News-Info-Alerts

Re: 50 Years Later

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 11, 2002

"50 years later, remains of pilot are closer to recovery

By Andrew Kramer
Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. — The sister of a Cold War-era spy pilot is a step closer to burying the remains of Robert C. Snoddy, who vanished 50 years ago in a covert mission over northeastern China.

Ruth Boss, 78, of Creswell, said her brother never told her he worked for the CIA.

“He told me, ‘Sis, I know you mean well, and I know you’re nosey as heck. But don’t ask me what I’m doing. If anything should happen, leave me be,’” she said in a phone interview.

“He was a big tease. You know how brothers are with sisters. I loved him dearly,” Boss said.

On Tuesday, China agreed to allow forensic anthropologists from the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to examine the site of the 1952 crash, the first time China has cooperated with the United States in looking for a Cold War-era soldier missing in action in that country. The news could not only bring peace of mind to the family, but close a decades-old mystery.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said China decided to permit the search based on “the position of promoting friendship between the two peoples and in a humanitarian spirit.”

Chinese authorities told the U.S. military a few years ago they had buried the badly burnt bodies of Snoddy and fellow pilot Norman A. Schwartz of Louisville, Ky., in unmarked graves near the crash.

They are among 124 soldiers the U.S. military lists as missing in action from 10 separate covert operations during the Cold War. That compares with a total of about 88,000 U.S. servicemen listed as missing in action in foreign wars since 1941, when the United States entered World War II, according to the Defense Department’s POW/MIA office in Washington.

The forensics team will visit the site July 15, although it isn’t clear if the bodies can be found or identified, said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the office.

“We owe it to the families, who waited 50 years to get answers in this case,” he said.

Snoddy grew up in Roseburg. He had a paper-route, went to Oregon State University and learned to fly airplanes in the civil air patrol in Madras. He married a girl from California when he was a Navy lieutenant during World War II, and later lived with her in Japan, where he worked as a pilot. He was 6-foot-2, skinny and had sandy hair.

And then, on Nov. 29, 1952, Snoddy’s C-47 plane crashed over Manchuria and he vanished.

Snoddy worked for Civil Air Transport, a clandestine CIA airline — wholly without his family’s knowledge.

Boss said her family was first told the plane went down in the Sea of Japan on a routine flight, and an incorrect date was given — Dec. 3. In a sad coincidence, that happened to be the wedding anniversary of Robert’s parents.

In truth, the C-47 was shot down five days earlier.

Snoddy was flying the plane. It was stripped down for the dangerous mission — flying low over snowy foothills in Manchuria to pick up a Chinese spy working for the CIA, according to Greer. The C-47 was carrying a crew of four.

Boss said CIA officials told her privately years later that the spy had double-crossed the United States.

As the plane approached, Chinese soldiers threw back white tarps camouflaging machine guns in the snow at the meeting point, and shot down the plane, Boss said she was told.

Greer said the United States does not know why the plane went down.

Snoddy and Schwartz died in the crash, he said.

The others on board, Richard Fecteau and John Downey, were captured alive and imprisoned by China. China released Fecteau on Dec. 12, 1972 and Downey on March 12, 1973, only after Washington acknowledged their spy mission.

The CIA has dedicated a star to Snoddy in the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., along with 79 other employees who have died in the line of duty. Boss attended the unveiling ceremony. The latest star belongs to Michael Span, the CIA agent killed in Afghanistan last fall.

Snoddy’s family learned few details of the crash and stealthy mission over the years. His mother, Myrtle, never accepted her son was dead, Boss said.

“She said, ’It can’t be. I know my son, wherever he is, he’ll be coming home. He’ll find an airplane and come,”’ Boss said.

When Myrtle died, Boss didn’t put a headstone on her grave; she said she wanted to wait and bury her brother in the same plot with his mother. “I’ll put his name on the headstone. I want to feel that I have brought him back to her,” Boss said.

Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. "