<3 co TO Seti toe auger it, ae Dre Si LC a eet ee ee am 4 rei Passengers first victims of Cruise, cold war games By FRED WEIR New facts emerging about the KAL 007 tragedy hint at a terrible truth: the innocent passengers aboard that airliner may have been, in a very real sense, the first human victims of the Cruise missile — a fate that may One day engulf us all. As a consensus grows among defence analysts and knowing journalists that the Korean jetliner was in fact On a spying mission, ‘‘sources’’ inside the U.S. intel- ligence establishment have begun to leak an elaborate hew story. They claim that the Soviet Union has been testing an ‘‘anti-ballistic missile’? on the Kamchatka Peninsula, that the Soviets have been concealing this new ‘‘superweapon’’ from U.S. surveillance satellites by means of ‘‘sliding roofs and tarpaulins’’, and that all this means the USSR is in serious violation of the 1972 ABM Treaty. It seems likely that these accusations are intended to | Prepare us for the inevitable public disclosure of KAL 007’s role as a spy-plane, and to offer an extraordinary Yationale for such use of a civilian aircraft. It will be Suggested that if the USSR is developing an effective ABM system, the ‘‘threat’’ to western security is serious €nough to justify even such a desperate means of intel- ligence-gathering. However, a different explanation is strongly in- dicated. Aviation Week & Space Technology, a magazine With close Pentagon connections, identifies the Soviet Weapon in question as a ‘‘modified version of the SA-12”’. The SA-12, a direct descendant of those SAM’s Which wreaked such havoc on U.S. airforces in Viet- Nam, is characterized as ‘“‘a new surface-to-air missile with enhanced low-altitude capabilities’’. It is perfectly Clear that this does not describe an anti-ballistic missile, which must be capable of taking out re-entering war- heads high in the stratosphere. The new Soviet weapon Can be only one thing: an anti-Cruise missile. It should come as no surprise to learn that the USSR is News Analysis probably engaged in a crash program to develop a de- fence against Cruise missiles. The Cruise, now being if deployed by the Strategic Air Command, undermines Soviet security like no weapon before it. The United States intends to construct some 9,000 of these low-fly- - § ing radar-evading missiles during the next three years, and to station them around the entire periphery of the Soviet Union. No wonder the Soviets are unusually sensitive about the secrecy of their SA-12 tests. And, given the single-minded obsession of the Reagan ad- ministration with gaining military supremacy over the USSR, it is hardly surprising that U.S. intelligence would go to extreme lengths to penetrate the new Soviet defensive weapon. It has become increasingly obvious that KAL 007 was indeed sent to gather data on the SA-12 tests. We know now, thanks to evidence released by the Soviet military, that the Korean jetliner flew directly over the testing site at Petropaviovsk, altered course by several degrees in order to avoid a major anti-aircraft installation on the other side of Kamchatka, and then deviated once more to overfly crucial bases on Sakhalin Island. The Soviet military claims — and very possibly can prove — that they intercepted electronic communications between the airliner and a U.S. Airforce RC-135 reconnaissance plane that was also in the neighborhood. Ronald Reagan’s emotional assertion, made on na- tional TV, that the ‘U.S. would never use a passenger aircraft for such purposes, indeed, that there is no need to do so in ‘‘this age of sophisticated satellite sur- veillance”’, rings somewhat hollow in light of the emerg- ing facts. It seems that high-flying satellites and SR-71 spy planes are unable to detect the low-energy micro- FE ee AE, FE a YY Speculation is mounting that the KAL007 spy mission was to pry into Soviet anti-Cruise tests in the area. wave signals which are used for communication between Soviet technicians on the ground. It is necessary to get up very close to intercept such transmissions. A civilian aircraft, for instance, which found itself over the test site, at the right time, would apparently be able to record the ground communications on its standard radio gear. Both Soviet and American military people have in- dicated that the arrival of KAL 007 over Kamchatka coincided precisely with important missile trials. And the Korean jetliner was flying low. One of the aircraft’s final acts, as it headed for Japanese airspace, was to radio Narita control that it was about to climb to its normal cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The passengers on KAL 007 were certainly innocent victims. They were, in the final analysis, victims of Reagan’s Cold War, of escalated arms build-up, and of the Cruise missile — a weapon that seriously undermines Soviet security and threatens to make victims of us all. U.S. wants Lebanon base ..Where.was. condemnation of Israel? _.... What we swallowed On Feb. 21, 1973 a Libyan civilian air ” “dastardly deed’’. On the contratry, a as Mideast springboard DAMASCUS (Sept. 6) — Parties of the Arab world issued a joint statement Warning .that the Reagan Ad- Ministration is preparing a large-scale direct U.S. military intervention in Lebanon and that in Lebanon at pre- Sent, “‘the U.S. troops have become the Main participants in the conflict.”’ The Marines in Beirut have opened artillery fire on Druze positions in the mountains south and east of the city. This represented a further U.S. military Intervention on the side of President Amin Gemayel’s fascist Phalange- - dominated government and army. The army is composed largely of recent re- Cruits from the Phalangist militia, the Same outfit that carried out the mas- Sacres in Sabra and Shatila refugee Camps a year ago. Ahmed al-As’ad, head of the Syrian Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization, Said from Damascus that the White House is doing everything possible to distract U.S. and world public opinion from the ominous U.S. military moves into Lebanon. He stressed that Reagan IS using the Korean airliner incident Mainly for this purpose. The joint statement of all the Com- Munist Parties of the Arab world urged the Arabs to be on guard against the Very dangerous plans of the U.S. to MOve into Lebanon. It said that al- though Reagan at first told the people of the U.S. that the Marines would be there only a few weeks at most, in fact _ the U.S. military presence in Lebanon 1S Now entering its second year. “The U.S. troops are fighting on the side of the Israeli invaders and the Phalangists and are trying to wipe out the Lebanese National Patriotic Forces,’’ the Arab Communist Parties said. ‘“‘The obvious purpose of these U.S. military activities is to turn Leba- non into a springboard for attacking Syria and launching attacks on the Arab national liberation movement. ‘‘Moreover, the imperialists are try- ing to make out of Lebanon a NATO military base which would threaten the security and independence of the states of the region,”’ the joint statement said. . It stressed that this sinister U.S.- NATO plan ‘’is in line with the global strategy of U.S. imperialism which is aiming at unleasing a nuclear war againt the Soviet Union. In an article published in the Sunday New York Times, former South Dakota senator James Abourezk pointed out that in Lebanon the Christians are a minority of the total population. While Lebanese in general are willing to ac- cept Gemayel, a Christian as president, they are unwilling to accept all the fas- cist Phalangist baggage he tried to bring into office with him. Abourezk, who is himself of Lebanese descent, strongly argued that U.S. troops should get out of Lebanon now. Instead of trying to use military force to beat the majority of Lebanese to their knees, he said, Washington should be using its political, diplomatic and economic leverage to assist in working out a sane, democratic solu- tion to Lebanon’s internal problems. —————————— ee plane, a Boeing 727, enroute from Cairo to Beirut, was shot down by Israeli air force jets over the Sinai desert with the loss of 108 lives. The Israeli Government placed the blame for the downing of the civilian aircraft, which it claimed had in- truded into Israeli-controlled air space, squarely on the “ stubborn’ now dead, French pilot of the doomed aircraft : (Winnipeg Free Press, Feb. 23, 1973). In the words of General Dyan at a news conference, ‘“‘when a plane is or- dered to land and doesn’t, it must have hostile intentions’’. (ibid) Further justi- fication was claimed by the Israeli Chief of Staff, Lt. General David Eliazar, who said ‘although the airliner was a civilian aircraft, the Israelis could not assume it was carrying passengers on a peaceful mission’’. (Winnipeg Free Press, Feb. 24, 1973) The reaction of then Canadian Exter- nal Affairs Minister, Mitchell Sharp, was typical of the response from the NATO governments. They expressed ‘‘shock and regret’’ but there was no condemna- tion of the Israeli action, no charges of ‘‘crimes against humanity’’, no calls for sanctions or boycotts against Israel. A spokesperson for the International Fed- eration of Airline Pilots Association de- clared that his group rejected proposals for a boycott or strike against Israel. (Winnipeg Free Press, Feb. 27, 1973) President Nixon of the USA did not go on TV to rally world opinion against the few days after the downing of the Libyan aircraft, Israeli Premier Golda Meier, was warmly welcomed in Washington by ‘President Nixon. She didn’t feel, said Mrs. Meier, that the incident would interfere with her talks with the Presi- dent. It didn’t. There was no public WILLIAM ROSS Backgrounder statement to indicate that the matter was even mentioned at the meeting of the two heads of state. In a matter of a few days the downing of the Libyan civilian aircraft was no longer front page news in the Free Press which didn’t even consider it important enough to warrant an editorial comment. Mr. MacEachen was wrong when he piously declared the other day, ‘‘I hope the world will never swallow the shoot- ing down of a civilian aircraft by a mili- tary fighter’. (Winnipeg Free Press, Sept. 6, 1983) But the Canadian and U.S. Governments did precisely that when the country which did the shooting was a client state of the USA. The tragic loss of lives of the South Korean spy plane is to be deplored, but the incident is being cynically exploited by President Reagan — with the Cana- dian government following slavishly be- hind — to whip up cold war hysteria so as to provide the political climate to reck- lessly accelerate the nuclear arms race. That could result in the destruction not of hundreds of innocent lives, but of hun- dreds of millions of men, women and children throughout the world. PACIFIC TRIBUNE—SEPTEMBER 21, 1983—Page 5