Former Airman Tries To Break Code Of Silence
Don Walsdorf signed a pledge more than 40 years ago not to talk about his secret life as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force. He is 70 now.
Time grows short for telling the true story of America’s aerial spy campaign against the Soviet Union in the dark, early days of the Cold War.
It is not just the spy story that weighs on Walsdorf’s mind.
He is haunted by memories of airmen he briefed on evasion and escape from enemy forces, airmen who boarded B-29s and RB-47s bound for the Soviet Asian coastline, men who never returned.
In the last few months he has spoken to the families of these men. He has requested information from military archives about what happened to them. The mails are slow.
“When you are dealing with people in the archives who were born after the Vietnam War, they don’t understand the urgency,” the retired Spokane insurance executive and art gallery owner said.
The urgency is that Walsdorf suspects that as many as 141 American airmen, most of whom trained at Fairchild Air Force base in the early 1950s, were shot down, killed or captured by Soviet military forces between 1951 and 1953 while flying surveillance missions off the Pacific coast of the old Soviet Union.
For decades, the U.S. government made no acknowledgment that such flights ever took place.
Walsdorf knows they did. He was there.
“I was an intelligence specialist for the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron that flew out of Yokota Air Force Base in Japan,” he recalled a few days ago.
Part of his job from 1951 until 1954 was to brief air crews on evasion and escape should their planes be shot down.
When he volunteered to go to Yokota, his mission was never fully explained. Once he arrived, Walsdorf learned most missions flown were designed to penetrate the Soviet air defenses to intercept, record and analyze radar and voice messages from the Soviet military.
The details of the Soviet Union’s anti-aircraft defenses were important. If World War III began, American B-52s carrying nuclear weapons would be flying through these air defenses on missions to Moscow.
What Walsdorf also came to know very well was that many of the crews he briefed before their flights never returned. “I know of 14 aircraft that were lost while I was on duty,” he said.
The families often were told that bad weather had resulted in a crash.
Bad weather, it seemed, and the ferocious enemy fire from Soviet aircraft and ground artillery.
When he left the Air Force, Walsdorf was warned that if he breathed a word about the operations his life would be endangered. So he didn’t breathe a word until 1992, when he started seeing bits and pieces of the story beginning to emerge in the news, including stories in this newspaper.
A 1993 story in U.S. News and World Report suggested that Francis Gary Powers wasn’t the only American pilot to be shot down over the Soviet Union as the U.S. government had long suggested.
When he came across the name of Bruce Sanderson, a young man who wondered what had happened to his father who had flown out of Yokota in 1953 and never returned, Walsdorf decided to start talking.
He called Sanderson in North Dakota.
He began tracking down the names of others he had served with in Japan more than 40 years ago.
“When I started listening to family members who have been searching so long for answers to questions about what happened to their husbands and their fathers, it seemed like now was the time to get involved and start talking,” Walsdorf said.
Walsdorf hopes government archivists will respond to his pleas, and the pleas from the families of men who didn’t return from the spy missions, by cooperating with efforts to find more information about the men who disappeared.
Locating their graves would be a start.
And it’s possible some of these men, now in their late 60s or early 70s, could still be alive.
Yet time is running short. and that is why Don Walsdorf is talking.
A British Broadcasting Company special on U.S. airmen missing in the Soviet Union airs Oct. 8 on the A&E channel.
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