Balloon "Flight for Freedom" -- in the USA

The Crusade for Freedom national office established a 1959 campaign quota of $10,000 for South Dakota. Harvard Noble was the Crusade’s state chairman. One of state’s planned local activities in March 1959 was the “Flight for Freedom,” a piloted balloon trip that was planned to fly from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to the East Coast of the United States in conjunction with a local radio marathon to raise funds for the Crusade for Freedom.

Below, we will briefly look at the only known manned balloon flight undertaken in the United States in support of the Crusade for Freedom and Radio Free Europe—the “Flight for Freedom.” The pilot was Paul Edward (Ed) Yost, who has been called “The Father of Modern Hot Air Ballooning.”

In the late 1940s, after a few years as a bush pilot in Alaska, Ed Yost began working for General Mills, which then was doing high-altitude research for the U.S. Navy. General Mills also was one of the companies that supplied the balloons to the Free Europe Press for its balloon/leaflet operations.

In 1956 Yost and three other fellow employees left General Mills and founded Raven Industries, which continued to work on balloon research for the U.S. military. In 1959, Yost was Raven’s Industries Operations Manager in Sioux Falls and announced a flight that would begin Saturday night carry him over Dubuque, Iowa, Chicago, Pittsburgh and finally land into the New York area Sunday evening. 

The organizers publicly estimated a total flight time of about 20 hours to reach the East Coast. Privately, they did not expect the balloon to travel that far. Yost was to radio his position, weather conditions, and support statements in behalf of the Crusade for Freedom from the governors of the states over which he flew. The Civilian Air Patrol and airport radar stations were to keep an eye out for Yost and his balloon.

For Yost’s “Flight to Freedom”, Raven donated the balloon, which, according to a Raven newsletter, was

built after working hours by more than a dozen Raven assemblymen. All controls and instruments were likewise built on time donated by the instrumentation personnel and the launching and monitoring were done after hours by the field operations crew. The spirit proved to be contagious and other business firms made substantial contributions in equipment and support

The goal of the balloon flight to-the East Coast was to bring attention locally and nationally at each municipality over which the balloon floated. Sioux Falls radio stations started a marathon at 6 p.m. to collect $5 for each minute for the flight, with proceeds going to Crusade for Freedom.

On Saturday evening, March 7, 1959, weather was less than perfect for a balloon flight. But the radio marathon had begun and Yost decided to continue with the balloon flight. At Joe Foss Field in Sioux Falls, searchlights played, sirens blared and a large crowd estimated to be over 1,000 onlookers cheered as Yost, wearing three suits of underwear, fur-lined boots and nylon coveralls, lifted off at 6:30 p.m. in the 50x25 foot balloon.

State and national flags were visible on the gondola underneath the “inverted tear drop” shaped balloon. Yost smiled and waved his arms to the crowd from the gondola, which was equipped with a parachute, oxygen, Raven manufactured radio equipment, hot coffee, 15 sandwiches and a red aircraft warning light. Reportedly, his last words before he took off were: “This wind should take me over Dubuque, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and then New York.”

Blue - Planned Flight, Red - Actual Flight

Yost radioed 40 minutes later that the balloon had leveled off at a height of 8,000 feet, was traveling at 30 mph, and had crossed over into the neighboring state of Minnesota. His last radio contact was at approximately 11:30 PM. The balloon had traveled only about 130 miles eastward, before freezing rain and snow forced Yost to end the trip by landing at the Herbert Larson farm near Amboy, Minnesota. Yost afterwards said,

I could see the light on at the Larson place although it was after midnight. It looked like a nice place so I decided to put down there. The Larsons were a bit surprised. But they certainly were hospitable. Mrs. Larson fried some eggs and put the coffee pot on the stove. The bed they fixed for me was a lot more comfortable than the four by five, one-foot deep gondola I was riding.

Raven Industries sent a truck to Ambroy, Minnesota, and Yost returned to Sioux Falls Sunday with the balloon equipment. There would be no second flight.

        

Raven replaced its normal commercial newsletter in April 1959 with one devoted to the balloon launching, including a full-page fact sheet about Radio Free Europe and Crusade:

In this issue we’d like to replace the customary description of commercial products with a plea for YOUR support of the Radio Free Europe “Crusade for Freedom” program. To assist in evaluating the worthiness of this cause, here are some facts:

Individuals and companies in America donating truth dollars are the only source of support of the program. As a civilian corporation, Radio Free Europe can ignore the niceties of diplomacy, call a spade a spade, and carry on an active, unrelenting campaign to combat the communist big lie.

Send in your contributions now.

Even though the balloon flight plan was not successful in reaching its announced final goal of landing on the East Coast, the Crusade campaign benefited from newspaper coverage around the country. For example, the Daily Herald newspaper in Utah, carried a news items and photograph: 

         STORM IMPRISONS FREEDOM BALLOON

Farmer Jim Larson examines the balloon of Ed Yost that landed on his farm at Amboy, Minn., Sunday. Yost, who had hoped to pilot his 50-foot balloon from Sioux Falls, S. D., to New York City to gain publicity and money for the Crusade for Freedom was forced to land here when about 150 pounds of ice gathered on his open gondola when he ran into a snow storm.

Ed Yost’s balloon days were far from over, e.g. on October 22, 1960, on a farm in Bruning, Nebraska, he strapped himself into what looked like a lawn chair, placed his feet on a dowel dangling from ropes, ignited the propane tanks to heat air that had been pumped by fan into the balloon, and lifted off. His flight, which lasted 25 minutes, reached 500 feet and covered about three miles has been recognized as the first successful hot-air balloon flight.

On April 13, 1963, he and fellow Raven employee, Don Piccard, became the first hot-air balloonists to cross the English Channel, in a flight took three hours and 17 minutes, their balloon was named the “Channel Champ.” 
In 1976, Yost set 13 aviation world’s records for distance traveled and amount of time aloft in his attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean —solo— by balloon. He failed to be the first solo “ocean crosser,” when his balloon came down about 500 miles off Portugal.

In 2003, Ed Yost was the first inductee into the National Balloon Museum’s U.S. Balloon Hall of Fame. By the time he died in 2007 at age 87, Ed Yost had over 20 U.S. patents dealing with ballooning equipment.

Photographs courtesy of famed hot-air balloon veteran James A. (Jim) Winkler, REKWIN Co. Archive, who was inducted into the U.S. Ballooning Hall of Fame in 2009.

Excerpt of Yost interview taken from Ed Yost History, KOB-TV.m4v

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmPSNM-SZ-U)

The Russian Teddy Bear was a KGB Mole: The Oleg Tumanov Story

In modern use the term “mole“ applies to anyone who secretly penetrates an organization, gains its members’ trust, and either steals its classified information and/or undermines it clandestinely.

Encylopedia of Cold War

espionage, spies and secret

operations, by R.C.S. Trahair

Below we will look at one of the “moles” in Radio Liberty: Oleg Tumanov

Oleg Alexandrovich Tumanov was born in Moscow on November 12, 1944. Oleg Tumanov attended elementary and secondary school in Moscow until 1961. He then attended a "trade school for draftsmen" to 1962. In 1963, he “joined” the Soviet Merchant Marine and served until 1965, when he "jumped ship" in Egypt's waters, swam to shore, made his way to Libya and asked for political asylum.

Tumanov Press ID

American authorities were notified and Tumanov was flown to West Germany. He was then processed at the American controlled refugee center known as Camp King, near Frankfurt, Germany, as a defector. Officials at Camp King notified Radio Liberty (RL) about a young Russian prospect. A RL manger went to Frankfurt and interviewed Tumanov. He was invited to Munich and successfully passed the written and spoken Russian language tests and joined Radio Liberty in June 1966 as a News Writer trainee. Almost 20 years later, he had risen to the position of a Chief Editor in the Russian Service of RFE/RL. He never acquired German or American citizenship. 

Oleg Tumanov was reported missing twenty-five years ago on Wednesday, February 26, 1986: RL’s Russian Service director called and said that Tumanov had not reported for work that morning and did not answer his telephone. He added that there had been no word from him for over 24 hours. 

Afterwards, numerous articles appeared in the Western press speculating that Tumanov had been kidnapped by the KGB or that he was a KGB agent in Radio Liberty. Newspapers in the United States, for example, published one article in early March 1986 entitled, “Was this Teddy Bear Really a Mole?” Syndicated columnist Lars-Erik Nelson wrote, 

Tumanov, 42, is a “cuddly teddy bear,“ ... Some of his colleagues also raised the suspicion that he was a mole who had risen to the key editorial position at one of America's most important propaganda outlets to the Soviet Union -- and had redefected. Everybody knew there was a mole at Radio Liberty -- maybe more than one. 

On April 28, 1986, the Soviet news agency TASS announced that Oleg Tumanov had returned home and considered “it his civic duty to reveal plans hostile to the peoples of the world--the plans of those who inspire a 'crusade' against the USSR and supervise wide-scale psychological warfare.” Tumanov appeared at a 3 PM press conference in the Press Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow. However, the 90-minute conference did not go as expected.  Foreign correspondents did not buy his story. After Tumanov read a KGB prepared statement, the floor was opened to questions from Soviet and foreign correspondents.  

The next day, the British newspaper The Guardian best summed up the failed press conference:

The slick new Soviet publicity machine suffered its first public humiliation yesterday when a carefully staged press conference in Moscow for yet another dissident returning to his homeland virtually collapsed in ridicule. Clearly nervous, sighing deeply, and at times mumbling almost incoherently, Mr. Tumanov refused to give any details about when or how or why he had decided to return to the Soviet Union.

Radio Sofia and Radio Warsaw briefly reported on the press conference and both quoted Tumanov that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were “branches of American special services, a convenient cover for secret operations against the Soviet Union and other Socialist Countries.”  Radio Prague carried brief items in the afternoon newscasts, and Czechoslovak television carried a long report on Tumanov in its prime-time evening news program.  In addition, Radio Budapest broadcast a long report from its correspondent, who had attended the press conference.

           

The Soviet news agency TASS also saw things differently,

Oleg Tumanov, former acting editor-in-chief of the Russian service of Radio "Liberty", spoke at a press conference at the Press Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the U.S.S.R. today. He told newsmen how after defecting to the West more than 20 years ago he had found himself in an anti-Soviet trap set up by the military intelligence service and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.

“My road back home has been tortuous", Oleg Tumanov said in conclusion.

"I wouldn't wish anybody to experience this kind of 20-year-long road. I am now at home and it would seem the easiest thing to say that everything I have lived through has been a nightmare dream. No, a dream it hasn't been. Everything I told you here has been a reality, a nightmarish reality. Only perhaps it is not everybody that can see this reality objectively. I could and so the road back to my homeland was for me the natural and logical one. At a difficult time, and the world is going through a difficult time now, every honest person should be with his own people. This is why I am here.”

The investigation into his activities at Radio Liberty for almost 20 years showed that Tumanov stole personnel lists, background information and reported on the personal lives of Radio Liberty’s Russian Service personnel. One example of his KGB activities was that by 1974, he had contributed 12 to 13 volumes of information. A Soviet propaganda film “Radio Divisiant” about Radio Liberty appeared in 1974 and some on the documents Tumanov supplied to the KGB were shown in the film. 

Three years after Tumanov returned to Moscow, on February 20, 1989, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda published a very interesting interview with Oleg Tumanov that was contradictory to anything that previously appeared in print:

I took the elevator to the fifth floor. A short bearded man around 40 years old wearing a blue jogging suit opened the door and apologizing, repeated: "Our lamp has burned out--don't trip over." That's how I met Oleg Tumanov..

You are, naturally, interested in how I came to be there. And why I am  now sitting here?--he asked. In reality, it is a sad story. Long ago, finding myself in Genoa, I requested political asylum. I was 20 years old then. After a while they assigned me to Radio "Liberty" in Munich. They gave me US citizenship. I very soon realized that I had made an unforgivable mistake. I had to wait an awful long time before I saw my homeland again. When the time came that I could not bear to work any longer at the radio station, I left. Later, I found out that the Bavarian authorities had sentenced me to 25 years imprisonment.

No. He didn't fit the image of "super spy" James Bond, capable of walking through fire and water, especially in this ordinary blue jogging suit.

Tumanov was never granted U.S. citizenship and was not prosecuted in Bavaria.

Two former KGB officers, who should have been in a position to know, claim that the KGB recruited Tumanov after he was in the West. Former KGB Colonel Viktor Gundarev, who defected to the United States in 1986, said 

Tumanov was a bona fide defector to West who had resettled in West Germany sometime in mid-1960's, after processing through the American camp ... Within a year, KGB officers had located Tumanov in Munich. KGB Headquarters Directorate "K" (counterintelligence) ordered an approach to Tumanov by the KGB Representation in East Berlin, Karlshorst. A KGB officer contacted Tumanov and handed him letters from his father and mother. Tumanov's father was, apparently, a well-connected man who pleaded with his son to cooperate or take responsibility for ruin of his father's career. Tumanov agreed to cooperate with the KGB. 

According to former KGB General Oleg Kalugin:

My job was to attack Radio Liberty at the source-at its European headquarters in Munich-by placing agents on its staff. If we couldn't control what Radio Liberty was broadcasting, at least we could know what it was up to, learn something about the CIA, and perhaps soften the station's blows against us. In my ten years in Foreign Counterintelligence, we had several good agents at Radio Liberty, whose staff included many émigrés from the USSR. But by far our best agent there was a man named Oleg Tumanov,...

The department read millions of letters annually, and among them one year was a disgruntled missive from Tumanov in which he told a relative, "Maybe I have made the greatest mistake of my life." ... we persuaded the relative to write Tumanov and tell him that the security services had paid a call and said it wasn't too late to make amends for what he had done. One of Tumanov's relatives, who actually was working for us, took the letter to Austria, located Tumanov, and asked him to read the correspondence.

Tumanov said he was interested in working for us and returning to the Soviet Union, and our agent introduced him to a KGB officer stationed in Vienna. Our officer told Tumanov that before he returned to the USSR, we wanted him to take a job at Radio Liberty.

Tumanov in his memoirs Confessions of a KGB Agent, published in 1993, wrote that he had been trained by the KGB before being sent to the West with the objective of joining Radio Liberty. Depending on what version you want to believe, he was either recruited by the KGB after arriving in the West, or was sent out of the Soviet Union with the task of penetrating Radio Liberty. In any event, he supplied information to the KGB through personal meetings in Vienna, East Berlin and Helsinki, for at least 14 years, perhaps as long as 19.

  

In his memoirs, Oleg Tumanov succinctly summed up his life and disillusionment in post-Communist Russia when he wrote:

Today I rarely leave my apartment. I don’t have a job and I live on the pension the state pays me. I spend my days reading books and papers. I go to bed early and rise late.I am forty-eight years old, but I sometimes feel like a very old man...I am alone among strangers and among friends. 

Everything is mixed up; everything has changed. Émigrés who had been working against the Communist regime are now regarded not as enemies but as national heroes.

Oleg Tumanov died on October 23, 1997 in Moscow. His obituary was never published; in fact, there was no publicity about his death in Russia.  

For More Information:

Chapter 7, of my book Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989, for the Tumanov story and other KGB agents at Radio Liberty.

Oleg Tumanov: Confession of a KGB Agent (Berlin, edition q. inc., 1993). He admits in the book that he wrote his memoirs with the help of the KGB but denies that they “censored” the book (p. 182). He does not give away secrets such as who else was working for the KGB at Radio Liberty.