Conspiracy theories persist about the downed Korean airliner
It has been exactly a year since a Soviet Su-15 jet fighter blasted Korean Air Lines Flight 007 out of the sky over Sakhalin Island, hurling 269 civilians to their deaths in the Sea of Japan. On the anniversary, the inevitable conspiracy theories are attracting worldwide, and often uncritical, attention, perhaps more than at any other time since the incident. Some of the allegations, contends Roy Godson, a U.S. intelligence expert at Washington's Georgetown University, are a result of "a massive, overt disinformation campaign" by the Soviet Union.
The theories vary and sometimes conflict, but all attempt to make U.S. officials share in the blame for the tragedy with the Soviet commanders who ordered the unarmed airliner to be destroyed. Some maintain that the Korean plane was on a U.S. spy mission, as the Soviets claim. Others charge that while the plane may have been inadvertently off course, U.S. military trackers saw it go astray, issued no warning and coldly exploited the situation to see how Soviet air-defense systems would react. Concerned over the notice such arguments were getting, the State Department held a briefing last week at which one official repeated to reporters: "These charges are totally false. The U.S. does not use civilian airliners for intelligence purposes, and there was no U.S. intelligence connection whatever with this plane, directly or indirectly."
Radio Moscow even went so far as to pick up and wildly distort an Italian newspaper interview with John Keppel, a retired State Department official, who had wondered about early reports that KAL 007 might have exploded some time after being hit by the Soviet missile. The Soviet broadcast twisted this into an allegation by Keppel that U.S. officials had ordered the plane blown up by remote control after the fighter attack so that its spy gear could never be recovered.
Another conspiracy theory was raised in an unusually speculative article in Defence Attaché, a generally respected London journal. An editor's note disclaimed agreement with the views of the author, who wrote under a pen name. The author's basic claim was that the KAL intrusion on Sept. 1 deliberately coincided with the Far East passes of both a U.S. spy satellite and the space shuttle Challenger. In his version, the airliner was sent over Soviet territory instead of a U.S. electronic-surveillance aircraft because U.S. officials believed that the Soviets would never shoot down a civilian aircraft. The U.S. plan, he suggests, was for the satellite and the shuttle to monitor Soviet responses to the airliner's intrusion. NASA officials insist that the shuttle was never close enough to receive aircraft radio transmissions from the 007 intrusion area and thus could not have had such a monitoring assignment.
A more elaborate theory was presented in the leftist U.S. magazine The Nation.