Dan's Papers - June 29, 2007 - 15 Years Ago In Dan's Papers July 3, 1992

Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, my wife and I visited Moscow and Leningrad. We made many friends. What has happened since is that our house in East Hampton has become a way station for these Russian friends who are now leaving that crumbling nation. They stay with us a few weeks, even a few months, and then set up more permanent arrangements. We are happy to help because we can identify with them. All four sets of our grandparents came to America this way, getting help, a hundred years ago.

Most recently, we had Natasha and her seven-year-old daughter, Ludmila, staying with us. They stayed a month, and then found their own place. Now, a year after that, they have been joined by Natasha's husband, Sergei. An officer in the Soviet Navy, he had been against the move initially, but now he has left the navy and has come.

Last Saturday, the three of them came to visit us in our apartment and it was a joyful reunion. We hadn't seen Natasha and her daughter in several months. We had never even met Sergei, and Sergei came bearing gifts. Three of them. He brought a bottle of brandy from Armenia, complete with the hammer and sickle on the label. He brought a piece of granite, carved and mounted beautifully on a pedestal. It was from Siberia. And then he brought out a third gift, and it is this gift about which I intend to write.

"From Korean Airplane," he said in his broken English. "Shot down."

It was a small piece of orange canvas, the kind that might be heat welded to a piece of kapok. It could have been part of a life raft or a float. Or maybe a part of a chute; the kind that unfolds in an emergency from a 747 airliner.

As it began to sink in, exactly what I was looking at, Sergei began to talk, in Russian, and after a while he would pause and Natasha would interpret what it was he had to say.

In 1983, Sergei was a naval cadet aboard a large rescue ship known as the Ivan Kozem based in Vladivostok. One night, they were awakened by an alarm. They went to their stations and remained there until the dawn.

Shortly after dawn, the Ivan Kozem was put to sea. The crew already knew what had happened. A big airliner, purported to be from South Korea, but maybe from the CIA, had wandered over Soviet air space and had been shot down. They were to look for wreckage.

The Ivan Kozem, Sergei told me, was uniquely qualified to find the Korean airliner. It was the only ship in the Soviet fleet equipped with underwater submarines. Its submarines could patrol the bottom, send video images up to the bridge and, under orders, could use mechanical arms to bring things to the surface.

"We found the wreckage," Natasha translated. "And the first order, that day, was to have the submarine arms make as much of a mess as possible on the bottom covering everything up. We were to hide what we found. And what we could not hide, we were to bring up."

A prime target was the "black box" of the airliner, but they never did find it. They spent the day dredging into the mud and covering as much as they could. What they did bring up included many personal effects, also pieces of human beings.

"We were able to take many things as souvenirs," Natasha translated. "There was a razor one cadet took that I later saw him shaving with. Many other things, raincoats and pieces of seat and so forth we cut up with scissors and made little ribbons out of. We would tuck them into our clothes. The colors were so bright, the fabric so strange."

I turned the piece of orange fabric I had over. It was so eerie, my hands were shaking. On the back was printed, in big black letters as if they had been stamped on, 90 FLO. These were English letters made by Boeing in Seattle, not Russian Cyrillic letters.

"The second day we were there the word went around the ship that the submarine arm had opened a small case and had revealed a one hundred dollar American bill. Our great ship spent the next three hours trying to raise this one hundred dollar bill. It would be grasped in the arm, then lost, then grasped again. One time, the arm grasped it and raised it all the way up to the surface. We all ran to the side, but a swell came and washed the bill and the mud it was in back out of the metal grasp. We never got it again."

On the third day, other ships arrived and agents from the KGB came aboard and they took charge of all the debris. The cadets hid what they had taken. Then the Ivan Kozem returned to Vladivostok. During the next few weeks, talk amongst the Soviet cadets included a report that the first man ordered to shoot down the Korean airliner refused to do so and was subsequently executed. Another report was that different people from different branches of the military were involved in investigating the incident so no one group could know the whole thing. During this time, incidentally, they were under orders to observe a strict silence about what they had seen and done. They talked anyway.

Sergei spent eleven years in the Soviet Navy after that. He is tall, barrel chested, sports a black beard and, in his halting English, can be very funny. He is thirty years old. He is a licensed navigator. Occasionally he excuses himself and goes out on the deck and smokes a cigarette. He'd like to be a mate on a boat.

As for his gift, I have folded up the piece of orange fabric and I have tucked it in a desk drawer where I keep other bits of memorabilia. I don't quite know what else to do with it. It is a remarkable gift. Also, it gives me the creeps.