Blackmail Scheme

From the U.N. command to Red headquarters in North Korea last week went a curt note and a list of 3,404 names. They were the names of U.N. soldiers who disappeared in action and did not come back in the mass exchange of P.W.s.

Though some were certainly dead, the U.N. had solid evidence that many of the men had been Red prisoners at one time. Among 944 Americans on the list: Air Force Captain James A. Van Fleet Jr., West Pointer son of the former Eighth Army commander; Jet Ace Captain Harold E. Fischer, who bagged most of his ten enemy planes by disdaining the prized radar gunsight, relying instead on naked eyesight and "Kentucky windage."

Peking radio promptly dismissed the list as a "fake." But three days later, U.N. suspicions were confirmed. Australian-born Wilfred Burchett, correspondent for the French Communist paper, L'Humanite, wandered into Panmunjon to chat with U.N. correspondents. Communist Burchett, whom many U.S. newsmen remembered as a competent reporter for Australian Associated Press during the Pacific war, had previously acted as a news "leak" for the Communists. This time, he carefully let slip the fact that the Chinese were still holding an unspecified number of U.S. airmen who had allegedly been shot down over Chinese territory beyond the Yalu. Since Communist China did not officially take part in the Korean war, explained Burchett suavely, the Chinese did not regard these men as prisoners of war and would continue to hold them until their release was negotiated "through diplomatic channels." The implication was clear: the airmen were to be used in a scheme to blackmail the U.S. into diplomatic recognition of Red China and concessions at the Korean peace talks.

The scheme posed a painful problem. The U.N. had no way of knowing how many of the 3,404 men really were alive and in Red hands. It could not submit to blackmail, but neither could it callously write off the missing men. Said the senior U.N. armistice commissioner, Major General Blackshear Bryan: "The Communists have got to give us an accounting of them--or else." But nobody in the U.N. command seemed to know what the "or else" could possibly be.

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