Back in World War II when the US and Russia were allied against the Nazis, hundreds of Soviet aviators were trained on the North Carolina coast as part of a secret spy project — but now, an effort to honor their mission has triggered a miniature Cold War in a small US city.
The Russian Ministry of Defense wants to place a 22.3 tonne bronze monument in Elizabeth City, where the recently declassified “Project Zebra” was carried out. Russia would pay for the 4m monument, with the city footing the bill for improvements to the as-yet undeveloped park on the Pasquotank River where it would be located.
However, amid international tensions and fears about Russian hacking of US elections, Elizabeth City elected officials have rejected a memorandum of understanding that was to be the next step.
“We are living in troubled times, and people are very concerned about a lot of things,” council member Anita Hummer said at the meeting where the council voted 5-3 to reject the memorandum. “And I realize that it’s about honoring fallen heroes from World War II, and we have Americans who fought in World War II who are buried in Russia. But times were different then.”
One council member said the monument could be a Trojan horse; Johnnie Walton worries the Russians could put something in it that could be triggered remotely to disrupt the Internet or electrical grid.
“Russia is known for hacking now. They’re experts at hacking, and then we’ve got the largest Coast Guard base [that] can’t help anybody because our computers have gone down, because Russia controls our mouse,” Walton said at a committee meeting, according to the city’s paper The Daily Advance.
A Russian-US joint commission on prisoners of war (POWs) and missing in action (MIAs) wanted the monument in Elizabeth City because of a top-secret World War II operation at US Coast Guard station there. Declassified just a few years ago, Project Zebra helped train about 300 Soviet aviators. Their mission was to find German submarines and bomb them.
One night in 1945, three Russians, a Ukrainian and a Canadian were killed when a seaplane bound for Russia crashed in the Pasquotank River. Their sacrifice was never publicly recognized and the crash was forgotten for decades.
After Project Zebra was declassified in 2013, efforts slowly developed to honor it with a monument, which would include three figures.
The previous city council unanimously approved the statue in May last year, so supporters were caught off-guard by when the new council voted no in February — especially because three of the negative votes came from incumbents who had supported it earlier.
Public discussion has played out along mostly racial lines; four of the five council members who oppose the monument are black, and two of three who support it are white.
Information about the monument did not filter to the African-American community as well as it did to the white community, said Hezekiah Brown, one of two citizens who spoke against it.
Not that he is convinced that more information would matter.
“We’re at war with Russia still. We’re in a cyberwar here,” Brown said. “They interfered in our election. And they’ve not said they won’t do it again… The war has to end. Then you do something. You don’t do it while you’re at war.”
Officials also are hearing from citizens such as Rick Boyd, who turned in a petition with 569 local signatures supporting the project.
The monument offers the two rival nations a chance “to show that we worked together in the past, and that we can work together in the future,” he told the council.
Retired US Air Force general Robert Foglesong, chairman of the US-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs, has asked the council to reconsider its vote.
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