Return of the Airmen

(See Cover)

The inaugural music was just fading away in Washington when, across the top of the world, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn ("Tommy") Thompson was summoned to the Kremlin office of Nikita Khrushchev. For two hours Thompson and Khrushchev talked, and within minutes after Thompson emerged into the bitter Russian winter, the diplomatic wires were humming between the capitals of the two great cold war powers.

For the next two days, top Administration officials hurried in and out of the White House--but kept strict silence as to the subject of their conversations with President Kennedy. Washington newsmen began to sense that something big was in the works, something more than the energetic enthusiasm of a new Administration plowing into its problems; the New York Herald Tribune actually dug out the story, but withheld it after Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger explained that publication would be "inimical to the interests of the U.S."

In Moscow, an observant reporter remarked on the unusual bustle of activity around the U.S. military attache's office; he was immediately pledged to silence. Out at Sheremetyevo Airport a few hours later, a British newsman spotted the U.S. air attache's car and came up to cadge a ride to town. Then he spotted two strangers in the back seat, decided not to intrude--and missed the story of his life.

That story broke the next day when President Kennedy, at his first news conference, made a dramatic announcement: "Captains Freeman B. Olmstead and John R. McKone, members of the crew of the U.S.A.F. RB-47 aircraft who have been detained by Soviet authorities since July 1, 1960, have been released by the Soviet government and are now en route to the U.S."

In human terms, the release of Bruce Olmstead, 25, and John McKone, 28, was a heart-touching event. In diplomatic terms it was a blatant Khrushchev move in the continuing cold war, a Soviet gesture toward the new U.S. Administration that cost Russia nothing. In political terms it was a first test of the Kennedy Administration's ability to stay cool while the heat is on--and, from the moment that Ambassador Thompson entered Khrushchev's office, the Administration passed its test handsomely.

Three Strings. In his talk with Thompson, Khrushchev made it perfectly plain that he has not by one jot or tittle changed his views on the outstanding issues of the cold war--Berlin, the Congo, Laos, disarmament or nuclear testing. Khrushchev's offer to free Olmstead and McKone came at the very start of the session. He attached three strings: 1) the announcements of the airmen's release must be made simultaneously in Washington and Moscow, with no advance news leaks; 2) the U.S. must publicly declare that it has discontinued its U-2 flights over Soviet territory; 3) the U.S. must promise not to make international political capital out of the prisoners' release--that is, it must not remind the world that they had been criminally held captive after being shot down over open sea.

Tommy Thompson swiftly relayed Khrushchev's message to Washington, and it was up to Jack Kennedy to make the decisions. The demand for simultaneous announcements offered no substantive problems. Neither did the requirement for declaring against U-2 flights; President Eisenhower had ordered such overflights discontinued shortly after U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers crashed on Soviet soil last May, and President Kennedy had already determined to maintain the ban. The third Soviet stipulation was much more difficult to accept, and it was to become a major reason for the strict security set up around the two U.S. airmen. But Kennedy had no choice but to agree, since it meant freedom for Olmstead and McKone.

For as long as the two airmen remained in Russian cells, there could be no more than cold and formal conversation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Diplomatic communication leading to even the slightest relief in tension between the two countries had been all but destroyed by the crash of the U-2 and Khrushchev's foaming conduct at the summit last May. The return of the RB-47 flyers was only a gesture toward relaxing tensions. It was still winter on the cold war frontier, and RB-47 flights were still necessary along the enemy's outposts.

Rigid & Regular. When their six-jet modified bomber lifted clear of the airbase at Brize Norton, England last July, Olmstead and McKone and their four crewmates were beginning a mission that was vital to U.S. security. Their bomb bays were crammed not with high explosives but with delicate electronic gear designed to measure the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet radar defenses. Theirs was a flight far different from that of Francis Powers. Theirs was a "ferret mission" of a sort that has been carried out for years by U.S. ships and planes patrolling the long coastline of the Russian heartland. The Navy bomber shot down over the Baltic in the spring of 1950 was on a ferret mission. So was the Air Force C-130 transport that was lured by false radio beams into Soviet Armenia and shot down in September 1958. (Of the 17 men on board, the Russians eventually returned six bodies; they still insist that they have no knowledge of the remaining eleven.) During the past ten years, at least 75 Americans have been killed on ferret missions near the Soviet border.

The purpose of such flights is well known to the Russians. Soviet trawlers carry out the same sort of missions off the coast of the U.S.; Soviet planes constantly probe the DEW line radars that reach from Alaska across Canada. And since the ferrets must come as close as possible to coastal defenses without leaving international airspace, their careful flight plans follow courses as rigid and regular as a railroad route. There was no doubt that the Soviets knew exactly where the Olmstead-McKone RB-47 intended to fly as it circled north. If Soviet radars had not been able to trail other planes along the same route, those planes would not have been able to measure Soviet radar.

Pious Search. This was the constant danger: that at any time, using any excuse, Soviet fighters might scramble to the attack at a point chosen well in advance. U.S. intelligence officers had warned only the month before that such an incident was imminent. On that clear day last summer, the RB-47 carrying Olmstead, McKone and their companions flew into a well-laid ambush somewhere west of Novaya Zemlya in the Barents Sea.

When the Air Force reported the plane lost, the Russians piously joined in the search. For ten days, until Khrushchev returned from a junket to Austria, they remained silent about the attack. Then they announced that they had shot the plane down over Soviet waters near the Kola Peninsula. Olmstead and McKone, the only survivors, were in prison. They would, cried Nikita, be tried as spies, "under the full rigor of Soviet law." Such vehemence seemed only natural after the loud propaganda that followed the capture of U-2 Pilot Powers and Khrushchev's intransigence in Paris.

For nearly seven months, the Soviets stuck stubbornly to their stand. Henry Cabot Lodge, then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., made an eloquent presentation of the American case, explained how U.S. radars had tracked the doomed plane until the moment it was shot down--well out over international waters. But the Russians were unmoved. They held Olmstead and McKone incommunicado, let them see each other only twice, refused to permit U.S. embassy personnel to visit them. All that the Russians returned of the plane or its crew was the body of the pilot, Captain Willard G. Palm. Captain Oscar L. Goforth, Major Eugene E. Posa and Captain Dean B. Phillips, the three others presumably killed in the attack, were never found.

That's John. Unlike U-2 Pilot Powers, who began talking almost from the moment of his capture, Olmstead and McKone bore their imprisonment bravely. Once every two weeks--all they were allowed--the prisoners wrote home. From their letters, their anxious families could piece together the loneliness of men who dared not guess what their futures promised, what their country could or would do to save them. At her home in Topeka, Kans., near Forbes Air Force Base, John McKone's wife Connie read and reread every word she received. "The handwriting is John's," she told herself after poring over some passages, "but it is not John. His use of words is too stilted." At other times she would exclaim happily: "That's John!"

She recognized the car buff who told her: "About the car, change the oil and filter every 3,000 miles. Grease it every 1,000 miles." The advice about snow tires, having the wheel bearings packed, checking the muffler, was all familiar. The constant concern about John's mother and father reminded Connie of the close-knit family she had married into. "I know Dad and Mom are my best friends in the world along with you and your folks."

Always there were questions about the kids--Cathy, 5 1/2, Lori, 2, and John, 8 months. "Send me a closeup picture of you and the kids. Give me hope and something to live for." There were memories of courtship on the campus of Kansas State University, where John got a B.S. in business administration after graduating from little Tonganoxie (Kans.) high school. "You wrote about how you will never forget the day you came to me when we were in college and said you wanted to marry me. I was thinking of that same thing about the time you wrote the letter, Connie. Maybe there is such a thing as telepathy, eh?"

When she felt lowest, Connie McKone consoled herself by recalling the survival training that John got after he joined the Air Force and graduated from navigator and bombardier school in 1954. That tough course would be useful now. "I want to come home so badly," John wrote. "Kiss each of the children for me and pray God I will be home soon."

"Oh My . . ." Gail Olmstead, pregnant with her second child (the first: Karen, 2), spent the empty, endless weeks of waiting at her parents' home in Plainfield, N.J. It was hard to maintain her husband's faith that everything would work out, that they would be back together soon. The details of Bruce Olmstead's confinement were not encouraging: "I am kept alone in a cell but am not being abused." Prison, he wrote, "has pretty well shown me that I couldn't quite make it as a cloistered monk. I am given cigarettes, hon, and filters at that. But, oh my, how I long for a good old American cigarette . . . And I must confess that I wouldn't be averse to a martini."

Like McKone, Bruce Olmstead seemed to worry more about what his ordeal would mean to his family than what it would do to him. His own spirit, which he showed from the moment he joined the Air Force after graduating from Kenyon College in 1957, was more than enough to sustain him. Brought up in a devout Episcopal family, Olmstead made the most of a Catholic Bible surprisingly provided by his jailers. He read Scriptures and spent hours making up sermons. "Often in his letters home," said his brother, Dermatologist Brent Olmstead, "he'd include a little prayer he'd written especially for us." In his letters home, Bruce Olmstead always seemed to be trying to construct for himself some sort of image of his daughter's childhood that he was missing. "I try to picture her emptying the ashtrays. All I can see is her, with a surprised, half-whimpering look on her face, with half a cigarette in one hand and rubbing wet tobacco into her face with the other."

Enough Blame. For Gail Olmstead and Connie McKone, the toughest job of all was to follow Air Force advice to remain calm and quiet, not to make personal appeals to Khrushchev, not to complain to the press. It seemed to the two women that very little was being done for their husbands. Regularly, every two weeks, the U.S. State Department sent notes to the Soviet Foreign Office and asked that the two officers be released. Regularly, the notes drew evasive replies.

"I don't know if it's the State Department's fault, or President Eisenhower's fault, or the American public's fault for allowing this case to drag on," said Connie McKone during her troubled time. "I guess there's enough blame to go around. One thing I'll never forgive our Government for is telling us absolutely nothing about the fate of our husbands. We had to hear the first word about their capture on television . . . I realize things are done we can't be told about, but I won't feel everything possible is being done until John and Bruce are home."

Home Free. The two prisoners themselves had reason to doubt that much was being done for them. Even last week, while Ambassador Tommy Thompson bargained for their freedom with Premier Khrushchev, there was no break in their prison routine. Then, suddenly one morning, their guards gave them Russian suits, heavy wool overcoats and felt hats. They were hustled into a car and driven across Moscow to the American embassy, where even the Marine guard did not recognize them (said one Marine later: "They looked like Russians"). They were handed over to U.S. officials; Ambassador Thompson briefed them on the cloak-and-dagger arrangements that had been made to get them out of Russia unrecognized. Seats had already been reserved on a KLM Electra--under other names. Crisp new passports with Soviet exit visas were ready. There was barely time to smoke an American cigarette before they were rushed to Sheremetyevo Airport.

Just as their plane taxied toward takeoff, there was a sudden jolt. Two tires blew out. While spares were flown from Warsaw, the Electra's passengers were taken back to the airport terminal. McKone and Olmstead made the long hour's drive back to the U.S. embassy. No one could say when their plane would be ready to leave, and every passing minute increased the possibility of a news leak. The two men were spirited into the ninth-floor apartment of the embassy's air attache, Colonel Melvin J. Nielsen. Embassy electricians were ordered to do phony "maintenance" work on the front-entrance elevator to keep it temporarily out of commission and discourage visitors. It was twelve hours later before the men finally got off the ground and headed for Amsterdam. They had barely left before President Kennedy made his press conference announcement that they were free and on their way home.

Wonderful Thing. By that time, Colonel Godfrey McHugh, White House Air Force aide, had telephoned to Connie McKone and Gail Olmstead to report that their husbands were free. Memories of the news-breaking conversations are blurred with emotion. "There was silence and heavy breathing over the phone," said McHugh. "It got me, too. In their voices you could tell how they felt." Later, after his press conference, President Kennedy, too, decided to call the wives. But their phones were already jammed. The operator announced that President John Kennedy was among those waiting to get through. Which call did Mrs. McKone want first? "I'll speak to John," said flustered Connie McKone.

Flown in by Air Force Globemaster, the two women beat their husbands to Washington. Captains Olmstead and McKone were forced to delay overnight in Goose Bay, Labrador, while weather cleared along their route. It was a convenient layover. It gave the two men time to outfit themselves with Air Force uniforms at the base post exchange; it gave Air Force doctors a chance to convince themselves that both men were in good mental and physical health. But there was no need to worry about what either man might say to the press. Newsmen were kept far out of reach all week.

No Complaint. The Air Force Constellation carrying Olmstead and McKone landed at Washington in weather that surely reminded the men of their Moscow winter. But once they walked down the steps from their plane, tossed a brisk salute to President Kennedy and located their wives, snow and the cutting wind were of no concern. Oblivious to Air Force brass and Government dignitaries turned out to do them honor, both officers kissed their wives with unabashed enthusiasm. The McKones held a long, long embrace. The first kiss left a great smear of lipstick around the flyer's mouth. Connie McKone clasped her husband's face in her gloved hands, pulled back to look at him, then moved close to kiss him once more. In the excitement of this moment, conversation was almost incoherent. Every few sentences Bruce Olmstead repeated: "I'm sure glad to be back. I can hardly believe it!" His wife answered steadily: "I'm so happy to have you home." Only as they drove out to their VIP quarters on the base did the two women finally get a chance to talk about their children.

Late that same afternoon, both couples drove to the White House, where Jack Kennedy waited for them on the snow-swept north portico. Coffee in the Red Room with Jacqueline Kennedy, Vice President and Mrs. Johnson, Air Force Secretary Eugene Zuckert and Kansas Representative J. Floyd Breeding was a time of relaxed small talk. The President advised the two officers to head south for a vacation. "You had lipstick all over you," he told McKone, remembering the captain's airport reception. But nothing could fluster the man who had stood up to seven months of solitary confinement. "I don't think either one of us has anything to complain about one bit," said McKone.

Deeper Significance. For the two Air Force captains, the reunion with their families was an unqualified blessing. But even as the flyers left for Kansas at week's end, pundits around the world were already debating the deeper significance of their adventure. DETENTE. THE HORIZON CLEARS, cheered headlines in Paris' L'Humanite. "We welcome this action as removing one obstacle to Soviet-American relations," said a British Foreign Office spokesman. The London Daily Telegraph was more skeptical, and more realistic: "We should not forget that it has for many years been the practice of Soviet diplomacy to take up indefensible positions, and then to expect gratitude when some small retreat is made from them."

In the U.S., the reaction to the release of Olmstead and McKone was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. But a few warning voices were raised. Vermont's Republican Senator George Aiken charged that Khrushchev was merely "playing power politics." Cried New York's Republican Senator Jacob Javits: "There is no thaw in the cold war, and this doesn't change anything on critical matters like Berlin, Laos or the Congo."

This was indeed a danger: that the U.S., in its gratification at the return of its airmen, might be deluded into thinking that Khrushchev had really taken a basic step toward thawing out the cold war, that the issues so long and bitterly contested between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have somehow changed. Such a surge of popular hope could pressure the Kennedy Administration into dealing with Khrushchev in ways it had determined to avoid.

Nikita Khrushchev's desire to meet and play summitry with Jack Kennedy is no secret. Ever since Kennedy's election, "Smiling Mike" Menshikov, the Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., has been urging the advantages of a Khrushchev-Kennedy meeting. Kennedy, however, had set himself against playing Nikita's game. He was backed in his resolve by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whose low opinion of summitry was expressed in a Foreign Affairs article last April: "Summit diplomacy is to be approached with the wariness with which a prudent physician prescribes a habit-forming drug--a technique to be employed rarely and under the most exceptional circumstances, with rigorous safeguards against its becoming a debilitating or dangerous habit." Early last week Kennedy and Rusk conferred for five hours, then announced their plans for achieving U.S. international aims not through summitry but through the "quiet diplomacy" of traditional channels. It was just such quiet diplomacy that helped win freedom for Olmstead and McKone.

But in the glowing aftermath of the airmen's release, things seemed somehow different. The Administration went out of its way to prevent anything that might offend Khrushchev or otherwise cause international ill will. Jack Kennedy imposed strict controls on "tough" policy speeches by Pentagon leaders: Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke was required to rewrite a speech almost completely; Air Force Chief of Staff Thomas D. White was questioned about two paragraphs in a speech that was finally cleared. The Administration also asked for a postponement until March on a Warsaw meeting to discuss the bitter issue of five American civilians being held in Red China.

Then, at week's end, came U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson to express his personal opinion that Jack Kennedy would be "happy" to meet with Khrushchev if Nikita attends the United Nations General Assembly sessions in March--a suggestion that was greeted with cheers in the Russian press. And State Secretary Rusk followed up with a "clarification" of the statement he had made earlier in the week. "We do intend to use our ambassadors abroad fully," said Rusk, "but that does not mean that we are rejecting the possibility of other types of meetings." Thus, said Rusk, he would not "on principle" exclude summit meetings.

While Airmen Olmstead and McKone were still in their Soviet cells last week, Secretary Rusk explained to top State staffers the possibility that they would soon be released. He also expressed a worry. "The one thing I fear," he said, "is that Americans will think the Russians have really changed, that they're softening, that the worst is over." It would be just as bad if the Administration itself, however happy about effecting the release of the American airmen, were to place too much stock in Nikita Khrushchev's cold war gambit.

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