The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Murray Sayle’s cover article in the April 25 issue of The New York Review is ostensibly a critique of two new books about KAL 007; Black Box: KAL 007 and the Superpowers by Alexander Dallin and KAL Flight 007: The Hidden Story by Oliver Clubb. Sayle also purports to critique several other technical reports and documents about the tragic downing of the Korean airliner in August 1983. With the possible exception of Professor Dallin’s work, Sayle seriously addresses none of these. Instead, he devotes much of his attention to a work not even listed as a subject of review: my article entitled “KAL 007: What the US Knew and When We Knew It,” which appeared in The Nation in the August 18–25 issue last year. The reason for this curious asymmetry, according to Sayle, is that the arguments in my article “underpin all conspiracy theories and certainly, although no doubt independently, reflect the thinking of Soviet leading circles.”

By labeling the Nation article a “conspiracy theory” and linking it to the Soviet Union, Sayle seriously misrepresents it.¹ The article was actually a lengthy critical examination of the Reagan Administration’s official version of the downing of KAL 007—i.e., that the plane accidentally flew over two sensitive Soviet military installations; that the US government had no knowledge of the plane’s deviation from course and therefore had no opportunity to warn it; that the President and his top advisers knew nothing about the plane’s downing until at least seven hours after it occurred. My central thesis was that such an explanation, requiring that we accept a remarkable set of coincidences, was extremely difficult to believe given the facts already in the public record. Among these were the anomalies of KAL 007’s known flight path, the US’s considerable military and intelligence capabilities which had the ability to detect the plane on its deviant course, and the capabilities of the US command and control system, which should have kept top Administration officials informed of such a dangerous situation as it was developing. I put forth several alternative scenarios which could account for both the plane’s deviation and the US government’s failure to warn it. These included: 1) that the plane was on a planned intelligence mission; 2) that US military and intelligence service communications systems suffered a major breakdown, leaving the President and the Pentagon unaware of the plane’s deviation and downing; and 3) that US intelligence hardware did pick up the deviation, but a decision was made not to warn the plane so that Soviet defense systems could be monitored as they reacted to the intrusion. As is evident, scenarios two and three require no assumptions as to the intentionality of KAL 007’s deviation from course.

Lacking crucial data which have been kept secret by all the governments involved, I could not and did not purport to prove any of these theories. Rather, I concluded my article by asking a number of specific unresolved questions about the case, suggesting the US government release a wealth of data which could help answer those questions, and calling for a Congressional inquiry into the circumstances of the tragedy.

Sayle accuses me and others whom he calls “conspiracy theorists” of eliminating from the realm of possibility an accidental deviation from course by KAL 007 and attempts to discredit our work by suggesting that a plausible accident scenario exists. This scenario says, basically, that the pilots of KAL 007 mis-set their automatic pilot switch and never noticed the error during their five-and-a-half-hour flight. The result was that the plane, rather than being flown by its Inertial Navigation System which was programmed to take it on its assigned route, flew instead on a fixed magnetic compass heading of 246 degrees to the spot where it was shot down. This theory is hardly new, first appearing in the Far Eastern Economic Review in October 1983. The following December, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) also examined this particular “accidental” scenario, along with several others, and noted serious flaws with each. In February 1984, the ICAO’s own expert Air Navigation Commission refused to endorse a scenario, “because any of them contained some points which could not be explained satisfactorily.” In spite of these findings, Sayle picked up the theory sometime thereafter, publishing it in a two-part series in the London Sunday Times in May of last year. With the addition of a generous number of ad hominems and the attempt to debunk “conspiracy theories,” this is the same argument he put forth almost a year later in The New York Review.

While Sayle has made numerous factual errors in his article, I here confine myself to a discussion of his central thesis: the 246 degree magnetic heading scenario that he supports seemingly without reservation. The irony here is that Sayle is guilty of precisely that of which he accuses others: He simply refuses to entertain any alternative to his own conclusion that KAL 007’s deviation was accidental. Instead of addressing evidence that directly contradicts his theory, he sets up a series of straw men which he then proceeds to strike down, inviting his audience to believe he has shattered his opposition in the process. For example, we know that KAL 007 passed some twelve nautical miles (NM) to the north of Bethel, its first required reporting waypoint, yet reported itself to be on course. Sayle says that this means the aircraft “could not have been coupled to either its own INS [Inertial Navigation System] or the Bethel VOR [a very precise land-based navigational aid], neither of which could have permitted errors of such size so early in the flight.” He goes on to say, “There is only one other possibility: KE007 was being flown by magnetic compass, or, in pilots’ jargon, in ‘heading mode.’ “²

If you managed to get through the jargon and technical sleight of hand, you still might fail to recognize that you were being called upon to take an extraordinary leap of faith. Sayle suggests that because the airliner was off course, the pilots must have been negligent and oblivious to an extraordinary number of warnings from their navigational aids and instruments. Sayle has entirely ignored the possibility of intended “error.” His explanation is a bit like saying, “Because the car was speeding, the speedometer could not have been working.” It is arguing from conclusions to premises rather than the other way around.

The scientific method of analysis, which Sayle purports to employ, requires not only the consideration of alternative models, but the willingness to ask hard questions about a preferred scenario. Such hypothesis testing, which Sayle avoids, is precisely what Alexander Dallin does. Proceeding methodically through the various possible explanations for the deviation from course of Flight 007 in his book Black Box, he concludes that intentionality is the most likely one. “In fact,” writes Dallin, “it must be acknowledged that with the passage of time this argument, unlike all others, looms stronger than before.” While otherwise attentive to many of Dallin’s points, Sayle somehow fails to mention Dallin’s conclusion on this central issue. Yet this is precisely what Oliver Clubb, whom Sayle calls a “one-hundred-proof conspiracy theorist” and scarcely mentions at all, concludes.

For the record, it should be noted that Professor Clubb, far from having my article in The Nation “underpin” his analysis as Sayle says it does, had taken his manuscript to the penultimate draft before he even saw my work. It was only at a quite late stage that he added a few quotes and references. In short, Clubb arrived at his conclusions independently, as did Dallin. When informed investigators from diverse backgrounds arrive at a similar conclusion, it is reasonable to inquire what evidence might be responsible for this agreement. Sayle does not pursue this line of inquiry at all. Deriding those who believe that intentionality can play a role in complex human affairs, Sayle cautions that to so suggest “gets us into the heady world of laundered funds, trench coats, and exploding cigars so familiar from movies, TV, James Bond, and Watergate.” I am not certain about the other examples, but as to Watergate, I recall that it was intentional, was conspiratorial, and was proven to be so.

To avoid examining other scenarios, Sayle brings front and center the principle of Ockham’s razor, which he renders as saying, “When offered a number of different theories, start with the simplest.” It is reasonable advice. To find out whether Sayle’s own theory is up to Ockham’s set task and offers us the most parsimonious explanation, I consulted seven senior 747 pilots representing five major US airlines. Several of these pilots have extensive experience flying the North Pacific routes. Two are the Flight Training Officers for their respective airlines. Because of the controversial nature of the KAL 007 tragedy, all requested that their names not be used. All agree that the 246 degree magnetic heading theory fails that test of parsimony. In order to accept Sayle’s thesis, we have to make at least twelve different, independent assumptions. It must be assumed:

1. That the INS automatic pilot selector switch was improperly set to “heading mode,” an error which went unobserved by both an experienced pilot and co-pilot for almost five and a half hours. This is Sayle’s overarching assumption.

2. That the crew of Flight 007 forgot to use the Very high frequency Omni Range (VOR) navigational beacon at Bethel to verify their position, although to do so is very important for an airliner at the beginning of a long overwater flight. The VOR, as Sayle says, “broadcasts pencil-thin beams of radio waves that radiate like the spokes of a wheel and so are called radials. An aircraft that has ‘captured a radial,’ as the pilots put it, can fly along it with a maximum error of a mile at a distance of sixty miles from the transmitter.” The Bethel VOR beacon’s coverage extends 135 nautical miles (NM) east and 160 NM west of the waypoint, which means that KAL 007, given its speed, had access to the navigational aid for about three quarters of an hour. To use the VOR is a required Korean Air Lines procedure, and to do so on August 31, 1983, was especially important because the VOR beacon at Anchorage, KAL 007’s point of origin, was out of service that night. Bethel was thus the first opportunity for the pilots of KAL 007 to verify their position. Sayle’s scenario demands that the navigational aid and the requirement to use it were both forgotten.

3. That the crew could not have looked at the Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) readouts on their instruments as the airliner passed Bethel. This information is automatically displayed in the cockpit in front of both the Captain and the First Officer. The DME gives the precise distance to a DME signal, at Bethel part of an ultra-high frequency system called TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation). The Bethel TACAN is co-located with the VOR, producing a combination with the ponderous acronym VORTAC. This navigational aid provides pilots with a very accurate cross-check on their inertial navigation system. Had the DME been used, as required by Korean Air Lines, the pilots would have known how far their aircraft was off course.

4. That neither Captain Chun Byung-in nor First Officer Son Don-hwin used one of their INS’s to check the “cross track distance/track angle error,” which tells pilots how much they are off course. Sayle admits it is prudent to monitor this display. To do so is especially important at waypoints. A senior 747 pilot with a major US airline noted that his company requires monitoring this display at waypoints. While not required for all airlines, according to several pilots the use of this display is customary and thus it would have been highly unusual for a crew to have flown for five and a half hours without checking the reading once.

5. That the pilots did not notice that the course adjustments normally made by the INS at waypoints did not occur. A plane being flown by the INS goes directly to a waypoint, whereupon there is usually a course correction as the system automatically steers to the next waypoint, which is seldom on precisely the same heading. Passing Bethel, the INS would normally change course as it steered the airliner directly toward the next checkpoint, NABIE, in what a senior pilot with a major US air cargo carrier who has frequently flown on the route in question, Romeo-20, described as a “dramatic turn.” Given Sayle’s theory, the airliner would have just continued on the same heading with no correction at all. The lack of this course change at Bethel (and at subsequent waypoints) would itself be a warning to the crew that something was amiss with their navigational equipment. Sayle requires that the pilots of KAL 007 be oblivious to the fact that these expected course corrections never took place.

6. That the crew of KAL 007 could not have known that the position coordinates continually displayed on their Inertial Navigation System were incompatible with the plane’s assigned route because there were no maps in the cockpit. Sayle correctly notes that INS number I, also known as the “Captain’s INS,” is always set to display the aircraft’s present position in longitude and latitude. But then he hands us a real whopper: “Had Captain Chun plotted any of these against a chart, he would have instantly seen he was off course. But he did not have the necessary maps to do so. Neither the Korean Air Lines rule book nor the NOPAC [North Pacific] manual required him to plot his position on a chart.” Two points: First, Sayle is simply wrong about the maps. The Air Navigation Commission, the expert investigative panel of the International Civil Aviation Organization, noted that a “Jeppesen high-altitude en-route chart for the North Pacific was available [on board KAL 007] for use on the flight deck.”