Turn Over the Flight Recorder : The Soviets should tell more about the 1983 plane disaster

On Sept. 1, 1983, a missile fired from a Soviet fighter near the northern Pacific island of Sakhalin sent a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 plunging into the sea. All 269 persons aboard, including 63 Americans, were killed. Moscow’s claim that KAL-007 was on a spy mission did nothing to diminish the horror of the attack. Just how the New York-to-Seoul flight came to stray off course and overfly Soviet territory remains a mystery, the key to which may be contained in the flight recorder and other instruments aboard the plane. But the wreckage of KAL-007 has never been found.

Or has it . . . ?

Last month, the government newspaper Izvestia reported that the airliner’s wreckage was in fact located years ago in shallow water in the Sea of Japan. This story has been neither officially confirmed nor denied. South Korea, with which a Soviet Union desperate for economic aid is rushing to normalize its relations, demands answers from Moscow. Are the Soviets now ready to tell the truth about the tragedy?

Certainly Moscow can calculate that its international interests would best be served by making public every shred of information it has about the disaster. Whether internal Soviet politics makes that possible is something else. It was the Soviet military that played the key role in destroying KAL-007, the same military that lately has become so ominously assertive in government affairs. President Mikhail Gorbachev has recently gone out of his way to be kind to top military leaders. Those officials might well be determined not to invite fresh embarrassment by revealing the candid details of the military’s destruction of a civilian airliner.

But South Korean officials are pressing Moscow hard for the facts. It’s always been clear that Soviet authorities knew more than they were telling about KAL-007. Are they now ready to tell what they know? The political leadership may be ready to do so. The question is whether the military is ready to let them set the record straight.