Shootdown: 2flight

When Korean Airlines flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet fighter in 1983, many questions and contradictions emerged that still haven't been answered. Johnson's absorbing study explores the complex affair from various angles and provides a broad context, including an assessment of the strategic balance in Northeast Asia, the use of civilian airlines for espionage and the way international crises are handled by the Reagan administration. Presented here are the four major theories of what happened and why: that Flight 007 strayed off course by accident; that the pilot tried to take a shortcut to save fuel; that the Soviets lured the plane off course through electronic interference with navigational equipment; and that 007 was, as the Soviets have claimed, on a surveillance mission. In the book's piece de resistance, Johnson reruns the sequence of events surrounding the flight as if hypothesis four were true, and most readers will likely agree that it is the only one that makes sense. Johnson is a Fellow in Politics at Oxford. Photos. 50,000 first printing. (June 2)