How Moscow Handled the 007 Affair
KENEZ, PETER
LESSONS FOR THE WEST How Moscow Handled the 007Affair BY PETER KENEZ Less than two months have passed since the "termination" of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, and the event is already history....
...Everyone in the West instinctively understood that the U.S...
...He further maintained that there were 11 individuals on board whose task was to handle an enormous store of spying equipment...
...The naive Soviet reader must have thought the entire world "condemned thecrude American provocation" and Washington's "sending innocent people cynically to their death by putting them on a spy plane...
...Did the passengers just die mysteriously...
...Then, apparently, the pilots did not know they were shooting down a 747...
...After that important press conference there were no surprises in the Soviet media's treatment of the matter...
...Moreover, the leaders judged their domestic audience to be more important...
...On the other hand, the statement concluded with the following lines: "Tass is authorized to state that leading circles in the Soviet Union express regret in connection with the loss of human lives and at the same time resolutely condemn those who, consciously or as a result of criminal negligence, have allowed people to die and are now trying to use what happened for unscrupulous purposes...
...At the critical moment there was no one to take charge and act firmly...
...We are under attack...
...The general on the spot could act because he had instructions for such an eventuality...
...Since it is unlikely that we are going to uncover a great deal more information about the USSR's actions in this case than we now have, it is not too early to pose a basic question: How much and what did the affair reveal about Soviet policies and skill...
...Who appointed him judge to assess the social system of the Socialist states...
...The combination of centralization and lack of decisiveness left the giant temporarily muscle-bound...
...Most people would agree that the public relations aspect of Soviet arms control policies, for example, has been very well designed to encourage European and to a lesser extent American opposition to the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe...
...With their embassies and consulates besieged by journalists and demonstrators, Soviet diplomats had to confine themselves to the distribution of this lame explanation issued by the Soviet news agency, Tass...
...Actually, the majority of the Soviet people, reading their press, could guess what had happened, and yet their leaders were incapable of admitting the truth...
...No doubt, officials who haveaccess to the relevant classified information will learn a great deal about how the Soviet military functioned...
...The Tass statement on September 3 was particularly curious...
...After all, who is there to point out the contradiction...
...might do wicked things, but it does not shoot down civilian airplanes...
...The stories about spying, presented by the experts, got increasingly farfetched...
...Did the plane leave Soviet air space and subsequently crash by itself...
...On September 6 a new theme appeared: The United States is orchestrating a world campaign of propaganda against us...
...The incident quickly grew into a propaganda disaster, as the Soviet authorities exhibited extraordinary confusion...
...Soviet representatives abroad sought to give a somewhat different version of what happened for selected foreign audiences than was presented in Pravda...
...In addition, it wanted to reassure the domestic audience that the USSR's borders would remain inviolable...
...civilian leaders gave a poorer account of themselves...
...They obviously did not foresee that destroying a civilian plane would capture the attention of the entire Western world...
...The Soviet leaders could have minimized these harmful consequences by accepting responsibility for downing KAL 007, or even by presenting a consistent story from the beginning...
...it undermined the image of sweet reasonableness that the Russians have tried to project...
...Soviet generals are not known for overstepping their area of competence and easily assuming responsibility...
...As is usual when the Kremlin still has not developed a firm position on an international issue, the press was full of quotations from foreign newspapers...
...Soviet politicians and newspaper men undoubtedly were expressing a genuine frustration...
...The Soviet government especially wanled lo retain ils halo of infallibility...
...Quite obviously, the Foreign Minister did not want to be in the position of having to deny any knowledge of the ultimate fate of the airliner...
...The press conference raised an interesting issue...
...The Soviet system is not efficient, apparently, in responding to political emergencies...
...There is no evidence whatever for believing that those in positions of power agonized over the course taken...
...The plane would not land when it was directed to because the spies were afraid their sophisticated machinery would fall into Soviet hands...
...Papers continued to print selected quotes from foreign sources designed to show that the Koreans were on a CIA-organized mission...
...If the authorities in Moscow believed it would satisfy world opinion, then they betrayed a staggering ignorance of the Western media and attitudes...
...The Kremlin has stated (and there is no reason to doubt it) that the decision to "terminate the flight" was made by the regional Air Defense Command...
...The Soviet Union is a great power and the world must continue to deal with it...
...Then, at the end of September, articles on the subject disappeared from Soviet newspapers...
...Some Russian officials, for instance, while visiting foreign cities, confided that KAL 007 was shot down by accident...
...Some of the admiration has been well founded: The Soviet authorities have in the past often displayed uncommon tact and insight in dealing with foreign public opinion...
...Moreover, the deplorable killing of269 civilian passengers was, alas, not the most shocking event of the modern era...
...On the one hand, it not only repeated but elaborated on the earlier assertion...
...It was a relatively easy task at the time for Soviet editors to scour the Western media for "embarrassing" excerpts...
...When satisfactory quotes were not available from the preferred "bourgeois" press, Izvestia andPravda contented themselves with reprinting the views of Communist and East bloc papers...
...That the men in the Kremlin performed so badly on this occasion, although in the past they have shown a clear understanding of the importance of Western public opinion, is illuminating in several respects...
...They have no Freedom of Information Act to worry about, and therefore their debates, disagreements and errors of judgment are often not revealed...
...By now the Soviets had fully developed their position: They knew they were dealing with a spy plane from the beginning, and as more evidence came in it became ever more certain that they were correct and consequently had nothing to apologize for...
...First, it took the Russians a very long time to establish visual contact with the plane...
...Soviet leaders apparently feel that their citizens have come to believe sentences have magic power, and that it does not strike them as strange if two sentences on the same page obviously contradict each other...
...The dreadful performance of the Soviet leadership, in fact, is the most striking lesson of the events that followed the destruction of the airplane...
...Dealing with their own people, though, turned out to be poor preparation for addressing the rest of the world...
...We need not dwell, however, on the military's incompetence...
...In the West we have come to admire Soviet propaganda and diplomatic maneuvering...
...What were those to think who gained their knowledge entirely from Soviet sources...
...the intruder plane left Soviet air space and continued its flight toward the Sea of Japan...
...Peter Kenez, a past NL contributor, is Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Cruz...
...Indeed, by the end of September, according to Administration officialsin Washington, interest in the tragedy was virtually exhausted...
...The actual shooting down of the airplane on September 1 is the least surprising part of the story...
...for a period at least, it weakened the European peace movement by contradicting the assumption that the two sides in the Cold War are really alike...
...Onewould assume that the timing of the statement had to do with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's journey to Madrid for the closing meeting of the Helsinki review conference...
...It simply did not occur to them that people would become so emotionally involved in the death of 269 human beings...
...The end of the September 3 declaration clearly contradicted the beginning...
...On September 7, the Soviet government finally issued a statement that acknowledged the obvious: "Since even after this {internationally accepted warning signals] the intruder plane did not obey the demand to head for a Soviet airfield, and tried to escape, an Air Defense Force fighter-interceptor fulfilled the command station's order to stop the flight...
...They simply did not know how to handle the difficult and obviously unpleasant matter...
...and various Soviet experts, military and civilian, reported ever more proof that the plane was spying...
...The Soviet leaders do much better when they have the leisure to consult and plan...
...Soviet public pronouncements on blowing up KAL 007 revealed a remarkable ineptness...
...During the rest of September the newspapers were full of the affair...
...It cannot be said that the Soviet Union attempted to underplay the significance of the action it had taken so long to admit...
...But the gap between what the Soviet people were being told and what was being said elsewhere could not be allowed to become too glaring...
...At this point they were more concerned about winning the sympathy of their own people than explaining themselves to foreign audiences...
...Much of the impression of Soviet cleverness, though, is attributable to the ability of politicians in Moscow to operate in secret...
...It detracted attention from the deployment of American missiles in Europe at a crucial time...
...If not, the discussion of the weather is clearly irrelevant...
...That is perfectly understandable, perhaps even appropriate...
...But it is far more likely that they were playing for time...
...That audience did not require a coherent story...
...And Tass went on to say that the Korean airliner was on a spy mission, staged by the CIA...
...Lastly, in the Soviet Union the needs of domestic and foreign propaganda are often in sharp conflict...
...Everything we know about the Soviet leaders, about their extraordinary suspiciousness and concern for the security of their borders, should have prepared us for what happened...
...On September 19, for example, Marshal of Aviation Pyotr Kirsanov explained to the readers oiPravda that the Korean plane's flight was synchronized not only with a satellite, but also with the movements of an armada of American ships and military planes...
...Would the military authorities have acted differently if they knew their target was a regularly scheduled Korean flight...
...The fact that the Red Air Force carried out a purge in the Pacific Regional Command soon after the event strongly suggests that the authorities in Moscow were less than fully satisfied with the performance...
...We have been treated unfairly...
...The initial, extremely brief statement appeared inPravda, the Party newspaper, on September 2. It spoke of an "unidentified airplane" and asserted that the craft left Soviet air space unharmed...
...The heart of the matter is that they judged humanity on the basis of Soviet values and experiences...
...In vain does it havean Institute of the USA, and in vain does it have in positions of authority people with long experience in Western countries...
...For approximately 10 minutes it was in the observation zone of radar devices, after which it could no longer be observed...
...Ogarkov contended that the weather was poor when the incident occurred, and therefore the pilot did not know that he was shooting down a 747...
...It is rather unsettling to contemplate that our adversaries in the Cold War have such a poor understanding of the Western world...
...First, the Soviet system proved inflexible...
...Next day, in Madrid, Gromyko repeated the crucial sentence word for word...
...But even those of us who have to be satisfied with reading the New York Times and Pravda must conclude that the Soviet Air Force did not do well...
...simple Soviet citizens" inundated editorial offices with letters expressing their indignation at the American provocation and at the hypocrisy of President Reagan...
...Thus Izvestia, the government daily, asked plaintively that day: "What right does he [Reagan] have to make judgments on all these things...
...The whole sordid sequence of events caused considerable harm to Soviet interests...
...On September 9 the government put Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of Staff of the Red Army, Boris Kornienko, a deputy foreign minister, and Leonid Zam-yatin, a member of the Party's Central Committee in front of Western journalists to answer questions...
...The Soviet press maintained its completely untenable position for five days...
...World attention had turned to other matters...
...Second, the Soviet Union misjudged Western opinion...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 20
