MC Dikshit, who co-piloted the Air India Flight 300 Constellation Kashmir Princess that fell into the sea after a mid-air bomb blast on April 11, 1955, died in Delhi on December 5 at the age of 105 after a prolonged illness. And with him, the world lost the last of the witnesses to a gruesome CIA conspiracy. The Kashmir Princess, a small four-engine propeller-driven Lockheed, was sent by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to take Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai to Jakarta for the historic Bandung conference.
Sporting a Ho Chi Minh beard, the frail Dikshit lived in East Delhi’s Samachar Apartments and shopped in the local market even during his last days.
Even in his sunset days, Dikshit was reluctant to talk about what happened in 1955. However, his colleague Anant S Karnik told the story in a book.
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| M C Dikshit |
But the deputy prime minister Vallabhbhai Patel, who was suspicious of Nehru's bonhomie with China, wrote to him in December 1950:
We have to consider what the new situation now faces us as a result of the disappearance of Tibet, as we know it, and the expansion of China up to our gates. Throughout history, we have seldom been worried about our northeast frontier. The Himalayas has been regarded as an impenetrable barrier against threats from the north. We had friendly Tibet which gave us no trouble. The Chinese were divided. They had their domestic problems and never bothered us about our frontiers." (1)
Patel died soon on December 15th and Nehru continued to dovetail China. India officially recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet through the 1954 agreement on Trade and Intercourse between India and the Tibet Region of China. But India had in effect recognized Tibet as part of China in September 1952, when it decided to change the status of its mission in Lhasa to that of a Consulate General.
The preamble of the 1954 agreement included the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence, known as the Panchsheel Treaty.
But, at the homefront, China was facing a nuclear threat from the U.S. in the aftermath of the first Taiwan Strait Crisis.
Taiwan Strait Crisis
The First Taiwan Strait Crisis was a brief armed conflict between the Communist People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Nationalist Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. The conflict focused on several groups of islands in the Taiwan Strait that were held by the ROC but were located only a few miles from mainland China. The crisis began when the PRC shelled the ROC-held island of Kinmen (Quemoy). Later, the PRC seized the Yijiangshan Islands from the ROC. The ROC then abandoned the Tachen Islands (Dachen Islands), which were evacuated by the navies of the ROC and the US.
In August 1954, the Nationalists placed 58,000 troops on Kinmen and 15,000 troops on Matsu. The ROC began building defensive structures and the PRC began shelling ROC installations on Kinmen. Zhou Enlai responded with a declaration on 11 August 1954, that Taiwan must be "liberated." He dispatched the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to the area, and it began shelling both Kinmen and the Matsu Islands.
Despite warnings from the U.S. against any attacks on the Republic of China; five days before the signing of the Manila pact, the PLA unleashed a heavy artillery bombardment of Kinmen on September 3, during which two American military advisers were killed. In November, the PLA bombed the Tachen Islands. This renewed Cold War fears of Communist expansion in Asia at a time when the PRC was not recognized by the U.S. Chiang Kai-shek's government was supported by the U.S. because the ROC was part of the U.S. policy of containment of communism.
On 12 September 1954, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the use of nuclear weapons against mainland China. President Eisenhower resisted the pressure. However, on 2 December 1954, the U.S. and the ROC agreed to the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which did not apply to islands along the Chinese mainland.
The PLA seized the Yijiangshan Islands on 18 January 1955. Fighting continued in nearby islands off the coast of Zhejiang, as well as around Kinmen and the Matsu Islands in Fujian. On 29 January, the Formosa Resolution was approved by both houses of the U.S. Congress authorizing Eisenhower to use U.S. forces to defend the ROC and its possessions in the Taiwan Strait against armed attack. The U.S. Navy then assisted the Nationalists in evacuating their forces from the Tachen Islands.
In February, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned the U.S. against using nuclear weapons, but in March, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated publicly that the U.S. was seriously considering a nuclear strike. In response, the NATO foreign ministers warned at a meeting of the alliance against such action. In late March, U.S. Admiral Robert B. Carney said that Eisenhower is planning "to destroy Red China's military potential. The PRC backed down in the face of American nuclear brinksmanship and in light of the lack of willingness by the Soviet Union to threaten nuclear retaliation for an attack on the PRC.
Filled with internal squabbles, China was weak and Nehru was the champion of the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa. The Panchsheel came to form the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was born when leaders from 29 newly independent Asian and African countries met in the Indonesian resort city of Bandung from April 18 to 24, 1955.
The previous year, 1954, the US had set up a body to help “direct the thinking” of poor countries on the other side of the world.
American political operatives travelled to Asia to pull together a group called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, described as a political-military alliance of states to "contain communism". In practice, it was a body designed to foster loyalty to the US and create negative feelings towards groups associated with socialism or communism.
But Indonesia’s Sukarno, leader of the world’s fifth most populous country, responded by organizing a group of home-grown Asian voices: the Bandung Conference. Asian leaders who signed up to attend the Indonesian meeting were in favour of a doctrine of neutralism as the logical default position of the developing world.
From the US administration’s point of view, neutralism was unacceptable. The antipathy of CIA deputy director Frank Wisner towards Sukarno and Zhou Enlai was well known. Asia contained more than 50 per cent of the world’s population – it was unthinkable that it should lean toward socialism or communism.
In the allied-US territory of Taiwan, leaders feared that Zhou Enlai’s peace initiatives (including the cultivating of good relationships with British leaders, such as Hong Kong’s Governor Alexander Grantham) meant that it had become conceivable that China would one day join the United Nations. That had to be prevented.
Amidst its fruit orchards, Dutch-built canals, and colonial bungalows, it was Indonesia's Sukarno who played host to an array of leaders, including the mercurial Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, Egypt's firebrand Prime Minister Gamal Abdul Nasser, Sir John Kotelawala of Ceylon, Pakistan's Prime Minister Muhammad Ali Bogra, and Burma's Premier U Nu.
China's Zhou Enlai was also there, invited at Nehru's insistence.
The explosion inside
The plane took off on the night of April 11, 1955, from Hong Kong's Kai Tuk Airport, but without Zhou Enlai and his senior colleagues. China had gotten wind of the CIA plot. But, Li Hing, in The Truth Behind the Kashmir Princess Incident, records that Zhou had delayed his travel due to health reasons. (2) Xinhua reported in 2005 that Zhou was forced to change his schedule for an appendicitis excision.
Five hours after the takeoff, Kashmir Princess exploded at a height of 18,000 feet. Around 09:25 GMT, while cruising at FL180, a muffled explosion was heard and smoke entered the cabin.
An instant later, the pilots saw flames streaming from behind the number three engine on the right wing. Smoke began to fill the cockpit. As the captain shut down and feathered the number three engine, he saw too that the fire warning light for the baggage compartment was illuminated.
A fire in the cargo hold, a fire on the wing, and smoke in the cockpit were extraordinary, life-threatening emergencies. As the captain pointed the plane’s nose down toward the sea, he hoped to ditch the plane into the water so that the survivors could escape in life rafts. A distress call was transmitted, declaring the airliner’s position over the Natuna Islands, in Indonesia.
Moments later, the radio went dead as the electrical system in the aeroplane began to fail, along with other critical systems as the fire spread below.
During the descent hydraulic failure occurred, followed by an electrical failure. A ditching was planned, but dense smoke entered the cockpit. The aircraft struck the water's surface with the right wingtip and crashed. Rescuers arriving at the scene discovered that it had broken into three parts on impact.
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| Kashmir Princess |
All except three crew members — Dikshit, Pathak and Karnik — were killed. Captain D K Jatar remained in his seat and supervised the rescue operations. Air hostess Gloria Berry kept her calm and distributed seat belts to the passengers risking her own life. Jatar and air hostess Gloria Berry courageously saved the passengers from the falling plane.
Gloria Berry had pleaded with Jatar for him to jump and save his own life, but he knew that this was his plane to man till the end and as the duty of a pilot he did that without hesitation. Gloria remained with him till the end. When the wreckage of the aircraft was recovered during the investigation, Jatar’s body was found slumped on his chair in the cockpit.
Jatar and Gloria were awarded the Ashok Chakra, posthumously. They were the first civilians to be posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra.
Three members of the Chinese conference delegation, five Chinese journalists, one member of the Vietnamese delegation, one Polish journalist and one Austrian journalist died in the crash.
Three journalists were from the Xinhua news agency: Shen Jiantu, Huang Zuomei and Li Ping. Shen, who died at the age of 40, was the eldest, while Li was only 26.
The dead included a war hero, Raymond Wong Chok-Mui, who worked for the Chinese and the British against invading Japanese soldiers in the 1940s.
The passengers were a decoy delegation of lesser cadres, according to a research paper, Target Zhou Enlai: The Kashmir Princess Incident of 1955 by Steve Tsang. The flight had been chartered by China.
Back in Delhi, Nehru invited the three survivors to Teen Murti House. But they politely declined any special honours.
The CIA-Taiwan plot
In July 2005, China declassified the records relating to the CIA conspiracy. It revealed that four days before the blast, on April 7, Zhou had changed his plans and decided to accept Burmese leader U Nu’s invitation to fly him from Rangoon to Jakarta. Zhou left China three days after the crash and flew to Rangoon. Nehru and Egypt’s Kamal Abdul Nasser also joined the team, from Rangoon to Bandung. However, the change in the flight was kept a secret with a view to confusing the U.S.
The de-classified Chinese documents revealed that Zhou Enlai had been tipped off about the upcoming bombing of the Kashmir Princess. Rather than cancel the flight and lodge a protest, he had assigned lower-level Chinese cadre officials onto the aeroplane as well as a set of journalists, as their presence would result in wider press coverage.
Three days later, Zhou would emerge in Jakarta, riding a wave of positive press coverage.
The full evaluation of the events determined that an explosion had taken place in the plane’s wheel. That, in turn, had ignited fires in the baggage compartment and on the right wing. The most obvious explanation was a bomb mixed in with the passenger bags.
To the investigators, it made no sense for one of the passengers to have brought a bomb on board in a suicidal bid to down the plane. The fact that originally Zhou Enlai was supposed to have been on board was strong circumstantial evidence pointing to an assassination attempt, but by whom?
Interviews were conducted with all of the ground crew, fuel truck staff and baggage handlers who might have had access to the plane at its points of origin as well as in Hong Kong, where the flight had made a stop en route to Jakarta. All of the personnel checked out and were proven to be innocent, except for one Hong Kong janitor working for an airport contractor. Quite simply, the man who investigators had originally identified as the lowly janitor, Chow Tse-Ming, was missing.
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| Zhou with Nehru in Bandung |
China’s investigations showed that the plot was masterminded by the CIA but executed by Kuomintang agents in Hong Kong. Chow, 34, a cleaner of Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company (HAECO) at the airport and a drug addict, had planted the explosive — a US-made MK-7 detonator — in the wheels of the aircraft. In the middle of the investigations by the British administration of Hong Kong, Chow was flown to safety in Taipei in an aeroplane owned by a CIA-funded firm.
Chow Tse-Ming was an alias; in fact, two other aliases for the same man were also uncovered. He used the name Chow Tse-ming in Cantonese and Zhou Ju in Mandarin. As well, in the days leading up to the bombing and crash of the plane, Chow had been spending a lot of money around Hong Kong.
Finally, his disappearance from Hong Kong was finally traced to him having departed quietly, hidden in the luggage compartment of a Civil Air Transport (CAT) flight to Taiwan. CAT was a frequent CIA contract air carrier, though it also flew other airline operations and cargo flights around the region. CAT was set up in Delaware to serve US interests in East Asia.
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| Wreckage of Kashmir Princess in sea |
Li Hong writes that deeply grieved by the crash, Zhou Enlai personally oversaw efforts to crack the case, dispatching trusted intelligence officer Xiong Xianghui to Hong Kong as his liaison with other intelligence outfits. (2) In June 1956, British authorities in Hong Kong arrested 44 Chiang Kai-shek spies, who were all expelled from the territory, and thus set free. On August 4, Zhou lodged a formal complaint with British authorities, saying "the British government still bears an inescapable international responsibility.
Zhou Enlai made enormous efforts to expose the destructive US-Taiwan plot. The Chinese Premier, in his talks with Henry Kissinger in 1971, described the incident of Kashmir Princess thus:(3)
When I went to the Bandung Conference in 1955 I almost lost my life. At that time we chartered an Indian plane, the “Kashmir Princess” from Hong Kong. Because Prime Minister U Nu wanted me to go with him, I went to Burma. He asked Nehru and Nasser to go with him and I changed my route at the last minute while the others went via Hong Kong. The saboteurs thought I was on the “Kashmir Princess” and set a time bomb on the plane. Just as the “Kashmir Princess” was about to reach Bandung, it exploded in mid-air and crashed into the sea.
India, together with authorities in Hong Kong, investigated the bombing. We have evidence that the bomb was placed by a Chinese who was brought over to Hong Kong, and I convinced the Indian Commissioner to go directly with our people to Hong Kong and demand from the Hong Kong authorities that they arrest that man. But such news leaks out, and the Indian told his Embassy, and just as we got to Hong Kong, that man flew to Taiwan.
In the years that followed, the Chinese asked the Nixon White House twice about the events of the plane’s bombing and whether the CIA had been involved, expecting that perhaps the attempt had been a joint CIA-KMT operation. In response to the second request, Kissinger quietly noted that the Chinese thought far too highly of the CIA’s actual abilities. Ultimately, the evidence was compelling but not conclusive that the Kuomintang Government of Taiwan had attempted to assassinate Zhou Enlai.
Kao reveals the plot
India deputed R N Kao to investigate the crash of the Kashmir Princess. Kao later became the founding chief of the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW).
Born in the holy city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh in 1918 to a Kashmiri Hindu Pandit family who migrated from Srinagar, Rameshwar Nath Kao joined the Indian Imperial Police, after clearing the civil services examination, in 1940. After completing the Master's degree in English Literature at Allahabad University, Kao, for a while, took up a job in a cigarette company floated by Pandit Jag Mohan Narain Mushran, the then Chief Justice of the Benaras State.
As a police officer, his first posting was in Kanpur as an Assistant Superintendent of Police. Kao was deputed to the Intelligence Bureau (IB) on the eve of Independence when it was being reorganised under B.N. Mullick. He was put in charge of VIP security, which included the task of looking after the security ring of Nehru. Sometime in the late 1950s, he was sent to Ghana to help the then government of prime minister Kwame Nkrumah set up an intelligence and security organisation there. But it was the Kashmir Princess investigation that made the reclusive Kao, a hero.
The three survivors, including Dikshit, were crucial to the investigation. The details of Kao's investigation have been recorded in a book, The War That Made R &AW by Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket.
At the Chinese premier’s office in Beijing, Kao’s one-on-one briefing with Zhou Enlai was held behind closed doors. Even though Kao was determined to be the neutral investigator on the case, Zhou advanced theories of a Taiwanese conspiracy behind the crash and urged Kao to expedite the investigation process and submit his findings.
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| Xinhua journalists who died in the crash |
His patience and rigour finally paid off in September 1955. A clear picture had started emerging of the events that had occurred on the day of the Kashmir Princess crash. Realising that he had finished his probe, Kao sent an official message to Zhou Enlai with his investigative results. In Beijing, Zhou immediately sent for Kao.
In a detailed briefing, Kao told Zhou how his investigation had led him to Chow Tse-Ming or Chow Chu. A Taiwanese national working as a member of the ground maintenance crew of the Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company, Chow had agreed to place a time bomb—a weapon of choice in those days—in the Kashmir Princess. In return, he was promised a reward of 6,00,000 Hong Kong dollars, by a Taiwanese spy named Wu Yi-chin. He guaranteed Chow's escape to Taiwan, a place from which he could not be extradited, and where he could live out his days as a king on his huge pot of wealth.
Chow had been in Hong Kong since 1950, and gambling debts made him a receptive target. He would be part of the crew performing routine maintenance on Zhou Enlai’s plane, meaning he’d have a window of opportunity to plant an explosive on board.
On April 11, Kashmir Princess arrived in Hong Kong from Bangkok around noon and spent nearly 90 minutes on the ground at Kai Tak. Luggage — 37 pieces — were loaded onto the place, supervised carefully by CTS. During that time, while part of the crew was performing its scheduled maintenance, chow placed a time bomb in the aircraft’s starboard wheel well.
The mastermind behind the plot was Chiang Kaishek, the ousted Chinese leader, who had gone on to become the ruler of Taiwan. Kai-shek was plotting to kill Zhou Enlai, and when it was publicly known that he would be taking a chartered flight from Hong Kong to attend the Bandung Conference, he made his move. The Kashmir Princess crash was the result of this ongoing political rivalry between China and Taiwan.
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| Captain D K Jatar |
The US confession
From the very beginning, the U.S. had viewed the Bandung conference as a Soviet ploy against it. Three months before the conference, in January, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles set up a working group which included intelligence outfits and diplomats to keep a tab on what was seen as an anti-US line-up.
At the time, the West viewed the Bandung Conference as a gathering of communists and pro-communists that would boost the expansion of communism in Asia. The CIA believed that China planned to use the conference to boost its image as a world power. Although the CIA sent several agents posing as journalists to cover the conference, evidence suggests that some CIA officers might have taken a further role in the action.
In 1975, a U.S. Senate committee heard testimony about CIA activities in East Asia in the 1950s and CIA officers revealed the plot to assassinate an East Asian leader “to disrupt an impending Communist [sic] Conference in 1955.” That leader’s identity would remain unknown until 1977, when William Corson, a retired U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in Asia, published Armies of Ignorance, identifying that leader as Zhou Enlai.
CIA agent John Discoe Smith, working in India, defected to the Soviet Union, on October 24, 1967. He accounted for many of his operations in his memoirs, I Was a CIA Agent in India, including his delivery of a mysterious bag to a KMT agent. He says that in 1955, Jack Curran, a CIA officer attached to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, asked him to deliver a bag to one Wang Feng at the Maidens Hotel in the Indian capital. Smith claimed that the bag contained the bomb used to sabotage Kashmir Princess. Curran told him to be careful, as the suitcase contained explosive devices—for use in Hong Kong.
The book reveals that Smith had spent 1954 to 1959 in India working as a communications technician and code clerk at the US Embassy in New Delhi. This involved routinely performing tasks for the CIA.
Between June 1954 and January 1957, Zhou paid four visits to India, and in October 1954, Nehru flew to Beijing, where he met not only Zhou but also Mao. It was the first visit by the head of a non-communist government since the creation of the People's Republic of China. According to New York Times, "The six miles between city and airport were walled by unbroken banks of humanity, clapping, cheering and crying the inescapable Chinese slogan, "Long live peace."
So, China raising the question of the annexation of Taiwan time and again, is not without substance. The Kashmir Princess incident reminds us that not too long ago, the fighting between the two sides was not limited to words and worry, but included very real attacks, attempted high-level assassination, spycraft, and murder.
Tail end:
Interestingly, former flight engineer A.S. Karnik, 82, received a cheque for 50,000 rupees ($8,800) in 2005 from the Chinese ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi. Karnik approached the Chinese embassy in September last year after the Indian government failed to pay him the monthly allowance it promised for his bravery in 1972.
Captain D K Jatar, who piloted Kashmir Princess, is a part of Indian aviation history-Air India's maiden international flight was captained by K R Guzdar and D K Jatar. On June 8, 1948, Malabar Princess, a 40- seater Lockheed L-749 Constellation flew over 8407 km from Mumbai to London via Cairo and Geneva. It carried 35 passengers, including JRD Tata.
On arrival in Taiwan, Chow Tse-ming, the man who planted the bomb, was arrested at Taipei airport as an illegal immigrant. Taiwan officials told him that he was going to be sent back to British Hong Kong.
But at the last moment, someone had a word with immigration officers and Chow was allowed to disappear into the Taiwanese population. He lived out his years as a rich man in Taiwan.
The incident suggests that the heinous crime involving the Indian aircraft was being supervised by the larger power, which still guides Taiwan.
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1. Quoted in Bertil Lintner, China's India War, Page 14
2. Selected Essays on the History of Contemporary China, Brill, 2015
3. Office of the Historian, Government of the United States. 162. Memorandum of Conversation. Beijing, October 21, 1971. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XVII, China, 1969-1972. Retrieved from: Office of the Historian, United States Department of State (https://history.state.gov/).
© Ramachandran
