"N.J. families left in the dark about long-lost airmen
Cold War spies' fates unknown
Sunday, December 28, 2003
BY RUSSELL BEN-ALI
Star-Ledger Staff
For Raymond Goulet, each new year begins with hope that there will be more news of his brother.
An Air Force radio man and gunner, Roland Goulet was shot down off the coast of the former Soviet Union on a spy mission it took his government 40 years to acknowledge.
Some days Raymond Goulet even imagines his brother walking through the door of his Moorestown home.
"You never really give up hope," Goulet says of the search for his brother, who was aboard a flight sent to size up Soviet radar capabilities off the Sea of Japan on July 29, 1953. "But it's been a frustration for my family."
From 1950 to 1969, 165 airmen disappeared during Cold War reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union, North Korea and China; 126 people are still unaccounted for, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Their work was so secret that the United States did not publicly admit the flights had happened until 1992.
The secret flights were known as "ferret missions," in which U.S. aircraft few close enough to the Soviet border to invite a response that would help pinpoint Soviet radar. It proved to be deadly work.
Families of the missing airmen initially were told by the government the planes disappeared or were shot down during routine training flights or while doing weather reconnaissance.
Now that the United States and Russia are friendly, the two countries are working together to try to help families find out what really happened to the lost airmen.
A special commission, called the United States-Russia Joint Commission on POWs and MIAs, was established in March 1992, months after the breakup of the U.S.S.R., to investigate the "ferret missions" and other reconnaissance flights.
The commission on prisoners of war and those missing in action tries to determine whether American servicemen are being held against their will in the territory of the former Soviet Union, and, if so, to secure their immediate release and repatriation, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
It also seeks the return of the remains of any deceased American servicemen interred in the former Soviet Union and to finally tell the story of what happened to the brave airmen.
Much of the work is being done at the Central Archives of the Naval Forces of the Russian Federation at Gatchina, near St. Petersburg.
At home, U.S. Department of Defense officials hold monthly meetings in different cities to brief families on the commission's work and provide any updates. Sometimes there's nothing new to tell. Over the years, a few tidbits have come to the Goulets.
"It's frustrating because you want to find out something more," said Susan Goulet, Raymond's wife. "And you just come home and find out that you really didn't learn much."
The process is slow, officials said. It involves interviewing and reinterviewing surviving fighter pilots and witnesses and recovering and sharing classified documents that were stashed in warehouses long ago.
"It's been a very, very difficult thing because we have to rely a great deal on our access to Russian archives," said Larry Greer, a U.S. Department of Defense spokesman.
"But we have been able to develop some tantalizing leads on reports of burials of Americans who we believe were held in the Soviet Union," Greer said.
Still, the remains of only 18 Air Force and Navy missing Cold War servicemen have been located through the commission's work, Greer said.
William E. Burrows, an aerospace historian, has written about the "ferret missions" in his book "By Any Means Necessary, America's Secret Air War in the Cold War."
"It was a cat-and-mouse game," he said of the flights.
The Soviets would use radar to track the U.S. aircraft and send fighter planes to intercept them, said Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington. The pilots would try to evade enemy fighters and rush back to overseas bases while the crew recorded Soviet radar frequencies.
The Russians knew the drill well and often withheld the use of radar until the last minute, forcing the flights to come closer and closer to Soviet soil.
For nearly four decades, the United States maintained that Roland Goulet's crew disappeared on a routine navigational training flight 40 miles off the Soviet coast, according to a report by the joint commission's Cold War Working Group.
But in 1992 a commission report revealed he was aboard an RB-50 aircraft, a reconnaissance bomber plane heavily altered for intelligence gathering, when it was shot down by two Soviet MiG-17 fighter planes just outside Vladivostok, U.S.S.R., in 1953.
The only confirmed survivor, Air Force Capt. John E. Roche, plunged into the Sea of Japan from the burning plane, but Soviet and U.S. documents released to the commission suggest that there could be others.
Roche later told investigators that he eluded floating slicks of burning fuel and curious sharks until a U.S. Navy warship plucked him from the water, according to commission findings from 1992 to 1996. From his position, Roche said, he could see Soviet patrol boats in the waters around him that appeared to be searching for survivors. At the urging of intelligence officers, Roche remained silent about the mission for many years.
A Soviet sergeant watching from his post on a nearby Russian island told U.S. interviewers in 1993 that he saw seven parachutes descending from the burning aircraft within two minutes of the engagement, a commission report states.
U.S. search and rescue operations dropped a lifeboat to four survivors spotted from the air following the encounter, according to commission notes. Three other survivors were spotted in the water about a mile away.
A commission report says that at first the Soviets maintained there was only a fishing trawler nearby. The Russian co-chairman of the commission later said there were Soviet patrol boats in the area but, curiously, none of their logbooks were ever found, the report says.
The bodies of two crew members were later found along the coast of Japan. Goulet and 13 other airmen remain unaccounted for.
Families of the airmen say there is much bitterness still over the way the government misled them about their deaths.
"It's very difficult because of the fact that there wasn't a body, there is no closure," said Edward Kobayashi, whose brother Richard Kobayashi, an Air Force second lieutenant from Cape May who vanished during a 1956 Cold War flight. "So my mother, at times, gets a little depressed because we didn't have a funeral for him."
His father and two of his brothers died without ever knowing the nature of his military work, Edward Kobayashi said.
For years the government maintained Richard Kobayashi's plane and its 16-member crew were lost during a weather reconnaissance flight over the Sea of Japan during a typhoon. Decades later it would acknowledge that it was an intelligence-gathering flight. The plane was never found.
The missing also includes Jack Thomas, a Navy serviceman from Stillwater in Sussex County who disappeared in 1950 when his naval aircraft was shot down close to the Soviet border at Liepaya, Latvia, according to Department of Defense records.
Thomas left behind a wife of two years, said Alex McCord of Newton, Thomas's brother-in-law.
Some are bitter that they were misled into thinking their sons may have died in an accident or may have gotten lost when in fact they died in combat.
Some families think the facts behind the spy missions and the fate of American soldiers may never become public because they could embarrass two governments.
"Given that situation, as you can imagine, nobody is anxious to uncover instances where Russians brutalized American flyers in the gulags, in prisons and so on," Burrows said. "They just want it to die, to go away."
Goulet said he would never stop trying to get more news of his brother. He and his wife have joined a missing in action information group, keep track of the government's work to identify buried remains through DNA testing in a laboratory in Hawaii and are planning to attend a briefing by the Defense Department slated for April in Washington.
"I really sincerely think they have the answers," said Goulet. "But this particular flight, if you bring it up, they just want to sidestep the issue. (I thought) they never leave their dead behind. They always try to bring them back."
©2003 The Star-Ledger"