Fallout from Flight 007

By Ed Magnuson

Conspiracy theories persist about the downed Korean airliner

It has been exactly a year since a Soviet Su-15 jet fighter blasted Korean Air Lines Flight 007 out of the sky over Sakhalin Island, hurling 269 civilians to their deaths in the Sea of Japan. On the anniversary, the inevitable conspiracy theories are attracting worldwide, and often uncritical, attention, perhaps more than at any other time since the incident. Some of the allegations, contends Roy Godson, a U.S. intelligence expert at Washington's Georgetown University, are a result of "a massive, overt disinformation campaign" by the Soviet Union.

The theories vary and sometimes conflict, but all attempt to make U.S. officials share in the blame for the tragedy with the Soviet commanders who ordered the unarmed airliner to be destroyed. Some maintain that the Korean plane was on a U.S. spy mission, as the Soviets claim. Others charge that while the plane may have been inadvertently off course, U.S. military trackers saw it go astray, issued no warning and coldly exploited the situation to see how Soviet air-defense systems would react. Concerned over the notice such arguments were getting, the State Department held a briefing last week at which one official repeated to reporters: "These charges are totally false. The U.S. does not use civilian airliners for intelligence purposes, and there was no U.S. intelligence connection whatever with this plane, directly or indirectly."

Radio Moscow even went so far as to pick up and wildly distort an Italian newspaper interview with John Keppel, a retired State Department official, who had wondered about early reports that KAL 007 might have exploded some time after being hit by the Soviet missile. The Soviet broadcast twisted this into an allegation by Keppel that U.S. officials had ordered the plane blown up by remote control after the fighter attack so that its spy gear could never be recovered.

Another conspiracy theory was raised in an unusually speculative article in Defence Attache, a generally respected London journal. An editor's note disclaimed agreement with the views of the author, who wrote under a pen name. The author's basic claim was that the KAL intrusion on Sept. 1 deliberately coincided with the Far East passes of both a U.S. spy satellite and the space shuttle Challenger. In his version, the airliner was sent over Soviet territory instead of a U.S. electronic-surveillance aircraft because U.S. officials believed that the Soviets would never shoot down a civilian aircraft. The U.S. plan, he suggests, was for the satellite and the shuttle to monitor Soviet responses to the airliner's intrusion. NASA officials insist that the shuttle was never close enough to receive aircraft radio transmissions from the 007 intrusion area and thus could not have had such a monitoring assignment.

A more elaborate theory was presented in the leftist U.S. magazine The Nation.

Written by David Pearson, 31, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Yale University, the article argues that the KAL crew was unbelievably negligent if it went so far off course without realizing it, and that American experts who track aircraft and eavesdrop on radio transmissions from Alaska to the Far East were even more incredibly incompetent if they failed to spot the errant flight. He contends that these specialists must have been particularly alert since they were aware of preparations by the Soviets to test a new missile on Aug. 31 aimed at the Kamchatka Peninsula, where the airliner first flew over Soviet territory. "All electronic eyes and ears were directed toward the exact place," Pearson writes. "Far from slipping by unnoticed, KAL 007 had flown onto center stage."

No U.S. observer, however, sent word through civilian air controllers to warn the airliner of its dangerous course. To Pearson this suggests either a prearranged U.S.-Korean spy plot or a desire by U.S. officials to exploit an accidental intelligence-gathering opportunity. The State Department rebuttal is a categorical denial: "No agency of the U.S. Government even knew that the plane was off course and in difficulty until after it had been shot down. Only the Soviets knew where it was before it was shot down." Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt contends that precisely because U.S. surveillance was directed toward the incoming Soviet missile, it could easily have missed the civilian airliner's deviant course.

So far, the only authoritative investigation into the disaster was that conducted by the International Civil Aviation Organization. It concluded that there was no evidence of the airliner being on an intelligence mission. It said that the 007 crew could have flown unknowingly off course either by committing a 10DEG error in programming its inertial navigation system or by erroneously setting the Boeing 747 on a steady magnetic compass heading of 246DEG (an investigative series in London's Sunday Times showed how this could happen if a switch were left in the wrong position, disengaging the inertial navigation system). In either case, the crew would have been inexplicably careless in not using other means to verify the plane's location.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democratic and often critical member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, asserts that there was no intelligence bonanza to be gained from a KAL 007 overflight of Soviet territory. The U.S., Leahy points out, has far better techniques for testing Soviet radar defenses than by endangering civilians and, in fact, continually runs such tests. He says he has reviewed still classified information on the airliner shooting and, despite the suspicions of conspiracy advocates, finds nothing in it that would relieve the Soviets of their responsibility.

--By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Ross H. Munro/Washington

With reporting by Ross H. Munro