Perhaps the best way I can show you the extent to which he has transformed our knowledge of the case is th tell you what it looked like to me before and after I began to work with him.
KAL 007 first came to my attention on the morning after the disaster in a two-line item in the local newspaper on Nantucket Island, where my wife and I had been spending a couple of days with friends. The item merely said the the Korean airline, en route from New York, was overdue at Seoul. The at struck me as disturbing, but left me wondering why in itself it should national news. Driving home that morning, we turned ont eh radio and heard an account of Secretary of State Shultz's announcement to the world - that the Korean airliner had been, brutally and inexcusably, shot down by the Soviets. When we understood from the broadcast that the airliner was 350 miles off course, had overflown sensitive parts of two strategic Soviet areas, the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island, in a row, and had done so in the small hours of the morning, we were far from sure we were being told the truth about the flight.
As a Foreign Service officer at our Moscow embassy, I had analyzed Soviet statements during the Stalin and Khrushchev perioids. Both Grace and I had learned to look at statements with a skeptical eye in the effort to separate information from disinformation. As a member of an inter-agency working group in Washington After Francis Gary Powers's U-2 went down over Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960, I had taken part myself in official lying. Not realizing that the Soviets had the U2's cameras virtually intact and Powers himself alive, we (the members of the working group) very stupidly recommended that President Eisenhower stick to the cover story that the U2 was a weather plane that had inadvertently strayed off course. It is hard to reallize today that when Eisenhower got caught in the lie we thrust upon him, it was the first time many Americans realized that a US president would lie to them on an important subject. We had made our contribution to the erosion of truth-telling, on which democracy in large measure depends.
For the next few days after getting back from Nantucket, I followed the KAL 007 news with interest. On the evening of September 5 my son and I listened to President Reagan's TV address. He played a bit of the tape of the intercepted voices of the Soviet pilots over Sakhalin. We heard a Soviet interceptor pilot, who the president told us was pursuing the Korean airline, say, "I have accomplished the launch," and then, two seconds later, "The target is destroyed.
At first it sounded convincing to us. Then, in view of the case's importance to US-USSR relations and the danger of war, we decided to review everything we knew about the case to see how probable or imporbable the story of the disaster really was. After a review of the facts that had been in the newspapers, we concluded that it wasn't probable at all.
I had already been worried that the Reagan administration was pushing the Soviet Union too hard and that the situation might go wholly off the rails. We had overflown a Soviet island in the Kuriles wiith carrier aircraft and had stopped a Soviet ship on the high seas in the Caribbean. The Soviet minister of defense had spoken of the dangers of "appeasement" in terms reminiscent of 1939. I haa written of my concerns to George Ball, former undersecretary of state, one of the sane elder statesmen I knew, who shared them. Against this background, it seemed to me that the KAL007 case was worth an objective look by some competent body.
I went down to Washington, with supporting memoranda, twice that September to say so to members of Congrss on relevant committees. On my first visit I met with considerable interest. On my saecond, ten days later, I might as well have had leprosy. Reagan had escalated the rhetoric so much that he had made it seem virtually disloyal to the United States to say, "Wait a minute, let's look at the evidence more carefully."
I realized it would take more than considerations of probability to convince anybody to touch the case, however cautiously. Over the next six months I wrote a draft memorandum reviewing the evidence. I also talked over the case with other people working on it: Robert W Allardyce, a thoughtful ex-TWA captain, James Gollin, a writer and Allardyce's collaborator; and Seymour M Hersh, who had been running into my material one place or another around Washington. Anne Zill, the presidennt of the Fund for Constitutional Government, knew what I was doing and told me that if my expnses started gettiing too big for the family budget, to come to the FCG and say what I needed and why.
In March 1984 I told her I wanted to go to Japan in search of better evidence. I flew over on Korean Air Lines flight 007, a flight that had not yet changed its infamous name. In Tokyo I got to know Shozo Takemoto and the other leaders of the Japanese next-of-kin's investigation group. I talked to knowledgeable members of the Japanese and foreign press and got a better idea of what had been carried in the Japanese press but had not been printed in the United States.
Before I left the United States, Victor Navasky, the editor of the Nation had sent me a promising draft analysis of the KAL 007 case by a graduate student, whose name Navasky withheld. He asked me what I thought of it. I replied favorably. When I got back from Japan, I met the author of the study, David I. Pearson, then a Ph.D candidate in sociology at Yale, with whom I started to collaborate. The book he wrote, expanding on the insights of his initial study, he did with characteristic objectivity and attention to detail. Published by Summit Books in 1987 as KAL 007: The Cover Up it is a cogent and highly useful compilation of data showing why one should not believe the official US account of events.
By the time he closed the text, David Pearson and I had identified reasons why many of the things the Government said had happened could not have happened. But neither he nor I had any idea of what had actually taken place toward the end of the Korean airliner's flight. In so far as I, at least, thought I knew, I was substantially wrong. What had happened was more startling than anyone outside several intelligence services, with the exception of Michel Brun, had any inkling. And what Michel had at that stage was "merely" the key that would unlock the door to the rest. One day in the spring of 1987 I was talking on the telephone with Richard Witkin, the aviation editor of the New York Times, another person who has followed the case with care. He told me that a French pilot name Michel Brun said that a number of US military aircraft had been shot down over Sakhalin that night and asked me what I thought of the theory. I said it sounded pretty far-out to me, and we went on to other matters.
After I hung up, I sat at my desk for a while staring into space. It came to me that in following my hypothesis of what had happened over Sakhalin, I had discarded a number on contradictory pieces of evidence, dismissing them as disinformation or simple garbles. I saw that the pieces I had thrown away fitted nicely into what Brun was saying. I decided to go back to Japan to check out his evidence and to collect as many relevant documents as I could.
Before I left New York, Ned Chase, a senior editor at Scribner's with whom Brun had been corresponding, introduced me to Brun over the telephone. He was in Tahiti at the time. He has two daughters in Paris, one in Tahiti, and a wife in Tokyo. He lives pretty much all over the world and works wherever he is. He was in Tokyo the first few days after my arrival. I telephoned and he came over to the hotel where I was staying, and we talked. Later on we went to a helicopter show, which he wanted to see for professional reasons, and went on talking. Although we signed no treaty of alliance, since then we have worked together.
I was already impressed by what he was saying. As we worked, my respect for him only grew. I saw that he brought to the case an unparalleled range of relevant knowledge and experience. He knows aviation and aircraft. He had been the pilot of multi-engine aircraft, the CEO of an overwater airline based on Tahiti, an aircraft-accident investigator, and an aircraft broker. He knows navigation on the sea as well as in the air. He still holds a master's ticket in the Merchant Marine, having started on the sea before he took to the air. He was decorated for the radio work he did during a raft voyage he undertook with his brother and three others from Tahiti to Chile. This experience and these skills were very much to the point in understanding the evidence in the Korean Air Lines case. Equally imnportant was that could read and speak Japanese - which he does along with English, Spanish, and Polynesian. There is real knowledge of the case in the Japanese government and among some others in Japan. Japan was geographically close to the disaster and had first-class radar and signal-intelligence capabilities.
But most important of all has been Michel's intellectual curiosity and his unusual, almost fierce, intellectual independence - he is not only French, he has Basque blood on his father's side and Corsican on his mother's. He is aware of, but is not dominated by, what other people are thinking and saying. He thinks for himself. When he has a piece of evidence he does not understand, he does not discard it. He keeps chewing at it until it yields something intelligible. When he has understood a new piece of data, he reviews the case carefully to see what the implications of the new piece are for his interpretation of the rest of the evidence.
Before I discuss the successive stages of his achievement in the KAL 007 case, it may be worth mentioning some of the larger bodies of source material he analyzed. The have included the tape of the intercepted voices of the Soviet pilots over Sakhalin, the FAA and Japanese Ministry of Transportation tapes of air-traffic control communications between Anchorage and Tokyo on the one hand and KAL 007 and its sister ship KAL 015 on the other, the archives of the Japanese press in the Diet Library in Tokyo, as well as the relevant proceedings of the Diet, Japanese Maritime Safety AGency situation maps showing the successive positions of the US, Soviet, and Japanese ships during the naval search off Sakhalin, the after-action report of the US Navy task force taking part in the search, the sixty or so articles Izvestya printed on the KAL 007 case, the documents Boris Yeltsin turned over in November 1992 to the US next of kin and the Republic of Korea, and the two reports the International Civil Aviation Organization issued in 1983 and 1993 concerning its investigations of the KAL 007 case, misleading but accompanied by useful documentation>
Some of the many interviews Michel conducted in Japan included officers of the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency, the Japanese media, both national and on Hokkaido, fishermen and local officials on the Shimokita Peninsula on the Tsuguru Strait, target-drone and aviation-honeycomb manufacturers in Tokyo, and electronic and frequency measurement experts in Tokyo. He searched many miles of beach on both sies of the Tsuguru Strait, the western coast of Honshu south from the strait to Niigata, and on Okushiri and Sado Islands.
The thing that let Michel understand what no other writer or investigator had understood, and to see evidence they had passed by, was his realization the the early statements of Japanese Air Self-Defense and intelligence officers simply could not be fitted into the single-intrusion, single-interception, single-shootdown story insisted on by the United States. Understanding that several intruding aircraft had overflown Sakhalin and had been shot down nearby, he understood the meaning of the fact that, while floating aircraft debris had been seen on the surface off Sakhalin on the morning of the disaster, no floating debris from KAL 007 itself had reached the search area off Sakhalin for more than a week. Given the nature of the currents, that pointed to a crash site for the Korean airliner far to the south.
This realization in turn prompted Michel to confirm the southern crash-site in the two ways available to him. First, he talked to people who had found KAL 007 debris in the south in September 1983 and searched the relevant beaches himself for debris from the airliner still on them. Second, he examined the air-traffic-control tapes covering the period after KAL 007 was supposed to have been shot down. He did this first by ear, then with a personal oscilloscope, and finally with the aid of a world-class expert working with state-of-the-art equipment. I mention all this not to scoop what Michel tells you in his book, which goes far beyond any hints I have given you, but to make it clear that his investigation proceeded by logical stages and was accomplished by a staggering amount of work.
Before I sgn off, I will answer two questions often asked. First, how does Michel brun's book differ from that written by Seymour Hersh, The Target Is Destroyed, (SEE NOTE BELOW) generally held by the media to be the last word on the subject? Second, what is the importance of the KAL 007 case now that twelve years have passed since the disaster?
As to Hersh, some of whose other work I admire, in The Target Is Destroyed he dismissed the obvious possibility that KAL 007's diversion from course had been intentional in a footnote saying that he found no evidence that it was. I will deal with his book almost as briefly but more factually. He missed the two most important things about the case: that there had been a battle over Sakhalin between US and Soviet military aircraft; and that KAL 007 itself was not shot down there but was destroyed four hundred miles to the south, off Honshu.
As to the continued importance of the KAL 007 case: the lives of ordinary airline passengers were put at risk without their knowledge or consent. Two hundred and sixty-nine civilians, of whom sixty were American citizens, were killed, as were some thirty or more US Air Force and Navy officers and enlisted men. All this was the result of a wholly unjustified and badly planned intelligence and provocation mission. The government lied to the next of kin of both these groups and has failed to show them the consideration it owes them. A substantial risk of World War III was run for inadequate reason - if, indeed, there could have been an adequate one for risking a nuclear holocaust.
Through the manipulation of evidence, lying, and the subornation of witnesses, the Reagan administration turned its own ghastly blunder into a renewed political attack on the Soviet Union. In doing so it further committed itself to its mistaken quest for a decisive victory rather than striving for a gradual way of bringing US-Soviet relations into a viable accommodation. The disatrous results are only now beginning to dawn on us - Chechnya, economic disintegration, the spread of disease, the illicit sale of nuclear materials. In turning the truth of its own blunder in the KAL 007 operation into an aggressive fiction tailored to its purposes, the administration committed itself (and, sad to say, its successors) to years of lying to the very people from whom in a democracy, it derives its powers.
How could such a badly conceived and dangerous initiative have been undertaken? By no means least among the contributing causes were the dangers inherent in covert-action programs. In operations shielded by secrecy and conducted with the compartmentalization of information, true controls shrink virtually to zero. The senior officials who approve the plans have no real understanding of their dangers. The great majority of those carrying them out have little idea of what is being done beyond their own specific tasks. Effective congressional oversight is impossible - at least, it has never existed in the United States. At the root of clandestine operations is the mind-set that separates out simple objectives and considers anything justified in the drive to achieve them.
If the KAL case were no longer important, why would the US government devote such considerable resources to keep what happened from the public? It is not only trying to cover up a past blunder. It is also trying to protect a present and future "capability," the license to conduct clandestine operations that may differ from the KAL case in their specifics and their targets, but are similar in their disregard for democratic restraints and in the risk that they, too, will end in disaster.
There is every reason to think that covert operations continue to be a major element in US policy - indeed, one that enjoys broad bipartisan support. Republican and Democratic directors of Central Intelligence, Robert M Gates and James R Woolsey, have both stressed that the end of the Cold War only increases the number of our potential enemies and the need for clandestine operations. In December 1992, Mr Woolsey told the World Affairs Council, we may have slain the dragon (the USSR), but there remain a vast number of snakes (from Islamic fundamentalists to Mexican peasants) who can fit the blanket label of "terrorist" and justify intervention abroad and curbs on civil liberties at home.
I hear people say, "Michel Brun may be right about what happened in the KAL case, but couldn't we correct the mistakes quietly with less cost to the US's reputation" (and to the interests of those who took part in the cover-up?) I am reminded of the eminent Victorian lady who, on being told that Darwin said we were descended from the apes, remarked, "I hope it is not true, but if it is, I trust it will not become widely known."
To the contrary. An open discussion is essential to build the political will to prevent such abuses in the future. There will be both institutional pressures against disclosure (from the intelligence agencies and others who fear their interests might be damaged) and specific temptations to engage in new clandestine operations (for it is true we live in a chaotic world). In the 1970s the Church Committee in the US Senate began the process of airing. For a time it may have had a restraining effect. That is why it was abandoned - first in the heightened Cold War of the 1980s and now in the "chaos" of the 1990s.
But must we abandon democracy to defend "democracy"? The KAL tragedy shows the cost of such a policy: the cost to the passengers who boarded the airliner in good faith, the risk the operation ran of nuclear war and the damage to responsible government involved in the cover-up. Future risks will be different in their specifics but equally real.
At the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, are inscribed the words from the Gospel according to St John: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall amke you free." Only if we meet the challenge, will we have freedom. The KAL case is not only one of the most remarkable events of recent history. It is a present opportunity we dare not miss.
John Keppel
Essex, Connecticut (not in phone books now)
August 15, 1995
Note, Hersh's book does not mention US radar capability once.! You could read this book and seriously believe that the most important intelligence of the US is.... radio intercepts!!! that take 20 hours to interpret!!!!
more later... maybe
Keppel and Brun on KAL007
Back to main page, Main page.
The whole story??? Read me! Korean Air Disaster 1983. An explanation.
Wreckage Investigation
Amazing what they can discover...if they try.
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