FEATURE |

_ Author calls for full Congressional investigation

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, It is now precisely one year (Sept. 1,
983) since the Korean Airlines Flight
007 disaster, in which 269 people tragi-
Rally lost their lives.
_ A year ago, a tidal wave of jingoism
‘and Cold War zeal descended over us. At
tts summit rode the Reagan administra-
tion, followed closely by most of the
Media and big politicians of the U.S. and
Canada. KAL 007 was invoked to justify
Neployment of Pershing II missiles in
urope, to rush the MX missile into
roduction, to dispense with arms con-
rol negotiations, to ban, boycott and vil-
y virtually any kind of interchange with
the Soviet Union.
| That wave has now subsided: those
Who created it have gone off in search of
New propaganda forms. Only a handful of
investigative journalists have remained
With KAL 007, an issue that has sud-
Nenly, strangely, become unpopular.
| It is a tribute to that ancient adage,
‘the truth will eventually out’’, that
David Pearson’s article on KAL 007
Nppeared in America’s staid old liberal
lewsmagazine, The Nation, last week
‘Aug. 25).
_ Exactly one year ago, Pearson, a scho-
lar at Yale University, was researching
his doctoral thesis on the Pentagon’s
World Wide Military Command and
Control System, which co-ordinates all
Of the day-to-day intelligence activities
Of the U.S. In the aftermath of the KAL

THE SATURDAY STAR =:

007 incident, he tried to track down some
information relating to it but was told
that the System’s computers ‘‘were not
functioning’ on the day of the tragedy.
That rebuff intrigued Pearson, and led
him into a year-long, intensive study of
the KAL 007 incident culminating in
what may well be the most damning,
devastating indictment of the National
Security State ever to see the light of day
in the mainstream U.S. media.

It is difficult to do justice to Pearson’s
deeply thoughtful and heavily
documented analysis. It is, however,
worth recounting a few of his major
findings because. some of them are new,
and startling, and because it may en-

- courage readers to get a copy of the arti-

cle, and show it to others.

Even those who are intellectually pre-
pared to expect the worst from the
Reagan administration cannot help but
be shocked and amazed at the extent to
which the U.S. leadership, military and
various intelligence agencies, were in-
volved in planning and executing KAL
007’s spy mission, and how they all lied
about it afterwards, in unison, to the
world.

The history of U.S. intelligence ac-
tivities indicates that the downing of
KAL 007 was not an isolated event.
Pearson documents a number of similar
cases that have come to light in the past,
where U.S. and allied civilian and mili-

‘Soviet ‘spying’ charge

Special to The Star ‘nion, admitting for the first time that its
Lines 74

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Hy ‘shoot the By MICHAEL McDOWELL

t ine year ago the media engaged in an orgy of anti-Soviet hatred. Today, numerous
Studies reveal KAL 007 was part of an elaborate, on-going U.S. intelligence program.

News
Analysis @
ous Gb j

Fred Weir

tary aircraft have penetrated deep into
Soviet airspace on proven intelligence
gathering missions:

“These incidents and numerous
others suggest that the United States and
its allies have been engaged in ongoing
and extensive aerial reconnaissance of
the Soviet Union and other Communist
nations for decades. The United States,
reluctant to admit that, has usually cited
radio or navigational difficulties as the
cause of intrusions into Soviet airspace.
Perhaps most troubling, many of the in-
cidents have occurred at potentially con-
structive moments in the process of arms
control negotiations between the super-
powers. In all instances that can be
documented from the public record, the
Russians have attempted to force intrud-
ing aircraft to land, firing on them only if
they did not respond to signals ...

‘‘Based on this record, if the Soviet
Union seems obsessed with maintaining
the integrity of its borders, the United
States seems equally obsessed with their
violation . . . the United States, at least in
its intelligence gathering activities,
places a very high priority on penetrating
Soviet airspace. That is the context in

which the tragedy of Flight 007 must be ;

understood”. :

e Turning to the unhappy events of
August 31, 1983, Pearson finds that even
before it left Anchorage, Alaska, KAL
007 was behaving oddly. For one thing,
the airliner was forty minutes behind
schedule, a delay which has never been
explained. (The British magazine, De-
fence Attache, has charged that the only
conceivable reason the plane was held up
was to synchronize its flight with the
oribtal path of a “‘Ferret-D”’ surveillance
satellite, which was to play a major role
in that night’s events.) For another thing,
“*KAL 007’s pilot added 9,800 pounds of
fuel at Anchorage which were neither
needed for his scheduled flight nor ac-
counted for in his subsequent position
reports to air-traffic controllers’’.

e When KAL 007 passed the military
radar station at Cape Newenham, Alas-
ka, at 1420 GMT that night, it was al-
ready 65 miles off-course. Under a 1982
agreement between the U.S. Defence
Department and the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA), military
operators are obliged to report the posi-
tions of off-course airliners to civilian air
traffic controllers, who then radio the
aircraft in question. It is now a matter of
public record that the U.S. military-
early-warning system spotted and re-
corded Flight 007’s deviating course,
yet, inexplicably, this information was
not passed on.

e Another Korean jumbo-jet, KAL
015, was also following the R-20 route to
Seoul that night, just eight minutes be-
hind KAL 007. Pearson proves that KAL
015, pretending to be KAL 007, com-
municated false position reports to air
traffic controllers while the real KAL 007
deviated further and further from its
scheduled course.

e Pearson develops a definitive pic-
ture of the activities and movements of
the U.S. Airforce RC-135 that night, in-
cluding its rendezvous and interaction
with KAL 007. He concludes, quite re-
luctantly — this is very painful ground

Study shows KAL 007 spy plane

for any loyal American to explore — that
given the known facts, the Soviet version
of these events, presented by Marshal
Ogarkov on September 9, must be the
correct one. By contrast, says he,
“‘Official U.S. accounts are neither com-
plete nor credible’’.

e “It is certain’, writes Pearson,
“that the RC-135 was aware of both the
location and flight direction of KAL 007
which, at the time the two aircraft passed
at their closest point, had deviated from
its normal route by over 200 statute
miles’’. He adds, *‘an intrusion into the
airspace of the Soviet Union, if it triggers
Soviet air-defence systems, offers an
intelligence bonanza. It is certainly pos-
sible that the RC-135 was there to take
advantage of the extraordinary oppor-
tunity afforded by KAL 007’s intru-
sion’’.

e Pearson describes, in awesome de-
tail, the vast array of U.S. intelligence
resources that are concentrated in the
Far East, with their attention riveted 24
hours a day on the Kamchatka Penin-
sula. This was all the more true because,
on the night of August 31, the Soviets
were scheduled to begin sensitive missile
testing there. Given all this, remarks
Pearson, when it entered Soviet airspace
‘‘far from slipping by unnoticed, KAL
007 had flown ontocentre stage’’.

e Perhaps the most surprising conclu-
sion, for which Pearson presents persua-
sive evidence, is that the U.S. jammed
Soviet radar, and employed a variety of
electronic countermeasures to protect
KAL 007 while it was in Soviet airspace.
This would explain widespread — and
incredible — reports about the
“‘incompetence”’ of Soviet air defences
that night: how Soviet radar operators
kept ‘‘losing’’ KAL 007 from their
screens; how a dozen fighter planes
scrambled to intercept failed to find the
jumbo jet for two hours; and how, finally,
a radar-guided missile fired by the Soviet
fighter plane at KAL 007 went awry, and
the Soviet pilot had to fire a second —
this time an infra-red, heat-seeking mis-
sile — to bring the Korean plane down.
Sophisticated electronic warfare also
goes far toward explaining how U.S. and
Korean spymasters had the confidence
to plan such a job in the first place.

e Finally, in an exhaustive analysis of

* the communications transcripts, Pearson

shows that the pilot of the Soviet Su-15
interceptor did, in fact, run through the
correct AS ced (Identification
Friend/Foe) sequence when it came into
visual contact with KAL 007. These
measures included flashing lights, calling
the unidentified craft on the universal
hailing frequency of 121.5 megahertz,
and, as a last desperate strategem, firing
tracer bullets past the airliner in an effort
to attract the pilot’s attention. Not only
did KAL 007 fail to respond to any of
these efforts, Pearson’s analysis of the
transcripts reveals that in those last ter-
rible seconds, the pilot of the Korean jet
attempted to take evasive action.

Pearson concludes with a list of ques-
tions, arising from his research, that he
feels ought to be taken up immediately
by a full-scale Congressional inves-
tigation. are

Says he: ‘Now, a year after this bizarre
episode, Congress owes it to the! pas-
sengers of KAL 007, their families, the
people of the United States and the world
community to conduct a full and
thorough investigation, to let the truth be
known. In a democratic society, there
must be limits to the damage that can be
inflicted in the name of ‘national se-

999

curity’’’.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, SEPTEMBER 7, 1984 e 7