Published Thursday
April 12, 2001

Offutt Speaker Describes Fatal 1958 Spy Mission

BY JOE DEJKA

WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_div=3&u_hdg=0&u_sid=88279

Forty-two years later, the words of the Soviet pilot are still chilling.

"The target is falling."

A murky photograph taken through the MiG-17's gun sight shows the crippled four-engine American reconnaissance airplane streaking away in flames. The airplane had made a fatal navigation error and flew from Turkey into Soviet Armenia during the Cold War.

A man who has spent years studying the downing of the C-130 visited Offutt Air Force Base on Wednesday, and his timing could hardly have been better.

As he detailed the fate of the pudgy four-engine propeller plane, he confirmed what an American air crew recently learned when it flew a similar airplane off the coast of China: Eavesdropping on adversaries has always been dangerous - and, he maintained, essential - work.

"To a great extent, it's keeping the world honest," said Larry Tart, a retired Air Force senior master sergeant.

His message found a friendly audience Wednesday in the Strategic Roost of the Association of Old Crows. The association is made up of active-duty and retired defense electronics experts, those who fly or have flown on similar reconnaissance missions for the Air Force.

Association member Robb Hoover, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who arranged Tart's visit, said everyone there shares a bond with the crew detained in China. "It could happen to them as much as an EP-3," Hoover said.

Reports that the incident ended peacefully, with China planning to release the Americans, were met with relief by members.

"Cooler heads prevailed, and we're all elated about that," Hoover said.

Diplomacy, however, would not have changed the outcome over Armenia four decades ago.

Tart, 63, wearing a tie clip shaped like a C-130, said the inexperienced crew was "flying by the seat of its pants" when it set out Sept. 2, 1958, on a routine reconnaissance route, setting its course on a navigational beacon in northern Turkey.

He suspects the crew by mistake set its course on a similar beacon transmitting from the Soviet side. That led the crew unavoidably into the sights of the waiting MiGs, he said.

All crew members died, he said, and the incident was shrouded in secrecy by both sides - the Soviets taking days to respond and U.S. military leaders spooning out information on "a need to know" basis.

After a 96-hour diplomatic silence, the Soviets agreed to give only six bodies to the Americans. Of those, only four were positively identified and the rest were listed as missing in action.

Tart, who served as a Russian linguist on U.S. air crews from 1967 to 1976, said America's reconnaissance effort grew after the Soviet Union detonated a nuclear device in 1949 and North Korea attacked South Korea the next year.

The United States even sent spy planes on flights over the Soviet Union, "literally driving the Soviet leaders up the wall," he said. Those flights were discontinued in the late 1950s, but reconnaissance flights of the Soviet perimeter continued, with Soviet airplanes reciprocating with flights over Alaska and off America's Atlantic coast, he said.

Tart said the difference between the C-130 incident and this month's EP-3 incident is that the latter crew was clearly in international airspace.

"It was perfectly legal," he said.

Such missions are essential to discern the intentions and capabilities of potential adversaries, he said.

"If President Bush would have said we won't fly anymore, that's exactly what the Chinese wanted," he said.

He commended the American pilot, calling it "a miracle" that he landed safely.

Hoover said the China incident should serve as "a dose of cold-water reality" to American young people who have not lived through the all-consuming fears of the Cold War, when the enemy was clear.

People must recognize that dealing with an incident in the post-Cold War era requires a different approach and the diplomatic one was appropriate, Hoover said. "I think it was handled as well as it could be handled."