Swedish Experts To Raise Spy Plane Wreckage
Sweden's Ministry of Defense
is about to bring up some rather painful memories. About three
years ago, Swedish civilian divers started looking for a spy plane,
an old DC-3 that crashed into the Baltic in 1952. Now, they've
found it. The question is, what are they going to do with it?
The Mission
The DC-3, manned by a crew of eight, was on a secret mission to
track Soviet radar installations. Sweden, officially neutral in the
Cold War, was actually working with NATO all along. So, when a
Soviet MiG-15 came along and shot the DC-3 out of the sky,
Stockholm was in a quandary. Should they raise the wreckage and
properly bury the dead, or pretend the whole thing didn't
happen?
The Swedes pretended it didn't happen, refusing to acknowledge
the DC-3's true mission and hardly lifting a finger to find the
aircraft. How could they without blowing their Cold War cover? Now,
however, the Cold War is over. It's time to bring home those who
were lost at sea.
"The commander-in-chief, General Johan Hederstedt, has decided
that the airplane wreckage, which is expected to be the missing
Swedish DC-3 (file photo, below), will be salvaged as soon as
possible," the armed forces said in a statement.
Reconciliation
After the incident, Sweden wasn't the only country that kept mum
about the shoot-down. Nobody in Russia was talking, either. Then,
in 1991, after the collapse of communism in Russia, the pilot of
that MiG-15 happened to meet a Swedish diplomat. Grigory Osinski
told the diplomat what happened over the Baltic in 1952. Later in
1991, the Soviet Minister of Defense officially apologized to
Sweden and to the relatives of the eight crew members lost.
But the families weren't mollified. They couldn't understand why
eight men had to die in a war where no one was supposed to shoot
anyone else. As families often do, they wondered if their family
members might have survived 40 years in a Russian gulag. As most
families do, they couldn't help but look back.
Bringing up the DC-3 won't change a lot of that, but it will
satisfy the need to close the book on this secret venture. "More
than anything else, the relatives want to get certainty as soon as
possible," Jan Andersson, the Swedish air force chief, told a news
conference.
So, the Swedes will now raise the DC-3. They aren't likely to
find any human remains after all these years. Still, it's a
national sore spot over there and spending $125,000 on raising the
aircraft from the Baltic is a small price to pay for closure.
FMI: Swedish Government Web Services