Advertisement

It seems barely a footnote in the infinite chronology of events that makes up the history of the Cold War.

In November 1955, a C-54 made its way north from Burbank, Calif., toward an unknown site in the desert that years later would become notorious as Area 51. Back then it was known as "Watertown," this desolate place north of the Nevada Test Site.

Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Etta James, Marty Robbins and the Clovers were making music, Berry Gordy had just turned 26, and Lee Van Cleef and Forrest Tucker were in the newly released western, "The Vanishing American."

The Navy commissioned the USS Boston, world's first guided missile cruiser, and near Denver, a plane with 44 souls on board was blown out of the sky by a man who planted a bomb under his own mother to collect insurance.

A C-54 was busy piloting men back and forth from Burbank to "Watertown," making two flights a day, when on Nov. 17 the world ended for passengers and crew.

Fourteen men were killed in the impact when the plane was caught up in stormy weather just below the summit of Mt. Charleston and clipped a bare ridge. It had been only inches too low.

Some of the men were with the CIA, some worked with private contractors, some were serving in the Air Force. About none was much information released.

Numerous family members were already in their own graves before the government released their secret -- most of the victimes had been working assiduously on the development of the U-2 spy plane.

Author Kyril D. Plaskow, whose name sounds like that of a James Bond villain, has finally told their story in "Silent Heroes of the Cold War Declassified" (Stephens Press, paperback, 203 pages, photographs, map, $19.95).

The U-2 has become part of spy legend in the wake of Soviet Russia's shoot-down of Gary Powers and its later work ferreting out offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.

But at the time of its development, it was unkown outside Lockheed's "Skunk Works" and the upper echelons of the CIA.

One passenger, Edwin J. Urolatis, was thought by his family to be working for a popular soap company, and when told his son had died on a remote mountain over Las Vegas, the father was stunned. "It can't be him, he works for Proctor and Gamble," his father moaned. "it can't be him."

He was actually working for the CIA in security.

Terence J. O'Donnell, also with the CIA, was based out of Los Angeles, but his parents never knew that. Only in 1998 did his mother learn he had been involved with the U-2 project.

Plaskow's book begins in the simplest way possible, by outlining the plane's flight plan, explaining how it became lost in the storm and was then lost for good, and detailing the efforts on the part of a recovery team to locate the wreck and bring down the dead.

Plaskow then outlines how, in 1972, 12-year-old Boy Scout Steve Ririe learned about the crash and became fascinated by it. If there is a hero in all this, perhaps it is Ririe, who became obsessed by the story and never let go, finally meeting members of the families of those who died and ensuring that their story should not be forgotten.

Ririe also recounts his own unnerving experience, camping out with his wife directly below the site where the plane struck the mountain.

"He didn't know that parts of the plane were scattered all over the area around them, that their tent was in the midst of its graveyard," Plaskow writes.

But both Ririe and his wife knew something was eerily wrong that night.

Half of the book is Plaskow's account of the flight and its aftermath; the other half is something quite different.

Where the men who died might ordinarily be relegated to end notes, Plaskow offers a detailed biography of each individual, which reminds us that every casualty in any story, war, spy or otherwise, was a living, breathing human being with hopes and dreams and quirks until the moment his life was taken -- to paraphrase historian Bruce Catton, the infinitely complicated trajectory of a life meeting without fail the simple, flat trajectory of a bullet.

My only concern about an otherwise excellent piece is the willingness of the author to refer to these men as "heroes." They weren't.

Patriots by all means, who arguably sacrificed their lives in pursuit of some greater good. But their deaths occurred simply because they were aboard a plane that failed to miss a ridge. There is no evidence that their sacrifice hindered or helped the U-2's development.

Or does that part of the truth remain hidden among the CIA's still undisclosed secrets?

(The book is for sale at the PVT's main office in Pahrump.)