"Cold-Blooded Murder"

A leaden afternoon sky hung over Wiesbaden Air Force Base in West Germany. The U.S. Air Force jet screamed down the runway on takeoff. Aboard were Captain John F. Lorraine, 34, an instructor pilot; Lieut. Colonel Gerald K. Hannaford, 41; and Captain Donald G. Millard, 33. Hannaford and Millard were getting checked out in the twin-engined T-39 jet trainer. Forty-seven minutes after takeoff, radarmen at two U.S. air defense stations near the East German border noticed a fast-moving blip on their scopes. It was the T-39, zipping east at better than 500 miles an hour.

Frantically, the two stations radioed the plane on Air Force frequencies and a Russian-monitored international distress band. Repeatedly, they called warnings that the T-39 was flying toward Communist territory. There was no reply.

As the helpless radarmen watched, the plane shot across the border. In less than five minutes, two other blips appeared beside the T-39. For the next eleven minutes, the radar showed the three planes moving eastward. Then, inexplicably, they veered west, and Captain Lorraine's training plane suddenly vanished. At the same time, residents in the East German village of Vogelsberg, 50 miles from the West German border, heard machine-gun and cannon fire overhead. Seconds later, they saw the U.S. jet, one wing shot away, cartwheel to earth.

The "Measures." As Moscow told it some 30 hours later in a stiff note protesting the U.S.'s "gross provocation," Russian MIG fighters had been sent up to intercept the wandering T-39. The MIGs, claimed the Russians, had signaled with conventional "follow-me" wigwags, and followed that with a warning burst of gunfire. When the T-39 "did not react," said the note, the fighters were "forced to undertake measures" to protect East German airspace.

The Russian explanation was transparently phony. Obviously the MIGs knew from listening in that the unarmed plane was having radio trouble. In fact, the T-39 probably had a complete electrical breakdown that knocked out its navigational equipment as well as the radios. This, and a 45-knot wind from the west, would account for the trespass. But that did not explain why the Russian fighters disregarded time-honored rules for handling airspace violations. Countless such violations occur in the crowded, nervous skies over the border between West and East Germany. Normally the trespasser--U.S. or Russian--is forced to land, answers a day's worth of questions, and is sent on his way.

A Pigeon. As the bodies of the three U.S. fliers were returned at week's end to West Germany, the nagging question still remained. "I think they feel in Moscow the same way we do," said one Air Force officer. "If they could have reached out and put their hands over that damn fool's gun, they would have. And if we could have thrown a rope up in the air and pulled those poor guys back, we would have."

Even so, adds a bitter Air Force man, "the Russians knew they had a pigeon" when they went after the relatively slow intruder. The Soviet protestations to the contrary, the incident, in Senator Richard Russell's words, amounted to nothing less than "premeditated, unnecessary and cold-blooded murder."

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