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Rebecca Scruton, 28, a Meriden, Conn., mother of two young children, had become a widow in December, when her husband Dale, 30, died of cancer. She was on Flight 007 only because she had a passport problem when she went to board an earlier flight; her children were not with her. There were 269 such stories of personal poignancy.
The death toll was the fifth highest in aviation history. For Americans, the loss of 61 U.S. civilians in a military attack may have been the greatest since the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor.
In the waters of the Sea of Japan, Soviet ships and aircraft warned outsiders away from their search of the area where the plane went down. The U.S. moved five F-15 jet fighters from Okinawa to northern Japan, but did not send them into the area. The U.S. Air Force also dispatched at least one AW ACS surveillance plane to Hokkaido. In the tense situation, both superpowers raised their alert status in the region, but no one wanted to provoke yet another air tragedy.
One question vital to Soviet intentions about the tragedy is who authorized the order to fire. The hours of radar tracking and even the period of scrambling after Flight 007 entered Soviet airspace would allow ample time for the matter to be passed all the way back to Moscow. Lynn Hansen, of the Center for Strategic Technology at Texas A & M, doubts that anyone below a three-star colonel-general, such as a Far East-theater air-defense deputy commander, "could make that weighty a decision; they're all scared of that responsibility." Georgia Tech Sovietologist Daniel Papp warns that "if we assume it went all the way to Moscow, then there are very grave questions as to Soviet intent. If it was a general who decided it was time to show that they meant business, that is far less serious in its policy implications."
Retired Admiral Bobby Inman, former deputy director of the CIA, speculates that the Soviet Union was so stung by its inept handling of a similar, 1978 Korean airliner intrusion over their territory that individual air-defense units now have standing orders to direct any interlopers to land and to shoot them down if they do not. "Their priorities are different from ours," Inman says. "They place highest priority not on human lives but on preventing penetration of their airspace." The Kremlin had time last week to learn what was happening at the lower command levels, Inman suggests, but did not intervene to stop it.
Did the Soviet interceptors signal the airliner to change course or to land, and if so, did the Korean crew ignore the signals? The Soviets, of course, insist that both answers are yes. But so far the tapes of their air-to-ground reports have not borne out the claim. Moreover, the KAL crew would have made its own radio report of such action, if it had been able.
Why were there no radio communications between Soviet military officials and the airliner? Soviet ground stations should have been aware of the frequencies the airliner would be using and could have given instructions to the plane. That in turn would have alerted air controllers in Japan to what was happening. Early American analysis of the tapes provided no evidence of any such calls.