The Foreign Service Journal, May 2007

assigned to the U.S. legation in Helsinki as air attaché (see “‘The First American Official Killed in This War’” by J. Michael Cleverley; December 2003 Foreign Service Journal ). But Henry may well have been the first official U.S. casualty of the Cold War. Speculation as to why the Soviet Naval Air Force shot down the flight from Tallinn swirls around several dif- ferent theories. Perhaps the Soviets thought that it was ferrying Estonia’s gold outside the country (a popular urban legend), or taking Estonian President Konstantin Päts into exile. A third theory, perhaps the most com- pelling, is that the plane was shot down to prevent the diplomatic pouches on board the plane from leaving Estonia. Some Estonian researchers believe that Antheil’s pouches contained secret information detailing the Soviet Union’s future plans for the Baltic region — plans that the Estonian general staff had turned over to an unidentified U.S. government official just hours before Antheil boarded the plane. The “Kaleva” also carried two French diplomatic couriers. Accord- ing to a June 19, 1940, report by John C. Wiley, the minister in charge of the U.S. legations in Riga and Tallinn, the French diplomatic pouches may have included dispatches from French Ambassador Erik Labonne in Mos- cow reporting on his recent conversa- tions with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov — conversations the Soviets might not have wanted to fall into German hands. Wiley’s source for this information appears to have been General Johan Laidoner, commander- in-chief of the Estonian armed forces, whom he’d met with earlier that same day. But perhaps the simplest explana- tion is the best: overzealous Soviet pilots decided to shoot first and ask questions later while enforcing the new Soviet blockade of Estonia. This was to become an all-too-familiar Soviet pattern. Just 12 years later (almost to the day), on June 13, 1952, a Soviet MiG-15 shot down a Swedish M A Y 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49 The plane crashed several kilometers north of Keri Island, but the wreckage was never found and the nine bodies on board were never recovered.