BEARING in mind what is now known authoritatively about the KAL 007 tragedy, it is worth remembering those in the Untied States and Britain who wrote books and articles, lectured, and gave interviews on behalf of the most implausible, improbable, and patently impossible misinterpretations of the disaster, and otherwise fed off the baseless theory that KAL 007 was a spy flight: David Pearson of Yale led the charge with a series of articles in the Nation and a major book, in which he both misunderstood and misused the technical data. One example is the chart he prepared purporting to show that the airliner made violent evasive manoeuvres to dodge the pursuing Soviet jet. On the basis of rough estimates from Japanese radar sites, Pearson plotted the altitudes as if they were exact, ignoring the inherent 10 to 20 per cent inaccuracy of such data. One altitude was lower than a previous one, so he drew an airliner ''diving'' at an angle of 45? along a drawn-in flight path, giving a striking image of a frantic attempt at escape.
But Pearson was careful to use ''feet'' on the vertical scale and ''minutes'' on the horizontal scale, allowing him to compress the horizontal scale by a factor of several hundred, which made the ''descent'' unrealistically steep. Had he used the same scales his ''descent'' would have been at less than a single degree. Had he understood the inherent limitations of height-finding radar at extreme range, he wouldn't have had an ''evasive dive'' at all. And as the recovered ''black box'' data show, there wasno such dive.
R. W. Johnson, a politics don at Magdalen College, Oxford, began writing anti-American analyses within weeks of the shootdown. His 1985 book on KAL 007 contains between 500 and 1,000 significant factual errors, not including barmy misinterpretations. Despite confident claims to the contrary, he failed to master the aviation jargon necessary to understand the problems of the flight. Johnson invented the phantom ''paying cargo left behind at Anchorage'', an allegation that supposedly showed ''prior intent''by the pilot to engage in air spying, by misreading an entry on the weight manifest. The pilot had written in ''1,200 D/H'', then scratched it out and entered it several lines further down. As any commercial pilot could have told Johnson, this was a reference to the six KAL employees who were ''dead-heading'' home in extra seats on the airliner. It never was ''paying cargo'' and it never was ''left behind''.
Oliver Clubb of Syracuse University published his own book in 1985. For him, the incident was further proof that President Reagan was preparing a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. But Clubb kept being tripped up by simple technical errors and sloppy reasoning. Relying on an unchecked newspaper clipping, Clubb wrote that the airliner appeared to have turned off its civilian transponder system while crossing Sakhalin Island (it hadn't). Clubb wrote that all aircraft in the world, military and civilian, use a compatible, standardised transponder identification system (they don't). He even confused the two Soviet areas the airliner crossed, the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island, in arguing that the pilot had deliberately turned off the airliner's beacon prior to its first entry into Soviet air space.
Carl Jensen of Sonoma State College in California sponsors an annual ''Project Censored'' review in which a panel of academics (including Noam Chomsky and Jessica Mitford) pick the best stories ''censored'' by right-wing media pressure. In 1984 one of his prize-winning stories concerned Ernest Volkman, described as the editor of Defense Science magazine, who revealed that Korean Airlines planes regularly fly over Soviet territory on missions for the CIA. But Volkman's quotation itself first appeared in an unverified newspaper clip, and a quick check would have shown that Volkman was not ever the editor of Defense Science but simply a staffer at Penthouse. When asked directly, he's happy to admit that he was merely repeating a rumour he had heard.
Conn Hallinan of the University of California at Santa Cruz's journalism department has long insisted that US ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and her UN staff ''doctored and distorted key sections'' of the tape of the Soviet pilot that she dramatically presented before the world body a week after the shootdown. Hallinan and others have promoted interpretations that have the pilot patiently exhausting every reasonable method of contacting the intruder and, only at the end, reluctantly firing in the face of the intruder's deliberate refusal to comply. The ''black box'' voice tape and Moscow's transcripts of Soviet military communications fully confirm Kirkpatrick's presentations.
Sugwon Kang of Hartwick College in upstate New York wrote a long spy-flight article for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars that helped convince New York Times columnist Tom Wicker in September 1985 to attack the Reagan administration for not warning the Korean airliner ahead of time. Kang, as quoted by Wicker, had catalogued all the US military surveillance assets in the area that could have tracked the lost airliner: ''At least one P-3 Orion Navy reconnaissance plane, several RC-135s, the frigate USS Badger, the reconnaissance ship USS Observation Island with its radar ''Cobra Judy'', and, of course, the land-based facilities on Shemya Island (''Cobra Dane'' and ''Cobra Talon''), Hokkaido (the phased-array radar at Wakkanai).'' Not a single one of these items is relevant or even real.