The Press: Over the Bridge

Over the international bridge connecting Communist China with the free British colony of Hong Kong last week walked two gaunt, hollow-eyed newsmen. After 18 months’ imprisonment, NBC Correspondent Richard Applegate and I.N.S. Correspondent Donald Dixon were released by the Chinese Communists. With them was a U.S. merchant marine officer, Ben Krasner, captured with them while they were cruising on Applegate’s sailboat Kert in international waters west of Hong Kong.

In a hotel, where they were interviewed by some 40 newsmen, they shucked their filthy yachting clothes, which they had been wearing ever since they were captured, and took their first hot baths in 18 months. Then they headed happily for a champagne and steak party, where fellow newsmen celebrated their release and heard more of their story.

Intrusion. The only crime the Communists accused them of, said the three, was “intruding into China’s territorial waters.” Under questioning, they insisted to Red officers that the Kert never touched Chi nese waters, was well within international territory when a Red gunboat took them in tow. But the Communists were not satisfied. First the three were taken to a detention and interrogation center for seven months. Then, handcuffed and blindfolded, they were moved to separate cells in a Canton jail. In the tiny (6 ft. by 11 ft.) concrete cells each one also had a Chinese cellmate. For beds there were only planks; the only light came through small, high windows that they were forbidden to look out of. They never saw each other, were not even sure whether the others were alive. The only time that they were ever out of their cells, except for escorted trips to the toilet, was for questioning.

The Communists pressed Correspondent Dixon to describe U.S. units that he had seen as a war correspondent in Korea (“I played dummy”) and military installations on Formosa, where he had made a five-week tour (“I told them only what I had written”). Correspondent Applegate, after long questioning, finally wrote a phony description of U.S. germ warfare in Korea. He decided that the Communists wanted the “confession” as the price for letting them go free. But the Reds complained that his confession contained “lies” and “inaccuracies,” so he went back to his cell, read germ-warfare confessions that were reported in English-language Communist propaganda papers he was given, and made his own confessions square with those that had been forced out of U.S. prisoners in Korea. (The Communists never used Applegate’s “confession,” presumably because they had already finished their germ-warfare propaganda campaign by then.)

First Class. Applegate and his companions had seen so little of China that they were little help to correspondents trying to check up on reports of British Labor Party Leader Attlee’s group. But when a reporter asked whether the Communists had rid China of flies, as Attlee’s party had said, Applegate, Dixon and Krasner guffawed. They said that their cells were vermin-infested, and killing flies and bugs was one of the few ways they passed their time. Applegate once counted 412 insects squashed on the walls of his cell.

They did not know that they were to be released until right before it happened. Then each got a haircut and shave. The three were reunited again when they were bundled into a U.S. jeep, driven to a railway station and put aboard a first-class coach on the train. Said Applegate: “The Communists have classes, too.” The prisoners never found out why they were released. In New Zealand, after some British dailies had said that Attlee. secured their release during his China tour, Attlee himself disclaimed credit, pointed out that he had not even specifically mentioned the imprisoned Americans while he was in China. But whatever the explanation for the Communists’ releasing them, there was no doubt about the effect that the imprisonment had had on the three. Said Correspondent Applegate: “Before this happened to me, I was a reporter [who] tried to stay neutral in the cold war between freedom and Communism. But I’m not neutral any more.”