US Finds Wreckage And Remains In China

It was during some of the darkest days of the Korean War... an American C-47 flying for the CIA was ambushed by Chinese ground-to-air gunners while on a secret mission to pick up a Chinese spy. An American search team working in rural China has now turned up what could be remains of the flight crew, 52 years after their plane went down.

Norman A. Schwartz and Robert C. Snoddy were flying into the Manchurian foothills of China's Jilin Province on November 19th, 1952, carrying along with them CIA operatives John Downey and Richard Fecteau. When their plane went down, Snoddy and Schwartz were killed. Fecteau and Downey were captured and held prisoner by the Chinese for more than two decades.

Family members were first told that the C-47 went down in the Sea of Japan during a routine flight to Tokyo. Their aircraft was registered to Civil Air Transport, a CIA cover operation in the Far East.

When a search team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's Central Identification Lab first visited the crash site two years ago, they reported the likelihood of finding human remains at the remote crash site were especially grim. But a search team returned to the site, near the Chinese town of Antu, last month and found what are thought to be human remains -- perhaps of the flight crew. Those remains are being flown back to the POW/MIA lab in Hawaii, where it may be months before analysts come up with anything conclusive.

"This would be a wonderful discovery," Roberta Cox, Snoddy's daughter, told the Associated Press. Snoddy's sister is equally hopeful.

"I'd like to bring him home," said Ruth Boss, who, like her niece, has waited 52 years for some sense of closure.

FMI: www.jpac.pacom.mil