[struwwelpeter]

A&E's recent reprisal of "Shootdown" prompted me to dust off this old posting. A YEAR before this BS was filmed, Izvestiya released volumes of information showing the Soviet Union to be at fault. They even interviewed the pilot, who stated that he knew it was a civilian airliner while shooting it down.

Of course, that doesn't stop the libs from repeating a lie over and over again. Once the libs do a send up on any event, it becomes 'history' - which is why that Reagan mini-series had to be stopped.

[Dilbert56]

There's a book: "Massacre KAL007" that proposes a fairly credible theory on why KAL007 was shot down. KAL paid huge bonuses to crews that saved fuel. One trick was to radio an incorrectly close position to get earlier sequencing in the approach pattern. Another, according to this book, was to take shortcuts through Soviet airspace. A Soviet base commander had apparently been executed for failing to intercept these overflights. Thus the stage was set. An intrusion and a very itchy trigger-finger.

[vetvetdoug]

Wasn't the President of the John Birch Society on board KAL 007 or was that McDonald also?

[1066AD]

IIRC initial reports out of Japan said it had landed on Sakhalin but then it changed to shootdown into sea.

struwwelpeter love it .. Little Johnny Headinair etc :)

[First_Salute]

Some enlightenment, here ---

Standard OPS: Shortwave radio checks by commercial aircraft, prior to trans-oceanic flights, are so powerful, that thousands of miles away, you can hear these pre-flight checks of commercial aircraft and sometimes the militaries', while they are still on the ground "over there."

The Korean airliner would not only have been using VHF (in U.S. aircpace, especially), yet it would also have been using shortwave radio on any flight planned over the ocean.

Already in the story above, is mention of the level of interest and observation by the Soviets, that they knew of the approach control radio traffic as the "Cobra Ball" neared a U.S. base on its return trip.

Such information methods are also used by the Soviets and the U.S. to track commercial flights.

That's the plan. That's what we are supposed to be doing.

So that we are not surprised by commando assault from such "allegedly commercial aircraft."

We routinely practiced for this kind of attack --- especially expecting it upon any of our (and NATO and SEATO) military airfields around the globe.

The problem for the Russians was not that they had any doubt about the Korean jetliner's legitimacy. The problem was that their own plans call for such an assault on us, and they could not rid themselves of imagining that their plan was being used against them.

The Russians chose to err on the side of protecting their careers.

[Question_Assumptions]

I send A&E a nasty feedback letter on their website about this very topic including a link to an appologetic Russian web site in English that still points out what BS the movie was. But worse, A&E's sister channel The History Channel showed a quasi-documentary on their History Explorer program (I think it was from the BBC from around 1988 and they are going to repeat it on December 17th and 18th on History International) called "Disaster: Stray or Spy" on the same subject, hauling out the very same conspriacy theories. I told them they should start The Disinformation Channel. If you are really annoyed about this movie, you should push for them not to rebroadcast that History Explorer show in December without a disclaimer card.

[krb]

The Soviets were real dumb-asses.

The US was on the verge of voting for an absurd Nuclear Freeze bill that would have stymied Reagan's efforts to "build up to build down" (the strategy that eventually brought the Soviet Union to its knees, fulfilling the prediction Reagan had made as far back as the 1976 election).

The KAL 007 shootdown, in the words of Newsweek, "Showed the side of the Soviet Union that Ronald Reagan had always warned about."

The Nuclear Freeze was defeated.

[nw_arizona_granny]

Thank you for having the link to this on your homepage.

It is an amazing story, one that I didn't know enough about.

[nw_arizona_granny]

This was new information to me and is worth reading.

An amazing story.

Russia as usual.