Target Is Destroyed

by Seymour M. Hersh

The Soviet destruction in 9/1983 of 269 people aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was one of the most upsetting crises of the Cold War era. The USA & USSR immediately blamed one another for the disaster; but, as Hersh powerfully argues, responsibility went far beyond ordinary governmental decision making & into the murky sphere of superpower intelligence calculations & confusion. He asserts that the catastrophe followed more from Soviet ignorance than viciousness, & that the whole episode demonstrates how the superpowers are more interested in gaining political advantage than the truest understanding of events. Hersh cannot provide a final recounting of this complex crisis. But he does show how one critical thinker can provide a more believable reconstruction of events than can any self-interested governmental regime.--Library Journal

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Journalism, Aviation, Politics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."

He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.

Reviews

[Lynn Sherrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The KAL shootdown in 1983 occurred while I was taking the California Bar exam. After a few months the story disappeared from the news, and it remained another history mystery that I forgot about. Two weeks ago, doing research for my book on Berkeley in the late sixties, I came across an article about Larry McDonald, a congressman from Georgia, who was killed in the shootdown. McDonald, although a Democrat, was a cold warrior, and president of the John Birch Society. His aides believed that he was targeted by the Soviet Union. McDonald, Jesse Helms, and other officials were bound for Korea to commemorate the anniversary of a mutual aid treaty with Korea. Jesse Helms was on a different plan, but believed, as well, that he was a target of the Soviets. Arriving in Seoul, Helms demanded the Air Force send a plane with a fighter jet escort to bring him home.

[Ronald Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the very beginning the details of this book took me right back to those dark days in September 1983 - the horror of a passenger airliner being shot from the sky, the tension of the Cold War, and the relish with which the Reagan administration took advantage of both.

I especially appreciated the technological details Hersh provided and the skill with which he presented them. His thoroughness was impressive and though written less than three years after the event, he was able to obtain inside information from participants who were understandably fearful of talking. I now wish I had read this book when it first came out in 1986.

Amid all the political jockeying and superpower posturing that followed this tragic event, in hindsight the only heroes would appear to be the investigative journalists - especially Seymour Hersh - who remained doubtful and asked the right questions. The conclusions in this book have stood the test of time well, and were only supplemented in the 1990s with the related confidential Soviet information released by the Russian government following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I get more and more of the 'news' from books written years after the events, books based on information not available at the time, not available or not publicized: data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, through the testimony of retired--sometimes deceased--principals now safe from sanctions, through memoirs, through simple dogged research.

When KAL707 was downed by the USSR in 1983 I, like everyone else, heard the official line that the Soviets had knowingly murdered almost 300 civilians on the plane which had inadvertantly penetrated their airspace. I had trouble believing it was that clearcut then--and trouble accepted some left-wing theorizing along lines suggesting that the 747 had been a Lusitania--a commercial plane cynically and secretly packed with surveillance equipment.

Hersh's book, composed three years after the event, documents a different story, one reflecting poorly on the Soviets to be sure, but also upon intelligence establishment in the USA and especially upon the Reagan administration which knowingly lied about the incident in order to gain political points.