来源：清谈天地 www.talkskyland.com
１９５２年拍，ＲＢ－２９轰炸机执行任务起飞之前的机组人员照片。
１９５５年，在中国监狱里面。
机组人员名字：
ARNOLD, Jr., John K. COL USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
BAUMER, William E. MAJ USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
BENJAMIN, JR., Harry M. A2C USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
BROWN, Howard W. TSGT USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
BROWN, Wallace L. 1LT USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
BUCK, John W. CAPT USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
HART, JR., Alvin D. A1C USAF KIA
KIBA, Steve E. A1C USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
LLEWELLYN, Elmer F. CAPT USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
SCHMIDT, Daniel C. A1C USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
THOMPSON, III, John W. A2C USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
VAADI, Eugene J. CAPT USAF RMC RMC from China 1955
VAN VOORHIS, Paul E. 1LT USAF MIA
WEESE, Henry D. 1LT USAF KIA
下面是有关报道：
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.
Keywords: Stardust Four Zero, Col. Arnold Major Baumer RB-29 January 12, 1953 Wally Brown。
附：莎莉的老爸阿诺德
宁娜
刚参加工作不久的一天，小老板莎莉讲家里有张写有中文的纸条，想拿来让我翻译一下，我说好的。第二天莎莉把一张质地粗劣的纸条递到我手里。我展开一瞧，乐得差点儿一屁股坐地上。上面写的是：我X你家十八代祖宗！我好容易倒顺了气，翻给莎莉听，她也放声大笑。“这是哪里来的？” 莎莉于是讲了纸条的来历。
莎莉的老爸叫约翰•阿诺德（JOHN ARNOLD），人们称他“杰克”。他在朝鲜战争中的军衔是空军上校，也是战争中被俘的军衔最高的美空军军官。1953年1月12日，杰克上了一架B-29轰炸机去北朝鲜执行任务。据他说任务不是轰炸，而是“撒传单”。飞机在鸭绿江附近遭到几架米格飞机的攻击，冒着烟栽下来了。除了三名机组人员死亡外，其余11人均跳伞后被俘。杰克在冰天雪地里安全着陆，冻得半死后让一个朝鲜妇女抓获，然后被带到那女人的家，一起送去的还有两个一块儿跳伞的同僚。屋里很冷，那女人和几个村民生了火，又往火里扔了块铁板。眼看铁板越烧越红，杰克吓得浑身发抖，以为要给他们上烙刑。不是。人家那是用来烙玉米的。朝鲜人把生玉米放在铁板上滚，三滚两滚就滚得喷香。杰克们每人吃了一个玉米后被送交中国志愿军。据称他们在朝鲜境内只呆了四天。杰克的家人当晚就得知飞机被击落，但不知其死活。他的名字被列在失踪名单上。直到1954年11月的一天，莎莉12岁的哥哥在邮箱里拿到一封信，杰克写的，他还活着，关在沈阳的战俘营里。杰克因“间谍罪”被判刑10年，进了北京一家著名的监狱。莎莉“秦、秦、秦”了半天叫不上名儿，我乱猜是秦城监狱吧，纸条的故事就发生在那儿。
美国鬼子阿诺德在牢里表现很差劲。我们宽待俘虏，给人高马大的他熬了大米粥当早饭。杰克没喝过粥，不认得此物；楞说是喂猪的，不是人吃的，还绝食抗议受了虐待！监狱管理人员气坏了。一个站岗的战士指着杰克的美国大鼻子破口大骂，杰克听不懂，就用英文回骂，双方吵得不可开交。有人把翻译请来，杰克撕下一条纸，让那战士把骂他的话写下来。那位也不含糊，敢作敢当，写就写！翻译没有翻纸条上的内容，这句写有超级国骂的纸条被杰克留下来作了纪念。
经联合国外交斡旋，阿诺德先生于1955年8月4日获释。那天他才知道战争已于1953年7月27日结束。他们11人在香港见到了美方人员。据杰克的战友讲，那天天很热，有人递上可口可乐，杰克们激动得热泪盈眶--又喝到家乡的水啦！那年莎莉六岁，抱着洋娃娃看见一个头快顶到门框的人走进家门。她告诉我，若不是被俘，老爸已升将军。那一年阿诺德的名字常出现在报刊电台的头版头条，他的故事被评为当年第11大新闻，出够了风头。回国时英雄般一路受到热烈欢迎。
虽然在中国呆的时间不长，阿诺德先生好象思想改造得不错。五十年代美国的小学课本里写共产主义是魔鬼，莎莉拿给她老爸看，老爸却说，这些人根本不懂共产主义，胡说八道。共产主义是一种美好的生活理想。如果我呆在1949年的中国，也会和大多数中国人一样，选择跟毛奔共产主义。
不过莎莉讲，说她老爸是间谍他不服气。那天肚皮涂成黑色、趁着夜晚单飞的B-29任务倒底是什么？杰克也不是完全清楚。中方几乎肯定飞机是搞间谍活动的而且已将阴谋粉碎；美方则死不认账。杰克一直怀疑他们当中有人与CIA有关连，但不知具体是何人。1998年三月，同机被捕的炮手哈里临死前向杰克坦白，他就是当年同CIA的联系人。杰克从此变得沉默，很少谈及往事。
1997年莎莉的母亲去世后，杰克的精神垮了。之后，他就呆在养老院里，脑子一时清醒一时胡涂。那养老院有几幢粉红色的小楼，从外面瞧着很高级。昂贵的费用是从军队给杰克的养老金里支付的。杰克对几个儿子都不感冒，只喜欢女儿莎莉；说她是个服从命令听指挥的乖宝贝。一有事就打电话向她“发号施令”。莎莉的丈夫不幸长得象当年杰克手下的一个常出错的机械师，杰克糊涂时一见到女婿就板脸训斥，让他“代人受过”；气得他不愿见老丈人。有一天，老杰克在电视里看到一种飞机很眼熟，兴奋得要命，命令护士立刻给空军基地打电话，要求去打仗；死劝不听，大吵大闹。最后还是莎莉赶去，冲他喊口令，警告他不听话就关禁闭，这才老实安静下来。
莎莉老爸的葬礼在2002年年初。我是被邀请参加的惟一中国人。阿诺德先生安祥地躺在雕刻精美的棺木中，身上覆盖着美国国旗，周围是鲜花。他的军中好友老远赶来主持追悼会。从悼词里得知，阿诺德毕业于美国西点军校，退役后创立了阿拉巴马空军基地的民航总部。62年由华盛顿DC迁来本市。他在州立大学当过教授、学生教务长、学生事务副主席，还在州移民劳工部、社区服务部当过头儿。坐在我旁边的大老板那会儿恰是州立大学的在校生。据她回忆，那时杰克整天站得笔直，端着肩膀一脸军威。说他的眼睛特别厉害，被“盯”一下没人吃得消。我马上想起捷尔任斯基用来盯叛徒的眼睛。一次，全校最捣乱的学生被叫去三楼的教务长办公室训话，还没上到二楼,腿就软得爬不动了。追悼会上，杰克的往日趣事被生前好友和亲属们一件件抖出来，引起一阵阵笑声。没有眼泪，没有悲伤。我感慨，这样的追悼会真是对杰克八十八年多彩人生的坦诚总结。
那张纸条一直由莎莉保存着，她说要为老爸写本书。
