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STATE DEPARTMENT
COVER-UP OF KAL FLIGHT 007

WHO KILLED CONGRESSMAN LAWRENCE McDONALD?
By: Todd Fahey

It is a story that no one wants to talk about anymore--not ideological
colleagues Congressman Bob Stump (R-AZ) and former Senator Steve Symms
(R-ID), nor from any quarter of the State Department: the assassination on
September 1, 1983, of a United States Congressman aboard a passenger airliner
at the hands of Soviet fighter jets. A southern Democrat lawmaker, who was
also jointly Chairman of the John Birch Society and President of Western
Goals Foundation, both famously anti-Globalist/anti-communist organizations,
and who had announced to his advisors in the weeks prior to his death that he
would be seeking the Presidency of the United States--as a conservative
Democrat--in 1988. A cousin of WWII hero General George S. Patton, and who
had inherited Patton's mountain of anti-Soviet Intelligence records; who had
organized a private Intelligence network which threatened to rival that of
the CIA--at once commanding, polished on-the-stump and movie-star
handsome...: The kind of man who could seriously derail the Presidential
aspirations of George Herbert Walker Bush, the elder.


Such is the story of the late-Congressman Lawrence Patton "Larry"
McDonald--former U.S. Naval Reserves flight-surgeon-turned-lawmaker-turned
Presidential hopeful. In death, even, for the Establishment's purposes, the
most dangerous man in America.


Like so many stories approved by "our government," the "official version"
does not jibe with the facts.


George P. Schultz, then-U.S. Secretary of State, ended the probe of the
downed Korean Airlines flight 007 in December 1983, barely three months after
the event, explaining that the Boeing 747 aboard which was Larry McDonald
flew off its scheduled course, strayed into then-Soviet airspace, and that
Soviet pilot Major Gennadiy Nikolayevich Osipovich, at the helm of a Soviet
Su-15 fighter jet and upon the orders of Col. Gen. Ivan M. Tretyak, commander
of the Far Eastern Military District, obliterated the craft in mid-air with
two air-to-air missiles and that its passengers and crew were destroyed along
with it (ICAO Report, December 1983, Appendix D, page D-3) (Istvestia
articles, 1991).


Dan Rather, at CBS, and other Talking Heads, nodded with relief at this
explanation, and then-President Ronald Reagan contented himself with the
Senate's non-binding "condemnation" of the U.S.S.R., which was Senate Joint
Resolution H.J. Res. 353, in proceedings chaired by then-Senator John Tower
(R-TX) (who would, himself, perish in an airline crash in 1991).


But that is not what happened

In fact, the evidence of a successful landing of KAL 007 on Sakhalin Island
or an at-sea ditching, with surviving passengers, Congressman McDonald among
them, is so massive--from signed FAA logs, to official statements from
Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau, to testimony from Korean lawmakers and Korean
CIA (KCIA)--that the only rightful conclusion is one of cover-up. �


Evidence of a Landing at Sakhalin Island

Signed logs of Duty Officer Orville Brockman at Federal Aviation Agency (FAA)
headquarters in Washington, DC., of FAA representative Mr. Dennis Wilhelm,
Tokyo, and reports from a "Mr. Takano" at the Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau
headquarters, Air Traffic Division, all show that KAL 007 was not destroyed,
and was, in fact, guided down to Sakhalin Island--a disputed territory held
jointly by the former U.S.S.R. and Japan.


Of the many sightings or confirmations of the Sakhalin Island landing, the
most salient and verifiable are these:


--C. K. Suh, Manager of the American Regional Office of Korean Air Lines in
Los Angeles, contacted by telephone Congressman McDonald's press aide Tommy
Toles, stated that he had "just called Korean Air Lines in Seoul" and that
"the information I [Suh] got from them is that [the] U.S. Embassy in Korea
informed the Korean Government, Minister of Foreign Affairs...that the plane
has landed in Sakhalin."


--From FAA directly, Mr. Toles received a phone call from one of its
officers, who stated:

"This is Duty Officer Orville Brockman at FAA headquarters in Washington, DC.
We have just received information from our FAA representative, Mr. Dennis
Wilhelm in Tokyo, as follows: He has been advised by the Japanese Civil
Aviation Bureau headquarters, Air Traffic Division, Mr. Takano -- T-a-k-a-n-o
-- who is his counterpart in Japanese aviation, as follows: Japanese
self-defense force confirms that the Hokkaido radar followed Air Korea to a
landing in Soviet territory on the island of Sakhalinska --
S-a-k-h-a-l-i-n-s-k-a -- and it is confirmed by the manifest that Congressman
McDonald is on board."


--A month after the incident, South Korean lawmaker Son Se-il, of the
opposition Democratic Party, reported having received a classified CIA report
which indicated that at least some KAL 007 passengers and crew may have
survived. The 57-year-old lawmaker told reporters that he had received the
document, marked "Top Secret/codeword," but would not disclose his source.
(Yonhap News Agency)


Reuters news service verifies that it obtained a copy of the 17-page report,
some of which was published on October 26, 1983. The Reuters report states
that this document indicates the Boeing 747: "...probably successfully
ditched, there probably were survivors, the Soviets lied massively and
diplomatic efforts need to be made to return the survivors."


--Columnist Jack Anderson (Deseret News, 04/03/84) confirms that a news
associate, Dale Van Atta, visited Tokyo in early 1984, and confirmed "from
Japanese Intelligence sources and documents stamped 'secret' in red Japanese
characters" key aspects of the KAL 007 incident, amongst which:

At 3:38 AM on September 1, 1983, "The Japanese radar station at Wakkanai,
Hokkaido, which had been tracking the unidentified aircraft's progress, saw
the blip disappear from the screen less than 50 miles away. The trackers
thought it was probably a Soviet plane that had gone down." (Anderson column,
Deseret News, 04/03/84)


Robert W. Lee, writing for the John Birch Society's The New American
magazine, finds, of Van Atta's discovery:
"Since Wakkanai is itself only about 40 miles from Sakhalin's southern tip,
KAL 007 would have had to have been very close to the island if it was `less
than 50 miles away' from Wakkanai when it disappeared from radar. Since it
had been airborne for 12 minutes at that point, there is no way that it could
have been tracked that close to the island unless it had changed direction.
And if it changed direction, it was under the control of the crew. (That
trackers thought it was a Soviet plane also implies that it was heading
toward the Soviet military stronghold, as a Soviet plane would be expected to
do. Had it been moving away from the island, there would have been less
reason to conclude that it was a Soviet aircraft.)" (Lee, "What Happened to
Flight 007?", The New American, 08/29/88)


Most shockingly, and disputedly, shortly before his death, Israeli
Intelligence official Avraham Shifrin, an expert in the Soviet-era gulag
prisons system, in a series of American television interviews reported in
1993 the existence of Soviet eye-witnesses to a captive Congressman Larry
McDonald, being held at Lubyanka prison, a special KGB stronghold, and that
the other survivors were jailed in encampments at Wrangel Island or along the
Trans-Siberian border. Shifrin claimed that the Border Guard boats of Soviet
(KGB) Gen. Semyon Romanov had been dispatched to an area between the Moneron
and Sakhalin Islands, and had stripped the largely intact KAL 007 of luggage
and a very-much-alive crew and human cargo.


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)


South Korean ambassador to Moscow, Hong Sun-yong, flew to the Kremlin upon
orders of an embarrased President Noh Tae-Woo to demand explanation.
According to a December 3, 1991, New York Times report of this meeting, it
was acknowledged by Russian officials "that it knew that the FDR tapes had
been removed." The Times states that Ambassador Hong "was told by Yuri
Petrov, a senior Yeltsin aide, that the original tapes had been withheld
because Russia planned to provide them to an international investigative
body."


On December 8, 1991, the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization
(ICAO) met in Russia for a two-day crisis meeting to discuss the sensitive
nature of KAL 007. Again, Russian President Yeltsin failed to turn over the
original CVR and FDR, forcing acting-U.S. Ambassador to Russia James Collins
to issue a public acknowledgement, admitting that Washington D.C. has yet to
obtain materials crucial to an investigation of KAL 007. To-date, the South
Korean government has never received the original CVR or FDR recordings, nor
has it officially pressed Russia for the return of its property.


And yet the investigation into the violent death of a United States
Congressman is, in the words of the State Department, "closed."


Who was Larry McDonald--this "unstoppable man on a mission," in the words of
officials at John Birch Society's Appleton, WI, headquarters? It is a
question th

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