United States. We understand that is his desire. I believe the same comment or a comment to that effect was made this morning at the White House.”
The announcements in Washington coupled with indications emerging from a Japanese Cabinet meeting that Belenko was about to be transferred to the Americans, incited the Russians to new fury and desperation. Soviet Ambassador Dmitri Polyansky read to the Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister a statement, the crudity of which exceeded all bounds of conventional diplomatic propriety. The Russians declared that Belenko had made an emergency landing and accused the Japanese of lying about it, or “fabricating a story” to conceal the “physical violence and other unforgivable means” employed to kidnap him.
After the confrontation between Belenko and the KGB officer, Soviet Embassy spokesman Aleksandr Shishaev denounced the meeting as “a farce, a shame on the Japanese government.” He claimed that “it was impossible for him [Belenko] to answer questions. He was under the influence of narcotics. He sat there like a dummy.”
With the departure of Belenko for the United States, the Soviet pressures on Japan did not abate; they merely were refocused on recovery of the MiG-25 before the Americans could study it. Surveillance flights by Soviet fighters and seizure of Japanese fishing craft and their crews at sea continued. Moscow threatened economic retaliation and hinted at all sorts of dire, though unspecified, consequences unless the Japanese bowed at once.
A flurry of secret messages about the MiG-25 bounced back and forth between Tokyo and Washington, many handled through General Scowcroft, who coordinated and mediated between the Defense and State departments. The Pentagon wanted to bring the plane to the United States, test it, fly it, keep it. “Absolutely,” remembers Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense. “We wanted the plane. We wanted metal samples; to fly it, take it apart, then fly it again.”
Some in the State Department, however, were skittish, fearing that retention of the MiG would strain detente and complicate other relations with the Russians. And the State Department was reluctant to pressure the Japanese, who initially were inclined to manage disposition of the plane in a manner that would spare the Soviet Union as much embarrassment as possible.
Out of all the bureaucratic wrangling, a compromise emerged. How long would scientists, engineers, and technicians require to extract all data desired by disassembling and studying the plane on the ground? A minimum of thirty days, the Pentagon said.
The Japanese promptly pledged to make the MiG-25 available at least that long, provided American specialists wore civilian clothes and acted as consultants working under their supervision.
In their threats, insolence, and condescension, the Russians had gone too far and provoked the Japanese government, with widespread support of the citizenry, into a posture of defiance. The Japanese now started subtly taunting the Russians. Rejecting all Soviet protests and charges, the government expressed surprise that the Soviet Union had yet to apologize for violating Japanese airspace. Said Foreign Minister Kiichi Miyazawa: “I realize the Soviet Union is the kind of nation that gets bogged down in red tape in making declarations, but at the very least, the Soviet Union has a duty to control the actions of its uniformed military men. It’s like landing in a neighbor’s garden and not even bothering to say ‘Boo.’”
As for all the strident Soviet demands that the MiG-25 be given back, another Foreign Ministry official said, “The Soviet Union should first explain what it thinks of the incident. It is no way for anyone to try to take back something he has thrown, even though inadvertently, into the yard of his neighbor.”
What then will happen to the plane? Well, the Japanese solemnly explained, that is a complicated issue. There are precedents for returning it and precedents for keeping it. We will just have to see. But for the time being, we will have to retain it as “evidence” while our investigation of the whole matter continues.
The Los Angeles
The trouble with the Soviet authorities is that they just won’t
Material evidence in a crime such as this plainly deserves the most careful going-over, perhaps even by experts from several countries. After all, who knows what that pilot could have been surreptitiously carrying? Perhaps a little caviar hidden among the plane’s electronic countermeasures? Maybe a liter of vodka secreted somewhere in the airframe? A hot balalaika or two cached in the turbojet engines? The only way to find out is to take the plane apart piece by piece, as the cops did with the smuggler’s car in “The French Connection.”
The interests of the law must, of course, be served. It all seems very sensible and straightforward to us. Why the Russians can’t understand is a puzzle.
With the revelation that American “consultants” were en route to assist in the Japanese “investigation,” the Russians realized they had no chance now of preventing examination and exploitation of the MiG-25. So they redirected their propaganda toward the Soviet people and their pressures toward the United States.
Tass on September 14 initiated the Soviet efforts to represent Belenko as a hero and patriot abducted and spirited away against his will by the Dark Forces with the connivance of the devious and unscrupulous Japanese. According to Tass, Belenko during a routine training flight strayed off course, ran out of fuel, and made a forced landing at Hakodate. (An unidentified Soviet source attempted to lend credence to this version by telling Western newsmen that Belenko maintained radio contact with his base up until his landing.) Tass asserted that Japanese police clamped a hood over Belenko’s head, dragged him away by his arms, shoved him into a car, and hid him in isolation, refusing Soviet pleas to see him.
On the very day following the landing of the Soviet aircraft in Japan, an official representative of the White House announced that President Ford had decided to grant asylum to the Soviet pilot. The same White House representative was forced to acknowledge that the American authorities did not even know whether the pilot had sought asylum in the U.S.
It is difficult to label this announcement as anything but inflammatory. Even the sensation-oriented American press and television called this “unusual” for the White House, apparently dictated by reason of the election campaign. It is evident that American “special services” were behind this “invitation” to the Soviet pilot. Subsequent events showed their participation in the removal of Belenko to the U.S….
Despite persistent demands on the part of the Soviets, Japanese authorities refused for several days to satisfy the appeal for a meeting between Soviet representatives and the pilot. When such a meeting finally took place, it was reduced to a worthless farce. At a distance of 25-30 meters, fenced off from the representatives of the Soviet Embassy in Japan by a barricade of office tables, sat Belenko, like a mannequin, surrounded by police and other representatives of the Japanese authorities. Not even a Soviet doctor, who would have been able to render a professional opinion as to the physical condition of the pilot, was allowed at the meeting.
This was in no way a meeting conducive to talking with Belenko. His two or three incoherent sentences were hardly confirmation of the Japanese representatives’ assertions as to the pilot’s intention “to receive political asylum” in the U.S. The entire course of the meeting, which lasted only seven minutes in all, including time to translate his sentences into Japanese, demonstrated that Belenko was in an abnormal condition, under the influence of drugs or something else. Immediately following this meeting, he was placed in an airplane owned by an American company and taken, under guard, to the U.S. This is how the Japanese authorities, in collaboration with American “special services,” treated the Soviet pilot.
Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko flew to New York on September 20 and, when asked about the Belenko affair, said, “This is a matter that will come up in discussions between us and the United States.” That evening during a private dinner with Kissinger at the Waldorf-Astoria, Gromyko emphasized that the return of Belenko was an issue of such grave importance to the Soviet Union that Brezhnev himself was personally concerned with it. The Russians, he said, were not at all sure that the man presented to them in Tokyo was even Belenko. The belief that Belenko had been abducted and was being held against his will would continue to poison U.S.-Soviet relations until it was eliminated, and it could be extirpated only if the Russians, with one of their own physicians present, were allowed to talk personally to Belenko at length.
In Washington the Soviets, who sometimes try to lobby in Congress as assiduously as the AFL-CIO or American Medical Association, sought to generate pressures in Congress for the return of Belenko. An emissary from the Soviet Embassy delivered a handwritten letter from Belenko’s wife, Ludmilla, and mother to the office of
