Amleto Vespa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amleto Vespa (10 April 1884 – between 1941 and 1944)[1][2] was an Italian mercenary and secret agent of Italian origin, who worked in Manchuria from 1922 to 1940, first for a local warlord, and then for the Empire of Japan. A self-proclaimed fascist and an admirer of Benito Mussolini, Vespa had no admiration for the Japanese administration of Manchukuo, which he described with considerable venom in a book published in 1938.
Vespa was born in the town of L'Aquila, Abruzzo, as the youngest of five children of Alessandro Vespa, a civil servant and Ginevra Concetta de Chellis, a teacher.[1][2] Little is known of his early life, aside from what he subsequently wrote in his autobiography, in which he claims to have been born in 1888 to a poor farmer's family, left the Italian countryside in 1910 to fight in the Mexican Revolution against Emiliano Zapata, had been involved in various political intrigues in Eastern Europe and to have married a Polish countess. He also claimed to have traveled extensively in the United States, Australia, French Indochina and in Mongolia. His Italian military service record however shows that he was born in L'Aquila in 1884 and there are no traces in the Mexican archives of an Italian in the front line alongside Madero.[1][2] Letters to his brother indicate that he left Italy in 1908 for San Francisco and in 1911 traveled to Vladivostok, where he joined the Allied Expeditionary Forces intelligence services.[1][2]
He met his wife Jeannine (Nina for short) in Vladivostok, where she and her mother, as Russian aristocrats, had fled after the 1917 revolution.[1]
Vespa and his wife moved across the Chinese border to Harbin in 1920, and worked for Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin until Zhang's assassination in 1928. The Italian consulate in Tianjin had arrest and deportation orders issued for Vespa, who was accused of smuggling weapons and dealing in drugs on behalf of Zhang. To avoid arrest and deportation, he managed to obtain Chinese citizenship in 1924.
After the Manchurian Incident of 1931, Vespa fled Harbin just ahead of the Kempeitai secret police. His family was captured and eventually freed after Vespa agreed to work for the new Japanese rulers of Manchuria under the name "Commander Feng".
