The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 F O C U S O N R E F L E C T I O N S S ECOND -L INE D IPLOMACY : T HE F IRST KAL I NCIDENT n April 21, 1978, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was in the second day of strategic arms control negotiations in Moscow with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko when an event in the extreme north of the Soviet Union introduced an unexpected and unwelcome issue into bilateral relations. In the pre-dawn hours that day a Korean Airlines Boeing-707 jet airliner bound from Paris to Seoul via Anchorage, Alaska, with 113 persons aboard suffered a drastic malfunction of its directional gyro, and wandered more than 1,000 miles off-course over the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea southward into Soviet air space above the Kola Peninsula, O I N THE SHADOW OF CRUCIAL TALKS IN M OSCOW BETWEEN C YRUS V ANCE AND A NDREI G ROMYKO , QUIET DIPLOMACY RESOLVED THE FIRST K OREAN A IRLINES INCIDENT . B Y K ENNETH N. S KOUG J R . Jim Nuttle