[antimedia] Rumsfeld Presses China on Fate of Navy Pilot, a Friend of over 50 Years AP 5-6-06

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In the days we live in, being loyal to his friends - whatever their fate may
be or might have been - is a sign of " noblesse ".....author unknown     
 
Rumsfeld Presses China on Fate of Pilot
By ROBERT BURNS, AP
 
WASHINGTON (May 6) - In August 1956 a newlywed Navy pilot, Lt. James B.
Deane Jr., was shot out of the sky on a nighttime spy flight off the coast
of China. Nearly half a century later, a famous friend found himself in
Beijing with a chance to quietly press Chinese leaders for more cooperation
in resolving Deane's fate.

The friend was Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary known for hardline
views on communist China. He and Deane were fellow Navy fliers and became
buddies while stationed together in Florida in 1954 and 1955.

Rumsfeld's personal connection to the Deane case is a coincidence of history
not publicly reported until now.

The chief focus of Rumsfeld's visit to Beijing last October was his concern
about China's military buildup. Privately, he also made a point of urging
Chinese officials to look further into the Deane episode. Like other efforts
he made on behalf of Deane's widow before becoming defense secretary, his
urging yielded no new answers.

The Cold War case has been clouded in mystery and secrecy since the Martin
P4M-1Q Mercator in which Deane and 15 other men were flying was shot down
over the East China Sea shortly after midnight Aug. 23, 1956. Rumsfeld
raised it while also seeking more Chinese openness on all cases of missing
U.S. servicemen.

"I remember the good times with him and remember the sorrow of losing him,"
he said of his friend in an interview with The Associated Press.

China has acknowledged that its jet fighters attacked the Mercator as it
scooped up electronic intelligence on military radars and other sensitive
Chinese systems. But China repeatedly has denied knowing Deane's fate.

The remains of four crew members were recovered - two by the crew of a U.S.
search vessel and two by China, which returned the bodies through British
authorities in Shanghai. The other 12 were never found. Adding to the
mystery were unconfirmed U.S. intelligence reports, in the months after the
plane was shot down, that Deane and perhaps one other may have survived the
crash and been taken to a Chinese hospital.

A March 4, 1957, report by the 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron said
two survivors of the Mercator attack had been moved in late November to the
residence of a Chinese government official. Identifying information for one
"appears to fit the description of Lieutenant (junior grade) James Brayton
Deane, Jr.," said the report, which was declassified in 1993.

The Rumsfeld-Deane link is the only known instance of a secretary of
defense, whose official duties include overseeing U.S. government efforts to
account for missing-in-action servicemen, having a personal link to an MIA
involving China. It is a coincidence that Rumsfeld has kept out of the
public spotlight in deference to Deane's widow, Dr. Beverly Deane Shaver,
who until now had pursued the matter strictly in private.

Now Shaver is going public, eager to express her gratitude for Rumsfeld's
support and correct what she believes has been a false U.S. government
characterization of her first husband's fate.

"He was declared missing, when I'm 99.9 percent certain he was not. He was
alive," she said in a telephone interview from her home in suburban Phoenix.
"It almost makes a person's life a lie, and that really bothered me."

Deane was 24 years old.

"He was a big man, physically, and had a good smile and enjoyed life,"
Rumsfeld said in the interview. "As an aviator he was a very serious person.
He was a fine, enjoyable person to be around."

A year after the plane was shot down, the Navy told Shaver that Deane was
presumed dead, based on an absence of evidence that he was alive. Shaver,
however, now feels she has seen enough evidence - including declassified
intelligence reports - to conclude that he likely survived the attack, if
not a subsequent detention.

She and Deane were married May 19, 1956, and were living near Iwakuni Naval
Air Station in Japan when her world suddenly collapsed. She recalls a Navy
chaplain arriving at their home unannounced the morning of Aug. 23. And she
recalls thinking then of the words her husband had often used to calm her
fears for his safety.

"You don't have to worry about me flying," he would say. "You only have to
worry when you see a chaplain at the door."

Over the years, Rumsfeld avoided speaking publicly in detail about Deane,
although he mentioned his name in a speech five years ago.

That occasion was a ceremony honoring the crew members of a Navy EP-3E Aries
surveillance plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet in April 2001
near Hainan Island. Though that crew survived and was released from Chinese
custody after being held for 11 days, the incident offered haunting
parallels to the Deane case.

Both involved an electronic surveillance mission gone awry and both touched
Rumsfeld - the first in a deeply personal way.

At the moment he spoke Deane's name at the Andrews ceremony - "the co-pilot
was a close friend of mine," he began - Rumsfeld says he pictured the
24-year-old's face. When Rumsfeld noted that 47 men from that same squadron
had been lost during the Cold War - including 31 in an April 1969 attack by
a North Korean fighter jet - he visibly choked up.

Deane's link to Rumsfeld had its roots in Grand Rapids, Mich., Deane's home
town. A high school friend of Deane's, Jon Parrish, went on to Princeton,
where he met and became friends with Rumsfeld. Deane attended Cornell.

All three were enrolled in their universities' Naval Reserve Officer
Training Corps programs and after graduating in June 1954 they wound up
together in Pensacola, Fla., where freshly minted officers take flight
training.

Both Parrish and Rumsfeld were married. Deane was not. When Shaver, whom
Deane met at Cornell, came to visit him in Pensacola, she would stay at the
Rumsfeld's house, and she kept in touch over the years.

In late May 1956, just days after his wedding, Deane headed to Japan with
his Mercator squadron. It was a time of tension between Washington and
Beijing, which suspected U.S. efforts to destroy the communist regime that
had seized power in 1949. The U.S. military regularly flew electronic
surveillance missions off the Chinese, Soviet and North Korean coasts.

Richard Haver, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and Navy officer
who looked into the case at Rumsfeld's request in the late 1990s, said the
Navy's original investigation concluded that the Mercator's nosedive into
the sea was an "unsurvivable water entry."

"Chances are really pretty slim" that Deane or any other member of the crew
got out alive, Haver said in an interview.

Haver reviewed U.S. intelligence records of the case and interviewed former
Mercator pilots. He concluded that Deane's fate may never be known.

U.S. officials believe the Chinese government knows more about the matter
than it has said, which is very little.

Rumsfeld has had a hand in quiet, inconclusive U.S. government inquiries
about Deane since 1974, when Rumsfeld was chief of staff to President Ford.
At that point, just two years after Washington began to normalize relations
with the communist government in Beijing, the Ford administration was using
the diplomatic opening to press for information about Deane and other MIA
servicemen.

"The Chinese had informed us privately that they, themselves, hold no
American servicemen," Henry Kissinger, then the secretary of state, wrote in
a declassified memo in January 1975. "They said they had as yet found no
bodies nor had they turned up any other kind of information," but were still
investigating.

When Ford met Deng Xiaoping in Beijing in December 1975, the future top
Chinese leader gave Ford a memorandum that said, "The Chinese side has no
information on what happened" to Deane and the other 11 missing members of
his crew.

Subsequent inquiries by U.S. officials - including Rumsfeld's last October -
produced essentially the same response from Beijing: We've looked again and
found nothing.

Shaver, who has made two trips to China in search of answers, said that in
1999 she had indirect contact with a former head of China's air defenses in
the region where Deane was shot down. He recalled the attack and said two
pilots had survived. But when pressed more directly he would not repeat the
claim of survivors.

Shaver has not discussed the matter directly with Rumsfeld, but says she
knows he raised the matter in Beijing.

"Rumsfeld was very compassionate on this," she said.

 

 

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