Soviet deception in the search for KAL 007: a seaman's testimony
The Soviet deception of U.S naval forces in the search for KAL 007 involving harassing vessels, attempted rammingsKAL 007/ Russian Ram attempt , cutting cables, radar locking on of U.S. targets by the Soviets is well corroborated from U.S. sources as well as Soviet sources (to themselves http://www.rescue007.org/TopSecretMemos.htm ) . This deception was intended, and was successful, in the Soviet ruse of convincing the West that they had not recovered the KAL 007's black box, had not located the aircraft, and had not recovered the passengers and crew in a secret coordinated naval and air mission to Moneron Island, effected within something over an hour from the shoot down. But here is something from Russian sources that comes in the form of a testimony of a Soviet seaman relating one of the stratagems employed by the Soviets. This stratagem involved the harassment of one of the three Japanese vessels assisting the U.S. forces as well as involving positioning false black box "pingers" in International waters off the island of Moneron (far from the actual location where KAL 007 had come down within Soviet waters near Moneron).
For a fascinating corroboration of the Soviet harassment on this particular Japanese vessel [Keiko-Maru No. 3] as well as corroborating Commander Piotti’s of U.S. Task Force 71 assertion that the Soviets employed false pingers to divert and confuse the allied endeavors, we may turn to a Soviet seaman’s report published in the Izvestiya series and quoted in “World Wide Issues,” 31 May 1991:
“I recall: there was a moment when Japanese search vessel Keiko-Maru No. 3 (or Kaiko- Maru No. 3) dropped anchor next to Mirchink; this vessel had a self-propelled underwater search apparatus, controlled from the vessel via cable. The operational radius of the apparatus from the mother vessel is, if I am not mistaken, two to 2.5 kilometers... At that time the TOF commander, Admiral Sidorov, gave an order—immediately equip a trawler stationed on Sakhalin with grapnels (devices to cut mine mooring cables or hawsers) and send it to a station next to the Keiko-Maru. As soon as the vessel lowered its apparatus, the trawler was supposed to cut the control cable of the Japanese... See how far it went: this was outright banditry! The only thing that saved the Keiko-Maru was the false “pinger” planted by our Navy. The Japanese also took the bait of its beacon signal and went to the wrong area.”
And so the Soviets not only safely absconded with KAL 007’s surviving passengers, they also successfully kept U.S.-led forces at bay, preventing them from seeing and understanding that the “wreck” that their lead salvage vessel, the Mikhail Mirchink, was bringing up—was nothing but a ruse.
