A Shot in the Dark: The Untold Story of Korean Air Lines flight 007
22nd May 2024
The shootdown of Korean Air Lines flight 007 took the lives of 269 people and raised troubling questions on both sides of the Pacific. How could a trained flight crew make such a colossal navigational error, and then fail to notice for five and a half hours? Were they really so unaware? And how could Soviet air defense fail to recognize that the airliner wasn’t a threat? Did they know that they were attacking a plane full of civilians? For ten years, these questions had no concrete answers, becoming fuel for wild speculation and deliberate manipulation by politicians and amateur observers alike, building a cloud of myth and mystery around the events of that September night. But with the end of the Cold War came an end to the embargo on information, and since 1993 a great deal has come to light about what really happened — not only on board flight 007, but also among the Soviet military personnel who shot it down, and within the halls of power in Moscow and Washington, where staunch cold warriors used the shootdown to further their goals at the expense of the truth. Piecing together the evidence reveals that that truth is at once extraordinary and mundane; unbelievable yet inevitable; monstrous, but also terrifyingly human — a story that still lingers darkly in the imagination more than 40 years after it began.