Apologies - I’d missed it. Shutting up now.
One factor I’d add is that this wasn’t just some random piece of Soviet airspace. The plane flew over the Kamchatka Peninsula which was one of the most militarily sensitive areas in the Soviet Union.
This was part of what made the Soviets suspicious. The plane was flying in pretty much the exact area where a spy plane would choose to fly (and this explains why the genuine spy plane had been following the same route). But it also happens to be the area you fly near if you’re going from Alaska to Korea.
Military planes, such as AWACS, Tankers and spy planes are often built on commercial hulls, at the time the Boeing 707 was used in all three roles.
Isn’t Krasnoyarsk 2,000 miles as the crow flies from the Sea of Okhotsk? Even if the radar had been operational, would that be credible? I’ve heard of over-the-horizon radars but I don’t know what they might be capable of.
I’m not stating or defending the thesis - it was the Cold War imagining of a third-rate author. His entire thesis, written in the darkest times, was that the US wanted to know the capabilities of the Krasnoyarsk radar and concocted a plan through the CIA and KCIA (yes, Korean CIA… didn’t mean to confuse anyone) to send an innocent plane deep enough to make them light the radar up. Analysis of the radar signal would tell us reams about its capabilities.
That nearly all of this was nonsensical at the time, and became nonsensier with the simple revelations of Hersh’s book (and yes, I meant to praise him - another ambiguous comment not intended that way), and now the full revelations that the supposed target radar was never finished or operational… 'nuf sed.
I loosely subscribe to the notion that there are two theories of history, the conspiracy theory and the fuckup theory. Many tried to cram KAL-007 into the first category but the longer view has clearly placed it in the second.
It was though, entirely unbeknownst to it, approaching the scene of an ongoing battle between the Vincennes and Iranian gunboats.
- They didn’t get court martialed:
- If anyone did deserve to face it a court martial it was Captain William C. Rogers III of the Vincennes. He created the conditions for the entirely avoidable accidental shoot down of IA 655. He compressed the battle space and the reaction time available to his crew by closing on the Iranian shore chasing after said gunboats which were no longer a threat. His over-aggressiveness in the mere four weeks deployed in the area before shooting down IA 655 earned the Vincennes the nickname “Robocruiser”. The commander of the USS Sides, a frigate nearest the Vincennes when the incident occurred later was scathingly critical of him in an article published in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. From wiki on what he had to say about him:
Hmmm… still not a letter of recommendation on their files for the positive effects of restraint.
I suspect the same mentality was at work in Siberia. The repercussions of letting a giant spy plane fly over classified installations and depart undisturbed were probably perceived as career-limiting, and passenger planes did not fly in that area, they knew better. So the best course of action, do a perfectly legitimate take-down of the aircraft ignoring orders to surrender and land.
Did a Soviet fighter fly in front of airliner and dip its wing? That’s a clear physical signal used to say “land now”. And should have woken up the airline pilot that “this means you”.
As an aside, I saw fighter do this to a Cessna flying over me in eastern Massachusetts on Sept 11. Rather surreal.
The AWACS aircraft would have been an E-3 Sentry which is built on a Boeing 707 airframe. Although the radome is quite visible in these pictures, it is easily missed in low visibility conditions. The size difference between a 707 and a 747, while obvious when parked side by side on the ground, is not readily apparent in the air without clear visual references. As already noted, the Soviets had previously observed a valid US reconnaissance plan on a similar path, and were reasonably assuming that this was a continuation of that flight which unambiguously entered Soviet airspace over the Kamchakta Peninsula, which was a location where missile tests often took place (although the actual shootdown probably occurred over international waters).
The suspicions, such as they are, arise from the secrecy the Soviets demonstrated after the shoot down; at first, denying the shootdown or that they’d even seen the aircraft on tracking radar, then admitting that there had been a crash but refusing to acknowledge or turn over the recovered flight data and cockpit voice recorders (which didn’t occur until after the fall of the Soviet Union), and Soviet interference in rescue operations. For the part of the Soviets, who had concocted an atmosphere of fear in response to the bombast of the Reagan Administration’s new “hard line” against the Warsaw Pact and Reagan’s infamous “Star Wars” speech in March of 1983, were already conducting an ill-managed intelligence operation where KGB operatives were directed to find evidence of a conspiracy by the NATO powers to start a pre-emptive attack on the client states of the Warsaw Pact and/or provoke the Soviet Union into a nuclear attack that the US and UK could respond to. Yes, Soviet agents were directed to actively find signs of a conspiracy, which for an organization where failure to accomplish directives meant return to the Soviet Union (away from the comforts of Western lift) and reassignment to unpleasant duties or even to labor camps (which still existed all the way until the end of the Soviet Era) meant that agents were highly motivated to find, interpret, or in some cases manufacture from whole cloth evidence of a conspiracy that didn’t exist.
This was exacerbated by problems with the then-fielded MIRV-capable R-36M (NATO reporting name SS-18 ‘Satan’) which the US knew about; the Soviets feared the US would attack before the improved Mod 4 variant could be fielded. There is an irony here in that the entire impetus for the deployment of the LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ MIRV-capable system, which the Soviets then believed was ahead of schedule in development and would also be resistant to counterforce strikes by virtue of the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison system and other, even wilder scheme recommended by the Packard and Scowcroft commissions, which included drilling silos a mile deep into the Rocky Mountains, hiding them in submerged buoyant tubes in Lake Michigan, scooting them around a complex of thousands of shelters covering a goodly portion of the entire state of Utah, or running them around in an underground racetrack in Nevada where they would pop up on command. (None of these schemes–not even the prosaic Rail Garrison program–came to pass, as the operational cost of moving such a heavy booster around or hiding it in mountains/underwater was projected to be more than then entire military budget in multiples.)
So it is easy to see how the Soviet Union–which, mind you, had a titular head (Yuri Andropov) who was in terminal illness and was effectively governed by a select group which was predisposed to believe the worst about NATO intentions–could view an ostensible civilian aircraft as both a surveillance flight or a provocation to war. (For what it is worth, during the Eisenhower era and perhaps even later proposals for ‘dirty tricks’ provocations were presented, and it is entirely possible that the Soviets obtained access and took the proposals to be actual plans.) The failure to disclose this as an unfortunate accident, which in the posterior view it certainly was, was an artifact of the extreme paranoia on both sides of the Cold War. As for conspiracies involving using KAL007 as a surveillance platform, all I can say is that anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of surveillance operations would realize what a ridiculously complex and leakage-prone operation that would be, especially at a time when our ability to perform high altitude aircraft and satellite surveillance had improved dramatically.
The “Truth about the KAL 007 Shootdown” is that it was a clusterfuck of misunderstanding and mismanagement, exacerbated by fear on all sides that something more nefarious than a plane flying off course and misidentification as a security threat had occurred. This should have been a wakeup call to all sides, and if the Soviets had been more open about the incident (as they eventually were about the meltdown of Chernobyl #4 after a similar attempt to stonewall the West) then it may have been seen as an opportunity to defuse tensions that could have driven both parties to the believe in imminent war and nuclear exchange. As it was, it took the ascension of a (relatively) new leader who sought to improve the quality of life of Soviet citizens to enact the kind of reforms that opened relationships with the United States and the West. And given how that turned out for the Soviets, they were perhaps correct to be paranoid, albeit not of attack from without but unrest and decay from within.
Stranger
Brilliant post, Stranger.
Still, let me ask, does the E-3 Sentry have rows of illuminated passenger windows?
At a minimum, the pilot’s observations indicated that plane may well have been a passenger plane; and that should have given them pause. A long, long pause.
The last overnight flight I was on to the east, by the time we were over Japan in the middle of the night almost no reading lights were on and probably the majority of window shades were down.
Against a black sky, having the shades down would make no difference.
In any case, I would bet that some shades were up and, even if not, there is always a light leak outlining the window. So, as a minimum the pilot would have seen a row of light rectangles/ovals punctuated here and there with fully lit rectangles/ovals (or whatever shape the windows were).
ETA: How could they not take another look just to be one hundred percent certain? Why not fly across the nose of the Boeing with their wing lights flashing? There was no risk that they would then be warning it away - the Boeing could never have taken (successful) evasive action against a fully armed MIG. No, they wanted to shoot it down to make a point.
I think the background is that a well-crafted spying operation is designed to look like an innocuous event. The result of this is that a genuine innocuous event can end up looking like a well-crafted spying operation.
Missed the edit window time limit.
When I said, “no risk that they would be warning it away”, I was trying to say it’s not like they would have then lost their only chance to shoot it down had it actually been an enemy (i.e. USAF, etc) plane.
Yes they would have. To shoot it down, they would have needed it stay within the Air Defence Identification Zone (which IIRC was 300 NM off the Soviet coast). If this was a spy plane and it got out off the zone, the plane, its pictures and data are already gone and and soon be in the hands of the Americans. Plus, for all the Sovs knew,there was a squadron of US fighters off outside staying below Radar range and ready to escort the plane back… the US did at times escort U2 and other flights away from Sov airspace.
Plus, I think you are overestimating the endurance of the interceptors.
I think the military aircraft in question was an RC-135, not an E-3.
No matter what, the prominent bulge of the 747 should have made it obvious that it was a 747.
I went to Japan recently (I returned Friday), and on both the flight there and the one back, every single window in the cabin had its shade pulled down. That’s because people mostly are trying to get some sleep to get over the jet lag quicker.
Not true - the closed shades are really good at keeping the light in/out. On my way to Japan, it was in daylight the whole time (we left Friday morning and landed Saturday afternoon, without ever going through darkness). The cabin was pretty dark, and there was no light coming in from the windows. And there were NO windows with the shades open. Someone opened one for a few seconds, and it was like a Krieg light going off.
I believe there are serious questions about whether Soviet pilots ever made significant visual contact. All big planes look the same in the distance, especially in dim light. The interception was at about 3:00 am local time. There is also no particular reason a 747-based craft couldn’t have been hostile or intentionally in Soviet air space.