During the first half of the twentieth century, Russians endured a revolution, two world wars, three famines (1921–22, 1933, and 1946–47), and twenty-five years of Stalin’s terror that murdered hundreds of thousands outright and sent millions more to die in the frozen camps, forests, and mines of Siberia. An accurate accounting of lives lost in all these catastrophes is impossible, but the total could easily approach fifty million.1 Stalin’s successors after 1953 presided over a less lethal but only marginally more successful society. By 1991, the survivors were exhausted, with strength enough only to shrug off the geriatric kleptocracy that lived by stealing the economy’s scant output for the exclusive benefit of itself and the 10 or 15 percent of the population who were party members.
But in 1978, long before glasnost, Chernobyl, and Afghanistan, those old thieves, led by Brezhnev, were still firmly in power and the Soviet Union still looked formidable. Even including those few Westerners who saw clearly how ideological cynicism and grotesque economic mismanagement in the USSR had sapped its vitality in the decades since World War II—and they were very few, in Washington or anywhere—most analysts granted that the Soviets’ military might gave them superpower status roughly equivalent to that of the United States. And so did everyone one else. Only several years after Gorbachev’s assumption of power (he became general secretary in 1985) would events begin to lead everyone to the knowledge that the Soviet Union was a huge Potemkin village, and its Warsaw Pact was a sham.
In October 1978, when AF 586 flew south along the Kamchatka coast, the USSR was an acknowledged superpower at the head of a military alliance that by some assessments was the military equal of the United States and NATO, and by some important measures (men in uniform, numbers of main battle tanks, and artillery tubes) said to be its superior.2
Once Mys Sinyavin arrived at the crash coordinates, the U.S. goal was to keep the ship there, searching for survivors until all fifteen men had been found, dead or alive. Mys Sinyavin continued the search for Grigsby and Miller for hours after the thirteen were brought aboard (reported to Moscow early Friday morning, local time), but the real follow-on hunt for the two lost men was left to Mys Belkina and Gorodok. The two vessels remained on station, continuing the search, despite knowing that prior to its departure for port Sinyavin had reported the survivors had said the “remaining two crewmen . . . have been killed [sic].”
Next (and throughout), Washington wanted the crewmembers transferred from Soviet custody as soon as possible. Pursuit of this objective initially took the form of pressing for a transfer at sea, from Mys Sinyavin to CGC Jarvis, as soon as the Coast Guard cutter could arrive alongside. By late Friday evening, Moscow time, however, the embassy had concluded correctly that Sinyavin was not going to wait for a rendezvous with Jarvis. After it became clear that the trawler was proceeding to Petropavlovsk, the Soviet foreign ministry was pelted with embassy requests to clear a U.S. medical evacuation aircraft from Yokota into Petropavlovsk (and later to Khabarovsk when it developed that the men were being flown to that city). For the next five days, until Wednesday night when the effort was finally abandoned, the goal was to get clearance for a U.S. medical evacuation flight into the Soviet Union.
At 8:30 P.M. Friday, Moscow time, some fifteen hours after the first request for assistance had been made, Washington asked the embassy to make “preliminary approaches” to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get an American medevac flight cleared into Petropavlovsk from Yokota. The subject, Washington said, had already been “discussed informally” with the Soviet embassy. Preliminary approaches in Moscow were followed up with a formal, written request for flight clearance midday, Saturday, a few hours before Sinyavin arrived in Petropavlovsk.
Barely thirty-six hours after plucking them out of the sea, Mys Sinyavin was delivering the survivors of Crew 6 to Leviathan’s vestibule. Sinyavin had saved them from death, pulling them from the water scant hours before the last man in the Mark-12 might have died, but why, each would soon wonder, and for what?
Early Sunday morning, 29 October, as the ten Americans trod under the lights down Sinyavin’s gangplank to put foot on Russian soil, each man knew that his status had suddenly changed. No longer was he a survivor of a disaster at sea, aboard ship among fishermen—sympathetic, ordinary sailors—who instinctively understood his experience and respected him for it. Now he was a cold war warrior, alone with nine of his crew and unexpectedly washed up at the enemy’s camp.
Their training at Warner Springs had conditioned the crew to anticipate harsh confinement under miserable conditions, and there was nothing in their experience to contradict this expectation. Ignorant of Washington’s appeal to Moscow for assistance and of the high-level dialogue between the two governments that had turned Sinyavin around and sent it northeast to rescue them, with no indication from their hosts about how long they were to be held and under what conditions, it was easy to imagine that each move was a step on the passage to something worse.
Finding of Fact. During the night of October 28 Mys Sinyavin arrived in Petropavlovsk, USSR. The survivors were taken to the naval hospital, where they received physical examinations and, in their opinions, excellent care.
Sinyavin sailed into port at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski around midnight, 29 October, local Siberian time, 28 October in Adak across the International Date Line. Its hyphenated name distinguishes this city on the Kamchatka Peninsula’s eastern shore from another Petropavlovsk in distant Kazakhstan, but no one can confuse the two. Kamchatka is nothing like arid Kazakhstan in Central Asia.
Three hundred miles across at its greatest breadth, the Kamchatka Peninsula is a cold, calloused thumb of marshes, tundra, and mountains that thrusts down 750 miles between the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk before it finally dribbles off into the submerged volcanoes that are the Kuril Islands. Like the Aleutians, Kamchatka forms part of the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. Fully 22 of the peninsula’s 127 volcanoes are thought to be still active, and the ever-present threat of earthquakes has capped the buildings in Petropavlovsk at a maximum of five stories. Five stories of the slab-sided, utilitarian building style ubiquitous throughout the Soviet bloc.
Thanks in part to this drab architecture, the small port city is famously ugly but its setting is majestic. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, named in 1740 after founder Vitus Bering’s two ships, the Saint Peter and Saint Paul, hugs on one side the northeast shore of Avachinskaya Bay, a huge, superb natural harbor, and on the other the bases of two imposing volcanoes, Vulkan Koryak (elevation 11,339 feet) and Vulkan Avacha (just over 9,000 feet).3 Neither is nearly as tall as Klyuchevskaya Volcano, almost 3 miles high and 350 miles away, but in clear weather their sharp cones towering over the squat, waterfront city beneath them are handsome and imposing nonetheless.
Crew 6 had flown far enough down track during its PARPRO mission two days ago to have seen these same peaks sixty miles away, poking up through the clouds above the peninsula’s craggy eastern mountain range, from PD-2’s cockpit windows. (Grigsby’s photos of the volcanoes had gone down to the sea floor in the camera lost with PD-2.) Crewmembers would spend the next forty-eight hours in their shadows.
The city was then the political, economic, and cultural center of the Kamchatka oblast (province), the metropolis of a bleak and inhospitable region that boasted scarcely two people per square mile and harsh winters that spanned much of three seasons. In 1978, Petropavlovsk was a fishing town, a center of net and ship repair, of fish processing and canning. It was also an important military center.
The Soviet Union’s National Air Defense Forces had a major presence in Kamchatka oblast and in Magadan oblast, immediately north.4 Together, these two provinces formed the North Pacific ramparts of a nation that had recently and provocatively taken publicly to calling itself a Pacific power. Air defense fighter bases and radar sites bristled along the coast from Mys Shmidta on the Chukchi Sea, south past Provideniya, Anadyr, and Ust-Kamchatsk to Petropavlovsk. The Soviet Pacific Fleet’s headquarters was in Vladivostok, on the Sea of Japan, but Petropavlovsk was one of the fleet’s three major home ports, and the one with easiest access to the open sea. Between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok lay the Sea of Okhotsk, an often ice-covered Soviet lake and a sanctuary for Soviet Pacific Fleet ballistic missile submarines on sea trials.5
In light of its strategic importance, and reflecting the Soviet Union’s customary xenophobia, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski was a closed city, like Vladivostok. In addition to the usual restrictions on internal travel imposed on all Soviet citizens, which would have kept many of its own nationals outside of the sensitive area, Moscow had long maintained an absolute prohibition on foreigners in the strategic city. Crew 6, as foreign as anything that could be imagined by Far East Military District headquarters in Vladivostok, would be a temporary exception to this strict injunction.
Sinyavin’s speed of advance from the ditching site 370 miles away had almost certainly been carefully adjusted to ensure that it would not arrive pierside until well past sunset, shrouding in autumnal darkness any view of the city and especially of its sensitive navy base complex south of the city center from the American sailors who would soon disembark. As it rounded Mys Mayachny (Beacon Cape), sailed north through the narrow throat into the bay, and entered protected waters, the seas calmed and Sinyavin finally began to ride easily during the remaining five miles or so into port. Moore, still nauseous below decks, and the other Americans felt the difference right away. The business of entering port and tying up the trawler at an isolated pier took a while, and by the time the P-3 crew had been assembled on deck, everything was ready.
The scene before them could have come out of a Humphrey Bogart movie. A few pools of weak light illuminated the ground near the bottom of the gangplank. From there to the nearby steep slopes of the volcanic cones rimming the harbor, everything else was obscured in shades of gray. A darkened bus idled pierside at the head of a line of barely visible sedans. Armed guards formed a loose perimeter around the ship and the bus; others stood about ominously in the shadows everywhere on the pier. When the Americans left Sinyavin for a brief and peculiar ceremony in what appeared to be a warehouse across from the pier, the sedans disgorged a small troop of men, who strode purposefully aboard the ship as if they were their replacements. Almost certainly this boarding party would closely interrogate the trawler’s crew about everything that happened since the pickup from the rafts.
Walking into the warehouse—dim, drab, two long tables illuminated with bare bulbs hanging overhead, uniformed men on its other side, at least one in a photogenic commissar’s fur cap—was like returning to the camp at Warner Springs. The ceremony was a formal change of custody. Captain Arbuzov (or his representative, no American knew what he looked like) was turning over ten men and three bodies to the Border Guards and receiving signed receipts in exchange. They were now in the hands of the KGB, which had nearly two days to prepare for them. Standing in the warehouse, Gibbons’ reaction to the scene was somber. “Oh, no,” he thought, “here we go, handcuff time.” Nearby, Forshay steeled himself with the thought that “we’re not working for Kinney Shoes. We’ve got to follow the rules.” The rules he had in mind were those they had rehearsed at SERE school. Say little, agree to less, sign nothing, resist everything.
Their minder, here and in Khabarovsk, would be a major wearing the green epaulets of the Border Guards, the KGB’s own army. (In a few days the major, Viktor Anyasov, would have relaxed enough to reveal a talent for capitalism. During an unobserved moment aboard their bus, he put ideology aside just long enough to sell some rubles for American dollars, exchanging these paper souvenirs of the Soviet Union for hard currency usable on the black market or in well-stocked stores for party members.)
Ceremony over, the crew was driven uphill to another building some fifteen minutes away and escorted into two-man rooms in an otherwise vacant, upper wing of what proved to be the naval base’s hospital. Spotless. Practically empty.
Once the surviving members of the crew were again dry and warm, fed, and rested, all of which was the case before Sinyavin pulled into port, only Forshay needed further medical attention (and all he got for his battered back was aspirin). The Russian decision to put them in hospital, first in Petropavlovsk and later in Khabarovsk, must have had more to do with keeping their unexpected American guests isolated until a final decision was made about what to do with this flotsam than with any medical requirement. Hospitals, especially but not exclusively psychiatric hospitals, had a long history as places of confinement in the Soviet Union. Resorting to them for this purpose would have been a natural and easy decision for the KGB, into whose custody Crew 6 was apparently assigned.
U.S. requests for medevac aircraft clearance to the closed city of Petropavlovsk and access to the surviving crewmembers became strident after Sinyavin entered port. During the next five days, what started as Bogart shaded over to Brigadoon. Everything that the Americans saw on the ground—wooden barracks, trucks and cars, x-ray machines and television sets, tape recorders and toothbrushes—looked like something from the past recently withdrawn from a time capsule. Everyone would recall the glass syringe used to take blood samples, grown in memory to the size of a quarter-horsepower drill. Caylor would later describe the experience as akin to being on the set of a 1930s movie.6
The crew spent Sunday and Monday getting basic physical exams in pairs, resting and being generally wary and uncooperative, Gibbons especially so. He roamed the hospital and went so far as to insist on being present when the bodies of the three sensor operators were examined. A request of the group to fill out individual biographical questionnaires was refused, without consequences. All other Soviet initiatives to get information seemed half-hearted, almost perfunctory. The crew assigned names to their custodians, drawing on the cast of a familiar cold war–era cartoon for their inspiration: “Rocky,” “Bullwinkle,” “Boris,” and “Natasha.”
In a cable late Sunday night from Ambassador Shulman to Ambassador Toon, captioned “Night Action Immediate,” Shulman told Toon, “President’s instructions are to proceed as energetically as possible to effect return of men soonest. Communicate President’s concern and reiterate request in strongest terms for C-141 permission and immediate consular and medical access.” When Toon met the next afternoon with Foreign Minister André Gromyko’s senior deputy, Georgy Korniyenko, he dutifully delivered the message. Its tone, the embassy reported to Washington, stimulated a “mild complaint” from Korniyenko.7
In reply, Korniyenko told the ambassador that the aircrewmen, whose arrival in Petropavlovsk had been delayed until Saturday night (local time) by “heavy storms,” were to be flown from Petropavlovsk to Khabarovsk Tuesday evening. There would be no objection, he said, to travel by embassy personnel to Khabarovsk. When Toon’s suggestion that the men be flown, instead, to Japan was politely rebuffed, the embassy immediately made plans to send a four-man team to Khabarovsk on the first available Aeroflot flight.
The embassy quickly sent the news by urgent, “night action” message over Toon’s signature to the secretaries of state and defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the commander of the Military Airlift Command (with copies to twenty-two other interested addressees).8
As Korniyenko had predicted, the Americans departed Petropavlovsk Tuesday evening on Aeroflot’s domestic service. They left from a remote corner of Yelizovo Airport, climbing from their bus directly onto the waiting aircraft, in sight of what appeared to be derelict civil aircraft abandoned around the field. Howard Moore remembers the other passengers—presumably all Soviet citizens, most must have had some government or military connection—staring in goggle-eyed wonder from the back of the crowded Aeroflot Iluyshin 62 transport as the Americans boarded forward, carrying all their flight and survival equipment in their arms, and looking like ET going home. Standing under the dim lights of the transport’s cabin and glancing aft across the same cultural divide, the American passengers saw evidence of long neglect. Frayed carpeting, torn cushions, collapsed seat backs, and missing seat belts testified that this aircraft had endured years of hard use. They sat down, with no idea where the tired, scruffy transport was taking them.
Finding of Fact. After two days in Petropavlovsk, the ten survivors and the remains of the three deceased crewmembers were taken to Khabarovsk, U.S.S.R., via commercial airliner. All personnel were required to remain in the hospital until their departure to Niigata, Japan, via Japanese commercial airliner on 2 November 1978.
In daylight and at a distance, the swept-wing Aeroflot IL 62 jet they flew in, painted in the domestic fleet’s blue and white livery, would have looked handsome to anyone but an accountant. Its four, tail-mounted engines guaranteed horrendous operating costs for any airline that kept real books. Aeroflot, the USSR’s huge flag carrier, like the country itself, could not afford what it was doing but did not know how to do anything else.
Khabarovsk, then the largest city in the eastern third of the Soviet Union, lies at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, just north of the Manchurian border. It is thirty-eight hundred miles, seven time zones, from Moscow and eleven hundred miles from Petropavlovsk. The crew’s flight there from Petropavlovsk was nonstop. Two-plus hours in the IL 62, west-southwest across Kamchatka and the Sea of Okhotsk, directly over Sakhalin Island, and finally descending over the mainland straight toward Khabarovsk.
The two cities—Petropavlovsk a seaport amid peat bogs, Khabarovsk an inland crossroads—are very different. Petropavlovsk lies pressed between the bay and the mountains; Khabarovsk stretches out atop three parallel ridges, the source of the poetic, incongruously maritime legend that the city is built on the backs of three whales.
The Americans saw none of this; arrival here was at night, too. Nor was anyone on Crew 6 aware that their destination had a certain special status among historians of the cold war. Khabarovsk was the site of a notorious detention and interrogation camp for UN prisoners during the Korean War, and for captured American electronic warfare aircrews for years after that fighting stopped. Their short stay would be nothing like that.
The Americans were arriving in the city just as its annual cycle, an oscillation between frenzied work during the short summer and near-frozen repose during the long winter, was approaching quiescence. From late spring through early autumn, cargo transport and passenger traffic would have been relatively heavy in and between the city’s terminals. The last days of October, however, were already too late to continue resupply of the far North, and a reduction in heavy traffic was the first sign of the near-hibernation to come.
Khabarovsk (from a description in the San Jose Mercury, sounding like it was lifted out of a tourist brochure and written on the day the crew arrived there), “is a modern city in the Soviet Orient. Roughly the size of San Jose, it is the center of a territorial [krai] government and dates back to 1652. It has an attractive waterfront park and esplanade, and modern factories and apartment blocks housing workers.” The Mercury went on to note that it “is a major industrial center and is an ‘open city,’ that is, it is not sealed off to Westerners for security reasons.”
Here the Border Guards ran the hospital that was to be their inn for two days. The accommodations were somewhat more comfortable than before, and the food was somewhat better, but the same austerity was visible everywhere to the increasingly restive Americans. In retrospect, Crew 6 was obviously in a holding pattern, watching time go by while Moscow organized itself to deal with them. At the time, no one on the crew knew what to expect. A few hours before being notified they were going to Japan, to be returned to their countrymen, Ed Caylor still thought that their next trip would be to Moscow, for an indefinite stay under uncertain conditions. He was wrong, but Caylor could not have known that the Soviets had evidently decided to return his crew expeditiously, and as early as midday Sunday were just groping for the best way to do that. That is when Isakov, the foreign ministry’s deputy director of the USA Division, personally urged his American counterpart to be patient, assuring the embassy’s political counselor that “all would turn out well.”
If someone in Moscow or in its far eastern military districts ever thought to hold the crew, he apparently quickly lost the internal debate about what to do with these few Americans who had figuratively washed up on the Kamchatka coast. There’s no indication of any intent to detain the crew, and scant evidence of any serious effort by the KGB to obtain any military intelligence from them. It is even possible to take at face value Captain Arbuzov’s statement that the American crew was taken to Petropavlovsk and not transferred to Jarvis for medical reasons, not as an exercise in realpolitik or in an effort by the USSR to keep its options open.
The crew assumed their bunkrooms in both hospitals were bugged. To defeat this eavesdropping, they spoke to each other in affected accents of the Deep South, a sort of vocal code they imagined the Soviets would have difficulty breaking. Their rooms almost certainly were wired. A few of the wandering Americans chanced upon some of their keepers moving a bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder around on the floor below theirs. The device must have been a part of the KGB’s surveillance equipment. Some of the “medical personnel” who came to see them, sporting new lab coats and unfamiliar stethoscopes, were obviously intelligence officers. Gibbons, heading to the morgue under escort, passed two surprised men wearing audio headsets on the floor below the crew’s rooms. But overall, the intelligence collection effort appeared perfunctory, almost a ritual.
The Soviets took a quick crew photograph on the hospital steps at Khabarovsk, and this high contrast photo of ten somber-faced men facing almost expressionlessly into the sun made it into some American newspapers on November 2. (The picture appeared simultaneously in the San Jose Mercury, the Palo Alto Times, and the San Jose Times, poignantly on the day of Moffett Field’s memorial service for the five dead. Only Shepard had objected to the photo. He was fearful of its possible propaganda uses. The group finally agreed among themselves to a short photo session. Everyone was to look military; no one was to smile or gesture.) The Soviets’ public relations foray misfired badly, an indication of the fearfulness of those waiting at home. The photo immediately triggered a quick spasm of anxiety among the families. In the three ranks of unsmiling, almost grim faces staring out at the camera, wives and parents imagined the reflection of all kinds of abuse and suffering. One man, his arm partly concealed behind another’s, was thought to have suffered an amputation. Other observations were only slightly less hysterical.9
Reflecting the same perspective, although more hopeful of an early return, the U.S. Forces Japan headquarters put a C-9 Nightingale medical evacuation aircraft on one-hour alert at Yokota, ready to speed to Khabarovsk as soon as permission was received from the Soviets to evacuate the presumably injured crew.
The consular visit that the embassy had been pressing the Soviets to permit finally happened in the hospital at Khabarovsk. The team members included the naval attaché, Capt. L. Anthony Bracken, the embassy’s medical officer, a Dr. Nydell, a consular officer, Carter, and a medic, Briggs. One of the three civilians was a young African American, and he unwittingly provided the team’s bona fides to the still-suspicious crewmembers. Once they saw him, crewmembers were reassured, believing that the Soviets would have been very unlikely to have a black, English-speaking agent in their Moscow stable of agent provocateurs. Tony Bracken, who delivered a kit of personal grooming items and embassy souvenirs to each man, is remembered most clearly, perhaps for that reason. Among other things, he wanted confirmation that AF 586’s crypto had been properly destroyed. Embassy Moscow reported to the State Department that the team accompanied Patrol Squadron 9’s flight crew from the USSR to Japan, and perhaps it did; however, none of the survivors has ever mentioned having American escorts on the JAL flight with them out of Khabarovsk.
The lapse suggests either great fatigue or extraordinary introspection during the flight. Alternatively, the flood of vodka washing over a hastily arranged farewell dinner sponsored by the colonel in command of the Border Guards’ hospital may have dampened the Americans’ powers of observation. In photographs of the cheery event taken just hours prior to takeoff, the table is set with a white cloth. Clean plates and flatware are evident everywhere, as are carafes of water and bottles of vodka. The only food in the photos is a bowl of apples, being ignored by the hosts and guests alike.
Captain Bracken had briefed Ed Caylor on how the senior man must uphold the honor of the side at such an event. Caylor, who remembers the vodka as “excellent,” obediently went drink for drink with his host. He recalls the first four, glass-draining toasts. There were others; the hospital commander was making no secret of his relief to be getting rid of his charges without incident. A photo shows Gibbons and Flow, with their demonstrably empty vodka glasses upside down on their heads, seated next to Moore, getting ready to drain his. Once the vodka ran out, the party switched to grain alcohol. That is when Bracken (who still remembers how the two-hundred-proof medicinal spirits sucked the moisture out of his mouth on contact) decided it was time to leave for the airport. The crew would fly to Japan warmed by Khabarovsk’s “excellent” vodka, wearing souvenir Soviet Air Force flight jackets and black fur hats.
The Soviets were eager to see the Americans leave as quickly as possible and had asked the American Embassy to make arrangements to effect their speedy departure. Conveniently, Japan Air Lines served the open city once a week from Niigata, two hours and ten minutes to the south-southeast, across the Sea of Japan, and that is how Crew 6 left the Soviet Union, in a nearly empty JAL DC-9 at 8:00 A.M. They could have gone to Niigata on the weekly Aeroflot flight, but that would have meant delaying the departure one day, until 5:00 A.M. Friday, and no one wanted to wait.
Just after 4:00 P.M. Thursday, Capt. J. W. Hegeman, the chief of the Naval Intelligence Service office in Yokosuka, the home port of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, met the ten survivors of Alfa Foxtrot 586 at Niigata, Japan. He got to them, he said, while they were still at their seats in JAL’s DC-9 from Khabarovsk. With Captain Hegeman now escorting them, the survivors changed planes and boarded a Military Airlift Command C-141 transport for the short hop south to Yokota Air Base near Tokyo. (Fifth Air Force had held a C-141 aircraft on three hour alert at Yokota for several days to retrieve the Navy airmen from the USSR, backing up the C-9 medevac waiting for the launch order that never came.) Three welded zinc coffins, containing Brooner, Garcia, and Rodriguez, were transferred smoothly from one plane to the other also. They would be rolled out of the aircraft’s cargo door in Japan to meet a Marine Corps honor guard, already draped with the American flags that would cover them on the trip back to California. Once aboard the -141, the men were safe; their ordeal was over. Inside the transport’s huge fuselage, Ed Caylor and the others were breathing American air, if not yet standing on American soil. Each man finally let his guard down and relaxed for the first time since John Wagner had restarted PD-2’s no. 1 engine one week earlier.
While families waited impatiently at home, the ten survivors would remain at Yokota for two days, time enough for yet another cursory medical examination and for somewhat more extensive intelligence debriefings. In the Navy’s eyes, the debriefing had a higher priority than the domestic reunions still to come. Families in the United States would have to wait a few days longer.
Captain Hegeman headed an impromptu team of 14 (eight Navy officers, four senior enlisted men, and two civilians, ponderously dubbed “the P-3 Survivor Recovery Coordinating Element”), which would conduct the intelligence debrief. His team included six who were assigned to intelligence activities in the western Pacific. The other members were drawn from U.S. joint service command’s several interested staffs.
Hegeman and his team were to see if and how the Soviets had extracted any secrets during the week the Americans were in their hands. They were also collecting “confirmational intelligence,” information from Crew 6’s personal observations during five days in the Soviet Union that could verify what the United States thought it already knew from other sources. Had the members of the crew seen anything in Petropavlovsk or Khabarovsk, his team wanted to know, that could affirm, or refute, information gained from other sources? Had they seen anything like this, for example (showing what was obviously a closeup photograph of Soviet Navy ships in port at Petropavlovsk)?10
At the end of the two days, Hegeman was fulsome in his praise of the men, even while he was edging himself to center stage. “My firsthand observation, as the man closest to the recovery operation . . . they were superb,” Hegeman wrote in a personal message to the wing commander. After reminding Rear Admiral Prindle that he had been “the first Navy man to greet the crew . . . at Niigata and the last to bid them goodbye and a safe trip back to CONUS,” Hegeman went on: “They made my job and the job of my debriefing team easy. They anticipated the debriefings and were mentally prepared to provide the details. They were observant and had sound presence of mind and judgment during their ordeal. They wanted to ‘unload’ as fast as possible. We were overwhelmed with their endurance and in some cases had to put more than one debriefer to a crewman just to absorb the wealth of raw information provided.”
“Sound presence of mind” is an apt description.
Once he was thawed out aboard Sinyavin, Harold Moore found, to his horror, the copies of the encrypted transmissions he had been recording for Bruce Forshay in a breast pocket of his flight suit. Fearing that the wet, but still legible, sheets with the mysterious encrypted letter groups could reveal something sensitive, Moore spent the next several trips to the ship’s head, its communal toilet, carefully discarding damp, wadded fragments of paper into an open hole in the deck that passed for a plumbing fixture.
Shepard, who had been slipped waterlogged briefing notes by some of the enlisted crew while he was aboard Sinyavin, carefully got rid of them, too. He also had a magnetic tape reel in a flight suit pocket, recordings of Soviet radar signals copied from the aircraft’s electronic support measures intercept equipment operated by Rich Garcia, lifted from the body by Matt Gibbons during his first visit to the morgue. Crewmembers took turns surreptitiously holding the tape cassette flat against the picture tube on the old black-and-white TV set in the hospital lounge at Petropavlovsk, hoping the tube’s magnetic field would erase the tape. No one knew if their stratagem worked, but the tape was blank when they replayed it in the United States days later.
Forshay had memorized the configuration of a large search radar antenna their bus had passed on the way to the airport, and he had also made a mental note of the time during dinner at Khabarovsk when every electric light visible in the entire city had suddenly gone dark. Others studied passing radar antennas especially carefully, too.
Even so, it is difficult to picture what Hegeman was referring to when he spoke of a “wealth of raw information provided.” Confined to a commercial fishing trawler, then restricted in vacant wings of two military hospitals and transported between them in the dark, it is unlikely that any of the men would have gleaned any especially meaningful “intelligence.” Even the indomitable Gibbons, prowling like a hyperactive ferret everywhere he could get into, could not have gleaned an intelligence coup from what little he was able to see. Khabarovsk, moreover, was an open city. It had almost certainly been subjected to street-level surveillance in the past.
The debrief had trailed on for two days, because Hegeman was convinced that the crew could give him a lot of intelligence, and he wanted to be certain that they had given nothing away. Impatiently pressing Hegeman to get on with it, Bud Powers quickly came to the conclusion in Yokota that the interrogation should have been finished in a few hours.
Years later, however, people still believed that Matt Gibbons and “Inu” Shepard, at least, had come home from Russia with the secrets of Petro’s submarine base and of Kamchatka’s radar order of battle locked in their brains.