by Thomas G. Parker, MD with Beverly Ballaro, PhD
In the winter of 1950, during my second year of surgical training at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston, I volunteered to join the Air Force and soon received orders to report for active duty upon completion of the training year. Then, unexpectedly, one of my surgical professors, Reginald Smithwick, summoned me to his office-an unusual event of either great or terrible implication.
The Korean War had erupted in the summer of 1950, just five years after the end of World War II. The United States found itself, once again, faced with an urgent military situation and an armed forces doctor shortage. Younger physicians in the reserves were called up to active service shortly after the onset of battle, and the Doctor Draft Act quickly became law.
When I received the summons to my professor's office, I could not have guessed that I was about to be swept up in these events. As it turned out, a fellow academic surgeon in Washington, DC, had made an inquiry of Smithwick: Did he know of any young surgeons who might be interested in special, classified duty with the Department of Defense? Well, I thought, when Smithwick made his pitch, why not? I was 25, single, and adventuresome.
The next day I met with a Dr. Gibson for an interview. The former gastroenterologist displayed a sharp sense of humor and yet a businesslike demeanor, giving the impression that he conducted all his endeavors with the utmost dedication and professionalism. Gibson revealed few details except to inform me, rather cryptically, that I would be taking on a medical, classified assignment with the Department of Defense and that he would be in touch shortly. I was instructed not to mention our meeting to anyone, and we exchanged no written information beyond names and phone numbers. One call later, roundtrip plane tickets arrived for a prearranged rendezvous with Gibson in our nation's capital.
Upon my arrival in Washington, Gibson drove me to a Navy building on E Street, which he identified as Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. I had never even heard of the CIA. Over the next 48 hours I underwent exhaustive testing, orientation, interviews, polygraphs, and a medical checkup. I received repeated reminders not to reveal my new affiliation to anyone, family included.
Not long afterward, my Air Force assignment orders mysteriously changed, and I received new orders instructing me to report to what turned out to be a mythical Pentagon office. This "office" was actually just a mail drop. The change in orders was my last written communication. After that, we conducted all business by telephone.
In the summer of 1951 I did indeed report to a new, secret life in Washington, where "the Company" made things move quickly and smoothly. The perks included a lieutenant colonel equivalent GS-19 salary grade: the rather princely sum of $1,800 monthly. This was no small comfort for a guy who had previously been earning $25 a month.
Tricks of the Trade
The CIA, then in existence as an agency for only two years as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services, labored under huge growing pressure from the Korean War. Many Ivy League graduates were secretly recruited, but I was the only new doctor there as far as I could tell. For three months, we underwent eight hours of training a day in security, strategies, geopolitical issues, clandestine techniques, and assorted secret tricks. We learned how to set up a safe house, create a mail drop, and carry out a "dead drop," whereby a document is hidden at an unmonitored site for subsequent pickup by another agent. We were taught how to copy a key on a wet blotter, to ascertain whether a door had been opened by closing a paper match in its hinge, and to malinger. My favorite malingering sleight called for us to hide some venapuncture or animal blood in the mouth, then, when a pressing situation arose, to writhe and spew blood on the nearest enemy.
This was serious business with a bright, highly motivated crowd. And, of course, the training marked a dramatic change from my surgical training with its emphasis on learning to help people rather than to deceive them. We were eventually team-tested to execute some of our new skills in downtown Washington; one final drill tasked us to obtain a certain document from a particular commercial office. We were warned that the CIA would deny any knowledge of us if we got caught. The police arrested one team but its members were quickly released by a federal judge's mysterious order.
War Games
I volunteered to go to Korea for one year because assignments at other stations usually lasted two years. I was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia for a fortnight, where I had the dubious honor of participating in the jump school, hand-to-hand combat, and weapons management courses-not what I had envisioned as part of my medical mission. I persuaded the authorities that I did not need the full tour, yet I still learned to shoot a .45-caliber revolver and 30 mm carbine, to carry a 100-pound backpack, to eliminate an enemy with a knife by thrusting rather than slashing, and to make a proper landing after bailing out of an airplane. I also learned six different ways to kill a man using only my bare hands.
At Fort Benning, a soldier or two always seemed to be clinging helplessly to the jump towers at some high spot, with parachutes drooping against the 250-foot-tall structures. They were the unlucky souls who had drifted the wrong way when released from the free-fall training towers. A rescue sergeant always seemed to be on his way up to help disentangle the men and get them down. No one earned merit points for tower hanging.
One of my most memorable moments took place one day as I was walking under the beginners' jump platform, where soldiers were engaged in making their very first jump. They wore parachute harnesses rigged to cables that rolled them downhill to a soft landing. On one end of the platform stood a few young servicemen shouting at the top of their lungs to the sergeant down below, "I'm a coward, a chicken-shit coward! I balked, I didn't jump!" They kept repeating this mantra, their humiliating penalty for hesitating to obey a jump command.
A Long Way from Home
Just before Christmas of 1951, I arrived at a U.S. Air Force base in Atsugi, Japan, where the CIA exclusively occupied a high-security, isolated compound. The compound housed uniformed personnel from all the services, mostly officer grade. Although no signs announced a CIA presence, the diversity of personnel, mix of uniforms, presence of civilians and women, and absence of Japanese personnel suggested that it was not just an American Air Force base, as the entrance sign claimed. Assorted aircraft were on the ground, as were Civil Air Transport personnel and planes. The next day I flew to Korea.
The Korean War was the first "international" conflict sanctioned by the United Nations, which officially endorsed the use of troops to repel the northern invasion into the southern part of the country. Some 25 nations sent personnel, all of whom served under the United Nations flag. American troops rubbed shoulders with Greek, Belgian, Turkish, British, French, and Australian soldiers. The Swedes ran a hospital; the Danes a hospital ship. In reality, however, it was mainly an American effort, as evidenced by some 37,000 Americans who died there. It was a unique war waged by diverse, free men, and we learned much from each other.
My new station, Tong Ne On Chong, was located just outside of Pusan at a Korean hot spring resort, which had been commandeered and now bore an Air Force "cover." It had a tiny medical unit that had been started by a bewildered Navy doctor who was all too happy to leave. With it came a fine, cautious Korean lad, Lee Won Woo, then 23 years of age, without whom I could not have done much. He had been General William Dean's houseboy when the North Koreans came south, pushing the general ahead of them. General Dean was in command of the early, overwhelmed American forces that made a stand finally at the Pusan perimeter. Woo was reserved at first, but we soon earned each other's respect. We were together about 20 hours a day for a year, and we found that we shared a remarkably similar philosophy even though we came from hugely different societies and faiths.
My job was to provide medical support to everyone from household staff to covert agents operating in North Korea. We supported a number of clandestine training camps headed by Republic of Korea (ROK) senior officers. We all were feeling our way and it was uphill work. I was called one night on the field phone by a young CIA case officer asking how many morphine syrettes it would take to kill a Korean trainee who was going to be buried alive. This Korean man had been convicted of being a double agent. We guessed six, and the traitor was "mercifully" buried with morphia. I also witnessed an ROK commander, in view of all his trainees, formally execute a double agent with a pistol shot to the head. This was all a long way from New England and I lost 20 pounds in the first two months.
"The Company" had full access to everything, including an entire Far East airline that it later was revealed to have owned. My support from Washington was superb, and more than once I had to use a medical hot line (my pseudonym was Andrew J. McElfresh, taken out of the Dublin phone book). I had to deport an older full colonel who was behaving dementedly, a Navy lad who was gay, and a lieutenant colonel who fractured his femur during a jump he had been expressly warned not to make.
I also rendered medical care for our ROK commandos, who were sometimes injured while blowing up bridges or making parachute landings. They arrived by truck, helicopter, or ocean luggers in strange ways and at strange times. We had dispensaries at our U.S. and ROK training sites, where we treated common health problems. Major trauma required a hospital and I had top secret authority to admit anyone-including Koreans-to any U.S. facility. At odd hours, this took some convincing of medical duty officers at U.S. Army hospitals and U.S. Navy hospital ships. None of these facilities was near the combat zone.
Once I did an appendectomy on the commanding officer of an island training camp. I operated out in the open sun the assistance of a corpsman and instruments boiled by wood fire. Thank goodness, the spinal worked. When I revisited that camp, you would have thought I was the president of Korea.
Spies Awry
The intelligence community included some fascinating people. One U.S. Air Force sergeant had a personal cadre of about 20 Korean men whom you did not want to cross. They manned two eight-ton native fishing boats off the eastern coast on the China Sea. Below deck, they hid a destroyer's firepower with recoilless 80 mm cannons and weapons of all kinds. They would sail north, change the flag at the 42nd parallel, and proceed to cut telephone cables and blow up train bridges. Then there was a British Major Kitkat (clearly not his name), who would appear with a wounded man or two (we never asked questions) and then disappear, only to repeat his mission in a month or so.
But sometimes events did not go as planned, such as when a CIA case officer and his pilot went down in a "sterile"-that is, unidentifiable-C-47 airplane deep inside China. They were on a top-secret mission to pick up a defecting communist Chinese official as part of Operation Skyhook, a highly classified CIA maneuver used to snatch people from the ground by slow, low-flying aircraft.
In this maneuver, a ground team would stake two 20-foot-tall "goalposts" joined by a nylon snatch line. They would then affix a snatch line to a harness that the escapee wore while standing with his back to the flight pattern. The plane would fly in low and slow enough so that its grasping, self-tightening hook would sweep between the poles, snag the lift line, and whisk the escapee into the air. To prevent G forces from tearing the man apart, the system relied on a sensing wench spooled with 800 feet of nylon rope of good stretching capacity, which immediately reeled out against the resistance. Then it would slowly reverse and the man would be reeled up into the plane.
Following the crash, the 21-year-old CIA case officer was a prisoner for 20 years in China. On my return to the United States, I had the awkward duty of informing his widowed mother that he was dead. We did not know, in fact, whether he was dead or alive or even what had happened. We simply stuck to our cover story of a plane going down in the China sea. Until his capture was known, a U.S. submarine dutifully waited near a previously designated Chinese land point on the last day of each month, as per the agent's Escape and Evasion Plan-another CIA specialty. When President Nixon opened diplomatic relations with China, the case officer was released. He lives today in Connecticut with a Chinese wife-truly a fine man and unsung hero, who has never written about the misadventure that cost him 20 years of freedom.
Close Encounters
Part of my job was to care for U.S. personnel who were, at times, a rowdy bunch. Their complaints ranged from lacerations to fractures to sexually transmitted diseases. One of my great triumphs was getting a 50-by-25-foot winterized clinic built on the nearby United Nations Civil Assistance Command compound by providing off-the-record treatment for an army quartermaster major for gonorrhea. I then traded two cases of medical Scotch for a winterizing kit, which allowed us to run the facility year-round. I was also able to find a Korean doctor and nurse to staff the clinic for Korean civilian patients, whose only access to medical care had been at the beleaguered local facilities.
I traveled to campsites mostly by bad dirt roads and wore out two jeeps during my tour. As we had lost some personnel in guerrilla actions, my superb aide, Lee Won Woo, always wore a sidearm, and I always carried a 9 mm Beretta in a hidden shoulder holster. And we certainly did not want to travel at night. In fact, the United Nations train making the journey between Pusan and Seoul was frequently targeted by guerrilla snipers during its overnight run. Passengers were actually assigned weapons for the trip, and each numbered seat had a designated 30 mm rifle stored in a wall rack. The train had three open, sandbagged stations at the front, middle, and rear, each equipped with a manned .50-caliber machine gun. I sometimes felt as though I had stumbled onto the set of a Hollywood Western.
One afternoon, some 40 miles from Pusan, Lee Won Woo and I were making our way home by jeep from a camp. We came upon a small farming community with a large U.S. military truck surrounded by 50 or more angry Koreans. One distraught citizen cradled a three-year-old child in his arms. Woo ordered the people to step back and told them that I was a doctor. When I confirmed that the child was dead, the four of us suddenly found ourselves in a menacing situation as the crowd closed in tighter around us. Without warning, Lee flipped out his .45-caliber revolver and fired two rounds into the air. The crowd backed away as I hustled the two GIs into the jeep. Lee rode shotgun while I drove until we reached a safe distance. I have no doubt that, tragically, this child had darted out into the path of the truck. I am indebted to my courageous aide, as were the unlucky corporal and private.
Coming in from the Cold
By the time I returned to the States after my year of service in Korea, the CIA had matured amazingly. It now has a complex medical support system. But I feel we helped give it a jump-start way back when. I was indeed happy to have survived this powerful experience and to resume my surgical training in August 1953. I was newly married and the future had never looked brighter.
Fifty years ago, I signed a contract, a copy of which I never owned, promising neither to publish nor to reveal any information about the CIA. After recently receiving clearance from the CIA allowing this article to go to press, I am delighted to be able to share my memories of this extraordinary adventure with my old friends and colleagues, who thought I was just behaving peculiarly back in 1951.
©
© Copyright 2002 Thomas G. Parker, MD with Beverly Ballaro, PhD
Beverly Ballaro is a freelance writer from Boston, MA
US Legacies Magazine 2003
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