The Curious Case of Flight 007
Nossiter, Bernard D.
BOOKS The Curious Case of Flight 007 "THE TARGET IS DESTROYED" by Seymour M. Hersh Random House. 282 pp. $17.95. SHOOTDOWN: The Verdict on KAL 007 by R.W. Johnson Viking Press. 335 pp....
...If Reagan, rhetoric apart, was relatively restrained, the American military was not...
...one made a brave if unsuccessful attempt to order up fictitious but provocative intelligence...
...As Reagan spoke, moreover, his intelligence community of rival services was reluctantly accepting the early assessment by the Air Force: The Soviet fighter did not know he was slaughtering innocents...
...The plane, Moscow asserted a few days later, had continued on its flight to Japan, a crude lie that went uncorrected for several more days...
...It has a sporting chance of escape...
...Hersh proposes that the plane's notoriously meticulous Captain Chun allowed his engineer to insert a ten-degree error in the liner's navigation system...
...We are likely never to know...
...This, of course, is one more reason to think Johnson is nearer the truth...
...Puffery aside, Hersh has drawn from his extensive interviews a bizarre portrait of the elite National Security Agency (NSA...
...In the search for wreckage, the NSA director refused to give the U.S...
...satellite and several intelligence planes and ships were all around 007 to harvest the wealth it triggered...
...The odds against such a sequence are overwhelming and strain probability...
...Johnson is a journalist in the style of I.F...
...The best intelligence came from a pair of drunken Russian GIs gossiping on their radios...
...But this does not diminish Hersh's remarkable account of NSA, a fit agency for Dr...
...A military plane flies faster and can outmaneuver a 747 like the Korean liner...
...Hersh, a brilliant reporter, is ill-served by his publishers, who claim on the jacket that he has told "what really happened to flight 007...
...havior...
...Lies, incompetence, and arrogance mark the cruel incident three years ago when a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean civilian airliner as it was leaving Soviet airspace, killing all 269 aboard...
...But could even the Reagan Administration risk sending American civilians to a ghastly death...
...The clumsy failure of Soviet interceptors over Kamchatka opened up even more Russian electronic secrets, and a U.S...
...Johnson would argue that his unproven theory fits the known facts better than Hersh's tale of compounded error...
...by Bernard D. Nossiter Governments often lie to protect or enlarge power...
...Navy some useful intelligence the electronics crowd had discovered...
...Like any good reporter, Hersh is skeptical...
...Between oaths, one asked the other if he heard about the civilian airliner mistakenly shot down by their comrades...
...He never made a conclusive identification before firing—astonishingly reckless beBernard D. Nossiter is a veteran foreign correspondent whose new book, "Global Struggle," an account of Third World economic conflict with the rich, will be published by Harper & Row early in 1987...
...But he has allowed himself to be persuaded of an implausible theory to explain why 007 was 365 miles off course...
...The NSA directs an armada of ships, planes, and satellites in the Northern Pacific along the route 007 was flying...
...nobody passed this on to the ill-fated liner...
...A cassette prepackaged with the conventional flight plan should have prevented any accidental entry in the navigation system, Hersh's starting point...
...Johnson (Shoot-down: The Verdict on KAL 007) can hardly be faulted for failing to fix what actually took place...
...In effect, Hersh says, 007 blundered into Soviet airspace twice because of compounded errors in navigation...
...And yet there are stiff objections...
...NSA sent emergency reports to a skeptical Washington which said, in effect, "Stop worrying...
...18.95...
...The skies in the Northern Pacific were dark and the line, over the Soviet island of Sakhalin, adopted the twists and turns of a plane evading detection...
...America may be perfectly willing to sacrifice foreigners, dehumanized strangers...
...President Reagan called the Russians barbaric and said they must have known they were destroying a civilian airliner because it had flown a straight course on a clear, moonlit night...
...After 007 was destroyed, the intelligence experts spent hours trying to establish a link between reports of a missing Korean liner and what they saw and heard on their screens and radios...
...Stone, a close and voracious reader of documents, cut off from officials, possessing a clear and logical mind...
...Their agents, uniformed and civilian, who service military and intelligence bureaucracies, routinely lie as part of the nature of their work...
...According to Seymour Hersh in "The Target Is Destroyed," some generals plotted moves that could have brought on World War III...
...And it is driven by men paid to risk their lives...
...In fact, Reagan, who had chosen to exploit the propaganda value of the affair rather than take the more dangerous course urged by some of his advisers, had to know that at least three of his four statements were untrue...
...Johnson is struck by the fact that Captain Chun, before leaving Anchorage for Seoul, plotted on paper a new course that neatly matched the "mistaken" route he took...
...Strange-love...
...NSA's electronic magic did, indeed, pick up the Soviet fighters that scrambled over Kamchatka and Sakhalin to intercept 007...
...This, Johnson concludes, is the behavior of a plane engaged in a passive probe, one without reconnaissance devices, sent aloft to touch off Soviet defenses...
...Moreover, if the object was to tickle Soviet electronics, why not send a military plane...
...Moreover, at least seven more errors of roughly equal magnitude were then made to account for the plane's peculiar course...
...This multi-billion dollar outfit is an electronic snooper, supposedly capable of eavesdropping on the calls of Politburo members in their limousines...
...As it happened, by dreadful accident or design, 007 produced an intelligence bonanza for the United States...
...The plane forced the Soviets to light up a vast array of air-defense installations, deep into the sensitive Soviet Northeast...
...This was done frequently in the 1950s and 1960s...
...These tendencies reinforce each other, creating arrogance and incompetence in government...
...Nor does it undo the careful case Johnson has built to demonstrate that Captain Chun and his crew knew just what they were doing...
...According to Hersh, NSA's bumbling bureaucratic behavior continued to the very end...
...Given governments' propensity for untruth, Hersh and R.W...
...Johnson, an Oxford don, candidly acknowledges he can't prove his thesis that flight 007 was engaged in a passive intelligence probe...
...Captain Chun's subsequent behavior tallies with that of a pilot who avoids contact with civilian airports, evades Soviet fighters over Sakhalin, and makes a last, barely unsuccessful dash for international waters...
Vol. 50 • November 1986 • No. 11
