The plane appeared again on Sakhalin Island radars at 2:36 A.M. Once again it was given the track number 6065. However, this time the annotation was changed to “91,” which meant one military aircraft.
The command post duty officer at the Su-15 regiment at Sokol tried that night to use a long-distance phone operator to reach a radar station, Burevestnik. Located on Iturup Island in the Kurils, Burevestnik had sent a message saying that a target was approaching Sakhalin.3
“Good morning,” the duty officer said to the long-distance operator, giving his secret code word, Oblako 535, and asking her to put through an urgent call to Burevestnik.
“Yes, high priority, urgent,” he insisted when she asked for the code again.
“Very well, wait,” she told him.
She asked for his phone number, then for his name. He gave it, and she didn’t understand.
He gave it again. He impatiently clicked on the receiver.
Four minutes passed. “There is no answer,” she replied.
“No answer?”
“No.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know why, there is no answer.”
“Did Burevestnik not answer?”
“There was no answer at the number at Burevestnik.”
“That cannot be…”
The operator asked, “What is that? What kind of organization is that?”
“It’s a military organization,” the duty officer said. “I need it now, operator, whatever it takes, but I must call there. It’s a matter of national importance. I’m not joking.”
“Just a minute. Just a minute.”
Five minutes after he started making the call, with the airliner flying eight miles a minute toward Sakhalin, the command post duty officer asked, “Well, what [is happening], eh?”
“Calling, no answer.”
Osipovich was napping at Sokol when the airliner approached Sakhalin. He was on duty, having taken the night shift so he could have the next day free; it was the first day of school and he was supposed to speak at his daughter’s class on the theme of “peace.” He ate and then dozed off watching television, and then awoke to check the guard.
Unexpectedly, the phone rang as he was getting dressed. He was ordered to rush out to the Su-15 and prepare for takeoff. The weather was poor as a frontal system rolled into Sakhalin. At 2:42 A.M. Osipovich ran to the plane and took off, flying toward the ocean, climbing to 26,000 feet. His call sign was “805.” Soon another Su-15 was in the air, and then a MiG 23 from the Smirnykh air base, also on Sakhalin. Osipovich had no idea what was going on; perhaps it was an elaborate training mission?
Soviet radar had resumed tracking the airliner and given it the same number as before, 6065. The conversations among ground controllers show they thought it might be an RC-135, although some had doubts. Not once in all the ground conversations nor in the transmissions to the pilots did anyone mention a Boeing 747. They directed Osipovich minute by minute toward the target, and told him: “The target is military, upon violation of State border destroy the target. Arm the weapons.”
Osipovich at first could only see the target as a dot, two or three centimeters. He had studied the RC-135s and knew the various Soviet civilian airliners, but he later recalled he had never studied the shape of foreign aircraft such as the Boeing 747.
A ground controller speculated, “If there are four jet trails, then it is an RC-135.” The 747 also had four engines.
“805, can you determine the type?” Osipovich was asked by the ground controller.
“Unclear,” he said.
Confusion reigned on the ground. No one wanted to be responsible for allowing another intrusion like the one on April 4. The Sokol command post duty officer, speaking to a superior, was asked if the incident was serious. “Yes, it looks serious, like on the fourth, but a bit worse,” he replied.
At 3:09 A.M. an order was given to destroy the plane, but then rescinded. The Sokol command post duty officer wondered if the Americans would really fly a spy plane directly into Soviet airspace. They usually circled outside territorial waters. “Somehow this all looks very suspicious to me,” he said. “I don’t think the enemy is stupid, so… Can it be one of ours?”
He called another command center at Makarov, on the eastern tip of the island, to see what they knew about the plane’s flight. “It hasn’t bombed us yet,” was the reply.
As he closed on the 747, about fifteen miles behind it, Osipovich saw his missile lock-on light illuminate.
At 3:14 A.M., the commander of the Far East Military District was given a report. He was told Osipovich was ready to fire, but “he cannot identify it visually because it is still dark.”
“We must find out, maybe it is some civilian craft or God knows who,” said the commander.
“The pilot sees only a shadow,” said another ground controller.
“He cannot determine the type?”
“No way…it is dark, dark.”
Osipovich was now getting closer, 7.4 miles behind the airliner, which crossed Sakhalin. “It is flying with flashing lights,” he reported. Shortly after 3:12, Osipovich tried to contact the airliner by the Soviet friend-or-foe electronic identification system, but there was no response because the plane was civilian and did not carry a compatible military responder.
The Soviet ground controllers asked Osipovich six times whether the airliner was showing navigation lights, on the assumption that a plane without them might be on a spy mission. At 3:18, Osipovich reported, “The air navigation light is on, the flashing light is on.”
The Sokol ground controller told Osipovich to flash his lights briefly as a warning, and he did. Then, at 3:20, he was ordered to shoot a warning burst from his cannons. He did. There was no response. Then, unexpectedly, the airliner seemed to slow.
Unbeknownst to the Soviets, at 3:20, air traffic controllers in Tokyo had given Captain Chun permission to climb from 33,000 to 35,000 feet, and this caused the airliner to slow. Cockpit voice recordings show Chun and his crew never knew what was happening around them. Investigators later concluded that the change in altitude was seen by the Soviets as an evasive action and reinforced the suspicion that it was an RC-135 spy plane.
“805, open fire on the target,” ground control instructed Osipovich. But at that moment, Osipovich said he couldn’t because he had almost overtaken the airliner. “Well, it should have been earlier, where do I go now, I am already abeam of the target?” This statement that he was “abeam,” or alongside the airliner, suggested, to some, in retrospect, that Osipovich should have seen the 747’s distinctive hump. But investigators said radar tracks show that Osipovich was consistently behind the 747, and to the right. Osipovich also recalled later that his own plane “began to rock” at this point; he did not say why.4
In the next radio transmission, Osipovich said, “Now, I have fallen back from the target.” He added the airliner was at 33,000 feet and on his left. He does not indicate his own altitude—above or below the 747. If he was below the 747, it would have been harder to see the plane’s hump.
At 3:24, Osipovich’s radio crackled with orders: “805, approach target and destroy target!” The airliner was just slipping away from the Sakhalin coast. Osipovich recalled later it was at this point he had finally gotten a look at the plane, and he realized suddenly it was larger than an RC-135.
“Soon I could see it with my own eyes,” he recalled. “It was a big plane, and I thought it was a military- cargo plane because it had a flickering flash-light. There were no passenger plane routes, and there had been no occasions of any passenger planes losing their way…I could see it was a large plane. It wasn’t a fighter plane, but either a reconnaissance plane or a cargo plane.”5
He fired. At 3:25, two R98 air-to-air missiles streaked ahead, one a heat-seeker that locked onto a source of infrared radiation such as the engine exhaust, the other guided by a radar. They each carried forty-four pounds of
