News-Info-Alerts

Re: CILHI Team Set For China Mission

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 14, 2002

"CILHI teams set for MIA mission in China

By Wayne Specht, Stars and StripesPacific edition, Saturday, July 13, 2002


An eight-person investigation team from Hawaii’s Central Investigation Laboratory prepared for Monday’s trip to China seeking the remains of two Cold War-era aviators as if it were a major expedition.

This week, the Chinese government announced they will allow the team access to rugged northeastern China, where they’ll attempt to locate the burial sites of two U.S. pilots who died 50 years ago when their unmarked plane crashed during a CIA spy mission.

The decision represented a breakthrough in U.S. efforts to win Beijing’s cooperation in accounting for Americans lost during the 1950-53 Korean War, Pentagon officials said.

“This is the first time the Chinese government has allowed U.S. teams to search for remains of our soldiers from the Cold War-era,” said Army Staff Sgt. Sebastian Harris, a CILHI spokesman in Hawaii.

The CILHI investigative team consists of an anthropologist, several mortuary-affairs specialists, a quartermaster, medical personnel and a photographer, Harris said. They are scheduled to leave Hawaii on Monday for mountainous Jilin province, where the two pilots crashed on Nov. 29, 1952.

Pilots Robert C. Snoddy of Eugene, Ore., and Norman A. Schwartz of Louisville, Ky., were attempting to pick up an anti-communist Chinese agent when their C-47 “Gooney Bird” aircraft was shot down.

They were killed in the crash, but two CIA officers on board, 25-year-old John Downey and Richard Fecteau, then 22, were captured alive and imprisoned in China for two decades. Harris said investigative team members prepared for the rugged terrain they expect to face by undergoing high-altitude mountaineer training on Hawaii.

Harris added this is not a CILHI investigation team’s first trip to China. Others have traveled to China in past years searching for aviators from World War II and the Vietnam era.

Snoddy and Schwartz were pilots for Civil Air Transport, a CIA proprietary airline that supported clandestine missions in the Far East. They were considered contract employees rather than CIA staff officers, but in December 1998, their names were added to the Book of Honor at CIA headquarters. That marked the government’s first public acknowledgment of the men’s agency connection.

Recovery of the pilots’ bodies, believed to have been buried at the crash site, would close one of the few remaining Cold War missing-in-action cases involving China but not directly related to the Vietnam or Korean conflicts.

Harris said the investigation team’s trip, expected to last three to four weeks, is exploratory.

“They’re doing the initial groundbreaking work, and if they determine there are remains to be recovered, a 14-person search and recovery team would be mobilized on a later trip,” he said.

The chairwoman of a national organization keeping alive the memories of Americans who fell in battle calls the mission a promising one.

“What we’re all hopeful of is that a successful result from this mission will prompt more cooperation from the People’s Republic of China in other areas,” said Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.

— The Associated Press contributed to this story.

© 2002 Stars and Stripes"