Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302280020
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J. LENGTH: Medium
IN CRISIS, TOP SOVIETS CHOSE LIE
Hours after the downing of a Korean airliner, Soviet foreign ministry officials concluded that the best way to deal with the "nasty problem" was to tell the truth. But the military and political leadership refused to follow their advice.Moscow also ignored a clear signal from then-U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz that the truth about the downing of KAL Flight 007 was known.
Shultz and Soviet officials gave their versions of the incident Saturday at Princeton University at a conference on the end of the Cold War.
A Soviet fighter plane shot down the commercial airliner off the Soviet Pacific coast on Sept. 1, 1983. All 269 people aboard were killed. The Soviets then claimed the KAL flight was on a spy mission.
Sergei Tarasenko said he was in his Soviet foreign ministry office when he got word a plane had disappeared. When he called the defense ministry, he said an official "started to explain to me that they `destroyed . . . ,' and then suddenly there was a pause and in a couple of minutes he said, `I cannot continue talking to you.' "
Tarasenko said he and other officials concluded "the best way to proceed was to tell the truth" - to blame human error in bad weather, complicated by the military tension between the superpowers.
He said that course was proposed to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who "agreed in principle but said he wouldn't go against [Defense Minister Dmitri] Ustinov."
Shultz said that U.S. intelligence had a transcript of conversations between the Soviet fighter pilot and ground-control officers. He said he read from the transcript "as a very deliberate effort to say to the Soviets that we had this information and that they would be well advised not to say otherwise."