The Times of Trenton_Decoding mystery of clerk's death (June 14)

14.06.2008

The courier assignment that turned out to be Henry W. Antheil Jr.'s last was supposed to be a simple one in the early stages of World War II.

He was to bring diplomatic pouches full of sensitive material from the U.S. legations in the capitals of Estonia and Latvia to the U.S. legation in Helsinki, where the 27-year-old Trenton native worked as a code clerk.

Instead, his mission became entangled in tragedy and mystery -- part of which the U.S. Navy had hoped to solve with a high-tech underwater search earlier this month.

Antheil died 68 years ago today along with the eight other people aboard the Finnish airliner carrying them on the last flight out of Tallinn, Estonia, prior to its occupation and annexation by the Soviet Union.

His death may have placed him among the first American officials to be killed in World War II.

The airliner on which Antheil was flying, called the Kaleva, exploded over the Gulf of Finland en route to Helsinki from Tallinn 50 miles away. The disaster occurred at about 2:05 p.m. local time on June 14, 1940, the same day the Nazi occupation of Paris began.

Although a conclusive determination to the cause of the explosion and crash has never been made, suspicion as early as July 1940 was that Soviet bomber pilots shot down the passenger plane, according to a May 2007 article in Foreign Service Journal.

Antheil "was sent to secure all the military codebooks and all the codebooks," said his nephew, Arthur McTighe of East Windsor.

Once he returned to Finland, Antheil planned to see his Finnish fiancee who was the love of his life. "And then the plane was shot down," McTighe said.

Some Estonian researchers believe that Antheil's diplomatic pouches included secret information detailing the Soviet Union's future plans for the Baltic region that the Estonian general staff had turned over to an unidentified U.S. official earlier on that ill-fated day, according to the U.S. Embassy in Finland.

The Soviet Union and Russia have not acknowledged shooting down the Kaleva, according to The Associated Press.

Neither the Kaleva's wreckage nor the bodies of the nine people aboard have been found -- not even after a six-day search this year in late May and early June of the area where Estonian and Finnish researchers believed the Kaleva might be.

That search, conducted by the U.S. Navy's oceanographic survey vessel Pathfinder, came up empty despite the use of three small unmanned submarines in the expedition.

"There is no indication of a large human-made object in this area," Martin Ammond, senior surveyor aboard the Pathfinder, said in a statement posted on the website of the U.S. Embassy to Estonia.

Even so, embassy spokesman Eric A. Johnson, who has taken a keen interest in Antheil's case and the Kaleva over the years, said in the statement that officials are confident the plane's wreckage will turn up and hopeful that other ships will continue the search this summer in new locations.

The Pathfinder search, conducted during a training mission in the Baltic Sea, was done in response to a request by Estonian Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in January.

The search centered near the tiny island of Keri about 20 miles northwest of Tallinn, where the wreckage reportedly was believed to lie 300 feet underwater.

McTighe said it's unfortunate the Navy searchers didn't find the Kaleva, not only because of the personal connection he and his family have to its tragedy but because of its historic significance to Estonians.

"I know that in Estonia ... the Kaleva symbolizes their loss of liberty because it was the last plane out before they were invaded by the Soviets," he said.

"I would have loved it if they found the plane, but hey, it's 68 years. It's a long time," McTighe said.

Although McTighe was born eight years after the Kaleva went down and never got to meet his uncle, he learned a lot about him from his mother, who was Henry Antheil Jr.'s younger sister.

"My mother absolutely worshipped Uncle Henry," McTighe said.

Henry Antheil's brother, the late composer George Antheil, in his 1945 autobiography "The Bad Boy of Music," wrote admiringly of Henry, calling him "one of our foremost war experts," according to the May 2007 Foreign Service Journal piece about the diplomat.

His life seemed worthy of a blockbuster espionage thriller, the way George Antheil described it in an unpublished letter from Aug. 25, 1940, according to the Foreign Service Journal:

"Henry lived a lone (sic) and dangerous life, traveling from country to country, followed by foreign agents from border to border, never knowing what moment might be his last."

The two brothers shared a fascination with codes, which they would discuss at length from time to time, McTighe said.

Those discussions helped inspire some of George Antheil's work in music and other areas, McTighe said.

Incidentally, an off-Broadway play called "Frequency Hopping" based on a real-life collaboration between George Antheil and the actress Hedy Lamarr (the two invented a torpedo-control system called frequency hopping) premiered May 29 with performances at the 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich St., in Manhattan. The play runs through June 29.

Contact Robert Stern at rstern@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5731.
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