Forgotten Men

In a grim Moscow prison, two Americans while away the hours of their lonely confinement. They read Dickens, Thackeray and the Bible; they write letters to their wives. It has been nearly five months since Air Force Lieutenants F. B. Olmstead and John McKone and four companions were shot down in their RB-47 reconnaissance plane over the Barents Sea. The two young officers were captured, brought to Moscow on loudly trumpeted but plainly trumped-up charges of espionage. The body of one fellow airman was returned to the U.S.; the others are listed as missing.

In an eloquent argument before the U.N. at the time, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge protested that the RB-47 was on a legal reconnaissance flight, well beyond the limits of Russian territorial waters, that the crewmen were in uniform, and that they had made no pretense at concealment. Lodge offered to argue the case, backed up by evidence, before any international tribunal; the Soviets coldly turned the offer down. And there the matter lay.

There was no hullabaloo demanding their release, no publicity such as attended the case and trial of Francis Gary Powers --a well-paid civilian who admittedly flew his U-2 over Russia on a photomapping expedition for the Central Intelligence Agency. The men of the RB-47 were uniformed members of the Air Force, on regular duty and a legal mission.

Yet, since Lodge's strong statement in the U.N., the State Department has done nothing more than register regular fortnightly requests--which the Soviets as regularly ignore--for permission to interview the imprisoned men. The department has skipped from one excuse to another to explain its inaction: first it was the embarrassment of the Powers case, then it was the election. Recently, the lame explanation has been offered that nothing must be done until the new Administration takes office. When the Russians offered to return the airmen as a "gift" to the Kennedy Administration, the State Department had no comment--not even insisting again that the men are illegally held and the victims of Soviet piracy.

The wives and widows of the men of the RB-47 have abided by the department's request to keep quiet and wait. But waiting is difficult for young wives, and they can find small comfort in the driblets of letters that manage to seep through the Communist censorship. Among the personal messages the prisoners were permitted to write to their families, a few notes gave an inkling, especially as the Christmas season approached, of their solitary anguish. "I can't believe that nothing is happening," wrote Bruce Olmstead, "and I do my best to make it from one day to the next, hoping that some decision will present itself." Said John McKone: "This is an ordeal. I don't think that either one of us will ever be the same ... I have no idea what the future holds for us at this time."

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