FOREIGN RELATIONS: How They Died

Looking across the border to Soviet Armenia, Turkish natives saw a huge plume of smoke rising from the Communist territory. On that same day—Sept. 2, 1958 —just short minutes before the smoke rose, Allied radio monitors around the southern ring of the U.S.S.R., taping their daily quota of Russian radio talk, recorded the grim conversation of five Soviet jet fighter pilots.

The jets had scrambled into the sky for a look at an intruder inside Russia's southern border. It was, in fact, an unarmed, four-engined U.S. Air Force C-130 transport carrying 17 men. In flying a course from Trabzon to...