See note(1)
By some standards, the loss of 269 souls aboard Korean Air Lines flight 007 on August 31, 1983, was a modest disaster. The Titanic, for example, claimed 1503 lives; the Lusitania 1198. But historians may come to believe that the political implications of the downing of the civilian 747 airliner by a Soviet fighter plane eclipsed even the importance of the Lusitania which, we recall, led our country into World War I. For a few days, in the wake of this air tragedy, America and the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of a war that might well brought an end to human life on planet Earth.
Secretary of State George Shultz’s appearance on national television at 10:45 A.M., on September 1, was riveting. His voice occasionally breaking with emotion, Shultz declared, ‘The Soviets tracked the commercial airliner for some two and a half hours.’ President Ronald Reagan soon appeared to add, ‘This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts that guide human relations among people everywhere. It was an act of barbarism.’
It was nearly a week before the USSR owned up to its deed. When it did, its spokesmen were adamant that KAL 007 had been on a deliberate ‘spy mission’, one which included a ten minute ‘rendezvous’ with one of our RC-135 (Cobra Ball) spy planes. The alleged rendezvous occurred as the airliner approached the strategically important Kamchatka Peninsula. The White House ignored the accusation. However, Speaker Jim Wright, leaving a White House briefing, let it slip that there had indeed been an RC-135 near KAL 007’s flight path. The Administration’s image of certainty of Soviet guilt began to develop flaws.
It was soon revealed (and confirmed years later in Alvin Snyder’s 1995 book, Warriors of Disinformation), that the first official transcript of Soviet air-to-ground communications distributed by our National Security Agency (NSA) had been purged of the Soviet fighter pilot’s declaration to his controller, ‘Now I will try my cannons [to attract their attention].’ Axed also by our NSA, according to Snyder, was the Soviet controller’s questioning of pilot, Lt. Col. Gennadiy Osipovich, ‘… can you determine the [intruder aircraft] type?’ – as well as the answer, ‘Unclear.’ (page 62) Osipovich had also radioed that it was too dark to see the target clearly. Nevertheless, President Reagan, we recall, flatly asserted: ‘There is no way a pilot could mistake this [Boeing 747] for anything other than a civilian airliner.’
In his book, Alvin Snyder, then a senior official of the U. S. Information Agency (USIA) used the butchered ‘transcript’ of Osipovich’s exchanges with his controller to scab together a televised tape of the exchanges that an apparently unwitting Jean Kirkpatrick was to show the UN’s Security Council. The reaction to the Administration’s propaganda initiative were immediate. The political strength of the peace movements in both England and Germany, muscular enough to have kept the U. S.’s Pershing II and Cruise missiles out of these countries, suddenly evaporated. Cargo planes loaded with Pershing II’s arrived in England within days; then Germany. Cruise missiles followed.
Curiously, it may well have been the visible bumbling of each side that made the other side blink. The Soviet denials were utterly unconvincing, but so were the U. S. claims that it had known nothing in ‘real time’ of the aircraft’s disastrous deviation from its flight path and so was unable to warn it.
In January of 1984, with the public finger pointing and posturing at a peak, teams from both sides were meeting secretly on Soviet soil. Their mission: to work out U.S.-U.S.S.R. air traffic control protocols in the North Pacific to assure that a KAL 007 disaster could never occur again. By then, the threat of nuclear war, terribly real in the hours and days following the downing, had subsided.
Alvin Snyder closed his chapter on the incident with this:
‘[Korean Airlines flight] 007 was a victim of the cold war, and it proved this war could be very real and could lead to human casualties. Another casualty, always war’s first, was the truth. The story of [KAL] 007 will be remembered pretty much the way we told it in 1983, not the way it really happened.’
So, what was the truth?
A meticulous reconstruction of the technical evidence by this writer proves that KAL 007’s pilot, Captain Chun Byungin, had indeed taken his passengers on a very real version of Mr. Hare’s Wild Ride. As 007 approached the Soviet’s nuclear submarine base on the Kamchatka Peninsula, for example, the Jumbo Jet’s blip mysteriously disappeared from the Soviet’s first-line-of-defense radar screens. In fact, Chun, after radioing Alaskan Air Traffic Control that he was cruising at 33,000 feet, had descended below Soviet radar coverage to 9,000 feet or lower. By the time the 747 popped up on radar again, this time at 29,000 feet, it was half way across Kamchatka and so far ahead of Major Vasiliy Kazmin’s MiG-23, that it reached the safety of the open seas before his stalker could catch up.
Next, having raced across the Sea of Okhotsk, Captain Chun made a sharp north turn towards Sakhalin Island. Over Sakhalin, Chun again confounded his pursuers by momentarily disappearing into a ‘dead spot’ in Soviet radar coverage; a void, according to Col. Osipovich in an interview in Izvestiya, the Soviet’s didn’t even know existed. This, of course, opens an important question: If even the Soviets did not know about the ‘dead spot’, how could Chun have known?
Using a variety of ruses, Chun managed to pull within two minutes of the safety of international airspace over the Sea of Japan. There a frustrated Colonel Gennadiy Osipovich was forced into a wild last-minute manoeuvre called ‘the Snake’ to position his Su-15 for the kill. And, convinced by KAL 007’s antics that he was stalking a hostile ‘intruder’, kill he did.
The 1992 revelation that the Soviets had recovered KAL 007’s so-called black boxes as far back as October 1983, and had hidden them away under lock and key, further clouded an already confusing mystery. In 1993, based upon the alleged data recorded on the black box tapes, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), an arm of the United Nations, released its ‘final’ report.
The report stated that one of the black boxes, the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR), ‘proved’ that the pilots had forgotten to turn control of their autopilot over to their automatic navigation system. The grossly inattentive cockpit crew, accordingly, had allowed the aircraft to follow a constant compass direction of 245 degrees for some 5 1/2 hours to their destruction.
But Anchorage’s FAA-certified radar data, for example, proves beyond question that the crew did in fact connect its autopilot to the 747’s automatic navigation system; the aircraft, indeed, was never on a constant 245 degree magnetic heading. Additionally, our National Security Agency’s independent monitoring of Soviet defense radars proves that Chun rarely had his 747 at the altitude he was reporting to air traffic control; and its airspeeds were likewise grossly at odds with oceanic flight regulations and Chun’s radioed reports. But the truth is harder to accept than a soothing lie.
There is much irony in that the KAL 007 tragedy that initially unfolded before the world via transcripts which, according to Alvin Snyder were ‘doctored’ by our National Security Agency, may fade into limbo thanks to a report based upon ‘doctored’ black box tapes or transcripts. All told, this may be a fitting finale to an event that marked, and may even have brought about, the end of the cold war and the shadowy skullduggery that conflict entailed.
Author’s footnote to history: This writer was told by Senator Carl Levin (circa 1984) that there would be no congressional hearing into the probability Captain Chun embarked on his mission and 240 innocent passengers perished on orders from some one high in our own government. The reason? There was no money available for such an investigation. This in the face of prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s $40 million (plus) probe of President Clinton that has revealed only Bill’s alley cat-like proclivities.
Note
- This appeared in the Berkshire Eagle (USA), August 28 1998. For information about the author’s book on this subject go to http://www.vgernet.net/roberta
Thanks to Sakurai Haruhiko for bringing this piece to my attention.