Korean Air Lines Flight 007 conspiracy theory

Korean Air Lines Flight 007 conspiracy theory

 

The abduction theory says that one of the missiles missed KAL 007, and the plane landed or ditched safely. The passengers and crew were then taken by the Soviet government and put in prison camps.

Bert Schlossberg, an Israeli-American who is the son-in-law of one of the crash victims and runs the International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors, and Avraham Shifrin, a former Soviet prison camp inmate who moved to Israel in the 1970s after leaving the Soviet Union, are both in favor of it.

It has been covered by the conservative news agency Accuracy in Media and the magazine of the far-right John Birch Society, whose second president, Democratic Representative from Georgia Larry McDonald, was on the flight.

Schlossberg, a new Israeli citizen, met Shifrin in 1989. Through Shifrin, Schlossberg met and questioned one of Shifrin’s sources, which led him to doubt the widely held belief that everyone on KAL 007 had died. Schlossberg was sure that the passengers and crew of KAL 007 had been found and jailed by the Russians after he did his own research and looked at newly released documents.

Schlossberg backs up this theory in a self-published book and on the Committee’s website by saying that Soviet military communication and cockpit voice recorder transcripts show that the plane flew at an altitude of 5,000 meters for almost 5 minutes after the missile exploded until it was over the only land mass in the Tatar Straits and in Soviet territory, where it then began a slow spiral descent.

He says this shows that the plane can fly for a long time and that the pilots planned to water land near the only place where rescue would be possible.

He also says that there are no bodies, body parts, tissues, or luggage on the surface of the water or at the bottom; that the Soviet Union stopped US, Korean, and Japanese search ships from entering Soviet territorial waters around Moneron Island, where KAL 007 was last seen spiraling down; and that the Russian Federation released previously unknown Soviet transcripts of mission orders within half an hour of the crash, sending helicopters to find the plane.

Schlossberg has also said that a letter sent by Senator Jesse Helms to Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1991, when Helms was the ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, asking for information about what happened to KAL 007 shows that Helms took the abduction theory seriously. In the letter, there was a list of questions, one of which asked were any survivors were and where their camps were. It also asked what happened to Larry McDonald.

Schlossberg’s work hasn’t gotten much attention from the mainstream media. In a review of what happened when Larry McDonald died, University of Georgia Law Professor Donald E. Wilkes called Schlossberg’s theory “even more ridiculous” than Michel Brun’s idea that the shootdown happened in Japan and that Soviet and American planes fought in the air.

Avraham Shifrin, who said he was an expert on the KGB, said that his research center found that KAL 007 landed on water north of Moneron and that the passengers were able to get off on emergency floats.

They were rounded up by the Soviets, who then sent them to camps (with the children “separated from their parents and safely hidden in the orphan houses of one of the Soviet Middle Asian republics”). McDonald was thought to have been in a few Moscow prisons, including the Central Lubyanka and the Lefortovo.

Even though James Oberg knows that Shifrin knows a lot about Soviet prison camps, he says that Shifrin “got really confused” about what happened to KAL 007. Hans Ephraimson, who is related to one of the passengers, said that Shifrin is a “con man who doesn’t know how much grief he’s caused to families” because he couldn’t find Shifrin’s sources.

Michel Brun says that this theory is not completely crazy.

In his book, he looks at how the CIA and the South Korean government told the world that KAL 007 had landed in Sakhalin and that everyone on board was safe. He carefully looked for the source of this first piece of information and found it.

It came out in the Mainichi Shinboun newspaper in Japan on September 1, 1983. He said that this information came from radars on Wakkanai. So, he says that another, probably military, plane landed on Sakhalin during the “Sakhalin battle,” and that its passengers, who were either Americans or South Koreans, were jailed in the Soviet Union.