By 1966, the Cold War was in full swing and tensions
between East and West were rising. Only a couple years earlier, the world held
its breath at the brink of nuclear war with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the
United States had begun ramping up its involvement in Vietnam. The Berlin Wall
was now a standing symbol of the Cold War as the government of the German
Democratic Republic enforced its stance to prevent its people’s defection into
the West.
On 6 April 1966 a pair of Soviet Air Force Yakovlev
Yak-28P Firebar fighters took off from Finow Flugplatz located near Eberswalde,
East Germany on a mission to another yet undisclosed airbase in East Germany.
Part of the flight plan for the pair of fighter aircraft took them through the
vicinity of Berlin. By this time East and West Berlin had been physically
separated for over five years by the Berlin Wall. At around 3:30pm one of the
pilots radioed air traffic controllers with an emergency situation declaring
that one of the Yak’s two Tumansky R-11 turbojet engines had failed and that
the aircraft was becoming unstable and difficult to control. Soviet military
controllers ordered the stricken aircraft to make an emergency landing at Schönefeld Airport in East Berlin. Unable to
keep control of the aircraft, the pilot of the wounded Yak-28 flew across the
border into West Berlin maintaining control of the aircraft long enough to
avoid a series of apartment blocks before crashing into Lake Stößensee in the
British controlled sector of West Berlin. In the struggle to maintain control
of the aircraft to avoid collateral damage both crewmembers; the pilot and
navigator failed to eject and were killed in the crash.
American and
British military intelligence services were monitoring the Soviet distress call
from a monitoring facility at the Teufelsberg as well as at nearby RAF Gatow at
the time of the crash and members of the British BRIXMIX in West Berlin were
dispatched to cordon off the crash site. The crash site was secured quickly in
an effort to prevent the Soviets from an unauthorized incursion into West
Berlin to recover the downed aircraft. As members of the British Royal Military
Police secured the perimeter a bus carrying Soviet soldiers intended for
pulling guard duty at the Soviet War Memoral at the Tiergarten arrived on
scene. Tensions began to escalate as Soviet soldiers attempted to force their
way through the cordon to the crash site.
One of the first
on scene was a member of the British Royal Air Force Squadron Leader Maurice
Taylor who rowed to the crash site and began taking photographs of the area
snapping several shots of the wreckage of the Soviet aircraft. British
interpreters did the best they could to stall Soviet forces under the command
of General Vladimir Bulanov so they could recover the aircraft and analyze it
for characteristics that would be of interest to the West. A barge and crane
were floated into position over the crash site and British officials issued a
promise to the Soviet Mission in Berlin that the bodies of the crewmen and the
wreckage of the aircraft would be returned to the Soviet Union. Secretly
British technical experts were flown into West Berlin from Farnborough’s Royal
Aircraft Establishment where they would make several remarkable discoveries
about the Soviet aircraft.
The Yak-28
carried a sophisticated radar system known as the Skipspin which gave the
Soviet fighter the capability to look up and down as well as ahead when doing
scans. This radar system was of great interest to both the Americans and
British militaries. British divers successfully recovered the bodies of the
Captain Boris Yapustin and Lieutenant Yuri Yanov the following day; however the
British stalled in returning the bodies using the extra time to remove the
radar system and the engines of the Yak-28 while convincing the Soviets that
work was still being done to recover both pilots’ remains. The Soviet commander
under suspicion that the British were up to something accused the British of
having soldiers prepared to shoot any Soviet soldier that penetrated the cordon
over the lake. In an attempt to substantiate his claim, the General ordered a
platoon of Soviet soldiers to march towards the Lake. Major Johnathan
Backhouse, a British interpreter was present when a standoff ensued and
soldiers on both sides switched their weapons from safe to arm. Backhouse
quickly asked the Soviet troops if they had received clearance to enter the
area. Upon responding that they had not been authorized to enter General
Bulanov ordered the troops to fall back away from the lake.
On the third
day, the bodies of the Soviet crewmen were officially reported as having been
recovered and the return of the bodies to Soviet forces was scheduled for the
approaching evening. Secretly the
Firebar’s secret Skipscan radar was already on its way back to the United
Kingdom for analysis but work was still being carried out to remove the radar’s
dish from the nose of the aircraft which was lodged in the mud of the bottom of
the Lake. The British were carrying out a brilliant deception of the Soviets as
they allowed a boat to arrive and offload several passengers while secretly,
the Yak’s engines were secured by line to the bottom of the boat where they
were dragged nearly a mile from the wreck. Once at a secured location away from
the prying eyes of the Soviet forces, the engines would be raised, loaded into
crates and sent to RAF Gatow to be flown back to Farnborough for analysis.
As the British
returned the bodies of Kapustin and Yanov to the Soviets, the engines and radar
were on their way to the United Kingdom where they were studied by British
technical experts. Within a 48 hour period the engines and radar systems were
carefully returned to the wreckage of the Firebar and on 13 April 1966, the
barge was sailed to the Soviet sector where the wreckage of the fighter was
accounted for piece by piece before being handed over to Soviet authorities. As
Bulanov supervised the recovery of the wreckage he noted that tips of the
turbine blades within the jet engines had been removed. After accounting for
the wreckage, the Soviets claimed that one part of the aircraft was still
missing: the radar dish. The British denied this saying that everything they
had had been turned over to Soviet forces, anything still missing was
unrecoverable still on the bottom of the Lake. In reality, during the rush to
recover and analyze the radar there was no time to return it to the wreck. Soon
after, the British developed methods to deceive and exploit flaws in the
Skipscan radar.
In the Soviet
Union, Captain Boris Kapustin and Lieutenant Yuri Yanov were celebrated as
heroes who valiantly gave their lives to save the lives of thousands of
civilians by ditching their plane into the sea rather than crash into the
populated city. Both men were posthumously awarded with the Order of the Red
Banner for their exploits.
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