Human remains found
at CIA crash siteTwo agents were on a secret
mission in China 52 years ago
WASHINGTON >> An American search team has located what its believes are human remains at a site in China where a CIA plane crash-landed on a secret mission nearly 52 years ago, a Pentagon official said earlier this month.
The plane's two pilots, Robert C. Snoddy, of Roseburg, Ore., and Norman A. Schwartz, of Louisville, Ky., are believed to have been killed in the crash, but their bodies were never recovered.
An initial visit to the crash site in July 2002 by a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base found wreckage of the downed plane but no human remains. They concluded that the probability of finding remains was "quite low."
A search team returned last month to the site, near the town of Antu in the northeastern province of Jilin, and recovered what are believed to be human remains, as well as unspecified debris, according to Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense POW/MIA Office.
Greer said it was too early to know for sure whether they were the remains of Snoddy and Schwartz.
Snoddy and Schwartz were accompanied on the flight by two CIA officers and were about to pick up an anti-communist Chinese spy in the Manchurian foothills when their C-47 was shot down on Nov. 29, 1952. The CIA operatives, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, were captured alive, imprisoned by China for two decades and released only after Washington acknowledged they were spies.
The U.S. government initially told family members the men went down in the Sea of Japan on a routine flight to Tokyo, maintaining a cover story in order to keep a lid on the CIA's covert actions in China.
At the time, China and the United States were fighting on opposing sides in the Korean War, and the CIA was trying to undermine the fledgling communist regime on its home territory.
Snoddy's daughter, Roberta Cox, who was born less than one month after his plane went down, said in a telephone interview Friday from San Jose, Calif., that she was hoping for confirmation that the remains are her father's.
"This would be a wonderful discovery," she said.
Snoddy's sister, Ruth Boss, 80, said in a telephone interview from Creswell, Ore., that the government has told her nothing about the result of the latest search mission in China, but she hopes the recovered remains turn out to be those of her older brother.
"I'd like to bring him home," she said.
Snoddy and Schwartz were pilots for Civil Air Transport, a CIA proprietary airline that supported clandestine missions in the Far East. They were considered contract employees rather than CIA staff officers, but in December 1998 their names were added to the Book of Honor at CIA headquarters. That marked the government's first public acknowledgment of the men's agency connection.
Central Identification Lab
www.cilhi.army.mil