Re: The Col. Arnold story

["Diana Boothe" <philsbarbie1@arkansasfamilies.net>]

And, I have to know, just out of curiosity, lol, if Bob Burns is the same
Bob Burns from NW Arkansas............??? I've seen postcards that advertise
"The Home of Bob Burns", but didn't know why "Bob Burns" home would be on a
postcard. Did ANY of that make sense?? lol
 Sorry, if this is TOO off-topic! :o)

Take care,

Diana

philsbarbie1@arkansasfamilies.net

Arkansas Families: http://www.arkansasfamilies.net/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ed Evanhoe" <ed_evanhoe@korean-war.com>
To: <korean-war-l@UKANS.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2003 11:55 AM
Subject: The Col. Arnold story


List has been kinda quiet recently so thought I'd post this 1998 news story
by AP writer (and friend) Bob Burns.

There is lot more to this, and some other POW accounts than meets the eye.

Ed
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------


Air Force Unit Kept Secrecy
By ROBERT BURNS
  Associated Press Writer

    On an autumn afternoon in 1952, John K. Arnold Jr. was walking to
American military headquarters in Tokyo with two undercover CIA officers
when one offered a jarring word of warning.  "You're a marked man now,"
he said.  People who moved in CIA circles did not go unnoticed by enemy
agents, but Arnold felt no threat. He was not a spy. He was an obscure
Air Force colonel, commander of an even more obscure flying unit tucked
away among sugarcane fields in the Philippines.  Why would the
communists bother with him?

    He learned why just a few weeks later -- from behind bars in a
Chinese prison.

    China had discovered that the newly created Central Intelligence
Agency and the Air Force were collaborating on a new Cold War weapon --
an "unconventional warfare" group whose connection to the CIA was so
sensitive that it remains an official U.S. government secret to this day.
Arnold commanded one arm of this clandestine group, making him an inviting
catch.

    It was minutes before midnight on Jan. 12, 1953, when Arnold and 13
of his men in a B-29 bomber -- its belly painted black to match the
night sky -- were shot down over China's border with North Korea. They
made headlines around the world when Washington eventually negotiated
their release. But the story behind their ordeal -- the hidden CIA
connection --
is only now emerging from behind a veil of official secrecy.

    To his captors' surprise, Arnold knew few details of the CIA link. He
knew enough, though, that the Chinese were convinced they had cracked an
American espionage operation. And he knew enough to make his 2 1/2 years
in prison a living hell of interrogations, torment, deprivation, abuse and
humiliation.

    It remains unclear how much China knew about Arnold and his unit before
he
  was captured and convicted of spying ("plotting to undermine the state"
was
the exact charge), but evidence reviewed by The Associated Press suggests
the Chinese knew enough to lay an ambush.

    That, in turn, implies a breach of security that compromised one of the
CIA's earliest Cold War collaborations with the Air Force. Best known of
such
partnerships was the U-2 spy plane program, whose CIA link was exposed when
Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960.

    Newly declassified government records support Washington's original
claim
that Arnold's plane was dropping propaganda leaflets over North Korea when
it was attacked, not spying as China insisted. But the papers reveal China
was right on a more telling point: Arnold's group was part of a far-reaching
CIA assault on communism, and China was a target.

    Born in February 1951 and christened with the innocuous-sounding name
Air
Resupply and Communications Service, the group supported the CIA with
specialized aircraft and crews that included air commandos trained in
sabotage, demolition, hand-to-hand combat and other guerrilla warfare skills
at a secret CIA facility at Fort Benning, Ga., called Training Center One.
They helped the CIA in clandestine operations designed to subvert communism
in its grand contest with capitalism -- and not only in the Far East, where
ideological conflict was playing
out in war on the Korean Peninsula.

    The Air Resupply and Communications Service's acronym, ARC, was fitting.
Three ARC subgroups, known as wings, formed an arc around America's main
foes -- the Soviet bloc and China -- with bases in England, Libya and the
Philippines. A fourth base in Alaska was planned but never opened.  The idea
was to combat, not just contain, communism in ways short of "hot war."

    Thus, the ARC wings operated on two levels -- a publicly admitted
assignment
  of psychological warfare such as leaflet dropping, and a secret mission to
conduct "unconventional warfare" in support of the CIA.  That included
delivering CIA-supplied weapons for storage in parts of Europe for
resistance groups to be activated in the event of Soviet invasion. Fear of
Soviet attack at the time can hardly be overstated.
The acknowledged part of the ARC's work served as a convenient cover for the
secret part.

    "It was felt to be important that the real purpose of these units not be
made public," says a declassified Air Force history. It was for this reason
the name Air Resupply and Communications was chosen --"a name which has
since served to confuse all" not privy to its real mission.

    Each of the three ARC wings had about 1,000 men and an extraordinary
complement of aircraft. Besides B-29s outfitted for air-dropping agents and
communicating with them behind enemy lines, they had amphibious SA-16
"Albatross" planes for covert landings on land and at sea, C-119 "Flying
Boxcar" transports and C-118 transports -- with their national markings and
serial numbers erased -- for use by CIA -supplied crews.  The ARC's men were
sworn to secrecy, and some still won't talk.

    "I'm not interested in divulging anything more about this," said John W.
Thompson II of Hampton, Va., who was a "scanner," or lookout, aboard the
Arnold plane.

    Eugene Vaadi of Sarasota, Fla., pilot in command of the B-29, says the
accepted rule was "you don't mention this, even in your sleep."

    Vaadi, who has the rare distinction of being shot down and imprisoned in
two wars (he was downed over Germany during World War II and initially
declared killed in action), recalls being asked to acknowledge in writing
before deploying to the Far East in the summer of 1952 that in the event of
capture by the communists, "we wouldn't be recognized by our government."
And they weren't, publicly, until China provoked a U.S. response by
announcing 22 months after their capture that Arnold and his crew had been
convicted and sentenced to prison terms of up to 10 years.
Washington called the spying charges "utterly false" and the prison
sentences "a most flagrant violation of justice."

    With the Cold War long over, some ARC veterans are now willing to reveal
glimpses of their "special operations" -- risky, dark-of-night flights
behind the Iron Curtain to pick up defectors and infiltrate spies, for
example, and covert air support for French forces in Indochina before the
American public knew the extent of U.S.
involvement in an anti-communist struggle for Vietnam.

    Norman Runge of Bear, Del., who flew C-119s and SA-16s from an ARC base
in Libya, said he ferried supplies to secret U-2 bases in Turkey and
Pakistan in the mid-1950s. At the time, the cover story for the CIA's U-2
spying was high-altitude "weather research."

    McElvin "Mac" Swah of White's Creek, Tenn., was among ARC pilots who
flew
  C-119 transports to Vietnam in 1953-54 in support of French forces against
the communist and nationalist Viet Minh. The planes first were spirited
through a
hangar at Clark Air Base in the Philippines to replace their U.S. Air Force
markings with French national insignias.
The ARC also trained CIA-hired civilian pilots for C-119 missions into
Vietnam in support of French forces  in the decisive final months of the
French-Indochinese war, according to George Pittman of Palm Bay, Fla., a
former ARC squadron commander who conducted the training.
    Details of actual ARC operations are hard to find. ARC veterans say
their units did not always make written records. If they exist, the
government
has kept them under wraps.   "It was a matter of keeping it secret from the
enemy, and in doing so we kept it secret from everybody," said Edward
Joseph, of Arlington, Va.,  a retired Air Force colonel who commanded a
super-secret squadron of the
580th ARC wing that trained guerrillas in the Libyan desert and dropped
CIA-supplied weapons into the Balkans in the 1950s.

    There is little doubt the CIA masterminded the ARC. A top secret 1953
Pentagon report said Air Force "unconventional warfare" operations,
including such covert activities as guerrilla warfare and "subversion
against hostile states," gave "maximum support to the Central Intelligence
Agency."

    The partially declassified Pentagon report says that in peacetime,
"targets" of unconventional warfare were designated by the CIA. "During
wartime, target groups will be the USSR satellite countries and friendly
countries overrun by the enemy," it said.

    Michael Haas, a retired Air Force colonel who wrote a
government-sanctioned report last year on the history of Air Force special
operations, cited a document that said the ARC program originated with a
1949 request by "an agency outside the Department of Defense." His review of
Air Force records, including some still secret,
left no doubt which agency made that request.  "It could only have been the
CIA, and it was," he said in an interview.

    The CIA apparently believed its hand was well-hidden. It maintained only
a small number of contacts or operatives in the three ARC wings. One was
James Darby, who in World War II had served in a clandestine unit, "the
Carpetbaggers," which air droppedagents in Nazi-occupied France for the
Office of Strategic Services,
forerunner to the CIA.

    Darby, now retired in Vero Beach, Fla., was director of operations for
the 58lst ARC Wing at Clark Air Base in the Philippines at the time Arnold
commanded the unit. He said CIA money helped finance some 581st operations.
A CIA officer he recalled only by the name "Hall" would accompany Darby
regularly to the unit's finance office to make cash deliveries.  "There were
just a few of us who knew," Darby says.

    Arnold says he only recently learned of the extent of CIA involvement
from former colleagues in the 581st, including Harry M. Benjamin Jr., whom
the Air Force listed as a B-29 gunner but who revealed to Arnold before his
death in March 1998 that he was one of the unit's CIA contacts.

    "I had known that some had associations with the CIA, but I didn't know
which ones they were -- and I didn't want to know," Arnold said in an
interview at his home in Tallahassee, Fla. By shielding himself from such
details, Arnold believed he was staying "clean" to fly some ARC missions and
take the risk -- slight though he believed it to be -- of falling into enemy
hands.   It was a fateful judgment that cost him
dearly. But it was based on a principle he holds dear: Don't ask others to
take risks you won't.

    Arnold was born and reared in Washington, D.C., son of a government
bureaucrat. He has a modest manner, a dry wit and a remarkably sharp memory
of events now four decades old. At 84 years old, he is not eager to discuss
the past. You see pain in his haunted eyes as he recalls his years in
captivity -- "visiting the Chinese for such a long period of time," as he
put it in his understated way.

    A West Point graduate, class of '36, Arnold was trained in meteorology
and spent the decade of the 1940s -- including the World War II years -- in
the unglamorous Air Weather Service. He yearned for a chance to command a
fighting unit. So while the 581st did not promise actual combat, he saw it
as a step in the right direction.

    After training for a year at desolate Mountain Home Air Force Base in
southern Idaho, the 581st with Arnold in command quietly deployed to the
Philippines in July 1952.  Shortly afterward a second wing, the 580th,
headed to Wheelus Air Base in Libya; it was responsible for operations
in the Middle East and the southern flank of the Soviet Union. Third to
deploy was the 582nd, to RAF Molesworth in England; it was responsible
for much of Europe, including the Soviet satellite states of the Baltics
and Eastern Europe.  The 581st's area of responsibility was the communist
areas of Asia, including the Russian Far East.

    In a coerced statement to his captors, put on public exhibit in Beijing
on
Dec. 7, 1954, Arnold described his unit's mission:    "The main functions
  of the wing, in time of war or at such other times as may be directed by
higher headquarters, are to introduce special agents and guerrilla units
into communist countries and communist-held areas; to supply by air delivery
these personnel
and the guerrilla units originally operating there, and to keep in contact
with them
by radio for CIA. It operates under the cover of psychological warfare."
    Arnold and others from his captured crew say they had trained for such
covert missions against China and the Soviet Union but had not yet conducted
any by
the time they were shot down.

    Raindrops spattered the tarmac at Yokota Air Base outside Tokyo at dusk
on
Jan. 12, 1953, as Arnold and 13 other men in Air Force flight suits climbed
aboard a refitted B-29 bomber, tail number 44-62217, callsign "Stardust
Four-Zero."

    The mission plan on that Monday night called for Arnold's crew to spend
28 minutes over six leaflet-drop targets in North Korea, then slip out of
Korean airspace and return to Yokota. Arnold intended to fly back the next
morning to the Philippines, where his wife , May, awaited him.

    As it happened, the crew dropped Korean- and Chinese-language leaflets
on
each of their first five targets and were at 22,000 feet approaching the
sixth at Cholsan, just south of the Yalu River dividing China from North
Korea, when searchlights from the ground suddenly lit up the big bomber.

    With no fighter escort and only a pair of .50-caliber tail guns for
defense, the
plane was easy pickings for MiG-15 fighters positioned --by design or
coincidence -- for the kill.

    At 11:16 p.m., the plane made its last radio transmission: "Mayday."
With the engines aflame, Arnold rushed to the rear to grab his parachute .
There he spotted the tail gunner, shot and apparently dead. The others
managed to bail out as the plane plummeted to the frozen earth.

    By daylight, at least 11 of the men had been captured by Chinese troops
and taken to the river city of Andung, China, where the main Soviet military
force in the Korean War -- the 64th Air Defense Corps -- was based. After
brief questioning at Andung, they were taken north by train to Mukden, where
they spent 16 days in prison. Next stop, Beijing-- known then as Peking --
where they remained behind bars until their release at a Hong Kong rail stop
on Aug. 4, 1955.

    An Air Force intelligence officer, Delk Simpson, who was stationed in
Hong Kong, was the first to greet the released men. Close behind,
Simpson said in an interview, were CIA officials. A few days later, in
Japan, the men would be interviewed by an Air Force team that included
CIA psychologist John Gittinger; Arnold later was debriefed at CIA
headquarters.    In a cruel twist, Wallace Brown, the pilot on Arnold's
plane, said the debriefings upon their return felt more like an
inquisition. "We were considered potential saboteurs," Brown said, for
having been so long under the thumb of communists.    For China, the
Arnold crew offered a propaganda bonanza. They could be used not only to
expose sensitive U.S. secrets but also to humiliate the hated CIA.

    An added bonus for the Chinese: An officer aboard the downed plane,
Maj. William Baumer of Milton, Pa., was operations chief for the 91st
Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron -- not an ARC unit. He had flown
previous secret missions to monitor military sites in China and Russia.
Baumer refused to be interviewed for this story.

    Moscow saw opportunity, too. A secret KGB message dated 17 days after
Arnold went down and addressed to the highest levels of Soviet security
in Moscow said the Chinese asked for help in organizing the crew's
interrogations. The Soviet military intelligence adviser in Beijing was
"ordered by  us to render such help," the note said. Another message
four days later informed the Soviet air chief in Moscow that he was
receiving the English text of Arnold's interrogation and other materials.
"We managed to take these items from our Chinese comrades," the note said.

    As a colonel and wing commander, Arnold was a rare prize for his
captors.
But to exploit this opportunity, the Chinese needed confessions , and that
meant torture.

    Although he and his fellow prisoners were sometimes physically abused
by guards, Arnold says the Chinese pressure was mainly psychological.
Most effective was solitary confinement. He was isolated for nearly all
his 31 months in prison, awakened at odd hours to undergo questioning
and made to stand rigidly for dozens of hours on tightly bound feet. He
was fed only minimally and, for a time, held in manacles that slowly
forced both shoulder joints out of their sockets. In the early weeks of
his confinement, guards aimed cocked pistols at him during interrogations.

    "They threatened me with every kind of torture," he told debriefers
just days after his release.

    Often he was in handcuffs that were so tight they cut off his blood
circulation. "One of the things they did was come up behind me and press
my fingers," in the motion of milking a cow, Arnold said. "I can't
describe the pain."  The abuse became too much. "I was in a state that I
would classify as a complete nervous breakdown," he told the debriefers.

    In a classified assessment of the Arnold crew's conduct in captivity,
the Air Force concluded that they endured "more brutality, tricks and
contrivances" than was encountered by any Americans held prisoner during
the three-year Korean War. The secret Air Force report praised the men's
"courage and staunchness of resistance" but none ever was given an
official commendation. Some were kept on active duty. Some left. Arnold
was assigned to Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., but he never was given
another command.   "Arnold was an early casualty of this business," says
Darby, the former 581st operations chief.

    Even President Eisenhower offered little more than "all good wishes"
in reply to a private letter Arnold wrote one year after his return from
China in which he thanked the president for gaining his crew's release.
In drafting the reply for Eisenhower, an aide cautioned that "laudatory
remarks" would not be appropriate, given Arnold's "previous actions."
Arnold is not bitter, but he and his men paid a steep price as secret
warriors in the Cold War.

    The fate of three crew members -- 1st Lt. Henry D. Weese of San
Bernardino, Calif., 1st Lt. Paul E. Van Voorhis of Ozone Park, N.Y., and
Airman 2nd Class Alvin D. Hart Jr., of Saginaw, Mich., -- has never been
determined. China claimed they died in the shootdown, although it never
returned their bodies. Arnold believes Hart died on board.

    One surviving crew member, Steve Kiba, told the AP he saw Van Voorhis
several times in prison months later. Arnold said he believes Weese and
Van Voorhis, the plane's radar operators, were given to the Russians. In
a letter to Van Voorhis' parents after Arnold and the others returned to
the United States, the Air Force said of Van Voorhis, "Although he was
observed to bail out of the aircraft, ... he was never seen or heard from
again."

    It may never be known just when Beijing caught wind of the ARC secret
. George Pittman, a retired Air Force colonel who served with Arnold in the
581st, recalls that when the wing moved -- supposedly in total secrecy --
from its Idaho training base to Clark Air Base in the Philippines in July
1952, Chinese and Russian periodicals that the wing's intelligence officers
had been receiving turned up at Clark
before the men had even arrived.

    "That tells you they knew what was going on," Pittman says.

    How they knew is unclear. Joseph, the 580th squadron commander, said
the CIA concluded in its assessment of the damage done by the defections
of British spies Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess in May 1951 that they
had passed ARC secrets to Moscow. The two Britons apparently had
received this information from Harold "Kim" Philby, Britain's top
intelligence
officer in Washington, who later defected to the Soviet Union.

    The Air Force began to dismantle the ARC program in September 1953.
Three years later, it was gone -- or, perhaps, quietly transformed under
new
cover in a new stage of the Cold War.



Ed Evanhoe, PO Box 916, Antlers, OK, 74523