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In Spain a super-secret search goes on, ‘Thunderbair style THE CASE OF The skeletal remains of the tail section of an H-bumh-carr>ing a L'.S. accident team who were rushed to the scene in Spain. t 10 o'clock on the sparkling morning of Jan. 17, three tinj ob jects rendezsoiised in the clear blue sky 30.0(10 feet up o\er the south ern coast of Spam. Two of them were Strategic Air Command B-52 bombers from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. The third was a K.C-135 jet tank er. stationed in Spain, sent up to refuel the bombers. In the midst of the first delicate transfusion, while the mother tanker hovered above the first bomber, fire sud denly broke out in the tankerand it exploded with a boom that reverbetated around the world. The tanker's crew of four was instantly killed. The lire spread through the umbilical fuel line to the bomber and it fell in flames. At least seven red-and-white para chutes billowed out amid the fall ing debris. One was afire. Others carried the bodies of dead airmen to earth. Four were blown out into the Mediterranean by a gusty northwest wind. The other bomber streaked away to the west. Miraculously, not one of the thousands who watched the trag edy from below was killed or in jured in the rain of debris that fell on the village, the countryside and into the sea. But seven U.S. air men lost their lives in the collision and the Air Force lost a nuclear bomb and. perhaps, another topI'.S. military forces moved in immediately, setting up a huge in stallation that sealed olT the area from the rest of the world. An in tensive search began for the bomb and any traces of radioactivity. A team of radiation experts from the Atomic Energy Commission was rushed to the scene. Navy ships suddenly appeared and formed a perimeter that stretched far out to sea. Ever since, the unidentified operation on land and water has been conducted under the tightest of military secrecy. At first the Thimderball aspects of the great gradually the search force took on the familiar trappings: squads of frogmen emerged on the beaches, prowled the waters. Now the spirit of James Bond is all over this tiny coastal area of southern Spair Beforc the nuclear age came ic Palomarcs. life went on as passive ly as it had since the Moorish in vaders were expelled 400 years ago In the nearby hills, people still livi. in caves, and a group of wild cam els {abandoned after the filming ol Lawrence of Arabia) lopes acrosthe semidcsert not far away. The town of Palomares itself is a dusty congregation of one-story white washed houses. The countryside is a mixture of barren sand dunes where only cactus grows, and dry riverbeds which the peasants have laboriously irrigated into true! gardens and citrus orchards. Now, however, there is an eeir o
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desolation over the land. The to matoes are rotting on the vine, or have been scythed down by the weirdly clad American soldiers. Small red flags flutter everywhere, radiation has been detected o r even suspected. Oranges and lemons in the small orchards are unpicked. Black goats forage in the aban doned bean patches. An occasion al clump of scarlet poppies bright ens the landscape and proclaims the arrival of spring, but it is a silent spring in Palomares. an coast at Palomares looks like a World War II invasion beach head. The cruiser Boston, flagship i of Rear Admiral William S. Guest, I commander of the naval search, j lies at anchor not far offshore, ; flanked by a destroyer. Farther out ; —all the way to the edge of the horizon—are the silhouettes of a j dozen other ships, including some ; of the most sophisticated craft in the U.S. Navy. On the beach, an ] encampment with neat rows of ] rectangular green tents houses 700 I airmen, soldiers, sailors, civilian I technicians and Spanish troops. A i motor park, filled with Jeeps, bull- ] dozers and supply trucks, is on the j At one side of the camp is a j of Air Force Maj. General Deljmar Wilson, Commanding General of the 16th Air Force and commander-in-chief of the entire bile communications system, which can reach any place in the world in a matter of minutes, has been hooked up in GHQ. The system, perhaps as a gesture to the White House, is officially known as of Brig. General Arturo Montel Touzet, commander of the Span ish forces on the beachhead. On the beach, somewhat re moved from Camp Wilson, as the airmen have named it, is a grim reminder of the tragic event that brought about this costly and com- j plex land, sea and air expedition. : It is called the “Junk Pile” and grows bigger every day, as bits and j pieces of the two fallen planes are J recovered from the fields or fished : from the sea and added to it, neat ly identified with tags. j Officially, the military and dip-1 lomatic authorities in Spain will not even admit that a bomb is miss- j ing. Washington has authorized the U.S. Embassy in Madrid and the 16th Air Force in Torrejon to issue a few terse releases, announc ing that the crash occurred, listing the survivors and dead, admitting that U.S. Army and Navy units are present at Palomares, and acknowledging, after much prod ding from the press, that the B-52 . carried unarmed nuclear weapons. The plane actually carried four un armed H-bombs. Three of them were recovered almost immediately in the dry bed of the Almanzora The result has been utter frustra tion and confusion among the in an explosion on the beachhead had Italian paper printed a photograph of some crumbling mine buildings and announced that they had been ruined by the crash of the planes. The UPI reported Soviet trawlers lurking outside the search zone. As the stories grew more fantastic, the men in charge became more ft reporter, seeking the press center last week, blundered into an off-limits area. Before he was chased away he encountered a crew of bizarrely dressed soldiers work ing over a tomato patch. They car ried Geiger counters, scintillation counters and other odd-looking implements, and they wore gleam ing white fatigues, light blue sur gical caps that fitted snugly over their ears, and blue face masks. Lat er, when two of the men appeared in the PX wearing their white fa tigues, the reporter asked who they postal detachment,” an informa tion officer blandly told him. “I don’t know why their new uni From time to time helicopters Francisco Ponce Navarro c scribes how a flaming jet engi from one of the planes land in the dirt road in front of r house on the edge of Paloma'n and spotter planes swoop la the camp to drop their car: filled with aerial photog messages too secret to be tr; ted over Talking Bird, and s from San Javier, the Spar force base 118 miles away neers are repairing and resu all of the primitive roads in cinity, and the Navy is bui pier from the beach out from an old lead mine. The search area is a ro lipse of 15 square miles, wi third of it extending into t The naval operations are ci by Admiral Guest. Every it Navy swimmers and snc probe the bottom of the se a depth of a few inches tc 20 feet. Beyond that, blaci frogmen continue the sea depths of 50 feet. Farthi frogmen on a large, self-pr craft known as the “Deep explore and re-explore the at even greater depths. Joi bergh and his team of civil derwater experts are based Deep Jeep. At the outer s the search area, where the IV ranean drops steeply to depths than individual div go to, the Sixth Fleet has t in some of the Navy’s mos sophisticated detection dev: evision, radar, shadowgrap a bathysphere. An oceano;
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submarines, the two-man Alvin and the 51-foot research craft Aluminaut, are at work trying to recover objects which have been found on the bottom of the sea, but which divers cannot reach or raise. These amphibious forces have recovered more than 100 objects from the sea, according to U.S. Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke. They include galley equipment, a large rubber ball, a file case, an en tire wing of the bomber, and old Spanish galleon cannon balls. Ob jects located at the outermost lim its of the search zone have been marked by rings of red cork buoys to await salvage by Alvin or Alu minaut. When local fishing vessels fouled the lines of the buoy mark ers, Admiral Guest ordered them out of the area—and instantly touched off gossip that the bomb was emitting radiation in the sea. Guest has been evaluating water samples constantly, at eight-hour intervals, and has found no trace of nuclear contamination. Never theless the sale of shrimp from nearby waters has dropped 50%. A change in the search patterns last week touched off speculation that the missing bomb may have landed on the ground instead of in the sea. Many of the shins were moved a few miles west of the orig inal search area while on shore the hunt wasintensified along the Almanzora River bed. In the town, the worried farm ers gather in clusters in the local bar and at the crossroads, by the sign that reads Equipo de Busca de Avion (Airplane Search Team). Of 400 acres of farmland immedi ately surrounding Palomares, des military, just seven acres have been returned to their owners as safe. About 32 more acres are ready to be returned, certified as not radio active but still subject to the ap proval of Spanish nuclear energy experts. Around Zone Zero is a perimeter of 400 additional acres which are in a sort of half-con demned state. The farmers there are not allowed to harvest and sell their tomatoes, which have grown too ripe to be sold at distant mar kets. Unless the crops can be mar keted in a hurry, they will be lost. The 800 acres of produce in Zone Zero and its perimeter have a mar ket value of about $2 million, which the U.S. will have to pay if all the crops are lost. ■he citizens of Palomares do jnot fully understand why the sol- | diers are still there, and they can only suspect the black dangers that may lurk around them. They are concerned for their families. Many children have been evacuated from the community by their parents, and eight families have moved out altogether. The little groups at the bar talk incessantly about the events of Jan. 17. “Everyone was in the streets looking up,” says nandez.“The fuselage of the bomb er fell in the street just 70 meters ■ from the schoolhouse, where 44 boys and two teachers were at their classes. One case was hit by a piece j of a bomb. The young married i woman inside was covered with I dust but was not hurt. It is bad for this place. The fishermen of When the accident occurred, thousands of Spaniards from a dozen neighboring towns rushed to the scene with every kind of ve hicle they could muster, from mule cart to ambulance. One member of the bomber crew was ejected while still strapped into his seat. He managed to unfurl his para chute by hand and landed safely in a field where he was found still in his seat but upside down. The three other survivors—all, from the bomber—were lucky that the fishing fleet from Agtiilas was in the area when they splashed down. When the fishermen heard the ex plosion and saw the parachutes and debris falling into the sea, they hauled in their nets and made for the distant parachutes. The fishermen saw four para chutes over the water—three with men dangling from the shrouds, and one silvery chute carrying a cylindrical object about four feet long. By the time the fishermen reached the airmen, the fourth parachute and its mysterious car go had disappeared beneath the waves. It is most unlikely that the object was the missing bomb, in asmuch as the three recovered bombs crashed with the B-52 and were not ejected. On the day of the tragedy, the Spanish and American authorities set up a special court, headed by a judge advocate from the Spanish air force, to indemnify the farmers and fishermen. So far, 70 damage claims have been settled. A week after the accident, Generals Wilson and Montel called a meeting of the heads of the hamlet’s 243 fami lies—the women of Palomares were furious because they were not invited—to explain the reasons for sealing off certain areas and to thank them for their help, both to the survivors and in the recovery of the wreckage and the three bombs. But all efforts to pay the villagers for their aid have been ■ he reaction of Spain to the ac cident and bomb scare has been calmer than that of any other Eu ropean country. “The foreign broadcasts from Moscow and Prague had a disturbing initial ef fect on the Palomares area,” says Ambassador Duke. “They were sensational in nature and they caused some anti-American rioting in the villages. But as the days went by, and the stories became wilder and wilder, the people re alized they were untrue, and they turned back to the local authori ties, Spanish and American. The Spanish government’s reaction has been one of sympathy, concern and cooperation.” However, the government did ban future flights by armed U.S. planes over Span It will take at least another month of searchings cleaning up and decontamination before the airmen at Camp Wilson fold their tents. “And it may be years before we have finished with the people of Palomares,” says Ambassador the Ambassador adds, “is to leave Spain as we found it.” That mis sion can hardly be accomplished. The new hard-surface roads, the miles of wire strung along the roadsides, the bulldozed earth and the exposure of the people to these strangers from another country and another century all have brought the realities of the nucle ar age to dusty Palomares.
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lagged like a fallen kite in 2 thick branches, a piece from e of the U.S. Air Force planes its in an olive tree in the arid unfryside of southern Spain. In the widening search for the bomb, the deep-diving research sub Aluminaut (shown above in test run) has been combing the ocean floor. At right, frogmen, operating from a landing craft, continue hunt near shore. U.S. Navy ships lie in background.