rush back to Washington to deal with the crisis, saying, “Our military made a gross blunder by shooting down the airliner and it probably will take us a long time to get out of this mess.” Andropov called the generals “blockheads” who didn’t understand the implications of what they had done. Dobrynin said Andropov “sincerely believed,” along with the military, that the plane had made an intrusion into Soviet airspace as part of an intelligence mission to check Soviet radars. But even that, Andropov said, was no excuse for shooting it down instead of forcing it to land.13
After the three-hour Politburo meeting, Andropov went on holiday to Simferopol, where he stayed at one of several luxury villas reserved for the Soviet leadership. Accompanying him was not only his usual staff, but an entire medical facility. At this point, Konstantin Chernenko, long a weak acolyte of Brezhnev, took over running the Politburo meetings. Andropov never returned to the table.
Dobrynin said Andropov “was actually ready to admit the mistake publicly” but was talked out of it by Ustinov. The Soviet reaction was to lie about the events and cover up. The first bulletin from TASS on September 1 did not even mention the plane being shot down:
An unidentified plane entered the air space of the Soviet Union over the Kamchatka peninsula from the direction of the Pacific Ocean and then for the second time violated the air space of the USSR over Sakhalin Island on the night from August 31 to September 1. The plane did not have navigation lights, did not respond to queries and did not enter into contact with the dispatcher service.
Fighters of the anti-aircraft defense, which were sent aloft toward the intruder plane, tried to give it assistance in directing it to the nearest airfield. But the intruder plane did not react to the signals and warnings from the Soviet fighters and continued its flight in the direction of the Sea of Japan.14
The Politburo met again September 2, with Chernenko presiding. The Soviet rulers circled the wagons, and worried about whether to even admit the plane had been shot down. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko said he favored admitting that shots were fired but to insist “that we acted legally.” Defense Minister Ustinov then told the group, “I can assure the Politburo that our pilots acted in complete conformity with the requirements of their military duty, and everything stated in the submitted memorandum is the honest truth. Our actions were absolutely correct, insofar as the American-built South Korean aircraft flew 500 kilometers into our territory. It is extremely difficult to distinguish this aircraft by its shape from a reconnaissance aircraft. Soviet military pilots are prohibited from firing on passenger aircraft. But in this situation their actions were perfectly justified because in accordance with international regulations the aircraft was issued with several notices to land at our airfield.”
Mikhail Gorbachev, a younger, rising star among the aging Politburo members, said, “The aircraft remained above our territory for a long time. If it went off track, the Americans could have notified us, but they didn’t.”
Ustinov claimed the Korean aircraft had no lights. After firing warning shots, he said, the Soviet pilot “informed the ground that the aircraft was a combat one and had to be taken down.”
Gromyko: “We cannot deny that our plane opened fire.”
Viktor Grishin, then the Moscow party first secretary, asked, “And what was the South Korean pilot saying?”
Ustinov: “We didn’t hear anything.”
The KGB chief, Viktor Chebrikov, described the sea search, in waters up to 328 feet deep; Soviet ships and Japanese fishing vessels were in the area. “This means they can raise the plane’s black box, and we can too,” said Gromyko. The others worried aloud that evidence of a deliberate shoot down would come out. Gorbachev asked whether the Americans had detected the actual firing of the Soviet interceptor.
Chebrikov: “No, they haven’t. But I want to re-emphasize that our actions were entirely legitimate.”
Nikolai Tikhonov, a Brezhnev man and chairman of the Council of Ministers, said, “If we acted correctly, legitimately, then we have to say straight out that we shot this plane down.”
Gromyko: “We have to say that shots were fired. This should be said straightforwardly, to prevent our adversary from accusing us of deception.”
Grishin: “First of all, I’d like to underline that we should declare openly that the plane was shot down.” But he wanted the information dribbled out: first announce an investigation, and only later admit “the plane was fired at.”
Gorbachev: “First of all, I want to say that I’m convinced that our actions were lawful. Given that the aircraft remained above the Soviet territory for about two hours, it is difficult to presume that this was not a pre-planned action. We must show precisely in our statements that this was a crude violation of international conventions. We must not wait it out silently at the moment, we must take up an offensive position. While confirming the existing version, we must develop it further, by saying that we are seriously investigating the current situation.”15
In fact, the “existing version” was a lie. Gorbachev, said Volkogonov, “was concerned only about finding a way to extricate the leadership from an unseemly affair, and to shift the blame onto the other side.” The Politburo session reveals “a shocking lack of remorse—or even the expression of remorse—for the 269 victims of the crash,” Volkogonov added. “The tragic case of the South Korean Boeing became a pathetic symbol of Andropov’s rule.”16
Moscow did not acknowledge the shoot down until September 6 and delayed an official explanation for three more days. The obfuscation only deepened suspicions in the West. By silence and untruths, the Soviets seemed to be behaving exactly as Reagan said, like an evil empire. They claimed the plane was carrying out a CIA mission, deliberately flying into sovereign Soviet airspace as a trick. Then, with disclosure of the RC-135 in Washington, the Soviet propaganda machine went into overdrive. On September 5,
“The way this incident was dealt with throws light on the mentality of the Soviet leadership,” Volkogonov wrote later. “Andropov himself was silent on the issue for more than a month… The plane’s ‘black box’ had been found and brought to the surface. It was decided to say nothing of this, either to the world’s press or to Seoul, and Soviet ships were kept in the area for another two weeks to give the impression that the fruitless search was still going on.”
Reagan’s speeches bristled with outrage and revulsion, but in actions, he did not ratchet up confrontation. He rejected Thurmond’s demand to expel the KGB agents.18 Shultz won Reagan’s approval to go ahead with a scheduled meeting in Madrid with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Reagan did not want to close off nuclear arms control talks over the shoot down. “If anything,” Reagan recalled in his memoirs, “the KAL incident demonstrated how close the world had come to the precipice and how much we needed nuclear arms control: If, as some people speculated, the Soviet pilots simply mistook the airliner for a military plane, what kind of imagination did it take to think of a Soviet military man with his finger close to a nuclear push button making an even more tragic mistake?”
In Madrid, Shultz raised the airliner in his private, first meeting with Gromyko. “The atmosphere was tense,” he recalled. “He was totally unresponsive.” A larger meeting that followed was “brutally confrontational,” Shultz recalled. “At one point, Gromyko stood up and picked up his papers as though to leave. I think he half-expected me to urge him to sit down. On the contrary, I got up to escort him out of the room. He then sat down, and I sat down.” Gromyko said it was the most tense meeting he had ever conducted in dealing with fourteen secretaries of state. Shultz said “the meeting became so outrageous and pointless that we just ended it.”
The United States had attempted to embarrass Soviet officials and challenge their lies. The Soviet leaders saw the episode as a provocation, a deliberate attempt to trip them up.
On September 27 in Washington, Gates, the deputy CIA director, delivered to Shultz an intelligence assessment that said relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were as “pervasively bleak” as at any time since Stalin’s death in 1953. Gates said the Soviet leaders feared Reagan’s administration more than any in history.19
On September 28, Andropov issued one of the harshest condemnations ever of the United States, published in both
