Why was flight KAL 007 destroyed?

Press, 11 October 1986, Page 21

Why was flight KAL 007 destroyed?

Shootdown: The Verdict on KAL 007. By R. W. Johnson. Chatto and Windus, 1986. 335 pp. $29.95. (Reviewed by Vincent Orange) Early on September 1, 1983, a south Korean 747 jumbo jet airliner (KAL 007) was shot down by a Soviet fighter just as the airliner was leaving Soviet airspace over Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew were killed. A world-wide uproar followed: the United States and its allies accused the Soviet Union of the mass murder of innocent civilians, while the Soviet Union and its allies accused the United States of having put those lives at risk by sending the airliner on an espionage mission. From that day to this, American and Russian spokesmen have been energetically spreading lies and halftruths about the affair. R. W. Johnson, and many other writers around the world, have tried — no less energetically — to counter that “disinformation.” Mr Johnson, an Oxford don, has produced a scholarly account of this tragedy, citing a wide range of English-language sources and documenting his points carefully. He freely acknowledges that much essential information — in American,' Russian, South Korean, and Japanese control — is still withheld from investigators and concludes that “we have no absolutely definite answers, merely a vast pile of circumstantial evidence.” That being so, a more accurate sub-title for his book might be “The Many Mysteries of KAL 007’s Last Flight.” These mysteries begin with the aircraft's departure for Seoul from Anchorage, Alaska. Why did it leave behind a paying cargo for which there was ample room? Why was it carrying more fuel than it needed? Why, in these days of amazingly accurate navigational aids, did it stray so grotesquely far — 365 miles — from its scheduled course? Why was it not warned by the Americans that it was straying? Why did it fail to make several obligatory position reports? Why, when it did report, did it transmit apparently false information about its course, altitude, and speed? What contact, if any, did it have with an American RC-135 surveillance aircraft operating in that region? Why

did • it fail to respond to radio messages, signals, or even warning shots from a pursuing Soviet fighter? Why were the Americans subsequently unable (again apparently) to recover its cockpit voice recorder and flightdata recorder from the waters where it crashed, a task of no unusual technical difficulty? Above all, why was KAL 007 shot down? Could it not have been forced to land in Soviet territory by its pursuers? The author poses these and many other questions. Although he offers his own carefully reasoned answers (at considerable length and with much avoidable repetition), his main concern is to present the evidence fairly, leaving the reader to decide what to believe. To understand why KAL 007 was destroyed, we need to krtow why it strayed so far into Soviet airspace. Of four likely explanations, Mr Johnson considers and rejects three: that it strayed off course by accident; that its captain was attempting a short cut to save fuel; and that the Russians deliberately lured it off course by electronic interference with its navigation equipment. He argues that the aircraft was working as a “passive probe” to trigger Soviet radar and surveillance devices. The Americans were particularly anxious to learn about a vast new radar system being built at Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia. Did this system violate the S.A.L.T. 1 treaty? If so, it would be held to justify both resistance to concessions in arms-control talks and a large increase in military spending. Raising the temperature of the Cold War would assist President Reagan’s reelection in 1984. American military aircraft are constantly “tickling” radars nearest the Asian coast in order to permit intelligence analysts to observe and assess their performance, but their specialist crews and highly-secret equipment are so valuable that they take very great care not to get captured or destroyed. Only a civilian airliner, carrying no “improper” equipment whatever, could pretend to get lost and so penetrate deeply enough to trigger inland radars about which the Americans knew little. South Korea already ran scheduled flights close to the region in question and, according to this author, South Korea is a State prepared to co-

operate with the United States in such a venture. Assuming that it did, Mr Johnson argues that the Americans would have cleared a path for KAL 007 by choosing a dark, cloudy night for it to’get lost; by instructing its pilot to switch off his lights over Soviet airspace; and by jamming coastal and airborne radars. Even if KAL 007 were intercepted, no ’ Russian fighter pilot would shoot down a civilian airliner. He would merely order it to land. Nothing would be found and a display of injured innocence would follow from the American and South Korean Governments about touchy Communists with plenty to hide. What went wrong? For some reason, pride perhaps, the captain of KAL 007 tried to evade the Russian fighter which caught him. He gambled on his skill as a former fighter pilot, Russian reluctance to shoot down an airliner and his nearness to international airspace. He was, in fact, only one minute away when Major Kasmin fired, mistaking him for an American military aircraft. But the Americans got their intelligence bonanza. Practically every available Soviet electromagnetic device was turned on over a period of about four hours in an area of about 7000 square miles. The harvest was such that teams of analysts were given years of work. Mr Johnson’s explanation makes many suppositions, as he admits, but it provides a plausible motive and a political context within which such an operation might be mounted. His explanation gains strength from the refusal of the Governments concerned to institute or publish "a thorough, convincing, and detailed” inquiry into the tragedy. If it is correct, the Americans behaved shamefully in putting at risk 269 lives. Even if it is not, the fact remains that Major Kasmin killed those men, women, and children by shooting down an aircraft that he had not certainly identified. On the other hand, if American military aircraft did not constantly intrude into Soviet airspace and if KAL 007’s conduct had been less unusual (to say the least), Kasmin might have held his fire. It is an old, but simple story: when tension between States is high, incidents are certain; when incidents occur, lives are lost and a war may follow.