NIGEL WEST
Chris Pocock with Clarence Fu The Black Bats: CIA Spy Flights over China from Taiwan 1951 -1969
Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, PA 2010. 144pp. £32.50.
Chris Pocock will be familiar intelligence aficionados as the author of Fifty Years of the U-2, a book published in 2005 that competes with Norman Polmar’s Spyplane: The U-2 Declassified, released in 2001. Now Pocock has turned his attention to the clandestine missions flown from Taiwan over the mainland, and the tale is indeed a fascinating one, beginning at the height of the Korean War when the CIA employed Civil Air Transport, the successors to General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, to fly supplies in support of the Nationalist forces still engaged in combat operations against Mao Zedong. The task, of course, was doomed, but the redoubtable Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek offered Taiwan as a strategic outpost from which to harry the Communists and then monitor the development of China’s atomic weapons program.
For nearly two decades Nationalist pilots flew signals intelligence collection platforms, aerial reconnaissance missions, leaflet drops and agent insertions. The cost to the elite 34th Squadron, which was equipped with the Douglas A-26C/B-26C, P2V-7/RB-69As, C-54s, C-123, C-130, the P-3A armed with Sidewinder air-to-ar missiles and the unarmed B-17G, was considerable. Their mission was to fly at low altitude to evade hostile radar and air interception while the P-3A was restricted to international airspace, at least 40 miles off the coast, to monitor signals traffic. Most flights took place at night from Hsinchu in northern Taiwan, earning the squadron its black bat symbol. Initially, the aircrews had enjoyed several advantages, with fighter pilots heavily committed to the Korean conflict, and poor radar coverage of the coastline, but by 1955 the situation had deteriorated and become much more dangerous. Following the ceasefire more interceptors could be deployed south, and the quality of the air defense radars improved to the point that virtually every take-off was watched electronically by operators on the mainland.
The
squadron flew 838 missions with a loss of 148 crew, or two-thirds of
the original squadron’s strength, and 15 aircraft. Some crewmen were
captured in the People’s Republic of China and eventually returned to
Taiwan, and the unit’s last overflight took place on 25 January 1967.Despite being stood down officially in 1971, as President Richard Nixon prepared to make his historic visit to Mao in Beijing, the Black Bats remained operational and conducted missions over Vietnam, participating between 1971 and 1972 in the CIA’s MAIN STREET project which monitored North Vietnamese communications.
In March 2010 the ashes of five missing aircrew were interred at the Martyr’s Shrine near Taipei, a ceremony that further enhanced the mystique surrounding the Black Bats. Now their story is told, in compelling detail, and the author offers a comprehensive, technical account of the clandestine flights and their aircrew. Although the CIA is in the book’s title, there is little new about the organisation which operated through a commercial cover, Western Enterprises Inc., a company registered in Pittsburgh, sponsored by the energetic Frank Wisner, the architect of the Agency’s Cold War covert action project. Nevertheless, despite this disadvantage, The Black Bats remains a fascinating read
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