He flatly turned them down at first. "Impossible." he
insisted. "The area is just too big."
They persisted. They gave him more background on the incident,
and it began to intrigue him. He realized that had all
the details been known at the time, the consequences of
the event would have been enormous.
Soon, he was hooked.
No doubt about it, this was a daunting task. He would
need enormous resources. A ship. Sophisticated gear.
Sonar. Radar. Acoustical imaging equipment. Money. All
would be available from Swedish government sources he was
assured.
He enlisted Carl Douglas. As an historian and owner of
Deep Sea Productions, his input and support would be invaluable.
So would that of Ola Oskarsson, chief surveyor at MTT,
a survey company specialized in high resolution marine
survey. Many others, all with wide experience on the sea
were hired. Anders Jallai began planning the expedition.
The Baltic Sea, separating Sweden from Finland, Russia,
and the then Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,
is difficult at best. Sunny days, calm waters, still winds,
and it’s beautiful; otherwise, it can be terribly
challenging and unforgiving.
A number of earlier expeditions had been unsuccessful.
From 1991 through 1997, the Swedish Navy had tried several
times and failed. A private consortium's missions, in 2000
and 2002, also failed. In truth, for the vast area covered
by the sea, they had little to go on. There were the secret
radio transcripts; eyewitness testimony from government
inquests; some old Russian maps and little else. Now, 50
years after its disappearance, in respect for the service
rendered by its crew to their country, an all out attempt
would be launched to solve the mystery.
It had begun on June 13th 1952. A Swedish military plane
and it’s eight man crew, had simply disappeared without
a trace over the Baltic Sea. The air command center in
Stockholm had received an emergency call from the DC-3
plane: "We've been shot." A Morse code message
followed, then nothing.
A second aircraft was dispatched to search for the missing
plane. That aircraft was shot down west of St. Petersburg
by Russian fighters. Its crew survived an emergency landing
and were rescued. Claiming it had violated Soviet airspace,
the Soviet Union admitted to shooting down the second airplane,
but kept silent on the DC-3. Thus was born one of the most
persistent mysteries of the Cold War.
Sweden was neutral during the Cold War and maintained
the plane had been on a routine training mission. The Soviet
Union claimed it didn't know what happened to it. No further
information was forthcoming from any neighboring country.
The incident poisoned diplomatic relations between Sweden
and the Soviet Union for decades.
Then in 1991, a Russian pilot, Grigori Osjinski, admitted
to a Swedish diplomat that he had shot down the plane.
Only then did the Swedish government disclose that the
plane had been spying on the Soviet Union for NATO. It
seems that the DC-3 had been equipped with British surveillance
gear to spy on Soviet radar at the behest of Great Britain
and the United States.
So began Jallai’s odyssey. He and his expeditionary
crew would eventually spend five years combing the Balitic
floor for the wreckage and remains of the crew. Littered
as it is with thousands of sunken ships and downed planes,
numerous false finds would be recorded in their logs. It
would only be after they determined to revisit all previously
searched areas that they would eventually located the plane,
intact in international waters. 75 miles east of the Swedish
coastline.
End of the story? Perhaps. But the mystery surrounding
this flight persists. The newspaper “Svenska Dagbladet” reports
that divers on the salvage team raising the spy plane found
no traces of the British surveillance equipment on board.
|
Swedish markings were clearly
visible
on the salvaged aircraft |
Even more intriguing are the allegations by family members
of the crew that the crew survived and were imprisoned
in the Soviet Union. When the wreckage of the plane was
finally discovered, it was possible to recover the remains
of four crew members. Four others remain unaccounted
for. Witness accounts from former prisoners indicate that
Swedes may have been locked up in the Soviet Union’s
prisons in the 1950s, and some accounts even allude that
Swedish pilots were among them.
The questions arise whether the Swedish government, claiming
strict neutrality throughout the Cold War, in fact played
a double role, or triple roles -- one of neutrality, one
pro-Soviet and one pro-West.
A look into the background of these assertions might begin with the new book “Hemliga
förbindelser” (Secret Connections: The Baltic DC-3 Incident, Sweden,
and the Cold War) by veteran Swedish journalist Roger Älmeberg, and son
of the pilot of the downed spy plane
 |
| Roger Almeberg |
|
