Flight of the Forgotten. Mark A. Vance
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John called and told me that they had located the Ketchum crew’s accident report and that a copy of it was available to the next of kin, I was ecstatic. Big Joe had come through with a lot of historical information from the Air Force Historical Records Center at Maxwell Air Force Base and had been told that the accident report itself was available from Norton Air Force Base in California. It was as if the veil on a lifetime mystery was starting to lift and I can still remember my excitement as I submitted a written request for the report. I was so elated at the time that I wasn’t really listening when my friend also cautioned that Big Joe had been told quite unequivocally at Maxwell Air Force Base that we would never find out everything about this particular crash. He had been told that many before us had tried and failed even while doing official Air Force research. My uncle’s crash evidently had a number of information roadblocks that should not have been there for something supposedly routine from so long ago. At the time though, I wasn’t hearing any of it as I fired off my letter and eagerly awaited the report. I was confident that my childhood mystery would soon become an explained event that a professional pilot could easily understand.
It was more than just a surprise a short time later, when my request for a forty-three year old accident report resulted in a terse letter from the U.S. Air Force and a maze of at least thirty blacked out microfilm documents. The crash report, which I had assumed just finding would be the biggest challenge, contained numerous unreleasable portions and withheld data. The Air Force contended that they still had to protect the confidentiality of eyewitnesses to the crash. It was the beginning of a stonewalling process that would last the next three and a half years, at which time they finally admitted there were no eyewitnesses.
My follow-up request a short time later was much more direct and drew an even nastier response from the Air Force colonel in charge of the facility, ordering me to cease the investigation. I had signed my letter captain and it had been misinterpreted as meaning Air Force captain rather than airline captain. Hence, the colonel in charge of the facility ordered me to cease the inquiry immediately for the sake of my military career. He informed me that the unreleasable data in the report I was requesting was beyond my level of understanding and that he had personally reviewed the file and found nothing in it I needed. He went on to cite various exclusions to the Freedom of Information Act and again stressed the importance of protecting Air Force eyewitnesses. His letter went one step further though, employing the term “detrimental effect on our national security” to indicate his level of displeasure with my inquiry. He ended his letter by offering me the option to appeal his decision to the Secretary of the Air Force, no doubt assuming that an Air Force captain would never do so. That option was simply a ruse to make the process appear democratic, when in fact the Air Force had absolutely no intention of ever releasing the information.
The predictable response to my immediate appeal was a complete denial of everything I was requesting under various Air Force regulations and exclusions to the Freedom of Information Act. The Air Force Secretary’s letter cited a variety of civil court cases in which the Air Force had successfully defended itself against challenges of this sort leaving me convinced I was wasting my time. After several months of requests, denials, counter-requests and counter-denials leading up to this point I was summarily informed that this was the final Air Force action on the entire affair.
May 25, 1989, Houston, Texas
By now, five months had passed. I was discouraged and irritated even though I knew the entire process was designed to wear me down and make me lose interest. It was working. I was on the verge of total surrender. I had reached a low point emotionally. I owed Buster and his crew my best effort, but I was beginning to feel as helpless as they must have felt inside that burning airplane.
It was like that between Buster and me. We shared thoughts and feelings, and he had a way of showing up when I needed him most.
“It looks like that seed we planted in you is really growing.” he announced one evening as I sat at my desk working on the project.
“I … I’m glad you’re here. I need your help, Buster. They won’t tell me anything.” I declared, eyeing him as I rubbed my eyes.
“No, they won’t but you’ve got to keep going anyway. Someday you’ll understand why.” he replied.
“Why won’t they just give me the accident report?”
“Because they can’t. It’s against their rules. Our airplane didn’t just explode, Mark. They blew it up!” he said emphatically.
“You were murdered? My God!”
“Yes, and we need you to keep going. The families need to know the truth and you’ve got to find it for them. They need you to prove it. Prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.” he insisted, as I nodded in wide-eyed astonishment.
Several days later, undeterred by the ongoing lack of progress, I immediately began searching for a solution to the stalemate over the crash report. Again, I turned to my good friend John Sandersen for help.
“It was murder!” I blurted out.
“Murder? How do you know that?” he asked skeptically.
“Believe me, I know. That airplane didn’t just explode. It was supposed to explode.” I declared.
“Are you saying it was sabotaged?”
“Yes. I don’t know all the details yet, but we need to focus on the fact that it was sabotaged. Who did it or why I don’t know yet. But I intend to find out.” I said.
“Could it have been something it was carrying?” he asked, trying to deal with the sudden revelation of sabotage.
“Maybe. That Royal Air Force sergeant you found living in the crash area said nothing has grown in the loch where they crashed for over forty years. He was running his own investigation into the crash until he was ordered to stop by his superiors.”
“Nothing?”
“Not even a lily pad.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” John muttered.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, here’s what we do. I’ll get Big Joe and the “good old boy” network going again and see what he can find out behind the scenes. He has a lot of contacts in the Royal Air Force that’ll definitely be interested. If that thing crashed in Scotland carrying a nuke or a binary of some sort, the natives are really going to start getting restless. I’ll see what I can dig up through U.S. Naval Intelligence over here.”
“Thanks. That would be great.”
“Yeah, we might even be dealing with a German spy thing or something like it. Do you realize that?” he asked.
“German spy?” I repeated.
“Well, it has to be something pretty off-the-wall if there was a bomb involved.” he said.
“I don’t care what it is or who did it. I want the facts and my family needs to hear the truth.”
June 8, 1989, Houston, Texas
The news tore through us like shrapnel. The unimaginable had happened. Big Joe’s primary contact with the Royal Air Force had been found dead. British Air Vice Marshall Ian Harrison, a longtime friend of Big Joe and a man well-positioned to begin a formal British inquiry, had been found dead under very mysterious circumstances soon after receiving Big Joe’s first communication. Only days after he had begun inquiring on our behalf, British Air Vice Marshall Harrison was dead. His lifeless body had been discovered in a rowing skiff on the Thames River, the victim of an apparent heart attack. We would later learn that death from an apparent heart attack while manning a rowing skiff alone is a classic intelligence world method of execution. It is brought on by a lethal injection rarely found by the coroner. Air Vice Marshall Harrison had never been known to row.
June 12, 1989, Houston, Texas
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