mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (09/07/83)
In the dozens of articles about KAL 007, several have said that it would have been pointless for the plane to be a spy plane because "we" have high-powered surveillance satellites and spy planes. It should not be necessary to use a civilian airliner as a spy plane. This makes the (almost standard) assumption that the US and its allies are identical (ie the US tells its allies everything and vice-versa). The assumption is almost certainly untrue, and even if it were true, the allies might possibly want to check the truth of what they were told. There is no evidence in any newspaper article I have seen as to whether the Koreans use passenger planes as spies, but they don't have satellites and they probably don't have specialized spy planes either. It would not be unreasonable for the Russians to suspect them of using airliners as spy planes, particularly as they seem to have made a bit of a habit of straying off-route in the same direction (according to the newspapers). Martin Taylor