KAL Flight 007

An Article by John Keppel

Based on Incident at Sakhalin: The True Mission of KAL Flight 007

by Michel Brun

There are several reasons

There are several reasons why the public should not accept the "case closed" verdict on the 1983 Korean Air Lines Flight 007 disaster which the United States Government has been seeking for more than a dozen years to impose.

Two hundred and sixty-nine civilians and thirty or more U.S. Air Force and Navy servicemen lost their lives in a wholly unnecessary and improper U.S. intelligence and provocation operation. Infairness to the dead and the next-of-kin, the circumstances of their deaths should be made clear. The integrity of U.S. law is also at stake in this respect.

In the incident the world came closer to World War III than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. If similar dangerous mistakes are to be avoided in the future, it is essential that the lessons of the KAL 007 case be learned. There is by now a large body of new evidence, all of it accessible and much of it easily verifiable, which should be examined by a Congressional investigation or one by a Special Prosecutor.

Much of it is contained in Incident at Sakhalin: The True Mission of KAL Flight 007 by Michel Brun, a French aviation expert. In his book, Brun shows why the official story of what happened to the Korean airliner is wrong in virtually every detail. As well as presenting the new evidence the book tells the story of how he got it. It includes accounts of his exhaustive and successful searches of the beaches of Japan for debris from the airliner far to the south of where the official version of events says it was shot down.

What we were told at the time of the KAL 007 disaster (August 31, 1983) was essentially the same as the government asks us to believe or, more precisely, to accept without contest today. According to this "official truth," the Korean airliner, bound for Seoul from New York via Anchorage, went off course accidentally and unwittingly, alone overflew Soviet territory at the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island, alone was intercepted by Soviet fighters over Sakhalin Island, and alone was shot down and crashed into the sea to its west.

Over more than ten years of investigation, Michel Brun has collected and analyzed evidence which indicates that KAL 007's off course flight was intentional that when the Korean airliner approached Sakhalin Island so too did a number of U.S. military aircraft some of which had already overflown the Kamchatka Peninsula that when a number of them entered Soviet territorial airspace at Sakhalin a more than two hour air battle was initiated in which some ten U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy aircraft were shot down with the loss of at least thirty U.S. servicemen that KAL 007 itself appears not to have overflown either Kamchatka or Sakhalin but passed through the Straits just the south of that Soviet island flew south over the Sea of Japan for at least 45 minutes and was then destroyed off Honshu by means and for reasons which remain to be established.

Incident at Sakhalin was published by Four Walls Eight Windows in New York. Your bookstore may have it. If it does not, the store can obtain it from Publishers West, or you can order it by calling 1-800-626-4848.

If you believe that the case requires a rigorous and objective public investigation, please say so to your representatives in Congress. If you send me, John Keppel, by e-mail at keppel@snet.net , copies of letters to your representatives in Congress, we may be able to cite a cumulative tally of letters calling for an investigation.

If you have unclassified information on the events at the time of the disaster or concerning the cover-up, please send it to me by e-mail. You will find an account of my involvement in the case in my preface to the book and in Michel Brun's text. I will pass on any information sent me to the author and the publisher, unless for some reason you tell me not to.

If you have information which you think may be restricted by classification or by an NSA or other non-disclosure oath, please ask your Congressional Representative or a lawyer how it can be brought to bear on U.S. Government policy. If you wish the name of a lawyer qualified to offer such advice and prepared in this instance to do so without charge, I will give you one.

From the first there was evidence in plain sight that most, probably all, of the assertions of the official story as to what happened to the Korean airliner were not true. The initial U.S. and Japanese announcements of the disaster (Secretary Shultz's and that of the Japan Defense Agency) clearly referred to two different interceptions and shootdowns, more if you look at the Japanese statement carefully.

The first substantive Soviet statement also indicated not a single incursion into Sakhalin airspace and a single shootdown but several.

The explanation offered by Nikolai Ogarkov, the Soviet Chief of Staff, in his September 9, 1983 press conference was treated by the United States as an admission that the Soviets had shot downthe airliner. But Ogarkov's statement, like virtually all subsequent Soviet and Russian statements on the destruction of KAL 007, was ambiguous. It was only superficially in line with the U.S. position and contained contradictory elements, no doubt intended as flags for careful observers.

In the light of a previously published Soviet radar map, Ogarkov's account of events clearly contained elements taken from two different interceptions and shootdowns. Even more jarring, it cited a time (quoted in Sakhalin time) a full hour after the Korean airliner had left the area.

From debris and oceanographic evidence it was apparent soon after the incident, as the Japanese admiral in charge of the search by the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency (Coast Guard) indicated, that the Korean airliner could not have crashed where the massive search for it was being conducted. He said that if floating debris from the airliner did not show up soon in the search area, they would have to conclude that it had not crashed there.

What made all this hard for most of us (but not Brun) to understand at the time was the extent to which we were hypnotized by the Reagan Administration's false assertions and the extent to which it escalated its rhetoric in support of them, e.g. the alleged (but non-existent) Soviet shooting down of the airliner was "a crime against humanity." We were also bemused by the fact that the other governments involved (Russia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea), each for its own reasons, went along, on the surface at least, with the U.S. story.

In late 1992, however, the cover story threatened to come apart due to United States pressure on Russia to make its endorsement of it more explicit and to Yeltsin's ill-coordinated response to it. To repair the situation the United States, Russia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea agreed to ask the International Civil Aviation Organization to reopen its investigation. In this connection Russia gave the ICAO black box data, allegedly from KAL 007, which even cursory examination should have told anyone who looked were intentionally misleading.

The digital flight data recorder tape shows that the aircraft carrying the DFDR transmitted on five radios simultaneously, whereas KAL 007 was able to transmit only on three simultaneously.

The landing and taxi sequence of the aircraft carrying the DFDR on landing in Alaska does not fit the layout of Anchorage International Airport, at which KAL 007 arrived after its flight from New York.

Examination of the data registered on the DFDR tape shows a take-off and climb sequence in Alaska different from the KAL 007 sequence recorded by the Tower at Anchorage International Airport.

The digital flight data recorder tape contains recordings lasting 27 hours, whereas the DFDR tape aboard KAL 007 could physically have contained no more than 24 hours 48 minutes of recording.

The DFDR tape which the ICAO examined shows that the aircraft followed a constant magnetic heading of 245 degrees. That would have taken it over Sapporo on southern Hokkaido rather than over Sakhalin, where the report says KAL 007 was shot down.

The cockpit voice recorder tape examined by the ICAO in 1993 carries the end of the 18:27 GMT transmission by KAL 007 as "descending to one zero thousand." The copy of the Air Traffic Control recording made at Narita Airport and given to the Japanese Diet in 1985 by Premier Nakasone had the end of the same transmission as "blood bath, really bad."

The digital flight data recorder tape must have come from another aircraft almost certainly one flying a simulation of KAL 007's flight after the event in order to generate false evidence. The cockpit voice recorder tape carries Tokyo, KAL 007 and KAL 015 radio transmissions which were intercepted by stations not aboard the Korean airliner or which, in at least one instance, were outright forgeries. So was the CVR channel carrying cockpit chatter and cabin announcements.

Incident at Sakhalin's basic assertions are:

1.U.S. military aircraft were shot down by the Soviets over or near Sakhalin Island on the night of August 31, 1983, and

2.KAL 007 itself was destroyed some 400 miles to the south, off Honshu, for reasons and by means which remain to be established.

They rest on documentary evidence (photographic, oceanographic, physical, and electronic).

On the first point, Brun has in his possession:

1.a copy of a Japanese Maritime Safety Agency report which mentions 54 tagged items of floating debris, not from the airliner, recovered off Sakhalin shortly after the disaster, and

2.Japanese press photographs of some of these tagged items which are clearly military and of U.S. manufacture. They include a pilot's ejection seat from a high-performance aircraft and part of the wing flap from a U.S. anti-radar aircraft, EF-111.

On the second point, he has:

1.Japanese Maritime Safety Agency statements indicating that floating debris from KAL 007 first showed up off Sakhalin only after nine days following the disaster,

2.official oceanographic data indicating that this floating debris from the airliner must have come from a crash site far to the south of Sakhalin.

3.a copy of the relevant Air Traffic Control communications tapes given to the Japanese Diet by Premier Nakasone in 1985, and

4.computer print-outs of spectrographic and voice-print analysis done at the Iwatsu Electric Company Laboratory by its director Dr. K. Tsuboi, a world-class authority.

Items 3 and 4 above indicate that KAL 007 made radio transmissions as much as 45 minutes after the official story says that it was shot down. These transmissions were made on VHF. For them to have been recorded at Tokyo's Narita Airport the airliner must at the time have been in line-of-sight range of it, thus far to the south of Sakhalin.

Brun's reconstruction of what happened cites a mass of other evidence which is consistent with this hard core. What is astonishing is the mutual consistency of the information he has gathered from diverse sources independent of each other.

Incident at Sakhalin is essential reading for anyone interested in the dangers of clandestine intelligence operations, the risks of nuclear war run by the Reagan Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), cover-ups of discreditable mistakes by government, plausible deniability, the denigration of critics, and the manipulation of the media, U.S. public opinion, international organizations, and the governments of other countries.

John Keppel

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