Ghosts of Cold War Continue to Elude Investigative Team

On April 8, 1950, a U.S. Navy Privateer airplane stuffed with the latest electronic monitoring equipment took off from Wiesbaden, West Germany, with 10 people aboard.

Its mission: to spy on the Soviet Union.

Sometime in midafternoon, Soviet reconnaissance spotted the plane over Lepaya, Latvia. Fighter planes scrambled and caught the American plane over the Baltic Sea. The Privateer turned away; the Soviet pilots opened fire.

They watched as the plane caught fire and dived, burning, into the clouds below--the first known shootdown of an American plane in the Cold War.

On a snowy, blustery day this fall, 47 years later, five U.S. investigators, flanked by three Russian colleagues, stood in a veterans hall in Kaliningrad, headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet. Red flags adorned the wall, recalling the glory days of the Soviet navy.

A dozen old men stood stiffly before them.

The old men, wearing clusters of military medals on the jackets of their gray suits, were questioned: What did they know about the plane’s disappearance? Was it ever found? Could anyone have survived?

Warily, the men--Soviet naval veterans all--opened up to tell secrets once reserved for the ears of Stalin and few others.

It was a typical day’s work for the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission on POWs-MIAs: a few new details on missing Americans, but nothing substantial.

For five years now, a small group of Americans and Russians has crisscrossed the vastness of the former Soviet Union--much as their counterparts have done in Vietnam--looking for the slightest evidence that might resolve the fate of dozens of U.S. servicemen.

The missing men include the crews of at least 10 planes that were shot down in the Cold War. Perhaps more tantalizing, they also include American prisoners from the Korean War who might have been brought to the Soviet Union for interrogation and thrown into its infamous gulag prison system.

In the early days of the project, its investigators were driven by the spine-tingling possibility that they might discover an American veteran alive in some labor camp, psychiatric hospital or remote village.

Five years, untold staff hours, millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of air miles later, they can point to one triumph: the discovery and return of the remains of Capt. John Robertson Dunham, an Air Force spy pilot who was shot down in the Soviet Far East in 1952.

As for finding someone alive, the hope still lingers--but barely.

“You can’t rule out the possibility,” said A. Denis Clift, president of the Joint Military Intelligence College and a member of the Joint U.S.-Russian Commission.

Still, he added, the investigators have found nothing to contradict the words of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who said in 1992: “One may conclude that today there are no American citizens held against their will on the territory of Russia.”

The case that brought Clift from his home in Annapolis, Md., to the amiable meeting hall in Kaliningrad is one of the most intriguing in the commission’s files.

When the Privateer vanished in the Baltic in 1950, the Navy told the families of the crew that it had been lost on a routine training mission. It was not until 1975 that the United States admitted the plane had been spying.

At that point, the public learned another long-held secret. In 1955, two Americans released from Soviet prison camps quietly revealed a remarkable rumor--that eight Americans shot down over the Baltic in 1950 had been seen in the Vorkuta prison camp.

In 1956, the State Department sent a cable to the Soviet government saying it had received such “persistent, detailed and credible” reports that it was “compelled to believe that the Soviet government has had or continues to have under detention” members of the Privateer crew. The Soviets denied it.

In the chill of the Cold War, there was little else the United States could do. In 1991, however, with relations between the United States and the Soviet Union at their warmest in decades, the issue was revived.

In July of that year, a Wisconsin woman, Jane Reynolds Howard, read an article in the Los Angeles Times, “American Ghosts in the Gulag,” that explored the possibility Americans might have been held in Soviet prisons. Among those cited was the crew of the Privateer.

Howard had a special interest in the case. Her first husband, Navy Lt. j.g. Robert Reynolds, was the navigator aboard the doomed flight.

“It was like a light bulb exploding in my brain,” Howard recalled in a telephone interview from her new home in McLean, Va. “Bob could still be alive!”

Howard began lobbying the U.S. government to investigate, convinced that her husband--who would by this time be in his 70s--might be alive. She flew to Moscow, interviewed Soviet military officials, and pushed and prodded the Pentagon to follow up.

By March 1992, the United States and Russia had established the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission on POWs-MIAs. One of its top priorities was--and still is--”the Reynolds case.”

Investigators have traveled all over Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine conducting interviews with military officials, veterans and former prison inmates about the Privateer crew.

One American official, Lt. Col. Terron Nelson, has made 15 trips on this case alone. Another, Jim Connell, head of the Pentagon’s POW-MIA office in Moscow, has visited 10 former Soviet prisons, including the prison camp at Vorkuta, and culled through millions of prison records for some evidence that the Privateer crew might have been held.

There was some excitement in late 1992 when a Lithuanian man recalled seeing an American named Robert in a Soviet prison in Irkutsk in 1950. This Robert spoke English, and said he had been shot down over the Baltic and picked up by Soviet soldiers, the man said.

But, shown a photo lineup, the Lithuanian was unable to identify Robert Reynolds. Prison records contained nothing about Reynolds or any American named Robert.

Like so many tips the commission receives, it was a dead end.

So what did happen to the Privateer? Presumably, it plunged into the sea. The plane’s lifeboats were found floating and empty. Had anyone ejected? Was anyone rescued? Could anyone have survived?

These questions brought the investigators to Kaliningrad.

Immediately after the shootdown, Stalin had ordered a huge search for wreckage of the plane and its spy equipment. The crews of 45 Soviet naval vessels spent two months looking.

Ultimately, the admiral in charge wrote Stalin: “Despite the great effort and considerable resources devoted to the search for the American airplane, no parts of it were found.”

But a year ago, a Soviet veteran of the search told American investigators he helped raise wreckage of the Privateer from the sea and saw four bodies pulled from the wreckage.

Was he telling the truth? Confusing this case with another? Would an admiral have dared lie to Stalin?

At the veterans hall in Kaliningrad, the investigators interviewed 12 veterans who had participated in the search. They did little to advance the case.

But later, the panel interviewed another veteran outside his home.

Leonid Zurilenko, a short, ruddy, gray-haired man in a black leather jacket, remembered something interesting. After the search had ended, “I heard talk that they had found an airplane. They raised the tail section and covered it with a tarp. On the order of Stalin, everything was packaged, sealed and sent to Moscow.”

Another tantalizing tip--and so far, nothing more.

After the interviews in the veterans hall, the veterans raucously dug into sausages and cucumbers, smoked fish and vodka. Then, flush with the spirit of international cooperation and the vodka, they grew sentimental about what was, for them, a remarkable meeting of former adversaries.

“I’m not a nationalist,” declared Vladimir Ilich Parazhin, a puckish 76-year-old who was named for Lenin but more closely resembles a later Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev.

“All mothers give birth to their children the same way,” he said. “And to find the remains of a mother’s children, I’m prepared to give up the rest of my life-- whether it’s for Mother Russia or Mother America!”

Stirring and noble words, but they beg a question: How much time and effort should go into the search for people who are almost surely dead?

It is not a question that gives pause to the POW-MIA hunters. Their mandate is to hunt, and, if anything, the criticism they hear from a well-organized lobby of POW-MIA relatives in the United States is that they are not hunting hard enough.

Connell, the head of the U.S. search team in Moscow, noted the commission has never closed a case.

“People often ask, ‘How much longer are you going to do this?’ ” he said. “And I answer: ‘It’s indeterminate. As long as the political will exists in Washington, D.C., you’re never going to finish it.’ ”