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Pious Search. This was the constant danger: that at any time, using any excuse, Soviet fighters might scramble to the attack at a point chosen well in advance. U.S. intelligence officers had warned only the month before that such an incident was imminent. On that clear day last summer, the RB-47 carrying Olmstead, McKone and their companions flew into a well-laid ambush somewhere west of Novaya Zemlya in the Barents Sea.
When the Air Force reported the plane lost, the Russians piously joined in the search. For ten days, until Khrushchev returned from a junket to Austria, they remained silent about the attack. Then they announced that they had shot the plane down over Soviet waters near the Kola Peninsula. Olmstead and McKone, the only survivors, were in prison. They would, cried Nikita, be tried as spies, "under the full rigor of Soviet law." Such vehemence seemed only natural after the loud propaganda that followed the capture of U-2 Pilot Powers and Khrushchev's intransigence in Paris.
For nearly seven months, the Soviets stuck stubbornly to their stand. Henry Cabot Lodge, then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., made an eloquent presentation of the American case, explained how U.S. radars had tracked the doomed plane until the moment it was shot down—well out over international waters. But the Russians were unmoved. They held Olmstead and McKone incommunicado, let them see each other only twice, refused to permit U.S. embassy personnel to visit them. All that the Russians returned of the plane or its crew was the body of the pilot, Captain Willard G. Palm. Captain Oscar L. Goforth, Major Eugene E. Posa and Captain Dean B. Phillips, the three others presumably killed in the attack, were never found.
That's John. Unlike U-2 Pilot Powers, who began talking almost from the moment of his capture, Olmstead and McKone bore their imprisonment bravely. Once every two weeks—all they were allowed—the prisoners wrote home. From their letters, their anxious families could piece together the loneliness of men who dared not guess what their futures promised, what their country could or would do to save them. At her home in Topeka, Kans., near Forbes Air Force Base, John McKone's wife Connie read and reread every word she received. "The handwriting is John's," she told herself after poring over some passages, "but it is not John. His use of words is too stilted." At other times she would exclaim happily: "That's John!"
She recognized the car buff who told her: "About the car, change the oil and filter every 3,000 miles. Grease it every 1,000 miles." The advice about snow tires, having the wheel bearings packed, checking the muffler, was all familiar. The constant concern about John's mother and father reminded Connie of the close-knit family she had married into. "I know Dad and Mom are my best friends in the world along with you and your folks."