Korean Air Flight 007 conspiracy theories

The Korean Air Flight 007 incident has spawned a number of conspiracy theories. As with any serious disaster, theories have arisen that differ with official explanations. The theorists' main concerns are why the airliner was off course and even whether it crashed.

Conspiracy Theories
One good explanation is KAL 007 was mistaken for a USAF RC-135 that was flying a routine electronic intelligence mission northeast of Kamchatka at about the same time. The primary long-range Soviet radar systems were not operational at the time, so as the RC-135 flew on its "racetrack" course it appeared on the inbound leg, turned around, and then disappeared again. This pattern was repeated several times, until Flight 007 flew inbound on a track approximately from the RC-135's inbound leg at roughly the time the plane should have re-appeared on their radars. This time the radar contact did not turn outbound again, giving Soviet forces an opportunity to intercept it. The U.S. routinely conducted Burning Wind SIGINT/COMINT flights to test the USSR's air defense systems (and over the years lost several planes on such missions). Another significant factor in this event may have been the PSYOPS programs carried out by the United States against the Soviets. These programs, exposed in investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's 1986 book The Target is Destroyed (Random House), included massive naval exercises and simulated attacks carried out in proximity of critical Soviet bases. Combined with the overt SDI program, these PSYOPS programs raised the Cold War tensions between the US and the Soviet Union to dangerous levels.

The most persistent "off course" theory is that the flight was part of a deliberate U.S. intelligence-gathering effort. According to this theory, U.S. intelligence has a long history of "tickling" Soviet radar by deliberately flying planes into Soviet airspace and then recording the responses. As far back as the late 1940s, U.S. military aircraft had engaged in this practice, and some were even lost in the attempt (see James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, 1983, about the National Security Agency). In 1983, the theory goes, U.S. intelligence wanted to use a civilian plane as "bait" to test the Soviet reaction to an incursion inside their borders. If caught, the pilot could claim innocence, that he was only "lost"--the plane would not need to be equipped with "smoking gun" spy gear since U.S. spy satellites and spy planes such as the RC-135 could record the various responses.

The Soviets advanced this argument, which was presented in detail by Soviet Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov at a press conference on September 9, 1983, covered by the world's press media. Speaking before a huge map showing the intrusion of KAL 007 into Soviet airspace, Ogarkov bluntly argued that the intrusion "was a deliberate, thoroughly planned intelligence operation." What was generally missed by Western media, was the fact that in 1978 Korean Air Flight 902 flew into Soviet air space, in what to the Soviets appeared as a similar operation, that time flying almost 180 degrees off its polar course.

President Reagan dismissed such theories as Soviet propaganda. However, independent researchers published books which, at the very least, seem to substantiate some of the details of the allegations. For instance, David Pearson notes in his book (KAL 007: The Cover-Up) that the flightpath of KAL 007 "passed over Soviet missile-testing areas, over the sites of several large phased-array radars, and near the Soviet submarine pens at Petropavlovsk" on the Kamchatka peninsula. Similarly the plane passed within a few dozen miles of Soviet air and navy bases on Sakhalin island, and if it had not been shot down as it left Sakhalin airspace, Pearson says, it was "on a heading that would have taken it eventually over the Soviet military center at Vladivostok." Fifteen minutes behind KAL 007 in international airspace was another civilian plane, KAL 015, which relayed KAL 007's messages to ground control. Investigators James Gollin and Robert Allardyce published a 2-volume book (Desired Track, 1994) which analyzed the parts of the plane's flightpath which were recorded and are publicly known, and concluded it must have made deliberate turns, which undermined the theory that the plane was simply left on autopilot. In short, theorists allege there were too many inconsistencies with the various "accident" scenarios for the flight to have been innocent. However, this theory would have to presuppose that the US spies were willing to forfeit the life of a US Congressman, and an anticommunist one at that, in order to merely conduct a test that could have been done more efficiently as had occurred in the past.

The Theory of Passenger and Crew Survival
A few theorists believe KAL 007 did not crash, claiming that a single engine loss would not knock a 747 out of the air, and that the reported twelve-minute period between the missile strike and ocean impact was suspiciously long. These theories were discredited when Russia produced the actual cockpit voice recorder, in which the pilots reported a depressurization and rapid descent. Bert Schlossberg, Director of the International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors, maintains that the Soviet military communications of the Shootdown released by the Russian Federation show that, despite the fact that KAL 007 was damaged by one Soviet "Anab" missile, it was able to pull out of its descent at 5,000 meters and maintain a level flight for over 4 minutes (18:31 GMT to 18:35 GMT) only to begin a slow spiral descent over the only available land mass in the whole Tatar straits - Moneron Island. This indicated that the pilots had a good measure of control of the stricken airliner and were in quest for some place close enough to land to ditch safely. Further, the military transcripts show that there were two documented air and sea rescue missions involving helicopters, KGB border patrol boats and civilian fishing boats (then in the vicinity of Moneron) sent out by the Soviets just minutes after missile detonation.
Furthermore, in support of a safe water landing, a careful examination of the Cockpit Voice Recorder tape transcripts, shows that, contrary to much commentator opinion, not even one of KAL007's four engines was damaged. Here are the crucial post detonation remarks of pilot and copilot - At 18:26:06, Capt. Chun yells out, "What happened?" First Officer Son responds, "What?" Two seconds later, Chun yells, "Retard throttles." Son responds, "Engines normal, sir." This indicates that Maj. Osipovich's heat seeking missile had missed its mark. At 18:26:45, First Officer Son again reports, "Engines are normal, sir." Once again, there is confirmation that the heat-seeking missile (as well as the radar guided missile) failed to hit its mark.

Some theorists also view as suspicious the amount and types of material recovered from the accident, which was said to compare oddly with other crashes of 747 aircraft. That only two bodies were recovered, relatively intact, was also inconsistent to some. It should be noted that most human remains on the sea floor at the crash site would have been subjected to intense cuttlefish feeding. Yet the cuttlefish (or giant sea crab) explanation for the dearth of human remains is brought into question by the fact that not only were the Soviet civilian divers, who only seven days after the shootdown had visited the site of the sunken aircraft, amazed at not finding bodies (Izvestia 1991 series of interviews) but they were equally amazed at not finding skeletal remains or suitcases and packing cases - objects which cuttlefish could not devour (see "Condition of the Bodies Recovered" in the Discussion to this article).

Quoting from the [http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?includedetail&storyid213472 KAL 007 Mystery] link listed below, "For the first eight days following the KAL 007 incident no floating debris or body parts were reported recovered". In addition, some theorists point out that the Soviets prevented the joint U.S Japanese Search and Rescue operation from entering into Soviet territorial waters around the last location KAL 007 was tracked, Moneron Island, and were forced to search for the KAL 007's wreckage (and whatever human bodies might have been within the wreckage) only in international waters. This left open the question whether there were indeed bodies in the downed aircraft. As Admiral Walter Piotti, the Commander of the naval operation would conclude in his After Action Report:

“Had TF 71 been permitted to search without restriction imposed by claimed territorial waters, the aircraft stood a good chance of having been found.”

“No wreckage of KAL 007 was found. However, the operation established, with a 95% or above confidence level, that the wreckage, or any significant portion of the aircraft, does not lie within the probability area outside the 12 NM area claimed by the Soviets as their territorial limit.”

But it wasn't until Sept. 1, 2003, 20 years after the shootdown, that an official Russian acknowledgment of Soviet duplicity in concealing the fact that they had known where the plane was located even while pretending to search for it with the U.S. This acknowledgment was from the office of the Deputy Director of the Russian (Federation) State Archives of Recent History - see . But this official acknowledgment only expressed publicly what the Soviets had expressed secretly to themselves, as released to the world by Boris Yelsin in 1982. From Soviet Defence minister D. Ustinov and KGB head V. Chebrikov to Yuri Andropov - "Simulated search efforts in the Sea of Japan are being performed by our vessels at present in order to disinform the US and Japan. These activities will be discontinued in accordance with a specific plan." See -

For an account of the Naval operation, see

Further, a comparison of similar air disasters highlight the stark contradiction between what might have been the human remains expected and the actual dearth of human remains in the case of KAL 007. In 1985, an Air India Boeing 747, carrying 329 passengers, exploded at 31,000 feet over the North Atlantic when a suspected bomb was detonated. In that tragedy 132 bodies were recovered - 123 of them on the same day. All were identified. In 1987, when a 747, South African Airways Flight 295, exploded at from a cargo-bay fire, 15 of 159 persons were recovered along with several thousand pieces of debris, some as far away as ." And, on July 17, 1996, Trans World Airlines Flight 800, a Boeing 747, exploded possibly due to mechanical causes in the air over the Atlantic. All 230 passengers and crew perished. All 230 passengers and crew were recovered and identified over a one-year period- the last two being identified through DNA analysis. In the light of all this, a body count of two seems improbable to some skeptics.

The official resolution of the navigational puzzle came in 1991 when the hitherto-concealed voice and data recorders were released by Moscow, apparently confirming the original professional accident investigation judgments that overconfident carelessness allowed a simple navigation error to go undetected. The alleged Soviet failure to properly attempt communication with the crew, and their urgency to stop the flight as it was passing out of Soviet airspace, led to this tragedy.

However, some theorists still tried to cast doubt on the authenticity of the voice and data recorder information made public by the Yeltsin administration. These included Michel Brun, who analyzed technical details of the timing sequences (Incident at Sakhalin, 1995), and Gollin and Allardyce who presented an extraordinary analysis of radar tracks (Desired Track, 1994). Also, in 1995, Alvin Snyder, the former official of the United States Information Agency who had put together the videotape for U.S. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's UN presentation on KAL 007, published a book (Warriors of Disinformation) in which he admitted: "By my calculation, the National Security Agency, with the apparent approval of the State Department and the White House, had deleted at least five critical minutes of conversation between the Russian fighter pilots and their ground controllers from the tape that we presented as evidence in the UN Security Council." This admission lent more credence to the Soviet claim that they did try to communicate with the intruder, to no avail.

Although conspiracy theories still linger on the Internet, the unanswered questions of this case have long since been settled to the satisfaction of airliner operations experts and government officials.

One notable passenger of Flight 007 was Larry McDonald, president of the right-wing John Birch Society and Democratic congressman from Georgia. McDonald believed that international bankers, spearheaded by the Rockefeller family in America, ran both the capitalist US and the Communist USSR in an international economic superstate. A vocal critic of the USSR, McDonald was the founder of the Western Goals Foundation, which was intended to combat the threat from Communism. McDonald was the only U.S. congressman ever killed by the Soviets during the Cold War. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Idaho Senator Steve Symms, both conservative Republicans and Congressman Carroll Hubbard, a Democrat from Kentucky, all staunch critics of the Soviet Union, were scheduled to fly to Seoul on KAL 007, but instead flew on KAL 015 which, with KAL 007, stopped at Anchorage airport for refueling before the next leg of the trip to Seoul. (Shootdown, R.W. Johnson, Viking Penguin, New York, N.Y. 1986, pgs.3,4)

While waiting at the airport, Senator Helms even befriended two young American girls, Noelle (5 years old) and Stacy (3 years) Grenfell who were waiting to board KAL 007, not knowing that they had only hours to live. Senator Helms wrote of that meeting - "I’ll never forget that night when that plane was just beside ours at Anchorage airport with two little girls and their parents...I taught them, among other things, to say I love you in deaf language, and the last thing they did when they turned the corner was stick up their little hands and tell me they loved me...I’ll never forget that.."

There is no evidence that the U.S.S.R. knew of the congressman's presence. Also killed was journalist Jack Cox, who co-authored the memoirs of former Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza, entitled Nicaragua Betrayed. Congressman McDonald was their publisher.

Some people, including former U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, have said they believed that all or most of the passengers and crew of flight KAL 007 survived after their damaged aircraft managed to land safely at an airfield on Sakhalin island, and were then placed inside various Soviet "gulag"-style slave labor camps, prisons, and orphanages, in the case of the many children. This theory was largely discredited when the flight recorders that the Soviets had recovered were released to the public after the Soviet Union fell. However, Bert Schlossberg, Director of the International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors, pointed out that the aircraft leveled off prior to coming down.
Criticism of Conspiracy Theories

According to the two volume book - DESIRED TRACK: THE TRAGIC FLIGHT OF KAL FLIGHT 007 and a three part article (KOREAN AIR LINES FLIGHT 007, THE ANATOMY OF A COVER-UP), due in the July, August, and September, 2007, issues of AIRWAYS MAGAZINE, Captain Chun Byung-in was never lost, changed altitudes, direction of flight, and airspeed multiple times, at one time being well below 3,000 meters as he crossed Kamchatka. All the substantiating data was recorded by our National Security Agency and released to ICAO, part of which was published in the June 6, 1993, ICAO Report. However, the FAA certified radar data tracking KE007 across mainland Alaska makes subsequent data more or less redundant as KE007 clearly did not turn to 245 deg (mag) at 1303:00Z. It continued on towards J501 and at 1309:00Z began "capturing" the Desired Track that had been programmed into the INSs. The capture was complete by 1312:00Z and, from then on, across Alaska, the 747 tracked a Great Circle course. This evidence is irrefutable. It can be double checked by anyone with the radar data, which is available from the FAA and/or ICAO.

As to the question about whether the Soviet radar was functioning across Kamchatka, the National Security Agency recorded "reflected" radar emissions. Had there been no Soviet emissions to record, NSA would have come up dry. Instead, there is a nearly unbroken cascade of radar fixes at one and two minute intervals between 1551Z and 1637Z. Those who attempted to obscure Chun's behavior, as embodied in the radar data, first floated the story that an Arctic storm two weeks before KE007 arrived, destroyed all the radar installations. A 31 day collection of NOAA's ground level weather maps failed to show any activity stronger than a few scattered rain showers. On Kamchatka, August is known as the vacation month; moderate weather prevails.

About that old saw that the Soviet's did not find KE007's debris field: Recall that Boris Yeltsin handed over both the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) to South Korea's president. Each had the correct serial number on the case. Beyond that, in the March, 2000, issue of AIRWAYS we had a copyrighted article, "The Wake Of The Flying Crane." We offered three underwater photos taken by the Soviets. One photo showed a section of badly damaged fuselage. Roughly 90% of KE007's registration number was visible. The second photo showed what proved to be a section of a 747's landing flap. The parts tag riveted to the skin checked with Boeing's parts catalog. The third was of the 747's right wing tip. It displayed the Surge Tank Protection System's (STPS) discharge indicator - part of the walk-around preflight check. The STPS was not Boeing's standard installation. It was a special purchase. Only TWA and Lufthansa bought them. KAL, via two other owners, acquired Lufthansa'a 747, hence the STPS. And certainly, no one seems to have challenged ICAO's claim KE007 turned to 245 deg (magnetic) at 1303:00Z. Supposedly that information came off the DFDR's tape. The evidence is overwhelming. The Soviets found KE007's wreckage. So, here is the question: How did 245 deg (magnetic) end up being recorded on the DFDR when the certified radar data proves the 747 was not only under the control of the autopilot and the INS but following a GCc?

The call-out, "Engines normal, sir . . .," is not proof the heat seeker missed. Osipovich, the pilot of 805, has repeatedly gone on record saying both missiles struck and that the left outer wing panel was blown off. The outer wing panel does not include number one engine. The idea the heat seeker must have missed was a necessary adjunct, because the #1 High Frequency radio antenna is on the left wing tip. Chun's so-called "last message" was supposedly broadcast via #1 HF.

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