Fifty years ago, the crash of the U.S. Navy’s most advanced fighter in British waters led to a desperate scramble to recover the wreck and safeguard its classified technology from the Russians

 By Steven Taylor

THE GRUMMAN F-14 Tomcat sat on the enormous flight deck of the USS John F. Kennedy, its two Pratt & Whitney jet engines rising to maximum power as the two-man crew prepared for take-off. Displacing 60,000 tonnes, over a thousand feet in length and with a crew of more than 3,000, the aircraft carrier was a true leviathan, a floating city of steel and the ultimate symbol of American naval power.

Strapped into the cockpit of the F-14 (serial number AB221) was its pilot, Lieutenant John Kosich, and, seated behind him, his radar intercept officer (RIO) Lieutenant Louis Seymour, who were carrying out their pre-launch checks before the big supersonic fighter was catapulted off the deck at a bone-rattling 68 miles per second.

It was the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 14, 1976, and the Kennedy was sailing in stormy waters 75 miles north of the Orkney Islands, serving as flagship of the U.S. Navy’s contingent of ‘Teamwork 1976’, a major multinational NATO naval exercise involving over a hundred vessels.

Suddenly, without warning, the F-14 lurched forward and began speeding along the flight deck, without any input from the pilot. As the out-of-control jet hurtled towards the deck’s edge, Kosich ordered his RIO to eject and the two American aviators simultaneously pulled on the yellow and black ejection seat handle, blasting them out of the cockpit in their Martin-Baker ejection seats at a shattering 33 feet per second. As the now unmanned Tomcat plunged off the deck and crashed into the grey, icy waters of the Atlantic, the canopies of Kosich and Seymour’s parachutes blossomed open and the two airmen drifted back towards the carrier. Both men landed on the expansive flight deck. Kosich was uninjured, but Seymour came down harder, suffering a fractured knee on impact. After initial treatment in the carrier’s medical bay, he was transferred by helicopter to Scotland and taken to Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary for further treatment.

Though no serious injuries had resulted from the mishap – which it was later determined was caused by a malfunctioning engine management system, propelling the $20 million fighter off the carrier on its own accord – the U.S. Navy now faced a serious problem. The Soviets were closely monitoring Exercise Teamwork 1976, with a Kresta II-class missile cruiser, submarines, a spy trawler bristling with sophisticated electronic intelligence-gathering equipment and a giant Tupolev Tu-142 ‘Bear’ maritime patrol aircraft shadowing the NATO fleet.

With the Cold War in full swing, American commanders were naturally worried that the Soviets would try to recover the wreck of the F-14 from Scottish waters and smuggle it behind the Iron Curtain for detailed analysis by their own aeronautical engineers, to unlock the secrets of the state-of-the-art warplane’s technology.

Since the earliest days of the Cold War, both Moscow and the Western intelligence had gone to enormous lengths to steal each other’s military aviation technology. In 1951, at the height of the Korean War, a joint British-American operation had successfully retrieved the wreckage of a shot-down MiG-15 fighter from North Korean waters. And in April 1966, British military divers recovered vital components from a Yak-28 interceptor after it had crashed into Lake Havel in West Berlin while on a training flight. Soviet military advisers based in North Vietnam, meanwhile, had retrieved the wreckage of dozens of American planes shot down during the Vietnam War. But capturing a mostly intact F-14 from the bottom of the ocean would be the Soviets’ greatest prize yet.

When it entered U.S. Navy service in 1974, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat was the world’s most advanced fighter. Capable of reaching speeds of over 1,500 mph and fitted with a powerful AN/AWG-9 radar, it went on to become one of the world’s most recognizable fighter planes. It even played a starring role alongside Tom Cruise in the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun.

Even more sensitive than the aircraft itself however was its long-range AIM-54 Phoenix missile system, one of which was aboard Lt Kosich’s F-14 when it crashed. In the 1970s, the Phoenix was the world’s most sophisticated air-to-air missile. Designed to shoot down Soviet nuclear-armed bombers at the unheard-of distance 80 miles or more, the radar-guided Phoenix was inevitably of great interest to the Soviets and would be a major prize for the Communists if they could get their hands on one.

The crash of the F-14 off Scotland also presented the Kremlin with a prime opportunity to avenge an intelligence coup the Americans had achieved at Moscow’s expense just a few days earlier.

On Sept. 6, 1976, Soviet air force pilot Lieutenant Viktor Belenko, profoundly disillusioned with the Communist system, defected to Japan in the U.S.S.R.’s most formidable fighter: the MiG-25 (known to NATO as the ‘Foxbat’). Belenko was promptly granted political asylum in the United States, while American technical specialists dismantled and exhaustively analyzed the Foxbat in Japan, before crating it up and shipping it back to the Soviet Union a few weeks later. The Kremlin was furious.

“[The] U.S. and Japan took the plane apart as if they owned it, like spoils of war,” raged Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. “We can’t qualify this as anything but hostile.”

To the Pentagon, the risk of leaving the F-14 where it had crashed was just too great, and so U.S. Navy commanders decided to launch an operation to locate and salvage the wreckage and its top-secret missile. As one American officer put it to the press at the time: “We would just as soon not leave the plane lying around on the bottom for them [the Soviets] to pick up.”

Salvaging the fighter would present a formidable challenge, however. The exact location of the wreck was unknown, and the waters in which it went down were deep and notoriously treacherous.

Leading the search effort was the submarine rescue ship USS Sunbird and the salvage tug USS Shakori. There was also a significant British element to the operation, with maritime recovery specialist Desmond Bloy, based at the Royal Naval Dockyard Chatham, assisting the Americans with the chartered West German salvage vessel Taurus.

“The Americans could not leave it where it was, since it had to be guarded from the Russians; it has equipment in it not known to them,” Bloy told the press at the time.

The most curious (and mysterious) vessel involved in the search for the Tomcat was the NR-1. Developed in the 1960s under a cloak of secrecy, it was a nuclear-powered mini-submarine with a 10-man crew, designed for search and recovery work at great depths, as well as general oceanographic research, for which it was equipped with an array of highly sophisticated sensors. Commander James Holifield, captain of the NR-1, compared the task of locating the Tomcat to “looking for a needle in a grassy front yard with only the aid of a penlight.”

For a month, the Anglo-American team scoured the waters north of the Orkneys, finding no sign of the $20 million jet, while the Russian vessels lurked nearby, keeping a close watch on their activities.

Finally, 31 days after the crash, the salvage navy tug Shakori’s sonar located the wreck, around 60 miles northwest of the Orkney Islands, at a depth of 1,850 feet. Disturbingly, however, when the NR-1 mini sub examined the wreck site, the crew found netting snared around the plane and concluded that the Soviets had got to it first and made an unsuccessful attempt to raise the wreckage. At least that was the hypothesis, considering no local fishing boats were thought to trawl at such depths. More alarming still, there was no sign of the Tomcat’s Phoenix missile.

While preparations were made to recover the aircraft, the hunt for the missile continued. To the enormous relief of U.S. naval commanders, two weeks later the Phoenix was discovered by the NR-1, not far from the position of the F-14. But while retrieving the missile proved relatively straightforward, raising the 30-tonne Tomcat presented a far greater challenge. “The weather was the thing,” explained Commander Holifield. “Up to twenty, thirty-foot seas.”

The first attempt to raise the wreck failed when the rough seas caused the lifting lines slung around the plane to snap as it was being brought up by the Taurus’s deck crane. But eventually the crew of the West German salvage vessel succeeded in bringing the F-14 to the surface and towed it to a sheltered anchorage between the islands of Egilsay and Shapinsay in the Orkneys, on Nov. 11. The cost of the salvage operation was later revealed to be $1.5 million (around $8.5 million today).

Although Moscow failed to snatch the F-14 from British waters, the Soviet Bloc did succeed in acquiring considerable classified information on the Tomcat and its Phoenix missile soon after.

In 1977, Marian Zacharski, a U.S.-based spy for Poland’s SB intelligence service, recruited William Holden Bell, a project manager at the Hughes Aircraft Company, manufacturer of the Phoenix missile and the F-14’s radar system.

Bell, heavily in debt, agreed to pass on classified material about both the missile and the radar to Zacharski, for which he was paid $110,000 in cash and gold coins. Bell and his handler were finally exposed and arrested by the FBI in 1981, after another SB intelligence officer defected to the West and tipped off the U.S. authorities that Bell was a mole. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, while Zacharski was later exchanged in a spy swap.

The end of the Cold War has not, however, brought an end to the threat of Moscow pillaging the secrets of the West’s military aviation technology. In an echo of the race for the crashed Tomcat, on Nov. 17, 2021, a highly advanced F-35 stealth fighter – the 21st century successor to the F-14 – of the RAF’s No 617 Squadron crashed into the eastern Mediterranean upon taking off from the Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. The pilot safely ejected.

Fearing that either the Russians or the Chinese might attempt a salvage of the wreck to learn the secrets of the F-35’s radar invisible stealth technology, the U.S. and Royal Navy mounted a major joint search and recovery operation, using a remotely operated vehicle. The F-35 was located and recovered three weeks later.

“It was discovered intact, inverted on the seabed, at a depth of 2,000 metres, with a few minor parts such as the ejection seat detached but close to the airframe,” stated an MoD spokesman.

The cost of the salvage operation was put at £2.6 million.

Half a century after the desperate race to salvage Tomcat AB221 off Scotland’s coast, the secret war between NATO, Russia and China to steal each other’s most sensitive military technology remains as intense as during those darkest years of the Cold War.

Steven Taylor is the author of Cold War Air Thieves from Pen & Sword Books (on sale now). You can visit his website at: www.steventayloronline.co.uk.