Lithuania buries truth about a Russian jet-crash

By Edward Lucas

Date: 06/10/05

Covering Eastern Europe during the Cold War, I was given a good bit of advice: "Look at the roofs." Nowadays, a tiny satellite dish can squirt or receive top-secret communications all over the world. But in the decaying days of communism, sending information long distances still meant big tangles of wire on high masts-tell-tale signs for the inquisitive class enemy.

The biggest array of antennae that I ever saw was at Linksmakalnis (literally 'Happy Hill') in Lithuania, once one of the Soviet Union's most important installations in the occupied Baltic states. The country's best-known Soviet-era dissident (and later émigré), the poet Tomas Venclova, wrote in the 1980s that though the forest of masts and wires was just visible from a nearby main road, it was the bunkers deep underground that held the real secrets.

In 1992, Linksmakalnis was still guarded by taciturn Russian soldiers. A few years later, I went back and found the huge looping antennae gone. The vast satellite dish, which had once sent and received eavesdropped information to the Soviet spies-in-the-sky, still gazed blindly into space, its building and the bunker entrance patrolled by a friendly but reticent security guard. I asked the Lithuania defence ministry if they knew what Linksmakalnis had actually done. But they couldn't (or wouldn't) say.

Linksmakalnis exemplified the spooky frontier atmosphere of the Baltic states in the dying days of the Soviet empire. And just up the road, in another former Soviet bunker, is a secret military installation that exemplifies the new era: the headquarters of the Baltnet radar. This casts an eye deep (300km, some say) inside Russia and Belarus. Although NATO has based no troops, tanks or guns permanently in its new Baltic members, its electronic presence is much more important. Peaceniks argue that it is preposterous to imagine Russia ever using military means to bully its former Baltic captives. But it is tripwires such as Baltnet that make sure the idea remains preposterous.

Apart from their radar, the Baltic states have no fighter aircraft or air defences; even keeping a few battalions of infantry up to NATO standards stretches their puny defence budgets. So warplanes from other NATO countries - currently Germany - are based, in rotation, at Baltic airfields. For the Russian general staff, Baltic membership of NATO was a huge setback. The one consolation is the chance to spy at the enemy at close hand. GRU (Russian military intelligence) efforts in the Baltic states are intense and increasing. It's absurd, of course: Russia and NATO are nominally friends. But in the Baltic cockpit, different rules apply.

That's why the saga of the Russian fighter aircraft that got lost and crashed in Lithuania last month is so interesting. Why was it flying low, with transponders sneakily switched off? Was this an attempt to test the Balts' alertness, their new NATO friends' efficiency in finding intruders and challenging them? Presumably.

Russia's reaction has been a predictable mixture of bluster, gloating and obfuscation. But Lithuania has behaved oddly, too, with bewildering blizzard of paranoid exaggeration from some politicians and strange statements and leaks from officialdom. The sacking of the country's air force chief is perhaps a necessary step, but the reason cited - that he was "too communicative" with Russia - is baffling. So is the lengthy palaver over examining the crashed plane's black box (why wait for specialists from Ukraine - has NATO nobody who can decipher Russian technowizardry?). It is all very mysterious, rather entertaining and slightly alarming. And just as with Linksmakalnis, I suspect we will never know the full story.

• Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Article on NATO's presence in the Baltic States, frictions with Russia and the unclear circumstances of a Russian fighter jet crashing in Lithuania in September 2005.

BBC News: Russian jet jangles Baltic nerves, 20.9.05 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4264010.stm

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