Secret hideaway was training

school for undercover men

It comes as a shock to the visitor to drive the 10 miles or ) from Saipan’s airport, along the west coast road and through le untidy villages, the white sprawl of Chalan Kanoa, and the >wn of Garapan that is no longer there, to turn inland at the ext cross-road, wind steeply up a hill —and run bang into langri-la! Especially a Shangri-la with such a fascinating, spy rama background.

a cup in the hills, maybe 1,000 t above sea level, in acres of i mown short like a putting green, t are 100 or so, flat-roofed, con , three-bedroom modern bunga , set around crescents and loops circles of paved road, indis lishable one from another, except a blue dog-kennel here, a red ?e there. the centre is a post-office and a k bar; further up the hill, an e complex and a huge club build tiis is Capitol Hill, Trust Terri headquarters and housing area lepartmental heads which, accord to some accounts, cost S3O ion. rom the coastal road this oasis of -century-Americana cannot be and after the mend-and-make-do tie rest of Saipan, Capitol Hill hits right in the wind, ow came it there? Within half tiour of my first sighting it, four lie told me why, and a fifth had n me a book to read on the sub i a sentence, Capitol Hill is the

Trust Territory’s dividend out of Saipan’s latest chapter of extra ordinary history. For the US Trust Territory is a Trust Territory with a difference—it was designated a strategic area in 1947 and, because of this, the United States has been able to use it for some enterprises that would have been impossible in other UN territories.

Navy administration

The US Navy administered the whole territory until July, 1951, when it passed to the control of the Department of the Interior, and the Territory got its first civilian High Commissioner. However, in January, 1953, as one of his last acts in office, President Truman gave the Marianas, with the exception of Rota, back to the Navy, and from then until 1962, under three presidents, it became a gigantic school for training Nationalist Chinese for the infiltration of Red China.

At this time Americans were al ready training Nationalist Chinese in guerilla fighting, and the best of these men were selected for the specialist

courses on Saipan. It is said that they were flown in at night to Kobler Field, taken to jungle hideouts, which weekend fossickers still stumble upon, and after their training was completed departed in the same way, never knowing where or in what country they had been.

The Navy provided the cover but the scheme itself and the way it was carried out was the work of the Central Intelligence Agency. What is now Capitol Hill was built in secret, and became the nucleus of the whole scheme; nor is it an accident that it cannot be seen from the coastal road.

A couple of guards on the roads that wind up to the heights from either side of the island effectively isolated it from the curious.

Outsiders not welcome

Life for the Saipanese along the chain of west coast villages went on much as usual except that their move ments into security areas were re stricted and travel out of Saipan was difficult if not impossible. Outsiders got in rarely and only after extensive security checks and surveillance—just how strict is indicated by the fact that in nine years no news of what was going on in Saipan leaked out.

Newspapermen were even more persona non grata than most, yet Fred Goerner, got in not once but several times during research for his book, The Search for Amelia Earhart, pub lished last year, and finally, with great elan, he laid bare the dastardly

This is Shangri-La. These buildings now house the people of the Capitol Hill Trust Territory headquarters, but once they were the centre of a mysterious enterprise.

CIA enterprise—or dastardly in his view. I might say that I found few other Americans who shared it.

For reasons that appear as mysterious as the whole CIA plan, operations on Saipan ceased in 1962.

It may have been because the inter national situation had changed and that the Red China-Nationalist China confrontation seemed less likely to end in war.

Perhaps someone felt that a curb should be put on some of the ClA’s activities; or enough spies may have been trained—the figure is supposed to be 8,000 over the nine-year period.

Perhaps the CIA merely changed its location and is now busy training other saboteurs and spies in another Shangri-la.

For whatever reason, the Saipan “school” closed in 1962, the Marianas were returned to Department of In terior jurisdiction and TT head quarters shifted from Guam into the model centre that the Navy or CIA had been keeping warm for them on what is now Capitol Hill.

As to the success or failure of the CIA scheme, or what ultimately hap pened to the thousands who are sup posed to have been trained, only the CIA knows, and is unlikely to say.

But it would be a happy thought if some of old Mao’s troubles in the past year could be attributed to spies who were trained on Saipan sometime between 1953 and 1962.

CENSUS ASSISTANT: The first census ever held in the Anglo-French New Hebrides got under way in May under the direc tion of Mr. J. Fabre (French) and Mr. J.

F. Yaxley (British). Assisting Mr. Yaxley was Miss Marney Anderson (pictured) from the Australian National University, Can berra.