The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

one of the most militarily sensitive regions of the USSR. There a Russian MiG aircraft fired on the airliner, killing two passengers, and forced its pilot to make a near-mirac- ulous emergency landing by first light on the edge of a frozen lake south of Murmansk. Vance was on his second trip to the USSR. The first, shortly after the Carter administration assumed office in 1977, had provoked a spectacular public display of con- tempt from Gromyko for having introduced a new focus on human rights into the Soviet context. There followed a year of frigid bilateral relations, which continued into 1978 with expulsions of commercial officers from both embassies and the announcement in mid-April that the most senior Soviet official at the United Nations had defected. Vance arrived determined not to allow the frosty bilateral climate to interfere with his negotiating objectives for strategic arms control. Seeking Assurances When Soviet authorities notified the American embassy of the downed airliner (the USSR and the Republic of Korea had no diplomatic relations), the sur- vivors were being held in the town of Kem, close to the site of the forced landing and nearly 400 miles north of Leningrad. Their rescue depended on joint efforts by the embassy, the consulate general in Leningrad and Pan American World Airways. As economic/commercial counselor, I immediately sought (and received) the foreign ministry’s telephonic assurance that Soviet authorities would not hinder evacu- ation of passengers — and crew. My stress on the latter was due to my vivid recollection of the disappearance of a South Korean visiting Prague in 1967 when I was serving there. Years later I learned that he had been turned over to the North Koreans to die a cruel death in captivity. With Ambassador Malcolm Toon fully occupied with Vance, Deputy Chief of Mission Jack Matlock and I called late that day on a Mr. Kapitsa, chief of the first division of the foreign ministry, to press for swift repatriation of all concerned. Kapitsa neither confirmed nor denied the telephonic assurance I had received, and the Soviet offi- cial who had given it took no part in subsequent discus- sions, but the Soviet news agency TASS seemed to con- firm the assurances by reporting: “The passengers and crew of the plane were taken to the nearest populated locality and arrangements are being made for their despatch from the USSR.” A supporting approach was made by the department to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Late on April 22, the third and final day of the Vance- Gromyko dialogue, there was a disturbing rumor that Soviet authorities might nevertheless detain the captain of the aircraft, Kim Chang Kyu, whose brilliant landing doubtlessly had saved many lives. A foreign ministry official told us only that he had not been informed of any intent to detain anyone. Secretary Vance’s special adviser, Marshall Shulman, was kept informed of developments, but Vance did not raise the issue with Gromyko. In the United States the press reported that “second-line” offi- cials were handling the airline issue. David Weisz, a young embassy officer with recent con- sular experience, put in an unbroken 48 hours (April 21- 22) successfully coordinating recovery of the survivors by the airline with assistance from Consulate General Leningrad. Preparations were complicated by the absence from the USSR of the senior Pan American rep- resentative in Moscow. (PanAm officials in Berlin had no experience with far northern coordinates in a region chock-full of air and naval bases, including submarine pens.) Belatedly, a Pan American aircraft flew with a full crew from West Berlin to Leningrad (where it arrived at 8 p.m. to pick up George Rueckert from our consulate general and three Japanese officials). It continued to Murmansk, whither most survivors had been moved. An Ominous Development Once in Murmansk, Rueckert learned that pilot Kim Chang Kyu and navigator Lee Kun Shik were not with the passengers and other crew members. They were still being detained in Kem, undergoing relentless, exhausting interrogation to establish why the plane had entered Soviet airspace and refused supposed instructions to land. Rueckert strongly protested their detention, and a heated discussion followed in which the Japanese officials joined (one of the dead had been a restaurateur, whose place- ment in a casket did not meet Japanese requirements for F O C U S 34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 Kenneth N. Skoug Jr. retired from the Foreign Service in 1990 with the rank of minister-counselor. He served as economic-commercial counselor in Moscow from 1976 to 1979. He is the author of The United States and Cuba Under Reagan and Shultz: A Foreign Service Officer Reports (Praeger, 1996) and Czechoslovakia’s Lost Fight for Freedom (Praeger, 1999).