William Beale (aviator)
| William H Beale, Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Died | April 6, 1962 Laos |
| Allegiance |
 United States of America
|
| Service/branch | |
| Rank | Lieutenant colonel |
| Battles/wars | |
William H Beale, Jr was a US military and paramilitary aviator. In the Second World War he was in the USAAF and flew bombing missions in the northern Pacific theater. In the Permesta rebellion in Indonesia in 1958 he flew bombing missions for the CIA. His career ended on a CIA covert mission in Laos in 1962 when he was killed in a plane crash.
Beale was a USAAF officer in the Second World War who flew Consolidated B-24 Liberators from the Aleutian Islands and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After the war, Beale spent several years training Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) pilots on Republic F-84 Thunderjets. He got married to the sister of a ROCAF fighter group commander, adopted her daughter and settled in Taiwan.
Beale left the air force and joined Civil Air Transport, a CIA front organisation based in Taiwan. CAT valued Beale for his connections with the ROCAF hierarchy.
In April 1958, CAT sent Beale to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, where he was assigned a Douglas B-26 Invader that had been painted black and had its markings obscured. On April 19, 1958 Beale flew the bomber to Mapanget, a rebel-held Indonesian Air Force base on the Minahassa Peninsula of northern Sulawesi. The rebels were Permesta, led by dissident local army officers opposed to the government of President Sukarno. Beale and his B-26 formed part of the CIA element in Permesta's Angkatan Udara Revolusioner ("Revolutionary Air Force") or AUREV. Beale flew his first AUREV mission on April 20, attacked Palu, the provincial capital of Central Sulawesi, with four 500 lb (230 kg) bombs followed by machine-gun fire. On April 21 he made a similar attack on the Indonesian Air Force base on the island of Morotai, damaging the runway and setting a line of fuel drums on fire. In the next few days Beale flew two more sorties attacking Palu.
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