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Angry Soviets. Some Washington analysts were even speculating that Belenko and his rough-and-ready flying machine might have been a deliberate Russian plant, designed to show that the U.S. Air Force has been overresponding to an imagined Soviet threat in weaponry. Others speculated that the Russians wanted the Japanese to let U.S. experts examine their plane. According to this scenario, such anti-Soviet action provided Moscow with an excuse to postpone indefinitely an agreement with Tokyo over the four strategic Kurile Islands, which were seized by the Russians in 1945. "It's far out, but that's how the Soviets think," said one senior State Department official last week.
Apparently unperturbed, the Japanese prepared last week to return the Foxbat to the Russians. The angry Soviets will send a freighter to take delivery of their aircraft at the port of Hitachi. The Japanese coolly demanded that the Russians compensate them for facilities damaged when Belenko overran the runway on Hokkaido and for the expense of dismantling, crating and transporting the plane from Hyakuri airbase, 90 miles north of Tokyo, to Hitachi.