Crash Report

Murder! cried the Red Chinese government. "Murder deliberately engineered by secret-agent organizations of the U.S. and Chiang Kai-shek!" Retorted the U.S. State Department: "Preposterous." The Chinese Communists had chartered an Air-India plane (fee $20,000) to take part of their delegation to the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. The four-engined Constellation flew in to Hong Kong from Bangkok on a regular flight, disembarked its passengers, and refueled. During the 80 minutes it stood on the airfield, it was ringed with security guards. Then the charter passengers were whisked in past customs directly to the plane. Chief among the three Chinese delegates were Huang Tso-mei, head of the official New China News Agency in Hong Kong and rated one of the Communists' top agents by Hong Kong police, and Shih Chih-ang, No. 2 man of Peking's chief foreign purchasing agency. Among other passengers, five listed as Chinese newsmen were actually (according to Western intelligence) unsung but important Communist propaganda and intelligence agents. The plane took off. A few hours later, it crashed into the South China Sea 250 miles east of Singapore. Without waiting for details, India's Prime Minister Nehru dispatched a message of concern to Peking: "This disaster has some very unusual features. Something must have happened suddenly. There must be a full inquiry." Peking did not wait, either. Even before the delegation left, said the Foreign Ministry, the government had learned of a "sinister plot ... to assassinate the members of the Chinese delegation, headed by Premier Chou En-lai and to sabotage the Afro-Asian Conference," and had warned the British to take special precautions. The Communist government charged the British with "heavy responsibility." The British formally rejected the charge, insisted that they had been warned only against the possibility of Nationalist demonstrations, not sabotage. Therefore no special measures had been taken to guard the plane itself, which was serviced by the regular Chinese crews at the airport. But, the British contended, the possibility of sabotage was "extremely remote." Only three survivors, all Indians, were fished out of the sea. Engineer A. S. Karnik, taken aboard the British frigate Dampier, gave the first authentic explanation of the crash: a hydraulic fire in the port wing. The plane broke into three pieces when it hit the sea. This sounded more like a common accident than sabotage. In their first broadcast, long before any survivors had been picked up, the Communists had said that the plane exploded in mid-air--the same kind of wild report that crash investigators on the world's airlines encounter after most crackups. But Peking, which knows a propaganda windfall when it sees one, grabbed its chance, without even waiting for the facts to be established.

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