The Long Detour

As the small U.S. Army Beechcraft U-8 bobbed in and out of broken clouds one day last month, the four men aboard caught sight of the railroad tracks and the grassy airstrip that were supposed to mark their destination: the town of Kars in eastern Turkey, 20 miles from the Soviet border. They put down, but as they taxied toward the terminal, the men spotted what looked startlingly like a red star on a nearby helicopter. "It must be a Turkish red crescent," muttered Major General Edward C.D. Scherrer, 57, head of the U.S. military-aid mission in Turkey and one of two American generals on board.

Seconds later, a Soviet army vehicle roared up to their plane. Scherrer and his companions suddenly realized the extent of their error. They had landed at Leninakan, 20 miles inside Soviet Armenia.

Last week, 20 days later, the Soviets finally released the four men after ballooning the incident into an unpleasant cold war quarrel. No deal was made for the return of the officers. After Moscow's announcement that the four would be released, however, the Turkish government agreed to hand over the pilot and one passenger of a small Russian plane that had been hijacked late last month. Even so, the two students who took over the plane remained in Turkish custody, as did the Lithuanian father and son who forced the crew of an Aeroflot plane to land in Turkey in October and who killed a stewardess in the process.

The Soviet release of the U.S. generals brought an end to the incident but hardly to the mystery of their capture. According to Scherrer, the plane had simply got lost in bad weather and then followed what seemed to be the Erzurum-Kars rail line. Turkish military observers had a different line of speculation. They said that the generals had taken a detour to catch a glimpse of the heavily guarded Russian border near the picturesque Turkish town of Ani, the ancient walled capital of Armenia. Emerging from a cloud bank, they picked up the Leninakan radio beaconwhich just happened to be set on precisely the same frequency as the beacon that normally comes from the Kars radio tower. Whether the Soviets deliberately lured the plane off course is uncertain, but the U.S. is convinced that it has happened before along the Soviet-Turkish border.

After their landing, the four men were taken to a VIP villa. Scherrer and his deputy for ground forces, Brigadier General Claude M. McQuarrie Jr.both of whom are privy to U.S., NATO and Turkish military secretswere questioned for a total of about 20 hours. Scherrer's inquisitor was a KGB colonel sent from Moscow. "I had to tell him several times he was being disrespectful and trying to put words in my mouth," said the general.

The four captives played pool and backgammon with two Soviet majors and a female Armenian interpreter who were their constant companions. Often they were joined in the evening by two Soviet generals, who displayed a healthy curiosity about U.S. military affairs. On the last night of their captivity, after being driven to the Soviet border village of Akyaka, the two U.S. generals were held up for nine more hours while the Russians tried to get them to sign a protocol admitting that they crossed the border near Ani, implying that they had been snooping along the border. Finally Scherrer wrote on the paper: "We don't know when or where we crossed."

Back at his base in Ankara, Scherrer, who stopped smoking last August, recalled that one of the Russian majors had remarked to him, "If you go through this without starting again, then you have really stopped." Said Scherrer: "I've stopped all right."

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