By now the shooting down of Korean Airlines flight 007 has receded from the headlines. But the repercussions from the incident will undoubtedly set the tone for debate over defense and foreign policy issues in the United States for months to come. President Reagan may not succeed in getting the reparations for the victims' families that he demands of the Soviet Union, but he probably will successfully extract reparations from the Congress in the form of votes for the MX and Pershing II missile systems.
Reagan's handling of the airliner tragedy, taken on its own terms, has been masterful. He pleasantly surprised his domestic opponents by refusing to take rash or provocative military action. Instead Reagan used the 269 deaths as an opportunity to gain ideological ground from which to launch more sweeping military initiatives in the future.
Reagan claimed that the downed airliner only proved what he has always said about the Soviets: that they are barbaric aggressors. He said the incident should "dispel any lingering doubt about what kind of regime we are dealing with." These statements found a surprising echo in even the more moderate quarters of the national media. According to Leslie Gelb of the New York Times, the airliner incident proved "that the leadership of the Soviet Union is different—call it tougher, more brutal or even uncivilized—than most of the rest of the world." Newsweek's cover screamed "Murder in the Air," and its news report ended by baldly stating, "... over a barren Pacific island, the world witnessed the Soviet Union that Ronald Reagan had always warned against."
Soviet officials have encouraged this kind of U.S. response by insisting that their action was completely justified and by making only the mildest statement of regret over the loss of life. The Soviets have stuck to their story that the airliner was on a spying mission and had to be stopped by any means necessary.
In the rush to construct propaganda barricades on both sides, the facts of the case have unfortunately taken a back seat. Because of U.S. and Soviet security considerations, we will never know the whole story of flight 007. But careful consideration of the facts that are available, while not justifying the callous Soviet action, would seem to dictate a much less self-righteous response from the United States.
Reagan's claim that the airliner incident proved the fundamental inhumanity of Soviet leaders was at first based on the assumption that the Soviets knowingly and without warning shot down a civilian plane and its passengers. To support this claim, Reagan publicized a tape of the Soviet pilot's radio transmissions which included the chilling words, "The target is destroyed." Several days later the administration admitted that the same tape also contained the pilot's report that he had fired warning shots which the airliner ignored. And it was weeks later before the State Department finally acknowledged that the Soviets may not have known what kind of plane they were shooting at.
U.S. reports of the incident made a great deal of the fact that the Soviets tracked the Korean airliner for two-and-a-half hours. But for most of that time they only tracked the plane on radar. Apparently the Soviets did not visually locate the intruding plane until a few minutes before it was shot down. In early October the Washington Post reported that this failure to visually locate an intruding aircraft for more than two hours had resulted in the dismissal of Soviet air defense commanders responsible for that region.
According to the tape transcripts released by the United States, the Soviet pilot was never any closer to the Korean plane than two kilometers. Several current and former pilots have since attested that at night from such a distance, a 747 airliner could be mistaken for a U.S. RC-135 spy plane. And it is already known that an RC-135 was patrolling the area during at least part of the time in question. In addition, two former RC-135 crewmen have written in the Denver Post that RC-135s will, on occasion, intentionally penetrate Soviet airspace to test their defenses. It is entirely possible, therefore, that the downing of flight 007 was a tragic case of mistaken identity.
The Soviet claim that the airliner was being used for espionage is obviously self-serving and backed by only scanty evidence. But the U.S. official version is perhaps just as deficient. In the wake of the airline incident, both the Boston Globe and the Hearst newspaper chain ran reports quoting U.S. intelligence officials to the effect that the United States, like the Soviet Union, uses civilian aircraft for reconnaissance purposes along sensitive border areas. Certainly no more plausible explanation has been given for why the Korean plane, equipped with three state-of-the-art computer guidance systems, went so far off course, or why, in an area so heavily monitored by U.S. intelligence, it was not warned of the danger.
The role of the RC-135 in the area is particularly significant in this regard. The administration claims that the spy plane, which according to some reports had earlier crossed the path of flight 007, had been back on the ground at Anchorage for an hour before the Korean airliner went down.
But the two former RC-135 crewmen writing in the Denver Post said that an RC-135 "always is relieved on its orbit by yet another RC-135 just prior to the conclusion of its mission." Their knowledge of the RC-135's capabilities leads them to believe "that the entire sweep of events—from the time the Soviets first began tracking KAL [Korean Airlines] flight 007 ... to the time of the shootdown was meticulously monitored and analyzed instantaneously by U.S. intelligence." They find that "the official U.S. version of events is incomplete and misleading," and they question why the RC-135's capabilities "were never utilized in an attempt to head off the tragedy."
Questions about the role of U.S. intelligence agencies are heightened by the fact that a Soviet missile test was scheduled in the area the night that the airliner was shot down. This means that both U.S. reconnaissance efforts and Soviet concern about intruders would have been at a peak. If the United States was in any way using the Korean airliner for intelligence purposes, or even if we could have headed off the incident and for some reason did not, then the responsibility for the 269 civilian deaths is not as one-sided as has been claimed.
At the very least, these questions should be raised and answered in a national debate that covers the facts of the Korean airliner incident. Instead we have heard a national orgy of threats and insults, backed by a presidential chorus of "I told you so." In this kind of atmosphere, angry words can easily lead to ill-considered deeds. If the Korean airliner tragedy is allowed to serve as "proof" of our need for the MX and Pershing II, the next hasty superpower confrontation could claim not just hundreds but millions of lives.
Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
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