Korean War's Ghost Pilots and Mystery Planes
Skepticism remains today. “Any ‘reports’ you may have heard or read about 86/84/80 attacks on U.S. aircraft are bogus,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Cleveland, who served as an F-86 pilot in Korea during 1952. “There was just one F-86 captured by the Communists after it crash landed in North Korea, and it was never made flyable. Now, there were indeed a few instances of F-86s starting to attack other 86s, thinking they were MiG-15s (they looked a lot alike from a distance), but when the attackers got close enough to recognize the ‘prey’ as fellow 86s, they broke off the attack. As a matter of fact, that happened to me,” said Cleveland.
Norm Kass, the former Pentagon official, also expressed reservations. “Soviet efforts to down an F-86 and bring it to Moscow for technical exploitation were handled through a program conducted with a tight veil of secrecy around it. It is not clear to me why the USSR would have risked exposure of the program and possible disclosure that its pilots were flying in U.S.-designed aircraft in a war that Moscow went out of its way to deny any participation in,” he told KorCon.
But neither Cleveland nor Kass had seen, or previously heard about, the Air Force accounts in this KorCon report. Evidence also suggests that more than one or even two F-86s, along with other aircraft types, were obtained by the Soviets. Some U.S. pilots were not skeptics; they had no doubt they’d spotted American aircraft being operated by the enemy.
“Experienced and reliable pilots of both fighter-interceptor wings have reported sighting F-86 type aircraft flying in formation with MIG-15s …,” noted an Air Force intelligence report. While some reports couched the identifications, for example calling an aircraft an F-86, F-84 or F-80 “type,” in other cases the intelligence reports were categorical. “At 0800 hours, four F-86s patrolling along the Yalu River north of the Suiho Reservoir observed two aircraft which separated over friendlies. One of the aircraft was definitely identified as an F-86 with yellow wing markings while the other appeared to be silver MIG with no markings.” (emphasis ours) The F-86 was last seen headed north toward enemy territory.”
In two attacks involving several aircraft over about five minutes, one U.S. F-86 sustained minor damage. “In both instances the attacking aircraft followed friendlies a sufficient length of time to make identification” that they were hostile American jets, according to the report. In one case, the “hostile” jet looked so convincing that an American pilot started to fly along with it, thinking it was his lost partner. “At 1245 hours, an F-86 flying south of the Suiho Reservoir reported being fired on by two F-86 type aircraft. This incident was observed by friendly’s wingman who had become separated and started to join these aircraft, believing them to be part of his flight,” said the report.
Even if the Soviets could fly a captured American jet, why would they risk it in combat? “(I)t would be in keeping with Soviet tactics to utilize an F-86 possessed by them to cause a psychological reaction of mistrust and uncertainty in the minds of U.S. fighter-interceptor pilots. This was believed to be an important consideration in the event that a hostile or any other F-86 should shoot down a friendly F-86,” noted a November 1952 intelligence report. Weeks after that writing, a Canadian F-86 pilot was shot down by what he claimed, after returning from a long stint as a POW, was another F-86. If an F-86 was the culprit, it is highly possible it was a case of “friendly fire” rather than Soviet subterfuge; the documents claim an investigation was conducted with unknown results.
How many U.S. aircraft did the Russians capture? Official U.S. records (see www.koreanconfidential for a link) show enough F-80s, F-84s and F-86s crashed in enemy territory or simply went missing to provide the parts for “hostile” versions. Russian veterans interviewed by American investigators in the 1990s also indicated Moscow got far more than a single U.S. jet. A former senior Soviet officer reported seeing a jet crash land in February or March 1951 and the Soviets grab it and its pilot.
The recovering of an F-86 in October 1951 has been well documented (see www.koreanconfidential.com for the link). Another veteran said he saw the Soviets capture two F-86s that were forced down in 1952, one early in the year and another in the spring or early summer. Georgiy Matevosovich Dzhargarov, a Soviet assigned to China, told U.S. investigators he stood right next to an F-84 that landed and was captured, along with its pilot, in June 1953. The pilot may have been taken away by North Koreans. KorCon reviewed Pentagon data for F-84s lost in June 1953. Some were seen destroyed, but the F-84G piloted by 1st Lt. Stewart Held on June 10 “faded from ground (radar) scope during night armed reconnaissance mission,” and was not seen again, according to Air Force records.
Russian records allude to much other equipment and wreckage being collected.
Ghost Pilots
Whether the Soviets actually used their captured technology in Korea, or shipped all of it to Russia for engineering as is now accepted, aircraft technology is worth far more when combined with pilots who know the plane inside and out, along with its uses, tactics and limitation. The records reviewed by KorCon make clear the Russians kept some American prisoners and have information on many more. One of the reports – authored by an exceptionally tenacious and meticulous government contractor named Dr. Paul Cole - also paints a picture of Russian duplicity and Pentagon sluggishness in the search for these men.
As Downes, the family group leader, puts it, in recent years the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) has generally given up pushing cases of men known or suspected to have been alive in communist hands (both in Russia and China, where DPMO has a more recent relationship) in exchange for a focus on human remains at known crash sites that both sides can agree upon. “It is officially in the bones business. That is good. Closure is being found for some. The critical eye, however, notes that this has become the sole focus. Efforts to learn the fate of Korean War missing men not already on American soil as remains have gone up in smoke,” he commented.
Making the search for answers more difficult over the years has been the Pentagon’s lack of follow-up analysis and the fact that the “USAF suppressed or destroyed evidence which showed American aircraft in Chinese airspace (during the Korean War),” according to the Cole document. American pilots were ordered not to cross the Yalu River into Chinese airspace except in limited circumstances – a political restriction that provided great advantage to the enemy and frustrated some American pilots. Interviews by Cole and other information show the desire to shoot down MiGs often outweighed orders from the top; pilots made cross-border forays and kept them secret to the occasional extent of destroying gun camera footage and fabricating the location of MIG shoot-downs and U.S. losses. (See KorCon’s YouTube channel for video of a mission and dogfights involving pilots of the 5th Fighter Interceptor Wing and their commander Col. Francis Gabreski, who reportedly took some of his men on secret Chinese missions.)
Such was the fabrication of wartime documents that in some cases the Soviet records appear more accurate than those of the U.S. Air Force, an awful irony given Moscow’s stonewalling in recent years. During one period when Cole was able to root out documents the Russians had withheld, DPMO failed to keep up with his findings and then dropped the project. Records make clear the current Russian government is withholding more than it has provided. A glaring omission is the refusal to provide files from the MGB (the precursor to the KGB), which could reveal the truth about dozens or even hundreds of American POW/MIAs.
Even the information Russia has provided sometimes reveals duplicity. A Russian official provided information on Maj. Charles McDonough in the form of two documents cut apart and pasted into one. Cole was able to find both original documents and discovered the Russians had edited them together to give “the misleading impression that McDonough died while being '’evacuated’ from the crash site when in fact McDonough died nearly two weeks after the crash. In that time McDonough had been interrogated by Russian forces, been transported from China to North Korea, and apparently died while being transported to an unknown destination by the North Koreans with a Soviet political officer escort.” McDonough, according to Soviet records, acted heroically before he allegedly died in communist hands under murky circumstances Moscow has yet to clarify.
