Pilot Defends Shooting Korean Jet Insists Boeing Airliner Was Sent On Spy Mission

Gennadi Osipovich held up his thick hands to show how, 13 years ago, he maneuvered his SU-15 fighter to blast a Korean 747 airliner out of the sky.

It was the morning of Sept. 1, 1983, and Lt. Col. Gennadi Osipovich’s unit had scrambled from its secret base on Sakhalin Island to intercept an intruder. After trailing the unidentified plane for more than 60 miles, the Soviet pilot zoomed alongside to get a look for himself.

“I was just next to him, on the same altitude, 150 meters to 200 meters away,” he recalled in conversations with a reporter last weekend.

From the flashing lights and the configuration of the windows, he recognized the aircraft as a civilian type of plane, he said.

“I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing,” he said. “I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing. It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use.”

Minutes later, he fired two air-to-air missiles, sending Korean Air Lines Flight 007 crashing into the sea, killing 269 people and causing what President Boris Yeltsin has called the greatest tragedy of the Cold War.

Thirteen years after the downing of KAL 007, debate still rages over whether the Soviet air force showed a reckless disregard for human life and why the Korean plane was so far off course.

In his first interview with an American journalist, the retired pilot addressed some of the mysteries that still surround the incident, although the central question of why the plane - en route from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul, South Korea - was so far off course is still debated.

A confirmed Communist who lives in the Caucasus region, Osipovich insists that the jetliner was on a spy mission and that there were no civilian passengers aboard. He even considers himself fortunate to have achieved a measure of celebrity by having destroyed Flight 007.

One of his few complaints is that the Soviet authorities paid him a smaller bonus for shooting down the plane than he had hoped: 200 rubles minus a small fee for postage.

For years, experts have debated whether the Soviet pilot was aware he was downing a civilian plane or had mistaken the 747 for an RC-135 American military reconnaissance plane.

But Osipovich says he knew he had no doubts that he was dealing with a civilian plane and not an RC-135. Viewed through the prism of the Cold War, the pilot treated the plane, not as a lost commercial airliner, but as part of a nefarious mission against the Soviet homeland.

Osipovich also revealed that in the pressure of the moment, he did not provide a full-description of the intruder to Soviet ground controllers.

“I did not tell the ground that it was a Boeing-type plane,” he recalled. “They did not ask me.”

He did, however, tell Soviet ground controllers that the plane had blinking lights on, which he says was an indication that it could be a transport plane.

His first thought was that it was a Soviet transport plane being used to test the readiness of the air defense forces.

“I thought it was some kind of inspection because never before had I seen foreign planes fly with those blinking lights,” he said. While American intelligence planes commonly flew along the Soviet periphery, Western commercial airlines never came close to the heavily militarized Soviet region, flying their passenger routes hundreds of miles away.

Disputing reports that he urged his superiors to be cautious, Osipovich said he was prepared to shoot the plane down as soon as it crossed the border and still regrets that he was not allowed to do so.

“I asked the ground what to do,” he said. “They got scared and told me to force him to land, and this was our big mistake.”

If the plane had crashed on Soviet territory, he said, the authorities would have recovered proof that it was on a spy mission.