FOR almost 10 years, two battered and corroded aviation data recording devices were hidden away deep in Soviet military archives. These were the ''black boxes'' from Korean Airlines Flight 007, destroyed by a Soviet jet on September 1, 1983, with the lossof 269 lives. In fact, the boxes were coloured bright yellow, to make them easier to find in the event of catastrophe. Their proper titles are the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), which recorded the last 30 minutes of crew voice communications, and the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR), which recorded dozens of operating parameters of the aeroplane's navigation and control systems over the entire flight.
Within a few weeks of the shootdown, Soviet naval forces had secretly recovered the boxes and other debris from the ocean bottom in international waters off the west coast of Sakhalin Island. And while Moscow military officials stridently insisted the airliner's course deviation was a ''CIA plot'' and the Soviet military attack was justified by the airliner pilots' not responding to signals, in private they read their own experts' reports on the purloined data recorders - and shuddered. So damning were these conversations and instrument readings that Soviet officials vowed to keep the evidence secret forever.
And much of the media played into Soviet hands. As one London documentary producer put it, to be ''sexy enough'' to be noticed, any findings on the KAL 007 tragedy had at least to imply CIA complicity. Falsehoods, invented by KGB disinformation specialists and retailed, by useful idiots in the West, cloak the origins of this particular flight. One agent kept trying to interest US newsmen in a claim that this exact airliner had been seen at Andrews Airforce Base near Washington getting spy gear installed.Another version alleges that Richard Nixon had been booked on the flight (or even had boarded the flight) but had been ''warned off''. Two more Soviet export fictions had the Korean pilot boasting to friends about his specially equipped spy plane, or privately sharing anxieties with his wife about ''a particularly dangerous'' mission.
A succession of Soviet leaders profited from the falsehoods, including Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the height of glasnost, solemnly assured Western investigators that such records simply did not exist. ''We have hidden them away where even our children won't be able to find them,'' boasted one military memoir a few years after the disaster.
That memo fell into the hands of Yeltsin officials in early 1992, and it led them to the discovery of the original boxes and the top secret Soviet Defence Ministry reports about them. Yeltsin released those reports in October 1992, and in January 1993 he turned the black boxes over to the United Nations special group for the safety of commercial flying, the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). The ICAO's final report of its investigation of this long-hidden data was released on June 14.
Then, oddly, after almost a decade of Soviet cover-up, the full truth about the tragedy got ''spiked'' in the Western press. Not a single major network even mentioned the new ICAO report. A brief and highly distorted piece appeared in the New York Timesunder the byline of a semi-retired aviation writer with a long penchant for ''spy plane theories''. Here, then, for the first time, is the real story of KAL 007, as revealed by the final ICAO report, by the investigations of Russian journalists at the now-more-or-less-honest Izvestiya daily newspaper, and from recent US officials' recollections.