlords in old China, but because he offended Italian arms dealers, he was arrested by the Italian government for illegally reselling arms and was also removed from the military. It was not until the 1920s, after Mussolini came to power, that he joined the Italian fascists and was wanted. He then climbed mussolini's son-in-law and became the official representative of the Italian air mission in China, responsible for selling fighter jets and training pilots to the nationalist government at the time. Because Kong Xiangxi, one of the four major families at that time, had a good personal relationship with Mussolini, plus Li Andong was able to speak the truth and bribe the top brass of the Kuomintang Air Force, at that time, the Kuomintang bought many aircraft from Italy, such as Fiat's CR-32 fighters. Italian aircraft do have their own advantages, such as good maneuverability, but there are many problems, reliability is quite poor, take the CR-32, there have been many aircraft crashes. Italian aircraft were basically useless on the Chinese anti-Japanese battlefield.

After the outbreak of the War of Resistance, Lee began to transform, focusing on intelligence — with his previous dealings with senior Kuomintang officials, he could obtain a lot of intelligence, and germany and Japan, especially Japan, were quite interested in his intelligence. In this way, a steady stream of intelligence passed through his hands and fell into the hands of Japanese devils.

In 1943, the Allies landed in Italy, the Italian government surrendered, as a die-hard fan of Mussolini, Lee Andong naturally did things for Mussolini, he even rushed into the Italian embassy with the Japanese army, and sent his compatriots to concentration camps.

In August 1945, Japan surrendered, and Lee Andong was arrested, but his status was relatively special, not a war criminal, not a traitor, and an Italian, so he was released after only one year of imprisonment.

In January 1949, after the liberation of Peiping, Li Andong began to engage in intelligence work again, because he had been operating in Beiping for many years, had many connections, and could receive a lot of important intelligence, and before he was arrested, he provided more than 500 pieces of information to the US intelligence department. That's not all, Lee even wanted to shell Tiananmen square at the National Day ceremony in 1950, when the Americans bid $500,000, so he acted with former Japanese spy Takashi Yamaguchi, who hid a Type 81 mortar and secretly measured the distance from Tiananmen square to the firing site to calculate the shooting of the yuan.

Fortunately, the public security department found a suspicious point in a letter sent by Ryuichi Yamaguchi to Japan, and after many investigations, cracked their plot, at this time, only 4 days before the National Day ceremony. At first, Lee and Tung denied it until the evidence was in front of him, and he had nothing to say, and he sat on the ground with his legs paralyzed. Two months later, he was shot. Andong Lee's ending proves a truth - many acts of injustice will kill themselves.