jwrlep@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (John Lepingwell) (05/21/91)
From: John Lepingwell <jwrlep@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> [I wanted to get this in before a long flame/debate erupts based on what I believe is erroneous information from Natl. Review.] Keith Broekhoven quotes from National Review, concerning the 1983 Soviet shootdown of KAL 007: >...in an extensive interview with Izvestia, the pilot who downed the >plane, Lieutenant-Colnel Gennadi Osipovich, says, no, there was no >warning to the airliner. And, no, he did not mistake it for a military >plane: it was clearly a 747. He further admits that the Soviet >government instructed him to lie on each of these points--an excuse >unfortunately not available to xxx, yyy, zzz, or aaa. I have recently published a short article in "Report on the USSR" on the KAL shootdown, based on the Soviet sources to which Natl. Review refers. ("Report on the USSR" used to be known as "Radio Liberty Reports" it is published by Radio Liberty in Munich, and presents up to date research on current events in the Soviet Union. The article just appeared in the April 26, 1991 issue.) Osipovich did NOT admit that he knew the aircraft was a 747. Instead, he reported that AFTER he shot the missiles he wondered what kind of aircraft it was, and thought it resembled an IL-76 (a large Soviet transport aircraft). Furthermore, he claims to not have even known what a 747 looked like (!). This is not to say that I fully believe this account, but Osipovich has repeated it in a subsequent interview with Krasnaya Zvezda (the Soviet military newspaper). He WAS told to falsify his story, however, and the Soviet ground-air tapes were doctored in order to support the Soviet case, even though they were never released. Other new information on this case (see the article for details): 1) KAL-007's air navigation lights were on throughout the interception. 2) The interceptor pilot did not fire tracer rounds to alert the KAL airliner, because his aircraft was armed with only armor-piercing rounds. 3) The Soviets did locate the wreckage of the airliner, and mounted a campaign to keep U.S. forces away from the area. 4) The "black boxes" containing cockpit voice recordings and flight data were found, and reportedly sent to Moscow for analysis. The article examines these issues in some detail, and also assesses their implications for the "conspiracy theories" that Keith Broekhoven mentions. To make a long story short the new Soviet revelations tend to support the U.S. account of the incident, and undermine the Soviet government's account and the conspiracy theories. John Lepingwell Dept. of Political Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign