The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  The sixteen-point checklist was largely a mirror image of the Soviet contingency plans for war with the West. The KGB agents in Bonn, Brussels, Copenhagen, London, Oslo, Paris, Rome and Lisbon were told to watch out for such things as “a sharp increase in the activity of all forms of intelligence,” especially on the readiness of Warsaw Pact forces; possible positioning of agents to awaken sleeper cells in the East to “operate in wartime conditions;” closer coordination between the CIA and Western spy agencies; an “increase in the number of disinformation operations” against the Soviet Union and its allies; “secret infiltration of sabotage teams with nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons into the countries of the Warsaw Pact;” and expanding the network of sabotagetraining schools and émigrés and setting up sabotage teams with them. The instructions strongly reflect the police state mentality of the KGB. They were looking for signs of what they would do in the event of war, such as imposing military censorship and postal censorship, or restricting people from using the telephone and telegraph.25

  When Gordievsky returned to London on August 18, 1983, after a long break in Moscow, he resumed meeting his British handlers. Gordievsky said he immediately passed to the British the latest KGB instructions on nuclear missile attack.26

  Gordievsky had once taken part in meetings at KGB headquarters about the RYAN operation, but he regarded the whole thing as foolish. “My reaction was very simple,” he said. “I said it was just another folly.” He found his KGB colleagues also took the demands from Moscow with skepticism. “They were not seriously worried about the risk of nuclear war,” he recalled, “yet none wanted to lose face and credit at the Centre by contradicting the First Chief Directorate’s assessment. The result was that RYAN created a vicious spiral of intelligence-gathering and evaluation, with foreign stations feeling obliged to report alarming information even if they did not believe it.” Gordievsky and others fed the vicious spiral: they clipped newspapers and passed the clippings along as intelligence.

  But when Gordievsky brought the cables from Moscow to the British, they took them quite seriously. They worried about the deep paranoia. They copied the documents and sent them to the CIA.

  The elements were now in place for a superpower miscalculation. Andropov had urgently raised the prospect of a nuclear attack in the telegrams about the RYAN intelligence-gathering operation. Reagan had escalated the rhetoric with his “evil empire” speech and announced his futuristic Strategic Defense Initiative in March. Documents from the U.S.S. Enterprise about the navy’s F-14 flyover and the provocative naval exercises off the Soviet coast in April were now in Soviet hands. The threatening Pershing II missiles were nearing deployment in Germany. The interceptor pilots on Sakhalin Island had already been burned once, and were warned not to let it happen again.

  Into this maelstrom of suspicions and fears flew a large, stray bird.

  ————— 3 —————

  WAR SCARE

  When Korean Air Lines flight 007 left Anchorage at 4 A.M. local time on August 31, the crew was well familiar with the planned route across the Pacific, which came close to the airspace of the Soviet Union before crossing Japan and heading to Seoul. The pilot of the Boeing 747 was Captain Chun Byung-in, forty-five years old, a veteran of the Korean Air Force who had logged 6,619 hours flying jumbo jets, including eighty-three flights across the northern Pacific in the previous decade. His copilot, Son Dong-Hwin, forty-seven, had made the crossing fifty-two times. And the navigator, Kim Eui Dong, thirty-two, had made forty-four flights across the ocean. In addition to the flight crew, there were twenty cabin attendants, six Korean Air Lines employees transferring back to Seoul, and two hundred forty passengers, among them sixty-two Americans, including Representative Larry McDonald, an extreme right-wing Democrat from Georgia who was chairman of the John Birch Society.1

  The flight plan was to take R20, the northernmost of five passenger airline routes across the ocean. These highways in the sky were fifty nautical miles wide and one thousand feet high. Route R20 was nearest the Soviet Union. The flight’s departure from Anchorage was delayed to account for headwinds, and to bring the plane into Seoul’s Kimpo International Airport at precisely 6 A.M. on September 1.

  Soon after takeoff, an error was made. The autopilot was improperly set and the crew did not notice. Instead of picking up the Inertial Navigation System, which would have steered the plane on the proper route, the autopilot was instead set at a constant magnetic heading. This may have been caused by the failure to twist a knob one further position to the right.

  The flight began to drift northward of Route R20. About 50 minutes into the flight, the crew of KAL 007 reported crossing Bethel, the first waypoint, at 31,000 feet. They didn’t know it, but the plane was already 13.8 miles north of Bethel and outside the air route.

  As they crossed the ocean, Chun and his crew saw nothing amiss, according to their communications with air traffic controllers. After Bethel, at the next waypoint, they reported all was well, but they were sixty-nine miles north of their route. At the next spot, they were 115 miles off course. After five hours in the air, they reported passing another waypoint, when in fact they were 184 miles north, heading directly toward the Kamchatka Peninsula of the Soviet Union. At one point the flight crew exchanged messages with another passenger plane that reported dramatically different winds—this should have alerted them they were off course. But it did not. The voices in the cockpit showed no alarm. They talked about mundane matters. One of the crew remarked, “Having a dull time…”

  “I have heard there is currency exchange at our airport,” one said.

  “What kind of money?” answered another.

  “Dollar to Korean money,” came the response.

  “Captain, sir, would you like to have a meal?” asked a cabin attendant.

  “What?”

  “Meal, is it already time to eat?”

  “Let’s eat later.”

  Another plane flew in the sky that night, circling close to the Soviet Union, an RC-135 four-engine jet used for intelligence missions by the U.S. air force. The RC-135, a converted Boeing 707, was a familiar spy plane, known to the Soviets. Osipovich, the interceptor pilot, recalled he had chased it many times. The RC-135 flights were monitoring Soviet ballistic missile tests on an intelligence mission known as Cobra Ball. The plane was crammed with cameras and special windows down one side to photograph a Soviet missile warhead as it neared its target. The upper surface of the wing on the side of the cameras was painted black to avoid reflection. The RC-135s were based on Shemya Island, a remote rocky outcropping in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

  Soviet missile tests often aimed at the Kamchatka Peninsula. How the missiles landed could help the United States monitor arms control treaties and look for violations. The pictures could show how many MIRVs came from a missile and the final trajectory. The RC-135 planes flew in circular or figure-eight orbits with camera lenses aimed at the Soviet coastline, in anticipation of a test.

  On the night of August 31, a missile test was expected and the RC-135 loitered in the sky, waiting. The RC-135 had a wingspan of 130 feet, compared to the 747, which stretched 195 feet and 10 inches across. Both had four engines, located under the wings. The 747 featured a prominent hump on the front of the fuselage for the upper passenger deck. As the RC-135 circled, at about 1 A.M., the larger 747 flew by, seventy-five miles south.

  This was a critical moment of confusion for the Soviets. They had been tracking the RC-135 by radar. When the missile test didn’t happen, the RC-135 headed back to its base on Shemya Island, but Soviet radar didn’t see it turn and go home. On the way home, the RC-135 crossed the flight path of the 747 at one point. The Soviet radar somehow lost the RC-135 and picked up the 747, now unexpectedly heading directly for Kamchatka. The plane was given a number, 6065, and the track was annotated with an “81,” which meant one unidentified aircraft.2 It was the off-course Korean Air Lines flight, but the Soviet ground controllers thought it might be a
n RC-135. The radar tracked the plane as it approached Kamchatka, but not constantly. Radar contact was lost, and picked up again while the plane was about halfway over the peninsula.

  When the airliner approached Kamchatka, Soviet air defense forces were slow to react. Controllers were groggy, commanders had to be awakened, and there were radar gaps. Transcripts of ground control conversations show they spotted the plane just as it flew over the air defense forces base at Yelizovo. They scrambled four interceptors. These planes zigzagged in the air for twenty minutes but could not find the jet, which was actually north of them, and they were forced to return to base. The plane flew on, straight out over the Sea of Okhotsk and toward Sakhalin Island, about seven hundred miles away. Radar contact was lost at 1:28 A.M.

  The plane appeared again on Sakhalin Island radars at 2:36 A.M. Once again it was given the track number 6065. However, this time the annotation was changed to “91,” which meant one military aircraft.

  The command post duty officer at the Su-15 regiment at Sokol tried that night to use a long-distance phone operator to reach a radar station, Burevestnik. Located on Iturup Island in the Kurils, Burevestnik had sent a message saying that a target was approaching Sakhalin.3

  “Good morning,” the duty officer said to the long-distance operator, giving his secret code word, Oblako 535, and asking her to put through an urgent call to Burevestnik.

  “Yes, high priority, urgent,” he insisted when she asked for the code again.

  “Very well, wait,” she told him.

  She asked for his phone number, then for his name. He gave it, and she didn’t understand.

  He gave it again. He impatiently clicked on the receiver.

  Four minutes passed. “There is no answer,” she replied.

  “No answer?”

  “No.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know why, there is no answer.”

  “Did Burevestnik not answer?”

  “There was no answer at the number at Burevestnik.”

  “That cannot be…”

  The operator asked, “What is that? What kind of organization is that?”

  “It’s a military organization,” the duty officer said. “I need it now, operator, whatever it takes, but I must call there. It’s a matter of national importance. I’m not joking.”

  “Just a minute. Just a minute.”

  Five minutes after he started making the call, with the airliner flying eight miles a minute toward Sakhalin, the command post duty officer asked, “Well, what [is happening], eh?”

  “Calling, no answer.”

  Osipovich was napping at Sokol when the airliner approached Sakhalin. He was on duty, having taken the night shift so he could have the next day free; it was the first day of school and he was supposed to speak at his daughter’s class on the theme of “peace.” He ate and then dozed off watching television, and then awoke to check the guard.

  Unexpectedly, the phone rang as he was getting dressed. He was ordered to rush out to the Su-15 and prepare for takeoff. The weather was poor as a frontal system rolled into Sakhalin. At 2:42 A.M. Osipovich ran to the plane and took off, flying toward the ocean, climbing to 26,000 feet. His call sign was “805.” Soon another Su-15 was in the air, and then a MiG 23 from the Smirnykh air base, also on Sakhalin. Osipovich had no idea what was going on; perhaps it was an elaborate training mission?

  Soviet radar had resumed tracking the airliner and given it the same number as before, 6065. The conversations among ground controllers show they thought it might be an RC-135, although some had doubts. Not once in all the ground conversations nor in the transmissions to the pilots did anyone mention a Boeing 747. They directed Osipovich minute by minute toward the target, and told him: “The target is military, upon violation of State border destroy the target. Arm the weapons.”

  Osipovich at first could only see the target as a dot, two or three centimeters. He had studied the RC-135s and knew the various Soviet civilian airliners, but he later recalled he had never studied the shape of foreign aircraft such as the Boeing 747.

  A ground controller speculated, “If there are four jet trails, then it is an RC-135.” The 747 also had four engines.

  “805, can you determine the type?” Osipovich was asked by the ground controller.

  “Unclear,” he said.

  Confusion reigned on the ground. No one wanted to be responsible for allowing another intrusion like the one on April 4. The Sokol command post duty officer, speaking to a superior, was asked if the incident was serious. “Yes, it looks serious, like on the fourth, but a bit worse,” he replied.

  At 3:09 A.M. an order was given to destroy the plane, but then rescinded. The Sokol command post duty officer wondered if the Americans would really fly a spy plane directly into Soviet airspace. They usually circled outside territorial waters. “Somehow this all looks very suspicious to me,” he said. “I don’t think the enemy is stupid, so… Can it be one of ours?”

  He called another command center at Makarov, on the eastern tip of the island, to see what they knew about the plane’s flight. “It hasn’t bombed us yet,” was the reply.

  As he closed on the 747, about fifteen miles behind it, Osipovich saw his missile lock-on light illuminate. Yolki palki! he said, meaning “What the hell!” He turned off the missile lock-on and flew closer.

  At 3:14 A.M., the commander of the Far East Military District was given a report. He was told Osipovich was ready to fire, but “he cannot identify it visually because it is still dark.”

  “We must find out, maybe it is some civilian craft or God knows who,” said the commander.

  “The pilot sees only a shadow,” said another ground controller.

  “He cannot determine the type?”

  “No way…it is dark, dark.”

  Osipovich was now getting closer, 7.4 miles behind the airliner, which crossed Sakhalin. “It is flying with flashing lights,” he reported. Shortly after 3:12, Osipovich tried to contact the airliner by the Soviet friend-or-foe electronic identification system, but there was no response because the plane was civilian and did not carry a compatible military responder.

  The Soviet ground controllers asked Osipovich six times whether the airliner was showing navigation lights, on the assumption that a plane without them might be on a spy mission. At 3:18, Osipovich reported, “The air navigation light is on, the flashing light is on.”

  The Sokol ground controller told Osipovich to flash his lights briefly as a warning, and he did. Then, at 3:20, he was ordered to shoot a warning burst from his cannons. He did. There was no response. Then, unexpectedly, the airliner seemed to slow.

  Unbeknownst to the Soviets, at 3:20, air traffic controllers in Tokyo had given Captain Chun permission to climb from 33,000 to 35,000 feet, and this caused the airliner to slow. Cockpit voice recordings show Chun and his crew never knew what was happening around them. Investigators later concluded that the change in altitude was seen by the Soviets as an evasive action and reinforced the suspicion that it was an RC-135 spy plane.

  “805, open fire on the target,” ground control instructed Osipovich. But at that moment, Osipovich said he couldn’t because he had almost overtaken the airliner. “Well, it should have been earlier, where do I go now, I am already abeam of the target?” This statement that he was “abeam,” or alongside the airliner, suggested, to some, in retrospect, that Osipovich should have seen the 747’s distinctive hump. But investigators said radar tracks show that Osipovich was consistently behind the 747, and to the right. Osipovich also recalled later that his own plane “began to rock” at this point; he did not say why.4

  In the next radio transmission, Osipovich said, “Now, I have fallen back from the target.” He added the airliner was at 33,000 feet and on his left. He does not indicate his own altitude—above or below the 747. If he was below the 747, it would have been harder to see the plane’s hump.

  At 3:24, Osipovich’s radio crackled with orders: “805, approach t
arget and destroy target!” The airliner was just slipping away from the Sakhalin coast. Osipovich recalled later it was at this point he had finally gotten a look at the plane, and he realized suddenly it was larger than an RC-135.

  “Soon I could see it with my own eyes,” he recalled. “It was a big plane, and I thought it was a military-cargo plane because it had a flickering flash-light. There were no passenger plane routes, and there had been no occasions of any passenger planes losing their way…I could see it was a large plane. It wasn’t a fighter plane, but either a reconnaissance plane or a cargo plane.”5

  He fired. At 3:25, two R98 air-to-air missiles streaked ahead, one a heat-seeker that locked onto a source of infrared radiation such as the engine exhaust, the other guided by a radar. They each carried forty-four pounds of high explosive designed to produce fourteen hundred steel fragments. The heat-seeking missile was fired first and took thirty seconds to reach the airliner. Osipovich saw an explosion.

  “The target is destroyed,” he reported.

  He broke away to the right. He was low on fuel, and landed back on the island.

  The explosion tore a hole in the plane five feet wide and the cabin pressure plunged. “What’s happened?” asked a surprised cockpit crew member at the blast. The missile had sliced through the control cables and the Boeing pitched up, pressing people into their seats. The engines remained on, but the speed brakes—the flaps that usually try to stop the plane on the runway—extended from the wing, the landing gear came down and passengers were told to put out cigarettes and prepare for an emergency descent. “Put the mask over your nose and mouth and adjust the headband,” the passengers were told on the public address system. The first officer radioed to Tokyo, barely able to speak through his mask. “Rapid compressions descend to one zero thousand.”