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Jul. 23--To Beverly Deane Shaver's horror and anger, she is convinced her life is inseparable from a 50-year-old lie.
Long ago, the Paradise Valley woman was married to a military pilot shot down and killed when the Cold War momentarily ignited over the China Sea.
At least, in August 1956, that's what the Navy said had happened to her husband of three months, U.S. Navy Lt. j.g. James Brayton Deane Jr.
But decades after Shaver mourned and moved on detailed evidence surfaced that Deane had survived the downing of his plane during an intelligence-gathering mission. Not just survived, but had been taken prisoner.
A dogged quest for the truth followed, but the 73-year-old Shaver has come to the awful realization that knowledge of her late husband's fate may be forever lost in the fog of battle, Chinese inscrutability and the intractable American bureaucracy.
If this is the story's end "then you learn to live with something that is totally unacceptable but something that you have no choice but to accept -- and that is, that you may never know," said Shaver, during a telephone interview.
Shaver began pursuing answers in 1992, after journalists alleged Deane and another member of the 16-man crew were taken captive. Since then, Shaver has petitioned the governments of America and China, and networked with anyone who may have a lead. Facts surface slowly.
The most recent development came Tuesday, when China's top military officer gave new documentation to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld's interest in Deane is personal as well as official; the two became friends while attending naval aviation flight school during the mid-'50s.
Neither Shaver nor Pentagon officials are optimistic the records will shed more light.
"I would be surprised if it's significantly different than what they have already given us," said Larry Greer, spokesman for the government's POW/Missing Personnel Office.
How Deane was lost is a reminder the Cold War sometimes turned hot.
On Aug. 23, 1956, shortly after midnight, Deane's P4M-1Q Martin Mercator was taking part in a top-secret mission to determine the sites of communist Chinese radar stations. It was dangerous work.
The Navy later determined a navigational error put the plane over Chinese islands, where a MiG-1F opened fire..
Shaver accepted the official word that her husband was dead. There was grieving, then life went on. She earned her medical degree, went into pediatrics, married a surgeon, raised two children and moved to Arizona in 1965.
Deane was in Shaver's past until she stumbled across the book "Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington's Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union." Inside, there was the accusation two American crewmen from her husband's final mission were taken captive.
"Part of the shock of the whole thing was, after 36 years, suddenly finding in a Phoenix bookstore that your first husband may have been alive," Shaver said.
The next year, she uncovered stunning news. A declassified State Department report cited intelligence that one of the prisoners resembled Deane, down to his smooth, hairless skin. And in 1999, the head of China's air defenses at the time of the incident corroborated details of the captured Americans, although he later retracted his story.
The Chinese, Shaver said, know the truth.
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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