Actually, indulging a taste for covert warfare that later would be well-known, Eisenhower did intervene in the French war, ordering the so-called Civil Air Transport—an airline secretly operated by the CIA and later renamed Air America—to help resupply French forces at Dienbienphu. CAT pilots flew 684 sorties and one pilot, James B. McGovern, was shot down on May 6 and died the next day.2
