gordan@maccs.McMaster.CA (gordan) (08/29/88)
[followups directed to the politics groups only] In article <8808281629.AA12686@columbia.edu> in misc.headlines, dare@EEVLSI.EE.COLUMBIA.EDU (Gary Dare) writes: -I was listening to CBC's "Sunday Morning" on my shortwave this -morning and they had an incredible documentary on new evidence -of KAL 007 being purposefully sent into Soviet airspace. Among -the points that have surfaced over the past five years: - - [numerous points omitted] "In the early hours of September 1, 1983, a Soviet fighter plane shot down Korean Airlines flight 007 as it flew without authorization over the Soviet Union's airspace. The Boeing 747 plunged into the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew." It is now exactly five years since KAL 007. An interesting and somewhat disturbing book on the subject is: SHOOTDOWN, Flight 007 and the American Connection, by R. W. Johnson (ISBN 0-670-81209-9). Briefly, the author proposes the unthinkable: that KAL 007 was in fact on a passive surveillance mission. According to this premise, the aircraft itself would have carried no surveillance equipment; rather, it would merely have overflown Soviet territory as a passive probe in order to trigger the Soviet radar network and air defense system into action. Regardless of whether it was intentional or not, electronic monitoring of Soviet defense installations during KAL 007's overflight apparently did indeed yield a gold mine of intelligence information. Although it is difficult to accept the author's final conclusion, this is not a typical "conspiracy theory" book. The exposition is lucid and the arguments are cogent and to the point; it does not have the outward appearance of merely jumping to conclusions. On the whole, it seems to have been carefully written and argued, and at the very least, it brings up a number of interesting points: o The seemingly inexplicable behavior of William Clark, who resigned as National Security Adviser just six weeks after KAL 007. In the weeks after the shootdown, he had failed to attend Cabinet meetings and "did not attend the special Presidential briefing of leading Congressmen and Senators on the 007 affair -- which even far junior Cabinet members attended." [p. 222] The implication seems to be that these were the actions of a man with a guilty conscience. o Japanese military radar tapes from the Wakkanai installation clearly show KAL 007 made mysterious changes in course and altitude in the last few minutes of its flight. While out of civilian radar range, KAL 007 radioed ground control and announced a climb to 35 000 ft, but actually dove to 29 000 ft and then rose again to 32 000 ft; furthermore, it made a change of course that actually took it deeper into Soviet territory over Sakhalin. [pp. 24--27] This information from the radar tapes was read into the records of the Japanese Diet (parliament) in May 1985. Nevertheless, the New York Times, among others, failed to print it. [p. 221] Meanwhile, the key USAF radar tapes of 007's flight were destroyed, according to US Justice Dept. attorney Jan K. von Flatern, after being kept for just fifteen days and then routinely recycled (i.e. wiped). [p. 289] o The routine civilian tapes of 007 talking to its ground controllers at Anchorage and Narita were not released until September 13, a lengthy and inexplicable delay. By contrast, the top-secret transcripts of the Soviet fighter pilot's conversation with his ground control were produced with a great flourish at the UN on September 6. There is in fact some question as to whether the civilian tapes are genuine in their entirety. In particular the final words spoken by KAL 007's crew are rather odd. A full 38 seconds after the plane was hit, 007 called Tokyo, but gave only the standard call signal rather than a Mayday distress signal, with no mention of an attack. After waiting for an acknowledgement from Tokyo, the final, fragmentary "rapid decompression" message was sent out. [p. 27] Thus Flight 007 was still on the air a full 56 seconds after it was hit, which, given the tremendous damage found to have been inflicted on both bodies and wreckage recovered later, seems remarkable. This is in contrast to both the Air India flight of June 1985 (destroyed by an on-board bomb) and the recent Iranian Airlines incident, in which there were no radio transmissions at all after the explosion. Finally, the author makes a fairly strong case that intelligence recordings of Soviet ground-to-air conversations were also made (not just air-to-ground), but that these have not been released and their existence has never been admitted to (except for one instance in which Japanese Cabinet Secretary Masaharu Gotoda inadvertently confirmed their existence in a press conference). Curiously, the American press apparently never followed up this story. [pp. 169--171] o "Under US law, because 007 was an American-built plane, with American passengers aboard, leaving from an American airport, there had legally to be an investigation into the disaster by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The NTSB did indeed open just such an investigation but was summarily (and illegally) ordered by the State Department to halt it and turn over all its documentation on the disaster. This was the last ever heard of these documents, or of the legally necessary inquiry in the US." [p. 227] o The ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) report on the affair devoted only eight lines of a 113-page report to the question of whether KAL 007 might have been on a surveillance mission [p. 231], and concluded that navigation error may have been responsible. However, the ICAO Air Navigation Commission (a specialist technical body) delivered its own report in February 1984, which "rejected the accident scenarios postulated by the first report". Although it did not establish the exact cause of the aircraft's `diversion from its flight plan track', "the ANC's report did not make comfortable reading and it received remarkably little press coverage." [pp. 235--236] o There is a chapter on the search effort for the black box. The author discusses US deep-sea retrieval technology, including recoveries of lost US and Soviet submarines [pp. 198--199]. A comparison is made with the Air India crash, for which the black box was recovered with relative ease. The possibility is left open that KAL 007's black box may in fact have been found (and suppressed). o In 1978, KAL flight 902 strayed over Soviet territory at Murmansk. The pilot, Kim Chang Kyu, ignored Soviet fighters until they fired at his plane (with some loss of life) and forced it down at a Soviet airfield. All passengers and crew were soon released, and there were no lasting international repercussions. [pp. 249--250] Several Soviet military officials, however, were reportedly purged or even shot as a result of the incident. There certainly seems to be no lack of a precedent for KAL aircraft straying into Soviet territory and ignoring attempts to force them to land until fired upon. o Two flights took off from Anchorage in roughly the same time slot -- KAL 007 and KAL 015 (with Sen. Jesse Helms aboard the latter). Oddly enough, KAL 007 almost immediately ceased direct communication with Anchorage ground control, and despite several direct requests to the contrary, simply relayed messages through KAL 015. Also, from times of arrival at various waypoints over the Pacific, there appear to have been some anomalies in the flight speeds of both 007 and 015. The pilot of KAL 015, Captain Y. M. Park, did not testify in the lawsuit brought by relatives of American victims; apparently, he has never answered questions about the incident. [pp. 291--293] Probably the most ironic passage in the book reads, in part, "There is, in a word, some reason to believe that risky schemes could get hatched in a milieu like this..." Here [p. 257] and elsewhere [p. 271], the author argues, essentially, in favor of the notion that covert operations could have been planned and executed by a small group of people and kept secret from the American public and even from Cabinet officials like Secretary of State George Shultz. Ironic, because when the book was written a few years ago, this was mere speculation; after the Iran-Contra affair came to light, it is known to be documented fact. If KAL 007's overflight of Soviet territory was indeed a deliberate passive surveillance probe, the worst-case scenario envisaged by the planners would probably have simply been a forced landing on Soviet territory, much like what happened after the Murmansk incident in 1978, with no lasting effect on international relations. However, the pilot, who had a reputation as a "human computer" for being meticulous and painstaking, may have decided at the end not to take the fall and the blame for what would inevitably be explained as an incredibly careless navigational error. At the end, he was just minutes from international airspace, and may have been tempted to take a chance (in any case, the Japanese military radar tapes leave little doubt that some sort of evasive action was attempted at the end of the flight). Naturally, the Soviet reaction to the incident did not incline anyone to believe them. Incredible as it seems in today's era of glasnost, it took them several days to even admit they had shot down a civilian airliner. They told a number of blatant lies and withheld information, which did much to turn world opinion against them even further than the original incident. Furthermore, the Soviet Union has for most of its existence been an evil empire in the literal sense, a terrorist state (no smileys). Any Soviet statement about a spy mission naturally sounds like a lame, belated, and incredibly cold-blooded excuse to avoid responsibility for an atrocity. And yet, there are still questions. Yes, anyone who says "the US is just as bad as the Soviet Union" is a fool; yes, the American people would never tolerate placing innocent lives at risk (even if the worst-case scenario had merely been a forced landing). But the American people would never have tolerated selling arms to the Ayatollah, either... _if_ they had known about it at the time. Can we really be sure that the shadow foreign policy pursued by a small, self-appointed group was limited to just Iran-Contra, or did William Casey and Co. have their fingers in filthier pies? Will we ever know? -- Gordan Palameta uunet!ai.toronto.edu!utgpu!maccs!gordan