VQ-1's P4M-1Q crash off China - 1956

VQ-1's P4M-1Q crash off China - 1956

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...050201384.html

Truth and Lies

By Katherine Shaver
Sunday, May 7, 2006; W14

Did Navy pilot James Deane die during a top-secret mission, as the Navy
told her? Or should she believe U.S. intelligence reports that he'd
been captured alive? Desperate for answers, Beverly Shaver turned to
two allies: old friend Donald Rumsfeld and her daughter

On her way to the gym one afternoon in 1992, my mother stopped by a
Phoenix bookstore to check out a new book titled Soldiers of
Misfortune: Washington's Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet
Union. Perched in an aisle, she scanned the index under "China" and,
upon flipping to page 185, read two paragraphs that almost brought her
to her knees.

They were an account of a U.S. Navy plane that had been shot down off
the coast of Shanghai during a Cold War spy mission in 1956. My mother
already knew plenty about the incident. Of the 16 men aboard, the Navy
said, only four mangled bodies had been recovered. The other 12 crew
members were never found. One year later, the Navy declared them dead.
No one, it concluded, could have survived such a crash.

The crew's families believed their government. They included my mother,
then named Beverly Billinger Deane. Her college sweetheart, Lt. j.g.
James Brayton Deane Jr., 24, had been one of the lost plane's pilots.
At the age of 24 and married just three months, my mother had suddenly
found herself a widow.

Yet, here she was, nearly four decades later, reading a far different
story.

"American intelligence knew that two of the crewmen had survived the
shoot-down," my mother read, feeling the shock pour over her. The two
Americans had been rescued by a Chinese patrol boat, the book said, and
were taken to an army hospital.

The book -- by journalists James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter and R. Cort
Kirkwood -- quoted a declassified U.S. Navy report dated almost two
months after the crash. The unnamed crewmen had recovered and were
being imprisoned in China, the report said. Their existence was so
secret, the book said, "that the U.S. government never asked the
Chinese to return the Americans."

My mother bought the book, slipped it into her purse and continued on
to the gym. After working out in stunned disbelief, she read over the
two paragraphs again, then stepped into a locker room shower and cried.

It had been 36 years since the morning she had awakened to another Navy
wife tapping urgently on the screen of her open bedroom window. She was
living in a cramped rental house near Iwakuni Naval Air Station in
Japan. "There's been a little trouble with the plane," her friend said.
My mother searched for her robe. The squadron's executive officer and a
chaplain were at her front door.

Over the next several days, my mother would learn only that the crew of
her husband's Martin Mercator P4M-1Q had sent one emergency message
saying it was under attack. Then the radio cut out. Nothing had been
heard from the crew since.

Within a week, my mother found herself headed back to the States on a
Navy transport plane. Three weeks after that, she returned to her third
year of studies at Cornell University medical school deep in a fog of
grief. It took two more years before she gave up hope of ever seeing
her vibrant, handsome husband again.

When a surgical resident asked her out on a date three years after the
shootdown, my mother, by then a pediatric resident in New Orleans,
accepted. He made her laugh for the first time she could remember. One
year later, she agreed to marry him, removed her first wedding ring and
took down the framed military portrait of the man she had vowed to love
for life. Her second husband, Jim Shaver, would become my father.

After returning home from the gym that night in 1992, my mother showed
my father her bookstore purchase. Look at this, she said. As my father
read, my mother recalls, he looked stricken.

You never buried him, was all he said, looking up.

I never had anyone to bury, she said.

Do you think he's alive? my father asked.

After 32 years of marriage, she knew what he was thinking. "Even if Jim
Deane were found alive," she recalls telling him, "you're my husband.
I'd never go back to a previous marriage."

Her lost husband had never been an issue between my father and her.
Still, my mother could feel the grief filling a void she thought had
closed decades earlier.

"Jim Deane was dead," my mother says. "The government said he was
dead."

But at 60 years old with four grown children, she suddenly wasn't so
sure. Had two crewmen from the plane actually survived? If so, which
two, and what had happened to them? Why hadn't the U.S. government ever
told her or the other wives and families?

In 1993, one year into her search for answers, my mother made another
startling discovery. A newly declassified U.S. report citing an
intelligence source described the two surviving crew members. One was
well-built and tall. He had slightly raised cheekbones and thin lips.
"This description," the intelligence officer wrote, "appears to fit
that of Lt. j.g. James Brayton Deane, Jr."

I NEVER HEARD THE NAME JIM DEANE until I was 7. My mother had taken my
two sisters, my brother and me on a 1976 summer trip through
California. My father, a surgeon with limited vacation time, had stayed
behind in Phoenix. At a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles, my mother
ordered sukiyaki, with a raw egg in which to dip her slices of meat.
The waitress seemed surprised at her request and commented how few
Americans knew the Japanese custom of the raw egg.

"Don't you wonder why I know how to eat this?" my mother asked us.
"It's because I used to live in Japan." It was then that she told us
about her first marriage.

My oldest sister, Anne, then 14, asked what I immediately wanted to
know: "Is he our dad?"

No, my mother assured us. Daddy is your father.

After that dinner, my mother rarely mentioned her first husband, and we
didn't ask much about him.

While I was home for Christmas in 1992, however, that would change. As
our family gathered for lunch by the backyard pool, my mother raised
the subject as suddenly as she had in that Japanese restaurant. She
told us about the book she'd found. My brother, Jos, remembers my
father staring quietly at his shoes.

You don't think he's alive, do you? my brother recalls asking.

Oh, no, no, no, my mother said.

We didn't know, however, that the search for this previous husband had
already begun to consume my mother's life.

Unlike some military widows and family members, my mother had not spent
much time trying to learn Deane's fate. For about a year after the
crash, she wrote letters to the military and U.S. government asking for
details about the investigation. The Navy repeatedly told her that all
information was classified and that everyone had likely died in the
crash.

After her husband was declared dead one year later, she says, she
compartmentalized her grief enough to move on with her life for 35
years. However, she had always promised herself that someday she would
find out what he had been doing when he vanished. He had been secretive
about his missions, saying they were highly classified.

In 1992, before finding the book, my mother watched on C-SPAN as a U.S.
Senate committee held hearings on the fate of missing U.S. military
personnel from the Vietnam War. With decades-old military records being
declassified, my mother thought the time had come to learn more about
her first husband's Cold War missions.

After reading about the two reported survivors, she hunted down former
Navy pilots and intelligence officers. Some were long dead. Others,
then in their eighties and nineties, didn't remember the shootdown or
were too feeble to talk. She filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
requests, seeking records from more than 25 U.S. military and
government agencies. Often, she says, she felt like she was battling
her own government to get 40-year-old answers.

From other pilots in her husband's squadron, my mother learned that
Deane had been part of a U.S. program of "ferret flights," a highly
secretive piece of the Cold War. In missions far riskier than my mother
had ever imagined, Navy and Air Force planes searched out the
land-based radar systems of Communist bloc countries. Their goal was to
get caught. Only then, when the enemy had picked up a plane on radar,
could the technicians in the rear of the U.S. plane detect that radar's
location.

Sometimes, if the Americans strayed too close, they got shot down. The
Pentagon office charged with investigating missing and imprisoned
military personnel lists 126 Americans missing from such Cold War
shootdowns.

When the U.S. government couldn't give her answers, my mother took her
search to China. On a visit to Beijing in 2000, she sought help from Li
Xiaolin, vice president of the Chinese People's Association for
Friendship With Foreign Countries. The association, with ties to the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had helped other Americans with MIA cases.
But Li told my mother that China's defense agencies still considered
all records about Deane to be "highly classified." If he'd gone down
with the plane, my mother reasoned, why would the Chinese government
have any records on him?

My mother also was surprised by the about-face of a retired top Chinese
Air Defense official. In 1999, he told a mutual acquaintance in great
detail how the Chinese had arrested "two pilots" from the shootdown
amid great celebration. However, a year later, the official said his
memory wasn't so clear. Moreover, his family didn't want him
interviewed again unless someone from the Chinese government was
present.

My mother's conclusion: "Someone got to him."

In the beginning, I figured my intelligent mother, who had practiced
pediatrics before her second child was born, merely needed a project
now that she was an empty nester. She had never given up on anything
easily. She also never did anything halfway. When she started drawing
and painting as a hobby, she didn't just take classes. She turned our
guest bedroom into an art studio.

I sometimes wondered whether she was merely romanticizing a man who now
had the JFK effect -- gone but forever young in her mind, not the
73-year-old man he would be today. I never considered that what drove
her might be a sense of guilt or loyalty, even love. My mother told me
recently that she couldn't stop picturing the awful possibilities.
While she had gone on with her life, her first husband might have been
imprisoned or even tortured. What if, she'd often think, he were still
alive and waiting to be found?

After a couple of years, my mother's search began to exact a physical
and emotional toll. She mentioned trouble sleeping. "I'd lie in bed all
night and think of whom I was going to FOIA next," she recalls. She
needed medication for high blood pressure. She looked drawn, tired,
older than her age.

I often wondered how my father put up with it. I chalked it up to his
kind, giving nature -- the traits that made nurses and patients rave
about his gentle bedside manner. I never doubted the strength of my
parents' marriage. Still, my siblings and I sometimes discussed our
fears that my mother's quest would cause a strain. When she would talk
about her research, my father often would look toward the floor and
sigh.

"Sometimes I would tell her, 'This is too much,'" my father says. But
he knew she wouldn't quit. "It was something she was going to do and
something she had to do. That was my job as her husband, to support
her."

What upset him most was watching the toll the search took, he says. He
asked medical colleagues and grief recovery experts for advice. He
urged her to seek counseling.

"Nobody would understand," she told him.

Through it all, my mother believed she had an important ally: Donald
Rumsfeld. He and Deane had become close friends in 1954 while attending
Navy flight training together in Pensacola, Fla.

After her husband's shootdown, my mother and Rumsfeld stayed in touch,
mostly through Christmas cards. When my mother began her search in
1992, Rumsfeld was a business executive in Chicago. She addressed her
letters to him as "Rummy." He wrote back to "Bo Bo," her college
nickname. She hoped he might tap his connections from his days as
President Gerald Ford's defense secretary.

He lined up letters from Ford and former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, asking the Chinese government to assist my mother. After
Rumsfeld became defense secretary under President Bush, one of his
aides followed up on my mother's inquiries.

"He feels a certain debt about all this," the former aide, Rich Haver,
says of Rumsfeld's interest in Deane's case. "This is very personal."

Still, my mother says, she got the sense that Rumsfeld believed she
would never get the answers she sought.

"You should make a movie out of this," Rumsfeld suggested during a
meeting in his Chicago business office in 2000.

"I can't," she said, "It wouldn't have an ending."

While I was visiting my parents in spring of last year, my mother, now
73, confided to me that she'd exhausted her search, and she still
didn't know what had happened to Deane. Maybe a reporter would dig up
something she couldn't, she said. Would I help?

"I think you'll open any doors that can still be opened," my mother
told me, "and close any doors that need to be closed. This is my swan
song."

THEY MET AT A FRESHMAN MIXER at Cornell University, introduced by a
friend who told my mother, "He'd be perfect for you."

Jim Deane had grown up affluent in East Grand Rapids, Mich. His father
had run a desk manufacturing company but had recently had some
financial troubles. A Naval ROTC scholarship offered Deane a student
deferment from the Korean War, a way to pay for college and the chance
to earn his wings.

He'd been a top student in high school, vice president of his senior
class and a varsity letterman in football, basketball, track and
swimming. His younger sister, Pam Deane Truog, remembers his childhood
bedroom full of model airplanes.

The glamour associated with her new suitor's military status wasn't
lost on my mother. Pilots "were really the fair-haired heroes of the
Navy," she recalls. By junior year, she had decided Deane was the one
she wanted to marry. The question was when. He owed the Navy three
years before he could pursue a business career. Following him around
the world as a Navy wife, even for a few years, meant my mother would
have to delay her medical school plans. It was a choice she hadn't
sorted through yet. After college graduation, he left for Pensacola to
become a pilot while she went to Manhattan to become a doctor.

"It wasn't until he went away and I was in medical school and couldn't
see him but every four to five months that I thought I was going to go
crazy," my mother says.

When she visited him in Pensacola, my mother often stayed off base with
Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce, while Deane lived in the bachelors'
quarters. The couples spent their free time water-skiing and sailing.

"We were 21 or 22, and we were all going through flight school,"
Rumsfeld recalls. "We'd socialize together. We'd study together and
work together and fly together . . . We'd have cookouts. We didn't have
much money, so we just kind of hung around."

Rumsfeld remembers his friend as "very smart and very engaging and big.
He enjoyed life. He was a serious person who worked hard."

Near the end of the 18-month flight training, Deane got some
frustrating news. Instead of jets, he'd been assigned to prop planes.
Flying the lumbering multi-engine planes, he told my mother gloomily,
"was just like driving a bus."

A few months later, he got his orders. He'd be with the VQ-1 squadron,
otherwise known as "Electronic Countermeasure Squadron One," in
Iwakuni. He'd heard the Navy was doing extensive background checks on
him, probably for top secret clearance. He had to report for duty in
two months.

Oh my God, my mother recalls saying in a phone call between Pensacola
and New York. We'll get married, and I'll leave school.

I never wanted to ask you to do that, he said.

Two months later, on May 19, 1956, they married in her home town of
Norwalk, Conn., amid the blooming dogwoods.

As she boarded a Navy plane to Japan that summer, my mother carried one
small suitcase and her black medical bag stuffed with their wedding
silver. Her new life in Iwakuni felt exotic and refreshingly carefree.
She filled her days getting to know the other Navy wives, taking
Japanese flower-arranging classes and practicing her cooking. On
weekends, she and her new husband bicycled through the countryside and
attended cocktail parties at the officers' club.

The squadron's wives didn't discuss their husbands' work, my mother
says, because none of them knew what their husbands did. She recalls
once climbing around the inside of the P4M-1Q patrol plane during a
base open house for the crews' families. In the rear, black sheets
covered what looked like small desks. My mother assumed that was secret
surveillance equipment. Seeing the ribbons of ammunition hanging from
the machine guns, she remembers thinking, "Why do they need real
bullets?"

About a month after she arrived in Japan, my mother remembers, she
chatted with her husband while he got ready for work.

I'm so glad I didn't get jets, he said, adjusting his tie in the
mirror.

Really? she asked. Why?

Because what I'm doing now is so interesting and so valuable, she
recalls Deane saying.

Two weeks later, his plane was shot out of the sky.

WHAT MY MOTHER DIDN'T KNOW was that her husband and his squadron were
flying some of the most dangerous and secretive missions of the Cold
War. It didn't take long for the Communist countries to figure out what
the U.S. planes were doing. Former Navy pilots say they had to keep
finding new ways to provoke the other side into turning on the radar.

"They absolutely knew we were there," says Karle Naggs, 72, one of
Deane's colleagues. "They'd see us and shut down their radar, and then
we'd fly along, and they'd turn it on again. It was a little bit of a
game."

The VQ1 pilots usually flew at night, with the plane lights off and the
windows darkened. Sometimes, pilots say, a Chinese or Soviet jet would
begin following them or lock its airborne radar on the U.S. plane. The
pilots of the larger, slower P4M-1Q would dive toward the ocean. Their
prop plane would have enough time to pull out and cruise low over the
water. The faster jets couldn't follow and pull out safely. A few quick
turns, and the American plane would fly away.

The missions were so secret that crews didn't learn where they would be
flying until hours before takeoff. Several pilots say they never knew
for certain whom their missions collected radar data for but assumed it
went to the National Security Agency. "I don't think anyone in the Navy
knew what we were doing," says Gary Grau, 72, one of Deane's fellow
pilots.

Many assumed that if anything went wrong over enemy territory -- a
place where the United States never admitted to being -- their country
would be in no position to rescue them.

"There was no doubt in my mind that if you crashed, there was no one
coming to pick you up," says Naggs.

On Wednesday, August 22, 1956, six weeks after my mother had arrived in
Japan, Deane took a nap to rest up for that night's flight. Later, my
mother dropped him off at the hangar with a quick kiss goodbye. Though
she usually didn't know how long he'd be away, he assured her he'd be
home for a squadron party four days later. She spent the evening with
another pilot's wife at a Japanese movie house watching "East of Eden."

Looking back, Deane's flight seemed doomed from the start. His would be
one of two VQ1 planes flying that night: The first would stir up the
enemy radar, enabling Deane's plane to pick up more signals. But the
crew wasn't aware of two key factors that made that night's mission
even riskier than usual, according to the follow-up investigation.
Unknown to the Navy, an Air Force plane was flying in the same area.
The VQ1 squadron also wasn't aware that U.S. intelligence had picked up
two new Chinese radar systems that could better detect them in the
Shanghai area. With the Air Force plane and the preceding Navy plane
already stirring up the radar, the Chinese would be more than ready for
a third plane off their coast. It also was a bright, moonlit night, the
kind usually avoided because it made the planes easy targets.

Lt. Commander Milton "Hutch" Hutchinson, 35, one of the squadron's most
experienced flyers, was in the chief pilot's seat. As the junior
pilots, Deane and Lt. j.g. Frank Flood, 24, likely would have switched
off during the flight between co-pilot and navigator, other pilots say.
In the back of the plane were 13 men who captured the radar signals,
worked the radio and manned the machine guns.

At 11:17 p.m., three hours into the flight and apparently unbeknown to
the crew, Deane's plane caught the attention of the Chinese air force,
according to a detailed account of the incident in a 2002 Chinese book
titled The Fight to Protect Motherland's Airspace. Chinese radar
tracked the plane for almost 45 minutes, when it then flew over China's
territorial waters, according to the book's account. Air force pilot
Zhang Wenyi, flying a Russian MiG-17F, intercepted the plane and, after
receiving orders, opened fire.

Harry Sunder, now 72, an air intelligence officer and a friend of
Deane's, was in the radio room back in Iwakuni when the emergency
message came in.

"Oh my gosh," Sunder remembers thinking, "This can't be happening."

Though they had had plenty of close calls, a VQ1 squadron plane had
never been shot down.

Zhang reported that he saw the plane's left wing in flames and
continued firing until his ammunition ran out. He then watched it crash
into the sea, according to the book.

The story of the shootdown was big news in the United States and China.
It made the front pages of The Washington Post and the New York Times,
just below headlines about President Dwight Eisenhower accepting the
GOP nomination to run for a second term.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told reporters it was "apparently
a routine patrol flight" that would "keep track of the shipping and the
like in that area."

He made no mention of tracking enemy radar.

The Navy's Seventh Fleet began to search almost immediately for the
downed plane. However, because of confusion about its last known
location, the fleet got to the crash site more than 24 hours late. The
United States and China exchanged diplomatic protests via the British.
Chinese officials said they had not found any crew members and did not
know their fate, according to declassified documents and press reports
at the time.

Within the next week, U.S. Navy vessels would find the bodies of two
crew members and bits of wreckage floating in the East China Sea. The
Chinese returned the bodies of two more crew members, saying only that
both had washed up on islands.

U.S. officials quickly realized they had a problem. In confidential
memos, Navy officials noted that the last position the crew gave, along
with the locations of one of the corpses and some of the wreckage, was
well within what the Chinese considered the 12-mile territorial limit
of their islands.

Concerns about the secret U.S. spy program being exposed reached the
White House. One week after the crash, Eisenhower met with Dulles and
Adm. Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The
president "particularly objected to" the fact that, after three years
in office, his administration "had no cover story ready" in case a spy
plane was lost or shot down, according to a write-up of the meeting by
Eisenhower's staff secretary. The State Department and military had
"quarreled for a week over what they should say" about the shootdown,
Eisenhower complained. If U.S. officials insisted the plane had never
strayed from international airspace, American citizens were "entitled
to demand to know why we do not do something about this incident,"
Eisenhower said. "Whereas, if we say the plane crew made an error, this
statement is alleged to be [blaming] the Navy."

A TOP-SECRET NAVY BOARD of inquiry attributed the shootdown to a likely
navigational error. Unexpectedly strong headwinds probably caused the
plane to stray off course and over Chinese islands. The board concluded
that, based on severe damage to the wreckage and bodies that had been
found, "the existence of any survivors is considered improbable."

In their investigation, however, the officers conducting the inquiry
ignored a disturbing piece of evidence. On the last day of the hearing,
the "counsel to the court" read a brief statement into the record.
According to an intelligence report received four days earlier, just
two weeks after the crash, "Fairly reliable information indicates two
seriously injured survivors of the P4M that was downed were captured by
Chinese Communists within 35 minutes after the actual shoot-down," he
said. "Both were taken to a hospital, where one died . . . The other is
now presumably a prisoner of war."

That information, the court noted cryptically, was "not within its
purview," and the board "did not pursue the foregoing matter further,"
according to its declassified report.

One year later, two military men from the United States visited Iwakuni
asking VQ1 squadron members about the lost crew, two squadron members
said.

"I was questioned," says Sunder, who had been Deane's suite mate before
my mother arrived. "It was hinted there was a survivor or maybe two. He
focused in on Jim."

What did Deane look like? one of the men asked. How would he react as a
prisoner?

He'd be mad, Sunder remembers answering.

Would he be cooperative? one of the men asked.

No, Sunder said. I wouldn't say he had a temper, but I don't think he'd
put up with anything.

At the end of the interview, Sunder recalls, his questioner told him:
"This is all secret. You can't tell anyone about this."

Sunder says a thought came to mind: "Does Beverly know about this?"

She didn't.

With her new, married life suddenly gone and her husband listed as
Missing in Action, my mother had returned to Cornell medical school.
"It certainly doesn't feel right to mourn someone when you don't even
know they are dead," she wrote a friend. Truog, who was 11 when her
brother vanished, recalls how the disappearance of their only son
devastated her parents. Their father, James Sr., wouldn't talk about
it, she says. Their mother, Edna, a concert pianist, never played again
for her own enjoyment. "She said it just made her too sad," says Truog,
61.

My mother spent late nights writing thank-you notes for still-arriving
wedding gifts and responding to letters of condolence. She believed
Naval officials' repeated assertions that no one could have survived
the crash. Yet, she says, no one had convinced her that someone
couldn't have first parachuted to safety. The scientist in her needed
proof that her husband was dead, she says. She studied nautical charts
of the East China Sea, trying to determine where currents would carry a
person or wreckage.

She peppered the squadron's executive officer in Iwakuni with four
pages of typewritten questions. She wrote to Eisenhower and top Navy
officials, urging them to continue the search. She was repeatedly told
the investigation was classified. Convinced the Navy would tell her
nothing, she stopped writing.

WHILE MY MOTHER STAYED UP NIGHTS in Manhattan typing letters, she
didn't know that a State Department lawyer in Washington was sharing
her search.

Samuel Klaus had been assigned to prepare U.S. shootdown claims against
China and the Soviet Union in the International Court of Justice.
However, in detailed memos, Klaus wrote that he got little cooperation
from the Navy, which had already dismissed the reports of survivors as
lies.

It was in Klaus's State Department files, unearthed at the National
Archives in the early 1990s, that my mother found most of the U.S.
intelligence reports. The names of the sources who provided the
information remain blacked out, still considered classified. The six
reports, which began arriving two weeks after the shootdown and
continued for nearly two years, gave the following account:

A Chinese patrol boat had rescued two badly injured crewmen about 35
minutes after the crash. The men were taken to a nearby hospital in
"strict secrecy" before being transferred to an army hospital in north
China. A nurse there reported that both had recovered and were
transferred to the "residence" of Tsai Mao, the chief of public
information for the social welfare ministry. Based on the physical
descriptions provided and photos of the missing crew, one prisoner was
believed to be Deane and the other either Warren E. Caron, 23, or
Leonard Strykowsky, 22. A house boy where the two Americans were being
held seven months after the shootdown said they were examined by a
doctor twice a month and had "received favorable treatment." The final
report said the older captive, known as "Mr. J" and fitting Deane's
description, was living outside Beijing in the "residence" of a man
named Ch'en Lung, who was assistant chief of the Public Security
Department in Beijing. The other American, the report said, was
"employed at the Sheng-Lung Corporation" in Shanghai.

Four of the six reports had been given an evaluation ranking of F6,
meaning the intelligence officer didn't know the reliability of the
source or the accuracy of the information, according to retired Far
East intelligence officials. British diplomats questioned the first
report's validity, saying they doubted China would conceal prisoners
who could prove the United States had violated its air space, according
to a letter from the British government. An internal Joint Chiefs of
Staff memo noted that a CIA official considered the first two reports
of survivors to be "almost certainly fabrication."

The only person who seemed to take the intelligence reports seriously
was Klaus, the State Department lawyer. In detailed memos, Klaus
questioned why Navy officials "had not demanded a return of any living
personnel . . . and operated on the assumption that all were dead."
Nearly three years after the shootdown, Klaus made the last entry in
his file. He said he was dropping the case because the Navy had not
provided enough evidence to prove that the Chinese had violated
international law by shooting down the plane. Klaus died four years
later.

James Doyle, now 80 and a retired vice admiral living in Bethesda, was
one of the Navy officials whose cooperation Klaus had sought. Doyle
said recently that he was too ill to be interviewed. However, he wrote,
I could quote the following from him: "Intelligence officers told me
that the reports of survivors had been investigated and found not to be
credible. They didn't go into any detail but said that informants had
fed us false information. I had no reason to doubt the intelligence
officers, especially in light of witnesses' affidavits from the crash
site and the Chinese Communist's penchant for disinformation. Judging
from where the crewmen were found, the debris and the currents, it
seemed highly unlikely that there were survivors."

One year after Deane disappeared, my mother accepted the Distinguished
Flying Cross for heroism on his behalf. She also received a letter from
the Navy stating that he had been declared dead.

"Please rest assured," the letter said, "that if any additional
information is ever received, it will be forwarded to you promptly."

LIKE MY MOTHER 10 YEARS BEFORE ME, I showed the intelligence reports to
anyone I could think of: China experts, former Far East military and
intelligence officials, retired VQ1 pilots and Chinese historians.

From my initial reading, the reports of Deane's survival seemed to make
sense. A few details didn't quite jibe, but the description of one of
the captives -- his height, the thin lips and high cheekbones --
matched Deane's photos. Most striking was one of the sources describing
one of the Americans as "not hairy." It seemed like an odd feature to
include. It also wasn't part of the physical description that the Navy
had for Deane and wasn't apparent from his photos. Yet, my mother says,
her husband's smooth, almost hairless skin was his most distinguishing
physical trait.

And how could six reports from apparently different sources -- some to
an Air Force intelligence unit in Japan and others to the Army in Korea
-- all be fabricated with such similar details?

"Various reports seemed to fit well enough to me to sound right," says
Eric McVadon, a retired rear admiral and U.S. defense attache in
Beijing in the early 1990s. "I don't see any motive for someone making
up all that."

However, McVadon is one of the few experts who didn't find flaws.
Deane's colleagues and other P4M-1Q pilots believe it unlikely that
anyone could have escaped from the plane in the first place.

The evasive dive toward the water would have put the already low-flying
P4M-1Q too low for a parachute to open in time, pilots say. A pilot
would have had to get out of the cockpit, buckle on his parachute and
climb out a small tunnel in the belly of the burning plane into 170 mph
wind without hitting a propeller or drowning in the parachute. If the
plane was spinning or diving, pilots say, centrifugal force would have
made even getting out of a seat very difficult, if not impossible.

"The issue is could you bail out safely at night over water when the
plane was on fire or out of control? That's a big order," says John
McIntyre, 76, a retired Navy captain who flew the P4M-1Q out of North
Africa.

Even if two people did bail out, experts in China and Far East
intelligence gathering during the 1950s say reports of their captivity
seem far-fetched. The United States didn't have the sophisticated
intelligence network to gather such detailed information, they say.
Informants boasting of their inside sources would make up stories
because they knew U.S. officials would pay for them. It wasn't unusual
for informants to sell the same story to different branches of the U.S.
military, they say.

James Lilley, a former U.S. ambassador to China who worked for the CIA
throughout the Far East during the 1950s, says that a great deal of the
U.S. intelligence out of China during that time turned out to be wrong.

"It was almost impossible to get this information out, and when you did
get it out, it was almost always fabricated," says Lilley, a senior
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Many of the China experts
and former intelligence officials I consulted also noted questionable
details. For example, one report said a Soviet sergeant had piloted the
attacking Chinese jet. But numerous military experts say the Soviets
weren't flying Chinese planes in 1956, and even the Chinese government
has since confirmed the attacking pilot was a member of the Chinese air
force.

It didn't seem plausible, they say, that China would have kept two U.S.
captives secret when they would have been proof that the Americans had
been spying.

"Generally they'd make a lot of hay out of that propaganda-wise, and
they'd try to horse-trade with the American government," says Sidney
Rittenberg, a professor of China Studies at Pacific Lutheran University
in Tacoma, Wash., who was imprisoned in China for 16 years on charges
of spying. "l don't know of any cases where people captured by the
military were kept secret."

Most striking, many China experts note, were the reports that Deane and
the other crewman were detained not in prisons, but in the "residences"
of two Chinese officials. Captured foreign spies would have been
immediately interrogated and kept in a prison, experts say. My mother
says several experts told her that "residence" may have been a
translation error referring to areas where security officials lived in
or close to a prison.

Jin Ling, a Washington Post researcher in Beijing, set out to find
whether Tsai Mao and Ch'en Lung, the two officials who reportedly
detained the Americans, had ever existed. Jin could find no record of a
Tsai Mao. However, she did find that Ch'en Lung, also known as Chen
Long, was indeed assistant chief of the Ministry of Public Security in
the early 1950s. Long died in 1958, but Jin tracked down his daughter,
Liu Xiaohua, 60.

Liu said neither she nor her mother, Yu Haiyu, 86, remembered any
foreigners ever in or near their living quarters in the Ministry of
Public Security in downtown Beijing. From 1956 to 1958 -- during the
time the reports said her father was detaining Deane in his Beijing
residence -- her father suffered serious heart problems, and her
parents lived in a coastal city 280 miles from Beijing, she said.

She wanted to help my mother, Liu said, and would try to contact some
of her father's former colleagues. "I believe that this tragedy tells a
lot: the unforgettable past, the true love between a couple and the
desire for peace and happiness," Liu wrote. After checking, she said,
none of her father's former colleagues could remember any survivors.

WHEN I STARTED LOOKING FOR ANSWERS IN CHINA, Americans who had done
business there cautioned me that I would get nothing by calling people
out of the blue. Everything happens through contacts and personal
introductions, I was told. I spent four months calling and writing the
Chinese foreign affairs and defense ministries, quasi-government
organizations that specialize in military and foreign relations, and
anyone who might know anyone in China.

I hit a wall.

The Ministry of Defense ignored me, as did the Chinese People's
Association for Friendship With Foreign Countries. Two Post researchers
who scoured the local libraries and publicly accessible archives found
few records of the shootdown. The retired air defense official who
initially said he remembered two pilots being captured and then changed
his mind was now too sick to talk, I was told. The Chinese pilot who
shot down the plane didn't want to discuss it, his brother said.

Even after almost 50 years, what I considered a small piece of Cold War
history is apparently still an unbroachable topic in China.

This fall, Jia Xiudong, the Chinese Embassy's political counselor,
agreed to meet with me. I knew it was likely my only shot at making a
personal pitch. We met in a small room off the embassy's quiet lobby on
Connecticut Avenue, just north of Dupont Circle.

I told him I understood the Chinese have said for years that they found
no survivors. However, my mother and I still needed to reconcile that
with the six U.S. intelligence reports to the contrary. I asked to see
any historical documents China had in the case.

Jia responded pleasantly. "We've spent a great deal of time and energy
and resources trying to help find anything, any clue even, about this
case," he said. But, he said, he had nothing to add to what he had told
me several weeks earlier by phone: that the Chinese never found
survivors.

He said former secretary of state Colin Powell had asked about the case
during a visit to Beijing in July 2001 and that Rumsfeld himself had
asked about it again last October.

The Cold War, Jia said, is history. "We have nothing to keep away from
you."

For the next 20 minutes, I asked again and again, as politely but as
forcefully as I knew how, to see China's historical records about the
shootdown. Each time, Jia reiterated that China had no records of
survivors.

Could my mother or I see whatever historical records China does have? I
asked.

"Even if she read them herself," Jia said, "there's no more information
than we've shared with you."

Could she just see the documents for herself?

"I don't know," he said. "It depends on whether the documents are still
classified. We could check it for you."

As Jia escorted me to the embassy's front door, I felt my mother's
frustration. Jia shook my hand. "Please give your mother our best," he
said with a warm smile. "We have tried very hard, but unfortunately,
that is what we have."

After receiving no response, I wrote Jia that I was left wondering why,
if China had never captured any survivors, no one in the United States
had been allowed to see any evidence supporting that. Several weeks
later, I received a two-page statement from the embassy. The Chinese
government had searched its military and public security archives. It
also had reinterviewed the Chinese pilot who shot down the American
plane, along with other military officials involved in the incident.
China's military archives had no records of Americans being captured
alive, the statement said. Any retired Chinese military official who
remembered survivors was probably confusing it with another Cold War
shootdown. Jia said he couldn't supply the Chinese historical records
because it would be too time-consuming to compile them from numerous
archives.

The statement also refuted a new, curious detail. The United States, it
said, had argued that a Chinese air force pilot's "memoir" mentioned
that two people "were ejected from the cockpit of the aircraft."
However, the statement said, the memoir had to be wrong because Deane's
plane was flying too low for a parachute to open in time. It was more
likely, the statement said, that the Chinese pilot saw "an ejection [of
two people] after the aircraft was shot, rather than a voluntary
bailout."

The Pentagon's POW/MIA office has never heard of such a memoir, nor of
any Chinese account in which two crewmen were seen ejecting, or being
ejected, from the plane, a Pentagon official says. Neither has my
mother. The 2002 Chinese book also never mentioned two people being
ejected. Perhaps they were two of the four crew members whose bodies
were later found. Perhaps it was new evidence that two people did,
indeed, get out alive.

I wrote and called Jia repeatedly, asking for more information. His
assistant said the embassy was waiting on an answer from Beijing. I
never heard back.

AFTER SIX MONTHS OF RESEARCH, I reluctantly conclude that Deane most
likely did not survive the crash. I am still struck by the uncanny
similarity between Deane and the physical description of one of the
reported captives, but that is about all. In speaking with the most
informed experts I could find, I believe the scales tip too much toward
the likelihood that most of the information in the intelligence reports
is implausible or wrong.

I am sickened by the thought that the pain and stress that has often
consumed my mother for 13 years might have stemmed from an informant
concocting a story for money. But I am also left with troubling
questions. Like my mother, I wonder why the Chinese, if they have
nothing to hide, refuse to release 50-year-old military records. And
why won't they explain the new account of two crew members being seen
ejecting from the plane before it crashed? I also share her dismay
that, according to Klaus, the U.S. government didn't pursue reports of
Deane's captivity more seriously.

My mother remains convinced that Deane parachuted from the plane and
ended up a prisoner of the Chinese. How else could someone who hadn't
seen him firsthand describe him so accurately? There was the hairless
skin, the high cheek bones, the fact that one of the American prisoners
was known as "Mr. J." Deane was the only crew member with a first or
last name that started with "J."

"Do we presume someone made this up and it all came together to match
up with Jim Deane?" she asks. "What are the chances of that happening?"

She also cannot forget the retired Chinese air defense official who
initially said he remembered China capturing two crew members before he
clammed up. Deane probably died in prison, my mother figures, but even
that she can't be certain of. "It's not grief, it's something
different," my mother says of the emotions she is left with. "It's the
horror of not knowing. How do you deal with that?"

Finally, I am struck by a sad irony. Had the U.S. government followed
through on its promise to tell my mother any new information gathered
about her husband, my family and I would not exist. Worse yet, my young
mother would have been left with a frustrating, lonely life. Had she
known that Deane had been reported alive in China, she said recently,
she never would have gone on another date, let alone married my father.

"In that sense all these lies allowed me to remarry, to have children,
to have years of happiness," my mother says. "But it still angers me
that I was lied to all those years."

On a particularly frustrating day toward the end of my research, my
mother called and heard my voice choked with tears. Short of China
suddenly deciding to open its military archives to me, I had hit the
same dead end as she had. I had wanted so much to provide her a sense
of peace, to help her let go rather than carry this search to her
grave. I felt like I had failed her. Coming from a family where one
does not cry easily, I hurriedly told my mother I would have to call
her back. Instead, I wrote her an e-mail, saying I was exhausted. I
told her my head hurt from banging it against a wall.

She wrote back within minutes, "I am 73 years old and have spent the
last 13 years of my life beating my head against the wall." While she
hadn't learned her first husband's fate, she wrote, she finally had
what she needed. She was ready to call off her search.

"After all you've done and all I've done, there is no question in my
mind that we have probably exhausted the possibilities," my mother
wrote. "That is something that I never could have said before, and that
in itself gives me great peace of mind and lets me get on with the rest
of my life. The ironic thing is that some day -- some day -- the answer
will come out. I probably will not be around to hear it, but you will."

Perhaps, but that possibility leaves me angry and sad, because my
mother and I agree on something vital: Whether he died in the crash or
was captured alive, James Deane gave his life for his country. A
half-century later, his widow deserves to know how the story really
ends.