FOREIGN RELATIONS: How They Died

Looking across the border to Soviet Armenia, Turkish natives saw a huge plume of smoke rising from the Communist territory. On that same day—Sept. 2, 1958 —just short minutes before the smoke rose, Allied radio monitors around the southern ring of the U.S.S.R., taping their daily quota of Russian radio talk, recorded the grim conversation of five Soviet jet fighter pilots.

The jets had scrambled into the sky for a look at an intruder inside Russia’s southern border. It was, in fact, an unarmed, four-engined U.S. Air Force C-130 transport carrying 17 men. In flying a course from Trabzon to Van, Turkey in high winds and bad weather, the C-130 had strayed over the Turkish “fence” into Communist territory, possibly confused by high-strength directional signals from Soviet radio stations. Following the vectors from their own ground radar stations, the Russians sped toward the target area, barking pilots’ combat chatter over the radio. The monitors caught virtually every word that mattered:

582, I see the target, to the right . . . Its altitude is 100 (hectometers—about 32,800 ft.) as you said.

I am 201, I see the target. Attack! I am 201, I am attacking the target … Attack, attack, 218, attack . . . The target is a transport, four-engined. I am attacking the target . . . Target speed is 300 [kilometers—186 m.p.h.. I am going along with it. It is turning toward the fence . . . The target is burning. There’s a hit . . . The target is banking . . . Open fire . . . 218, are you attacking? Yes, yes . . . The target is burning . . . The tail assembly is falling off the target . . . I am in front of the target . . . Look at him. He will not get away. He is already falling. Yes, he is falling. I will finish him off, boys, I will finish him off on the run. The target has lost control, it is going down . . . The target has turned over . . . Aha, you see, it is falling. Yes . . . form up, go home . . .

The Indictment. State Department officials locked up the incredible evidence until they could learn the fate of the 17 U.S. Air Force men on the plane. Through normal channels, the U.S. asked the Russians for an accounting. In reply, the Soviets denied any knowledge of the plane. Later, after U.S. protests, the Reds “found” the wreckage, turned over to the U.S. six bodies (TIME, Sept. 29), stridently denied that they had shot the plane down, insisted that it had just crashed and that they had no information about the eleven airmen who were missing.

Determined to win the return of the eleven men—dead or alive— the U.S. decided again to hold back public release of the damning evidence. Instead, the State Department privately confronted the Russians with the recording, hoping that the Soviets would settle the incident quickly to avoid worldwide condemnation. Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy tried it first, called Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov into his Washington office. “Smiling Mike” refused to listen to the recording, but Murphy handed him a Russian transcript. Result: silence.

The Guilt. When Russia’s No. 2 boss, Anastas Mikoyan, came to the U.S. last month, the State Department decided to try again. But amiable Anastas turned back the pleas of both Vice President Nixon and Secretary of State Dulles; he was, in fact, highly irritated by U.S. insistence that the Russians were withholding the truth, as well as the eleven men. State decided to give the Russians just one more chance: perhaps Mikoyan would swing around after he returned to Moscow and talk it over with other officials.

Last week, convinced by Moscow’s silence that quiet diplomacy was hopeless, the U.S. released the transcript of the recording, and with it all the background on all the futile talks. A day later the Air Force buried two unidentified members of the lost crew in Arlington National Cemetery. The four other bodies had been sent to their families for burial. Somewhere in Soviet territory were eleven more Air Force men, all of them, perhaps, dead. If there was any consolation for the U.S., it lay in the fact that the free world now knew how they died and who killed them.