Woman freed by Chinese was believed dead

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32797, 23 December 1971, Page 16

Woman freed by Chinese was believed dead

PALO ALTO, Dec. 22. The family of Mary Ann Harbert was stunned but “enthused and happy” wjien they heard she had been freed from a Chinese prison camp. She had been assumed dead, United Press International reported. ■. ? ■’■■ Mr Eugene Harbert, a geological engineer, said that he had “given up hope so many years ago/’ that his 23-year-old daughter was alive. She had gone to Hong Kong in 1968 to pick up a yacht to sail back to the United States. That was the last time anyone heard from Miss Harbert, and it was assumed that the yacht had sunk on the way to Manila, he said. “We’re pretty numb,” her father said after taking the day off to be with his wife in their Palo Alto home. Chinese officials released Miss Harbert and another American, Richard Fecteau, aged 44, and let them cross into Hong Kong on Monday. They immediately boarded a United States Air Force plane for the United States. Gerald Ross McLaughlin, who was on the yacht with Miss Harbert when the Chinese captured it, committed suicide on March 7, 1969, a Chinese announcement said.

“We did not have the faintest idea she had been captured, and I don’t know if it would have been easier or harder,” said her father. “We assumed the boat had gone down.” Miss Harbert was a graduate of the University of Utah and had worked for an architectural firm in San Francisco before she left to go to Hong Kong on April 18, 1968. The Associated Press reported that Honolulu was the first American stop for the Air Force plane carrying Mr Fecteau and Miss Harbert. Mr Fecteau, a civilian employee of the United States Government, served 19 of a 20-year sentence on Chinese charges of spying. The Cl4l which brought them home stopped first at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines before flying on to Honolulu where an Air Force doctor who examined the pair said they “appeared to be tired, but they’re in good health.” Mr Fecteau and Miss Harbert left the plane briefly at Honolulu, and Miss Harbert called her parents. “Her parents were just the picture of pure delight on the ’phone,” said a family friend. “It was a very poor connection, but they did hear her voice. She sounded fine and from all reports she’s thin but in good spirits. But then, she always was thin.” In announcing the release of the two, Peking also said the life sentence of another American, John Downey, aged 41, had been commuted from life to five years from the date of commutation, which was not disclosed, but was believed to be recent. Mr Downey and Mr Fecteau were passengers aboard a plane shot down on a flight from Japan to Korea in 1952, during the Korean War. The Chinese said that the two were oni a mission for the U.S. Central Intelligence | Agency, dropping Nationalist

Chinese spies. The United States denied the accusations. The Chinese captured Miss Harbert while she was sailing in Chinese waters north of Hong Kong on April 21, 1968. In Lynn, Massachusetts, Mrs Margaret Fecteau, the former wife of Mr Fecteau, said: “The Chinese haven’t been lying. “It should have happened a long time ago,” Mrs Fecteau said of the release of her former husband. “If we had only owned up to the Chinese in the beginning,

perhaps he wouldn’t have had to spend all those years in prison.” Mrs Fecteau was divorced from Mr Fecteau in 1951, a year before his capture. She has not remarried.

“It’s very involved and I’m not supposed to get into it,” she told a crowded news conference in her home. “He was a civilian working fpr the U.S. Government. I know what he was doing, but I can’t say. Let me put it this way, the Chinese haven’t been lying.”