Korean Air Lines Flight 007

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Korean Air Lines Flight 007
Occurrence
Map showing the divergence of planned and actual flightpaths
Date	September 1, 1983
Summary	Shot down by Soviet jet interceptors
Site	West of Sakhalin island
Aircraft type	Boeing 747-230B
Operator	Korean Air Lines
Registration	HL7442
Passengers	240
Crew	29
Fatalities	269
Survivors	0

Korean Air Lines Flight 007, also known as KAL 007 or KE007, was a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner shot down by Soviet jet interceptors on September 1, 1983 just west of Sakhalin island. KAL 007 carried 269 passengers and crew, including U.S. congressman Lawrence McDonald. There were no survivors.

The Soviet Union stated it did not know the aircraft was civilian and suggested it had entered Soviet airspace as a deliberate provocation to test their military response capabilities. The incident attracted a storm of protest from across the world, particularly from the United States amidst the Cold War.

Overview

The flight

Korean Air Lines flight KAL 007 was a commercial Boeing 747-200 (registration: HL7442) flying from New York City, United States to Seoul, South Korea. It took off from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on August 31 carrying 240 passengers and 29 crew. After refueling at Anchorage International Airport in Anchorage, Alaska the aircraft departed for Seoul at 13:00 GMT (3:00 am local time) on September 1. KAL 007 flew westward and then arced south on a course for Seoul-Kimpo International Airport that took the craft much farther west than usual (allegedly on a 245 degrees magnetic heading), cutting across the Soviet Kamchatka Peninsula and then over the Sea of Okhotsk towards Sakhalin, violating Soviet airspace over a significant distance.

A KAL flight had violated Soviet airspace before. In April 1978, a Soviet fighter fired on Korean Air Lines Flight 902 after it had flown over the Kola Peninsula, killing two passengers and forcing the aircraft to crash-land on a frozen lake. An investigation into the cause of that incident was complicated by Soviet refusal to release the aircraft's flight data recorders. Other commercial airliners had made course errors of comparable magnitude from time to time, but not over Soviet airspace.

The incident

As KAL 007 overflew Soviet territory, the Soviets scrambled Su-15 'Flagon' and MiG-23 'Flogger-B' fighters to intercept it. At 18:26 GMT, one of two Su-15s from Dolinsk-Sokol airbase shot down the airliner with a missile. The airliner crashed into the sea about 55 km off Moneron Island, killing all on board. Initial reports that the airliner had been forced to land on Sakhalin were soon proved false. Transcripts recovered from the airliner's cockpit voice recorder indicate that the crew were unaware that they were off course and violating Soviet airspace (at the end they were 500 kilometres to the west of the planned track). After the missile strike, the crew performed an emergency spiral descent due to rapid decompression from 18:26 until the end of the recording at 18:27:46. The Soviets initially withheld information that they had recovered the flight's data recorders; it was only after the Yeltsin administration took power in an independent Russia that the recorders were released 10 years after the incident.

Investigations

The International Civil Aviation Organization conducted two investigations into the incident. The first took place soon after the accident and the second occurred eight years later, after the data recorders were released in 1991. Both concluded that the violation of Soviet airspace was accidental; the autopilot had been set to either left-of-course in heading mode or had been switched to INS when out of range for a lock. This left the airliner on the constant magnetic heading chosen when the craft left Anchorage. It was determined that the crew did not notice this error or subsequently perform INS checks that would have revealed it, due to a "lack of situational awareness and flight deck coordination".

According to the U.S. Department of State transcript of the shooting as reported by the New York Times, the pilot who shot down Korean Air Flight 007 is heard stating that he fired multiple rounds prior to the shooting of the two missiles. Unless the interceptor was equipped with tracer rounds, however, these shots would not have been seen by the KAL 007 crew. The Soviets officially maintained that they had attempted radio contact with the airliner and that KAL 007 failed to reply. However, no other aircraft or ground monitors covering those emergency frequencies at the time reported hearing any such Soviet radio calls. The Soviet pilot reported that KAL 007 was flashing navigation lights, which should have suggested that the plane was civilian; Soviet radar personnel, however, misunderstood him to say there were no lights, an indication that the flight was a spying mission.

Aftermath

Political responses

US President Ronald Reagan condemned the shootdown on September 5, 1983, calling it the "Korean airline massacre," a "crime against humanity must never be forgotten" and an "act of barbarism… inhuman brutality." In an act that surprised many within the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations played tapes of intercepted communications between Soviet fighter pilots and their ground control. While not publicly claimed, it is almost certain that these communications were originally encrypted.

The next day, the Soviet Union admitted to shooting down KAL 007, stating the pilots did not know it was a civilian aircraft when it violated Soviet airspace. The attack pushed relations between the United States and the Soviet Union to a new low. On September 15, President Reagan ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to revoke the license of Aeroflot Soviet Airlines to operate flights into and out of the United States. As a result, Aeroflot flights to North America were only available through their hubs in Canada or Mexico. Aeroflot service to the United States was not restored until April 29, 1986.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, commissioned an audio-visual presentation in the Security Council using tapes of the Soviet radio conversations and a map of the plane's flight path to depict the shoot-down as savage and unjustified. Alvin A. Snyder, producer of the video, later revealed in a September 1, 1996 article in the Washington Post that he was given only selected portions of the tape of the Soviet military conversation that led to the downing of the aircraft. Unedited versions of the tape later revealed to Snyder that the Soviets sincerely thought the plane was an American RC-135 reconnaissance plane and that they had given the plane internationally recognized warning signals. Snyder writes, “I told the world the Soviets shot it down in cold blood, but I was wrong.”

Technical changes

As a result of this incident, Ronald Reagan announced that the Global Positioning System (GPS) would be made available for civilian uses once completed.

R20, the flight path that Korean Air Flight 007 was supposed to fly, was closed after the accident since it was deemed too close to Soviet airspace (only 17.5 miles (see Bert Schlossberg "Rescue 007") away at its closest point). Instead, all trans-Pacific flights flying over northern Pacific were redirected to use the R80 flight path, which is 178.95 miles from the Soviet airspace.

Hypotheses

It is generally believed that KAL 007 was mistaken for a USAF RC-135 that was flying a routine electronic intelligence mission northeast of Kamchatka at about the same time. The primary long-range Soviet radar systems were not operational at the time, so as the RC-135 flew on its "racetrack" course it appeared on the inbound leg, turned around, and then disappeared again. This pattern was repeated several times, until Flight 007 flew inbound on a track approximately 70 miles to the RC-135's inbound leg at roughly the time the plane should have re-appeared on their radars. This time the radar contact did not turn outbound again, giving Soviet forces an opportunity to intercept it. The U.S. routinely conducted Burning Wind SIGINT/COMINT flights to test the USSR's air defense systems (and over the years lost several planes on such missions).

As with any serious disaster, a number of theories have arisen that differ with official explanations. The theorists' main concerns are why the airliner was off course and even whether it crashed.

The most persistent "off course" theory is that the flight was part of a deliberate U.S. intelligence-gathering effort. According to this theory, U.S. intelligence has a long history of "tickling" Soviet radar by deliberately flying planes into Soviet airspace and then recording the responses. As far back as the late '40s, U.S. military aircraft had engaged in this practice, and some were even lost in the attempt (see James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, 1983, about the National Security Agency). In 1983, the theory goes, U.S. intelligence wanted to use a civilian plane as "bait" to test the Soviet reaction to an incursion inside their borders. If caught, the pilot could claim innocence, that he was only "lost" - the plane would not need to be equipped with "smoking gun" spy gear since U.S. spy satellites and spy planes such as the RC-135 could record the various responses.

The Soviets advanced this argument, which was presented in detail by Soviet Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov at a press conference on September 9, 1983, covered by the world's press media. Speaking before a huge map showing the provocative intrusion of KAL 007 into Soviet airspace, Ogarkov bluntly argued that the intrusion "was a deliberate, thoroughly planned intelligence operation."

President Reagan dismissed such theories as Soviet propaganda. However, independent researchers published books which, at the very least, seem to substantiate some of the details of the allegations. For instance, David Pearson notes in his book (KAL 007: The Cover-Up) that the flightpath of KAL 007 "passed over Soviet missile-testing areas, over the sites of several large phased-array radars, and near the Soviet submarine pens at Petropavlovsk" on the Kamchatka peninsula. Similarly the plane passed within a few dozen miles of Soviet air and navy bases on Sakhalin island, and if it had not been shot down as it left Sakhalin airspace, Pearson says, it was "on a heading that would have taken it eventually over the Soviet military center at Vladivostok." Fifteen minutes behind KAL 007 in international airspace was another civilian plane, KAL 015, which relayed KAL 007's messages to ground control. Investigators James Gollin and Robert Allardyce published a 2-volume book (Desired Track, 1994) which analyzed the parts of the plane's flightpath which were recorded and are publicly known, and concluded it must have made deliberate turns, which undermined the theory that the plane was simply left on autopilot. In short, theorists allege there were too many inconsistencies with the various "accident" scenarios for the flight to have been innocent. However, this theory would have to presuppose that the US was willing to forfeit the life of a Congressmen, and an anti-communist one at that, in order to merely conduct a test that could have been done more efficiently as had occurred in the past.

A few theorists believe KAL 007 did not crash, claiming that a single engine loss would not knock a 747 out of the air, and that the reported twelve-minute period was suspiciously long between the missile strike and ocean impact. These theories were discredited when Russia produced the actual cockpit voice recorder, in which the pilots reported a depressurization and rapid descent.

Some theorists also view as suspicious the amount and types of material recovered from the accident, which was said to compare oddly with other crashes of 747 aircraft. That only two bodies were recovered, relatively intact, was also inconsistent to some. It should be noted that most human remains on the sea floor at the crash site would have been subject to aggressive cuttlefish feeding. However, quoting from the KAL 007 Mystery link listed below, "For the first eight days following the KAL 007 incident no floating debris or body parts were reported recovered. In 1985, an Air India Boeing 747, carrying 329 passengers, exploded at 31,000 feet over the North Atlantic when a suspected bomb was detonated. In that tragedy 132 bodies were recovered — 123 of them on the same day. All were identified. In 1987, when a 747, South African Airways Flight 295, exploded at 14,000 feet from a cargo-bay fire, 15 of 159 persons were recovered along with several thousand pieces of debris, some as far away as 2,000 nautical miles." A body count of two seems improbable to some skeptics.

The 'official' resolution of the puzzle came in 1991 when the hitherto-concealed voice and data recorders were released by Moscow, apparently confirming the original professional accident investigation judgments that overconfident carelessness allowed a simple navigation error to go undetected. The alleged Soviet failure to properly attempt communication with the crew, and their urgency to stop the flight as it was passing out of Soviet airspace, led to this tragedy.

However, some theorists still tried to cast doubt on the authenticity of the voice and data recorder information made public by the Yeltsin administration. These included Michel Brun, who analyzed technical details of the timing sequences (Incident at Sakhalin, 1995), and Gollin and Allardyce who presented an extraordinary analysis of radar tracks (Desired Track, 1994). Also, in 1995, Alvin Snyder, the former official of the United States Information Agency who had put together the videotape for U.S. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's UN presentation on KAL 007, published a book (Warriors of Disinformation) in which he admitted: "By my calculation, the National Security Agency, with the apparent approval of the State Department and the White House, had deleted at least five critical minutes of conversation between the Russian fighter pilots and their ground controllers from the tape that we presented as evidence in the UN Security Council." This admission lent more credence to the Soviet claim that they did try to communicate with the intruder, to no avail.

Although conspiracy theories still linger on the Internet, the 'unanswered questions' of this case have long since been settled to the satisfaction of airliner operations experts and government officialdom.

One notable passenger of Flight 007 was Larry McDonald, president of the right-wing John Birch Society and Democratic congressman from Georgia. A vocal critic of the USSR, McDonald was the founder of the Western Goals Foundation, which was intended to combat the threat from Communism. McDonald was the only U.S. congressman ever killed by the Soviets during the Cold War. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Idaho Senator Steve Symms, both conservative Republicans and also staunch critics of the Soviet Union, were scheduled fly to Seoul on KAL 007, but were bumped from the flight at the last minute at Anchorage airport. While waiting at the airport Senator Helms even befriended two young American girls who were waiting to board KAL 007, not knowing that they had only hours to live. There is no evidence that the U.S.S.R. knew of the congressman's presence. Also killed was journalist Jack Cox, who co-authored the memoirs of former Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza, entitled Nicaragua Betrayed. Congressman McDonald was their publisher.

Popular culture

Two television movies were produced about the incident. Shootdown (1988), starring Angela Lansbury, John Cullum, and Kyle Secor, was based on the book of the same title by R.W. Johnson, about the efforts of Nan Moore (Lansbury), the mother of a passenger, to get answers from the US and Russian governments. The British Granada Television documentary drama Coded Hostile (1989 - US title Tailspin) detailed the US military and governmental investigation. Both films were produced before the fall of the Soviet Union allowed access to archives, but while Shootdown reflects American suspicions, Coded Hostile is more objective, highlighting the likely confusion of Flight 007 with the USAF RC-135 in the context of routine US SIGINT/COMINT missions in the area. An updated version of Coded Hostile was screened in the UK in 1993, incorporating details of the 1992 UN investigation.

Author Janet McAdams' title poem from her collection The Island of Lost Luggage responds to the incident.

Rock star Gary Moore released a song titled "Murder in the Skies", included in his 1983 album Victims Of The Future, which lyrically depicted this tragedy. The Jazz Butcher also had a song on their 1984 album Scandal in Bohemia about KAL Flight 007, called President Reagan's Birthday Present.

Also, the History Channel did a series, called Secrets of the Black Box, which chronicled this and other incidents.

In the 1991 movie True Colors John Cusack plays a character who claims that his parents were aboard KAL Flight 007 ("that Korean airplane that got shot down").

References and further reading

September 12th, 1983, pg.1

Bert Schlossberg, Rescue 007: The Untold Story of KAL 007 and Its Survivors, ISBN 0-7388-5775-0 (Trade Paperback), ISBN 0-7388-5774-2 (Hardback), ISBN 0-7388-5776-9 (eBook)
Michel Brun, and Robert Bononno (Translator), Incident at Sakhalin: The True Mission of KAL Flight 007, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996, ISBN 1-56858-054-1.
William P. Grady, Understanding the Times - Volume One: How Satan Turned America From God, Grady Publications, 2005, Chap. 15, "KAL 007", pp. 504-570, ISBN 0-9628809-3-0.
Seymour M. Hersh, "The Target Is Destroyed": What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It, Vintage, 1987, ISBN 0-394-75527-8.
Jeffrey St. John, Day of the Cobra: The True Story of KAL Flight 007, T. Nelson, 1984, ISBN 0-8407-5381-0.
David E. Pearson, KAL 007: The Cover-Up, Simon & Schuster, 1987, ISBN 0-671-55716-5.
James Gollin, and Robert Allardyce, Desired Track, American Vision Publishing, 1994, ISBN 1-883868-01-7
R.W. Johnson, Shootdown: Flight 007 and the American Connection, Viking Penguin, 1986, ISBN 0-670-81209-9
Alexander Dallin, Black Box, University of California Press, 1985, ISBN 0-520-05515-2
Alvin Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation, Arcade Publishing, 1995, ISBN 1-55970-389-X
Oliver Clubb, KAL Flight 007: The Hidden Story, The Permanent Press, 1985, ISBN 0-932966-59-4
James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, Penguin Books, 1983, ISBN 0-14-006748-5
Secrets of the Black Box: KAL 007. The History Channel, 2006.

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