On 12 September 1958, the Soviet Union told the United States that it had found the wreck of an American aeroplane in Armenia, and that from the remains discovered there it might be assumed that six crewmen had perished.

Seventeen men had been on board.

A week later, asked about the other eleven, Moscow replied that no other information on crew members was at the disposal of the Soviet side. Then it returned six bodies and said nothing else for thirty-three years.

A Racetrack Over Turkey

The 7406th Support Squadron flew C-130s that looked ordinary and were not. Behind the flight deck sat eleven intercept operators of the US Air Force Security Service, listening to Soviet air-defence radio and radar across the border.

The route that day was routine. Take off from Incirlik, fly to Trabzon on the Black Sea coast, turn for Van, then orbit a long racetrack between the two, never closer than a hundred miles to the Soviet frontier.

It left Incirlik at 11:21. At 12:42 the co-pilot told Ankara control it had reached Trabzon at 25,500 feet and acknowledged a weather report. That was the last anyone heard from it.

Shortly after one o’clock, it crossed into the Soviet Union.

Nobody knows why. The best explanation the NSA has offered is that Soviet navigational beacons in Armenia and Soviet Georgia broadcast on frequencies close to those at Trabzon and Van, and one Georgian signal was actually stronger than Trabzon’s. The agency’s own history calls what happened next unclear.

“There’s a Hit!!!”

Four MiG-17s intercepted it. One pilot identified the target as a four-engined transport. Then they took turns.

American listening posts in Turkey recorded the whole thing. The transcript the NSA has since declassified is the closest thing to a black box that exists for this aircraft, and it is not comfortable reading. The bracketed notes are the NSA translator’s.

“The fence” is the NSA’s translation of zabor, and its footnote says the word probably refers to the state border. The aircraft was trying to get out.

Soviet gun-camera film survives. One frame, taken by Senior Lieutenant Kucheryaev, shows the C-130 in his sight.

The aircraft came down near the village of Nerkin Sasnashen, fifty-five kilometres north-west of Yerevan. Nobody was seen to leave it. A Soviet forensic report identified six sets of remains and noted that fire had prevented identification of any more. A US Air Force review in 1997 reached the same conclusion: nobody could have survived.

The Eleven Who Did Not Exist

The United States did not raise it until 6 September. The Soviets denied all knowledge.

Then came the note of 12 September, with its six bodies and its careful assumption. Then the note of 19 September, refusing any information about the rest. Then, on 24 September, the six sets of remains were handed over and Moscow again said it knew nothing about eleven other men.

This was a lie the Soviet leadership could sustain because the eleven were not aircrew. They were listeners. Admitting they existed meant admitting what the aircraft was doing.

So on 6 February 1959, at the United Nations, the United States played the tape.

The National Cryptologic Foundation’s short account of the shootdown.

Playing intercepted Soviet fighter chatter in public was an extraordinary thing for a signals intelligence agency to do — it told Moscow exactly what could be heard and from where. It was done anyway.

Thirty-Five Years, Then a Dog Tag

Silence held until 1991, when Yeltsin began releasing what he called available information. A joint US-Russian commission on missing personnel then produced the Soviet air-defence archive material: a detailed investigative report dated 4 September 1958 from the Soviet commanding general in Armenia to the Kremlin, naming all four MiG pilots and enclosing the gun-camera photographs.

The Soviet recovery inventory listed temporary-duty orders for the flight crew, a .45 pistol, identity cards, identity tags, and German, Dutch, Turkish and American currency.

In 1993 a US Army graves excavation team dug the crash site in newly independent Armenia. They recovered more than two thousand bone and tooth fragments, life-support equipment, personal effects and wreckage. They also found a dog tag belonging to Airman Second Class Archie Bourg, an airborne maintenance technician — one of the eleven who did not exist.

Bourg turned out to be one of the two unidentified men buried at Arlington in February 1959. DNA testing confirmed it, and he was re-interred under his own name on 2 April 1997.

On 2 September 1998 — forty years to the day — all seventeen were buried together at Arlington National Cemetery, Section 34, Grave 2526, in a full-honours funeral beginning at eleven in the morning. Families of at least twelve of the men were there.

Where the Names Are

The eleven Security Service men are on the National Cryptologic Memorial at Fort Meade, all dated 2 September 1958: Master Sergeant George Petrochilos, Technical Sergeant Arthur Mello, Airman First Class Robert Oshinskie, and Airmen Second Class Archie Bourg, James Ferguson, Joel Fields, Harold Kamps, Gerald Maggiacomo, Clement Mankins, Gerald Medeiros and Robert Moore.

Two of the seventeen names were withheld from the Defense Department’s 1998 release at their families’ request. They are recoverable only from that wall.

A memorial at Fort Meade’s National Vigilance Park was dedicated on 2 September 1997, built around a C-130 refinished in 60528’s markings and ringed by eighteen trees, one for each aerial cryptologic mission lost. The park closed in February 2017 to make room for a new NSA visitor checkpoint, and the aircraft and memorials were removed.

The marker in Armenia is still there. The first one, a khachkar, was carved and unveiled in 1993 by Martin Kakosian, a sculptor who had watched the aircraft come down in 1958 as a student on a field trip. It later fell and cracked, and a joint American-Armenian memorial replaced it. In 2011 the US Army renovated the village kindergarten at Sasnashen, by way of thanks.

The full hour of released intercept audio, if you want to hear it rather than read it.

The US Army Corps of Engineers at the Sasnashen memorial on the 53rd anniversary.

Sources: National Security Agency FOIA releases including “Cold War Reconnaissance and the Shootdown of Flight 60528”, “Shoot Down of 60528” and the declassified radiotelephone transcripts; NSA National Cryptologic Memorial; National Cryptologic Museum monograph; US Department of Defense; Armenian Mirror-Spectator; US Army.