Eerie article on Yahoo about the shootdown of KAL 007.

Yaaaaaaaaaahoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ^

[A Little Bird]

You three seem to be very intent on discussing the spoofing of the INS. Have you taken a look at my posting #78? Spoofed or not, the evidence shows that either the INS was never engaged, or that it was engaged too late to control the airplane.

[A Little Bird]

The main thrust of your refute, if I understand it correctly, is this: Since the general public believed that KAL 007 people were dead, the Soviets would have nothing to gain by keeping them alive. On the other hand, they would have much to gain from "destroying the evidence." Therefore, the Soviets would have killed them off at the outset.

Before speaking of KAL 007 specifically, let's look back and see what history teaches. In 1973, the US government released an official statement enunciating a policy that "There are no more prisoners in Southeast Asia. They are all dead." This put N. Vietnam in the same kind of predicament that you say the Soviets were in: The people were already declared dead, so why not kill them off rather than risk their escape? Yet, in 1979, Private Robert Garwood -- one of those unfortunate POWs declared "dead" -- returned alive! Furthermore, Pvt. Garwood having returned to the US, reported that he had seen other US servicemen in captivity in N. Vietnam -- servicement whom the Department of Defense had already declared "dead." Clearly, Communism does not follow the same logic as the rest of the Western world. [This example taken from "An Examination of U.S. Policy Toward POW/MIAs" by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Republican Staff.]

Now, about KAL 007... First of all, let's deal with the statement "the Soviets would have nothing to gain by keeping them alive." Au contraire, perhaps they have much to gain. I do not know whether they have (yet) used the people as a bargaining chip, but one thing is for sure: The declaration by the media to the world that the passengers and crew of flight 007 were dead certainly would not preclude the possibility of them doing so if they wanted to. Even if the masses are fooled by the disinformation of their "death", as long as the US government knows that the Soviet government has the people alive, that's all the Soviets need to use them for their own ends. The rest of the world need never know, LOO-CY need never 'SPLAIN. And yes, there is good reason to believe that the US government did, indeed, have intimate knowledge of the incident at the time it happened -- much more than the media lets on. The threat of Russia exposing the fact that the US knew all along about the survival of the KAL 007 passengers and crew and covered it up might very well be enough to put Russia in a good negotiating position. Who knows what kinds of clandestine agreements are reached between the highest eschelons of the two governments, and are never reported in the media?

So I do not accept your claim that since the people have already been declared dead by their own countries, they will not have been kept alive.

Secondly, let's deal with the statement "they would have much to gain from 'destroying the evidence.'" Well, as I just mentioned, there is good reason to believe that the US already knew more at the outset than it's letting on. So killing off the people would not have prevented the US of learning of their survival. But, for whatever reason, it seems like the US is keeping Russia's secret. So why would they not have killed the people in the early '90s when the first allegations of the cover-up began being made, or even today with the current movement to re-open the case, threatening to spill Russia's secret? The answer lies in point 5 of posting #90. With the ever present threat of Glastnost and the opening of the books resulting in the truth about the survival of the KAL 007 people coming out, it would be far worse for the Russians to be found out as having executed the people so many years after the incident took place, than for them to be found out as having kept them as prisoners all these years. Indeed, when Sen. Jesse Helms wrote to Boris Yeltsin in his letter of December 10, 1991,

"The KAL-007 tragedy was one of the most tense incidents of the entire Cold War. However, now that relations between our two nations have improved substantially, I believe that it is time to resolve the mysteries surrounding this event. Clearing the air on this issue could help further to improve relations."

he implied that by providing the requested info, Yeltsin could make himself a "hero" of sorts -- The shining knight of the New Russia undoing the wrongs of the evil Communist regime that preceded his. Incidentally, in that same letter Helms demanded (among other things) to know the whereabouts of the survivors of flight 007 on the assumption that there are survivors; he does not ask if there are any.

The points in posting #90 were meant to illustrate the Soviet mentality of keeping most political prisoners -- not just the KAL 007 people -- alive. Perhaps only some of them apply directly to the KAL 007 incident. The important thing is that all these factors contribute to the forming of a MENTALITY -- the execution of political prisoners is to be limited. And a MENTALITY is something which is not easily made exception to. We would have to look to extenuating reasons for this MENTALITY to be set aside. In the absence of these reasons, we could not rule out their being kept alive.

[As for your rebuttal of point 6 in posting #90, I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. The Soviet mentality of making the captured peoples "pay" has nothing to do with putting on a show for the rest of the world who *knows* they have them. It's an attitude towards the captured peoples themselves, and for their own feeling of self-vindication.]

[struwwelpeter]

Most of the KAL rumors I've heard appear to be amalgams of the "Americans in the GULag" stories, mixed up with various historic shootdowns.

It's true that several US Korean War prisoners disappeared into the "GULag archipelago" on orders of Stalin. Solzhinetsyn even ran into a stray American here and there. It's also true that the Soviets "spoofed" (through masking beacons, radio compass signal intrusions or jamming, or other EM interference) a few aircraft across their borders, one famous example a US EC-130 shotdown in 1958. In 1978 another Korean airliner (a 707) strayed across the Kola Penninsula and was forced down on a frozen lake near Olenogorsk. After a short delay the passengers and crew were released, and this during the height of Brezhnev's paranoid empire.

It would be quite a task to keep KAL survivors a secret. I cannot imagine Andropov (Gorby's mentor) turning Stalinesque at a time when the Soviets were trying to show off a more friendly side to trick the US into dismantling their Pershing & GLCMs in Western Europe.

My best argument is that Russia has gone through a bit of a transformation, and nothing is secret anymore. Travelling about there (1993, 1998-2000) I've found people in quite a talkative mood. Even without prompting, veterans and ex-spies come up with the most interesting tales. About KAL 007, however, I've seen or heard nothing other than Osipovich's TASS interview in '93 where he admits they knew they were shooting down a civilian airliner but had no choice as letting it go would be embarassing.

[Bobby777]

It's also true that the Soviets "spoofed" (through masking beacons, radio compass signal intrusions or jamming, or other EM interference) a few aircraft across their borders,

that was my point ... I never believed there were any survivors even though there apparently was some "normal" conversation from KAL007 after the missile hit ... and then the "violent decompression" message ... this does not surprise me, as the Boeing XB-70 apparently flew straight and level for more than 20 seconds after the F-104 impacted the horizontal stabilizer(s) ... the pilots, hearing the screams of "midair! midair!" thought two of the four fighters had collided ... not thinking they had been involved because the collision was not felt in the cockpit ... what I've seen on tape is that KAL007 was 150 miles (at furthest) from the waypoints on Romeo-20, but that the waypoint indicator would light up whenever the aircraft was within 200 miles of a waypoint ... this seems like a huge margin to me, but I'm not a pilot ... the tape I have says KAL007 was 12 miles off by the time it passed the first waypoint and that a second KAL following 007 repeatedly reported KAL007 "on course" ... that also seems odd ... in either case, they (video people) claim that Shemya Island's radars should have noticed KAL007 crossing into Soviet territory ... as well as radars located in Japan ... this would certainly seem to be reasonable to me ... why no alert was issued from either of these locations is, at least, interesting ...

[Jefferson Adams]

Know what else? My wife was supposed to have been on that flight - KAL-007. She switched to a later flight at the last minute. Scared some of her family half to death who thought she was still on KAL-007 when it went down.

[goodell70]

Most people don't know this, but an ex-KGB agent managed to publish a book back in the early 80's in which he revealed, based on his own exposure to secret meetings in the late 50's, that Russia was going to go into an amazing "Communism is dead" phase. In reality, it would be "controlled chaos" over there - controlled by the concealed KGB and Communist Party. The scenario of change that he described actually took place about 6 years later almost exactly as though he had scripted it -- even details like the death of Cecesceu in Romania and the bloodshed over the Russian parliament. He explains who the architects of the plan were and the precedents they used in Marxist-Leninist history for obtaining its approval. You could say that it was all a "lucky guess," except that he was right on the money in detail after detail, and the whole thing caught the world more or less by surprise. Basically, we are in the "final phase" of the communist world's long range plan of strategic deception, in preparation for some kind of all out "assault" for the world communist victory. Part of the deception involves the popular idea that the government of China is independent of Moscow, and likewise the Eastern European governments. The "Tom Clancy" stereotype of these subjects (referring to this popular author's books about the Communist military) is what practically everyone subscribes to - that, and the idea that the Russians are stupid and do not really care that much about Communism. This way of thinking could be a big mistake. The book is "New Lies for Old" by Anatolii Golitsyn. There is a sequel to it entitled, "The Perestroika Deception," which consists of all of the memorandae he wrote for the CIA, to no avail. I think that if a person sees Congressman McDonald's "The Subversion Factor" documentary video on Russian subversion of the U.S. Government, and reads these books by Golitsyn (go to the John Birch Society or "The New American" website), he will have a better ability to grasp issues like those being discussed here. He will also come away with a much better grasp of the present "terrorist" problem. Thank you for reading my note.