It’s Been 42 Years Since Joe Danens Vanished With His Comrades on a Navy Spy Plane, but His Family Is Still . . . : Clinging to Hope

In this isolated, wind-scoured reservation town in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, the riddle of Joe Danens is an eerie local fragment of a seemingly eternal national mystery: What really happened to thousands of American servicemen who disappeared in Vietnam and Korea and countless Cold War skirmishes?

The question of Danens’ fate has haunted his family for more than 40 years--ever since his PBRY2 Privateer spy plane and its 10 crew members disappeared over the Baltic Sea on April 8, 1950.

No bodies were ever recovered. A life raft floating more than 100 miles off the Latvian coast was the only trace of the Privateer ever found.

“If he was dead, I’d say, ‘Let him rest in peace,’ ” says Danens’ niece, Patti Jo Comes at Night. “I’ve been praying about it for years and years and years. I asked for prayers for him.”

Two years ago, because her prayers had not been answered, Comes at Night turned to another source for comfort. With the help of her husband, Gordon, she began consulting shamans of the Blackfeet tribe. After conducting a special ritual, they told her that her uncle was alive.

“That’s evidence, that’s proof.” Comes at Night is matter-of-fact as she describes her spooky footnote to the era of the Iron Curtain and the balance of nuclear terror.

And indeed, in recent weeks it appeared as if Comes at Night had stumbled into a miracle. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin raised the stunning possibility that some American POWs might be alive in what used to be the Soviet Union. Then--in a reversal so familiar in the endless MIA saga--President Bush’s special envoy to Moscow said last week that he had found no evidence that Americans were being held against their will in former Soviet territory.

But Danens’ family has been through this cycle before. And the circumstances of the Privateer’s disappearance--especially that no bodies were found--have always provided fertile ground for doubt.

Meanwhile, halfway across the country in Middleton, Wis., the former wife of another member of the Privateer’s crew shares the yearnings of Danens’ family. And she also has found comfort in mystical messages.

“I’ve had dreams that maybe he was still alive,” Jane Reynolds-Howard says.

Danens has been gone from this scenic cattle, wheat and tourist country for so long that the most palpable proof of his existence is a photograph that shows him grinning and dressed in full aviator regalia, the ideal image of a young, confident warrior. And that is the way he is portrayed in family tradition--a handsome icon. Whatever rough edges he may have had have been smoothed into perfection.

But today, if he is alive, he would be 71 years old . . .

A petty officer who hailed from Cutbank, Mont., Danens was 29 and a 10-year Navy veteran when he and nine other crewmen of the Privateer spy plane apparently perished while on an electronic “ferreting” mission that took them near--and perhaps inside--Soviet airspace over what is now independent Latvia.

In those tense, pre-satellite days of superpower confrontation, American aircraft often played a Cold War version of chicken, flying close to or inside Soviet territory to obtain data about Soviet defenses.

Shortly after the plane vanished, the Soviet government said its fighters had attacked the aircraft, contending that the Navy plane was over Soviet soil and had fired on its MIGs.

The U.S. government denied the intrusion, saying that a reconstruction of the plane’s route showed that it most likely had been over the Baltic when it was shot down.

A year and a day after the incident, the secretary of the Navy “reluctantly” declared the crew dead because there “was no official information or conclusive evidence to support any probability of survival.”

Still, three generations of Danens’ family refused to believe that he was dead. His mother went to her grave in 1975 certain that her son was a secret captive of the Soviets. Before she died, she imparted her convictions to her granddaughter, Patti Jo.

Over the decades, the family hired lawyers, wrote letters to Washington politicians and consulted a private detective in a vain search for some clue regarding Danens.

Then, about two years ago, Comes at Night, with the help of her husband, Gordon, decided to go outside official channels and consult shamans on the reservation here for clues about the uncle she never met.

Provided with Danens’ old clothes as clues, several practitioners of traditional Indian religion conducted a ritual called “the search,” Comes at Night explains, as she rummages through a small stack of letters, photos, clippings and other papers that document her family’s obsession.

The spiritualists had visions of Danens as an old, sick man suffering from torture and imprisonment as a spy.

Comes at Night’s quest might well have ended there, in an irreconcilable conflict between faith and circumstantial evidence.

But then help came from an unexpected quarter.

Three weeks ago Russian President Yeltsin made his startling announcement that some American POWS might still be alive in former Soviet territory.

The statement jolted the MIA crusade with fresh energy and reverberated even into this remote corner of northwestern Montana.

Predictably perhaps, the euphoria was brief.

As in previous episodes of renewed optimism, Yeltsin’s statement soon appeared to be speculation rather than informed comment.

Last week, President Bush’s special envoy to Moscow said, “There probably is no living American POW detained against his will” in prisons of the former Soviet Union.

Malcolm Toon, a former ambassador to Moscow, added, “There may be former American POWs living in Russia or the former Soviet Union voluntarily.”

Toon confessed “some puzzlement” among Russian officials over why Yeltsin had said that some American prisoners might still be alive in Russia.

In characteristic MIA style, Toon had barely finished talking before fresh allegations about American POWs were making the news. A memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency charged that the Pentagon’s investigation of American POWs and MIAs after the Vietnam war was “sloppy.” The Los Angeles Times reported on Friday that the Defense Department had evidence that some American prisoners in the Korean War had been transferred to China, where they died after being the subjects of medical and psychological experiments.

If the past is any indication, Toon’s findings are unlikely to serve as the irrefutable proof sought by many relatives of the missing, including the former wife of another crewman on the Privateer.

That certainly is true of Jane Reynolds-Howard, who laughs when asked about Toon’s findings before adding, “No comment.”

Reynolds-Howard remarried a few years after her husband, Lt. (j.g.) Robert Reynolds, took off on his doomed flight. In that second marriage she had four more children in addition to the two daughters she had with Reynolds.

So for many years, Reynolds-Howard says, she was too busy to devote much time to the unresolved questions she had about Reynolds’ disappearance. And, she admits, she had repressed many of her feelings about the disappearance of her husband.

But by 1991 she was a widow living in Middleton, Wis., who felt the powerful tug of the past. When a friend sent her an article from the Los Angeles Times about the ferreting missions, she was galvanized to action.

Among other things, the article cited the case of her husband’s plane and detailed others in which there could have been survivors.

Late last year, Reynolds-Howard says she placed an ad in the Express Chronicle, a Moscow newspaper devoted to human rights, asking for reports of downed American fliers.

Reynolds-Howard says the ad drew a response from a former Soviet prisoner, who insisted he had met another prisoner who had shared a cell with Reynolds. Although the evidence was secondhand, the prisoner knew details, such as the date and place of the Privateer’s disappearance, that rang true.

Reynolds-Howard cannot say for sure that the American prisoner was her husband or another member of the Privateer’s crew. But she considers it intriguing evidence that there might have been survivors.

And she believes that Yeltsin’s statement about MIAs was made in good faith.

“I do believe President Yeltsin is sincere about wanting to get this cleared up and get this cancerous growth off the back of the Russian people,” she says.

But Reynolds-Howard also worries that Yeltsin is being resisted by old guard elements, such as the KGB, who want to keep the truth hidden.

She tries to be realistic, admitting there isn’t much chance Reynolds is still alive.

“When I got involved again, I thought there was a 2%, a 3%--at most a 5%--chance that Bob is alive,” she says.

If the miraculous should happen and Robert Reynolds is found, Reynolds-Howard is sure all her children will give him a warm welcome.

“One of my daughters from my second marriage said, ‘Wouldn’t he be surprised to see how his family has grown?’ ”

The sketchy report Reynolds-Howard received from the former prisoner mirrored other accounts that leaked from behind the Iron Curtain over the years.

Former prisoners of the Soviet gulag, congressional hearings and investigations by journalists have repeatedly produced tantalizing, though often secondhand, tales of downed American fliers glimpsed in Soviet prisons and labor camps.

For example, two Americans interned by the Soviets in the 1950s reported after their release that they had heard accounts from other prisoners of captured Navy fliers. One of the Americans also claimed that a Navy intelligence officer told him the Navy had aerial photographs of a Russian ship alongside the wreckage of the Privateer.

Larry McDonald was a U.S. congressman who took such reports seriously. The Georgia Republican made speeches on the House floor and inserted articles in the Congressional Record seeking to prod the federal government into action. Then, in a coincidence that seems incredible, McDonald was killed in 1983 when Soviet fighters shot down a Korean Air jumbo jet.

Some of the reports apparently were substantial enough to nudge officials in Washington. In 1956 and again in 1971 the U.S. government formally asked the Soviets for information regarding the Privateer’s crewmen, according to a 1976 State Department letter to Montana’s U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, who sought information on behalf of Danens’ family.

Each time, the letter noted, the Soviets replied they held no American prisoners.

Such disappointments ultimately took an emotional toll on Danens’ family, according to Patti Jo Comes at Night. Until a few years ago, Danens’ sister, Dorothy Ruegamer, who also is Patti’s mother, harbored hopes that she might once more see her brother.

But lately Ruegamer has begun walling herself off from such expectations because they are emotionally devastating, Comes at Night says.

When Yeltsin made his pronouncement, her mother was particularly upset, she adds, and was unable to finish watching a television broadcast of the story.

“She watched it for a while and she started to break up . . . “ Comes at Night says. “Nothing’s good enough for her unless she sees him walk through the door. It’s easier for her to believe that he’s dead because that way she doesn’t have to think about it.”

As for Patti and her husband, Gordon, the life or death of Joe Danens has become a constant topic of discussion in their home.

“It’s pretty much part of your everyday lives,” Gordon says. “It comes up every day.”

Whatever the final outcome of their search for Danens, Gordon stresses that the couple has the comfort of their tribal beliefs.

“Some people believe the spirit world is dead, but I believe (the spirits) are there to help us,” he says.

As for Jane Reynolds-Howard, she believes she has survived two heart attacks and triple bypass surgery because she now has a mission. Several years ago, she had a dream in which she was told, “There are things to do yet that only you can do.”

For a long time, she didn’t know what the dream meant.

Now, she says happily, she does.