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From: mjk@tty3b.UUCP (Mike Kelly)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: The Return of KAL 007
Message-ID: <383@tty3b.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-Jun-84 14:14:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: tty3b.383
Posted: Mon Jun 18 14:14:12 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Jun-84 07:16:22 EDT
Organization: Teletype Corp., Skokie, Ill
Lines: 65

LONDON [Reuters] June 17 - The South Korean passenger jet shot down over the
Soviet Union last year may have been used to trigger Soviet radar and electronic
defense signals so U.S. spy satellites could monitor them, according to an 
article in a British defense magazine.

The article, published by the jornal Defense Attache under the pseudonym P.Q.
Mann, said one of the two satellites involved was the U.S. space shuttle
Challenger.

It also speculated that in the resultant diplomatic confrontation Moscow may have
extracted a secret accord from Washington to demilitarize the shuttle.

Defense Attache, a twice-monthly journal widely read in the British defense
industry, said it did not necessarily agree with all the views in the article
but published it to inspire further investigation.  The editor said the author
had to remain anonymous for professional reasons but was someone well-known to
him.

The article linked the incident last September to separate incursions into Soviet
bloc airspace by two U.S. military planes in 1964, shortly after the first of the
U.S. Ferret electronic surveillance satellites went into orbit.

The incursions by the U.S. planes, both of which were shot down, coincided with
Ferret surveillance of the area, it said.

[In Washington, the White House denied the report.  "There's nothing to that
story," White House spokesman Peter Roussel said.]

All 269 people aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007 died in the crash.

Washington said all along that the Korean plane, a Boeing 747, was not engaged
in intelligence work.  But the article recalled that a U.S. military jet, an
RC-135, with a similar profile to that of the Korean plane flew within range
of Soviet radar shortly before the airliner entered Soviet airspace.  It
described this as a dummy-selling tactic to put Soviet defense systems on guard.

The writer said Moscow itself initially drew attention to apparent coordination
between the Korean plane's movemnt and repeated passes by a Ferret satellite.
It also noted that the shuttle was launched 36 hours before the incident 
"eastwards at the unusual local time of 0232, the first nighttime launch."

"It is possible that, in its orbital passes to the south of the Soviet Union,
it would have been advantageously placed to eavesdrop on emergency communications
streaming east to west across the USSR between the Far Eastern command and the
center of political control in Moscow," it said.

The most commonly advanced explanation of why the Korean jet crossed into Soviet
airspace is navigational failure, though the manufacturers of the navigational
equipment have been unwilling to believe that all three systems failed at once.

The article speculated that Moscow may have extracted a pledge from Washington
to demilitarize the shuttle as the price for not publicly damaging U.S.
credibility on the issue.

It said Moscow may have let Washington know that it knew that space
intelligence-gathering was the real reason why the Korean airliner entered Soviet
airspace and threatened to pursue the evidence publicly.

It pointed to "an astonishing pall of U.S. and Soviet government silence which
rapidly fell over the event."

--------------------------------------
The above wire service report appeared in the June 18 Chicago Tribune.

Mike Kelly