Unity Among Allies

Last week the United Nations General Assembly condemned Communist China for its illegal detention of U.S. military airmen. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, asked to make "continuing and unremitting efforts" to bring about the Americans' release, promptly cabled Red China's Premier Chou En-lai requesting a meeting in Peking. The U.N. vote was impressive in itself (47 to 5, with seven abstentions), but even more so was the vigorous manner in which the U.S. and her allies, after long months of scarcely muffled dissonance, acted in concert. The censure tune's most spirited notes were, in fact, sounded by the representative of Great Britain, which had previously ignored many Red Chinese crimes in its determination to admit the Peking regime to the U.N.

In the course of the U.N. debate, the Chinese Reds announced that they were holding four more American military airmen, in addition to the eleven already listed as convicted on espionage charges. The four, named by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., were Lieut. Lyle W. Cameron, 25, of Lincoln, Neb., shot down while on an armed reconnaissance flight over North Korea, and Lieut. Colonel Edwin Heller, 36, of Wynnewood, Pa., Captain Harold E. Fischer. 29, of Swea City, Iowa, and Lieut. Roland W. Parks, 25, of Omaha, all downed while on combat missions over North Korea. The General Assembly resolution last week called for action on all 15 uniformed men (but it did not cover two U.S. civilians also captured by the Chinese and sentenced on spying charges).

South of the Yalu. The heart of the U.S. case, as presented by Ambassador Lodge, rested on an explicit clause of the Korean armistice agreement, which required the return to their homelands of all prisoners of war who desired repatriation. There was no doubt in the Communists' mind about the meaning of this. On Aug. 31, 1953 their representatives on the Military Armistice Commission said: "Our side has repeatedly stated that our side will repatriate before the conclusion of the repatriations operation all captured personnel of your side who insist on repatriation, including those prisoners of war who have committed crimes before or after their capture."

Lodge displayed a radar map showing that the 6-29 carrying eleven of the imprisoned flyers had been attacked by twelve enemy fighters near the North Korean town of Sonchon, some 15 miles south of the Yalu. Said Lodge: "We do not know where it dropped, but we do know where it was attacked."

But, added Lodge, the "place where the plane or crew members came down is irrelevant. The repatriation provisions of the armistice agreement make no distinction at all on the basis of the place of capture . . . Even if the trumped-up charges against our airmen were true, which they are not, and even if our men were guilty of crimes, which they are not, they would still be covered by the armistice agreement provisions calling for the release of prisoners of war."

The Well-Dressed Spy. Russia's Jacob Malik, successor in the U.N. to the late Andrei Vishinsky, presented the Communist side of the dispute. Malik did his best to keep alive the fiction that the Peking government took no part in the Korean war, that the Red Chinese troops who fought in Korea were volunteers. Even so, he offered no factual evidence that the air space over "neutral" China had been violated. His sole proof of the U.S. flyers' guilt: some of them had "confessed."

Malik admitted, however, that the elev en 6-29 airmen had all been in uniform when captured. Western delegates ridiculed the idea that any spy would be sent to China attired in full U.S. military regalia. Asked the United Kingdom's Anthony Nutting: "Is this the sort of suiting in which he would best hope to slip unobtrusively into a Chinese military headquarters and there steal the latest military movement orders?" Jacob Malik tried to retract his admission; he had, he said, been misquoted by his interpreter. Cabot Lodge stomped on that excuse. Malik, he said (and he had a recording to prove it), had used the words v forme voyenno-sluzhashchikh. Their meaning: ". . . in the uniform of military personnel."

"A Miserable Product." It was, however, Britain's Nutting who used the harshest words against the Communists. What, he asked, about the Red claim that the Americans had confessed? "As Mr.

Malik well knows," said Nutting, "that is the remarkable and sinister feature of Communist trials; the prisoner always confesses; the verdict is always 'guilty.' No doubt this is more efficient. No doubt it is easier to invent the facts than to ascertain them. No doubt it is less embarrassing to have a prisoner confess his guilt than to have him plead and prove his innocence. But is it justice?" Of Malik's ideas on American spies in Air Force uniforms, Nutting said: "Such thoughts could only issue from a mind confused and haunted by spy mania. I say, therefore, that if anything were needed to prove to the civilized world the innocence of these eleven airmen, it is the tortuous confusion and the glib and hollow absurdity of the case brought forward by the Soviet Union ... It must be obvious that all fair-minded men can see this case for what it is: a miserable product of absurdity and hypocrisy."

Despite the decisive condemnation vote, there were indications that the Chinese Communists had partly succeeded in one aim: that of distracting Jawaharlal Nehru's attention from Communist subversion in India by crying "Spy" at the U.S. Among the seven abstaining nations in the U.N. vote was India, and Prime Minister Nehru was muttering something about "besides the legal question, there is the question of fact."

Against this small victory the Reds chalked up an enormous loss. Moscow and Peking work closely together, and in the light of recent dissension among the Western allies they could have expected Peking's move on the U.S. prisoners to widen the rift. An obvious part of this strategy was the Red Chinese announcement--on the same day that the U.S. airmen were convicted--that they would release a Canadian flyer also captured during the Korean war (see THE HEMISPHERE). The Communists figured that Washington would scream with indignation; Britain and France would interpret this as a further evidence of rash American bellicosity and back away, thus weakening the chances of a European agreement on German rearmament.

But events did not follow the Red script. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles stressed patience and restraint in dealing with the prisoner issue. Britain took the strongly indignant line. The U.N. acted more decisively than it had on any issue since the beginning of the Korean war.

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