<KMoore1223@aol.com>

Mon 3/14/2005 5:53 PM

What Really Happened?

The key questions which must be answered include the following:

\* How could KAL 007 remain airborne for 12-plus minutes without the
crew being in at least partial control?

\* How could the plane descend so fast during the early stage of its
descent, then slow to less than one-half the initial rate, without the
crew being in substantial control?

\* How could a jetliner be \"out of control,\" yet so closely follow a
textbook descent pattern?

\* Why were there no \"Mayday\" signals from KAL 007 during the minute
or more that it was in radio contact with Tokyo after the attack?

\* How could the supposed \"crash\" site (and locations of debris) be
closer to the point of attack than the plane\'s minimum speed to remain
airborne for 12 minutes plus would seem to allow?

\* Why was so little debris (and so few human remains) found,
considering debris recoveries from other disasters involving huge
aircraft?

\* Why was the recovered debris devoid of the sort of items one would
expect to come from the plane\'s cargo pit (such as luggage)?

\* Why were no life vests (either on or off bodies) found among the
debris?

\* Why was the search for KAL 007 abandoned by the U.S. after only ten
weeks (and never resumed), when searches for debris and remains from
other far less controversial air-crash incidents often last for many
months or years?

\* How does one explain the radar trackings which followed KAL 007
toward Sakhalin Island after the attack, when the jumbo jet was moving
away from the island at the time of the attack?

\* How does one explain the confirmed report from the FAA (based on
information from the Japanese self-defense force) that the plane was
tracked by the Hokkaido radar to a landing on the island?

\* If the airliner was indeed under sufficient control of the pilot to
make a 180 turn and head toward Sakhalin, why would the captain choose
to ditch it in the sea rather than land on a runway?

Assuming KAL 007 did not crash, then what happened after the attack? Is
there an explanation which takes into account the time the plane
remained aloft, its fast-slow descent rate, the incongruities regarding
the location, nature, and extent of debris, and the early reports that
the jet had landed on Sakhalin?

We cannot be certain that it happened as we will now speculate, but we
do believe that something very similar occurred: The rocket attack
destroyed the number four engine, generating shrapnel which punctured
the fuselage and ripped some chunks of metal from the plane (including
that small chip from the tail section, which was the largest piece of
the plane ever found). The decompression hurled at least two (and
possibly more) passengers from the plane, along with the sundry personal
effects and the other cabin items that were eventually found. Additional
debris could have fallen at various points during the descent.

The jetliner, according to standard procedure, descended quickly to a
point where the temperature and amount of oxygen could support life,
then slowed as the pilot decided how best to get on the ground safely
and with minimal additional injury and loss of life. He decided to
return to Sakhalin and touch down on one of the existing military
runways. By the time the jet began making its turn, it was perhaps 40
miles from Sakhalin. For the next five or six minutes it headed for the
island and, as it prepared for the landing, it dropped below the
Wakkanai radar some 50 miles away.

Continuing with our scenario, once on the ground the passengers and crew
were taken captive, the plane was sequestered (there would be adequate
facilities for doing so at a military air base), and the small amount of
debris which resulted from the engine explosion and decompression was
soon discovered (Soviet vessels and aircraft began searching the area
within an hour after the attack) and thereafter cited by the Soviets as
\"proof\" that KAL 007 had crashed into the sea with no survivors.
Later, segments of the plane and other props were planted, like Easter
eggs, so that they could be conveniently \"discovered,\" and publicized
years later, as conclusive proof that KAL 007 had \"crashed.\"

Is there any other scenario that so completely takes into account the
amount, location, and nature of the debris; the small number and
condition of the bodies which were found; the time KAL 007 is known to
have remained airborne; the considerable distance it likely travelled
during its descent; the early reports of a \"safe landing;\" and the
other key components of the case?

The truth about KAL 007 has been obfuscated, to a significant degree, by
the tendency of even well-intentioned conservatives and anti-communists
to remain willfully blind to the implications of the abundant evidence
that conflicts with the official line.

Consider, for example, this extract from a May 6, 1985 response by a
prominent senator (widely perceived to be a conservative) to a
constituent who had expressed concern about the possibility of KAL 007
survivors: \"We are all familiar with the sequence of events surrounding
the shooting down of the civilian Korean airliner, KAL 007, and many
questions still remain. However, no known reports show any evidence to
support the possibility of survivors. Upon the conclusion of a two-month
search in the Sea of Japan, the Department of Defense reported that
there were no findings or signs of wreckage. The search totaled over
3,000 square miles, 3,000 hours of flight time, and more than 320
ship-days at the cost of over \$22 million dollars. The evidence simply
does not support the probability of survivors regardless of the speed of
descent.\"

Similarly, the recently declassified November 15, 1983 Navy report
(referred to earlier) asserts that the search was conducted from
September 1-November 5, 1983, over a 225 square mile area, during which
the navy utilized remote-controlled, unmanned submarines capable of
descending 6,000 feet; special underwater navigation systems; a special
\"side-scan\" sonar system; and a line-of-sight precision navigation
system. Nevertheless, \"nothing associated with KAL 007 was
discovered.\"

Surely the expenditure of all that time and money, covering such a broad
expanse of the sea and utilizing topnotch technology, with nothing
whatsoever to show for it, might \-- just might \-- raise the
possibility that a crash had not occurred. And if no crash occurred, the
probability of survivors, and a lot of them, would be evident. Make no
mistake about it: The completely negative result of the exhaustive and
expensive U.S. search for remnants of KAL 007, a summarized by the
senator\'s letter an, the Navy report, is exactly what the result would
have been if no crash had occurred. It is definitely not the result one
would expect if a huge airliner had crashed.

The official conclusions about KAL 007 reek of whitewash, applied on the
U.S. side, perhaps, to prevent the American people from rising in their
wrath to veto further appeasement of communism and head off what could
otherwise become a major roadblock on the road to the much-vaunted new
world order. Were the full truth to come out, for instance, programs of
aid and trade with the Soviets, summit meetings, arms controls treaties,
and the many other aspects of our government\'s (and especially our
State

Department\'s) questionable foreign policy agenda, would undoubtedly
become far more difficult to implement.

Victims Alive?

Avraham Shifrin, a one time major in the Red Army and legal adviser in
the USSR\'s Ministry of Defense, was imprisoned for a decade during a
purge of Soviet Jews. He was eventually allowed to emigrate to Israel,
where he established a research center to document the existence of
prisons and concentration camps in the Soviet Union. His 1980 book, The
First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps in the USSR, listed more
than 2,000 Soviet prisons, slave labor camps, and psychological prisons.
Since 1989, Shifrin, as executive director of the Jerusalem-based
Research Centre for Prisons, Psych-prisons and Forced-Labor
Concentration Camps of the USSR, has been investigating the KAL 007
tragedy. On July 11, 1991 he issued a lengthy press release which
included this startling paragraph:

Our investigation (in-complete yet) has brought us on the tracks of the
kidnapped people. We know, for instance, that Congressman McDonald has
gone through a number of prisons in Moscow, among them the Central
Lubyanka, Lefortovo, \[and\] a \"special dacha\" of the KGB in a suburb
of Moscow. As far as his present whereabouts are concerned, the
investigation is underway, and the information available at the moment
cannot be disclosed. We partially know the camps where the plane people
were and, with a high degree of probability, are kept now. As for the
children from the plane, they were separated from their parents and
safely hidden in the orphan houses of one of the Soviet Middle Asian
republics.

It should be emphasized that this report is unconfirmed. But it is
sufficiently specific to merit thorough follow-up by our government.
Yet, as we write (in early August), it has been ignored by both the
major U.S. media and the State Department.

Let us briefly note the steps which our State Department and other U.S.
agencies took (and are taking) to muddy the water about this important

issue:

\(a\) The Department co-opted the KAL 007 case from the National
Transportation Safety Board, then refused to conduct an investigation of
its own. As summarized by David Corn in the Nation for August 17/August
24,

1985: \"Normally when an airliner crashes, responsibility for the
inquiry falls to the National Transportation Safety Board, which has the
technical expertise to assess what happened. Although the downing of
Flight 007 cannot be classified as a routine aviation disaster, the
N.T.S.B. office in Anchorage was notified the plane was missing just
three hours after it had plunged into the Sea of Japan and immediately
began to look into the matter. Shortly after that, it was told to
forward to its headquarters in Washington all the material \-- originals
and copies \-- it had gathered. From there, the information was sent to
the State Department. James Michelangelo, chief of the N.T.S.B.\'s
Anchorage office, was told by headquarters that the board was off the
case and the State Department would handle the investigation. Eighteen
months after the airliner was shot down, when asked if the State
Department ever conducted such an inquiry, a high-level State Department
official replied, \'How is the State Department going to
investigate?\'\"

\(b\) Administration sources claimed shortly after the attack that
Soviet searchers had recovered some bodies. It was another false
contention which mainly served to bolster the Soviet-instigated claim
that the plane had indeed \"crashed.\"

\(c\) On the day after the tragedy, but before the matter could possibly
have been properly and thoroughly evaluated, the State Department cabled
Seoul to stress that it did not believe that the Soviets had shot down
the plane due to the presence on board of Congressman Larry McDonald of
Georgia. McDonald, an outspoken anti-communist activist, was a
vigorously pro-defense member of the House Armed Services Committee
(with access to classified information); was renowned for the reams of
educational anti-communist articles, speeches, and reports which he
regularly entered into the Congressional Record; was chairman of the
fervently anti-communist john Birch Society; and was becoming an
increasingly popular and influential political figure within the
conservative movement.

The CIA, according to columnist Jack Anderson (who, by the way, was one
of Larry McDonald\'s most bitter critics on the Left) had \"reported
that the Soviets could easily have intercepted telex communications
indicating that \[McDonald and\] other tempting targets might have been
on the KAL flight, including Sen. Jesse Helms, R-NC.\"

But the State Department cable discredited the implications of that
report by asserting: \"We have no repeat no evidence that the presence
of Rep. McDonald aboard KAL 007 (or the planned travel of Sen. Helms and
others aboard that flight) was a factor in the Soviet attack on the
aircraft.\"

\(d\) The U.S. pulled its punches during the ICAO investigation. As
reported by Aviation Week & Space Technology for September 19, 1983: \"A
U.S. official said the U.S. response was being toned down at the ICAO
session so other nations with grievances could make the case for an
investigation.\"

\(e\) In February 1985, a Justice Department attorney acknowledged in
federal district court that the U.S. Air Force Regional Operations
Command Center at Anchorage had destroyed key tape recordings \"of radar
tracks from Cape Newenham and Cape Roanzof, in Alaska, which might have
told much about the path of the aircraft \.... The U.S. government
claimed that Air Force radar tapes are normally recycled about thirty
hours after recording an aircraft\'s passage. The fate of Flight 007 was
known well within thirty hours after the recordings were made. Still,
the Air Force did not save the tapes, even though it customarily
impounds information related to aviation disasters.\" (David Corn, the
Nation, August 17/August 24, 1985)

\(f\) Following publication of our earlier analysis of the KAL 007
incident in THE NEW AMERICAN for August 29, 1988, Assistant Secretary of
State for Legislative Affairs J. Edward Fox was assigned to respond to
congressional inquiries about the article. At one point, Fox stated that
\"the many responsible investigations already conducted into the tragedy
\... leave no doubt that the charges levied by the article \... \-- that
KAL 007 did not crash, that the Soviets took the passengers on board as
prisoners, and that the United States Government is somehow involved in
a conspiracy of silence on the subject \-- are dead wrong.\" Yet he at
no point attempted to answer the specific questions we raised. He
ignored every crucial point and question, which was understandable,
since them was simply no way that they could be credibly addressed
without abandoning the official \"crash\" scenario.

Fox asserted that Congress had \"already conducted several thorough
investigations of the tragedy,\" which was not (and is not) true, since
there has to this day been no thorough investigation of the incident by
Congress or any other official entity, including the ICAO (which Fox
cited as one of the \"most prominent\" of the investigators). By its own
admission, the ICAO report was incomplete and hurried. And its
conclusion that KAL 007 crashed was entirely inconsistent with even the
incomplete data it did include.

As a further indication of how incomplete the investigations have been,
on November 14, 1990 liberal Democratic Senators Carl Levine (MI),
Edward Kennedy (MA) and Sam Nunn (GA) wrote to Mikhail Gorbachev, noting
that a \"number of official and unofficial investigations by U.S. and
international agencies have failed to shed light on a most important,
unresolved mystery surrounding the aircraft\'s destruction, namely: was
the wreckage of the plane, or were the remains of its passengers, or any
of its effects, ever located by the Soviet government?\" The Senators
urged Gorbachev to release any official Soviet findings or conclusions
on this \"central issue.\" On December 20, 1991, Izvestia reported that
the letter (and a similar missive sent in August 1990 by Democratic
Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey) had \"gone unanswered so far,\" but
the first segment of Izvestia\'s initial ten-part series on KAL 007
appeared on January 22, 1991, replete, as we have seen, with
disinformation intended to lock in the myth that the jetliner
\"crashed\" and that no bodies were found by Soviet divers.

Our State Department\'s response to date has also been misleading and
evasive. Whatever the motives of those involved, it is time once again
to retrieve the KAL 007 file from the memory hole and re-scrutinize it.
If, as we firmly believe, KAL 007 did not crash, but instead landed on
Sakhalin Island, where its crew and passengers were taken captive, new
possibilities arise regarding why the plane was so far off course and
why the Soviets shot it down. For instance, if the plane landed, why
didn\'t the Soviets mitigate the situation by simply releasing the
passengers and crew? Why would they capture and keep them all, including
the many children who were on the plane? One possibility is that there
were one or more persons whom they wished to have either dead or
incarcerated. In that event, it would indeed be necessary to hold onto
everyone, since if even a baby were returned alive, it would be
necessary to account for all of the others.

Unanswered Questions

If KAL 007 landed instead of crashed, it means that the Soviets have
pulled off yet another incredibly audacious deception, with the
cooperation of our own government. the United Nations, and possibly
Japan, in camouflaging the capture of the plane and disappearance of
those on board.

The key questions which must be answered include the following:

\* How could KAL 007 remain airborne for 12-plus minutes without the
crew being in at least partial control?

\* How could the plane descend so fast during the early stage of its
descent, then slow to less than one-half the initial rate, without the
crew being in substantial control?

\* How could a jetliner be \"out of control,\" yet so closely follow a
textbook descent pattern?

\* Why were there no \"Mayday\" signals from KAL 007 during the minute
or more that it was in radio contact with Tokyo after the attack?

\* How could the supposed \"crash\" site (and locations of debris) be
closer to the point of attack than the plane\'s minimum speed to remain
airborne for 12 minutes plus would seem to allow?

\* Why was so little debris (and so few human remains) found,
considering debris recoveries from other disasters involving huge
aircraft?

\* Why was the recovered debris devoid of the sort of items one would
expect to come from the plane\'s cargo pit (such as luggage)?

\* Why were no life vests (either on or off bodies) found among the
debris?

\* Why was the search for KAL 007 abandoned by the U.S. after only ten
weeks (and never resumed), when searches for debris and remains from
other far less controversial air-crash incidents often last for many
months or years?

\* How does one explain the radar trackings which followed KAL 007
toward Sakhalin Island after the attack, when the jumbo jet was moving
away from the island at the time of the attack?

\* How does one explain the confirmed report from the FAA (based on
information from the Japanese self-defense force) that the plane was
tracked by the Hokkaido radar to a landing on the island?

\* If the airliner was indeed under sufficient control of the pilot to
make a 180 turn and head toward Sakhalin, why would the captain choose
to ditch it in the sea rather than land on a runway?

We urge you to raise these (and any other pertinent questions which may
come to mind) with your senators and representatives, the President, the
State Department, local newspapers, friends and acquaintances, radio
talk shows, and other media. And do not accept evasive, weasel-worded
replies from legislators and officials. Insist on clear-cut, detailed
answers and explanations. Above all, be persistent! Write, call, or
telegram as often as it takes to receive sensible answers to the
questions you pose.

The shameful alternative to digging out the real truth about KAL 007 is
to continue to abandon the 269 innocent persons who were on board,
including 61 Americans, some of who may still be alive, and all of who
deserve to be listed along with other POWs/MIAs who have fallen victim
to communism and for whom there has as yet been no proper accounting.

It is time for Americans to unite in demanding the truth about what
happened to KAL 007 and an accounting of its passengers and crew. Let
the chips fall (and heads roll) where they may.

The New American Magazine - That Freedom Shall Not Perish
\<[[http://www.thenewamerican.com/]{.underline}](http://www.thenewamerican.com/)\>

Kevin Moore

Tampa Florida