Nonstop to Copenhagen

The last message from the drop-bellied, high-tailed Navy Privateer was brief and businesslike. She was over the German North Sea port of Bremerhaven heading northeast toward the Baltic into bad weather, she radioed the U.S. Air Force Base in Wiesbaden. At Wiesbaden the four-engined patrol bomber had refueled some three hours before, a Navy stranger out of Africa, carrying a crew of four officers, two mechanics, three radar technicians and a communicator. She was supposed to be flying some kind of navigation training flight "nonstop to Copenhagen and return."

There was no return--only a long silence. Next day a score of U.S. planes swooped onto a Danish airfield to begin a needlepoint-fine search through the squalls and fog of the Baltic Sea. Danish and Swedish planes and boats pitched in to help. It was a nerve-racking business, for the narrow Baltic is virtually a moat lying between Russia's heavily armed northwestern seacoast and the Western world. Along the shores of captive Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the U.S.S.R. has laid down heavy rocket installations and submarine pens, and has girdled them all with high-powered radar detectors and a constant patrol of fighter planes and submarines.

On the third day of the search, a clue to the fate of the heavy bomber came, like a face slap, out of Moscow.

Out to Sea. U.S. Ambassador Alan G. Kirk was summoned to the Kremlin, heard Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky personally charge the U.S. with "an unheard-of violation of the elementary rules of international law." On the day of the Privateer's flight, a "four-engined military plane of the B-29 type" (the Privateer is actually a single-tailed Navy version of the old B-24 Liberator) had flown 13 miles across the Soviet coastline near the Latvian harbor of Liepaja, said Vishinsky. Soviet fighters had swept up in challenge and ordered the U.S. plane to land at a Russian airport. Instead it refused and opened fire.

"Owing to this," said Vishinsky coldly, "an advanced Soviet fighter was forced to open fire in reply, after which the American plane turned toward the sea and disappeared."

"The impudent fellows received a proper lesson," added Pravda, and in the next breath the Moscow radio reported the award of the Order of the Red Banner to four Soviet air force lieutenants "for excellent fulfillment of their duty."

Over the Sea? The Navy made no explanation of how a Privateer could have been 350 miles off course in the Baltic, even under the worst of weather conditions--but if she was well offshore she had a perfect right to be flying there. Knowing that all long-distance patrol planes are equipped with reconnaissance radar, Navy brass in the Pentagon were certain that she had not disobeyed standing orders to stay well clear of Russian and Russian satellite territory. And she couldn't have opened fire on a seagull because there were no guns aboard except the pilot's personal .45 automatic. The next logical question was: Had the Russians spotted the Privateer by radar, shot her down or fatally crippled her over the sea?

By week's end, only one scrap of evidence had been picked up in the Baltic--an empty yellow life raft of the type issued to Navy patrol bombers. This week, the U.S. charged that the Russians shot down the plane over open waters and demanded indemnity for the dead American flyers. But it was a sign of U.S. awareness of the incidental perils of cold war, that there were no shouts for any hot fighting to begin.

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