TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/83/83capts.4

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                !&                                                        4««Atrocity in the Skies

September 12, 1983

The Soviets shoot down a civilian airliner

The electronic bleeps and snatches of recorded radio communications
told a story that technicians and intelligence officers, working in
Tokyo, at first could not believe.  But as they sifted and shorted
through the millions of bits of data that are automatically collected
and stored by computers, the chilling conclusion became more and more
inescapable, and they notified Washington.  Finally, at 7:10 a.m.
Pacific Daylight Time, Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese put in an
urgent call to Ronald Reagan, who was vacationing at his ranch in the
hills near Santa Barbara, Calif.  The mystery of a missing South
Korean jetliner that had strayed over Soviet territory, said Meese,
had been solved:  17 hours earlier Korean Air Lines Flight 007 had
been cold-bloodedly blasted out of the skies by a missile-firing
Soviet interceptor, with an all but certain loss of 269 lives.

Thus began one of the strangest and least expected confrontations
between the superpowers in the annals of U.S. postwar diplomacy.
Though the aircraft so wantonly destroyed near the Soviet island of
Sakhalin was not American, the distinction scarcely mattered:  Flight
007 had left from U.S. territory and carried at least 61 American
passengers, including a U.S. Congressman.  The incident, moreover,
seemed to be a crime against all humanity, a violation of the most
fundamental rules of the air on which all the nations of the world,
including the Soviet Union, depend in the busy, crowded skies of the
jet age.  "Attacking an unarmed civilian plane," said Republican
Congressman Thomas F. Hartnett of South Carolina, "is like attacking a
school bus."

Stunned by both the senselessness of the attack and the Soviets'
blatant lack of repentance, Reagan loosed a withering diplomatic
barrage in Moscow's direction.  First he directed Secretary of State
George Schultz to go on television with a documentary account of the
last hours and minutes of Flight 007.  Then in the space of a few
hours he announced not once but twice that he was cutting short his
California holiday--first by two days, then by three--as his
determination to confer personally with the National Security Council
in Washington grew more urgent.  Just before boarding Air Force One
for the trip back to Washington, a grim Reagan mounted an outdoor
podium and read an extraordinary statement.  Calling the Soviet attack
a "barbaric act," the President implied that it reflected baser
motives than even the 1979 U.S.S.R. invasion of Afghanistan.  "While
events in Afghanistan and elsewhere have left few illusions about the
willingness of the Soviet Union to advance its interests through
violence and intimidation, all of us had hoped that certain
irreducible standards of civilized behavior nonetheless obtained," he
declared.  "But this event shocks the sensibilities of people
everywhere."

Noting that "where human life is valued, extraordinary efforts are
extended to preserve and protect it," Reagan declared that every
civilized society must "ask searching questions about the nature of
regimes where such standards do not apply."  He asked pointedly of the
Soviet Union:  "What can we think of a regime that so broadly trumpets
its vision of peace and global disarmament and yet so callously and
quickly commits a terrorist act to sacrifice the lives of innocent
human beings?"

His anger and the world's outrage were augmented beyond the deed
itself by Moscow's sullen and specious responses to the unequivocal
evidence of what had happened.  After remaining virtually silent on
the matter for almost two days, the Soviet Union finally issued a
labored account of an "unidentified plant" that had "rudely violated
the state border and intruded deep into the Soviet Union's airspace."
TASS admitted that Soviet interceptors had "fired warning shots and
tracer shells along the flying route of the plane," but refused to
acknowledge shooting it down.

TASS implied that the U.S. had planned the course deviations that took
Flight 007 into Soviet territory, since "relevant U.S. services
followed the flight throughout its duration in the most attentive
manner."  Hinting that the jetliner was on a spy mission, it added,
"So one may ask that if it were an ordinary flight of a civil aircraft
. . . then why were there not taken any steps from the American side
to end the gross violation of the airspace of the U.S.S.R.?"  TASS
said that "leading circles" in the Soviet Union express "regret" over
the loss of life, but the news agency dismissed the worldwide uproar
over the attack as mere "hullabaloo."

Schultz's reply was quick, angry and scornful:  "No cover-up, however
brazen or elaborate, can . . . absolve the Soviet Union of its
responsibility to explain its behavior."

He was echoed a few hours later at an emergency meeting of the United
Nations Security Council by Charles Lichenstein, the U.S. acting
permanent representative.  "Let us call the crime for what it is,
wanton, calculated, deliberate murder," he said.  While the Soviet
delegate, Richard S. Ovinnikov stared icily into space, Lichenstein
spelled out what "we might expect a normal, civilized government" to
do in the event of a tragedy like that of Flight 007, including the
admission of responsibility and the undertaking of steps to ensure
that it never happens again.  For its part, the Soviet Union is simply
"lying--openly, brazenly and knowingly.  It is the face of a ruthless
totalitarian state."  Ovinnikov, declaring the session
"unjustifiable," proceeded to read the TASS account of the episode to
delegates.

Overseas, the reaction was no less emphatic.  At least four West
European governments summoned Soviet diplomats and delivered sternly
worded protests about the shooting down of Flight 007.  Italy's huge
Communist Party fired off a demand to Moscow for an explanation of
this crime"; Japan's Communist Party did likewise.  In Seoul, where
South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan called the attack a "barbarous
act," tens of thousands of South Koreans joined protest
demonstrations.  Similar marches were staged in Korean-American
communities across the U.S. Editorial reaction in the U.S. and abroad
was uniformly unforgiving.  Britain's Sun posed a question s that was
at the heart of Western shock over the peacetime incident:  "Would
Washington or our government ever dream of launching killer missiles?
Never in a million years."

For the Reagan Administration, the crisis over Flight 007 was an
especially complex and complicated matter.  Despite the many
unanswered questions that continued to surround the incident, it was
clear that the Soviets had committed a brutally provocative act, one
that demanded an unambiguous U.S. response.  The President rarely has
much trouble expressing such sentiments on a visceral level, as a
senior White House aide pointed out shortly after the attack.  "It is
further evidence that the President was right,"  reminded the aide,
"when he said the Soviet Union is a country that is essentially evil."

Yet in recent weeks, for the first time in his Administration, Reagan
had been signaling a relation of tensions on the American side.  Two
weeks ago, the U.S. signed a new multiyear grain agreement in Moscow,
ending a three-year impasse over U.S. grain sales to the Soviet Union.
Washington also backed away from the previous objections to the sale
of pipeline equipment by U.S. firms to the Soviets.  Shultz was
scheduled to meet with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in
Madrid this week, and the two countries were slated to resume two sets
of arms negotiations within a month.  There was even talk of moving--
slowly, of course--toward a summit.

As the President flew back to Washington, a high-level task force
assembled at the State Department to ponder appropriate U.S.
countermeasures.  There was general agreement that the Administration
should not do yet another about-face on the grain deal, since Reagan
had criticized President Jimmy Carter's embargo and a second one would
virtually eliminate the U.S. as a credible trading partner.  The
various courses of action considered ranged from U.S. support of
expected retaliation by airline pilots all the way up to a
postponement of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks,
scheduled to resume this week in Geneva.  Above all else, State
Department officials urged a retaliation that would be joined by other
nations.

No final decisions were made at Friday night's two-hour NSC session,
but the President appeared to be leaning toward finding ways of
punishing the Soviets in the field in which they transgressed--civil
aviation.  Among those who attended the meeting, in addition to
reagan's usual foreign policy advisers were Acting Transportation
Secretary James Burnley and Federal Aviation  Administration Chief J.
Lynn Helms.  The U. S. was already conferring with allies over
possible joint moves at a meeting of the International Civil Aviation
Organization to be held later this month in Montreal.  Said one State
Department official, referring to the Soviet national airline: "We
want to do something that will affect the relations of Aeroflot to the
rest of the world."  One possibility: ground crews at international
airports could refuse to clean Aeroflot cabins, stock its planes or
refuel its empty tanks, effectively grounding the carrier outside of
the Soviet Union.

The prospects for a more radical move, like pulling out the INF
negotiations, seemed never to have been seriously considered.  "I
would not look for us to discontinue our discussions because the
stakes are too high," said a senior Administration official.  "We
would not be serving our own country or the world at large should we
stop our efforts to achieve arms reductions."  Such an approach would
be in keeping with the Administration's "two track" policy toward the
Soviets, challenging them when U.S. interests require it, seeking
agreements when mutual interests are served.

The journey that was to end in death and crisis began unportentously
at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport.  The
gleaming white Boeing 747-200B jumbo jet, trimmed in red and blue and
bearing Korean Air Lines' sleek symbolic bird on its towering 63-ft-
high tail, lumbered routinely away from Gate 15.  Due to leave at
11:50 p.m. E.D.T. on Tuesday, Flight 007 was 35 minutes late taking
off.

Even before the huge aircraft, 232 ft. long and 196 ft between wing
tips, rose into the cloudless sky, the 14 women and four men flight
attendants began making their 244 passengers comfortable.  Still in
their standard blue uniforms, the attendants served champagne to the
twelve first-class passengers, who had paid $3,588 (round trip) to
enjoy the roomy luxury of the top-deck lounge behind the cockpit
cabin.  Down on the main deck, nearly all of the 24 seats in the
business-class section, where tickets cost $2,380, were occupied.
Toward the rear, where passengers could fly for as little as $1,200,
nearly 80 seats were empty.  Flight 007 was bound for Seoul but 130 of
the travelers planned to go on to more Exotic Far East destinations
such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan.  They were flying KAL because it
offered some of the lowest fares to Asia.

None of the passengers could be looking forward to the flight.  They
would spend seven hours on the nightlong 3,4000-mile leg to Anchorage.
Then, still mainly in darkness as they headed away from sunrise in the
east, they would face an additional 7 1/2 dreary hours before reaching
Seoul's Kimpo Airport in what KAL brochures call "the land of morning
calm."

After reaching cruising altitude (35,000 ft.), many passengers took
off their shoes, loosened neckties, reached for pillows and stretched
out to sleep.  Some watched the in-flight movie, Man, Woman and Child,
a tearjerker about a married man suddenly discovering that he had
fathered a son during an earlier affair.  When not serving middle-of-
the-night snacks and cocktails, the attendants kept the cabin lights
low.  The trip to Anchorage was uneventful.  Flight 007 touched down
at 7:30 a.m. E.D.T. Wednesday (2:30 a.m. in Anchorage).

Most of the bleary-eyed passengers walked off the plane to stretch
their legs and sip coffee in a holding area at the terminal.  As they
milled about, service crews vacuumed the 747's rugs, emptied ashtrays,
placed clean linen on the backrests.  Ground personnel pumped 37,7750
gal. of fuel into the plane's tanks, enough for its normal cruising
range of about 6,000 miles.  A fresh cres, led by Captain Chun Byung
In, a veteran of 10,547 flying hours took over in the cockpit.  One
fortunate family left Flight 007 in Anchorage.  Robert Sears, a
freight handler for Alaska International Air, had been vacationing in
New York with his wife and two children.

Within minutes, an identical 747, KAL's flight 015 from Los Angeles,
descended out of the darkness and taxied up to its sister jet.  Also
bound for Seoul, it would follow Flight 007 by about 20 minutes.  Many
of its passengers joined those from Flight 007 in waiting out the 90
minute rest stop.  There was no hurry, since Kimpo would not open
until 5 p.m. (6 a.m. in Korea).

North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms stepped off Flight 015  He was part
of an official six-man congressional delegation representing the U.S.
at a conference in Seoul to commemorate the 30 anniversary of the
mutual defense treaty between South Korea and the U.S.  Helms stopped
to chat with a young Australian couple and their two daughters from
Flight 007.  "She was reading to those beautiful little girls," he
recalled later, through tears.  "it was the most marvelous thing you
could have seen."  With Helms was Idaho Senator Steve Symms.  They
looked for Georgia Congressman Lawrence P. McDonald, who was scheduled
to be one of the main conference speakers.  They knew he had taken the
other flight.  "Larry had no trouble sleeping on planes," Symms said
later.  "So he stayed on board during the stopover, and we never saw
him"  Added Helms: "Maybe if we had, we would have persuaded him to
join us or he might have got us to join him."

Kentucky Congressman Carroll Hubbard also got off Flight 015.  He had
expected to join McDonald on Flight 007, but had cancelled his
reservation at the last minute in order to accept a speaking
engagement in Kentucky.  McDonald had originally been booked on
Sunday's Flight 007, but had missed it when his connecting plan from
Atlanta was diverted because of thunderstorms in New York City.  He
had time to catch a Pan Am flight to Seoul but preferred the lower
fare he had arranged with KAL.

The first blush of the approaching dawn was barely visible as Captain
Chun nosed his craft back into the Alaskan sky at 10 a.m. (4 a.m. in
Anchorage).  He set off on "Jet Route 501," a southwesterly course
along the Aleutian Islands and one of five commonly traveled flight
paths at the start of the 3,800-mile run to Seoul.  At checkpoint
Bethel, about 340 miles west of Anchorage, he would switch to what
pilots call "Red Route 20," the most northerly and direct of the
internationally recognized course to Tokyo and Seoul.  It would take
him off the Soviet Union's Kamchatka Peninsula, about 30 miles form
the Kuril Islands, which are claimed and occupied by the Soviets, then
over the main Japanese island of Honshu, and finally westward to
Seoul.

The Soviet zones were well marked on Chun's maps.  One blue-bordered
warning declared:  "Aircraft infringing upon nonfree flying territory
may be fired on without warning."  Read another:  "Unlisted radio
emissions from this area may constitute a navigational hazard or
result in border overflight unless unusual precautions is exercised."
Still, Red Route 20 was routine in the hundreds of commercial
airliners that follow it each month.

Back in the passenger cabins, by KAL's usual procedures the women
flight attendants would now switch to native Korean dress.  The bright
and multicolored costumes include long skirts (chima) and short,
flared blouses (chogori).  They had orange juice and sandwich wedges
on hand for the tourist passengers, fancy snacks of chicken
florentine, zucchini au gratin, rice and cheddar croquettes, and soba,
a Japanese broth, for the first-class travelers. Everything presumably
would have seemed normal as the passengers munched and dozed their way
toward Seoul.

As Captain Chun and his craft bucked the prevailing headwinds, which
normally reduce the plane's speed from 540 m.p.h. to about 460 m.p.h.,
he advised air controllers in Anchorage, who supervised the first
1,800 miles of his trip, that he had passed the mandatory navigational
checkpoints, such as "Nabie" and "Neeva."

The KAL pilot had no way of knowing that other electronic eyes were
watching Flight 007 from far ahead of him, although he would assume
the Soviets would be monitoring the aircraft.  Soviet radar had locked
on the 747 at about noon (E.D.T.) that day, when Flight 007 was
cruising southwestward over the Bering Sea, and would follow the plane
for the next 2 1/2 fateful hours.  As always, U.S. and Japanese
intelligence stations were in effect watching the Soviets as they
watched the jumbo jet.  The stations did so by recording the radio
communications between the Soviet radar operators, probably located in
northern Kamchatka, and their superiors along the military chain of
command.  It would be many hours later before those tapes would be
examined and their significance determined.

Whether he knew it or not, Captain Chun and the other 268 innocent
travelers on his airliner soon were in trouble.  Somehow, Flight 007
had passed those lines, invisible in the sky but so clearly etched on
maps, that mark forbidden airspace.  The Soviets scrambled MiG-23s,
their widely deployed supersonic jet fighter, and Sukhoi-15s, a
slightly older but nonetheless lethal interceptor, to follow the 747.
Japanese and American intelligence sources later figured that at least
eight of the single-seat fighters pursued the relatively slow-moving
airliner.

According to the account of Secretary Shultz, Flight 007 first crossed
the Kamchatka Peninsula, then the Sea of Okhotsk and the island of
Sakhalin.  Unless it changed course, the airliner apparently would
have approached the around Vladivostok on the Soviet mainland.  This
cold and bleak region is ordinarily off limits to foreigners.

The Soviets have military reasons for their sensitivity.  Kamchatka is
the site of Soviet missile-testing facilities and early warning radar
systems.  The port of Petropavlovsk is home base for some 90 nuclear-
powered submarines.  The Soviets hope to turn the Sea of Okhotsk,
between the peninsula and the mainland, into a private sheltered lake
for submarines armed with missiles that could strike the continental
U.S.  The southern half of Sakhalin bristles with at least six Soviet
airfields and is merely 27 miles across the Strait of Soya from
Japan's Hokkaido Island.  The strait is a choke point for Soviet naval
vessels moving from the Sea of Japan into the North Pacific.
Vladivostok and Sovetskaya-Gavan are the main bases for the 820 ships
of the Soviet Pacific fleet.

The Soviets had every right of international law to send fighters up
to inspect the intruder.  Common sense, however, suggests that even
the most expert observer flying some six miles high in the dim predawn
light is not likely to see anything that U.S. surveillance satellites
have not repeatedly scrutinized and photographed in far greater
detail.

But rationality did not prevail.  At 2:12 p.m. (3.12 in the morning in
Japan), a Soviet pilot told his ground station that he was close
enough to see the Korean airliner.  Three minutes later, Captain Chun,
apparently unaware of his hostile company, routinely asked air
controllers in Tokyo, who had taken over supervision of the flight
from Anchorage, for permission to climb to 35,000 ft.  Permission was
given.  Six minutes later, a Soviet flyer radioed that the 747 was
just short of that altitude, ad 10,000 meters (33,300 ft.)  About the
same time, Japanese radar operators in Hokkaido noted that, although
Flight 007 had just reported its position as 115 miles south of
Hokkaido, they found no corresponding radar blip there.  They did spit
one 115 miles north of the island.

Was Captain Chun aware that he was off course?  Apparently not.  Had
he seen the interceptors trailing him?  Unlikely, since he almost
certainly would have informed the Tokyo controllers of his unwelcome
escort.  Not once did he indicate that he was in an unusual situation.
If all was considered normal aboard the 747, the attendants would now
be serving breakfast to the awakening passengers.  There would be
grapefruit and beef brochette for the high-fare travelers, a croissant
and Spanish omelet for the others.

But in the reddening skies over the southern coast of Sakhalin, a
chain of events began unfolding that was far from normal.  Japanese
radar operators saw the blip of an unidentified plan close in rapidly
on another blip they now knew represented the Korean airliner.  The
two symbols merged.  The time was 2:25 p.m.

Then, at 2:26 p.m., the whirling tape recorders, probably at the
Japanese Defense Agency's massive radar installation in the otherwise
sleepy town of Wakkanai on Hokkaido's northern tip, caught the
incriminating conversations between a single Soviet fighter pilot and
his unemotional commander on the ground.  As reported in the Japanese
press, the key transmissions included:

Commander:  Take aim at the target.

Pilot:  Aim taken.

Commander:  Fire.

Pilot:  Fired.

Later, there were more Soviet transmissions:

Unidentified questioner:  Where did it go?

The reply:  We shot it down.

Schultz curtly paraphrased these exchanges at his initial Washington
press conference.   Said he:  "The Soviet pilot reported that he fired
a missile and the target was destroyed."

Indeed it was.  But Flight 007, in what must have been an interminable
and terrifying descent for its travelers, seemed to die slowly.  At
2:27 the tried finally to signal its distress.  "Korean Air 007,"
began the voice.  But only an unintelligible garble of sounds
followed.

Three minutes later, radar showed that the airliner had fallen to
5,000 meters (16,400 ft.), halfway to the sea.  Within another two
minutes a second Soviet plan showed up at the same site on radar
screens.  At 2:38 p.m., twelve minutes after being hit, Flight 007
dropped off the screens.

Near the island of Moneron, 30 miles off the Sakhalin coast, Japanese
fishermen heard at least two thunderous noises from the sky above
them.  They reported seeing a fiery flash denoting that one called
"some awful explosion."  It was an explosion that would soon echo, in
disbelieving protest, around the world.

At Kimpo Airport in Seoul, friends and families awaiting Flight 007
endured a roller-coaster of worry, falsely raised joy and final
sorrow.  They waited for five agonizing hours for some word of the
missing plane's fate.  Rumors filled the vacuum.  The 747 had been
hijacked.  No, it had been forced to land on Soviet soil.  Then
official confirmation.  A KAL spokesman said on the P.A. system that
the airliner was safely down on Sakhalin.  Everyone should leave
telephone numbers and await word on the reunion.  Cheers filled the
terminal.  Another 13 hours passed before the reality came from
distant Washington.  Shultz, his voice quavering as he fought to
control his anger, revealed the worst.

In Atlanta, Kathryn McDonald stoically faced TV cameras to declare
that her husband Lawrence, a staunchly conservative Democratic
Congressman and national chairman of the ultraright John Birch
Society, had been the victim of "an act of deliberate assassination."
She charged that it was no accident that "the leading anti-Communist
in the American Government" had been on a plane that was "forced into
Soviet territory" and shot down.  She linked her husband's "murder"
with the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II, blaming both
on the Soviets.

Rebecca Scruton, 28, a Meriden, Conn., mother of two young children,
had become a widow in December, when her husband Dale, 30, died of
cancer.  She was on Flight 007 only because she had a passport problem
when she went to board an earlier flight; her children were not with
her.  There were 269 such stories of personal poignancy.

The death toll was the fifth highest in aviation history.  For
Americans, the loss of 61 U.S. civilians in a military attack may have
been the greatest since the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor.

In the waters of the Sea of Japan, Soviet ships and aircraft warned
outsiders away from their search of the area where the plane went
down.  The U.S. moved five F-15 jet fighters from Okinawa to northern
Japan, but did not send them into the area.  The U.S. Air Force also
dispatched at least one AWACS surveillance plane to Hokkaido.  In the
tense situation, both superpowers raised their alert status in the
region, but no one wanted to provoke yet another air tragedy.

One question vital to Soviet intentions about the tragedy is who
authorized the order to fire.  The hours of radar tracking and even
the period of scrambling after Flight 007 entered Soviet airspace
would allow ample time for the matter to be passed all the way back to
Moscow.  Lynn Hansen, of the Center for Strategic Technology at Texas
A&M, doubts that anyone below a three-star colonel-general, such as
a Far East-theater air-defense deputy commander, "could make that
weighty a decision; they're all scared of that responsibility."
Georgia Tech Sovietologist Daniel Papp warns that "if we assume it
went all the way to Moscow, then there are very grave questions as to
Soviet intent.  If it was a general who decided it was time to show
that they meant business, that is far less serious in its policy
implications."

Retired Admiral Bobby Inman, former deputy director of the CIA,
speculates that the Soviet Union was so stung by its inept handling of
a similar, 1978 Korean airliner intrusion over their territory that
individual air-defense units now have standing orders to direct any
interlopers to land and to shoot them down if they do not.  "Their
priorities are different from ours," Inman says.  "They place highest
priority not on human lives but on preventing penetration of their
airspace."  The Kremlin had time last week to learn what was happening
at the lower command levels, Inman suggests, but did not intervene to
stop it.

Did the Soviet interceptors signal the airliner to change course or to
land, and if so, did the Korean crew ignore the signals?  The Soviets,
of course, insist that both answers are yes.  But so far the tapes of
their air-to-ground reports have not borne out the claim.  Moreover,
the KAL crew would have made its own radio report of such action, it
had been able.

Why were there no radio communications between Soviet military
officials and the airliner?  Soviet ground stations should have been
aware of the frequencies the airliner would be using and could have
given instructions to the plane.  That in turn would have alerted air
controllers in Japan to what was happening.  Early American analysis
of the tapes provided no evidence of any such calls.

Did the 747 sustain some kind of massive electrical problem that
knocked out its navigational systems, lights and some of its radios?
It is virtually inconceivable.  There are three independently powered
inertial navigational systems on the Boeing aircraft.  There are four
electrical generators, one for each engine, and each can also be used
for such low-power tasks as lighting.  As for the radios, there are at
least five separate transmitters on board.  It is possible that the
crew was having difficulty on short-range channels with other
aircraft, yet it was never out of touch with ground stations.

Why then did the airliner stray so far off course?  That remains a
major mystery.  The inertial-guidance systems have to be programmed by
the crew before takeoff and after various checkpoints along the route
are passed.  Human error in programming, followed by inattention to
course while flying on automatic pilot, is a conceivable possibility.
The full explanation almost surely will never be known.

Whatever the answers to these questions, the Soviets clearly violated
international law and custom by using excessive force on an unarmed
civilian aircraft.  "Of course they'll claim they warned the plane--
who'll ever prove otherwise?" notes former CIA Official George Carver,
now a fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and
International Studies.  "But let's not be diverted by fine legal minutiae.
They had absolutely no right to commit murder."  Experts in international law
say the families and countries of victims may have valid claims for damages,
but no one expects the Soviets to ever pay restitution.

In the U.S., the Soviets' rash act certainly strengthens military
hard-liners and gives Reagan an ever better chance to win final
congressional approval for deploying the MX missile while limiting
U.S. concessions in arms-control talks.  Jesse Helms made the point
well in discussing the Soviets with conservative colleagues in Seoul
last week.  Said he:  "This is the best chance we ever had to paint
these bastards into a corner."

Actually, the painting has already been done.  It is a nasty self-
portrait that shatters the reasonable image that the Soviets have been
trying to project as part of their peace offensive to block deployment
of U.S. cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe.  For a nation so
profoundly insecure as the Soviet Union, the public relations debacle
resulting from someone's decision to shoot to kill was a terrible
setback.  But that was no consolation for all those families, from 13
nations, whose loved ones vanished on Flight 007.

--By William R. Doermer and Ed Magnuson.  Reported by Jerry Hanniflin
and Strobe Talbott/Washington and Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles