Second Opinion

What did the Soviets know?

Shortly after the fiery end of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a senior Reagan Administration official said the U.S. had "irrefutable" evidence the Soviets knew that the plane they blasted out of the skies over Sakhalin Island was a commercial jet. The President and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick made statements last month that in effect indicted the U.S.S.R. for deliberate, cold-blooded murder of the airliner's 269 passengers and crew. But last week the Administration admitted that the proof, far from being irrefutable, is nonexistent. Said State Department Spokesman Alan Romberg: "We do not have the evidence" to show conclusively that the pilots of the Soviet interceptors and their ground controllers knew what kind of plane they were downing.

Romberg was reacting to a New York Times story that claimed most U.S. intelligence experts now believe the Soviets really might have mistaken KAL 007 for an American reconnaissance, plane. But that assertion, intelligence officials told TIME, goes too far in the other direction. The most that can be said is that there is no evidence that the pilots or their ground controllers ever made a positive identification one way or the other.

As American intelligence people now reconstruct the event, Soviet radar at first did erroneously identify the plane as an American RC-135 (a reconnaissance version of the Boeing 707). An RC-135 had been in the North Pacific earlier that night. Though the Soviets tracked KAL 007 with radar for more than two hours, it is now believed that their interceptors had trouble finding the airliner. Not until it was about to leave Soviet airspace did they finally bring it into sight, and then they had to make a quick decision. They shot.

Did they know what they had hit? If not, say U.S. officials, they should have. The Times story asserts that the interceptor pilot probably fired two air-to-air missiles from behind and below the jet, a position from which he could not readily have identified the distinctive shape of a Boeing 747. Perhaps, but a 747 is much bigger than an RC-135. Tapes of the pilots' conversation also indicate that the jet showed flashing navigation and strobe lights, not a common characteristic of spy planes.

It is possible that the pilots and their ground controllers rushed to destroy the jet without making sure what it was, rather than take what they judged to be the greater risk of explaining to Moscow that they had let an "intruder" plane get away. That would still be utterly inexcusable behavior. Said Romberg of the Soviets: "They had the responsibility to find out. If they didn't, they were incompetent or negligent, or both." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.