Mission to Peking

In Peking last week, a slim, well-tailored Swede, representing the collective conscience of the United Nations, wrestled with the masters of China for the liberties of eleven U.S. airmen, jailed by the Communists as "spies." To some, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold's mission was a humiliation: traveling halfway around the world to beg justice for innocent men. But in eleven U.S. cities, from Redding, Calif. (the home of 22-year-old Air Gunner Daniel Schmidt) to Lewisburg, Pa. (the home of Pilot William H. Baumer), the families of the airmen thought only of the chance that, perhaps, he might succeed.

Hammarskjold's instructions, laid down by a U.N. majority of 47 to 5, were to make "continuing and unremitting efforts" to liberate the airmen and "all other captured personnel of the U.N. command, still detained" in violation of the Korean armistice. "Our prayers go with you," said U.N. Delegate Henry Cabot Lodge as the Secretary General's plane took off. In England, where he picked up Professor Humphrey Waldock, Oxford's ranking expert on international law, Dag Hammarskjold was advised by Sir Anthony Eden to stick closely to the P.W. issue and fend off all Chinese efforts to bargain for U.N. recognition. "To release these men would simply undo the latest of a series of acts of bad faith," wrote the Daily Telegraph summarizing Eden's position. "It would not accomplish the moral rehabilitation of Communist China."

Hammarskjold's next stop was Paris, where French Premier Pierre Mendes-France went out to Orly Field to meet him.* The two men chatted for an hour and Mendes-France commended this "mission of peace."

Advice from Nehru. Then came India, where Jawaharlal Nehru was conspicuously not at the airport when Hammarskjold's R.A.F. Argonaut touched down. Nehru, who claims to have arranged Peking's "acceptance" of the U.N. mission, was piqued by the inclusion of a Pakistani instead of an Indian adviser in Hammarskjold's entourage. Next day Hammarskjold had an interview with Nehru, who told him that by passing its "unfortunate resolution" the U.N. "had again crossed the 38th parallel." Unless Hammarskjold showed "humility" and was prepared to widen his discussions to embrace "a wider settlement," counseled Nehru, he was probably wasting his time.

Next it was China's turn to welcome the world's No. 1 international bureaucrat. On the way to Peking by plane, Hammarskjold paused at Hankow to meet, of all people, his nephew Peder Hammarskjold, charge d'affaires at the Swedish embassy to Red China.* He arrived in the Chinese capital in sub-zero weather.

Chow with Chou. Chou En-lai gave a cocktail party which Peking radio described as "proceeding in a friendly atmosphere." Later that night, he and tired Dag Hammarskjold dined in private. Talks began next morning in the ornate Hsi Hwa (West Splendor) hall of Peking's Forbidden City. Hammarskjold and Chou, flanked by their advisers, sat on a damask sofa, interspersing their legal arguments with sips of jasmine-scented tea, served in eggshell porcelain cups.

For three days the talks continued. All this time, Radio Peking rigidly excluded mention of the objective of Hammarskjold's visit, emphasizing instead that Premier Chou En-lai had graciously consented to talk to the "head of the U.N." about "problems relating to peace." Even this vague reference came late in the Peking newscasts long after such significant items as the weekly statistics of pig-iron output, the news of trade-union clubs, and the results of semester examinations in Peking's high schools -Red China's way of showing its contempt for the promptings of justice that had led 47 nations to send the Secretary General on a 12,000-mile mission.

*Mendes had his reasons for soliciting Hammarskjold's visit. "It showed that respectable people will still talk to us," said a French Foreign Office spokesman. *Sweden recognized Red China in January 1950; Dag Hammarskjold became Deputy Foreign Minister nearly a year later.

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