by Orr Kelly
The typical female agent carried neither weapons nor a radio. She was instructed to mingle with the enemy troops and travel as far as possible toward the front lines. Then she would permit herself to be captured by the Allies. Once in a prisoner-of-war camp, she identified herself with a special signal. She was then quickly released to make her report on what she had seen behind enemy lines.
Many of the agents were dropped after 26 October 1950, when the Chinese entered the war by marching three hundred thousand troops across the border into North Korea and sending the United Nations troops fleeing south. The rout was so rapid that the retreating Americans, who made up the bulk of the United Nations force, didn’t know where the enemy was—if they were not in deadly contact.
Aderholt got a call from Tokyo.
“They said they had lost contact with the Chinese army and the gooks, the North Koreans, and they would like to know if I had any way to find them,” Aderholt says.
“We didn’t have any radios that would work. We still had the hand-crank radios from World War II.
“I had been in World War II. Remember the invasion stripes on all the airplanes? So our own people wouldn’t shoot ’em down?
“We put layers of agents along the peninsula—thirty miles ahead, forty miles ahead. We’d parachute them at night. They had smoke grenades, yellow, green, and red. We’d fly up there every morning and every afternoon in daylight so they could see us, see the stripes on the planes.
“They’d pop their smoke to tell us where the enemy was. He hadn’t passed here. Or the Koreans had passed, or the Chinese had passed.”
With intelligence provided by this makeshift reporting method, the defenders were able to draw a rough outline of the disposition of the enemy’s forces and update it as they moved south.
Altogether, about a thousand “Rabbits,” both men and women, were parachuted behind the enemy lines between September 1950 and June 1951.
These intelligence-gathering missions were carried out for the military’s Far East Command. Aderholt’s outfit also flew many special missions for the Central Intelligence Agency, continuing the strong link the special operators had forged with the fledgling intelligence operation of the OSS during World War II—a shadow relationship that was to continue for many years in the future.
“We had lot of flights that went six hours, seven hours,” Aderholt recalls. “We’d go from Pusan [on the southern tip of South Korea] all the way up to the Choisin Reservoir up on the Yalu [River], on the Manchurian border. These were mostly for the CIA. The Far East Command was more interested in where the troops were.
“Anybody walked in and said they wanted to make a drop into China, we said, ‘When?’ They said, ‘Tonight,’ and we loaded them up took them there. We didn’t tell anybody. We just did it. And this is the only record that it ever happened.”
Aderholt’s Det 2 also operated a daily service to a guerrilla camp on Paengnyong Do, an island off the west coast of Korea just south of the present demarcation line between the two halves of the country. The pilots landed on the beach at low tide, unloaded their cargo, and took off again before the tide came in.
“I took my turn like everybody else. I flew mostly drop missions,” Aderholt says.
“We had volunteers [from the troop carrier squadron] to stay for thirty days. Some I ran off before thirty days. Some didn’t volunteer to come back. I had a few mainstays that were good.”
Why didn’t pilots volunteer to remain?
“They were scared. You take your choice of being in Tokyo or up there living in a tent and flying six-, seven-hour missions up to China at night.”
Despite the dangers of flying at night at low altitude over the rugged Korean landscape, Aderholt’s outfit lost only two airplanes during the entire operation.
When Aderholt left Korea, he went to work for the CIA. He was to surface again in Air Force uniform in the early days of the war in Southeast Asia.
Although Aderholt had served as a pilot in World War II, Korea was his first special operations war.
A few others can claim to have flown as air commandos in three wars. One of them is Lt. Col. Robert A. Madden. In World War II, he was a P-51 fighter pilot flying with the 1st Air Commando Group in the China-Burma-India theater in the final months of World War II. Recalled as a National Guard pilot in 1951, he volunteered in 1952 to join a unit in Korea flying what by then was known as the F-51. But instead, he was assigned to the 6147th Tactical Control Group and became a “Mosquito.” His job was to fly a single-engine T-6 trainer and act as a forward air controller and artillery spotter for the Army’s 25th Infantry Division.
Although there was no air commando or special operations designation in the Korean War, Madden had no doubt that his assignment in Korea fell within that category.
“I am convinced that few aviation units have flown a more vulnerable mission and few were less recognized, publicized, and remembered than the Mosquito organization,” he later wrote in an account of his experiences in that war. When he mentions his service as a Mosquito, some of his listeners tend to think of the twin-engine Mosquito light bomber flown in World War II; others assume he sprayed for insects; most just give him a puzzled look.
Madden’s service as a Mosquito ended abruptly on his twentieth mission when he stumbled on a carefully camouflaged enemy supply depot that the 25th Division had been eagerly seeking for weeks.
Flying well behind enemy lines, Madden, with Lt. Ralph Olivette, an Army officer, as spotter in the rear seat, had almost finished his day’s mission. Then, circling over a broad valley, he looked off toward the south and saw a large opening at the base of a hill.
He rolled in toward what appeared to be the entrance to a cave or tunnel so his backseater could see it and record the coordinates.
Madden knew the risk they were taking: he had to fly below fifty feet in order to see the hole, and he knew the supply center would be heavily defended.
As he dove toward the entrance to the tunnel, squeezing all the speed he could out of his engine, he rotated the control stick in a circle, jinking through a blizzard of tracer bullets, seeming to come from all directions.
“We lasted longer than I originally thought would be possible, considering the amount of fire we were drawing,” Madden recalls.
“Thinking we might be able to get out of there, I began gaining a little altitude—up to three or four hundred feet. At that point, I heard a very ugly ping—the kind of ping you hate to hear on a combat mission.… I looked to the right. The right wing had ten to fifteen holes, and fuel was pouring from three or four holes in the right fuel tank.
“On the left side, the fuel tank had not been hit, and I remember thinking that we had enough fuel in that tank to make it back to friendlier forces. Then I looked down and saw the ugliest little blue and green and orange flame that I had ever seen.
“We had taken a hit that nicked a fuel line to the fuel selector valve in the front cockpit, and apparently a spark had ignited the fuel. Yelling over the intercom that we were on fire and for Ralph to get the fire extinguisher, I stomped at the fire, but it only seemed to grow and spread.
“After what seemed to be an eternity, I called Ralph to hand me the extinguisher. He replied that he couldn’t get it out of the rack—that he couldn’t break the safety wire.
“By this time, the flames were above my knees, my clothes were on fire, and the skin on the back of my right hand had split wide open from the heat. Our cause was now hopeless, so I climbed as rapidly as I could, getting up to twelve or fifteen hundred feet. I yelled to Ralph to bail out. He did, and when I saw him leave the plane, I opened my canopy. This sucked the flames—now almost to my face—outside, which immediately caught the gas streaming from the right wing. The plane was one big fireball at this point.”
Madden and Olivette both reached the ground alive, but injured. Madden was badly burned, and Olivette broke his ankle and his nose. Both men were quickly captured. Madden later went on to fly in his thir
d war as an air commando. He put in two tours of duty in Vietnam, including service as commander of the 1st Air Commando Squadron at Pleiku.
Shortly after his capture in Korea, Madden had the unpleasant experience of being near the target of a bombing raid by what, from the sounds of their engines, he concluded were American B-26 bombers.
Ironically, another veteran air commando who had served in World War II and would go on to serve in Vietnam could have been at the controls of one of those bombers.
Richard Snyder, one of the enlisted men who flew the single-engine liaison planes during the Burma operation (see Chapter Four) remained in the Air Force after World War II and earned his wings as a commissioned pilot.
Snyder volunteered for service in Korea. He ferried a B-26 from California to Japan and then flew fifty-five missions in Korea—all at night. In Korea, he was a member of the 452d Bombardment Group. Although there weren’t any units designated as air commandos, Snyder was doing exactly what other pilots flying the same plane did later in the war in Southeast Asia.
“We were shooting up trains, trucks, anything we could see at night,” he says. “We accidentally hit a bomb dump one night. That blew sky high. When we got back to K-9 [the designation for their airfield], there was a guy from headquarters in Japan who wanted to talk to me on the phone.
“He said, ‘How did you find that dump at night? We’ve been looking for it for months.’
“I said, ‘We saw some trucks down there, and we figured, where they were last seen turning off their lights, they had to be going into something. It was a big lie. What we were doing was we were trying to hit the trucks, and the navigator missed them, and we hit the bomb dump. So when it went off, I dropped all the bombs on it.’”
After dropping his bombs, Snyder made three strafing runs on the target, and, to his surprise, there was no return fire. But on the fourth pass, they had him lined up and hit him with everything they had. They knocked off his radio antenna and hit the plane in the tail but failed to down the plane.
His navigator-bombardier asked if they had any ammunition left and told Snyder: “They won’t give us a medal if we’ve got any ammo left.”
By that time, the plane was in a steep climb, away from the target and the North Korean guns.
“I held the damn trigger down, and I fired off about a hundred rounds of .50-caliber straight up in the air,” Snyder says. “And I said, ‘Now we’re out of ammo!’ We went back home. I wasn’t about to go over that sucker one more time.”
While Aderholt, Madden, Snyder, and others were carrying on the special operations tradition in Korea, the Air Force had underway a far more ambitious worldwide effort patterned on the Carpetbaggers of World War II.
CHAPTER 13
Rebirth and Decline
In the winter of 1950–51, Colonel Bob Fish, who had commanded the Carpetbaggers a few years earlier, was teaching at the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and looking forward to a new assignment in the Strategic Air Command. When an officer from the Pentagon dropped by and asked if he would like to become involved in a new, bigger, Carpetbagger-like operation, he had no hesitation in turning down the proposal. To him, it looked like a dead-end job.
A few days later, he was called to report to the university commandant. Fish tells what happened next:
“He said the chief of staff wanted to talk to me. He rang up the Pentagon, handed me the phone.
“I said, ‘Colonel Fish.’
“The other guy said, ‘This is Vandenberg [Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, chief of staff of the Air Force]. Colonel, I understand you don’t want to work for me.’
“I gulped a couple of times, and I said, ‘General, that’s not the way I’d put it.…’
“I went to the Pentagon, and we established a little headquarters on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington.”
Fish, who had been present at the creation of the Carpetbaggers and stayed with them until the war ended, was thus in at the creation of the Air Resupply and Communications Service, or ARCS. And, as it turned out, he was there when it pretty much came apart a few years later.
What he found when he arrived in Washington was a very ambitious and very rapidly growing organization. It was designed to do what the Carpetbaggers had done during World War II, but on a much bigger and broader scale.
“There was a small group—a clique, you could call it—in the Pentagon at the time that was trying to grab off a great big mission that didn’t really belong to the Air Force,” Fish says. “They figured, if they could swing it, it would mean promotions for them and all that kind of good stuff. They really hadn’t thought the thing through very well, because what they did was they combined, under the Air Force program, all the elements of the resistance movement of World War II. That took part of the Voice of America, part of the CIA’s mission, and brought it into the Air Force.”
The plan was to create six ARCS wings, with about six thousand persons in each wing. They were to be prepared to drop propaganda and put agents in place anywhere in the world.
Although ARCS never reached its full size of six wings, it did grow into a worldwide operation with three wings stationed at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and later at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa; Molesworth and later Alconbury, England; and Wheelus Air Force Base, Libya. The wings were equipped with four-engine, propeller-driven B-29 bombers, the same type that had carried out the massive bombing campaign against Japan in World War II. They were modified by stripping out all the guns except for a “stinger” in the tail and adding a Joe hole for dropping agents. ARCS also had C-119 and C-54 cargo planes, SA-16 amphibious planes, and, later, helicopters.
The ARCS organization was established on 23 February 1951—seven months after the Korean War began—and the first wing, the 580th ARC Wing, was activated at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, two months later. In announcing the activation of the wing, the Air Force described the new unit’s mission: “These wings will have two major wartime missions. One, to prepare, reproduce, and disseminate psychological warfare materials as directed by the theater commander; and, two, the aerial resupply of military units.”
That latter phrase probably didn’t mean much to most of those who read the announcement. But for those capable of reading between the lines, it was a succinct statement of the kind of things Air Force special operators do—supporting guerrilla and resistance forces operating well behind enemy lines. But, in the context of the Cold War, it also meant operations across the borders of countries with which the United States was not at war—although not quite at peace either.
The focus was on the global confrontation with the Soviet Union. But as soon as the first ARCS wing had completed its training, it joined the hot war in Korea.
While the bulk of the wing operated out of the Philippines, one special unit was stationed in Korea. It was a helicopter unit that carried out secret operations—mostly at CIA direction—behind enemy lines. Except for the brief use of a primitive helicopter in Burma in 1944, it was the first use of helicopters by Air Force special operations—a pioneering operation that foreshadowed the way the helicopter later became one of the most important tools used by the special operators.
Robert F. Sullivan, a retired major who lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts, was one of the six ARCS helicopter pilots attached to the 58th Air Rescue Group at Seoul. He recalled his experiences in Korea in a memoir written for the ARC Light, the newsletter of the Air Resupply and Communications Association, in January 1995:
“We had a strange mission, or perhaps I should say all sorts of strange missions. Our primary mission of course was PsyWar, although to be honest I do not think any of us at the time thought of what we were doing as waging psychological warfare. We certainly were aware we were dealing with some pretty strange people, but I don’t think I personally ever equated putting spooks ashore with PsyWar as such.”
The original unit was made up of four helicopters, six pilots, one noncommissioned officer, and a doz
en enlisted men fresh out of tech school.
“We pilots arrived in Korea on 5 October 1952. We asked where the 581st [the unit to which they belonged] was, and people looked at us and said, ‘581st what? There’s no such outfit in Korea!’ Now, that’s the Fifth Air Force talking! Our new bosses. I think everyone was underwhelmed by that answer!
“We had no helicopters, no tools, no people, no housing, no supplies, no weapons, and without Third Air Rescue’s generosity, no place to even sleep or eat.”
Within a few days, the men organized themselves into something like a military unit and watched as Korean workers installed landing pads for their helicopters. But they still had no choppers.
“No one knew where the helicopters were,” Sullivan says. “Someone at Fifth Air Force remembered something about helicopters in crates over at Kisarazu [Japan] and got on the phone. There they were, four brand-new H-19As right out of the factory.
“We put our first ‘people’ ashore in North Korea on, I think, 27 December 1952. We flew off Ch’o Do [an island off the west coast of North Korea] and put these folks in well above Chinnampo on the mud flats. [Chinnampo is about seventy-five miles north of the demilitarized zone, not far from the North Korean capital of P’yongyang.] We flew north, angling slightly away from the beach until we were well off shore, then turned west and finally southeast and went back to Ch’o Do.
“This route was flown right down on the water, without benefit of radar, radar altimeters, or anything else, except for an altimeter setting at Ch’o Do and the M-1 eyeball. I personally dragged my nose gear in the water on one of the missions, causing a nose down-pitching motion, which of course caused major heart palpitations, and an extremely tight grip on the seat cushion!
“Joe Barrett and Frank Fabijan picked a Marine major named [Dave] Cleeland off the ice on the Haiju Reservoir in a big daylight shoot-out. Frank Westerman and Larry Barrett went inland and grabbed a chap named Cottrell, who was in deep, serious trouble at the time: another shootout. Don Crabb and I pulled [Air Force Capt.] Joe McConnell out of the water north of Ch’o Do after he shot down his eighth MiG and was downed in turn.”