In 1983, the Soviets Shot Down a Passenger Plane and Killed a US Congressman

Senator Jesse Helms stood in the Anchorage airport on August 31, 1983, playing games with two little girls. They were 3 and 5 years old. Their family was waiting for Korean Air Lines Flight 007 to refuel before continuing to Seoul.

Helms had considered switching to their flight since it departed earlier than his did. Senator Steve Symms talked him out of it at the last minute. The North Carolina Republican stayed on KAL 015.

The two girls boarded KAL 007 with their parents. So did 265 other passengers and crew. Among them sat Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald.

The 48-year-old Democrat was arguably the most anti-communist voice in Congress. He had introduced legislation to ban all trade with the Soviet Union. He founded the Western Goals Foundation to combat what he saw as communist infiltration of American institutions. Just months earlier, he had been appointed chairman of the John Birch Society. No member of Congress targeted Moscow more relentlessly.

Now he was flying toward Soviet airspace. None of them would survive the flight.

The Flight

Larry McDonald had missed his original flight by two or three minutes. Bad weather diverted his connection through Baltimore. When he finally reached JFK, his plane to Seoul had just departed. He chose to wait and take KAL 007 rather than pay higher fares on Pan Am. His new flight had a stopover in Anchorage, Alaska.

Representative Carroll Hubbard of Kentucky was also supposed to join the congressional delegation. At the last minute, he cancelled his reservations and accepted a speaking engagement back home instead.

The Boeing 747 lifted off from Anchorage at 4 a.m. local time. Captain Chun Byung-in commanded the aircraft. He had logged more than 10,600 flight hours. His crew included First Officer Son Dong-hui and Flight Engineer Kim Eui-dong. All three were experienced aviators finishing a grueling five-day international rotation.

Their assigned path followed Route R20, nicknamed "Red Route 20" by American pilots. The corridor skirted dangerously close to Soviet airspace near the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island. Navigating it required precise use of the plane's inertial navigation system.

Something went wrong almost immediately after departure. Investigators later concluded the crew likely set the autopilot to "heading" mode instead of engaging the inertial navigation system. The plane held a constant magnetic heading rather than following its programmed waypoints. The aircraft began drifting north. By the time it reached its first waypoint, KAL 007 had strayed 60 nautical miles off course. At the second checkpoint, the deviation had grown to 100 miles. The crew never noticed.

Cold War tensions in September 1983 had reached their highest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative had Moscow on edge. A massive U.S. Navy exercise called FleetEx '83 had recently sent American aircraft buzzing over Soviet military installations in the Kuril Islands. Soviet commanders who failed to intercept those planes were severely disciplined.

The Kremlin was also running Operation RYaN, an intelligence effort to detect signs of an American nuclear first strike. Paranoia gripped the hierarchy of the Soviet military.

On that same night, American reconnaissance aircraft monitored a scheduled Soviet missile test near Kamchatka. Soviet radar operators tracked both the spy plane and an unidentified intruder heading toward restricted airspace. They assigned separate tracking numbers to each. But as KAL 007 continued its steady southwestern heading, Soviet commanders grew suspicious.

The Order to Destroy

General Valeri Kamenski commanded air defenses in the Far Eastern Military District. He had received an official reprimand months earlier for failing to intercept American aircraft during FleetEx. He would not make that mistake again.

Soviet fighters scrambled from several bases on Kamchatka. They failed to locate the intruder before it crossed back into international airspace over the Sea of Okhotsk. But the aircraft's straight-line course carried it directly toward Sakhalin Island. More fighters launched to intercept.

Major Gennadi Osipovich piloted an Su-15 interceptor from Dolinsk-Sokol Air Base. He trailed the massive aircraft before pulling alongside it.

"I was just next to him, on the same altitude, 150 meters to 200 meters away," Osipovich recalled in a 1996 interview. "I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing. I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing. It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use."

He reported the flashing navigation lights to ground controllers, but did not tell them he had identified the aircraft as a civilian Boeing. They did not ask either.

General Anatoly Kornukov, commander of Sokol Air Base, ordered the shootdown. The intruder was about to exit Soviet airspace for the second time. At 3:26 a.m. Tokyo time on September 1, Osipovich fired two air-to-air missiles.

"Target destroyed," he radioed.

The missiles did not immediately destroy KAL 007. Shrapnel severed critical hydraulic lines and control cables. The aircraft lurched upward in an uncontrolled climb, throwing passengers against their seats. Cabin pressure failed.

The pilots fought to control the crippled systems. The crew managed to radio Tokyo that the plane was experiencing "rapid decompression" and requested clearance to descend. For five minutes, the wounded jumbo jet remained level. Then it began a spiraling descent over Moneron Island before it plunged into the Sea of Japan. All 269 people aboard perished, including 22 children under age 12.

Among the dead were citizens from 16 nations. Sixty-three Americans. Twenty-eight Japanese. Twenty-three Taiwanese. And one sitting member of Congress.

The urologist turned politician who spent his career warning Americans about Soviet aggression became its victim. The Soviets had killed their loudest critic in Congress.

America Responds

Moscow initially denied any involvement. Soviet officials claimed only that an unidentified aircraft had been shot down over their territory. Five days passed before they admitted destroying a civilian airliner.

Even then, they lied about the details. Moscow insisted the plane flew with its lights off. Osipovich had reported seeing them on. Soviet officials claimed their fighters fired warning shots with tracer rounds. The Su-15 did not carry tracer ammunition. They said the crew attempted to contact the airliner by radio. No such attempt was made.

President Reagan addressed the nation on September 5. He called the attack "a crime against humanity" that "must never be forgotten."

"Our hearts go out to them," Reagan said of the victims' families, "to brave people like Kathryn McDonald, the wife of a Congressman whose composure and eloquence on the day of her husband's death moved us all."

Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill condemned the shootdown as "unbelievably barbaric." Idaho Representative George Hansen was more direct.

"It's murder, plain murder," Hansen declared.

UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick appeared before the Security Council on September 6. What followed became one of the most dramatic moments in Cold War diplomacy. She played audio recordings of Soviet pilots coordinating the attack, captured by Japanese intelligence stations. The hushed chamber heard Osipovich's voice in Russian, with translations scrolling on monitors. The tape captured his final transmission confirming the kill.

"Straying off course is not recognized as a capital crime by civilized nations," Kirkpatrick told the assembled diplomats.

The Soviet representative vetoed a resolution condemning the attack. Moscow continued insisting that KAL 007 had been conducting espionage for the United States. No evidence ever supported that claim.

The Search

The U.S. Navy launched one of its largest search operations since the hunt for a lost hydrogen bomb off Spain in 1966. Task Force 71, commanded initially by Rear Admiral William Cockell and later by Rear Admiral Walter Piotti, deployed American warships alongside Japanese and South Korean vessels to scour the waters near Moneron Island.

They searched in the wrong place.

The Soviets refused to allow foreign ships into their territorial waters, which extended 12 nautical miles from shore. Moscow claimed the wreckage lay in international waters and provided coordinates for the search area. American forces spent weeks combing 225 square miles of open ocean. They found nothing.

Soviet ships constantly harassed and followed any vessels conducting searches in the area.

Piotti later concluded in his after-action report that the task force had established "with a 95% or above confidence level, that the wreckage, or any significant portion of the aircraft, does not lie within the probability area outside the 12 nautical mile area claimed by the Soviets as their territorial limit."

The wreckage was in Soviet waters all along. Moscow knew it.

Soviet divers reached the crash site in October 1983 and recovered the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. They told no one. The black boxes remained hidden for nearly a decade until Boris Yeltsin's government finally turned them over in 1992.

On September 26, 1983, a joint American-Japanese delegation met Soviet officials at the port of Nevelsk on Sakhalin Island. KGB Major General A.I. Romanenko handed over what he claimed was everything the Soviets had recovered including 213 shoes, fragments of clothing, and scattered personal documents.

Eight days after the shootdown, body parts began washing ashore on Japanese beaches in Hokkaido. Japanese authorities recovered 13 fragments, including two partial torsos. One belonged to a Caucasian woman. One belonged to a child with glass embedded in the body. All 13 were unidentifiable.

Soviet divers who reached the wreckage two weeks after the attack reported finding almost nothing inside the aircraft. Diver Vadim Kondrabayev told Russian magazine Itogi in 2000 that his team "worked beneath the water almost a month for five hours a day and didn't find one suitcase, not even a handle from them."

The Russians claimed they never recovered any bodies. They still make that claim today. Families held memorial services and buried empty caskets.

A Lasting Legacy

Reagan declared September 11, 1983, a National Day of Mourning. Five days later, on September 16, White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes announced a decision that would reshape modern life. The U.S. military's Global Positioning System, then still under development, would be made freely available for civilian use once completed.

The navigation technology that might have prevented KAL 007's fatal deviation would eventually find its way into smartphones, automobiles, and aircraft worldwide. Every GPS-enabled device traces part of its lineage to that September night over Sakhalin.

Soviet leaders fired or demoted several military officials responsible for Far East air defense. Osipovich received a bonus of 200 rubles. He later complained that the amount was smaller than expected.

Kathryn McDonald ran for her husband's congressional seat in the special election that October. She won the primary but lost the runoff to George Darden.

Jesse Helms arrived safely in Seoul aboard KAL 015. He spent the rest of his Senate career pursuing answers about what happened to his colleague. In 1991, he wrote directly to Boris Yeltsin requesting information about any surviving passengers. Yeltsin responded the following year, releasing the hidden black boxes and stating there had been no survivors.

The recordings confirmed what investigators suspected. The autopilot had never been properly engaged with the navigation system.

Human error, institutional paranoia and Cold War hostilities killed 269 innocent people over the Sea of Japan in 1983.