high explosive designed to produce fourteen hundred steel fragments. The heat-seeking missile was fired first and took thirty seconds to reach the airliner. Osipovich saw an explosion.
“The target is destroyed,” he reported.
He broke away to the right. He was low on fuel, and landed back on the island.
The explosion tore a hole in the plane five feet wide and the cabin pressure plunged. “What’s happened?” asked a surprised cockpit crew member at the blast. The missile had sliced through the control cables and the Boeing pitched up, pressing people into their seats. The engines remained on, but the speed brakes—the flaps that usually try to stop the plane on the runway—extended from the wing, the landing gear came down and passengers were told to put out cigarettes and prepare for an emergency descent. “Put the mask over your nose and mouth and adjust the headband,” the passengers were told on the public address system. The first officer radioed to Tokyo, barely able to speak through his mask. “Rapid compressions descend to one zero thousand.”
At 33,850 feet, the plane leveled off and rolled, falling toward the sea at five thousand feet per minute. All were lost.
Reagan was awakened in the middle of the night at Rancho del Cielo by a phone call from Clark about the missing plane. Nancy Reagan recalled her husband’s first reaction was, “My God, have they gone mad?” and “What the hell are they thinking of?”6
Like punch-drunk fighters, the United States and Soviet Union began swinging wildly at each other in a melee of anger, indignation and error.
An ultra-secret Japanese-U.S. listening post had monitored some of the radio transmissions from Osipovich to his ground controller. A portion of these intercepts were sent to Washington, translated and transcribed. The initial transcript showed Osipovich was guided to the intruder and included his declaration “the target is destroyed.” In Washington, these words seemed to shout from the page. They showed the Soviets were guilty of wanton murder. But the transcript was only a piece of raw intelligence, far from the whole story. It did not reflect the intense confusion among the Soviet ground controllers, nor the presence of the RC-135. All through the event, the Soviet military had never made a careful effort at identification, inflamed as they were by their fears of another flyover like the one in April. This climate of chaos and misjudgment on the ground was not reflected in the printed transcript of the radio intercept. The catastrophe was a window into the weaknesses of the Soviet military system, an example of how imprecise judgments and poor equipment could go terribly awry, but that was not what Reagan and his men saw in the transcript.
In Washington, according to Seymour Hersh, a small group of analysts with air force intelligence realized within hours that the Soviets did not deliberately shoot down the airliner. These analysts prepared a secret presentation, using color slides, showing how the Cobra Ball mission may have led to the confusion. But in the heat of the moment, the presentation got little attention. The presentation made it to the White House twenty-three hours later, and even then made no impact amid the emotions of the day. As Hersh put it, the presentation “crash- landed.”7
Shultz seized on the transcript of Osipovich to make a point. He wanted to go public with it. Shultz recalled in his memoir that, after an intense debate, he persuaded the CIA to let him use the transcript, even though it had come from ultra-secret intelligence gathering in Japan. For reasons that are unknown, Shultz did not wait until more complete information or transcripts could be examined. He apparently did not see the air force presentation.
On September 1, at 10:45 A.M., Shultz appeared before reporters at the State Department. In remarks delivered in a cold fury, he declared, “The United States reacts with revulsion to this attack. Loss of life appears to be heavy. We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.” Shultz claimed the Soviets had tracked the airliner for two and a half hours, when in fact they had difficulty following it and lost track. He claimed unambiguously that the pilot was in position “with a visual contact with the aircraft, so that with the eye you could inspect the aircraft and see what it was you were looking at.” With the press conference, Shultz launched what became a major U.S. rhetorical offensive against the Soviets, accusing them of deliberately killing the people on the airliner.
Reagan cut short his vacation and returned to Washington. He invited congressional leaders to the White House on Sunday for what became a dramatic, closed-door meeting. Reagan played an eight-minute tape, a fragment of the intercept in which Osipovich said “the target is destroyed.” Senator Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Republican, said Reagan should seek revenge by expelling 269 KGB agents from the United States.
The briefing also led to the first public acknowledgment of the presence of the RC-135. The House Majority leader, Jim Wright, D-Texas, told reporters after the briefing that he heard the spy plane mentioned on the tape. White House officials rushed to say Wright was wrong, but they acknowledged, in the process of the denials, that there had been an RC-135 in the skies the day of the shoot down, which made for front-page stories the next day in the
Reagan recalled he wanted to spend the day by the White House pool. Instead, he sat in his damp trunks on a towel in his study rewriting a speech on a legal pad. The Osipovich tape had become a powerful propaganda bludgeon. Reagan said he rewrote the speech to “give my unvarnished opinion of the barbarous act.” During the address that evening, Reagan played part of the tape. “The 747 has a unique silhouette unlike any other plane in the world,” Reagan said. “There is no way a pilot could mistake this for anything other than a civilian airliner.” Reagan acknowledged there was an RC-135 in the air that night, but dismissed the possibility of confusion over it, saying it was back on the ground “for an hour when the murderous attack took place…”
Reagan added, “And make no mistake about it—this attack was not just against ourselves or the Republic of Korea. This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere. It was an act of barbarism, born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations.”
While Reagan and Shultz were shaking their fists at Soviet brutality, within two days U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded the whole thing was probably an accident. At the CIA, Douglas MacEachin, deputy director of the operations center, had been on vacation in Boston, and rushed back to headquarters. Using large maps, he and others spent hours charting every known fact about the stray airliner, including the radio intercepts. Within a few hours, MacEachin recalled, they decided the Soviets had made a mistake, the same conclusion air force intelligence had also reached.9 In fact, the Soviets had not been sure what the airliner was, and had probably confused it with the American RC-135.10
The deputy CIA director, Robert M. Gates, later disclosed that this conclusion had been mentioned in the President’s Daily Brief—his morning intelligence report—on September 2. But some officials, he said, “just got carried away.”11
Andropov learned of the shoot down early on the morning of September 1, while he was still at home on the outskirts of Moscow. He was told that a U.S. warplane had been downed over Sakhalin. He knew the rules: if a foreign plane was detected in Soviet airspace, the intruder must be given a visual or radio signal ordering it to land on Soviet territory, and if ignored, the nearest border command post could order the plane destroyed. It had happened before. According to Dmitri Volkogonov, the historian, the practice was always to deny a shoot down: “It came down by itself.”12
At the Kremlin later in the day, just before a Politburo meeting, Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov approached Andropov and told him, “A plane’s been shot down. It turned out not to be American, but South Korean, and a civil aircraft, at that. We’ll find out more and report in greater detail.” Volkogonov said Andropov clearly had other sources of information, and replied, “Fine. But I was told there’d been a spy plane above Kamchatka. I’m flying to the Crimea later today after the meeting. I must have a rest and get some treatment. As for the plane, you sort it out.”
Dobrynin recalled seeing Andropov that day. Looking haggard and worried, Andropov ordered Dobrynin to
