Free Republic

Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots. In opening up about the 1952 debacle, the CIA is finding ways to use it as a teaching tool. Mistakes of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and paramilitary officers taking on al-Qaida and other terrorist targets. At the center of the story are two eager CIA paramilitary officers...

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) - A CIA pilot killed in an ambush by Chinese communists 53 years ago has been buried in his mother's grave, a year after military investigators found his remains and identified them. Robert Snoddy was 31 when he was shot down on a clandestine mission in Manchuria in 1952. A last wish of Snoddy's mother was that no marker be placed on her grave until her son came home. A stone with the names of both mother and son will mark the long-delayed reunion. "He's home, and it's not a time to be sad anymore," Roberta Lee...