The Korean War (52 page)

Anderson took four Koreans and two Americans. One of their Koreans had already acquired an American name, John. They rechristened the other three Matthew, Mark and Luke. On the night of 17 March, they parachuted uneventfully from a Dakota. All the next day, they laid up in paddy fields, some fifteen miles south of Wonsan. The next night, they marched some eighteen miles to reach the Kyongwon railway line, between Osan-ni and Huchang-ni. On the night of 19 March, covered by a heavy snowfall they climbed down into the railway tunnel and laid their charges
and pressure switches. Then they lay and dozed, waiting for the sound of a train.

It came in the early hours of the morning. In an agony of suspense they waited, and waited. Then there were two heavy explosions. The little group of men on the hillside leapt with glee like schoolboys. Their exhilaration faded somewhat an hour later, when they made radio contact with their base to learn that the US Navy could not pick them up from their intended rendezvous on the coast. A lot of walking lay ahead if they were to get home. They marched for three nights: ‘each man was silent,’ wrote Anderson afterwards,

lost in his own thought, plodding along mile after mile, wet, cold and hungry or, during the day, escaping reality in brief snatches of troubled sleep. The map meant nothing in this area, and many times I felt that we were heading for a hopeless wilderness. My compass showed that we were still moving in the right direction, but at times I doubted it. I sensed a feeling of resentment behind me as we walked mile after stumbling mile. Perhaps I should never have committed these men to such an ordeal. At times I even toyed with the idea of surrender. After all, perhaps we would never find the place we were looking for; perhaps we might wander for weeks about these hateful rain-soaked mountains without food or shelter. Perhaps the war would end and nobody would think of us again.
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Somehow, they survived. They evaded the North Korean troops whose paths they crossed. But they suffered another disaster when Matthew and Mark, two of the Koreans whom Anderson dispatched to steal food from a peasant house, did not return. They were never seen again. Anderson himself was feverish, and his spirits were not improved by difficulty making radio contact with their base. But at last, when they had almost despaired of rescue, they were given a new rendezvous. Two helicopters closed in under powerful fighter cover. One by one, they were winched into the
sky and away to safety. ‘We were over the moon – we felt as if we’d won the war,’ said Anderson.
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He now began to plan his next operation. His American parent organisation at Taegu was expanding fast. He was excited by the idea of creating long-term bases deep in the mountains of North Korea, from which his teams could sally forth to attack communications and dumps. Above all, they would seek to create an indigenous resistance movement in North Korea, on the familiar lines of the French maquis. This time, he would be more ambitious. He planned to take twenty men, to form a nucleus for a guerrilla army. In a mood of high excitement, he and his reinforced team prepared to drop once more into North Korea: ‘The very fact of belonging to a “secret” operational unit is exciting in itself,’ Anderson wrote, with frank delight. ‘All active-minded men the world over are boys at heart, be they generals or privates, and there are few things more stimulating or conducive to high morale and self-confidence than the knowledge that you have been chosen to do something about which others know nothing and which calls for a high standard of efficiency, integrity and courage. Basically, I suppose, it is conceit – a buccaneer complex.’
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That conceit was soon to be brutally shattered. But for the time being, they revelled in their fantasies. Anderson concocted one plan, to find and kidnap a Russian adviser. Colonel Magee was appalled: ‘My God, Bill, don’t do that for heaven’s sake!’ he said. ‘I admit it seems quite feasible, but Washington would go mad if they suddenly found a Russian officer on their hands.’ To Anderson’s consternation, only a few days before they planned to leave, he received new orders from Eighth Army: no British or American personnel were to engage in operations behind enemy lines. In future, these would be conducted exclusively by Koreans. But Anderson drove to headquarters, and persuaded them to allow himself and his British and American colleagues to go. There was another setback when the shortage of aircraft compelled Anderson to reduce his Korean contingent for the operation to fourteen men.
The remaining six, desolate, signed a petition in their own blood, demanding to be allowed to go. But the space problem was insoluble.

There was a momentary embarrassment at the airfield from which they departed, when the guerrilla party queued at the Red Cross canteen for coffee and doughnuts. ‘Say, are those Koreans in your party?’ asked the Red Cross helper behind the counter. ‘Well, I’m sorry, we don’t serve Koreans.’ The Koreans smiled sadly. The whole party took off without their coffee. They landed this time in the centre of North Korea, near Isang-ni. One of the Koreans, John, a veteran of the earlier operation, was severely injured in the drop. Uneasily, Anderson watched a North Korean patrol moving across the valley near their position. Then a young, ragged Korean peasant walked into the midst of their group. He told them that the police had seen their parachutes the previous night. He said that he himself was hiding from conscription for the army. Anderson’s party debated what to do with the boy. Eventually the Englishman let him go, with the promise of food if he brought some of his friends to help them. This, after all, was what they had come to do – to recruit North Korean sympathisers for a local guerrilla force.

The boy, named Lim, led Anderson to a nearby valley where he pointed out some hundreds of North Korean and Chinese soldiers bivouacked. Anderson thought the concentration big enough to justify an air strike. He radioed the co-ordinates of his position back to base. Sure enough, within a few hours aircraft strafed and rocketed the area. Then they let Lim go.

Now matters rapidly began to go wrong. The parachute landing of a reinforcement party was botched – they were dropped two miles from their landing zone. A supply drop resulted only in smashed equipment and radios littered across the mountainside. Anderson requested a helicopter to take himself out, to return to base to grip the situation. The helicopter came under fire as they climbed away, but Anderson felt confident that his party’s location would not be discovered. He returned to Taegu to find that a new draft of Korean recruits had arrived to be trained. Anderson personally
checked the parachutes and cargo nets for that night’s supply drop.

But three days later, disastrous news came. In a garbled radio message from his British wireless operator in the field, Anderson learned that his party had been surprised by the communists, and was heavily engaged. That night, Anderson overflew the area in an American aircraft, and established voice contact with his party. They told him that the situation was hopeless. ‘It’s no good, sir,’ said the voice of the Northumberland Fusilier on the ground. ‘They’ve got us – we’ll try and make our way out as best we can. Over.’

Anderson urged the wireless operator to light a fire or otherwise show his position to a helicopter. But the Englishman said finally: ‘There’s just me and Sergeant Monks, sir. But he’s hurt and I can’t leave him. We’ll be all right, sir, but there is no place a chopper can put down here and I think the place is lousy with the bastards. I’ll stay here with the sergeant, we’ll be all right. Out.’

Neither the English Fusilier nor the American sergeant were ever heard from again. Wretched with the burden of responsibility and guilt, Anderson flew back.

Most of his party were killed. Ten days after Anderson lost contact with the group, two Koreans, his American Ranger officer and NCO walked into his office and saluted. They told a bitter story. In an act of criminal folly, a supply aircraft had arrived over their position in broad daylight, and dropped a string of parachutes which brought the communists hastening down upon them. When the party scattered, the four men had been able to make their escape. They walked south through the mountains, miraculously got through the communist lines, and swam the Imjin river to reach the American lines.

In the months that followed, a growing ruthlessness was evident in the American approach to covert operations in the north. No more Americans or British were to go, but there was an ample supply of Koreans. To his astonishment and dismay, Anderson found himself asked to train Koreans by a new American
commanding officer, to be parachuted into the North seven days after their induction.

‘Seven days!’ exclaimed Anderson. ‘Good God! I can’t even train them to shoot straight in that time, let alone give them parachute training and practice jumps.’

‘There won’t be any time for practice jumps, just ground training and weapons training. Sorry, but there it is – that’s the assignment. The air force know where to drop them.’

Anderson was told that this was to be a new scheme – dropping Koreans in pairs some fifty miles behind the lines, with orders to make their way back with whatever information they could gather: ‘That way we can cover a hell of an area and get some really good information.’ He smiled at Anderson. ‘You don’t seem too happy about it. What’s worrying you?’

‘How many do you think will get through, sir?’

‘Maybe four or five. Hell, it’s their war, too, isn’t it?’

Bitterly unhappy, Anderson accompanied the first party of Koreans to their drop zone: ‘Never before had I taken unprepared men into battle and now I was about to do something far worse. I was sending untrained men into the most frightening and lonely of battles – a battle within a battle in which one’s own mind becomes the field of conflict, where hope, discipline and courage must fight against loneliness, fear and panic.’
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The British officer asked to be relieved of further involvement in the programme. At the behest of a British intelligence officer serving under diplomatic cover at the Seoul Embassy, Anderson made some further attempts to run intelligence-gathering teams into North Korea from the island of Chodo. But after the loss of his surviving British officer and most trustworthy Korean during a Chinese raid on their base, he withdrew. Anderson was posted back to England, where for some months he worked on small boat operations in the Adriatic for the A19 intelligence organisation. They discussed and planned the setting up of a unit to aid prisoner escapes from North Korea, burying supplies and inflatable boats along the coast. But by now, the talks at Panmunjom seemed likely
to succeed. And by 1953, the heart had gone out of both American and British enthusiasm for covert operations in the North. There had been too many tragic accidents such as Anderson’s Operation Vixen.

The United Nations never established successful covert activities in North Korea. The Royal Marines’ coastal raiding parties could inflict minor pinpricks on the enemy at small cost, with the heavy air and naval support they could call upon. But any operation which demanded the support of local North Koreans proved doomed to failure. The communist control of the countryside was too ruthlessly effective. From the spring of 1951, even the peasants of North Korea understood how very unlikely it was that the UN forces would ever reoccupy their country. The realities of power, or rather, of personal survival, demanded obedience to the regime of Kim Il Sung. It remains difficult, today, to believe that the information brought south by the small numbers of South Korean agents who survived justified the cynical squandering of so many lives by the various intelligence organisations in the South.

Yet as the Korean War progressed, like the Japanese economy and the regime of Chiang Kai Shek, the Central Intelligence Agency became one of its principal beneficiaries. Korea put the CIA on the map. Its principal officers were eager, ruthless, and ambitious for their organisation. They acquired control of forty old C-47s in the markings of CAT – ‘Civil Air Transport’, a forerunner of Air America and Air Continental which they sponsored in Vietnam. Their network of offices and bases extended throughout Japan and Korea. Hans Tofte even sponsored the shooting of a full-scale propaganda feature film in Japan, about the experience of Japanese prisoners in the hands of the Soviets, which became a local box-office success.

Later in the war, the CIA attempted ever more elaborate and ambitious operations. Hans Tofte claimed to have organised the interception of a Norwegian freighter loaded with medical supplies
donated to the Chinese by the Indian government. Nationalist Chinese gunboats with CIA agents aboard boarded the ship north of Formosa, seized its cargo, and left the freighter adrift, apparently the victim of piracy. According to one historian of the operation, ‘the nurses, doctors, and other medical personnel were never heard of again, and he [Tofte] does not speculate as to their fate.’
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Yet such dubious adventures plainly impressed somebody. Resources continued to be lavished upon the Agency’s Far East operation. A hydrofoil was built to its specifications in a Japanese yard, to which a junk upper deck was fitted, to provide a high-speed covert landing vessel. A succession of Korean teams were dispatched to try to contact American prisoners in the Yalu camps. All failed. A major base was established on one of the islands in Wonsan Harbour, from which to land parties on the mainland. A technique was developed for snatching men off the ground from a moving aircraft, which was employed to recover a handful of agents from North Korea. But the sum result from all these efforts was pathetically small.

The CIA operation, as its veterans readily admitted later, was disturbingly amateur. They experimented with recruiting some ex-Rangers from Fort Benning. But they discovered – in another foretaste of Indochina – that by the time these men had grasped the job, they were due for rotation back to the United States. The CIA’s first generation of direct recruits were young and green; many had volunteered in order to avoid being drafted into the army. Perhaps most serious of all, the quality of the intake of Koreans was poor. CIA recruiters constantly trawled the refugee camps, searching out North Koreans sufficiently motivated to return to their country. But the drop-out rate in training was very high. And the casualty rate among agents dispatched into North Korea was appalling, perhaps 80 per cent. The Agency’s officers also chafed under the difficulties of gaining access to the navy’s ships and the air force’s planes for moving its men and supplies. This problem was increasingly solved by the creation of their own sea and air fleets.