Flight 007, licence to lie

Philip Knightley

THE TARGET IS DESTROYED by Seymour Hersh

Faber & Faber, £9.95

This is the sixth book on the shooting down of Korean Air Line's flight 007 by a Soviet jet fighter over the Sakhalin peninsular on 1 September 1983. There have also been hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on the subject. The reason for such intense interest is not hard to understand: the two super powers con- fronted each other in a shooting situation and both behaved appallingly.

The Soviet Union blew the KAL jumbo out of the sky, killing all 269 passengers and crew, and has insisted ever since that 007 was an American spy plane and there- fore its action was justified. The United States suppressed its own intelligence that the shooting down was an unfortunate error and used the incident for political purposes.

The result was that Soviet-American relations deteriorated to the lowest level since the Cuban missile crisis 20 years earlier, with some of the Pentagon hawks arguing for a response ranging from the breaking of diplomatic relations to military action.

Seymour Hersh, an American investiga- tive journalist who first made his name with an account of the My Lai massacre, set out to write what he felt was the real story of the shooting down of Flight 007 the abuse of communications intelligence. Probably because of his reputation he achieved access to sources normally beyond any author or reporter. Dozens of people in the US intelligence community, some of whom had never spoken to a journalist in their lives, agreed to see him.

The Soviets granted him permission to visit Moscow and conduct interviews about the disaster. High-ranking Soviet defence ministry officials and military officers gave him their version of events. He interviewed Japanese military and government offi- cials. Yet in the end Hersh is forced to conclude that the whole story of Flight 007 may never be told. There are too many imponderables, and the men with crucial evidence — the flight crew of 007 — are dead.

But, given this, Hersh tells a powerful and frightening story of Soviet incompe- tence and intransigence matched only by American opportunism and manipulation of public opinion. Hersh says that the 007 incident demonstrated the importance of honest intelligence in a world where the concept of deterrence is predicated on the assumption that the men with their fingers on the trigger have accurate information.

Yet he concludes, 'Those in Washington who chose to increase international ten- sion, and their counterparts in Moscow who responded in kind, were acting in ignorance of the facts and realities.'

The facts were there. If the story has a hero he is Major General James C. Pfautz, then head of US Air Force Intelligence. When the first news of shooting trickled through to Washington from American signals and communications intelligence outposts in the area, Pfautz set to work to prepare an intelligence brief. He was scep- tical from the beginning that the Soviets would deliberately shoot down a civilian plane without any of their forces on alert, so be began with the cock-up theory.

There was an RC-135, a US intelligence- gathering plane, a modified Boeing 707, in the area where Flight 007 had been shot down. Had the Russian fighter pilot mis- taken the KAL jumbo for the RC-135? Pfautz's staff checked with tanker pilots who had done refuelling at night of RC-135 missions in the North Pacific. They told of the enormous difficulty of distinguishing between the two planes. One tanker pilot told of approaching within 500 yards of a Japan Air Line jumbo before he realised that the aircraft was not the RC-135 he was supposed to refuel.

All Pfautz's early suppositions were eventually confirmed by hard intelligence. The Russians thought Flight 007 was the RC-135, which had been on a mission just outside Soviet airspace, now intruding over Soviet territory. The pilot of the Russian fighter, flying below 007, failed to see it was a commercial airliner. He fired a warning burst of cannon shells. The crew of 007 probably did not see them. He was ordered to shoot down the airliner. He said, 'Holy shit!', but he went ahead and obeyed his orders.

In Washington, leading members of the administration, who knew if not all this, at least enough to make them cautious, de- cided that the incident offered a marvel- lous opportunity to slam the Russians, to provoke world outrage at the Soviet Un- ion's callous indifference to human life. The official version would be that the Russians had knowingly and cold- bloodedly shot down a civilian airliner that had inadvertently strayed into Soviet air space and that American intelligence inter- cepts of Soviet signals traffic confirmed this.

The administration machinery worked quickly and smoothly. The intelligence material was doctored to support this case. Complaints from Soviet experts that the English translation of the intercepts was wrong and out-of-context and would even- tually rebound on the administration were ignored. Officials gave special briefings to the press 'to put the proper spin' on the intelligence material.

Hersh says it all worked brilliantly. The United States scored a stunning propa- ganda victory over the Soviet Union, which, instead of coming clean and admit- ting a tragic error, found itself stuck with the 'US spy plane' story for which it was unable to offer any concrete evidence.

So convincing had been the administra- tion's presentation of its version, says Hersh, that when the National Security Agency told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee three weeks later that the agency had now concluded that the Rus- sian fighter pilot did not know that his target was a civilian airliner, 'most of the senators seemed to care little'.

Major General Pfautz remained dis- mayed about the administration's handling of the affair. He said that he had always felt that the United States reacted 'spasti- cally' to the Soviet Union without getting all the facts. 'I feel there's hope for mankind if at a time of crisis we can say "Hey, we think they've screwed up." If you hold the rhetoric until we get all the facts in, the other guy might say, "Hey, maybe they're not so bad after all".'