Silent Battle

Missing and given up for lost after an intensive six-day search last week was a Strategic Air Command RB-47E, a reconnaissance version of the B-47 jet bomber, and its six-man crew. Based in Britain, the plane, carrying a flock of cameras and a cabin full of electronic equipment, had sped north and east over Arctic waters on a mission that would have taken it into the Barents Sea 100 miles west of the Soviet island of Novaya Zemlya.

The official Pentagon explanation was that the plane was on a routine "electromagnetic survey" (i.e., weather and radiation studies), but the Air Force made no secret of the fact that the RB-47E was part of the continued U.S. probing of Soviet radar and radio communications--a "ferreting" job similar to operations of heavily equipped Soviet "fishing trawlers" that cruise continually off the American coasts. The plane lost radio contact some 300 miles west of Novaya Zemlya--just about the time that U.S. monitors picked up evidence of a flurry of Soviet interceptor activity in the area.

Though a Soviet cruiser radioed last week that it was joining the search, U.S. military men wondered whether the SAC plane was yet another victim of the cold war's silent battle in the skies.

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