KOREAN AIR LINE 007

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000201330002-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 47
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 19, 2008
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: July 25, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-01070R000201330002-9
PROGRAM The Fred Fiske Show
July 25, 1984 8:00 P.M.
STATION WAMU-FM
Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT Korean Air Lines 007
FRED FISKE: We are going to be talking about the shoot-
ing down of the Korean Airliner 007 almost a year ago. We have
in the studios two gentlemen who have studied that, each of whom
has written a book concerning it.
FISKE: It's been almost a year since Korean Airliner
007 was shot down by the Soviets It was September 1st, last year
when 269 passengers and crew members lost their lives in that
tragic incident which stunned the world and which led to tense
international confrontation. Now two writers have had the time
to study the incident and to analyze what probably happened.
Jeffrey St. John is a syndicated columnist, a veteran
broadcaster, editor and publisher of the United States Times,
winner of two Emmy Awards, and author of the new book Day of the
Cobra, published by Thomas Nelson Company.
Major General Richard Romer is a veteran flier with 135
missions as a fighter/reconnaissance pilot in World War II,
former Chief of Reserves of the Canadian Armed Forces. He is
author of the book Massacre: 747. It's published by Paper Jacks
in Canada, Ontario, Canada.
MAJOR GENERAL RICHARD ROMER: And in the United States.
FISKE: ...Gentlemen, we should make clear, I suspect,
that the conclusions that each of you reaches are based on evi-
dence and expert testimony, but much of those conclusions can't
be certain.
Material supplle' ~- Dnr11n Tr oo^-.+ I ,- nv hw -H H far filw ,nr1 rAfwrwnnw nurnosas only. It may not be reproduced. sold or publicly demonstrated or exhibited.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-01070R000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
GENERAL ROMER: Well, look, I'm a lawyer, as well as a
few other things. And it seems to me that all you can do in a
case of this kind is to take the evidence that is produced. And
none of us were on the flight deck of the 747, KAL 007, when it
left Anchorage on the night of September 1st/August 30th, four
o'clock in the morning. And so what we have to do is to take all
the evidence we can find, do some experimentation, if you can do
that -- and I did some of that with Air Canada. They flew me in
their 747 simulator and we looked at the whole question of what
happens when you punch in lattitude and longitude in your in-
ertial navigation systems, and we looked at the question of
whether the pilot knew where he was when he was shot down. But
you can add to these things.
But, fundamentally, you have to make some judgments
based on all the evidence. And that's all you can do. And you
have to make, I think, your judgments on as informed a basis as
you possibly can. And that's what I have tried to do. I haven't
read Jeffrey's book yet, but I'm quite sure that that's the way
that he approached it, as well.
JEFFREY ST. JOHN: Yes, as a matter of fact, General, I
And what I think the problem has always been since the
night of September 1st, Fred, is that the preponderance of evi-
dence available has largely been ignored, and conjecture has
substituted for evidence.
For example, the whole issue of premeditation. There's
a stronger case for premeditation, I think, than there is for
accident. And part of the body of evidence is in the area of the
past behavior of the Soviet Union in the air, not by reason of
the 1978 shoot-down, which I think we'll get into later, involv-
ing flight 902 out of Paris bound for Seoul via Anchorage, but
the whole history and psychology of the Soviet Union.
You know, there was an attempt, very early, to extend
the doctrine of temporary insanity to the Soviet Union by saying
this was an accident, this was an act of paranoia. Well, I don't
think anyone, any reputable Soviet scholar would ever call the
Soviet Union anything but a cold-blooded, pragmatic power that is
very cautious when it moves; but when it does move and it commits
itself, it commits its full might, and everybody is aboard. This
was totally ignored. And the evidence is clearly on the other
side, that this was not an accident.
FISKE: I don't see how anybody can use the term pre-
meditation, since the Korean airliner was in the air over Soviet
territory for almost 2 1/2 hours, and the Soviets obviously
thought long and hard and considered whether or not to shoot it
down. So, obviously it was premediated.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
GENERAL ROMER: To that extent, it was premeditated.
And I agree with that. The exercise that they went through, in
my mind, was quite straightforward. They saw this aircraft come
in. It entered Soviet airspace. They knew it was a Korean jet.
They knew what the schedules were of these aircraft, and they
watched these things go down the Pacific day after day.
And in my opinion, the Korean -- some of the Korean
captains had done this before and were cutting the corner. It's
always...
FISKE: ...that in your book, General, that this part-
icular captain was one of the most experienced. He was a very
experienced captain, wasn't he?
GENERAL ROMER: That is right. And we'll come to that.
You may disagree. But in any event, I'll come to the reason why
I think that this had occurred.
But in my opinion, they knew what the airplane was.
They knew it was not an RC-135. They knew it wasn't a whole
bunch of things. And they, above all, knew that it was not an
American airplane.
And so, they tried to catch it over the Kamchatka Penin-
sular, and failed. They then caught it over Sakhalin Island.
ST. JOHN: Was that because the interceptor fighters,
basically, were short on fuel?
GENERAL ROMER: They weren't short on fuel. They were
short on their techniques in terms of catching it, which involves
fuel. Because if you get your aircraft up too soon, you're going
to expend your fuel, and they have to get down.
ST. JOHN: Because we had two sets of fighters, one out
of Sakhalin and the other out of Kamchatka.
GENERAL ROMER: That's right. No, I'm talking about
Kamchatka.
ST. JOHN: I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just
wanted to...
GENERAL ROMER: They missed. But the one out of, obvi-
ously, out of Sakhalin got it. But the tapes, of course, of the
pilot 805 out of Sakhalin are very instructive in a whole bunch
of areas, not the least of which relates to the fact that he
said, I think three times, that he could see the target. Not
just the lights, because we know that the lights were on. He
reported that. But he said, "I could see," that he could see.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
4
FISKE: He reported that the lights were on?
GENERAL ROMER: Oh, yes.
ST. JOHN: Oh, sure. It's in the transcript.
FISKE: I thought General Ogarkov insisted that there
were no lights.
GENERAL ROMER: Oh, come on now. Let's get -- we'll get
to Ogarkov in a minute, or in a few minutes, because Ogarkov and
the Soviets put on one of the best propaganda exercises we've
seen in modern times.
ST. JOHN: Superb. Superb.
GENERAL ROMER: The New York Times called it spell-
binding. And he had a whole pack of lies that were developed out
of information given by the President and others.
Now let me go back to what happened. As the aircraft
approached and was intercepted, 805 saw the airplane. He said,
three times, "I can see the target." He knew that the airplane
was a Korean aircraft. He could see it. It was white. And
furthermore, they made the identification on the ground, because
he never once did what an interceptor pilot is supposed to do.
He never once said to Deputat, his control ground station, what
the airplane was. Never once said boo. That indicates quite
clearly to me that they knew.
[Confusion of voices]
GENERAL ROMER: And they knew it was not an American
airplane. And in my opinion, they, on a premediated basis, de-
cided that particular night that they had had enough of the Kor-
ean aircrft overflying their territory from time to time -- it
was a particularly sensitive night -- so the decision was made in
Moscow, at Kalinin, which is the headquarters of the air defense
force of the Soviet Union, because it went to that level and
beyond, that they would shoot it. And they did.
Now, on the question of whether he knew where he was, on
the question that I -- the proposition that I put forward, that
he was cutting a corner, it is also instructive that Korean Air
Lines, after this event, mounted an investigation of their own.
And as a result of this investigation, they went back over their
flying records and what had happened on other occasions, and in
the result they grounded 14 of their senior captains.
FISKE: When General Romer uses the term "cutting the
corner," he means attempting to save time and fuel by taking a
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
5
more direct route. It results in some enormous saving for the
airline over a period of time if this is done regularly.
FISKE: There's a question that you raise in your book
as to whether or not the airline actually encouraged this on the
part of its...
GENERAL ROMER: I think they encouraged it in terms of
legal and appropriate and safe corner-cutting and line-jumping,
if you will. And we can talk about what line-jumping is. And
that is simply when a Korean aircraft is coming into a major
airport and still out of radar range, he'll say that he's in
position X, 50 miles or 75 miles closer than he really is. And
then he'll be assigned a number in the whole pattern that puts
him ahead of others. And they've been known to do that.
Now let me come back to this. The fact is that Korean
Air Lines grounded 14 senior captains. You don't ground one
senior captain unless there is substantial cause when you're
running an airline.
ST. JOHN: How much was that, General, PR to mitigate
the lawsuits, do you think?
ST. JOHN: Was that an exercise in PR?
GENERAL ROMER: Well, I don't think it's an exercise in
PR, because you're dealing with the careers of 14 senior people
who are making a lot of money. And they could only, in my opin-
ion, do that to them if they had cause. Assume that they had
cause, then, sure, it will be evidence when the matter comes to
trial here in Washington, because Korean Air Lines will have to
answer -- and that's one of the major questions they will have to
answer, is why.
ST. JOHN: Did Korean Air Lines talk to you?
GENERAL ROMER: No.
ST. JOHN: They wouldn't talk to me either.
GENERAL ROMER: Well, they won't talk to us, for heaven
sakes. You've got to be kidding.
ST. JOHN: I'm sorry. ,
GENERAL ROMER: I tried to talk...
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
FISKE: Why would they not?
ST. JOHN: Oh, the guy told me right straight out. He
says, "We're going to be involved in court for five years," he
said.
GENERAL ROMER: Sure.
ST. JOHN: "And we can't talk to you. You're a journ-
alist. You're going to publish, and then the litigants will then
use that against us." He was very blunt about it.
GENERAL ROMER: That's quite fair.
ST. JOHN: And it's understandable.
FISKE: Let me pose this question to you. Do you rule
out positively that this airliner may, as Marshal Ogarkov charged
in that spellbinding press conference of his, have been on some
sort of intelligence mission?
ST. JOHN: Well, while he's looking up his reference,
let me just answer the question this way: First of all, you have
to know something about the good Marshal. His previous occupa-
tion prior to becoming Chief of Staff of the entire Soviet Army
was chief of the Soviet disinformation service for the Army. He's
had a long career in practicing in lying. That's the first thing
you've got to understand about Ogarkov.
The second thing is that the presumption of the question
and the presumption in the minds of people who think that this
happened, that it was on a spy mission, that the United States
Government would jeopardize the lives of 269 people to gather
intelligence, where it can be gotten from other sources of far
more sophisticated nature than even you, Fred Fiske, with all of
your experience, would dream of.
ST. JOHN: Not just sat'ellies, a whole lot of stuff that
we don't even know about. It's only been suggested.
Loo, there's one thing that really bugs the Soviet
Union's military, and that is their enormous lag in technology,
because they know they are outclassed when it comes to high tech.
And that's why the -- help me out, General. What's that --
Armtarg, Armtorg, the trading -- Soviet trading corporation,
spends inordinate amounts of time engaging in industrial espi-
onage, theft of Western secrets. As a matter of fact...
GENERAL ROMER: And equipment.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
ST. JOHN: And equipment. And they just can't get
enough of it because they don't have enough of it.
So, the presumption there is that we sacrificed 269
lives for that. But the weight of evidence is not there.
GENERAL ROMER: Well, you see, disinformation is the
correct word. And the whole Ogarkov exercise was formidable and
masterful on the whole -- on the matter of lying and disinforma-
tion.
The reason I was reaching for my book is I. have two
illustrations in the center. One of them is a map which was put
up on the wallboard behind Ogarkov on this press conference day.
And this was an unprecedented conference. He had never had a
conference before, none of that stuff. But suddenly he appeared
and he...
FISKE: Very few Soviet officials do.
GENERAL ROMER: Of course. And he had this great wall-
board behind him, and he had a pointer in his hand. On one side
of the wallboard he had what I have in this illustration, which
is a line on a map showing the Russians' allegation as to the
route of the aircraft, the 747, as it crossed the Sea of Okhotsk
and then it made a sharp turn to the right to go over a base, a
secret base on Sakhalin Island. And it looks like a hook.
If you follow the tape of the Soviet fighter pilot 805,
he says regularly and constantly the whole time he's tracking his
target that it's flying on a course of 240. There's no turn
whatsoever.
So, Ogarkov is lying on that one. But he's standing
there pointing with this pointer, and all his prestige, and he
knows that everything that goes on, the television camera is
going to be on, the camera on the television sets of the American
nation forthwith, and they'll be sitting there listening to him
and they'll be believing him because he's Chief of Staff of the
Soviet Union.
Then there's another one which he's pointing with his
pointer at what looks like a couple of racetracks. Those race-
tracks, he is saying to the American people, are the location and
the way the American RC-135, the electronic intelligence air-
plane, rendezvoused, rendezvoused with the Korean 747 before it
entered Soviet airspace, and when it entered Soviet airspace it
was under the control of the American RC-135, the Boeing 747
converted.
And of course, that is utter falsehood. The airplane
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
did what President Reagan said. We're not going to get into a
discussion about President Reagan, but he said that...
FISKE: Maybe we will.
GENERAL ROMER: Maybe we will -- that the RC-135 from
Shemya, which is an island to the east -- an Aleutian island to
the east of the Kamchatka Peninsular, that the airplane crossed
75 miles ahead but in front of the 747, and there was no contact
between the two at all. But the RC-135 then proceeded back to
its base.
ST. JOHN: Its mission, by the way, was to check pos-
sible violations for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for
a missile-firing test that had been cancelled just before 007 was
shot down.
FISKE: One of you mentions in his book that the Soviets
were conducting a highly important missile-firing test that very
evening.
ST. JOHN: I haven't read the General's book, but it's
in mine. GENERAL ROMER: Yeah. That's common information between
US.
Now, where Ogarkov got this idea for a rendezvous came
from President Reagan.
ST. JOHN: That's interesting.
GENERAL ROMER: On September the lst, when the event
occurred, the United States immediately let fire. Secretary
Shultz, here, gave a press conference that stunned everybody
because at ten o'clock in the morning he got up and he said, "The
Soviet Union has shot down Korean 007." He went through all the
details because he had the tapes, the transcripts of the tapes.
ST. JOHN: Never in my 25 years covering Washington have
I heard a diplomat give such a detailed briefing as that Shultz
-- it just was -- everybody there, Fred, was just absolutely
aghast. Because, you know, these are exercises in dissembling
most of the time. And suddenly the Secretary of State gets on
television at eleven o'clock in the morning and he is -- you
could hear a pin drop in that auditorium.
GENERAL ROMER: And he had this information.
Now, Tass, the government oracle of the Soviet Union,
immediately started and they responded. They made a bland
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
statement about the aircraft disappearing toward the Sea of
Japan. But when Shultz did his thing, then they started to re-
spond, throwing their bricks as well. And right from the very
beginning, it was clear that the intent that they had was to say
that the United States was controlling this airplane, that it was
on a spy mission, and therefore the United States Government was
responsible. And for the next two days they threw everything
they could in their statements. They didn't hold back anything.
And there wasn't one word said by the Soviets about an RC-135.
Nothing. There was no claim, nothing. There was some oblique
reference out of Australia. But there was no claim whatsoever
that an RC-135 was involved. And the Soviets didn't know that
there was an RC-135 involved until Sunday morning, when the Pres-
ident brought in the congressional leaders to the White House and
briefed them on what was going on.
ST. JOHN: It's called covering your ass, Fred.
GENERAL ROMER: Covering your ass. Absolutely.
He brought them in and then told them and told the Amer-
ican public, and therefore Ogargov and company, that an RC-135
had been in the area.
Now, to this day, I don't why he did this. I call it in
the book, generously, I call it dumb information, not disinfor-
mation. Because what happened then was that the great master of
disinformation, Ogargov and his team, took that and converted it
in five days into this masterful propaganda thing, and had them
rendezvousing.
FISKE: It's funny. It resulted in Senator Byrd, the
Democratic leader, trying to cover for the embarrassment caused
by the Republican President.
ST. JOHN: Well, you know, it's very interesting, tag-
ging on to what the General said. Here in Washington, when the
incident came down and they released the RC-135, and Byrd got up
and was very indignant, no one bothered to mention -- and I
brought this out in the political angle in the book, because a
lot of this -- my book is geopolitical, although it's also tech-
nical aviation. He was indignant about this shoot-down. And yet
in 1978 -- and this follows on to your point, General. In 1978
the Soviets shot down a Korean Air Lines 707, Flight 902 out of
Paris bound for Seoul via Anchorage. It got over Soviet air-
space. The story that was told by the Soviets in the aftermath,
and subsequently picked up by the West, was the very cover story
that they later concocted, only they didn't say the RC-135. What
they said was -- they said, in effect, something, if I can remem-
ber it correctly, "We followed you for two hours," which was not
true, because the plane was shot down. It took
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
them -- the plane was shot down 18 minutes after it entered
Soviet airspace, or let us say it was crippled. It wasn't actu-
ally shot down. It landed on a frozen lake.
The very story that they told in in April of '78 was the
same story they told in '83, but of course with one difference.
There was no one to contradict them because there were no sur-
vivors. In '78 there were survivors, because two people died, 12
people were injured. The story they told was contradicted by the
crew. And the exercise that they went through in '78 is pre-
cisely the exercise that I assume -- I know that the conclusion I
come to, and I'm sure General Romer comes to the same conclusion,
they went through the same exercise.
What that means, I'm not too certain. But it illus-
trates a pattern of conduct which is totally ignored in this
thing. And the stupidity, the bewilderment of both the Carter
Administration, characterized by the Reagan Administration's
bewilderment, they just didn't know how to deal with this in '78.
Jack Kemp got on the floor and-said this is going to happen
again.
By the way, the editor snipped out, because we had to
reduce the bulk of that book, or it would have been 18.95 and not
11.95 -- I wrote 100,000 words and we had to cut it down so that
it would be marketable. But they cut out Schmitt, the astronaut,
Senator Schmitt from New Mexico, got up on the floor and warned
that this was going to happen again unless a strong resolution of
condemnation and the Soviets would be punished for this. Guess
who opposed it? Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia,
and then the Majority Leader in the United States Senate.
FISKE: Interesting.
Well, if we accept the premise that the plane was not on
a spy mission, then a couple of other possibilities present it-
self. It was over Soviet territory. It was over a strategic
Soviet base on Sakhalin Island.
ST. JOHN: Don't omit Kamchatka too, please.
FI"SKE: Okay.
ST. JOHN: It's the home base of the Pacific fleet.
GENERAL ROMER: Oh, indeed. And it's also the area
where they're producing and going to install the great 150
rockets.
FISKE: Okay. So that, you know, it lends some credence
to the supposition that they had reason to be there. You know,
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
11
Marshal Ogarkov's argument. But I accept your reasoning it's not
likely to have been the case. So we rule that out.
Then we have to deal with navigational error and we have
to face the fact that they had veteran crews and very sophisti-
cated equipment with backups, three separate systems. Wouldn't
that make it seem highly unlikely that it was navigational error?
ST. JOHN: In 10,000 flights, the INS system has devi-
ated 10 to 50 miles. Suddenly you have an INS system deviating
by 320 miles.
GENERAL ROMER: All right. Furthermore, if you take
what the International Civil Aviation Organization team -- they
set up an investigation team -- and ICAO is an adjunct, if
you
will,
of the United Nations. It functions under its aegis.
And
they
got a group of five people who went out to investigate,
and
they
came up with what. I call -- regard as a flaccid kind
of
report in which they came down on all sides.
ST. JOHN: Here, here, here.
GENERAL ROMER: And they said the most likely possibil-
ity was that on the ground, on the ramp at Anchorage, they
punched in on the inertial navigation system the wrong coordi-
nates for the ramp.
Well, when you're punching in the latitude and longitude
of the ramp position, the airplane must be stationary, and that
is the key information you put in. It's put in in strict rou-
tine. The copilot puts it in. You're not flying, you're not
moving. You're sitting there. The copilot punches it in, and it
comes up on a little screen on the top of the INS, exactly what
you put in. Then the next step is that the captain confirms that
the numbers are correct. And behind him, the engineer confirms
that the numbers are correct. And then you start and you punch
in the next nine way points, the points to which you wish the
INS, locked in with the autopilot, to take you.
And they came to this conclusion that possibly the wrong
coordinates had been put in, sitting on the ramp, for the ramp
position.
Well, you know, this really stretches the imagination
beyond belief.
ST. JOHN: And he flew that route five years.
GENERAL ROMER: Right.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
12
FISKE: Beyond that, of course, he was reporting by
radio to various way stations along the way.
ST. JOHN: No, he had radio trouble. He had to pass his
position through to two other aircraft.
GENERAL ROMER: He didn't have radio trouble. Let me
come at that for a second.
First of all, when he was airborne, he took off to the
northwest, he then came around on a course toward the VOR --
that's very-high-frequency omni-range -- at a place called --code
named Bethel, 346 miles to the west of Anchorage. That was his
target. And when you lock on with your radio navigation equip-
ment to a VOR, as you're going toward it and everything is per-
fectly done, you go right over this beacon, because that's where
you're supposed to be. And if you go by the beacon and you want
to run a check to ascertain your position to make sure you're
exactly right, you do it on the VOR. There's no question about
that.
This man, as soon as he turned and started toward Beth-
el, began to go off the planned track, which was R-20. As he
went by Bethel, it became R-20. And he went by Bethel 12 naut-
ical miles to the north of it. And there is no justification or
reason, except he intended this, that he could go by Bethel with-
out knowing, prudent captain that he was, where he was. And he
was 12 miles off course even at that first point.
ST. JOHN: And let me juxtapose that, because here's
where we have a major disagreement. Maybe not a major disagree-
ment, but at least a disagreement.
What about the possibility, General, that -- you know
about route cards, right?
GENERAL ROMER: Yep.
ST. JOHN: Route cards, for your listeners, are basic-
ally preprogrammed -- these air corridors are flown throughout
the world so frequently and that system has such enormous reli-
ability -- and, you know, it took us to the moon. It guides
shuttles -- that Litton Industries has kind of had a mini little
gold mine in producing these computerized things called route
cards. The route card usually is up in the flight deck with your
aviation maps and what have you, and the copilot usually pulls it
out. And the accepted practice is to program with the route card
the first two INS systems, and then the third is usually done
manually.
Pilots sometimes are so confident that this system is
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
13
almost infallible that the sometimes will program it with all
three route cards.
Now, my conjecture, and it's only conjecture, is the
explanation that the General has given could be explained by the
fact that a route card was deliberately misprogrammed and put in
there. Plus there's the theory there's a possibility of hi-
jacking. Those are two theories I deal with in the book.
FISKE: Why would anybody deliberately do that?
ST. JOHN: Ah, well. All right. Let's assume for a
moment that the KGB, under Yuri Andropov, who's been doing his
number for 15 years, and of course he did a real number on the
Hungarian Freedom Fighters in '56 before he climbed up that slip-
pery slope of power in the Kremlin, and suppose we have a situ-
ation not unlike the terrorist truck bombing in Beirut, where
they have this in their hip pocket for a long time and they're
just waiting to spring it.
The installation of missiles in Europe is a very serious
problem for the Soviets. They don't want those Pershing II mis-
siles in Europe. They're ginning up the peace movement, the
freeze movement. The Japanese and the South Koreans are basic-
ally beginning to form more concerted alliances. Even --you
know, that conference to which Congress McDonald was flying,
along with Helms and other people, was a conference to discuss
the possibility of a new NATO alliance in the Far East.
Suppose the Soviets recognized all this and they decided
that they were going to use this number to do a number of things,
to try and terrorize the world to the same degree that the de-
struction of those Marines, with 250 lives lost, created the same
kind of almost terror and feeling that that incident was going to
explode into a war. That would be in character for the Soviets.
And it would also be in character for them to substitute a route
card to take that aircraft off course and deliberately destroy
Now, that's -- I have one problem with my theory, and I
am quite candid in presenting it as an alternative to pilot er-
ror, as the General has explained. And that is that we do not
know, or could I find out, whether a route card was in fact used
on that 007 flight.
GENERAL ROMER: Well, what was used is what is tradi-
tionally used...
ST. JOHN: FAA says that it wasn't.
GENERAL ROMER: What was used -- and I think it's Conti-
nental that produces these things -- was a computerized flight
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
plan. And that is par for the course on all the airlines.
ST. JOHN: Excuse me. You agree that they program some-
times not manually, but with the route card on all three.
GENERAL ROMER: Yes. But at the same time, they do have
the computerize flight plans that they would be handed on the
ground at Anchorage, and that would be utilized in terms of all
their way points and their latitudes and longitudes.
Now, I suppose the KGB could be credited with doing just
about anything. And if you're looking at all of the theories
whereby something might have occurred, that is one of them.
On the other hand, if you have a competent pilot like
Chun and somebody's thrown a curve at him in terms of a wrong
coordinate somewhere in his way-point system, he will catch it by
doing various checks as he's going by a VOR, such as Bethel. Or
if he finds that he knows his radios are working all right, but
when he goes to make his first way-point report he finds that he
can't raise Anchorage, he can, however, raise the flight that is
immediately behind him, 20 minutes...
GENERAL ROMER: 015 is 20 minutes behind him. And so
what he does when he gets to the point where he has to report,
make his first way-point report, which is at a place, theoretical
place called Nabby (?), about 700 miles down the road, and he's
well off course by this time, he discovers...
ST. JOHN: Knowing he's off course.
GENERAL ROMER: In my opinion, he knew.
ST. JOHN: Uh-huh. Okay.
GENERAL ROMER: But even if he didn't know, what he's
confronted with at this point is he's got serviceable radios, but
he can't, for some reason, reach Anchorage. So, what he does is
he passes his way-point report, Nabby way-point report, to Anch-
orage air traffic control by asking the other Korean airplane,
015, to retransmit for him.
Now, a man with his experience should know that while
his radios are serviceable, there's something wrong in terms of
his being out of range of his VHF transmitter repeater station
that it should have been, just a clue. And all I'm saying is
there are any number of ways that he could have checked.
There's another very, very important way that he could
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
have checked, and ought to have checked. And as I understand it
from all the information and from other pilots who made state-
ments at the time -- one of them was the 707 pilot who was shot
down...
[Confusion of voices]
GENERAL ROMER: ...shot down by the Soviets. He is now
flying the 747. The aircraft is equipped with what is called a
weather radar system, and the weather radar is in the airplane
for the purpose of the crew being able to see ahead to monitor
weather situations, particularly thunder clouds, cumulonimbus, so
that they can avoid them, because those clouds can kill you.
So, that's fine. But what they also have in this kind
of radar is a mapping mode, so that the radar will look down, and
it can look down up to 300 miles ahead, and for lesser ranges as
well. And there's a screen, radar screen by the captain's left
knee. The captain sits in the left-hands seat, the copilot sits
in the right. And there's a screen by the copilot's right knee.
And they can look at these radar sets. And what they do is to
use these radar sets in the mapping mode when they're this close
to the Soviet mainland, as they're going down R-20, just to make
sure that it's over where it should be. And it's a matter of
practice that the Korean Air Lines pilots use this device.
Well, if that had been serviceable -- and you have to
assume for the moment, since there are two of them in the air-
plane...
GENERAL ROMER: ...that he could have checked, that's
one way he could have checked whether he was coming up to a
coastline or whether he was avoiding it.
ST. JOHN: I have one caveat for you to consider, Gen-
eral. The northern coast of Hokkaido, if he had been on his
normal course, he would have overflown the northern Hokkaido, tip
of northern Hokkaido. When you look at the radar, northern Hok-
kaido and northern Sakhalin are almost exact in their configura-
tions. And it is very possible that, having flown that far, that
he looked at his onboard radar and assumed that he was on course
and in position by reason of the fact that what came up in con-
figuration was the exact geographical outlines of what he thought
was northern Hokkaido, which in reality was northern Sakhalin,
which is where he was.
GENERAL ROMER: I understand your caveat. But my con-
cern is that when he was approaching Kamchatka...
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
ST. JOHN: I have no caveat for Kamchatka.
GENERAL ROMER: I know you don't.
FISKE: Is it likely that he could have seen the outline
at night?
GENERAL ROMER: Oh, yes.
ST. JOHN: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Because your cabin...
FISKE: On the radar. I was thinking about looking
ST. JOHN: Your cabin is well lit with red aviation
lights and you...
FISKE: Well, gentlemen, yours is, as you say, a theory,
a speculation. Based on the evidence, if we're going to reason
logically, if we rule out the spy mission theory and we say it's
highly unlikely that it was programmed...
ST. JOHN: It was an act of airborne terrorism, in my
conclusion. The General doesn't believe that, but I do.
FISKE: What would loom into prominence in our reasoning
would be the shortcut theory that you put out. And Jeffrey talks
about terorism. Jeffrey suspects, although it's only suspicion,
no evidence, that the presence of Congressman Larry McDonald on
that plane may have figured into this. I personally...
ST. JOHN: I think they had larger fish to fry than
blowing away a Congressman.
GENERAL ROMER: I would think so. Furthermore, I don't
know that they would have known that he was there. He was going
to take the Korean aircraft out on the Sunday night. He missed
that because...
ST. JOHN: He missed two flights, according to his wife.
I talked to her.
GENERAL ROMER: And he caught this one. And I...
ST. JOHN: As a matter of fact, in the book I explore
that theory. There is, basically, one theory put out by the
supporters of McDonald, and not just the Birchers, and maybe I
can condense this as quickly as possible.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
The Soviets would not have gotten rid of Congressman
Lawrence P. McDonald if they had wanted to just get rid of some-
one who was an irritant, who was basically a very attractive,
articulate guy. He was not your run-of-the-mill characterized
Bircher. He was an exceedingly -- I mean I interviewed him when
he was alive when I was covering Congress. And McDonald had put
together a thing called Western Goals.
Now, I'm not sure I buy this, but I'm just presenting
it, of the thinking behind the assertion very early that he was
really the target.
He put together an outfit called Western Goals, which
was essentially a private espionage and intelligence service. He
had computerized lists, according to his followers, in Bonn, West
Germany in which he had made all the interconnects between vari-
ous terroist organizations and various subversive, what he called
subversive organizations. He had done the same thing, with the
help of the Los Angeles Police Department, as it related to the
Olympics. And it was apparently their belief that he had made
some very vital discoveries and connections. And the Soviets,
from Ogarkov to, particularly -- remember now, we're dealing with
the spymaster of all spymasters, Yuri Andropov, kidneys notwith-
standing. And the Soviets realized that if McDonald was out of
the way, the whole Western Goals operation would collapse.
There's only one problem with that theory. If it's true
that the information is on those computers, the information is
still available.
But that is the basis of the assertion of his supporters
that he was the target.
FISKE: It's unreasonable, of course, that they would
knock down an airplane and 268 other people to get McDonald.
There are lots of easy ways to do that.
ST. JOHN: But I gather that both the General and I
decided that we had had enough of all of this irrational non-
sense. I mean he's been reading me and I've been reading him,
and we're basically probably come out of the same school, since
our ages are not that far part. We came out of the school of
evidence and experience. The people who have been making state-
ments about 007 since September 1, including the Soviet Union,
have never been wedded to evidence and experience.
The evidence and the experience does not basically make
that a tenable theory, but it basically gives you at least a
perception of why they said what they said.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
I think the Soviets had larger fish to fry, as I said
before. I think that they were -- this was an act of airborne
terrorism. I think it was also, the consequences, to test Mr.
Reagan's Warner Brothers backlot rhetoric, and they found him
wanting.
And, you know, their conduct, Fred, since the time they
blew that aircraft out of the skies has been very, very consis-
tent with their attitude when they started it. Do you realize
that we signed a grain agreement, Fred, with the Soviets eight
days before they blew that aircraft out of the...
GENERAL ROMER: And did not deny it, didn't cancel it.
They just carried straight on with it.
ST. JOHN: And the United States refused to even cancel
it. Mr. Shultz and his people at State refused to even consider
it. There was a furious fistfight that went on within the State
Department as to whether we should allow this pipe-laying tech-
nology for that massive Siberian pipeline to go ahead. And of
course we eventually sold it to them.
GENERAL ROMER: Let's pick up the proposition about this
being an act of terrorism. That still fits conveniently into my
thesis that the pilot knew where he was going and he was cutting
a corner, because he was, in effect, in a de facto sense, in
Soviet airspace for over two hours. And that's plenty of time
for an Ogarkov, who sees all these facts about the meeting going
on down here in Seoul to do this and all of these factors, and
here this airplane comes in. And I say that I think that we'll
find that this has been happening before from time to time. And
this brilliant guy, this brilliant disinformation guy is the man,
in my opinion, who made the -- gave the order. He said it was
the commander at Biya (?). That's bullroar.
ST. JOHN: Yuri Andropov was probably on dialysis by
GENERAL ROMER: Oh, yes, he was. I think it was Ogarkov
by himself who, perhaps with a telephone call to Ustinov, de-
pending how much vodka either one of them had had.
But the fact is, when that airplane's blip appeared on
the screen of the radar operator on the Kamchatka Peninsular when
it was 60 miles out, that same -- the transmission was placed on
the board of the operations room of the air defense force at
Kalinin at Moscow. And there's a general officer on duty at all
times there, and he is responsible for the whole perimeter of the
Soviet Union, not just Siberia.
And at that point, as the whole situation accelerated
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
and developed, he knew about it. He, being a prudent general,
would start to inform his superior. Because in their system, and
the American system, or any other military system, you start --if
you're an officer in a responsible position and something like
this is going on, you shove it up to the next guy in the
decision-making process. And if he's smart, he'll shove it up to
the next guy.
And in this instance, you're therefore straight into
Moscow, you're straight into Koldinov (?), Marshal Koldinov, who
is head of the air defense force, and he would shove it up to his
boss, Ogarkov. And that's where this decision was made.
And he could, in this two-hour process, this guy, above
all guys, could put all the factors you were talking about into
his computer and say, "We will kill this airplane. We will make
it the example. We will give it -- we will teach the whole of
the Western World a lesson that they can't do these things."
ST. JOHN: Now, that is a new and novel -- I thought
that I had covered all the bases.
GENERAL ROMER: I'm helping you with your theory.
ST. JOHN: No, not only are you helping me, you're also
basically giving me a fresh angle. I thought I had covered
everything. And my compliments.
GENERAL ROMER: But it meshes in with your theory, and
at the same time it meshes in with my theory. Not only did this
fellow, this Korean captain know where he was, but it also meshes
with the fact that the Soviets knew that he was Korean from the
time he entered their airspace. And as the whole situation de-
veloped, the decision was made to shoot him...
ST. JOHN: That accounts for the two-and-a-half-hour
delay.
FISKE: Before we went on the air, you both agreed that
if this had been an American plane, the Soviets would not have
shot it down. Why not?
ST. JOHN: I think they would have shot it down because
their whole history is to take minimal risks. And it goes along
with the General's theory that nobody wants to take the heat,
either in the Soviet military hierarchy or the United States
military hierarchy. And the fact that Reagan was saying and
doing the things that he did, the Soviets were just not -- the
Soviets are not risk-takers. They never have been. Their advan-
tages have always been handed to them by the West.
What do you think?
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
GENERAL ROMER: Look, if this had been an American air-
plane, a Pan Am flight, or whatever, even if it had been an RC-
135, I don't care -- but if it had been a Pan Am, the conse-
quences for the Russian bear in shooting it down would have been
enormous, in comparision to what in fact happened. What in fact
happened was a relatively weak response from the United States
because the United States had already played its cards. It
closed down the Aeroflot office. So what? They couldn't cut off
Aeroflot from coming because that card had been played with
Afghanistan and Carter. So there was really nothing they could
do.
However, there were great demands here in Washington and
elsewhere in the United States that there be severe action taken
which the Administration ignored: cutting off diplomatic rela-
tions, cutting off the contracts, the grain contracts, doing all
sorts of...
ST. JOHN: Suspension of a whole broad range of agree-
ments that had gone forward.
GENERAL ROMER: Absolutely. And that's what would have
happened if it had been an American airplane. And a few other
things which I can't really conceive of, but would have been
quite dramatic. And the response from the United States and its
people would have been really quite formidable.
FISKE: Jeffrey, you say the Soviets are not risk-
takers. Okay, I'll accept that.
ST. JOHN: They're not risk-takers when they're uncer-
tain. They're risk-takers when they're certain they can get away
with it, and they're calculating and cold-blooded. No group of
men in the Kremlin, since the Kremlin was built, have ever been
as calculating as this bunch. Look, this bunch came up through
the Stalinist system.
FISKE: For non- risk-takers, it doesn't seem to me that
shooting down the Korean plane is a wise step.
ST. JOHN: Oh, they got away with it before. Hey, in
GENERAL ROMER: They're not taking a risk. They know
that Korea is this little country down there. They hate 'em
anyhow. And they've been doing this thing, in my theory, they've
been doing it from time to time, and the Koreans have been thum-
bing their nose at the Russians, whatever. But in shooting this
airplane down, they're not taking really a risk at all. They
know the United States is not going to go to war with them and
they know the United States is not going to really do very much
at all, except do a lot of shouting, Which is, in effect, what
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
occurred, and the whole world was revu.lsed.
But the Soviets made their point. And their point,
among other things, in addition to the theory that you produced,
they let the Western World know that they are a tough bunch of
bastards. And if you go into their territory, the one thing that
they are there to defend is their motherland. And they tell
their people, they tell their armed forces day after day, "The
United States is prepared to attack you at any moment." And the
Soviet people believe that. And it's one of the things that the
American people can't get into their minds, because they can't
get into the Soviet mind, that the whole thought of the Soviet
system is that the United States is going to attack them at any
minute. And that's a fact.
ST. JOHN: In The Day_ of the Cobra, I talk about this
ginning-up campaign, this psyching up of the entire frontier --as
they call them, the frontier forces. There was an enormous cam
paign from June until September about the necessity of vigilance.
And you know who was leading the pack, don't you? A fellow by
the name of Konstantin Chernenko, who issued a joint statement
with then-dialysis, almost-dead Yuri Andropov.
So, they were psyching, they were psyching. That's why
I say it Was premeditated, although the General basically sup-
ports the theory to be tenable. It would not have been the case
had it been an American airliner.
FISKE: Jeff, you devote some considerable space in your
book Day of th-eCobra ...you devote some considerable space to
harsh criticism of President Reagan and the Administration for
the way in which they reacted to this. You were hurt, I suspect.
ST. JOHN: No, no, I wasn't hurt, because I didn't get
my hopes up about Reagan. I really didn't get my hopes up about
Reagan.
See, I had interviewed Reagan in '75, and I realized
then that he was what his critics had said him to be, and that
is, basically, a very nice man, a very secure person who never
was on the trough and public payroll, and had been a success in
his own right, divorced from politics. And that's why he has
this kind of style of governance that he has that some people
take for Calvin Coolidge sleeping a lot. And it's not true bout
the President.
So, I wasn't -- I mean I knew what he did in California
and I realized that the rhetoric was not going to match any re-
sults. And I accepted that as basically part of his character
problem, and I was a little worried about it.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
But my criticism is based on the fact that they did not
understand the implications of what they were up against. And I
feared, and I think I have been borne out by events, that the
Soviets basically realize that they -- there's a political payoff
to everything the Soviets do. The Soviets never do anything
without a political payoff. They decided it was time to test the
Reagan Administration's rhetoric because they had a lot of fish
to fry and they wanted to find out exactly how far they could go
with the Reagan Administration.
I don't know how you can consider it harsh. All I did
was report the facts.
GENERAL ROMER: Well, let me say I...
FISKE: I detect a lot of harshness there.
GENERAL ROMER: I didn't say anything harsh about the
Reagan Administration, although I did say that the giving out of
the information that there had been an RC-135 in the area should
not have been done.
But one of the things that's disturbing me -- and I hope
that some people are paying attention in the United States -- and
that is that the campaign of the Soviets to convince the Western
World, and keep convincing the Western World, that the United
States Government was at fault and was involved is still going
on.
When a report comes out of the United Kingdom, everybody
in the United States says, "0h, gee. That's marvelous. It's
true. It's got to be true because it's coming from England."
ST. JOHNS: Defense Attache magazine?
GENERAL ROMER: Of course, and that's the point. De-
fense Attache magazine, about a month ago, produced an article
which the editors and the publisher discredited, saying: We
don't agree with much of what is said in this article, but we're
printing it anyhow.
ST. JOHN: And: We're not printing the guy's name.
We're not going to tell you who the guy is, so we can judge his
credentials.
GENERAL ROMER: But nevertheless we're printing it so it
will encourage further investigation.
What a lot of garbage!
Now, what this article said -- and it was written by a
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
23
fellow called P.Q. Mann. Well, that's his pen name. We don't
know who he is. So, what he said goes this way:
He said the 747 was sent in by the American government,
under three captions, to alert the air defense force system of
the Soviet Union so that the shuttle, the American shuttle, which
had gone up 36 hours before, in the darkness, would be able to
monitor what was being -- the messages that were being transmit-
ted.
ST. JOHN: By the way, its mission on that night shuttle
was to put a $41 million Indian satellite into orbit. And when
you're doing that kind of number, you're kind of busy. It's a
little difficult to do double duty for spying too.
GENERAL ROMER: That's right. But in any event, the
thesis was the shuttle was involved. The Ferret satellite, Amer-
ican, was involved in a coordinated situation. And the RC-135
was involved. And here was this little 747, under this whole
plan, with all of these three things involved, so that it would
go in and get all the air defense force going so that it could be
monitored. And that is absolute garbage.
But these articles continue to be produced, and they're
designed to do one thing. They are designed to discredit the
American government and to put the blame for the 747 incident on
the American government.
And if that isn't a KGB plant, that article which is
picked up by all the media in the United States, I'll eat your
shirt.
ST. JOHN: As a matter of fact, not only did P.Q. Mann
not tell us who he was, the presumption is, as we began this
program, the presumption is that the United States Government
jeopardized the lives of 269 people to gather intelligence, when
in fact it could get it from other sources.
More important is this gentleman did not understand that
the Earth is round, that the shuttle, in its orbit, was 2000
miles away, below the horizon, making it physically impossible
for them to physically communicate. And when you've got a coord-
ination -- look, you know this, having been in the military. I
know it only having covered the military. A spy, espionage,
covert operation is "Keep it simple, stupid," because you get to
many elements into an operation -- that's what happened at
Dieppe. They had too many operational things involved, and too
many things went wrong. They made too many assumptions.
Yet, here we have this sophisticated theory about these
three entitites coordinated, one which is below the horizon and,
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
since the Earth is round, and can't communicate, and is trying to
put a $41 million satellite -- the shuttle is in business to make
money -- and suddenly it becomes -- now here's the hooker. P.Q.
Mann leans very heavily on an article published in Pravda by
Soviet Air Marshal Pyotr -- I can't remember his name right now
-- published September 20th. He gives credence to this, but he
gives no credence to the American government and its explanation.
The space people made another very interesting point. I
called them in Houston when this story broke because the manu-
script went to press in January, and so this developed after the
book went to press, and I asked them about this situation. And
they said, "Well, your welcomed to look at our logs. Our logs on
every flight" -- as you know, having covered, seen space, they
log every single development aboard that aircraft. The guy said,
"Look, you come look at the logs. They're public record." If
for a sophisticated nature -- remember now, we've got 2 1/2 hours
when this whole incident took place. At least that's what we
know from the intercepts of 007, RC-135, although RC-135, as the
General pointed out, was back at its home base by the time that
aircraft was shot down. There is nothing in the logs to suggest
the kind of blackout that would have been necessary for the space
shuttle to perform the mission that Mr. P.Q. Mann said it per-
formed.
FISKE: You speculate, Jeffrey, that the invasion of
Grenada may have had as one of its purposes to divert public
attention from this country's lack of appropriate action fol-
lowing the shooting down of the Korean airliner.
ST. JOHN: I think your formulation leaves a little bit
to be desired, quite frankly. But let me put it the way I put it
in the book.
I think the decision to rescue those people was genuine.
I think their initial motivation was these people, these medical
students are in serious trouble. I think the calculations that
went into it, as political calculations went into shooting down
of 007, which I'd like to get to after the news, they decided
that, yeah, this will play good in Peoria. That was basically my
inference, not that there was some kind of linkage between the
two. They just realized that Reagan would look very good, after
having lost 250 Marines in Lebanon and also having not done very
much in the destruction of that airliner.
FISKE: Okay. Stand by, gentlemen.
FISKE: Good evening. You're on the air.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
MAN: I would just like to make two points. The first
one is that I recall reading that after the '78 incident in which
they forced down another Korean airliner and they killed two
people in the process and wounded others, that they sent a bill,
subsequently they sent a bill to the Korean government asking
them for -- demanding $100,000 for housing and feeding the pas-
sengers.
ST. JOHN: That's right, they did.
FISKE: I thought maybe they wanted to be paid for the
MAN: And so, you know, the point being that any wishful
thinkers here in the West that expected an apology after KAL 007,
I think, were pretty misguided.
My main point is this: After the incident, for some
reason my mind went back to a little item I had read several
years ago that for the first time, and I think it's the only
time, in East Germany, or at the border between West and East in
Germany, some deranged individual attempted to cross the wall the
other way, to go into East Germany. And he was shot down anyway.
And the thing that sort of struck me as being similar in these
two instances is that for any normal state, a deranged individual
trying to violate your borders, or an unarmed civilian airliner,
does not pose a threat to your security. But that's the point.
The Soviet Union is not a normal state.
ST. JOHN: And let me give you a contrasting snippet of
the respective characters of the two countries.
We know what the Soviets have done in two specific in-
cidents involving South Korean airliners. The Soviets, by my
count and my research, indicates they violate North American
airspace a hundred times a year, mostly over in Alaska. Our
procedure is to do two things. We escort them out. Or if
they're civilian airliners, we dock them landing rights in places
like Dulles. We do not use heat-seeking missiles. Therein lies
the character difference between the two countries.
MAN: Yeah, that's exactly it. The thing is, the people
who were surprised shouldn't have been, because this conspira-
torial sort of mentality of the Soviet Union goes back to day
one. I mean the Bolsheviks, during the civil war, had a slogan
for their cadres, which was, "Punish one, teach a hundred." And
that is what they have been doing for everybody who's not
directly under -- well, for everybody, the people under their
control and the people that they consider enemies, which is the
rest of the world. And I think this whole incident was perfectly
in keeping with their character.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
GENERAL ROMER: Well, not only that. It's in keeping
with the law that was passed just shortly after Andropov took
power. And I talk about that law in my book. And it really
requires the air defense force to use weapons against any air-
craft that intrudes into Soviet airspace, particularly if they do
not respond to signals, so-called.
So that this is embedded, their attitude is embedded in
their own law, which overrides any international protocols to
which they may have agreed before this time. So, they are to-
tally bloody-minded, and we just don't understand it.
FISKE: Good evening. You're on 88.5 FM.
MAN: There's no doubt in my mind that the Russians were
lying when they said that the airliner was a spy plane, and for
this reason: If they really thought that this was so, then they
would know that it would be carrying special types of equipment,
secret equipment, probably. And knowing what vultures they are
for Western technology, they would never have shot it down. It
seems to me they would force it down and confiscate everything
aboard. Wouldn't you agree?
GENERAL ROMER: That is a very good point. The counter-
balance to that is that if they had forced it down, they could
have only have forced it down on one of their secret bases on
Sakhalin. Now, they don't even let the Soviet citizens onto that
island any longer because of the secrecy of their operations.
FISKE: But General, can you force a plane down if the
pilot is determined not to go down? You can indicate to him that
you want him to go down. But if he refuses to go down, the only
next thing you can do is shoot him down.
GENERAL ROMER: That is correct.
MAN: ...scramble a few planes and shoot across the
ST. JOHN: The '78 incident illustrates that only by the
intrepid flying skill of Captain Kim, in 1978, was he able to,
first of all, bring that -- there were melon-sized cannon holes
in the fuselage, which created rapid decompression. And he im-
mediately took that 707 into a steep dive and brought it down to
about 9000 feet so people cold breathe. And he brought that
aircraft down on a frozen lake south of Murmansk.
So, yes, you can down an airliner and keep intact. Of
course, what, about a hundred feet of that right wing was gone.
And there were two people -- one person was bleeding to death and
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
the other person died later. So you can do it.
GENERAL ROMER: Well, it was apparent, too, that that
airplane, they intended to kill it, as well as they intended to
kill the -- but I think this gentleman has got a good point, in
the logic that might have been brought to bear by the person who
made the decision to shoot it down. And again, I think that is
Ogarkov. That if there was equipment on it, that if they had
forced it down, then they'd be able to demonstrate to the Western
World, "Look, here's the spy equipment." Or they might even have
planted it. But the fact is, that isn't the way they did it.
ST. JOHN: Apropos of the character of the Soviet Union,
in the aftermath of the '78 shoot-down, the Soviet Union was
terribly cooperative, after they did their usual propaganda num-
ber, in agreeing to the International Civil Aviation Organiza-
tion's drawing up of guidelines. Those guidelines constituted
something approximating the use of radio, lowering your landing
-- putting on your landing lights, lowering your gear, all kinds
of procedures. Furthermore, they signed a protocol which allowed
search and rescue vessels into their territorial waters.
So, what happened? They shot down another airliner five
years later. And what did they do? At gunpoint, they refused to
allow the South Korerans, the Japanese to send vessels of the
maritime agency into their waters, and including the United
States. They even went so far as to use electronic gear to try
and disrupt the sonar signals that they were using to try and
find the wreckage.
And, I mean, how do you deal with a power with which you
sign a grain agreement, and then eight days later they shoot down
an aircraft and violate the protocols about search and rescue?
That kind of evidence, if it's not persuasive, you've
got to be pretty much of a fool not to be impressed by that evi-
dence.
FISKE: You're on 88.5 FM.
MAN: If the Soviet Union were still governed by a bene-
volent czar, Kamchatka would be a regular service stop for all
transpacific flights going in that particular direction.. People
could get off there, shop there, and the could refuel the air-
liner.
ST. JOHN: Well, I question that, sir. Because Sak-
halin, according to Anton Chekov, was a penal colony under the
czar, and it became a gulag under Stalin. But go ahead.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
MAN: I think it's established that, as a result of the
earlier flight which was shot down in '78, those in the military
who were considered derelict were subjected to military court-
martial and execution.
ST. JOHN: That is not true.
MAN: That's not true?
ST. JOHN: No, sir.
MAN: Okay. It would still...
ST. JOHN: That was part of the disinformation program
that the Soviets put out as a way of a cover story for their
premeditation in that particular act.
MAN: It would still motivate people today who are in-
volved in these kinds of things not to be lenient on the merci-
less and the helpless.
The thing that's very particular, though, about this
exercise is the fact that the Russians, being aware of the fact
that this predicament was developing, at no time had recourse to
the Moscow-Washington hotline.
ST. JOHN: Ah, you've made Secretary Shultz's point, in
my interview. And we just last week signed a new hotline agree-
ment. And I thought to myself, "Didn't Shultz say something
about that?" And so I went in and looked at the index where the
Shultz interview -- he answered 20 questions that I wanted -- and
there it is. He says, in effect, "I don't understand why the
Soviets didn't use the hotline." Again, that illustrates the
character of the Soviet Union.
FISKE: Excuse me. Why would they have used the hotline
if they knew it wasn't an American plane?
GENERAL ROMER: You see, this is the point. They knew
that it was a Korean aircraft. So why should they be making that
teletype go? See, the evidence that they knew that it was a
Korean aircraft keeps building, without any question.
FISKE: Hey, thank you.
We're talking to Jeffrey St. John, author of Day of the
Cobra, Major General Richard Romer, author of Massacre: '747'.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
MAN: I'm curious, does Mr. St. John and General Romer
believe that this is a generally applicable tactic of terrorism
for Soviet surrogates, particularly in the Third World, like in
Africa, where there are areas of high tension, between Ethiopia
and Somalia, Angola-South Africa, those sorts of places?
ST. JOHN: I'm not sure I understood the question.
FISKE: Well, he shouldn't have hung up.
ST. JOHN: That the terrorism, the airborne terrorism is
analogous to terrorism? Terrorism, whatever form it takes, has
as its motivation political payoffs, publicity, and to inculcate
a paralyzing fear on the part of the intended victim.
GENERAL ROMER: The furtherance of a cause of some kind.
ST. JOHN: Sure, right.
GENERAL ROMER: And the furtherance of the cause here is
in the Soviet, on the broad base of things, is to further the
cause of their defense of the motherland and to intimidate the
rest of the world and to keep, if you will, the aircraft away
from their treasured area of Siberia.
FISKE: How much does that differ from the argument that
it results from paranoia than that they're out to get us?
ST. JOHN: They have a lot to be paranoid about.
FISKE: But, of course, that's not the same kind of
intimidation. On the one hand, you're talking about bullying,
showing off muscles, "Don't mess with us because we're tough."
On the other hand -- and this seems more likely to me, based on
what we know about the Soviets -- they're paranoid, that in fact
everybody's out to get them, and they sometimes react illogic-
ally.
ST. JOHN: I think the term may be imprecise -- not our
term, but the term as it's generally used. I don't think it's
paranoia. I think, deep down -- and this runs throughout the
history of the Soviets, by reason of their history -- there is a
deep inferiority complex.
In, The Day,of the Cobra I quote a strategic analyst who
says that these people are basically part of a system that is not
stable, but rigid. It breeds its own kind of fear and hatred.
And deep down, the Soviets -- the manifestations of their actions
are largely, I think, the product of this deep sense of inferi-
ority. This -- his name is Richard Clayburgh (?). He's with a
very substantial international think tank in
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
Alexandria. And he says, deep down, they basically hate us not
for what we do, but for what we are.
And I think that is -- you see that manifestation in the
attitudes over 007 and other issues.
FISKE: Probably other factors enter into it as well.
GENERAL ROMER: Oh, yes. You go back to the fact that
they had their terrible losses in World War II, that they were
attacked by Germany. They've lived through all this and they
keep all of this alive in their own internal propaganda.
FISKE: And they know that we and other Western nations
have in the past attempted to destroy their system and regard it
as a threat to us now.
And finally, they face what the rulers of totalitarian
states everywhere face, the necessity to keep their people riled
up by persuading them that, in fact, we're their enemies. Be-
cause absent that, they're likely to have more difficulty at home
than they already do.
ST. JOHN: But Fred, keep one thing in mind about that
massive slaughter of Soviet soldiers in World War II.
GENERAL ROMER: And people.
ST. JOHN: And people. Stalin must bear the responsi-
bility for this by reason of the fact he murdered most of the
generals, or had them cashiered. And by the time he got locked
in that conflict with the Germans, he had not high-grade gen-
erals. And he also thought of himself to be another Napoleon,
and he used tactics that were absolutely unconscionable which led
to the lives -- I mean you think the Chinese used human-wave
tactics in -- they were throwing Soviet soldiers in there that
didn't even have weapons.
FISKE: That may be the case, but it doesn't alter the
ST. JOHN: I don't say it alters. I think -- let's make
certain that we know that part of that slaughter was due to the
incompetence of Stalin.
GENERAL ROMER: What we're. talking aboutis the rationale
that the Soviets bring to their own actions. And if you're a
Soviet and you were in that country, you would be saying that the
actions that we take are perfectly reasonable. We do it for the
defense of the motherland. We go back in our history in order to
understand why. And those people out there wish to destroy us.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
This is the attitude, I think, that they have. And if
you were in that country, it might be perfectly natural with that
kind of mind-set. But we must understand here that this is the
attitudinal perception that they have of us.
FISKE: Good evening.
MAN: I've been familiar with radio communication and
navigation equipment since Lindbergh flew to Paris in 1927. I
was on one of the U.S. Navy ships which monitored his flight over
the North Atlantic shipping lanes. Now, Lindbergh had no radio
or electronic navigation equipment aboard the Spirit of St.
Louis. He flew by the seat of his pants. He used dead reckoning
and he looked out the window of his plane once in a while. And
that's the way the 007 pilots could have flown from Alaska to
Korea. They flew that route five times a week and should have
know the route as well as a bus driver going from Union Station
to National Airport.
FISKE: A few things enter into that, don't they,
gentlemen?
MAN: But excuse me. Let me finish just for 60 seconds.
And the 007 pilots had radio and computerized navigation
equipment aboard three times redundant, and yet they managed to
fly about 200 miles off course over Russian air defenses, or
within the Russian perimeter defense.
ST. JOHN: Three hundred and twenty.
MAN: Yes, for two hours with lights out and maintaining
radio silence. That's how you make a bombing run in wartime, as
Fred very well knows.
ST. JOHN: Lights on.
MAN: Excuse me. According to Admiral Turner and Gen-
eral Graham -- I got them on the radio, the Larry King Show,
before they were given the party line -- there's no way that 007
could have made that run except by predesign.
Now, the problem is, who done it, and why? And it seems
to me obvious that the CIA, the National Security Council, and
Defense Department were at least involved. They were probably
testing the Soviet air defenses and didn't think the Russians
would shoot down a passenger plane, which is very logical.
FISKE: Okay. Let's deal with that, gentlemen.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
32
[Confusion of voices]
MAN: I'm trying to make the point. But, you know, the
Soviets would have been nuts not to shoot that plane down. They
know a 747 passenger plane can be converted into a nuclear bomb
overnight. We could send a fleet of nuclear bombers disguised as
passenger planes over their borders at several points and wipe
them out overnight if we could convince them that they were just
passinger planes playing hide-and-seek, or something.
FISKE: Gentlemen?
GENERAL ROMER: Well, what can one say?
ST. JOHN: Where do you begin?
FISKE: With Lindbergh.
ST. JOHN: The General and I would have to go through
the entire program...
GENERAL ROMER: Over again.
ST. JOHN: Over again, and laying out all the evidence.
Sir, can I ask you a question?
MAN: Yeah.
ST. JOHN: Have you been listening to this program?
MAN: Yes, I've been listening to it, and I've been
listening to it since it happened. As I told you, I was lis-
tening the night it happened.
ST. JOHN: No, no. Have you been listening tonight?
MAN: Yes, I've been listening to both of you tonight.
ST. JOHN: I see. And you're not persuaded that there's
a certain amount of evidence that contradicts your theory?
MAN: I see no evidence. You have spent two hours giv-
ing your theories and speculations.
ST. JOHN: No, not necessarily speculations.
MAN: ...no more facts than I have. All of the wit-
nesses are down on the plane.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
ST. JOHN: Well, let me deal with one aspect and ask you
a question. Your presumption is that the United States Govern-
ment jeopardized the lives of 269 people to get intelligence.
ST. JOHN: I'm going to finish. Let me finish, or Fred
will push the button on you.
MAN: All right, all right, all right.
ST. JOHN: Your presumption is, based on your conclu-
sion, that the United States Government sacrificed 269 lives, or
at least jeopardized them, to gain intelligence that it could get
from a multitude of other sources, some still very secret.
MAN: No, I didn't say that.
ST. JOHN: I didn't say you said that. That's the pre-
sumption that you begin with.
MAN: No. Here's what I say. As far as the United
States Government and the CIA and whatnot, you know they've done
crazy things since...
ST. JOHN: But we're not talking about other crazy
things. We're talking about this specific incident.
MAN: How about the Bay of Pigs fiasco?
FISKE: Listen, thank you.
You're on the air.
MAN: I look like we got a polemic going on of some
sort. Well, you know, one of the things that everybody writes
about somebody else that has lack of empathy of some sort -- this
is my general opinion. The last caller has his point, and I
believe we should respect him. I mean since everybody is specu-
lating. Let's put it this way. They don't have the facts.
You know, one recent incident -- and I'd like to bring a
little analogy to it -- when the kamikaze were diving, I mean you
know, on our ships in the Pacific, we called them crazy people.
Did they have any heart? Did they have any feeling? They were
not patriots. They were nothing but ground meat. Now, I mean
some of our people, you know, have made those kamikaze dives, but
we made them heroes, see, on our side.
So, what I'm trying to say is look at the equation. If
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
you're biased on the equation, anything goes, for that matter.
We have to remember one thing. I mean on this particular inci-
dent, I'm aware that it was a butchery of some sort. But never-
theless you have to look at one thing.
FISKE: What's that?
MAN: The Russians have proven that, look, "You're off
your course, you know you're flying, we have given you all the
warning, you're not taking that kind of the warning. Down you
go, Buddy. We can't take no chances."
Pearl Harbor was one of the facts of some careless guys
that cost us almost the war. So, in view of the tension situ-
ation that is existing between the two countries, if this thing
would have been on the mellow side, possibly there would have
been something about it.
There was another incident a lot of people don't [unin-
telligible] was the U-2 incident. I mean General Eisenhower,
then President of the United States, was saying that there's no
airplane flying over you. We are not spying. And those guys
knocked it down and they...
ST. JOHN: You got our attention with the U-2 incident.
General?
GENERAL ROMER: That's one so old, you can touch it.
ST. JOHN: The U-2 incident, we now know from Oleg Pen-
kovsky, who was essentially providing intelligence to the West
until he was caught and shot. He was a high-ranking colonel
--the U-2 incident, according to Penkovsky and other sources --
and we have, what, 24 years now to -- this was a high-flying
aircrft, if there are people in the audience who don't remember
it. It was in May of 1960. It involved a high-altitude aircraft
which took precise reconnaissance photos. It was shot down and
Gary Powers was held.
That incident, according to Penkovsky was made the issue
it was by Khrushchev because he wanted to destroy that summit.
It was a deliberate -- by the way, there was an RB-47 aircraft
with eight crewmen aboard over the Kola Peninsular in the Barents
Sea that was shot down two months after that incident. And guess
what? We also now know that Khrushchev ordered that shot down.
For what reason? Because he wanted to make an international
incident as a way of influencing the 1960 elections.
FISKE: Each of you, in your book, discusses the fact
that the Soviets, in fact, overfly many strategic bases in...
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
ST. JOHN: They do it with commercial airliners. I mean
they've got that run that comes from Moscow -- what kind of air-
craft are they, General, with those huge propellers that do non-
stop from Moscow to Cuba? I can't remember it. And a lot of
them are commercial flights. And what they do is they will be on
a course that takes them over water, and then they will go over
the Groton, Connecticut naval base. I can't say whether they
take photographs, they've done it on several -- a Czech airliner
in '81 did it.
But what was your point?
FISKE: The point is that we don't shoot them down.
What do we do, we protest?
ST. JOHN: Well, that's the difference in the respective
characters of the both societies. The way we deal with problems
like this -- for example, there's a term in aviation, or military
aviation, called fence-checking. The General knows what I'm
talking about. And what they do is they routinely fly out of
Cuba and what they do is they penetrate Soviet airspace, knowing
that our radar is going to pick them up. We scramble our
fighters...
FISKE: They penetrate not Soviet airspace, our air-
ST. JOHN: Our airspace, yeah. And, of course, the
purpose of this is to check our reaction time in terms of how
fast we scramble fighters and they're fence-checking. They're
checking our fences.
Interestingly enough, the Soviets have become so cynical
about this that what these Bear reconnaissance bombers sometimes
do is -- these guys are so used to this that when the fighters
come up wing-to-wing, what they will do is they will hold up
signs and say, "I have to go now," in English. And these airmen
of the Soviets take it as a routine joke because they know we're
not going to do anything. Anybody that holds up a sign in Eng-
lish and says, "We've got to go now," is a guy that he's not
going to get blown out of the air, like 007 did.
MAN: I read a while ago an excerpt in the Washington
Post -- correct me if I'm wrong. I think it was from The Day-of
the Cobra. And it was saying something about the fact that the
Soviet Union could have been using some type of device to either
jam the...
ST. JOHN: It's called meconning. I go into it in the
book.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
MAN: Right. Then it was from your book.
ST. JOHN: Yes.
MAN: And you all haven't really talked about that very
much. I'd like to maybe see if you could.
ST. JOHN: You want to tackle meconning first?
ST. JOHN: Meconning is basically an electronic device
for allegedly trying to draw aircraft off course. On every map
-- as a matter of fact, we know that the Soviets have been trying
this -- they've been doing it for years. And because of this
knowledge, every single aviation navigation map that's issued in
that region has two black boxes with big black letters in it.
And the first warning says, "Warning: You may be subject to
Soviet interceptor attack." The second box says, "Warning: Your
navigational system may be subject to disruption electronically,"
or something to that degree.
My thesis in the book is that meconning may very well
have played a part in the rather extraordinary convergence of
circumstances that did take place that carried 007 320 miles off
course.
MAN: So, how positive is that?
ST. JOHN: Well, I've done several talk shows like this
and I've had several fighter pilots say, "Hey, the Russians tried
to mecon us at a given area in the Far East." And as a matter of
fact, I had a guy in Dayton, Ohio say he's a former fighter pi-
lot, he had the same thing happen to him. I had a guy who was
flying, I think, a C-130 aircraft. He said the same thing hap-
pened to him.
GENERAL ROMER: Well, I don't want to quarrel with your
ST. JOHN: It would make the show much more interesting.
We've agreed too much tonight.
GENERAL ROMER: Sure. However, the old fighter pilots
you're talking about didn't have inertial navigation systems, or
three of them, in operation. And it's pretty hard for some elec-
tronic gizmo that the Russians might have to twirl the inertial
navigation systems off, because they really aren't built that
way. They could distort a radio signal. They could distort a
VOR, perhaps, or something of this kind when you're doing a
cross-check on them.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
But one of the things that I think is very important to
understand is that this airplane was not drawn off course all of
a sudden at a particular point by anything. The airplane went
off course shortly after it left Anchorage, within ten minutes,
so-called, and it stayed on one single course for the whole of
its flight.
And I want to say to you that if you take a globe in
your library -- and I know you've got a globe in your library.
Don't drop it. But if you take the globe...and you take a string
and you run it from Anchorage to Seoul, you are putting in place
with that string what is called the Great Circle route from Anch-
orage to Seoul. And by a remarkable coincidence and by abso-
lutely astonishing good fortune, you will find that the island of
Sakhalin and the place where this airplane was shot down is right
under the string, right under the Great Circle route.
So I don't think that anyone pulled this airplane off
course. Certainly when he left Anchorage, he was a long distance
from any Soviet signals, whether electronic radar or otherwise.
ST. JOHN: That's why I entered the caveat about the
substitution of the route card. I still -- and my theory has yet
to -- and as you pointed out earlier, General, we may find out in
the trial, in these various civil suits, of whether in fact that
programmed computerized route card was used on that 747.
FISKE: You know, we all remember those dramatic days...
GENERAL ROMER: I thought you were going to say Lind-
bergh for a minute.
ST. JOHN: That blew my mind. That really did.
FISKE: He couldn't see out of the front of his plane.
He flew at low levels, looked down. Here we're talking about,
what, 30,000 feet they fly at?
GENERAL ROMER: Thirty-five, somewhere in that range.
FISKE: We all remember those dramatic days when we have
searched for the black box. It presumably was never found. Do
you -- let's speculate for a moment, and it has to be sheer spec-
ulation. Do you speculate (A) that the Soviets may have found it
and may not have revealed it? And (B) what do you think that
black box would reveal if in fact we had it?
ST. JOHN: The General believes that the aircraft disin-
tegrated in air after it hit 9000 feet.
Is that right?
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
38
GENERAL ROMER: No. No, no.
ST. JOHN: You think it disintegrated at a higher alti-
GENERAL ROMER: What I postulate is very simple, in
terms of the destruction of the airplane. And it relates to the
black box.
First of all, let's deal with the black box. The black
box is really two orange boxes. One's a data flight recorder...
[Confusion of voices]
GENERAL ROMER: ...But one is a data flight recorder and
the other is a cockpit voice recorder. The cockpit voice re-
corder eats itself. That is to say, it uses up the tape, and the
only thing that you have is the last 30 minutes of the flight.
So that whatever happened in Anchorage in terms of what they were
doing and all the way through is eaten up. The airline, the
international aviation organization is now thinking of making it
a little longer. But the only value would have been in terms of
the cockpit voice recorder, would have been in determining whe-
ther or not the Korean pilots saw the Soviet, the SU-15. That is
about all that would have occurred in the previous half-hour.
It might have been that if they were on some sort of spy
mission, they could have heard them talking about doing some-
thing.
ST. JOHN: Or if they had been hijacked, there might
have been conversations that would lead you to believe that.
GENERAL ROMER: But let's deal with the black box. It
was, in my opinion, not found. There's no -- the Russians didn't
get it and the American Navy didn't get it.
The black boxes had attached to them an acoustical sonar
device, and it makes a pinging sound. When you see a television
or movie with a submarine in it, a German submarine, it goes
ping, ping. And that's this acoustical device. And it is acti-
vated when it is immersed in water, the battery is activated, and
the battery has a 30-day power phase, and after that it dies.
Roughly 30 days.
Now, in the way I saw this happening, as an ancient jet
fighter pilot, goes this way: The SU-15 had two rockets, one
under each of its wingtips, 24 feet apart. One of them was
radar-guided, the other was heat-seeking-guided. And they were
Inab (?) rockets, is what they're called, and they have a 70-
pound warhead, a very powerful device. And both of them,
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
apparently, hit the airplane.
Now, the radar weapon, when it was launched, would see
ahead of it, because it was behind, would see the biggest thing
it could, by its own nature. And that was the fuselage of the
aircraft. And it went into the tail of the airplane. As it
entered, it detonated. It blew the tail off, and that's why we
have a piece of the fin of the tail, which is the only way you
can get that piece out of it is to blast it out. There were only
five bodies found. And as I see it, they were in the toilets.
ST. JOHN: Pieces of bodies.
GENERAL ROMER: Pieces, and only five, even though there
were 269 people on board.
The rocket then, as it was detonating, just kept
straight on going because it was going at enormous velocity, but
it killed everybody inside instantly. And that was the end of
the situation inside, with the exception of the crew, who within
a 58-second period made a transmission which said, "All engines,"
which means they lost their engines and rapid decompression.
That was the end of them.
But that the other rocket went into an engine, because
it was seeking the river of hot air. And it would have gone
into, as I see it, probably the inboard engine, either on the
port or the starboard, the left side of the airplane. And be-
cause of the position of the wreckage, I think it went into the
right side and the wing came off. And so the aircraft just went
straight down. It took about three minutes, not 12, to strike.
Now, to go back to the black boxes. The black boxes in
the 747 are positioned above the rear door, just ahead of the
toilets, which in the normal course of an impact probably would
be the place least to be damaged. But in this instance there was
a new factor, and that was that it was a rocket that hit it, hit
it in the tail, and the very place where the rocket detonated,
these black boxes were located. And I wonder, even if the Amer-
ican Navy had found this acoustical device that they heard once,
whether they would have still found the black boxes attached to
it, because the force of this explosion could have separated it.
ST. JOHN: So you don't buy the report that the spi-
raling -- that a low-level Japanese defense radar followed that
aircraft into a spiraling motion?
GENERAL ROMER: No. No. There was Japanese authority
which indicated that the airplane went straight in and it took a
three-minute run, which is all it would take under normal cir-
cumstances.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
40
FISKE: You're on 88.5 FM.
MAN: By the way, your phone connection is much better
than it has been recently.
ST. JOHN: He paid his bill.
GENERAL ROMER: Maybe the KGB is not bugging it, or
something.
MAN: Let me bring up two related points. One is I
think Jeffrey had a hard time understanding the President's lack
of firmness in terms of his reaction.
ST. JOHN: I understood it too well.
MAN: Well, my point is that the United States has
tended not to react in a really tough way, for a lot of reasons.
You go back to the Korean incident in '69 where the Koreans shot
down a plane. Now, there was a case tailor-made for a reaction.
It just came after the seizure of the American ship and then the
letting go of those people in December.
ST. JOHN: The Pueblo.
MAN: The Pueblo. Yes. And a couple months after Nixon
came in, these Korean jets roared out of the Sea of Japan, miles
away from the coast, and blew this plane out of the sky.
So, it hasn't been unusual for provocations to have
occurred and for us, for various reasons, not to react in ways
which might have maybe even played into the Soviets' hands. So
that follows a long policy thing.
The other thing is I tend to agree with the General in
terms of the path of the plane. I think that plane was off
course from the beginning.
And I also think two things: (A) the Russians very well
knew that it was a passenger plane; (B) their lower command saw
this plane getting away, in terms of it getting out of Sakhalin
airspace, and they probably felt if they didn't do anything,
somebody was going to pay with their head, or something like
that.
But finally, I wanted to make the point that I am really
upset about the Democratic Party. They could condemn Reagan for
making one statement about the evil empire, but they couldn't
even mention one of their own Congressmen, do anything at their
convention that even spoke of this guy as one of the people who
were shot down, let alone the incident as such.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
ST. JOHN: May I compound the political and moral felony
for all of us?
Geraldine Ferraro, who is now Walter Mondale's running
mate, lost her family doctor of 26 years, Dr. Michael Trupen (?),
and his wife, aboard 007. The transcript of this tearful and
very moving eulogy was in sharp contrast to two things: Ger-
aldine Ferraro's refusal to vote for anything even approximating
a mild sanction against the Soviets on September 15th, 1983, when
the resolution of condemnation was passed in the House, and,
moreover, she was unwilling to even mention the fact that here
was a man who had delivered her own three children, could not at
least mention in the same breath with Normandy and Vietnam the
fact that 269 people had been massacred.
Now, let me deal with my undue harsh criticism of
Reagan. Let me ask -- let me present very, very succinctly, I
hope, my perception about why the reaction took place. Let's
take, first of all, cold-blooded politics.
Mr. Reagan was painted as a nuclear Napoleon by his
Democratic opposition, who, by the way, while doing this, went
along with this non-resolution, is what I call it, his non-
resolution of condemnation. They realized, his handlers at the
White House realized that they were going into the Democrats'
hands and the nuclear Napoleon caricature if he allowed his ac-
tions to correspond to his rhetoric.
The second aspect of the reaction, the mild reaction of
the Reagan Administration was a bill of goods sold to him by
Secretary Shultz and the State Department.
You know, by the way, Mr. Shultz was literally the com-
manding -- commander-in-chief of this whole political operation
from the very beginning. It was he that decided to release the
transcripts. He told me that in an interview.
They decided that, yes, it's terrible that they have
destroyed 269 lives, and how barbaric this is. But the nuclear
arms reduction talks are far more important because the whole
planet is at stake. Not realizing, of course, that, if you fol-
low my thesis, that this was a deliberate act of airborne ter-
rorism. They totally misread this.
This studied incompetence on the part of Administra-
tions going back to '69 leads me to exactly the opposite conclu-
sion that you have presented, that this has been a matter of
policy. I think it's been a matter of bad policy because --the
policy has been bad because the perception has been wrong.
FISKE: Jeffrey, in your book, you say that you
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
attempted to put some questions to the President concerning this.
And you spoke to the White House and they seemed cooperative.
And then you smoke to Karns Small at one time. And when it be-
came apparent to her that you were devoting some considerable
space in your book to Larry McDonald, she lost interest in co-
operating with you. Why?
ST. JOHN: Well, simply by reason of the fact that they
didn't want to be tarred with the Birch brush. And my interest
in McDonald has nothing to much to do with his ideology. He
happens to be now a historical figure. He is the only elected
official in United States history to be murdered by a foreign
power. And plus the irony, of course, was his career and his
warnings about the Soviets, and what have you.
Those people at the White House did not want Reagan to
get anywhere near this issue.
By the way, as an update, I made a second request. On
the first anniversary, the United States Times is publishing, as
you might imagine, a rather lengthy year-later issue of this
whole tragedy. I made a second request. I asked not for 20
questions this time, but 25 questions, 'cause a lot had happened.
And you know, I got this sweet, nice little letter from a gentle-
man by the name of Mr. McManus, who is the Deputy Communications
Director, and he said, "We have taken this under considerable
consideration, but we do not think that the President should
answer questions at this time."
Now, I ask you, Fred -- I know that you think I'm unduly
harsh on Mr. Reagan, but I ask you, does that not smack of a
certain kind of callous? I mean here is one of the most impor-
tant foreign policy crises ever to be confronted by Mr. Reagan,
and he does not -- I didn't want an interview. I didn't want to
debate it. You know how Washington reporters are. If the can't
get a personal interview, they say, "The hell with it." I wasn't
interested in that. I was interested in just getting his re-
sponse.
Secretary Shultz answered my questions because of one
person. His name happens to be John Hughes. I've known John
Hughes for 20 years when he was with the Christian Science Moni-
tor, and he bugged Shultz over and over again until he sat down
before he went to Japan with the President last November and he
answered the questions. I think they were inadequate responses.
But I was genuinely interested in getting the Adminis-
tration's point of view, and I didn't get it.
FISKE: You're on 88.5 FM.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
MAN: The mysterious P.Q. Mann, a very shady character,
I might add, was interviewed over the telephone by Elizabeth Gray
of the CBC program As It Happens a few days after the publication
of his article in Defense Attache magazine. Did any of you hear
it?
ST. JOHN: No, sir, I didn't.
MAN: It comes on 88.5 right after Fred's program.
ST. JOHN: What did he say?
MAN: Well, he was talking his spiel about his conspir-
acy theory, you know, that the KAL 007 was on a spy mission, as
you mentioned.
ST. JOHN: Did he identify his true self?
MAN: No. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Gray, the good
radio journalist as she was and is, asked him to reveal his true
identity, because he was going under this pseudonym of P.Q. Mann.
And, of course, he politely refused. He speaks English with a
British accent, by the way...
GENERAL ROMER: Of course he does. Of course he does.
MAN: And by the way, if you'd like to hear that tape,
maybe you could call the CBC and they might make it available to
you. It was about a week after the article was published.
ST. JOHN: That's interesting.
FISKE: You're on the air.
MAN: It seems to me that simple logic teaches that
there was fault on both sides in that incident. There's no way
that that computer could have been programmed wrong. I mean to
say that the KGB substituted some cards or something is really
reaching too far.
ST. JOHN: Well, not necessarily. It could be done.
General Romer does not deny the fact that it could be done. It's
just the fact whether it was done is another matter entirely
different.
MAN: But reason tells us that there is no way that that
plane wasn't programmed to fly the route that it followed.
And the other thing is, reason tells us that the Far
East Command was under orders to shoot down intruding aircraft if
they didn't respond to warnings. So I mean...
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
ST. JOHN: But, sir, the intercepts clearly indicate
that there were no warnings. When that SU-15 fighter pulled its
landing gears up into its fuselage, it was out to shoot that
airplane down.
MAN: Excuse me. But the plane flew in front of the KAL
ST. JOHN: It did not. No, sir. The intercepts do not
show that.
MAN: The transcript of the radio transmissions shows
that it crossed the path in front of the aircraft before it drop-
ped back to fire its rockets.
FISKE: General, you're shaking your head negatively,
MAN: I read the transcripts of the radio transmissions
published in the paper.
GENERAL ROMER: Well, look, the best interpretations of
the tapes and the diagrams that have been made as a result of the
interpretation of the tapes indicate that the Soviet aircraft did
come up from behind, went over on the starboard, or right-hand,
side first, came up parallel to the airplane.
MAN: Exactly. In other words, the airplane knew that
it was being tailed by a Russian fighter.
GENERAL ROMER: That depends on whether or not the Rus-
sian fighter gave any signal by flashing his lights. And there's
no indication he did that.
ST. JOHN: And he didn't fire rockets, because SU-15
does not have cannons in that particular...
GENERAL ROMER: Oh, yes.
ST. JOHN: Does it?
GENERAL ROMER: Oh, yeah. He had cannons slung under
the airplane. There's no question about that.
ST. JOHN: But Ogarkov in Moscow said that they fired
cannon bursts. And at that altitude at that time of night, the
pilots would have seen the flashes, would they not?
GENERAL ROMER: No, not necessarily. We're getting off
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
the caller's subject slightly. But if you're firing cannon from
a fighter aircraft going at a substantial speed, and in this
instance over 500 miles an hour, because he's sitting behind him,
first of all, he has to be very close, because the cannon shells,
their trajectory, they do not go very far before they start to
drop off. So he'd have to be very close.
If there wer tracer -- what he would attempt to do if he
was warning was he'd have to get very close so he could put it
right where he wanted it ahead. And he was behind when he did
this.
In my opinion (A) he had cannon. The transcripts, as
they were ultimately interpreted on or about September the 11th
by the State Department, again, indicated that he did in fact say
he was firing the cannon. But in my opinion, he was attempting
to hit the airplane, not to warn it. Because to fire tracers is
not one of the recognized methods of warning another airplane. If
the pilot of the Korean 747 had seen these things flashing by
--he was an old fighter pilot -- he probably would have hauled
back -- flicked off the autopilot, hauled back and started eva-
sive action.
ST. JOHN: And the intercepts do clearly indicate the
fighter pilot saying, "Now I'll try my missiles."
GENERAL ROMER: Yes, "Now I will try rockets." But in
any event...
MAN: Tell me, gentlemen, can you tell me -- there was
map published in [unintelligible] showing that the KAL 007 made a
left-hand turn and flew directly over Vladivostok from west to
east. Is that true that it followed that path?
GENERAL ROMER: Nov it is not. Again, I have that very
map in my book as an illustration. And it is the Ogarkov map and
it shows the route of the aircraft going across Kamchatka, down
toward Hokkaido, and doing a right-hand, or westerly, turn to go
over a major installation on Sakhalin Island.
What I have said is that the interpretation of the
fighter pilot, pilot 805's transmissions to the ground, to
Deputat, indicate quite clearly that during the whole time he was
tracking it, which is during that relevant period, the aircraft
was flying on 240 and never made any turn whatsoever.
FISKE: You're on 88.5 FM.
WOMAN: I have two quick factual questions and a com-
ment. (A) What ever happened to celestial navigation?
(B) World Press Review, in March, picked up an article
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
from The Guardian on this by a Mr. R.W. Johnson of Magdelan Col-
lege, Oxford. Does either of your authors know anything about
Mr. Johnson or his credentials?
ST. JOHN: As a matter of fact, his credentials are
rather thin. And also, if you read -- did you read the article?
WOMAN: Oh, yes.
ST. JOHN: He gives you an exposition of his point of
view, and then he tells you, "Well, this might not have happened.
It's only a theory."
WOMAN: Okay.
ST. JOHN: And the evidence that he presented, as far as
I'm concerned, is not basic and primary to understanding what
actually physically happened.
GENERAL ROMER: But my dear fellow, he is from Britain,
you see, and therefore he is an authority about everything he
says.
WOMAN: Is he a historian? Is he a navigator? What is
GENERAL ROMER: Who knows? He's British, and therefore
everybody in the United States believes that he has credibility,
no matter what.
The first question you asked was, what happened to cel-
estial navigation? The answer is very simple. It disappeared
with the inertial navigation systems coming into play. Nobody
carries a sextant any longer. They have the three inertial navi-
gation systems.
WOMAN: All of which work all of the time.
GENERAL ROMER: All of which work all of the time, and
according to the manufacturers are infallible. If there's any
error, it's always human.
WOMAN: Okay. And besides, you have the little thing
that reads you the map off the ground.
GENERAL ROMER: That's the -- yes. That's the radar in
the mapping mode, the weather radar. Exactly.
WOMAN: I think there is a flaw in the argument that
anything they could have found out by the 007 flight they could
find out through all this sophisticated electronic technology.
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-0107OR000201330002-9
 Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-01070R000201330002-9
WOMAN: And that is, if what you want to find out is
what the other guy will do if you do thus and such, you may have
to try it out and see.
ST. JOHN: I hardly think they would do it with war
games in a civilian -- look, compared to the supersonic fighter
aircraft that we have, you don't use a 747 to test an opponent's
capability. You use something more sophisticated.
GENERAL ROMER: And furthermore, the Soviets, through
Colonel General Romanov, who died recently, but he was the major
air defense force spokesman, their chief of staff, he complained
after this event that the American RC-135's out of Shemya had
been going into Soviet airspace on any number of occasions and
had all of their air defense forces all twiddly-bang and on edge
because they were doing these intrusions.
So, why would anybody send in a 747 when the RC-135s had
been doing the job very effectively as it is?
ST. JOHN: And has far more sophisticated snooping gear
than you would find or could possibly hide in a 747.
FISKE: Ma'am, thank you very much for your call.
And gentlemen, thank you for a very, very stimulating
discussion....
Approved For Release 2008/09/19: CIA-RDP88-01070R000201330002-9