Almost ten months after a Soviet fighter shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing all 269 aboard, the precise circumstances of the tragedy remain a mystery. Last week an anonymous author in the British magazine Defence Attaché accused the U.S. of accidentally provoking the attack by using the airliner to gather intelligence about Soviet air defenses. The plane, the author said, deliberately overflew Soviet territory in order to test Soviet reflexes as the space shuttle Challenger and a U.S. Ferret-D electronic data-gathering satellite watched from above.
The Soviet accusation last September was very similar; the...