Kal 007: A Family's Painful Memories Linger -- `Citizen Inquiry' Here Adds To Mystery Of A Jetliner's Loss

Each new book, every small news story, even an offhand comment by an expert can cause Tom Hendrie and his family to relive the nightmare.

Yet Hendrie hopes for even more new twists in the maze of conspiracy theories surrounding the downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 nine years ago.

Hendrie's daughter, Mary Jane, and 268 other passengers and crew were killed when it was shot down by Soviets over the island of Sakhalin, north of Japan.

Canadian resident Hendrie says every new piece of information, however fantastic, is worth the pain it causes. Why? Because it improves the chance that "something will click," that investigators will discover whether the plane was on a spy mission or veered accidentally into foreign airspace, whether it was shot down by a panicked Soviet pilot or in calculated self-defense.

That's why Hendrie joined other victims' families and a host of experts at the University of Washington yesterday for a daylong "citizens' inquiry" into the incident.

Bodies of the flight's passengers and crew were never recovered. In fact, only one report claims the plane's fuselage was ever discovered: a story in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia.

Yesterday's event, organized by Seattle activists, was intended to pressure U.S. and international officials to further investigate the shooting.

Speakers yesterday included many international experts who had arrived to share theories. The audience was filled with people well-versed on the subject - specialty writers and former air-safety investigators, for example - and very few, if any, lay people who dropped in out of curiosity.

The case has generated a sort of subculture of people who research the case daily out of personal commitment.

Was KAL 007, en route from Anchorage to Seoul, "massacred" by Soviets after accidentally drifting off-course, as U.S. and Korean officials have claimed? Was it appropriately shot down because it was on a U.S.-controlled spy mission, as Soviet officials initially claimed? (Later they said that the whole affair was a series of accidents.) Or do any of a multitude of other theories apply?

For Hendrie's family, the latest traumatic news flash came last month, when a South Korean politician introduced the claim that some passengers survived the 1983 crash. The report traumatized Hendrie's surviving daughter because she had dreamed repeatedly that her sister had returned home, alive, asking why family members had never come looking for her.

A wild theory, Hendrie called the report of survivors. A horrific theory to contemplate. But one worth thinking about.

"They never found any bodies," he said. "You start thinking, `Maybe that could be.' "

Hendrie said he came to Seattle hoping to form an opinion about the case, but after the first six hours he had lost hope.

"There are so many different stories."

Indeed, if there was a common theme at yesterday's inquiry it was that no single theory should be thrown out.

To drop in on the discussion was akin to landing in the midst of an Oliver Stone movie or a Tom Clancy novel. There seemed to be a different KAL 007 theory for each of the roughly 60 participants.

At one point in the discussion, while theorists shouted challenges across the room at one another, one impatient observer interjected: "This is a quarrel between three police states."

The few family members who spoke were overshadowed by hours of technical testimony, but it was their personal accounts that gave meaning to the inquest.

"It's so important to know what happened to your relatives," said Nan Oldham of Washington, D.C., whose 27-year-old son, a Fulbright scholar, was on the jet.

"If the court case (by victims seeking compensation) isn't settled, if you don't have bodies to bury, if you can't get at the truth, then you can't put this to rest psychologically."

One of the most radical scenarios holds that there were as many as nine U.S. spy planes accompanying the airliner, and all were shot down.

John Keppel, a former State Department official who has researched the case, said comments by the Soviet who shot down the jet, among other evidence, upholds this theory. Keppel's research partner, French aviation consultant Michel Brun, walked the shores of the Sea of Japan and claims to have found debris from spy planes he says were downed at the same time as KAL 007.

The men also claim a tape from the plane's "black box," or cockpit recorder, recently turned over by the Soviet government, has been forged to indicate the pilots believed they were on the correct flight path.

If neutral observers can't accept the Keppel-Brun theory, many at least have heard enough intriguing evidence to doubt the simple "oops" theory purported by government officials.

For example, according to researchers who spoke yesterday:

-- The Korean pilot of 007 told his wife before leaving that this was a particularly dangerous flight and that he might not return. The family bought additional life insurance on the pilot before the flight.

-- Air-traffic controllers in Anchorage were recorded saying a jet was "bumping into" Soviet air space and should be warned. Yet no warning was sent.

-- No bodies were discovered floating in the sea where the jet was thought to have crashed. No rows of seats or other large debris from the Boeing 747 were discovered, leading some to wonder whether this was a jetliner at all.

-- Black-box tapes indicate no panic among the pilots or crew, despite allegations that they were calling air-traffic controllers to report a fire on one wing and the loss of air compression inside the plane. Some say this hints the pilots were not commercial pilots, but spies.

Of all the theories proposed, the one that seemed to gain widest acceptance among observers yesterday came from a Seattle-area lawyer representing some of the victims' families. The lawyer, Charles Herrmann, suggested the pilots shut off their navigation equipment because the plane was too heavy for the auto-pilot system to work. The pilots didn't want to dump any fuel, a costly though common measure taken to lighten planes.

Three men in the audience, who had been critiquing speakers all day, nodded in agreement. That theory, they said, seemed most reasonable.

But then they only added to the intrigue.

When asked who they were, they said they were former investigators for the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board. They were there not out of personal interest but for something "more than that."

Just what they wouldn't say.

----------- A CHRONOLOGY -----------

-- Sept. 1, 1983 - KAL 007 from Anchorage to Seoul strays into Soviet airspace north of Japan and is shot down by a Soviet fighter plane. All 269 aboard are killed.

-- The Soviets say the "black boxes" containing flight recorders that might have settled the dispute were not recovered.

-- The International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, is appointed to investigate. Its report, later criticized, says the pilots accidentally veered off course.

-- Dec. 22, 1983 - A federal judge, hearing a lawsuit by victims' relatives against KAL and the U.S. government, issues a gag order prohibiting all involved from speaking to reporters.

-- In 1983, families of 89 Korean victims of the crash accept $100,000 settlement offers from the airline.

-- July 1989 - A federal jury finds that the crew guilty of "willful misconduct" in straying and orders KAL to pay the families $50 million punitive damages.

-- In December 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the award, letting stand a $75,000-per-case limit on such awards.

-- In September 1992, Russians find two black boxes and three tapes from KAL007 hidden away in KGB archives. They say they were found 49 days after the crash.

-- On Nov. 19, 1992, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin apologizes to South Korea and hands over the flight recorders. A transcript of cockpit conversations gives no indication that the pilots were aware they had been fired on by a Soviet fighter jet.