And most damning of all, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports that agents at Central Intelligence Agency at 10:00pm, September 1, 1983, phoned its office with the announcement that "the plane had landed at Sakhalin. The crew and passengers are safe." (Michel Brun, Incident at Sakhalin: The True Mission of KAL 007, p. 5, ISBN: 1-56858-054-1; independent confirmation, confidential sources, Seoul Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Evidence of a Successful at-Sea Ditching

Those who discount a guided landing at Sakhalin Island, but who believe KAL 007 successfully ditched at-sea, with survivors, point to the following evidence:

Radar tracking of the Boeing craft demonstrate a 12-minute descent (ICAO report), which independent avionics experts have gone on-record as stating would have been impossible were the craft "destroyed" in-flight, as was stated by its pursuer, Soviet pilot Maj. Osipovich ("the target is destroyed" [Osipovich, from the ICAO report]. Studies of radar tracking and black box data reconnaisance of other crafts of similar weight and with decompression at similar altitudes, demonstrate that KAL 007 would have reached the ocean's surface in a mere 2 1/2 minutes-to-3 minutes.

To wit, just one comparison as reported by Associated Press: "A China Airlines jumbo jet fell 32,000 feet in less than two minutes Tuesday [February 19th] after all four of its engines failed . . ." (Deseret News/AP, 02/20/85)

Additionally, no bodies have ever been conclusively recovered from the supposed crash site; and although there have been unconfirmed reports by Japanese fishermen as finding bodies washed ashore in remote island locations of Japan, none have ever been identified by the former Soviet Union, the United States or any international organization as being from KAL 007. And in the first eight days following the supposed air-to-air obliteration of a 747, a craft dubbed by pilots and radar-trackers "heavy," for its sheer mass, no bodies and no debris were found at the supposed crash site. In all, according to the official ICAO report, only between 500-839 small pieces of debris were ever recovered.

Insight magazine offers a telling comparison to other crash site investigations:

"In 1985, an Air India Boeing 747, carrying 329 passengers, exploded at 31,000 feet over the North Atlantic when a suspected terrorist bomb was detonated. In that tragedy 132 bodies were recovered--123 of them on the same day. All were identified. In 1987, when a South African Airlines 747 exploded at 14,000 feet from a cargo-bay fire, 15 of 159 persons were recovered along with several thousand pieces of debris, some as far away as 2,000 nautical miles." ("KAL 007 Mystery," Maier, 04/17/01)

The Government Reaction

Then-State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, confronted with such testimony, indicating a potential survival of passengers and crew of KAL 007, stated in an October 25, 1992, news conference:

"In our view, the claim is false. We had no information that would indicate that there are survivors of the KAL crash. There are other groups that have asserted as well that there were survivors, but they have never substantiated their allegations . . . During recent talks with President Yeltsin, in fact, our delegation asked about possible survivors of the crash. President Yeltsin replied that there had been no survivors, and we have no reason to doubt the Russian government's statement."
(emphasis mine)

But the State Department did have information and every reason to believe that there were survivors, amongst which may well have been Congressman Larry McDonald. Or maybe that is the point. As a sovereigntist and Constitutionalist, a mortal foe of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, of which so many in Washington are a part--then State Department Secretary George P. Schultz and President George Herbert Walker Bush both prime-movers in the rush to Globalism--it is as if it was decided, by the powers-that-be, that Larry McDonald and the 61 other Americans aboard Korean Airlines flight 007 might better to be put to rest.

Indeed, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Bent, in 1984, declared the investigation of KAL 007 to be "officially closed"--a decision which the State Department has never reversed--despite the fact that the craft's "black boxes" were not produced until 1991, and not to U.S. officials, but to then-President of South Korea Noh Tae-woo, and still then, which were proven to be utterly bogus.

The State Department, in a pattern of obstruction as to KAL 007, after less than a month following the incident, in September of 1983, ordered aborted an investigation of the crash site by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. (None of these agencies today will comment on the matter.)

Those "Black Boxes" . . .

Then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin, on November 19, 1991, gave over to Korea's President Noh Tae-woo the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) of KAL 007, and was awarded, according to an Agency France Presse dispatch, a commendatory "laurel" by the South Korean government for his making available long-held discovery of the painful international incident.

Two weeks later, upon meticulous review of the contents, Seoul Transportation Ministry officials reported that: one of the flight data recorder boxes was empty and that the other box contained copies of the tapes, and not the original; and that two of the CVR tapes had been recorded backwards, rendering the communications "unintelligible." (Yonhap News Agency, South Korea)