Flight 007, licence to lie
Flight 007, licence to lie
1 NOVEMBER 1986, Page 27
Philip Knightley
THE TARGET IS DESTROYED by Seymour Hersh
...
But, given this, Hersh tells a powerful and frightening story of Soviet incompetence and intransigence matched only by American opportunism and manipulation of public opinion. Hersh says that the 007 incident demonstrated the importance of honest intelligence in a world where the concept of deterrence is predicated on the assumption that the men with their fingers on the trigger have accurate information.
Yet he concludes, 'Those in Washington who chose to increase international tension, and their counterparts in Moscow who responded in kind, were acting in ignorance of the facts and realities.'
The facts were there. If the story has a hero he is Major General James C. Pfautz, then head of US Air Force Intelligence. When the first news of shooting trickled through to Washington from American signals and communications intelligence outposts in the area, Pfautz set to work to prepare an intelligence brief. He was sceptical from the beginning that the Soviets would deliberately shoot down a civilian plane without any of their forces on alert, so be began with the cock-up theory.
There was an RC-135, a US intelligence- gathering plane, a modified Boeing 707, in the area where Flight 007 had been shot down. Had the Russian fighter pilot mistaken the KAL jumbo for the RC-135? Pfautz's staff checked with tanker pilots who had done refuelling at night of RC-135 missions in the North Pacific. They told of the enormous difficulty of distinguishing between the two planes. One tanker pilot told of approaching within 500 yards of a Japan Air Line jumbo before he realised that the aircraft was not the RC-135 he was supposed to refuel.
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http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/1st-november-1986/27/flight-007-licence-to-lie
