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[sec.] That K.A.L. 007 changed altitude and speed as it entered and flew over Sakhalin Island in Soviet territory, without reporting to Tokyo air traffic controllers as required under international aviation procedures.

[sec.] That near the end of the flight, Tokyo air traffic controllers received reports, ostensibly from K.A.L. 007, about and altitude change by the airliner that never tok place.

[sec.] That the airliner changed course over Sakhalin Island without reporting to Tokyo air traffic controllers.

[sec.] That early in the flight K.A.L. 007 must have made an unreported turn to the north toward Soviet territory.

[sec.] That the tape of the airliner's final radio transmission says something quite different from what the International Civil Aviation Organization (I.C.A.O.) claimed it said in a report that U.S. officials have heralded as "authoritative."

[sec.] On August 23, 1984, attorney Melvin Belli, who represents several relatives of those who died in the disaster, reported on West German television station ARD a conversation he had in Seoul with the widows of the pilot and co-pilot of K.A.L. 007: "They told me that the captain and the co-pilot were paid to intentionally take this shortcut over Russian territory. They made this statement voluntarily in the presence of three other American attorneys and thirty bereaved persons. The widows said that K.A.L. paid its pilots special bonuses for flying over Russian territory. The widows, furthermore, stated that the pilots had become so afraid of these flights that they wanted to discontinue them." Another lawyer present during the conversation told The Nation that Capt. Chun Byung-in's widow said that Chun had told her Flight 007 was an especially dangerous mission.

Ted Koppel admitted years later, "This was at a period when the President was very much interested in portraying the Russians as being a bunch of barbarians, was very much interested in getting the Strategic Defense Initiative program going. It all fit very nicely, didn't it, to have this image of the Russians at that time knowingly shoot down a civilian airliner?"

Nightline's programs on KAL 007 featured a steady parade of hawks like Richard Viguerie, William Buckley, George Will, William Safire ("a brutal act of murder"), Jesse Helms ("premeditated, deliberate murder") and John Lofton ("sever diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union"). Koppel himself stated there wasn't "any question that the Soviet Union deserves to be accused of murder, it's only a question of whether it's first degree or second degree."

On Nightline "007 Day Three," Koppel promoted an on-air telephone poll asking viewers whether the administration "should take strong action against the Soviets." Over 90 percent said yes. On the same show, right-wing leader Terry Dolan stated that "anyone who would suggest that the U.S. would ever consider shooting down an unarmed civilian plane is downright foolish and irresponsible."

When the U.S. shot down a civilian plane five years later, Nightline's hometeam bias was evident. Instead of eight consecutive shows (followed by two more later in the month), there were only three Nightline programs focusing on the U.S. shootdown. No American foreign policy critics denounced the U.S. for murder; instead the discussion focused on "somber questions" about "the tragedy," occasionally implying that Iranians were to blame.

What can explain the disparity in coverage? In each case, Nightline meshed with the propaganda needs of the U.S. government: the Soviet action was hashed and rehashed as evidence against the Evil Empire; the U.S. action was deftly handled as a tragic mistake.

GOP & KAL-007: 'The Key Is to Lie First'

By Robert Parry

At the AP, I made a small contribution to questioning the official story. I felt the released intercepts were suspicious. So I took the English language translation, as well as the original Russian, to Russian language experts, including one who taught Pentagon personnel how to translate Russian military transmissions.

The Russian language experts noted one important error in the English translation released by the State Department. In the context of the Soviet pilot trying to communicate with the KAL plane, the administration translated the Russian word "zapros," or inquiry, as "IFF" for "identify: friend or foe." The AP's experts, however, said "zapros" could mean any kind of inquiry, including open radio transmissions or physical warnings.

The significance of the mistranslation was central to the administration's case. U.S. officials had extrapolated from "IFF" to advance the "murder in the sky" argument. Since an IFF transmission can only be received by Soviet military aircraft, that was further proof that the Russians made no attempt to warn the civilian airliner.

Still, the mistranslation was only one of the ways the tapes were doctored, as Snyder discovered when the intercepts were delivered to his office for transfer into a video presentation that was to be made at the United Nations.

"The tape was supposed to run 50 minutes," Snyder observed. "But the tape segment we [at USIA] had ran only eight minutes and 32 seconds. ... 'Do I detect the fine hand of [Nixon's secretary] Rosemary Woods here?' I asked sarcastically.'"

But Snyder had a job to do: producing the video that his superiors wanted. "The perception we wanted to convey was that the Soviet Union had cold-bloodedly carried out a barbaric act," Snyder noted.

Only a decade later, when Snyder saw the complete transcripts -- including the portions that the Reagan administration had hidden -- would he fully realize how many of the central elements of the U.S. presentation were false.


"The moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first."

'Public Diplomacy'

Another key to the propagandists' success has been to soften up the Washington news media, to ensure that journalists were ready to accept whatever lies were told. To that end, Reagan assigned aggressive "public diplomacy" teams to intimidate and discredit the few Washington journalists who asked pointed questions and tried to get at the truth. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

In this regard, another interesting disclosure in Snyder's book is the quasi-official USIA role played by Accuracy in Media's Reed Irvine. Irvine is commonly described as a "media watchdog" and is addressed personably as "Reed" when he appears on Koppel's "Nightline." According to Snyder, however, Irvine also was an adviser to the Reagan administration's propaganda apparatus.

Provocation of the enemy was the official task of the Air Force intelligence "Ferret" program. For many years the Air Force had, been sending planes almost daily into Soviet territory to "tickle" their radar and defense systems in order to provoke responses such as the scrambling of fighters, the activation of radar and the firing of missiles. Despite the ever-present possibility that these "Ferret" provocations could start a nuclear war, American planes, according to Time, "had triggered the firings of more than 900 Soviet ground-to-air missiles, so far without a hit."(55) Over 25 aircraft had been attacked or


Washington was called "A City Without Guts" after Reagan backed off.
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destroyed and more than 120 Americans killed in the past three decades by these secret and deadly games of provocation.(56)

The "Ferret" program included the use of commercial airliners to gather intelligence along Soviet borders. According to Ernest Volkman, National Security Editor for Defense Science, Korean Air Lines "regularly overflies Russian airspace to gather military intelligence."(57) KAL, says the Boston Globe, was essentially a military company, all of its pilots being military officers with high security clearance. U.S. army intelligence officials have admitted KAL commercial planes have in the past been equipped with side-view cameras and sent to border areas to take pictures.(58) One of these KAL commercial flights was the means used by American intelligence to provoke the enemy and give us our first sacrifice.

At the end of August, American intelligence learned that on September 1 the Soviet Union was going to test their new PL-5 missile on the Kamchatka Peninsula.(59) In order to learn all we could about the tests, we activated all our radar, infrared and radio listening posts in the area. These included the sophisticated "Cobra Dane" Air Force radar system on Shemya island at the end of the Aleutians, the "Cobra Judy" Navy ship radar system near Kamchatka, the U.S. spy satellite network, RC 135 spy planes with radar and other sensors and our regular radio monitoring posts in Japan and Alaska.(60)

U.S. intelligence watched KAL 997[sic] fly into Soviet territory.
Whether KAL 007 was purposely sent by the U.S. into Soviet territory as part of this intelligence gathering-either equipped with cameras and other sensors or as what the intelligence community refers to as "a target of opportunity" - is as yet not known. Most of the pertinent information has been locked up by a U.S. court as a part of a liability suite against KAL and the U.S. government brought by the families of those killed. The suit claims that the military "saw and recognized radar indications" that KAL 007 was in Soviet territory but deliberately took no action to warn the crew.(61)
Whatever the reason for the flight's course deviation, all the details of the flight itself conform to a scenario of deliberate provocation of the Soviets by U.S. intelligence. As The Washington Post Magazine cover put it, "the U.S. watched" as the plane went into Soviet territory. Several
crucial facts make this conclusion virtually inescapable: (62)

[1] KAL 007 was held up for 40 minutes past its scheduled takeoff time, coordinating its arrival time [3:00 A.M.] over the Kamchatka test site precisely with the moment the American "Ferret D" spy satellite was over the same site.

[2] The plane was equipped with several backup Systems that made malfunctioning unlikely. But even if its computer was pro-grammed incorrectly and then doublechecked carelessly, its weather radar system and compass would easily have shown the pilot he was off course and over land not ocean.

[3] The pilot, who had flown the route many times before, only had to look out the window to see the lights of the towns, roads and cars on Kamchatka to know he was not over the Pacific as he was supposed to be. Yet he continued to fly deeper into Soviet territory.

[4] The pilot remained in radio contact with both Tokyo air control and a second plane, KAL 015, flying behind it, so it would have been simple for U.S. intelligence to have warned it when it saw that the Soviets had discovered KAL 007, cancelled their missile test, scrambled its fighter planes and told its pilots to follow

[5] U.S. intelligence could communicate directly to the President, the Secretary of Defense and the CIA, and could have put on their desks 10 minutes after transmission the information that KAL 007 was being chased by interceptors over Soviet ter-ritory. This would have given Reagan and his staff more than an hour and a half in the middle of a normal work day to warn the plane. Whether the President was told and then decided to allow the sacrifice or whether intelligence officers who were watching made the decision themselves is not now known.

Stories later ran in The New York Times and The Washingron Post Magazine concluding that "United States intelligence experts say that they have reviewed all available evidence and found no indication that Soviet air defense personnel knew before the attack that the target was a commercial plane"(63) and that "the entire sweep of events - from the time the Soviets first began tracking KAL Flight 007... to the time of the shootdown - was meticulously monitored and analyzed instantly by U.S. intelligence."(64) These revelations sank below national consciousness as though they had never been published.

Every detail of the government version given to the public was later shown to have been in-correct. Though Reagan said, "There is no way a pilot could mistake this for anything other than a civilian airliner," tapes later released showed pilots calling it "an RC 135." Though the President said there was no warning by the Russians, the State Department later admitted tapes showed the pilot said, "I am firing cannon bursts" before firing the missile that knocked it down, and had even said the target "does not respond to inquiries."(65) The President's claim that the Russian pilot could easily see the plane's outline in the clear moonlight was contradicted by the State Department's later admission that the Russian plane was always 2,000 feet below the airliner and could not see an outline at all. When the Soviet plane fired its warning shots, KAL 007 gave no response and continued to head straight for Vladivostok on the Soviet mainland.(66) Since the Russians have always been paranoid about their borders, and since there was no way they could possibly know the plane wasn't carrying nuclear warheads, we could reliably count on them to shoot it down. What the President had called "the Soviet massacre', was in fact the first American sacrifice of the Reagan presidency.

We projected all our bloodlust into the Russian bear.

It felt good to have 269 sacrificial victims as proof that the enemy contained all our sadism. Reagan's popularity polls rose again. NBC-TV

... Once again the American people had to taunt Reagan into more aggressive action. We even told him where to invade. "THE WAY TO ANSWER FLIGHT 007 OUTRAGE: GIVE MOSCOW HELL IN CENTRAL AMERICA," read a New York Post headline. But Central America was still being uncooperative. So Reagan turned first to two other sacrificial stages already in prepatation-Beirut and Grenada.

Brun’s thesis is that, while on flight from Anchorage to Tokyo, KAL 007 was a decoy posing as an innocent flight off course but was really on a spy mission to trigger the electronic and military reactions of the most strategically sensitive Soviet Pacific defense installations, where Soviet missiles were tested and their nuclear submarines trained, so as to give the U.S. military “real time” information.

This intelligence ploy failed spectacularly, of course, as the Soviets detected the plane and dispatched fighters to destroy it. Brun asserts that, in conjunction with this action, an air battle ensued between Soviet and American aircraft of at least two hours duration wherein ten U.S. military aircraft were shot down, killing some 30 U.S. military men.