Soviet Media Shred Secrecy Of Kal Flight 007

MOSCOW - The Izvestia reporters found Gennady Osipovich in a small town in southern Russia, a retired air-force officer cultivating his strawberries and tormented by the thought that he was responsible for the killing of 269 innocent people.

Others with direct knowledge of the shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 turned up in equally unlikely places. Some ran into Andrei Illesh, Izvestia's national news editor, on hiking expeditions. Others called from Moscow pay phones, frightened that they might be overheard but eager to recount their part in an incident that sparked one of the most serious superpower confrontations of the Cold War era.

It has taken almost eight years - and a furious row within Izvestia, the semi-official organ of the Soviet legislature - for the story to be told. Soviet generals who sanctioned the downing of the Korean Boeing 747 are sputtering with indignation. But thanks to a remarkable piece of investigative journalism made possible by the relaxation of official controls over the Soviet news media, the long-standing Kremlin version of the incident now lies in tatters.

"There have been many books written about KAL 007 in the West, but the only living eyewitnesses to this tragedy are in the Soviet Union," said Illesh, who began investigating the KAL affair while on vacation trips to the Soviet Far East. "The world is interested in what happened. But for me, what is most important is that ordinary Soviet citizens are opening their lips after so many years of silence. By talking, we become normal people."

When KAL 007 disappeared over the Soviet island of Sakhalin before dawn on Sept. 1, 1983, after straying 300 miles from its international flight path, the Kremlin's initial reaction was to feign ignorance. After an international outcry, Moscow conceded that the "intruder" had been shot down by a Soviet Su-15 interceptor jet after ignoring numerous attempts to force it to land. The Soviet Defense Ministry still insists that the Korean plane, en route to Seoul from Anchorage, was on a spy mission for the United States.

The Izvestia investigation established that, despite Kremlin claims to the contrary, no attempt was made to communicate with KAL 007 on an emergency frequency. Osipovich, the pilot of the Soviet interceptor, now denies official assertions that he fired tracer rounds to warn the jumbo jet, which was allegedly flying without its navigation lights. Several Soviet analysts interviewed by Izvestia have said KAL 007 probably was shot down over international waters.

Penetrating the wall of official secrecy surrounding the KAL affair, Illesh discovered that the Soviets managed to locate the wreckage of the plane 570 feet deep in the Sea of Japan. The "black box" flight recorders, which could reveal why the plane strayed from its course, were recovered and sent to Moscow for examination. The Kremlin's failure to make propaganda use of the black boxes, or even acknowledge that they are in Soviet hands, suggests that no evidence was found to prove the espionage allegations.

It is still not known how the Boeing 747 came to be so far off course after making a refueling stop in Anchorage. The generally accepted view of Western aviation specialists is that the plane's computerized navigation system either malfunctioned despite double redundancy safeguards or was misprogrammed by the crew. Either explanation also assumes a major breakdown in pilot attentiveness, the specialists say.

In the summer of 1983, relations between Moscow and Washington had sunk to their lowest point in many years. President Reagan had denounced the rival superpower as the "evil empire." Embroiled in a losing war in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was behaving like a wounded bear, ready to strike at any moment to defend its lair.

When Soviet radar detected an unidentified foreign plane above the Kamchatka Peninsula in the early-morning hours of Sept. 1, air defenses throughout the region went on alert. MiG-25 jets were sent up to catch the intruder but were obliged to abandon the chase because of lack of fuel. To prevent defections, Soviet pilots were never given enough fuel to reach a foreign airfield.

At the Sokol base on Sakhalin, meanwhile, Osipovich was the most experienced pilot present. At 4:30 a.m. local time, he was instructed to go to Readiness 1 and climbed into the cockpit of his Su-15 interceptor.

At 6 a.m., the order came to take off; an aircraft was "violating flight regime." After roughly 10 minutes' flight, he caught sight of the intruder through a thin layer of clouds. It looked like a flying dot, two or three centimeters across. The plane's flashing navigation lights were clearly visible against the pre-dawn sky.

The entire drama above Sakhalin was to last less than 18 minutes, the time it takes for a plane flying 600 miles an hour to cross this starkly beautiful Pacific island from east to west. During that time, Osipovich had to catch up with the intruder and maneuver himself into a position so he could open fire. His ground controller, Lt. Vladimir Borisov, was constantly yelling instructions in his ear, countermanding an initial order to destroy the intruder with directions to force it to land.

"Give him some warning bursts," shouted Borisov. But the Su-15 was not equipped with incendiary rounds, which would be more visible. So Osipovich fired 243 rounds of armor-piercing bullets past the airliner. According to Osipovich, the Korean plane responded by dropping its speed. Osipovich banked sharply, turning back toward the intruder from above. The two planes were leaving Soviet airspace, west of the settlement of Nevelsk, when the final order was relayed by Borisov: "Destroy the target."

Osipovich responded by dropping his nose sharply and locking onto the jumbo jet from above. From a distance of three miles, he fired two heat-seeking infrared missiles slung under the wings of his jet. By now, he could see the intruder more clearly. It was like no plane he had ever seen before; Soviet fighter pilots do not study the shapes of foreign civilian aircraft.

"The first missile hit near the tail," Osipovich told Izvestia. "There was a burst of yellow flame. The second took off half the left wing. The lights and flashers went out immediately."

A Soviet military report cited by Izvestia last week spoke of the plane crashing into the water at a 70- to 80-degree angle and exploding on impact. If that was the case, the shootdown must have occurred in international airspace between Sakhalin and the Soviet island of Moneron.

According to Izvestia, the plane's wreckage was discovered 11 miles east of Moneron, on the edge of Soviet territorial waters. Independent Soviet experts believe the plane took between 35 seconds and 2 minutes to fall some 30,000 feet.

When Osipovich returned to the Sokol base, he was greeted like a hero. It seemed as if the entire regiment wanted to shake his hand and congratulate him on destroying the intruder.

Amid the general euphoria, Osipovich was untroubled by the thought that the "target" may have been a passenger plane. "I had no idea that it was a passenger aircraft flying ahead of me," he told Izvestia. "I saw in front of me an intruder over the border, and it had to be destroyed."

Then, quite unexpectedly, everything changed. A government commission arrived from Moscow. A team of carefully selected Soviet journalists flew to Sokol to interview Osipovich - and bring his story into line with the official version. The Kremlin was determined to respond to U.S. accusations that it had deliberately shot down a passenger airliner.

When Soviet television interviewed Osipovich several days later, he was handed a carefully prepared script. To make the performance seem a little less wooden, he was given a bottle of vodka to drink. "I started to speak - about the lesson for the world, about the atom bomb. I could not speak so well now," the pilot recalled.

Osipovich complained that he was kept a virtual prisoner and was "not even allowed to go to the bathroom alone."

For the record, the Soviet Defense Ministry is still sticking to the version of events provided by the armed forces chief of staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, at an unprecedented Moscow news conference a week after the incident: It was all a provocation; Washington sent KAL 007 over Kamchatka and Sakhalin to activate Soviet radar systems and observe the enemy's air defenses; the black boxes were never found.

Precisely who gave the order to shoot down KAL 007 is still unclear. An officer in the Soviet military counterintelligence agency GRU was quoted by Izvestia last week as saying he thought the decision to shoot was made within the Far Eastern military command. He conceded that information about the incident would have been transmitted to Moscow immediately.

Establishing the truth is complicated by the fact that many of the military leaders directly involved still hold important positions. Ogarkov is head of the Soviet veterans' organization. His deputy, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, is President Mikhail Gorbachev's military adviser. The former head of the Far Eastern military district, Gen. Ivan Tretyak, is now chief of Soviet air defenses. Tretyak has dismissed the Izvestia reports on KAL 007 as "70 percent invention."

Osipovich, who was sent into early retirement after a training accident, still clings desperately to the hope that there was no one on the plane. "He does not want these 269 bodies on his conscience," said Illesh, the Izvestia editor. "He desperately wants to believe that the plane was empty."

The Izvestia investigation, which has now gone into a lengthy second series, has largely demolished the official Kremlin version of events. But it has not entirely borne out the official U.S.version. In particular, the newspaper has not found any evidence to support early claims by the Reagan administration that Soviet pilots deliberately shot down a civilian aircraft. The failure of U.S. military controllers to warn KAL 007 of the impending danger also is mysterious.

"I am far from thinking that the blame for this tragedy lies entirely on us," said Illesh, who wants a public Kremlin investigation into the flight. "The passengers on board KAL 007 had become the hostages of two great powers colliding with each other. They were condemned to die."