US Aircrews secretly imprisoned in Soviet Union

The US Air Force and Navy began flying reconnaissance flights near and sometimes over the Soviet Union during the 1940s. The risk of these Cold War aviators falling into enemy hands became a reality for the Pentagon starting in April 1950, when a Navy PBY4 “Privateer” was shot down by Soviet fighters over the Baltic Sea. During the following years, reports of surviving crewmen from the plane began to escape the Soviet Union.

U.S. investigators from the US-Russia Joint Commission uncovered reports the spy plane had been salvaged, but Stalin himself ordered that fact kept secret from the U.S. These facts were supported by previously classified US Navy intelligence files that concluded the Soviet Navy was operating captured US electronic equipment similar to that on the Privateer. “In view of the successful salvaging and operation of the electronic equipment, there exists the possibility that some or all of the crew were taken into custody and are being held by the Soviets,” the Navy concluded (additional information on this issue appears to remain classified.)

A 1956 State Department message to Moscow states the US is “compelled to believe that the Soviet Government has had and continues to have under detention crew members from the Privateer…”

“There exist a number of reports from released Gulag inmates indicating that there were indeed survivors from this flight who were imprisoned in the Gulag. There are enough of these reports over the years to suggest that they cannot be ignored,” US investigators concluded in the 1990s, adding: "(T)he frequency, content, and time frame of these reports at a minimum suggest that some American aviators were detained in the Gulag.” Some information on the incident still appears not to have been released to family members, including possible CIA information on Joe Danens, further Navy research on the captured electronic technology (the operation of which by the Soviets could indicate Moscow had captured and was forcing US prisoners to use the system), and analysis of the report of an American prisoner in Russia tattooed with the words "U.S. Navy" over an anchor.

An Air Force RB-29 was downed during a 1952 classified mission to gather intelligence on Soviet shipping between the Sakhalin and Kurile Islands. Twelve men were left missing, including mission commander Maj. Sam Busch (see more here). He had been studying to become a pharmacist, but was recalled to service for the Korean War.

On June 18, days after the downing, the US sent a message to the Soviets, reporting floating debris associated with the mishap, such as oxygen bottles and life preservers (life rafts and even the entire aircraft were also seen on the water, according to various reports). “The presence of such items would indicate that there were survivors who may have been picked up by Soviet ships,” the State Department said, asking for Soviet help. The Kremlin claimed to know nothing about the crew.

A returned Japanese prisoner from POW Camp 21 in Kharbarovsk would have disagreed. He said twelve or thirteen US airmen were in the prison as of the spring of 1953. Guards told him they were the crew of an American plane shot down by the Soviets.

Another Japanese repatriate said he’d met an American in a hospital at Narionburg, in the Magadan-area. We have seen two dates associated with what we believe is the same report, March 1952 and October 1953. Both concern an American officer shot down and wrongfully charged with espionage by the Soviets.

According to the earlier report, the American was Caucasian, a captain who had crashed in the vicinity of Kamchatka. He suffered from wounds and lung disease. The captain told the Japanese prisoner “I am going back alive and fight the Russians to the finish. Also, I cannot accept the sentence of being a spy. The sentence of 15 years based on item 6 of Article 58 (espionage) is unjust.” He was described as about 28, with shaven blond hair, an oval face with protruding forehead, deep set blue eyes and thick eyebrows.

Among the US airmen searching for the RB-29 after it went missing was Air Force Sgt. William Koski. The next month he himself was shot down over Korea and sent to a special POW camp in China. There he was interrogated about Maj. Sam Busch, commander of the lost aircraft. “If he were dead at the bottom of the Sea of Japan, why all the interest?” he recalled, adding “I am as convinced today as I was then that they had Busch . . . and maybe a few others of his crew."

A 1955 US Department of Defense memo concluded of the 1950, 1952 and other air losses: “Air Force crews…are probably held by the Soviet Union. …The missions on which these aircraft were flying, while related to the Korean War, are highly classified…The US should not be surprised, particularly in light of Japanese and German experience with the Soviets in World War II, if a number of completely unrecorded Americans are ultimately found to be alive…”

The classified memo went on the warn the U.S. Department of State of the "undesirability of providing any information" to the families concerning the possible survival of their loved ones.

When American investigators asked Russia during the 1990s about these reports, Moscow claimed it had no information on reported survivors from the RB-29. When American investigators asked why Soviet officers had repeatedly interrogated a Korean War POW about Busch, who had disappeared far away, Moscow said the Soviets might have picked up the name from “communications intercepts.”

Years later, a Russian émigré who had lived for years in and around the Soviet prison system said he’d learned that ''Bush and Moore” (Master Sgt. David Moore aboard Busch’s plane) from a US spy plane downed in the summer of 1952 “will forever remain in the soil of the Khabarovsk Region.” The émigré noted there might be worse fates than dying at the hands of Soviet officials: “By their horrible fate they (the American aviators) were spared the vastness of the (Gulag’s) (Soviet prison system) underworld.”

The émigré was told eight other survivors of the shoot down were put in solitary confinement in a prison in the city of Svobodnnyi, outside Khabarovsk near the Chinese border. Requests by a senior US official from the Joint Commission to investigate the émigré’s information on Korean War POWs were turned down by the Pentagon.

If you have information on survivors of Cold War reconnaissance flights imprisoned in the Soviet Union, please contact us.