Wippl Interviewed by WCVB on Vietnam Plane Crash
Joseph Wippl, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed about a team of American university professors who crashed into a mountain in Vietnam in 1967, killing all aboard including Harvard’s Dr. Vincent Conroy.
Wippl was interviewed for a segment on WCVB Channel 5’s Chronicle, entitled The Crash: Teaming Up For The Truth About Their Fathers. The segment follows two old friends discover they have an unexpected bond: both their fathers died on that plane. They then set out to try to answer the questions they and other family members have about what happened on that tragic day, and what role the CIA might have played in their parents’ mission.
Wippl discusses why the plane the group of academics were flying on at the time of the crash was operated by Air America, an airline operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
From the interview:
Air America had a lot of capability to fly people around, and those days in Vietnam someone would snap their fingers and say get me a helicopter or get me a plane and some plane would appear.
You can watch the entire interview here.
Wippl is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. He spent a 30 year career as an operations officer in the National Clandestine Service (NCS). Wippl has served overseas as an operations officer and operations manager in Bonn, West Germany; Guatemala City; Luxembourg; Madrid, Spain; Mexico City; Vienna, Austria; and Berlin, Germany. Learn more about him here.