Airmen as Spies
The main occasion of President Eisenhower's assured but extempore address was something so deeply felt in the United States that it gave his words even greater importance—the imprisonment in China of thirteen American subjects. Of these it is the eleven airmen, captured in uniform while on duty with the United Nations forces, that form the subject of the joint appeal to the Secretary-General by the sixteen combatant nations. The choice of the United Nations as the forum for this essential protest was dignified, right, and as shrewdly aimed at Peking's sensibilities (if that be the word) as a threat of blockade or other unilateral action could have been. It is quite irrelevant to suggest, as one opposition member attempted to suggest in a Parliamentary question here, that nations do employ spies after all, for Peking's choice of victims is lindefensible. Nevertheless, it should be understood." The maintenance of internal tension is essential to the dynamics of dictatorship--so essential that the Chinese Communist regime is prepared to demonstrate its own vulnerability by regular reiteration of the menace of spies and saboteurs.
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