Alternative Explanation for the crash from Janet Smith

The following is offered as a service to Janet Smith, daughter of Capt. Appleby. Janet has spent quite a lot of time and energy researching the crash and offers a different explanation from the CAB report. Janet can be reached at: janetksmith1945@gmail.com. She also has a blog at: Janet's blog (contains at least 1 article about the crash)

An Alternate explanation for the cause of the crash

DID THE KGB SABOTAGE A U.S. COMMERCIAL AIRLINER DURING THE KOREAN WAR?

FORWARD

This summary is about a controversial espionage story that is both intriguing and inconclusive. It’s all true, but there are credibility problems that have hindered it from getting into the public domain. Beyond this summary is a journal of several decades worth of personal investigation. It’s a mystery, a spy story, and ghost story.

In August, 1973, my mother, my brother, and I sat around her kitchen table discussing Jim’s sudden push to reopen the investigation into the crash of UAL 610 in 1951. Our dad was the captain of the flight, and there were many unanswered questions about it. Mom and I thought it was a terrible idea, and I certainly had no interest in pursuing it. Jim had just told us that he had been on a recent work travel trip. He was in Ohio, due to be in New York the following day, but for some reason, he was extremely restless and couldn’t wait to get on to New York, so he booked an earlier flight. When he got to New York, the AC in his hotel room wasn’t working so he found himself in a bar. There, due to name recognition in a conversation, he encountered an old friend of the family. This man, H. B. (Andy) Anders, was a UAL pilot who told him that the plane was sabotaged and Jim was crazy if he didn’t find out what happened. Back home, Jim told us about meeting this fellow, whose exact name he couldn’t recall, but he didn’t tell us that the man believed the plane was sabotaged.

My part in the investigation launched in November or December 1974, when I was living with my mother in Mt. View. I was an instructor in a small Bible College in San Jose, teaching Church History and Major Prophets. One night I had a dream that my father died in the Korean War. It was surprising and ridiculous: surprising because I didn’t know anything about the Korean War, including when it took place; ridiculous, because we all knew that he was an airline pilot who died on Crystal Mountain in Colorado in 1951, killing everyone aboard. One day while searching through an old cedar chest for some piece of paper, I ran across the newspaper clippings which my mother had deposited there many years previous. One headline was about a possible end to the Korean War. The word Korean War was circled in red. I was supposed to be preparing a lecture on Ezekiel for my Prophets class. Instead, I laid on her bed and read all the clippings. I shared the dream with my mother, but I added, “He and a bunch of others were crossing a river waist deep with their rifles at their chests, like you see in movies, and he just dropped and drowned. I can’t imagine why he was in the water.” My mom answered, “Well, you know where they found him don’t you?” I said, “No, where?” “In a little mountain stream.” The last scene of the dream has never come to pass. In it, another of dad’s friends called us over to his house to show us some documents that proved that dad died in the Korean War. That particular friend has never believed that the plane was sabotaged.

The next time I saw Jim, I told him about the dream. That’s when he told me that his bar companion in New York told him that the plane was sabotaged, and we were crazy if we didn’t try to find out what happened. After that, Jim and I were 100% all in. After years of interviewing pilots, reporters, and spies, and random emails from kind contributors, I may have 90% of the shocking story of why and how the plane crashed. I just don’t know who, and as of now, I haven’t a shred of proof.

Once I began my investigation, my mother, Deane, shared with Jim and I her memories of that night. She talked about the new DC-6, the stormy weather and the bitter airline strike, and how when the strike was finally over, Dad got a call asking if he would like to be the first flight out from San Francisco. Our next door neighbors Dick and Dotty Tobie were at our house that night, so Tobie agreed on the same call to take the second flight. Mom found out about the missing plane when a handful of press showed up at her door before dawn. She immediately called Dotty, who came over to stay with her. Dotty called her husband in Chicago, and that brought Tobie back to Colorado the same day.

She had a friend of the family, a general practitioner Dr. Walter Boyd from Fort Collins, Colorado, who was in the hand-picked party to hike up to the crash site. He kept her informed by phone of what was happening there, and passed on information that even the press didn’t know. He told her that there was a signal from Mexico that wasn’t supposed to be there. An Air Force courier named Col. Merle Parks had a briefcase containing Army documents pertaining to the end of the Korean War handcuffed to his wrist. He had an escort of four men from Travis AFB. His body was one of the last to be found, and the empty briefcase was found after he was. Dr. Boyd had been in the first and the second trek to the crash site. He said that on the second day, the National Guard cordoned off the crash site to all but investigators. And for years, that is all she knew.

Walter Winchell suggested on the radio that some pilots make a shortcut over the mountains and that may have caused the plane to be off course. Of course, that brought the threatening phone calls—how does it feel to be the wife of a murderer? Today, we would call Winchell a shock jock. He even called himself a “son of a bitch.”

After a certain point, she couldn’t deal with any more of my snooping. Jim urged me on, but he was an alcoholic at the time, and couldn’t be much help. Later, when I finally caught up with the Denver Post article, it confirmed the accuracy of much of what she told us. The Post article was not in the cedar chest, so it was 1980 before I could get to Denver to read it and to interview the reporter. I asked him if the Post could have been cooperating with the military in covering anything up. He assured me that that was not the case.

Mom never went to the crash site. She was a believer that tough jobs are best left to men, and she had those two male friends at the site, one of whom identified her husband’s body.

In 1999 my husband Ted and I were on our way home from Pasadena, California where I had just received an MAT diploma from Fuller Theological Seminary. My dad’s sister Mary and her husband Hervey (Hoad) were visiting my cousin and his family in Fresno, so we stopped to visit on our way home. We were all sitting around the pool when Hoad asked me how the crash investigation was going. I told him what I knew. He said, “You really should keep on this story. You know, Tobie told me at the funeral that your dad’s last words were, ‘What are you doing in here. You don’t belong in here.’” I shrieked “What???!!!” He also told me that when my mother was in Pennsylvania at my grandparents’ house, she informed them that W. A. Patterson (president of UAL) called her and told her that she shouldn’t feel bad about what anyone thinks about the crew because the crash was not my father’s fault. He couldn’t say any more than that due to issues of national security. I said, “You knew this all these years and you didn’t tell me??” In unison, they replied, “We thought you knew! Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?” No, I don’t recall that she never did.

It wouldn’t be impossible for someone to know Dad’s last words. He could have pressed the mic when a suspicious visitor entered the cabin, but if he had done that, Tobie, Salt Lake City, maybe Denver, and any nearby pilot would have heard it. Tobie denied telling my uncle any such thing. I believe both men, so there is some other logical explanation for that story. It would be difficult to keep an event like that quiet for decades. Tobie never initially accepted the intrusion theory, though he told me that others entertained the possibility.

The pilots, of course, were blamed for the accident. Official reports said that they pressed the wrong button the in darkness of the cockpit when looking for a vector to carry them from Cheyenne to Denver, causing them to think that they were further east than they actually were. One of Dad’s friends told us in a letter that he probably thought they had a “hell of a headwind.”

THE ATOMIC SECRETS WAR

My belief is that Flight 610 got caught in the crosshairs of the desperate espionage war going on over atomic secrets and Russian moles. In 1945, a Russian defector based in Ottawa, Canada fingered a large number of atomic spies and other Soviet agents and sympathizers in the ABC countries (America, Canada, and Britain). Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk who worked in the Russian Embassy, warned of highly-placed moles in the British government whom he only knew by code name. His revelations would result in the prosecution of 18 Soviet spies. Eight of those prosecuted would be convicted (Intrepid’s Last Case and The Philby Conspiracy, ch. 10). The impact of that situation was incalculable for America because during the Korean War “all U.S. secret intelligence from the Far East went through the British embassy in Washington” (Shadow Warriors, 101).

Decrypted Soviet espionage signals spoke of an agent with the code name of ‘Stanley’ who not only had access to most of our encryption efforts and products, but ran some kind of operation in Mexico as well. Stanley later was identified as Kim Philby, a British liaison between British, Canadian and American intelligence who was stationed in Washington DC. Philby represented the British group SIS (not the same organization as the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service). The British SIS was the English version of our CIA. Since he interfaced with the SIS, MI5, the FBI, and the CIA, Philby had access to just about everything going on in Western intelligence.

Another Soviet spy working in the British Embassy in DC from ’44 to ’49 was Donald MacClean. MacClean was also the British secretary for the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Development. He passed on much valuable information to the Soviets during the Korean War about U.S.-British atomic policy and capability. Although he knew nothing of physics, he was later called an ‘atomic spy’ because of the access he had to atomic policy and supplies. In 1949, MacClean left Washington DC and went to Cairo as First Secretary of the British Embassy. His alcoholism was getting the better of him, and the appointment was a complete disaster. After a few years, he returned to London to work for the British Foreign Office, American Department, which dealt with all of Latin America. In October, ’50, he was incredibly promoted to the head of the American Department. He was on all top-secret distribution lists and had access to much sensitive cable traffic pertaining to the war. He was also in a position to read policy messages and captured Soviet cable traffic information that we shared with Britain and France.

Guy Burgess was a hedonistic homosexual and alcoholic. In spite of the fact that his whole career was one disgrace after another, he managed to hold a job in the British Foreign Office. In the fall of 1950, he was ‘given one more chance’ and posted to the British Embassy in Washington as second secretary. In this position, he was able to come into contact with valuable classified information. Although he was seen to be a possible security risk, whenever he asked for material concerning the Korean War, it was given to him (Shadow Warriors, 102).

In 1951, Soviet messages mentioning a ‘Homer’ were deciphered, and the net closed even tighter around MacClean. Burgess was instructed by Philby and their Soviet handlers to behave so obnoxiously as to get himself recalled to London to warn MacClean that it was time to disappear. Both men were scheduled to be questioned by the British on Monday, May 28, but they vanished on May 25, 1951, a month before the crash.

Since Burgess had been staying with Philby in Washington, Philby then came under suspicion himself. He was stunned and furious that Burgess left with MacClean, but the wily old spy hung on and managed to maintain the loyalty of his SIS colleagues. The CIA chief in Washington had every agent that knew Philby write a memo about him. Some were supportive, but on June 13, ’51, one agent, Bill Harvey, turned in a report to the head of the CIA noting that Philby was here when this betrayal took place and Philby was there when that betrayal took place. The evidence was circumstantial, but it was enough for the CIA to press London to recall Philby. In late June, London interrogated Philby, but despite rumors and speculation, he held his ground. He was grilled in November in what was called ‘the Mock Trial.’ His SIS supporters seemed to have no intention of convicting him at that time. The impression was given that Philby had been sacked, but later investigators discovered that he remained a ‘field agent’ for SIS until 1954 (The Philby Conspiracy, 248).

Anthony Blunt completed the Ring of Four, which would also be called the Cambridge Spy Ring, because they were all attending Cambridge in the 1930’s and were recruited at that time to spy for the Soviets. Blunt worked in MI-5, the British version of our FBI. Between those four, and many other scientists, code clerks, and couriers, just about all of our atomic secrets, war policies, encryption codes, and decryption progress went to Russia, then to China, then to Korea, to the effect that, with little cost in research and development, Russia tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. Agent networks, covert actions, and Korean War strategies were betrayed, adding up to a huge loss of life in the west and the east. Vital H-bomb information crossed over to the Soviets in late 1951, while Russian spies traveled the globe using stolen Canadian passports, a process which had begun much earlier. Author Herbert Romerstein (The Venona Secrets, xv) claims that Russia developed the atomic bomb a good five or six years earlier than they would have on their own. “Documents recently released in the former USSR, moreover, demonstrate that, absent an atomic bomb, Stalin would not have unleashed Pyongyang’s army to conquer the entire Korean peninsula.” My research partner told me that we knew about the ring in 1948, and that we ran a counterintelligence operation against them in 1955. However, no one knew for certain about Philby until 1961.

For the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans, there were two highly sought bits of information that could qualify as motive for crashing a plane. First, they would be interested in the intentions of the U.S. as far as using nuclear weapons in Korea. In a press conference in November, 1950, President Truman indicated that the U.S. would use any military means necessary to end the war if need be, although in a meeting with Britain’s Clement Atlee on December 7, he promised that the U.S. would not use nuclear weapons in the war without consulting Britain first. General Eisenhower was far more of a nuclear hawk than Truman. As president (1953), he was willing to use such weapons and willing to let the communists know (The Korean War, 97, 98, 342). Secondly, since the Russian wealth of nuclear experts and highly placed spies in the U.S. and Britain was in the process of being profoundly compromised in mid-1951, they would want to know the status of the remainder of those assets.

One of ABC’s most highly guarded secrets was the fact that we were able to capture and decipher Soviet communications. Venona was the code name for the program in which encrypted Soviet communications were monitored and deciphered during WW II and afterward. Some of these signals were called ‘burst transmissions’ because agents from Canada to Mexico communicated in Morse code too briefly to be traced (Intrepid’s Last Case, 271). Others were cables sent in the usual manner because the code was so sophisticated that the Russians felt secure. A truly extraordinary discovery were radio beams designated as Knickebein beams, used to guide German bombers at night to targets in Britain (A Man Called Intrepid, Loc. 2710, 2711, 2734). Britain quickly learned to thwart these signals and guide the bombers to a safer target. A major front in the war was fought as decryption experts struggled to break enemy codes and read the messages. Of course, we hadn’t been reading them for too many years when someone in the signal corps sold out and passed our decryptions on to the enemy.

So, the situation in late June, 1951—The Russians had just acquired and tested the atomic bomb in 1949, thanks to so many helpful Canadians, Americans and British. Many Russian recruits in those days were fanatical ideologues who wouldn’t even accept pay for what they were doing (The Venona Secrets, 17). U.S. soldiers were dying in Korea because North Korea seemed to anticipate all our strategies. MacClean and Burgess disappeared from London on May 25. The Russians did not publicly admit their defection at that time, but they turned up in Russia. Philby was banished to London under a cloud, but still working for SIS on the sidelines and still in touch with his Soviet handlers and with Anthony Blunt in MI-5. On June 13, William Harvey sent a memo to William Bedell Smith of MI-6 suggesting that Philby was the mole Stanley of the Venona signals (Vogel, Daily Beast article). MacArthur had already alerted Washington that just about every operation in the Korean War up to that time had been betrayed to the Chinese, who then informed the North Koreans. Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg were in prison for selling atomic secrets to the Russians. In April, ’51, the month when they were sentenced, Julius was unburdening his mind to a fellow inmate, who was reporting his words to the FBI. Two other members of the Rosenberg spy ring had already disappeared. They would turn up much later in Czechoslovakia and Russia. That month the Rosenbergs were sentenced to die. Other KGB spies were being compromised. Several were spirited out of the U.S. through the Russian Embassy in Mexico City.

Thus in May and June 1951 the world of espionage was in an uproar over atomic secrets and cold and hot war spies.

DETAILS OF THE CRASH AND THE LINGERING MYSTERY

The following story is a compendium of information I have spliced together from official crash reports, my relatives, newspaper articles, interviews with pilots, journalists, and military personnel, and a couple of UFO researchers and their confidential sources. I have no official documents to show for most of my investigating, but I have recorded every step of my efforts in a journal since 1975, and I have been as factual and accurate as possible without official confirmation in hand.

On Friday, June 29, 1951, a Lt. Col. Merle Parks, chief of technical reconnaissance at Strategic Air Command, Offut Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, arrived at Travis Air Force Base with a briefcase full of Army documents that pertained to what we had hoped would be the end of the Korean War. These war documents were enroute from Korea and Tokyo to Washington DC. He routinely checked the briefcase into the security facility at Travis AFB (Nosoff interview and other military sources). Also at Travis at that time were five people from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. These were civilians employed by the Air Force who were specialists in technical reconnaissance and weaponry. One of them was a comptroller. The western newspapers would call them “civilian inspectors” and fail to nail down where they came from and what they were doing. However, they were far more than “inspectors.” Three of them had been at Hill Air Force Base in Utah to implement the installation and development of air reconnaissance technology such as night vision and aerial photography (Dayton Journal Herald and Dayton Daily News). Their deaths must have been a stunning loss to the war projects being developed through Wright-Patterson Field.

The other passengers associated with military projects were a civilian atomic chemist on ‘secret assignment,’ who was carrying classified documents, and Lt. D. P. Zylla from Treasure Island. Years later I would discover that Navy Lt. Daniel Peter Zylla was coming from three months in Korea (his obituary) and was also carrying classified documents destined for Washington, D.C. Unlike Parks, Zylla had a cover story. He was supposed to be on his way to his hometown of St. Cloud, Minnesota (email from his nephew). It’s not impossible to consider that Parks was a decoy and that Zylla carried the real documents.

For believers in the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash, the Dayton five are especially interesting. According to the legend, two crashed saucers and some alien bodies were stored at Wright-Patterson for a time. General Twining, the head of Materiel Air Command at W-P is alleged by Roswell supporters to have been in on the Roswell crash secret from the beginning. He may even have been one of the legendary MJ-12 working group on UFO analysis. Supposedly, after ’47, W-P became a center of UFO secret government research (The Day After Roswell; and The Roswell Incident). The base was the headquarters for Project Bluebook, the AF program to study UFOs from 1947–1969. So, those who believe in the reality of the Roswell incident would wonder if the Dayton briefcases were filled with harvested technology. There was no mention of their briefcases having been checked into the security area, however, and the secrecy surrounding the artifacts in Dayton were highly classified and compartmentalized. Employees at W-P AFB may have heard rumors about alien bodies, but it doesn’t follow that they would have privileged information or that the Roswell crash had anything to do with the Korean War.

Flight 610 was the first flight out after an eleven-day airline strike. Dick Tobie found Dad grousing about the weather in the pre-flight quarters in San Francisco. The flight was normal to Salt Lake City. Another ‘deadheading’ pilot rode in the cockpit for half an hour. He later claimed that the crew were all awake, in apparent good health, and in good spirits (Rocky Mtn. News). Some passengers deplaned there. The continued flight was delayed because Dad ordered the baggage compartment to be repacked. Tobie’s flight flew past 610 and took the lead.

Although the newspapers designated ‘Capt. Appleby’ as having made all of the radio broadcasts, my mother claimed that Dick Tobie told her that another pilot did the final radio work on Flight 610. When Jim and I interviewed him, had he had confirmed to us that dad made all the calls, our investigation would have been over. Since all pilots in the same vicinity were tuned to the same frequency, Flight 600 was able to overhear the communication between 610 and the tower. All the strangeness of the flight took place after the stop in Salt Lake. For one thing, 610 began to have trouble communicating with the tower. Flight 600 had routinely changed to VHF due to the mountains and the storms in the vicinity. The radio person on Flight 610 tried four times on LF, the usual night frequency, and didn’t switch until Flight 600 told them that they were getting through just fine on VHF. They offered to relay communications. 610 did not answer, but switched to VHF and immediately got through. Just before the last call to the tower, 610 thanked 600, but said that they were getting through just fine.

Most flights were making PIREPS, reports of thunder cells, but 610 made none, in spite of the fact that 600 reported a cell between Cheyenne and Denver. Allegedly, the incorrect toggle was switched, bringing in the wrong north-south A/N signal. This switch was reported to have been made earlier than it needed to be, contributing to the error. There were two parallel north-south radio beams, both leading to Denver, but if a flight catches the wrong one, it will think that it’s further east than it is.

The last communication was a normal report to Denver that they had reached 8,500 ft. Four minutes later they were not responding to calls from the Denver tower. When they should have found the correct beam and turned left, straight south toward Denver, they continued on a southwest heading for ten or twelve minutes and descended until they hit Crystal Mountain.

Several planes searched for the wreck, but a thick cloud layer hid the mountain all morning. By mid-afternoon, a large group of searchers trekked up the crash site. It was too late to do anything that day, so guards were posted, and the group left. Among the first people on the crash site was the National Guard. They cordoned off the area and screened who could come and go.

In 2016, I received an email from a Franklin (Lin) Kemp. When he was 15 years old, he was at a youth camp called Camp Cheley, which is just outside Estes National Park. He claims that he woke up some time after midnight and heard a plane go over. When he looked outside the tent, it was foggy. He heard the plane go over again. He thought it might be lost. Hang onto that thought. We’ll come back to it later.

When Travis Air Force Base heard that 610 was missing, it was early Saturday morning, so the person who arranged the escort for Parks was probably off base. The duty officer checked the security register and noticed that Parks had deposited his briefcase, so he sent a TWX to Lowry Air Force Base telling the OSI chief, Maj. William Nosoff, to send an agent to secure the briefcase and see if (a loaded word in this uncertain story) there were any sensitive documents that needed to be secured. Nosoff stated to me that he sent one agent, Bill Hendrix, unarmed and unacquainted with the importance of the briefcase. Nosoff was supposedly never apprised of the fact that later that day, several armed OSI agents from Strategic Air Command in Omaha arrived to help look for the briefcase (Denver Post). They would have been sent by General Curtis E. LeMay, a bulldog of a man who never met a secret that he didn’t like. Hendrix must have seen them, but he allegedly never told Nosoff and Nosoff never asked (Nosoff interview). Nosoff said he didn’t even read the Denver Post account, or he’d have read about those agents there. Nosoff’s blasé account of the document retrieval threw my first helper totally off the project. Without documents on the plane, there is no motive for sabotage. Nosoff convinced my first researcher and I that he did not believe that there had been top secrets documents in the empty case. There were toys in it, however, so had there been documents, they should have been with the toys. In other words if the documents had scattered, so would the toys. I asked other military people later if a briefcase with only toys in it would have been checked into a secure facility and been handcuffed to a wrist. The resounding answer was no. What Nosoff didn’t mention to either me or my research helper is that other documents were found and turned in. And other documents were missing! I found that out later. But Nosoff left me with one clue… I told him that only the FBI would really know for sure what happened on that crash. He agreed and repeated very emphatically and slowly, “The – Federal – Bureau – of – Investigation!”

Flight 600 landed in Chicago. Tobie received a call from his wife saying that 610 was missing, so he immediately made arrangements to fly back to Fort Collins. He was part of the search group that went up on Sunday morning, July 1. He noticed a lack of seatbelt stress on the co-pilot and navigator. They had rolled out of the plane at first impact, and “weren’t busted up at all.” The captain was almost cut in two from the seatbelt, and had impacted the console hard enough to make a dent. Tobie felt he was being watched very closely, and was not asked to aid in the identification process. I asked him if there was a stream in the vicinity. He said no. So my mother’s information about him being found in a ‘little mountain stream’ was wrong… or the body had been moved.

Somewhere in this time-frame, our signal hunters in Washington, D.C. picked up a signal from Mexico that was “not supposed to be there.” There is no record of this signal anywhere other than what was told to my mother. At first she told my brother and I that it was her old friend Dr. Boyd who told her, but later she hedged on that and said she couldn’t remember who it was. It’s possible that she got that from W. A. Patterson much later in that mysterious phone call. Hardly anyone knew about the certainty of the presence of documents, the handcuffed briefcase, and the escort from Travis. Many years later, his statements to me turned out to utterly contradict what his report said. It borders on the miraculous that this information was relayed to our family.

Wayne Phillips, reporter for the Denver Post, was able to pick up a rumor that the briefcase held highly important army documents that might pertain to the end of the Korean War. Any other newspaper that repeated that possibility was quoting Phillips. OSI men and the FBI and CAB officials admitted to Phillips that they were taking a long look at this crash as to the possibility of sabotage. So Phillips learned that docs disappeared from Parks’s briefcase, but Nosoff didn’t.

On Monday evening, July 2, when all bodies had been found, President Patterson hosted a thank you dinner for all volunteers. Late Monday night, the Omaha OSI left. On July 5, after the holiday, all bodies were released.

At that point, Walter Winchell had already broadcast the suggestion that 610 crashed because it was shortcutting. My mother, who was staying with my Dad’s parents in Pennsylvania, began to receive some nasty crank calls. My brother was sitting on the stair steps when she hung up from one of these calls and began to sob. That’s when he figured out that he’d never see our dad again. Mom immediately wrote Patterson about the charges. He wrote a nice letter back praising dad’s reputation and assuring her that it wasn’t true. All he could do at that time was comfort her and say that they should just wait to see how the investigations turned out. It was later, after the final reports, that he allegedly called her and assured her that the crash was not her husband’s fault, but that for national security reasons, he could not say any more.

The Civil Aeronautics Board, The Air Line Pilots Association, and United Air Lines all investigated the crash, concluding that the plane crashed due to pilot error. There was no mention of lost documents or handcuffed briefcases. The investigators looked for stray radio signals that could come from known sources, like known radio stations or other airports. Our access to the Venona signals was still profoundly classified. Patterson never repeated the statement he made to my mother to any civilian officially investigating the crash. All the pilot rumors about the plane being sabotaged were mere speculation on their part, because the few facts that would strongly point to the possibility were not known to any but a very few intelligence people who were sworn to secrecy. Even if the plane was proven tomorrow to be sabotaged, the civilian investigators cannot be faulted for concluding pilot error. Under the circumstances, they had no other alternative. Many pilots refused to believe that the cause was pilot error, but everyone had a different speculation about how it might have happened. None of the theories were very convincing.

SUBSEQUENT REVELATIONS

My first real source was a UFO researcher and author. He had a military intelligence source who discovered that, in spite of repeated assurances to my FOIA requests that there were no files pertaining to the crash, there were two files. I won’t repeat here all that was passed on to me because it came orally, and it’s very easy to garble technical information unless it is written down. I just knew there was some kind of summary file out there called a SUN file, which was allegedly Nosoff’s report. In it he stated that there were two packets in the briefcase, (or maybe from this perspective, we should say someone’s briefcase) one labeled atomic spy information and the other atomic secret information. I was given a file number. The first two numbers stood for the date, the next three for Lowry district, the 34 for counterespionage. I pressed the researcher for clarification, but got no response. He told me his source went off on TDY to ****, and was unavailable. When I sent new FOIA requests with the file number, I was told again and again that the file had been destroyed. He was attracted to the case because of the Dayton 5, but when Nosoff later convinced him that there were no docs ever in Parks’s briefcase, he lost interest in the case and forgot that he ever told me about the two packets. He didn’t keep notes on the progress, but I was journaling all along.

My next partner, Rick Doty, a formerly worked for the Office of Strategic Intelligence. One of his specialties was disinformation, and he was infamous in driving the UFO community crazy with wild goose chases, but he assured me that he was retired and had no reason to mislead me. I rolled the dice and chose to trust him because, frankly, I had little choice. He had four sources, two of whom found the summary file that was supposed to have been destroyed, and references to several investigations by different organizations over a period of fourteen years. None of these classified investigations dealt with the possibility of sabotage, but only of the conspiracy to steal the documents and of the possibility of a courier spy ring. The information that was passed onto to us came from OSI/FBI summary files that mention one CIA file, and one FBI file. The information presented in summary files is unclassified, but they describe the actual investigation files, all of which are classified, and to which we had no access. Many of the actual files may have been destroyed or refiled. When people apply for information through the Freedom of Information Act, the military punches about five possible key words into the DCII index. It takes about five seconds. They tell you that all their files are in that central index, when, in fact, the files they use for counter-intelligence investigations are not in the DCII, but in the top secret, secret, or confidential files. If a file is classified, the law says that you can appeal to have it declassified or you can try to get a limited clearance just for that subject. But if the files you seek are in any way related to an important counter-intelligence operation, they will deny that they exist. In my desperate, pleading requests, I was given this fool’s routine by the Air Force, OSI, and the FBI. But I don’t take it personally. Even when my uncle, who was an Army lawyer and a Colonel, signed the letter to OSI in 1980, we got the same answer. He made discreet inquiries to Army intelligence and was told that I may have demonstrated ‘conspiracy’, but not sabotage. He was told, “She’ll never find anything out.” He thought I was a total fool for pursuing the investigation and told me so in no uncertain terms.

I was told by Rick’s sources that declassifying files is a bureaucratic nightmare that can take years. Files are automatically declassified in a series of steps over a long period of time, but eventually they are destroyed. Only the summary file remains.

When I first interested Rick in the investigation, we turned up a few intriguing facts, then came to a dead end until he made queries to his old intelligence colleagues. First Matt and Brad, then Lenny (not their real names), then an old spymaster called ‘the Colonel’ began digging into the old case. The Colonel had been their boss when these men were part of an elite counter-intelligence team working overseas (so I was told). All of our correspondence was by email, and I was never told exactly which agency any but Rick and Lenny worked for (OSI and DIA). Without Rick’s strong recommendation, these men wouldn’t have given me the time of day. It was a thrill and a privilege to have had a quick glimpse into this secret world.

As it turns out, they had their own reasons for being interested in the case. Over time we made some startling discoveries, beginning with the James Eustus story. Some investigation summary files were listed under Eustus, some under the crash. The dates of the reports meshed perfectly. The more we discovered, the more the pieces fell into place.

As you read the following, be cautious about jumping to conclusions about who is guilty or innocent. The spying business is complex, and very little is what it seems. However, there are at least three confessed spies in the following story.

JAMES EUSTUS

Contrary to what William Nosoff told me, the initial AFOSI crash report, which Nosoff assured me he wrote, claimed that there were two military couriers on the plane. Between them, they were carrying 40 secret and top secret/coded atomic items. Only seventeen were found. These seventeen must have been in the briefcases of Joseph Coury and/or Lt. Zylla, and since Coury was not military, it was most likely Lt. Zylla. In 1970 the Larimer Co. coroner told me that the president of one of two Fort Collins banks was called in the wee hours of the morning to put documents in the vault. They were turned over to the OSI, which transported them to Lowry AFB, which turned them over to the Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque New Mexico.

The OSI file, which was stored in the FBI section (remember Nosoff’s clue?) was dated September 12, ’51. That would be Nosoff’s report that there were two military couriers on the plane carrying 40 documents, etc. In January of ’52, the Atomic Energy Commission investigated the loss of the documents on board the flight.

It was Lenny that turned up James Eustus. In 1949, Eustus was a private in the Army stationed in West Germany. At that time, he was recruited by the East German KGB. By 1950, he was stationed at Travis AFB, where he was a travel clerk with Army Transportation Command. His duties included assigning military couriers to commercial flights. On the night of Flight 610, he assigned Parks and Zylla, then alerted the KGB that something important was coming down the line. Eustus was eventually arrested, and according to his own account, he recruited and assisted a spy ring of six American couriers. He would notify his KGB handlers of the assignments, and they would be intercepted by KGB agents along the route. For $300, they would open their briefcases and allow the contents to be photographed. Years later, Eustus claimed that he was very sad because two of those couriers were on the UAL Flight 610 that crashed. However! Don’t judge them just yet. There’s a twist at the end of this summary.

In 1955, a CIA source tipped off the FBI about a sergeant who led a courier spy ring, but they weren’t sure just who it was. That may account for a 1955 investigation that is listed under the same file number as the above. Eustus was reassigned to Berlin in 1959. During a double agent operation, he was discovered as being a spy, so he fled to East Germany. While AWOL, he returned to West Germany and raped a 15-year-old German girl. He returned to East Germany, and was captured by a special operations team in 1960. One member of this team happens to be one of the retired agents who helped me. Eustus was arrested and returned to the West. He was tried by a General Court Martial for rape and being AWOL and improper contact with East Germans. He was sentenced to 20 years at hard labor at the U. S. Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth, and reduced to the lowest enlisted grade. He also lost all his pay and allowance.

At that time the U. S. Armed Forces Courier Service requested an investigation through the US Army Criminal Investigations Division.

In 1960, he confided to a fellow inmate that in 1951, he had put two courier recruits on a commercial airliner, but the plane crashed before they could reveal the contents of their briefcases. The inmate alerted authorities, and Eustus was interviewed by military intelligence. He confessed to being a spy, but he told a lie in that interview, which eventually led to the death of a double agent whom we will call James Kelly. It turns out that Kelly was on one of the teams led by Lenny.

In 1961, the FBI investigated the two couriers who were named as having died in the crash in ’61, concluding that they were both spies. There was a classified FBI investigation from ‘62-’66, but I don’t have any details on all of that. Remember, don’t judge just yet.

Eustus was Court Martialed again and condemned to death. In 1963, two months before he was due to die, he saved his life by a ‘full confession.’ This is where he made the claim about the 6 spies. He passed two lie detector tests, and his sentence was commuted to life. A report was written, which was also later filed under the OSI file number given me by my first source. That summary file was stored in the FBI section.

Two of the six spy ring members were arrested, convicted of espionage, and died in prison. The other two denied the allegations, but were recruited as double agents by Military Intelligence. They served so well, that they received the Intelligence Medal of Valor from President Reagan in 1987. One of them is retired and was living in California.

Eustus also traveled to Mexico several times, possibly to contact his KGB handlers. It was the Colonel that told us about KGB handler Nicholas Anton. Eustus would point out a likely recruit, and Anton would recruit them. Sometimes there was another nefarious character that was called a “cut out” because he came between the handler and the spy. The Colonel wrote:

“This was when the pandora’s box was opened. This Colonel told us about Eustus and his courier spy ring. However, instead of six spies, Eustus and Anton recruited eight spies. Two were killed in 1951 in the crash or your father’s plane. However, two got off the plane in Salt Lake City. The Colonel didn’t know the names of these two spies. An investigation started (in 1982) but most information had been lost over the years. It wasn’t until 1992 that the two were identified. They both died of natural causes over the years but were spies that were never caught. The Government was so mad about this they canceled all entitlements for their families, including retirement benefits. The Colonel spy was tried, convicted and placed in a German prison because of a prior incident involving Germany. The Colonel was released from prison in 1995 and disappeared. We think he went to Moscow.”

THE FINAL TWIST

There was one more surprising shock to this tortured story. During our time of discovery, there was an easy camaraderie and a real joy in discovery. Lenny wrote, “Hey guys, this is fun.” Rick complimented me for making the connections between file dates and info of Eustus and the crash. We marveled at the amazing coincidence that we all had a connection of some sort with this story. The Colonel (the good one) was friendly and free with information. He said it wasn’t classified, but it was sensitive, so be careful how I use it.

He had a couple of problems with the sabotage theory, and his questions were good ones. One, the Soviets had two major assets on the plane, so why would they crash the plane and lose them for one shot at documents? That objection was a head scratcher for me. The material being apprehended would have to really be something. Two, the original report said that there were no clues found that would point to sabotage. Nothing seemed out of order. I answered that one by pointing out the sloppy flying, the lack of seatbelt stress on two crewmen in spite of the fact that they were descending toward the mountains and there was a lot of turbulence, the loss of documents, the signal from Mexico, the fact that my dad did not make the last call, and the surveillance I had been under for a decade by Russian spies. I reminded him that Nosoff told me he didn’t even go down to the crash site. Radio beams were not the only German technology routing through Mexico at that time. The Rosenburgs used $200 Leica cameras, which came to them from Germany through the Russian Embassy in Mexico City. Mexico City was the spying center for all of Latin America. My mother would not have known that.

And now, years later in 2020, I can add Lin Kemp’s story about hearing the plane go over twice. Was the plane circling, looking for the beam? Is that why the navigator was also out of his seat when the plane crashed?

I kept pressing the Colonel to see if we could get the military records of Parks and Zylla. After all, they had to be the two couriers that died. They were the only two military people on the plane as far as the news clippings I had. All the Dayton people were civilians, definitely not couriers. A couple of times he asked me, “Who is Parks? Who is Zylla?” At one point he rechecked the Eustus reports and pulled out the six names, sending me the two he thought must have been the ones who died on the plane. I didn’t recognize them. I went back to my news clippings and checked the passengers listed there. As far as I could tell, those two men weren’t on the plane. The two that were certainly on the plane, Parks and Zylla, were not named in the courier spy ring! One of them may have been a spy, because someone on the plane had to fly the plane in, but it could have been any male on the plane. We had also knocked out a major argument against sabotage, because the named assets weren’t on the plane. I’m assuming if they were, they disembarked at Salt Lake City.

That little grenade cast a shadow over all the accusations made by the three confessed spies. I guess this was a fact that no one had ever thought to check. By the time Intelligence was looking for the two who disembarked at Salt Lake, passenger manifests must have been unavailable, or they might have discovered the conflict then. Did no one checked the newspaper accounts? So, two spies, the ones named, whom everyone assumed were dead, were not dead at all. They were still out there with new identities and passports and lives.

At the same time that we turned up this new conflict, Rick sent my research journal to the Colonel. He said that he’d read it. He was a pilot and knew how to assess the pilot error possibilities of that era. He asked me to give him a few days to digest it all.

That was the last I heard from any of them except Rick. I waited on pins and needles to hear something. I emailed notes, asked questions. Nothing.

SUMMARY

Everything I have just written indicates that important documents really did disappear from the crash site, but it does not prove that the plane was sabotaged. However, here again are several reasons why I believe that it was:

Initial speculation among pilots and investigators that there may have been an intrusion into the cockpit.

The change in pilot voices (or at least the fact that the last broadcasts were not done by my father). If he made that last radio transmission, the plane could not have been sabotaged.

The delay in switching to VHF, the odd circumstance of the plane being where it shouldn’t have been, the sloppy radio work.

The fact that documents disappeared before the search party arrived at the site.

The lack of seat belt stress on two flight officers. The lack of PIREPS.

The signal from Mexico.

Lin Kimp’s story.

There was also the intense surveillance that I was under from coast to coast for years. It would tend to indicate that someone or something was still being protected in the years from ’75 to about ’81. Perhaps not every incident that I recorded in my journal involved Soviets, but there were several that clearly were. If some incidents were not Soviets, it would indicate that some U.S. agency was as interested in where my investigation would lead as the Soviets were. At times I wondered if the FBI and the Soviets were playing cat and mouse with each other with me in the middle.

I had two critical packets of investigation mail on two separate occasions, in two separate locations, disappear enroute, never to be seen again.

Who, or what, were the Soviets and the U.S. trying to protect? It would make more sense if it were a who, because the crash itself was part of a distant cold war. We were fully at war with Korea in ’51; and they knew that we were threatening in our most secret chambers to nuke China or use biological warfare against them. Spies are highly motivated under such conditions. But by ’74, Stalin was long dead, as were many of the participants in the war. It would make little sense for the Russians to expend so much energy to cover up the crash so many years later.

There’s more, but this summary is already too long. There’s one more thing to say here. People told me that Rick Doty was not a reliable person. I took a risk in trusting him with this story. One thing that convinces me that the emails mentioned above did not come from his computer is that the files stated that there were two military couriers on the plane. Until this month, June 2020, I had no record anywhere that Navy Lt. D. P. Zylla was a courier. Recently a relative of his emailed me and told me that he was also carrying documents that were destined for Washington, DC. The newspaper just said that he originated from Treasure Island, but his obituary stated that he spent 3 months in Korea and was coming from there. He also had a cover story for why he took that particular flight. He was supposedly on his way home to St. Cloud, Minnesota. So there were two military couriers on the plane.

Bibliography

Berlitz, Charles, and William L. Moore. The Roswell Incident. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1980.

Breuer, William B. Shadow Warriors: The Covert War in Korea. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996.

Catchpole, Brian. The Korean War: 1950–53. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2000.

Corso, Col. Philip J., with William J. Birnes. The Day After Roswell. New York: Pocket Books, 1997.

Knightley, Phillip. The Master Spy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

Lindsey, Robert. The Falcon and the Snowman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Page, Bruce, David Leitch, and Phillip Knightley. The Philby Conspiracy. Garden City: Doubleday, 1968.

Polmar, Norman and Thomas B. Allen. Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage. New York: Random House, 1997.

Stephenson, William. Intrepid’s Last Case. New York: Sky Horse, 1983.

---------. A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II. New York: Sky Horse, Kindle ed., 2013.

Wright, Peter, and Paul Greengrass. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987.

Romerstein, Herbert and Eric Breindel. The Venona Secrets. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000.

Home Moggie!

Last Modified: 7/8/2020