The Telltale Heart: Was It a Russian Astronaut's?

Ever since Nikita Khrushchev steamed, steaming, into New York harbor last September to dress down the U.N. General Assembly, the world has buzzed with reports that a Soviet attempt to mark the occasion by rocketing a man into orbit ended in the death of the would-be astronaut. Last week in Washington, the story was hotter and more circumstantial than ever.

Name & Number. The buzzing began last Sept. 23, when Brigadier General Don D. Flickinger of the Air Research and Development Command ventured that two Russians aboard a space vehicle had been "clobbered" before they had gone into full orbit. Three months later, Chicago Daily News Correspondent Paul Ghali reported from Bern that in early October the Russians had fired off a capsule containing a man but that the capsule had failed to separate from its rocket, roasting the astronaut alive. By Ghali's account (TIME, Dec. 19), it was this failure, not the "airplane accident" reported by Moscow, that accounted for the death last October of Soviet Missile Chief Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin: when Khrushchev returned from New York, he berated Nedelin so severely that the marshal committed suicide.

Last month another log was thrown on the fire by Lieut.Colonel Paul D. Hickman of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, who astounded a national security seminar in Honolulu by declaring that not only did at least two Russian astronauts perish in a space attempt, but that U.S. officials knew the name of one. The Pentagon hastily repudiated Hickman's admittedly unofficial information, adding that the Air Force had "absolutely no evidence" to support the assertion. But last week came a Washington whisper that the Pentagon did indeed have evidence. The new rumor: that U.S. radio-telemetry had picked up the heartbeat of one or possibly two Soviet astronauts as they sat in their capsule in heavily wired space suits that automatically transmitted detailed information on their physiological reactions to Soviet ground control stations.

The Diamond Pattern. U.S. experts, the story went, were still unsure whether the Soviet astronauts had perished on the launching pad or while the rocket was soaring into space--and meanwhile a new mystery was in the making. Four Russian missile tracking ships were spotted on picket duty in the Pacific, deployed in a vast diamond pattern that has been observed only once before--when Khrushchev was on his way to the U.N. But in Moscow, the scientific secretary of the Academy of Sciences, Yevgeny Fedorov, solemnly warned last week: "Much time is still needed to ensure complete safety for man in space flight."

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