China? Spying from the air? Shootdowns? I can relate to that.

Or at least, my father could. But for hm, the tables were turned: no balloons, and China wasn’t doing the spying: he was. . . .My father, who died in 1997 and is buried in Arlington Cemetery, didn’t talk much about his time in World War Two. He was a co-pilot in a B-24 “Liberator” bomber.

The B-24 was an unglamorous warplane. About 18000 were rolled out of U. S. wartime factories; the wreckage of hundreds must be scattered across Europe, along with the bones of their crews.

Besides bombs, they carried tons of bullets; half or more of their crews were gunners, or grabbed the triggers when the German fighters came.

My father, Callistus “Click” Fager, grew up a restless farmboy on a small spread in very rural southeastern Kansas. He spoke of trudging behind a mule and a plow one day, with not much beyond more of the same in his discernible future, when he heard a buzzing noise. Looking up, he glimpsed a plane — not that many in the sky there then –and in it saw a vision of escape.

That vision was distant. But the start of World War Two opened the door: the Army Air Forces suddenly needed thousands of new pilots; crash programs were launched. In high school Click Fager had not been a great student. But for months he crammed, passed the exam, married his high school sweetheart, left her pregnant, and headed off to fly bombers.

Clearly he figured the risks of the war were worth it, if he got to fly. (Or maybe not; the U. S. lost 78,000 pilots and air crew members in that war, 25,000 of them in non-combat accidents. But he was one of millions of other young Americans who were then leaving farm work, come hell or [and] high water; and besides, who knew the future?)

Anyway, he did get to fly, and never (well, hardly ever) looked back at the Kansas farm.

Once across the Atlantic, the drill was: he had to fly 25 combat missions. If he survived, then he would be reassigned to non-combat flying.  Although he didn’t talk about his bombing missions, I read of some as a teenager, and even in print they were hair-raising enough.

All the missions were dangerous, but the most dramatic came in August, 1943, when I was still a babe in arms. Hitler was making much of the gasoline for his armies in a refinery complex in the city of Ploesti, in eastern Romania (next door to southern Ukraine).

Several hundred B-24s were sent to bomb the refineries into rubble in one massive raid. They planned to go in flying very low, just 200 or so feet in the air over hilly countryside, to evade German radar and deadly anti-aircraft guns. They were to attack and loose their bombs in three waves, just a few minutes apart, coming from three different directions, then be gone before the anti-aircraft crews could get them in their sights.

A clever plan, but it got all screwed up: bad weather or something, and the three waves came across the city almost simultaneously, a deadly-low-level air traffic jam, while having to dodge their own bombs.

Nevertheless, the mission did demolish about half the refinery complex. (But the success was short-lived: the Nazis sent in large slave labor crews, and had the refineries back on line in several weeks. More bombings were called for later, on a smaller scale.)

My father’s plane was shot up, and almost crashed into the Mediterranean Sea. But it managed to limp back across it to their base in north Africa, after a 2400-mile trip to hell and back.  I was told that all returning crew members received medals for bravery simply for surviving. He had several.

But what’s this got to do with China and spying? Coming up:

After his 25 missions, Click flew cargo planes for the rest of the war, and then stayed in the Air Force rather than return home to the Kansas farm.

When the Korean War began in June 1950, he was not assigned to combat there. Instead, he trained to fly a huge new bomber called the B-36, which was a pillar of the other “Cold War”, brandishing nuclear bombs at the Soviet Union and newly-Communist China.

The B-36 was the biggest bomber ever, with ten engines (6 propeller, plus 4 big jets in pods at the ends of the wings). It could stay airborne for forty hours, and cover 10,000 miles (four times more than the B-24), without refueling.  It could also fly at very high altitudes, above the reach of existing fighter planes.

Its mission was to carry nuclear bombs and fly big rectangular rings around Russia, to deter it from lobbing nuclear bombs (later missiles) at us or Europe. It started that in 1948, and continued til 1959.

While at home we knew generally what father was doing, the missions were all highly classified, and we neither asked questions nor were told much about them. He would be gone for two or more days, and come home in a drab green zippered flight suit, unshaven and exhausted.

I went off to college in 1960 and father retired a year or so afterward. As mentioned, he rarely talked about his World War Two days. Then more than thirty years later, the mid-1990s, as his strength was ebbing, one night out of the blue, he began to tell me about China.

It was sometime in the 1950s: he was interviewed for a secret mission. The U. S. still hadn’t recognized Mao Tse Tung’s Communist Chinese government (that didn’t happen til 1979, several years after he retired). So Americans had no resident diplomats sending dispatches to Washington about what was going on there, and all sorts of rumors and what we would now call disinformation were rampant.

Did China have nuclear weapons? If not, was it close to getting them? (They actually made their first nukes in 1964, I’m told; but who knew for sure?) How big was its army and navy? Where were their major bases? Etc.

I learned later that in the 1950s the CIA had been promoting and financing what they thought would be big internal uprisings against Mao inside China, but every one of these efforts failed miserably.

In that case, where could the U.S. government and military get some reliable information from inside China? The new idea was: from above. The medium: photography.

My father was to fly his B-36 on missions over China, armed not with bombs or machine guns, but cameras with ultra-long telephone lenses. The goal was to bring back lots of film, which the crew would never see, for analysts somewhere (the CIA?) to pore over.

There was a catch to this plan. Several, actually: The flights were, of course, secret. Top secret? Likely; I don’t know if they have ever been acknowledged. (But hey, FBI — I have no documents about them, classified or otherwise.)

And because the U. S. didn’t recognize “Red China,” if his plane went down, the fact could not be acknowledged. There were to be no telltale radio calls for help. If he and the crew survived, they were on their own. (Did he speak any Chinese? I don’t think so.)

And of course, neither my mother nor me and my siblings (about 7 by then; I’m the oldest of eleven total) ever knew about these missions, until he sat down that night in the mid-1990s and started talking. Did he tell others? I don’t know.

Presumably the missions were a success; some of the photos they shot no doubt were degraded by cloud cover, focus or distance; but pictures were more real than all the CIA’s foolish and fatally aborted “uprisings.” And my father was clearly a good pilot; he and his crew returned, exhausted but unscathed.

In May of 1960, after the B-36 was shelved, the Soviets did shoot down a different secret spy plane, the one-person U-2. President Eisenhower was publicly embarrassed when, after vigorously denying everything, the Russians produced the American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who had survived the U-2’s crash. Ike was obliged to admit he had been caught lying in front of the world.

The U-2 incident was a big international deal, but that’s another story. By then my father was on the brink of retirement, and as Cold War enforcers, bombers, including the B-36, were being replaced by intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Nowadays, I’ve learned, one of the largest American intelligence operations is called the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, (or NGIA)  and it has mainly replaced manned equipment with swarms of drones, large and small but all unmanned, taking aerial photos and videos of practically everything everywhere all the time.

Then thousands of analysts stare at computer screens to figure out what they mean.

The atrium in the NGIA’s massive but mostly hidden-in-plain-sight headquarters in northern Virginia, where many do this work, looks cavernous enough to house all the data on the planet.

Supposedly the NGIA doesn’t directly blow things up or kill people; but it supplies data to those who do. (I’m sure it’s quite busy with Ukraine right now.)

What, I wonder, would my father make of all this? Does it mean there will be new chances for restless youths to look up from the remaining family farms and catch a vision of escape in the open sky above? (Or maybe a balloon as big as two buses?)

Or does it mark the end of all that, and maybe ever more of us will soon be making the acquaintance of bots that put us out to pasture and back in harness, behind the newest version of an AI mule, and bound to follow Him/Her/It in a furrow that is really more of a Möbius strip . . . .

Let me check again: how many miles is it to Ploesti?