Juliet Tango November: A Cold War Crime: The Shoot-Down of an Argentine CL-44 over Soviet Armenia, July 1981

INTRODUCTION

This book is not a novel, although all the characters that will appear and all the events that will be related could well have come from several stories which confirms that reality always surpasses fantasy. This book is not a work of fiction either, but a historical work that started in the most unexpected way, which in turn, confirms it is the research that chooses the authors and not the other way around.

On 17 July 2014, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 commercial plane on a direct flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over Ukraine, 40km from the Russian border, by a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile. The episode caused the death of all occupants of the aircraft which fell, disintegrated on the town of Hrabove. This generated an international crisis between Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union for the criminal and political responsibilities inherent in the unjustified murder of 298 innocent civilians.

This book began with that takedown. As soon as he became aware of what had happened, the editor of the Argentine newspapers Los Andes and UNO de Mendoza contacted me in an attempt to obtain more details regarding the hypotheses surrounding the destruction of the Malaysian plane. To their disappointment, I had to tell them that it was inconvenient from a journalistic point of view and unprofessional from a technical point of view, to theorise about the causes of an aircraft accident without any elements of analysis in sight, so I excused myself from commenting. Although all that ended in nothing, the shooting down over Ukraine awakened a distant memory in me, dormant since my adolescence, the vague reference to an Argentine plane that had also been shot down by the Russians in equally confusing circumstances. To specify that episode, I turned to the source of my memory, the book Aviación Comercial Argentina (1945–1980) by Pablo Luciano Potenze, which I had read for the first time in 1987. There, on page 245, in the section corresponding to the Transport company Aéreo Rioplatense, I found the brief reference I had retained in my memory, according to which:

In July 1981, TAR made the front page of world newspapers when one of its planes crashed in the Soviet Union, making public the transport of arms that the company carried out between Israel and Iran.

The reference to an accident immediately referred me to a regular source of consultation, the Information Bulletins published annually by the Civil Aviation Accident Investigation Board (JIAAC), which in 1981, depended on the Air Regions Command of the Argentine Air Force. I did not find anything there, nor did I find any reference in the pages of specialised Argentine aeronautical publications of the time, specifically the punctilious Aero Mundial (edited by Alberto Mirkin) and the robust Aeroespacio (edited by the Argentine Air Force). This in itself was strange enough, but it became downright suspicious when, on successive trips to Buenos Aires, I found nothing in the official files of the JIAAC, nor in the files of the Undersecretariat of Commercial Air Transport (successor to the National Directorate of Commercial Air Transport of 1981), nor in the files of the National Civil Aviation Administration (successor of the Air Regions Command from 2007). Finally, and to my surprise, I did not find anything in the always orderly Directorate of Historical Studies of the Argentine Air Force or in the always fertile National Aeronautics Library (also dependent on the Air Force).

For an obsessive researcher there is nothing worse than elusive information and I must confess, in the first days of searching, the research object itself seemed to elude me, which ultimately strengthened my tenacity in tracking it down since it was evident that there was something strange surrounding the downing of the Argentine plane. I then decided to search primary sources and I ended up in the newspaper archive of the Los Andes newspaper, which has digitised all its copies from 1882 to date. This formidable computer search engine allowed me to remove the first veil, contextualise the dates and activate a more precise parallel search in La Nación, La Prensa and other periodicals of the time, whose pages I photographed with a digital camera in the newspaper library of the General San Martín Public Library (Mendoza, Argentina). Once this information was processed, I had a firm base from which to project myself onto the internet, which ended up being a really valuable source as it allowed me access to various official publications and sources, including declassified documents from the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

Thanks to the kindness of Drs. Hernán Adrián Gómez and Diego Sebastián Idiart (Director of Air Transport and Head of the National Aircraft Registry Department of the National Civil Aviation Administration, respectively) in 2015, I accessed the technical file of the Canadair CL-44 aircraft registration LV-JTN and, in this way, to the report prepared by the Civil Aviation Accident Investigation Board, a document that otherwise would have been impossible to find since it was never published (which explained why I had not found it in my searches and added even more mystery to the case). With all this new, extremely precise information, I went to the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Nation, where I was able to review hundreds of diplomatic communications sent regarding the disappearance of the Argentine freighter.

While the investigation was going on, and at a time when the mosaic of data seemed as if it could never be completed, new official documents hitherto unknown unexpectedly came to light and all from a fortuitous discovery. On 31 October 2013, while maintenance tasks were being carried out in the basement of the Condor Building, headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief of the Argentine Air Force, secret files were unearthed which belonged to the National Reorganisation Process, the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. The Air Force decided to communicate the discovery so that it became public, and thus the documents were identified and classified, among which there were several related to Transporte Aéreo Rioplatense.

As a result, I agreed to the charter agreement signed on 7 July 1981 between the company and Stuart McCafferty; and to a confidential memorandum addressed on 30 July 1981 to the Air Force Chief-of-Staff by the then National Director of Commercial Air Transport. These documents, added to those found in the Foreign Ministry Archive, were decisive in confirming the hypothesis of the cover-up perpetrated by the Argentine State regarding the demolition of the Canadair CL-44 of TAR. The cover-up carried out by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was much more difficult to elucidate, largely because the USSR had been dissolved since 1991, so it no longer existed as a state at the time this investigation began. However, little by little, I managed to lift the veil based on the statements of Valentin Kulyapin, the Russian pilot who had shot down the Argentine plane, who still lives in Moscow and claims the right to be considered a Hero of Russia for the actions he carried out on 18 July 1981 in the skies of Armenia. Kulyapin had been severely questioned by Colonel Marat Syrtlanov, whose effort to expose the fraud surrounding the downing of the Argentine plane not only shed light on the Soviet cover-up, but also showed me that there are still decent people in the world for whom the truth constitutes a value to defend. It goes without saying, that the correspondence with Colonel Syrtlanov was particularly fruitful for me.

At one point, in the middle of the investigation, I got completely bogged down by conflicting accounts, false data and maliciously misrepresented information. At that moment (which was not a single moment, but a period) I decided to archive everything and forget about it, because it seemed impossible to find a meaning or a thread to the events. However, one afternoon, I found myself looking in silence at the documentation libraries that I had accumulated so far and, in order not to waste the time invested, I decided to start over. This was literal, because I deleted everything I had written and started again, from scratch. Since I already knew that the available information was full of pitfalls, I went slowly, taking nothing for granted and citing the source of every relevant piece of information, no matter how small. Little by little, a first layer of solid information emerged, below which the others gradually appeared. Then, unexpectedly, the whole story popped into my head as a logical whole and I could not stop writing. The references that I took as notes are today the bibliographical citations that show where the information came from to write each chapter.

The first draft of this book was finished on 15 December 2018 in the format presented today. As usually happens in complex investigations, at no time was there a single line of argument, but several moving in parallel, which made the job really difficult, especially when I noticed the succession of official cover-ups that had surrounded each of the episodes in Israel, Iran, the United States, Argentina and the Soviet Union. That being the case, I worked on each axis separately and only at the end, when assembling them, was I able to have the overall vision that is presented today as a complete work.

Although this book was written under the protection of my aeronautical library, the research and writing was carried out without physical anchoring, separately polishing parts initially disconnected from each other. By way of example, it is enough to indicate that the general plan of the work was drawn up on the morning of 14 October 2014, at some point between Mendoza and Buenos Aires, while I was occupying seat 14A of the Airbus A320 on the LAN 4253 flight. The title arose at 9:30 p.m. of the same day, on the return flight, LAN 4252.

One of the main obstacles that this investigation went through was the language. A large part of events covered in this book had their epicentre between the Middle East and the Far East, in the territories that we know today as Russia, Israel, Armenia and Iran. That would not be too relevant, if it were not for the fact that each of these countries is home to different cultures who have a different language and a different way of writing. By way of example, the word Armenia is spelled Армения in Russian, הינמרא in Hebrew, ارمنستان in Persian, and Հայաստան in Armenian. (Additionally, Cyrillic and Armenian characters are written from left to right, while Hebrew and Persian are written from right to left). Searching for and understanding information about the disappearance of the Argentine plane in documents or computer portals written in these languages was a head start, which more than once led me to think that the biblical account of the tower of Babel (erected precisely in those latitudes), because if God intended to confuse and disperse men based on their differences in language, he really did it with great success. What struck me the most was that, in addition to the spelling differences, there is also a notable difference in pronunciation. If we pronounce the word Armenia while in Armenia, it is very likely that a local does not understand what we are saying at all.

Another obstacle was related to the computation of time. In Argentina and generally throughout the West, we take for granted that the days of the week go from Monday to Sunday, that the months of the year go from January to December and that the years are counted from the birth of Jesus. But all these parameters correspond to the Gregorian calendar, in force in the Christian world from 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII instituted it. In the Hebrew, Persian and Muslim calendars, the parameters are different, all official and of obligatory application in their respective territories or spheres of cultural influence. Thus, on Saturday 18 July 1981, the date on which the Canadair CL-44 of Transporte Aéreo Rioplatense disappeared according to the Western calendar in force in Buenos Aires, it was 27 Tir 1360 in Tehran, and 16 Ramadan 1401 in Ankara. and on 16 Tamuz 5741 in Tel Aviv – just to mention the capitals of three of the countries where the events reported in this book took place.

While the Gregorian calendar starts from the birth of Jesus, the Muslim calendar begins from the year in which the Prophet Muhammad began his pilgrimage from Mecca to Medina (Hegira), while the Hebrew calendar begins with the departure of the Jews from Egypt (Exodus). Additionally, the non-working day of the week changes according to each culture, since the inactivity of Western Sunday corresponds to Saturday in Jewish culture and Friday in the Muslim world. To confuse matters further, in the Hebrew and Muslim calendars, the day does not begin with sunrise, but with sunset. All these differences became a problem when it came to pinpointing exact dates according to the Western calendar and for the historical purposes of this book. The determination of hours was also torture, due to the difference in time zones around the planet. Suffice it to point out that in Tehran, the easternmost city in this story, clocks are seven and a half hours ‘advanced’ with respect to Buenos Aires, simply because the sun rises there seven and a half hours earlier. Thus, 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday in Argentina (last day of our week) corresponds to 4:30 a.m. on a do-shanbeh in Iran (third day of the Persian week). It is therefore inevitable that in the course of this work, some error has occurred in the calculation of the schedules, although the dates cited are precise, since they were calculated and confirmed on repeated occasions.

A job of this magnitude would not have been possible without the collaboration of many people. The first of these was my wife, Carina Cocuelle, whose daily support allowed me to have the necessary time to carry out the investigation. The many hours that this book demanded, throughout almost five years, were hours of absence for my family, so it was my wife who had to bear most of the housework and raising our daughter, Mercedes. I hope that by seeing this finished book you can both understand what I was doing on so many nights late for dinner or ending up in bed until the small hours of the morning.

All historical research is, in reality, a collective work, since an author is always based on the works, references and background of other historians. In my case, at all times I felt that I was standing on the shoulders of titans, for which I want to thank the aeronautical researchers Francisco Halbritter, Marcelo W. Miranda, Guido Ghiretti, Pablo Potenze, Gabriel Tomás Pavlovcic, Esteban Raczynski, Michael Magnusson, Luis Alberto Franco, Oscar Bellini, Atilio Baldini, Peter Amos, Alan Brough, Mikhail D. Guskov, Malcolm Porter and Bob Ruffle, many of them longtime members of Air Britain Historians. My thanks also to all those who made photographic material available to me, whose names appear in the credits of each photo published in this book.

Particularly useful was the collaboration of pilots from the extinct companies Aerotransportes Entre Ríos and Transporte Aéreo Rioplatense, especially Juan Neto and Héctor Montioli. The drafts of this book were reviewed by the pilots Pablo Mousten, Héctor Biondini and Raúl Conti, whose experience in the mentioned cargoes was particularly useful for correcting the original text.

My thanks also go to Agustina Saubidet, Palmira and Carlos FitzGerald, for sharing the memories and photos of another TAR pilot, the well-remembered Miguel Lawler FitzGerald. I would like to express particular appreciation to Oscar Palacio, in charge of live cargo in that company, for the richness of his testimonies and for sharing graphic and documentary material treasured over decades in memory of the crew members who died on the Canadair CL-44 that motivated this book. In the same sense, I cannot fail to mention Roberto Melo, a Uruguayan aeronautical technician, who served in the AER and TAR freighters, since his memories shed particular light on the most sensitive aspects of this story. It is an honour for me that both Oscar Palacio and Roberto Melo have agreed to collaborate on this book, since they are the last two living witnesses of those flights to Iran that ended in tragedy.

One of the biggest difficulties I encountered during the research was accessing sources written in the Russian, Persian and Hebrew languages, whose characters and scripts were truly unintelligible to me. I would therefore like to thank my English teacher, Guadalupe Campoy, who put me in contact with the Russian translator Miguel Borisov, with whose help I was able to unravel texts that had been inaccessible up to now. My thanks also go to Fabián Corzo, a good friend who is also a polyglot.

A special mention deserves the plastic artist Christian Zambruno, who drew all the illustrations in this book. The quality of his profiles and his drawings constitutes one of the best gifts that could be given to a reader.

In all