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