The Death of Korean Air Lines

Flight 007 By Peter Grier

A 747 heading from the US to Seoul strayed into Soviet airspace. The USSR shot it down.

s the fateful moment ap- lin, a sensitive and highly restricted transcript of his communications released proached, Maj. Gennadiy zone. Osipovich radioed superiors for by the US government. Osipovich sounded tense instructions but did not get an immedi- The Soviet pilot turned and dropped and frustrated. It was an early morn- ate response. below his lumbering prey. Then he ing hour on Sept. 1, 1983, and it had pulled his nose up, lit his afterburn- Anot been an easy time for Osipovich, An Infamous Act ers, and locked on with his own radar. an Su-15 fighter pilot assigned to the He could see that the mysterious At 3:26 a.m. Tokyo time, he fired two Soviet Union’s Dolinsk-Sokol Air Base multi-engine aircraft with blinking lights AA-3 air-to-air missiles. One of them, on Island, north of . was apparently unaware of his presence. proximity-fused, exploded behind the He had been trying to find a target Suddenly it began to climb, slowing its target, severing a crucial control line. now looming a few thousand meters speed. Osipovich’s air combat controller The other hit the aircraft but its effect ahead of his aircraft. He was having ordered him to open fire. remains unclear. no luck. Soviet tracking radars had The authorization came too late. The “The target is destroyed,” radioed produced inaccurate data, for one thing. speedy Su-15 was suddenly right next to Osipovich. For another, he and other scrambled the aircraft it was supposed to destroy. But it had not been. The aircraft, pilots had been slow off the mark. “It should have been earlier. ... I’m Korean Air Lines 007, remained air- Now the target was close to leaving already abeam of the target,” radioed borne for at least 12 more minutes. Its Soviet airspace after flying over Sakha- an agitated Osipovich, according to a pilots struggled to regain control until 62 AIR FORCE Magazine / January 2013 AIR FORCE Magazine Magazine FORCE AIR / January 2013 January /

Illustration by Zaur Eylanbekov had taken place. Confronted by the US Confronted place. had taken other. the about assumptions worst side’s each reinforced and new to heights tensions Georgia. from Democrat Lawrence P. a McDonald, conservative Rep. US included These water. the hit sengers and crew died when the airliner Cold War. Two late hundred pas sixty-nine the of events important most and deadliest the of one was ago decades of west just Sakhalin. Island Moneron near sea, the into spiraled airplane the line) and the actual flight path of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Sept. 1, 1983. 1, Sept. 007, Flight Lines Air Korean of path flight actual the (dotted and plath line) flight planned the of divergence simplified showing map A Below: Initially, Moscow denied the incident US-Soviet pushed act infamous The three 007 KAL of shootdown The - showed intercepts that the Soviet Agency Union had Security indeed National ered that the story was more complicated. a “massacre” and an “act of barbarism.” President Reagan called the shootdown thus killed and defenseless airliner civilians an in down cold blood. shot ingly part, charged that the USSR had know military region. the in installations sensitive from intelligence gather to sent spyplane a was aircraft admitted what had happened but said the tions and other evidence, Soviet leaders with intercepted air defense communica But US intelligence quickly discov quickly intelligence US But its for Administration, Reagan The 63 - - -

Mgarin73 via Wikipedia Top to bottom: US Rep. Lawrence McDonald (D-Ga.), who was killed on intended flight paths only grew. By KAL 007. Soviet pilot Gennadiy Osipo- the time it neared an oceanic waypoint vich in the cockpit of a Soviet fighter. named “Nabie,” some 200 miles off the Osipovich during a Soviet television US Congress photo Alaskan coast, the airplane was already documentary about the shootdown. 100 miles away from where it should Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov during a Sept. 9, 1983, press conference in which he have been. claimed the shootdown was justified. The airplane wasn’t on its way to Seoul. Instead, it was traveling at a thought the aircraft to be a spyplane, heading of 245 degrees, flying like most likely an RC-135 eavesdropping an arrow toward the eastern portions aircraft that had been flying lazy-eights of the Soviet Union. According to an off the Sakhalin coast in advance of a investigation conducted by the Inter- forthcoming missile test. national Civil Aviation Organization in Furthermore, US intelligence showed 1993, following release of the airplane’s that, from the point of view of the Soviet original flight recorder tapes by the new military, anyway, the episode had been Russian government, the KAL crew a messy disaster. A Boeing 747 had activated an autopilot shortly after tak- flown a slow and predictable path over ing off from Anchorage and then turned Soviet territory for hundreds of miles, to 245 degrees to comply with an air overflying the Kamchatka Peninsula, traffic control clearance. The aircraft 1 re-entering international airspace, then maintained a heading of 245 degrees until crossing above Sakhalin. it was shot down some five hours later. Why did it go off course? The au- What Happened—Probably topilot—more specifically, the pilots’ Meanwhile the USSR air defense interaction with the autopilot controls— system had descended into “some- appears to be a large part of the answer. thing bordering on chaos,” according When the autopilot used in the KAL to intelligence historian Mathew M. airliner was set to “heading,” it directed Aid. Fighters were vectored poorly, the aircraft straight along that heading radar data was wrong, and pilots and path. The KAL 007’s pilots used this their superiors on the ground filled the setting just after takeoff. But when the airwaves with expletive-laced rants autopilot was turned to the mode “INS directed at each other. Navigation,” it was designed to guide “Arguably the most significant revela- the airplane along a series of pre-entered 2 tion coming out of the KAL shootdown waypoints to its ultimate destination. was the fact that the massive Soviet KAL was supposed to use this mode, national air defense system had not per- riding the autopilot along a transoceanic formed well at all,” wrote Aid in his 2009 route with 10 waypoints just outside of

Soviet documentary screen shots history of the NSA, The Secret Sentry. Soviet territory, all the way to Seoul. How did a civilian aircraft flying That didn’t happen. Possibly, the straight and fairly level end up hun- pilots just forgot to turn the switch. It dreds of miles off course in dangerous is also possible that they set the switch, territory? but the INS Navigation mode did not That’s a central question of the KAL activate. 007 event. Conspiracy theorists have In the model autopilot used in that long pushed the idea that some sort of particular 747, the aircraft had to be dark US government plot lay behind within 7.5 miles of its preprogrammed the airplane’s actions that night. But route for INS Navigation to take over. 3 the simple fact of crew error, combined If it was farther away, or flying in the with continued inattentiveness, appears wrong direction, the autopilot stayed in to have put the Boeing airliner on a col- heading mode until the gap closed. If the

CIA photo lision course with disaster. gap didn’t close, the aircraft just kept KAL 007 originated in New York. on jetting along the previous heading At 4:00 a.m. local time, the airliner until the pilots noticed or something took off from its intermediate stop in else intervened. Anchorage, Alaska, headed for Seoul. In 1993, after examining all the As it flew west it began to slowly devi- evidence, that’s what ICAO concluded ate from its planned route. KAL 007 had occurred. should have passed over a navigational “The maintenance of the constant waypoint at Bethel, Alaska, on its way magnetic heading and the resulting to the open ocean, but when it reached track deviation was due to the crew’s Bethel it had already strayed 12 miles failure to note that the autopilot had north of its intended path. As it flew either been left in the heading mode or 4 on, the distance between its actual and had been switched to the inertial naviga- 64 AIR FORCE Magazine / January 2013 tion system (INS) when the aircraft was Navigation mode but did not detect towards the USSR was an RC-135,” beyond range for the INS to capture the that the INS system was not steering according to the ICAO. desired track,” stated the ICAO in 1993. the autopilot,” wrote Degani. Nearly four hours after its takeoff The pilots had almost certainly been So KAL 007 lumbered on, head- from Anchorage KAL 007 entered the trained how to use the autopilot in the ing for Siberia instead of Seoul. After restricted airspace of the Kamchatka correct way, but human interaction with several hours it neared a buffer zone Peninsula. Four MiG-23s scrambled complex automated systems is often of international airspace monitored by to intercept the aircraft and first flew fraught with problems, according to a the Soviet military for possible threats. east, then west to try and run down 2004 book on the issue, Taming HAL: Here a complication developed: A US their unidentified target from behind. Designing Interfaces Beyond 2001, by Air Force Boeing RC-135 was already But the Soviet fighters ran low on fuel Asaf Degani, a scientist from the NASA flying in wide circles in this area. Loaded before they could catch up and had to Ames Research Center. with eavesdropping electronics, its mis- return to base. KAL 007 continued on What if a pilot forgot the sequence sion was to spy on the USSR’s defenses unaware, warm and well-lit in the cold of events that would engage the INS in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Typically of high altitude. Navigation mode? What if they got such missions involved flying right up Crossing Kamchatka, the Boeing the wrong number for how close they to, but not over, the line into Soviet- passed into international waters over the needed to be to their preprogrammed controlled space. Sea of Okhotsk. But as it proceeded along track stuck in their head—20 miles, say, its straight heading it soon hit another instead of 7.5? No One Was Listening Soviet piece of land, Sakhalin Island. That sort of mistake should have been At some point the tracks of these More Soviet fighters took to the air to unsurprising, because it had happened aircraft converged enough for Soviet find a target that air defense officials before. air traffic controllers to misidentify the now suspected was military. The USSR “Such problems in operating this oncoming KAL 007. The presence of the military command was already tense, B-747 autopilot were not new, and the US spyplane thus “resulted in confusion due to a recently concluded major north track deviation that resulted was not a and the assumption by the USSR Air Pacific US Navy exercise and a Soviet fluke or a rare case. There were more Defense that the aircraft proceeding missile test in the region scheduled for than a dozen reported similar incidents in which flight crews selected INS-

Right: A Soviet Il-14 Crate aircraft inter- fered in the search and rescue opera- tions over the . Below: A Soviet salvage tug boat searches for pieces of the downed KAL-007. USAF photos by SSgt. Steve McGill

AIR FORCE Magazine / January 2013 65 later that day. They were in a shoot-now, that it must have crashed afterward. that KAL 007 was “a major, dual-purpose question-later mood. The Soviet news agency TASS issued political provocation carefully organized One Soviet commander said that their a statement to similar effect at about by the US special services.” orders were to shoot down the airplane the same time. This memo, cited in Fischer’s CIA even if it made it out to neutral territory, Faced with this attitude—and with the study, went on to say that the first pur- according to transcripts of their conver- knowledge afforded by its eavesdrop- pose of the KAL incursion had been to sations. Another said that if it had four ping capabilities—the US intensified its gather valuable intelligence. Second, if contrails, it must be an RC-135. rhetoric. On Sept. 5, President Reagan the USSR shot the airplane down, the Osipovich, the attacking pilot, said addressed the nation to denounce what US knew it could use the event to mount that he saw the aircraft’s blinking light. he called a “crime against humanity.” a global anti-Soviet campaign. He fired cannon shots to try and alert He played an intercepted audio tape of The fact that the US quickly moved to the pilots, but as he later admitted, his Osipovich’s discussions with ground do just that only deepened the USSR’s aircraft was loaded with armor-piercing, control, including a portion where paranoia. The Reagan Administration not incendiary, shells. The Soviets tried Osipovich mentioned the airplane’s used the incident as an argument for its to hail the airplane on a radio frequency blinking light. plans for increased military spending, reserved for emergencies, but inside while pushing for denial of landing rights KAL 007’s cockpit, no one was listening. Deepened Paranoia to the Soviet airline Aeroflot and other Then Tokyo air traffic control ordered A Boeing 747 airliner is a distinctive civilian sanctions. the airliner to climb to 35,000 feet. So- shape, noted Reagan. It looks nothing “For Washington, the incident seemed viet authorities took this as an evasive like a US military spyplane. to express all that was wrong with the maneuver, sealing the airplane’s fate. “There is no way a pilot could mistake Soviet system and to vindicate the The USSR’s destruction of KAL 007 this for anything other than a civilian Administration’s critique of the Soviet took place in the context of heightened airliner,” said Reagan. system. For Moscow, the episode seemed Cold War anxieties. The Soviet Union, The problem was that Osipovich had to encapsulate and reinforce the Sovi- for its part, felt vulnerable: Its economy indeed made just such a mistake and the ets’ worst-case assumptions about US had begun to break up, its leadership was US knew it. As early as the afternoon of policy,” concluded Fischer. aging and sclerotic, and the tide of world Sept. 1, thorough NSA translations of KAL 007 left behind little debris events seemed to be turning against its more intercepts showed that the Soviet as evidence of its plunge into the cold communist system. Meanwhile, the US officials might have believed they were ocean. A US Navy-led search for the had moved to aggressively confront its tracking an RC-135, according to Aid. wreckage, harassed by Soviet personnel, superpower adversary via the Reagan Yet Ambassador to the UN Jeane J. produced nothing. Administration’s strategic defense ini- Kirkpatrick went before the Security Later that fall, Soviet leader Yuri V. tiative, a general increase in military Council the day after Reagan spoke and Andropov entered the hospital and began spending, and ramped-up rhetoric about repeated his charge, using audio tapes a physical decline that culminated in his the failures of the Soviet empire. and a map of the KAL 007 flight path death the following February. Another The prospect of a US-launched nuclear to make her presentation more forceful. aging caretaker, General Secretary Kon- war appears to have genuinely concerned “Air Force intelligence dissented from stantin U. Chernenko, succeeded him. Soviet officials. Soviet behavior made the rush to judgment at the time, and He died in turn after only 13 months in Washington so suspicious it believed the eventually US intelligence reached a office. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail S. Kremlin might be capable of anything. consensus that the Soviets probably did Gorbachev was named head of the USSR, Then came the KAL shootdown. not know they were attacking a civilian and the rest is history. Gorbachev tried “The KAL 007 incident ... touched airliner,” wrote Fischer. “The charge to revive the Soviet economy and relax off a dangerous episode in US-Soviet probably should have been something superpower tensions, but he could not relations,” wrote intelligence analyst akin to criminally negligent manslaugh- arrest the decline and the Soviet empire Benjamin B. Fischer in a 1997 mono- ter, not premeditated murder. But the collapsed in December 1991. graph on the era for the CIA’s Center official US position never deviated from Boris N. Yeltsin, ’s new presi- for the Study of Intelligence. the initial assessment.” dent, was eager to turn the page on the The White House learned of the On Sept. 9, Marshal Nikolai V. Ogar- Soviet past. One way he did this was airplane’s destruction hours after it kov, the Soviet military’s chief of staff, by releasing Kremlin secrets related had occurred. US and Japanese eaves- held a press conference in Moscow at to KAL 007. In 1992, he made public dropping equipment had captured the which he admitted that the airplane Soviet memos discussing the shootdown air-to-ground conversations of Soviet had been shot down but said the action and subsequent sea search for wreckage. fighters involved, which revealed part was justified. Whether an RC-135 or a Later that year, he released the airplane’s of the story of what had happened. The Boeing 747, the airplane had surely been black boxes, which Soviet officials had next day at 10:45 a.m.—it was still Sept. on a US intelligence mission, he said. recovered, and a transcript of the Soviet 1 Washington time—Secretary of State His statement might not have been air defense communications surrounding George P. Shultz held a press conference pure propaganda. It appears to be what the incident. and denounced the Soviet action. the Soviet leadership truly believed. A The airplane itself still lies at the bot- “We can see no excuse whatsoever classified memo to the Politburo from tom of the ocean, shattered into small for this appalling attack,” said Shultz. the Soviet military and the KGB asserted pieces by the force of impact. n Confronted with this, the USSR dis- sembled. A Soviet diplomat visited the Peter Grier, a Washington, D.C., editor for the Christian Science Monitor, is a longtime State Department and told Shultz that contributor to Air Force Magazine. His most recent article, “Cleaning the Bug House,” they had warned the airplane off and appeared in September 2012. 66 AIR FORCE Magazine / January 2013