Family Hopes to Find Body of Spy Shot Down by Soviets

One Russian-American spy scandal killed Eugene Posa. Forty-one years later, his family fears another one could keep his body hidden.

Posa was a 38-year-old Air Force captain from Santa Monica in 1960 when he was tapped for a team to replace captured American U2 spy Francis Gary Powers for secret aerial surveillance over the Soviet Union.

But a Soviet MIG fighter shot down Posa’s Boeing RB-47 on its first flight. Posa seemed to disappear with the plane into the Barents Sea.

It wasn’t until 1992, at the end of the Cold War, that the U.S. admitted that the plane Posa was aboard was spying, not making the weather reconnaissance flight Washington officials had claimed. That’s when Russia disclosed that Posa’s body had been found by fishermen and buried.

But by then the decades of deceit and despair had virtually destroyed Posa’s Santa Monica family.

His brother had tried to conceal the disappearance from Posa’s elderly parents, fearful that the news would kill them.

He was right. After they accidentally learned their son was missing, the Italian immigrants took ill and died. Guilt-stricken, Posa’s brother killed himself.

Posa’s wife and two young daughters had been left wondering. Was Posa being held in some Soviet prison like Powers had been? Or was he dead?

“The Air Force says my husband is missing and I won’t believe he is dead until I am told he is,” Betty Posa told a reporter at the time.

She eventually held a funeral with an empty casket at a Santa Monica cemetery. Then she packed up her two daughters and moved to Lancaster to get away from the sad memories.

During the late 1990s there were several false reports to the family that Posa’s body had been discovered. Last fall the government again announced that Pentagon investigators were “close to pinpointing” Posa’s grave and that an effort would be made this year to retrieve it.

Then came the February arrest of FBI agent Robert Philip Hanssen, accused of spying for Russia.

When the U.S. ordered 40 Russian diplomats to leave this country, Russia retaliated by ordering out a similar number of Americans, including a member of the search planning team.

It was a renewal of Cold War-style tit-for-tat diplomacy. For months, it appeared that the latest search for Posa might be canceled. Last week, however, U.S. officials said the mission appears to be back on track.

Nonetheless, daughter Vicki Posa, now 52 and a Lancaster resident, said she and her sister Cathy, 50, remain skeptical. “I don’t want to hear anything anymore unless they have proof they have found him,” she said.

Shannon Daniele digs through a worn leather briefcase filed with photocopies of government reports. The snap-top satchel belonged to Eugene Posa when he was a dashing Air Force captain. The documents inside relate to his death.

Daniele, a 30-year-old Long Beach mortgage loan representative, is Posa’s grandson. He is looking for the Distinguished Flying Cross that was posthumously awarded Posa after his reconnaissance plane was shot down.

“I want to go over there with them when they look for him,” Daniele said, pulling out the medal and holding it in his hand. Befitting Posa’s final mission, the inscription etched on it is cryptic. “For extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight, 1 July 1960,” it reads.

“I have the money to go. It’s an eight-hour bus ride to get to the actual site where they think he is. There really isn’t lodging up there, but I’m sure I could find a host family through the Internet,” Daniele says. “Being there when they finally find him would bring a lot of closure to this.”

Daniele has spent five years hunting for clues to his grandfather’s disappearance.

“My grandmother never talked about it until right at the end, when she was dying of cancer. I got to read some of the love letters between her and my grandfather. This was a real romance. It’s clear how much she loved this man. That’s why she never talked about it. She was absolutely bitter over what happened.”

Posa’s widow had good reason to be frustrated.

Of the plane’s six-man crew, two bailed out of the shot-up RB-47 and were rescued by Soviets, who held them captive for a time. When the airmen returned home, they were welcomed at the White House by newly elected President John F. Kennedy.

In Santa Monica, meanwhile, word of Eugene Posa’s disappearance was being kept a secret from his parents, Joseph Posa, 82, and Isabella Posa, 80. Their older son, Philip, then in his 50s, wanted to spare them anxiety because of their age. “The shock would be too much for them,” he told friends.

The disappearance was a big deal in Santa Monica. Posa had been voted senior class president at Santa Monica High School in 1939. He had attended UCLA and Loyola University and had married a girl he had met on the beach at Santa Monica.

Philip lived with his parents and screened phone calls and visitors. Since his parents spoke only Italian, Philip did the translating when they left their 6th Street home.

He carefully avoided passing along words of condolence. When the couple heard a news broadcast that mentioned their son’s name, Philip said they had misunderstood, that the name on the television was “Rosa,” not Posa.

Soon, Philip was forging Eugene Posa’s signature on phony letters--correspondence supposedly sent by the flier from a base in England.

At Christmas in 1960 Philip prepared a gift package that included a pretend note in which Eugene told the pair how much he missed them and how fast his two daughters, Vicki, 11 and Cathy, 10, were growing. The note said his wife, Betty, sent her love from an Air Force base in Kansas, where Eugene Posa was normally stationed and where she and the children were living.

Philip explained to friends that he was undertaking the deception because he held out hope that someday the Russians would report that his brother was alive.

The subterfuge fell apart when Joseph Posa went to a neighborhood Italian grocery one day without Philip. Someone there told him how sorry he was to have heard about Eugene Posa’s disappearance.

Joseph and Isabella died soon after that.

“They died of broken hearts,” Daniele said. “Philip was so distraught that he went down to the Santa Monica Pier to the shooting arcade and killed himself. Ironically, my mom and her sister were hanging out under the pier at the time. Luckily, they didn’t know it was their uncle who had been shot.”

Daniele’s interest in his grandfather was stirred when he was 18 and was considering joining the Air Force. He says his family quickly squelched that idea.

Three years before his grandmother’s death, he persuaded her to share Eugene Posa’s story.

A trunk held the love letters and news clippings, his briefcase, his medals and personal items such as his wristwatch and his civilian driver’s license. There was also a thick file of government correspondence about theories over where his remains might be.

Daniele says he kept some of his grandmother’s ashes and plans to place them next to Eugene Posa when his grandfather’s remains are found.

The search for Eugene Posa’s body is tentatively scheduled for July.

Officials have worked through a joint American-Russian commission that has spent nine years trying to determine the fate of missing Cold War-era servicemen. Now, they think they know where Posa is.

In the past, it was thought he might be buried in a military cemetery in the town of Severomorsk. Now they plan to look in cemeteries in Murmansk and several other nearby sites on the Kola Peninsula.

Russian archives have been scoured for clues, and investigators have run ads on Russian TV and in newspapers asking for help. The MIG pilot who shot down Posa’s plane and a sailor who helped retrieve Posa’s body have been interviewed, as has a witness who saw the body in Severomorsk being taken away in a truck.

“We believe we’re on the verge of identifying the cemetery,” Denis Clift, co-chairman of the U.S. side of the commission, said last November.

Locating Posa’s body will help fill in the blanks of Air Force records on the fatal flight of his reconnaissance plane, which had been sent out as a substitute for the more sophisticated U2 spy planes that were grounded after the shooting down and capture of Powers on May 1, 1960.

To mark that two-month anniversary, the Soviets had sent aloft the MIG 19 to scout around. It soon happened upon the RB-47, flying 50 miles off Holy Nose Cape along the Kola Peninsula. The MIG got within 40 feet before it opened fire, shooting the left wing, engines and fuselage of the U.S. plane. Three crewmen ejected, but one died and his body was returned to the U.S. in 1960. Posa and two other reconnaissance officers went down with the plane.

Planning for this summer’s search had begun before the recent spy scandal surrounding FBI agent Hanssen. U.S. officials are moving ahead and hoping nothing goes awry.

“I have a team earmarked to go,” said Johnie Webb, deputy director of the U.S. Army’s Central Identification Laboratory, which works out of Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. The forensics lab has identified about 1,000 missing soldiers and fliers over the last 28 years.

“We have all of Posa’s records. If there are dentations, we’ll do dental work. If that gives us valid enough evidence, that will make the identification. If not, we can use mitochondrial DNA.”

Webb said family members are not encouraged to accompany forensic search teams as they do their grim work. But if Daniele is willing to pay his own way and gets approval from the Russians, the U.S. won’t stop him.

“For the family, I hope we can find him and maybe bring him home and maybe answer some of the unanswered questions the family has had about him over the years,” Webb said.

Shannon Daniele wants to be there when his grandfather is found.

“It will be good for this to finally end,” he said simply.

“One minute 40 years ago changed an entire family. And not for the better, either.”