The Soviets shoot down a civilian airliner
The electronic bleeps and snatches of recorded radio communications told a story that technicians and intelligence officers, working in Tokyo, at first could not believe. But as they sifted and sorted through the millions of bits of data that are automatically collected and stored by computers, the chilling conclusion became more and more inescapable, and they notified Washington. Finally, at 7:10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese put in an urgent call to Ronald Reagan, who was vacationing at his ranch in the hills near Santa Barbara, Calif. The mystery of a missing South Korean jetliner that had strayed over Soviet territory, said Meese, had been solved: 17 hours earlier Korean Air Lines Flight 007 had been cold-bloodedly blasted out of the skies by a missile-firing Soviet interceptor, with an all but certain loss of 269 lives.
Thus began one of the strangest and least expected confrontations between the superpowers in the annals of U.S. postwar diplomacy. Though the aircraft so wantonly destroyed near the Soviet island of Sakhalin was not American, the distinction scarcely mattered: Flight 007 had left from U.S. territory and carried at least 61 American passengers, including a U.S. Congressman. The incident, moreover, seemed to be a crime against all humanity, a violation of the most fundamental rules of the air on which all the nations of the world, including the Soviet Union, depend in the busy, crowded skies of the jet age. "Attacking an unarmed civilian plane," said Republican Congressman Thomas F. Hartnett of South Carolina, "is like attacking a school bus."
Stunned by both the senselessness of the attack and the Soviets' blatant lack of repentance, Reagan loosed a withering diplomatic barrage in Moscow's direction. First he directed Secretary of State George Shultz to go on television with a documentary account of the last hours and minutes of Flight 007. Then in the space of a few hours he announced not once but twice that he was cutting short his California holiday—first by two days, then by three—as his determination to confer personally with the National Security Council in Washington grew more urgent. Just before boarding Air Force One for the trip back to Washington, a grim Reagan mounted an outdoor podium and read an extraordinary statement. Calling the Soviet attack a "barbaric act," the President implied that it reflected baser motives than even the 1979 U.S.S.R. invasion of Afghanistan. "While events in Afghanistan and elsewhere have left few illusions about the willingness of the Soviet Union to advance its interests through violence and intimidation, all of us had hoped that certain irreducible standards of civilized behavior nonetheless obtained," he declared. "But this event shocks the sensibilities of people everywhere."