Who Killed Congressman Lawrence Patton McDonald? The State Department Cover-Up Of KAL Flight 007

[Chuck Boldwyn]

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Rense.com

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Who Killed Congressman
Lawrence Patton McDonald?
The State Department Cover-Up Of KAL Flight 007
By Todd Brendan Fahey
8-29-03

http://www.rense.com/general40/007.htm

It is a story that no one wants to talk about anymore.   Neither by ideological colleagues Congressman Bob Stump (R-AZ) and former Senator Steve Symms (R-ID), nor from any quarter of the State Department: the assassination on September 1, 1983, of a United States Congressman aboard a passenger airliner at the hands of Soviet fighter jets. A southern Democrat lawmaker, who was also jointly Chairman of the John Birch Society and President of Western Goals Foundation, both famously anti-Globalist/anti-communist organizations, and who had announced to his advisors in the weeks prior to his death that he would be seeking the Presidency of the United States--as a conservative Democrat--in 1988. A cousin of WWII hero General George S. Patton, and who had inherited Patton's mountain of anti-Soviet Intelligence records; who had organized a private Intelligence network which threatened to rival that of the CIA--at once commanding, polished on-the-stump and movie-star handsome: ...the kind of man who could seriously derail the Presidential aspirations of George Herbert Walker Bush, the elder.   Such is the story of the late-Congressman Lawrence Patton "Larry" McDonald--former U.S. Naval Reserves flight-surgeon-turned-lawmaker-turned Presidential hopeful. In death, even, for the Establishment's purposes, the most dangerous man in America.   Like so many stories approved by "our government," the "official version" does not jibe with the facts.   George P. Schultz, then-U.S. Secretary of State, ended the probe of the downed Korean Airlines flight 007 in December 1983, barely three months after the event, explaining that the Boeing 747 aboard which was Larry McDonald flew off its scheduled course, strayed into then-Soviet airspace, and that Soviet pilot Major Gennadiy Nikolayevich Osipovich, at the helm of a Soviet Su-15 fighter jet and upon the orders of Col. Gen. Ivan M. Tretyak, commander of the Far Eastern Military District, obliterated the craft in mid-air with two air-to-air missiles and that its passengers and crew were destroyed along with it (ICAO Report, December 1983, Appendix D, page D-3) (Istvestia articles, 1991).   Dan Rather, at CBS, and other Talking Heads, nodded with relief at this explanation, and then-President Ronald Reagan contented himself with the Senate's non-binding "condemnation" of the U.S.S.R., which was Senate Joint Resolution H.J. Res. 353, in proceedings chaired by then-Senator John Tower (R-TX) (who would, himself, perish in an airline crash in 1991).   But that is not what happened   In fact, the evidence of a successful landing of KAL 007 on Sakhalin Island or an at-sea ditching, with surviving passengers, Congressman McDonald among them, is so massive--from signed FAA logs, to official statements from Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau, to testimony from Korean lawmakers and Korean CIA (KCIA)--that the only rightful conclusion is one of cover-up. Evidence of a Landing at Sakhalin Island   Signed logs of Duty Officer Orville Brockman at Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) headquarters in Washington, DC., of FAA representative Mr. Dennis Wilhelm, Tokyo, and reports from a "Mr. Takano" at the Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau headquarters, Air Traffic Division, all show that KAL 007 was not destroyed, and was, in fact, guided down to Sakhalin Island--a disputed territory held jointly by the former U.S.S.R. and Japan.   Of the many sightings or confirmations of the Sakhalin Island landing, the most salient and verifiable are these:   --C. K. Suh, Manager of the American Regional Office of Korean Air Lines in Los Angeles, contacted by telephone Congressman McDonald's press aide Tommy Toles, stated that he had "just called Korean Air Lines in Seoul" and that "the information I [Suh] got from them is that [the] U.S. Embassy in Korea informed the Korean Government, Minister of Foreign Affairs...that the plane has landed in Sakhalin."   --From FAA directly, Mr. Toles received a phone call from one of its officers, who stated:   "This is Duty Officer Orville Brockman at FAA headquarters in Washington, DC. We have just received information from our FAA representative, Mr. Dennis Wilhelm in Tokyo, as follows: He has been advised by the Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau headquarters, Air Traffic Division, Mr. Takano -- T-a-k-a-n-o -- who is his counterpart in Japanese aviation, as follows: Japanese self-defense force confirms that the Hokkaido radar followed Air Korea to a landing in Soviet territory on the island of Sakhalinska -- S-a-k-h-a-l-i-n-s-k-a -- and it is confirmed by the manifest that Congressman McDonald is on board."   --A month after the incident, South Korean lawmaker Son Se-il, of the opposition Democratic Party, reported having received a classified CIA report which indicated that at least some KAL 007 passengers and crew may have survived. The 57-year-old lawmaker told reporters that he had received the document, marked "Top Secret/codeword," but would not disclose his source. (Yonhap News Agency)   Reuters news service verifies that it obtained a copy of the 17-page report, some of which was published on October 26, 1983. The Reuters report states that this document indicates the Boeing 747: "...probably successfully ditched, there probably were survivors, the Soviets lied massively and diplomatic efforts need to be made to return the survivors."   --Columnist Jack Anderson (Deseret News, 04/03/84) confirms that a news associate, Don Van Natta, visited Tokyo in early 1984, and confirmed "from Japanese Intelligence sources and documents stamped 'secret' in red Japanese characters" key aspects of the KAL 007 incident, amongst which:   At 3:38 AM on September 1, 1983, "The Japanese radar station at Wakkanai, Hokkaido, which had been tracking the unidentified aircraft's progress, saw the blip disappear from the screen less than 50 miles away. The trackers thought it was probably a Soviet plane that had gone down." (Anderson column, Deseret News, 04/03/84)   Robert W. Lee, writing for the John Birch Society's The New American magazine, finds, of Van Natta's discovery:   "Since Wakkanai is itself only about 40 miles from Sakhalin's southern tip, KAL 007 would have had to have been very close to the island if it was `less than 50 miles away' from Wakkanai when it disappeared from radar. Since it had been airborne for 12 minutes at that point, there is no way that it could have been tracked that close to the island unless it had changed direction. And if it changed direction, it was under the control of the crew. (That trackers thought it was a Soviet plane also implies that it was heading toward the Soviet military stronghold, as a Soviet plane would be expected to do. Had it been moving away from the island, there would have been less reason to conclude that it was a Soviet aircraft.)" (Lee, "What Happened to Flight 007?", The New American, 08/29/88)   Most shockingly, and disputedly, shortly before his death, Israeli Intelligence official Avraham Shifrin, an expert in the Soviet-era gulag prisons system, in a series of American television interviews reported in 1993 the existence of Soviet eye-witnesses to a captive Congressman Larry McDonald, being held at Lubyanka prison, a special KGB stronghold, and that the other survivors were jailed in encampments at Wrangel Island or along the Trans-Siberian border. Shifrin claimed that the Border Guard boats of Soviet (KGB) Gen. Semyon Romanov had been dispatched to an area between the Moneron and Sakhalin Islands, and had stripped the largely intact KAL 007 of luggage and a very-much-alive crew and human cargo.   And most damning of all, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports that agents at Central Intelligence Agency at 10:00pm, September 1, 1983, phoned its office with the announcement that "the plane had landed at Sakhalin. The crew and passengers are safe." (Michel Brun, Incident at Sakhalin: The True Mission of KAL 007, p. 5, ISBN: 1-56858-054-1; independent confirmation, confidential sources, Seoul Ministry of Foreign Affairs)   Evidence of a Successful at-Sea Ditching   Those who discount a guided landing at Sakhalin Island, but who believe KAL 007 successfully ditched at-sea, with survivors, point to the following evidence:   Radar tracking of the Boeing craft demonstrate a 12-minute descent (ICAO report), which independent avionics experts have gone on-record as stating would have been impossible were the craft "destroyed" in-flight, as was stated by its pursuer, Soviet pilot Maj. Osipovich ("the target is destroyed" [Osipovich, from the ICAO report]. Studies of radar tracking and black box data reconnaisance of other crafts of similar weight and with decompression at similar altitudes, demonstrate that KAL 007 would have reached the ocean's surface in a mere 2 1/2 minutes-to-3 minutes.   To wit, just one comparison as reported by Associated Press: "A China Airlines jumbo jet fell 32,000 feet in less than two minutes Tuesday [February 19th] after all four of its engines failed...". (Deseret News/AP, 02/20/85)   Additionally, no bodies have ever been conclusively recovered from the supposed crash site; and although there have been unconfirmed reports by Japanese fishermen as finding bodies washed ashore in remote island locations of Japan, none have ever been identified by the former Soviet Union, the United States or any international organization as being from KAL 007. And in the first eight days following the supposed air-to-air obliteration of a 747, a craft dubbed by pilots and radar-trackers "heavy," for its sheer mass, no bodies and no debris were found at the supposed crash site. In all, according to the official ICAO report, only between 500-839 small pieces of debris were ever recovered.   Insight magazine offers a telling comparison to other crash site investigations:   "In 1985, an Air India Boeing 747, carrying 329 passengers, exploded at 31,000 feet over the North Atlantic when a suspected terrorist bomb was detonated. In that tragedy 132 bodies were recovered--123 of them on the same day. All were identified. In 1987, when a South African Airlines 747 exploded at 14,000 feet from a cargo-bay fire, 15 of 159 persons were recovered along with several thousand pieces of debris, some as far away as 2,000 nautical miles." ("KAL 007 Mystery," Maier, 04/17/01)   The Government Reaction   Then-State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, confronted with such testimony, indicating a potential survival of passengers and crew of KAL 007, stated in an October 25, 1992, news conference:   "In our view, the claim is false. We had no information that would indicate that there are survivors of the KAL crash. There are other groups that have asserted as well that there were survivors, but they have never substantiated their allegations... During recent talks with President Yeltsin, in fact, our delegation asked about possible survivors of the crash. President Yeltsin replied that there had been no survivors, and we have no reason to doubt the Russian government's statement." (emphasis mine)   But the State Department did have information and every reason to believe that there were survivors, amongst which may well have been Congressman Larry McDonald. Or maybe that is the point. As a sovereigntist and Constitutionalist, a mortal foe of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, of which so many in Washington are a part--then State Department Secretary George P. Schultz and President George Herbert Walker Bush both prime-movers in the rush to Globalism--it is as if it was decided, by the powers-that-be, that Larry McDonald and the 61 other Americans aboard Korean Airlines flight 007 might better to be put to rest.   Indeed, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Bent, in 1984, declared the investigation of KAL 007 to be "officially closed"--a decision which the State Department has never reversed--despite the fact that the craft's "black boxes" were not produced until 1991, and not to U.S. officials, but to then-President of South Korea Noh Tae-woo, and still then, which were proven to be utterly bogus.   The State Department, in a pattern of obstruction as to KAL 007, after less than a month following the incident, in September of 1983, ordered aborted an investigation of the crash site by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. (None of these agencies today will comment on the matter.)   Those "Black Boxes"...   Then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin, on November 19, 1991, gave over to Korea's President Noh Tae-woo the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) of KAL 007, and was awarded, according to an Agency France Presse dispatch, a commendatory "laurel" by the South Korean government for his making available long-held discovery of the painful international incident.   Two weeks later, upon meticulous review of the contents, Seoul Transportation Ministry officials reported that: one of the flight data recorder boxes was empty and that the other box contained copies of the tapes, and not the original; and that two of the CVR tapes had been recorded backwards, rendering the communications "unintelligible." (Yonhap News Agency, South Korea)   South Korean ambassador to Moscow, Hong Sun-yong, flew to the Kremlin upon orders of an embarrased President Noh Tae-Woo to demand explanation. According to a December 3, 1991, New York Times report of this meeting, it was acknowledged by Russian officials "that it knew that the FDR tapes had been removed." The Times states that Ambassador Hong "was told by Yuri Petrov, a senior Yeltsin aide, that the original tapes had been withheld because Russia planned to provide them to an international investigative body."   On December 8, 1991, the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) met in Russia for a two-day crisis meeting to discuss the sensitive nature of KAL 007. Again, Russian President Yeltsin failed to turn over the original CVR and FDR, forcing acting-U.S. Ambassador to Russia James Collins to issue a public acknowledgement, admitting that Washington D.C. has yet to obtain materials crucial to an investigation of KAL 007. To-date, the South Korean government has never received the original CVR or FDR recordings, nor has it officially pressed Russia for the return of its property.   And yet the investigation into the violent death of a United States Congressman is, in the words of the State Department, "closed."   Who was Larry McDonald--this "unstoppable man on a mission," in the words of officials at John Birch Society's Appleton, WI, headquarters? It is a question that has haunted writers critical of government secrecy--of the Left and Right--for a quarter century.   JBS officials at the National Council-level, speaking recently on condition of anonymity, offered to this writer: "Larry McDonald was a medical doctor of urology, who joined the John Birch Society in the mid-60s and was determined to play a leadership role in American in the fight against communism. He started by leading an exemplary life as a JBSer and while as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives was chosen by founder Robert Welch and by members of the Executive Council to be the Society's Chairman in 1982." (The JBS maintains that Western Goals Foundation "was McDonald's baby from start to finish; Robert Welch was concerned that Larry might have too many irons in the fire, but there was no stopping him.")   Kathryn McDonald, his widow, would offer only: "He was my knight, my gladiator."   Approached on questions of Larry McDonald and Western Goals Foundation, Congressman Bob Stump (R-AZ), an ally of McDonald and from 1981-1987 a ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, responded irritably: "I don't understand why in the hell somebody would go back 10 or 12 or 14 years ago" (Silverman, "The Stealth Congressman," Phoenix New Times, 10/13/93).   A rare breed of Democrat (more properly, Dixiecrat), Dr. McDonald, in his five-terms in the U.S. House, garnered the highest lifetime rating ever bestowed by the influential American Conservative Union (ACU), a Washington think-tank run since the 1960s by David Keene. As such, he had earned his stripes and the accolades or epithets, depending on ones ideological bent, which many newspapers bestowed upon him. Larry McDonald was, indeed, "the darling of the Right in America."   Mae Brussell, the late conspiracy theorist from Monterey, California, heiress to the I. Magnin department store empire, and who wrote of McDonald for Hustler ("Who Killed Congressman Larry McDonald," February 1984) rightly posed this question:   "Why would the Soviet Union wish to make a martyr of Larry McDonald? If the Russians are the experts at terrorism that they're supposed to be, it would seem obvious that they could find an easier way to get rid of the congressman than chasing his airplane over Soviet territory for 2 1/2 hours. They could have easily blown him away anywhere in the world."   Ms. Brussell's conclusion, like that of this writer, is that the Soviets did not intend to make a martyr of McDonald--were probably not even aware that he was aboard the aircraft. The U.S.S.R. suffered serious setbacks in the eyes of the so-called World Community for their blunder, following the incident, with the U.S. Senate voting to approve the deployment of the MX-missile and to allow use of binary nerve-gas in warfare. But that 2 1/2 hours which KAL 007 spent over Soviet territory is a critical piece of the puzzle. As is the nearly 2 1/2 hours that the plane's flight crew spent <i>in total absence of communication, with each other or with air-traffic-control at FAA (U.S.) or with its Korean counterpart</b>. For 2 1/2 hours, from the time that the craft strayed off-course and into recognized Soviet airspace, and until the very last moments of the flight, when the pilots were tracked, chased and shot at by Soviet SU-15s, the flight crew said not one word to each other. (ICAO report)   Brussell attributes this bizarre behavior to "mind-control"; that the flight crew was part of a CIA reconnaissance mission, and that they were under the spell of their spymasters. It is an interesting theory, but officials at the John Birch Society offer a simpler explanation: "The only way those pilots flew off-course into enemy airspace for nearly three hours, in total absence of communication, is with guns to their heads."   For the record, the John Birch Society has stated recently: "Our belief all along is that the plane was hijacked in Anchorage, upon refueling."   But if hijacked, by whom? And toward what end? Why would hijackers force pilots of a passenger jetliner into Soviet airspace, subjecting even themselves (the hijackers) to obliteration by air-to-air missiles?   Unless it wasn't a passenger airliner--and which could explain why Senators Jesse Helms (R-NC) and then-Senator Steve Symms (R-ID) chose to be aboard the other, sister, aircraft, toward the same destination, Seoul, South Korea, where the three were slated to establish a South Korean branch office of McDonald's private Western Goals Foundation--just one facet of an Intelligence network McDonald was constructing toward his "ultimate goal of the White House" (confidential sources, JBS' Appleton, WI, headquarters) and, in the words of McDonald's most-trusted Intelligence advisor Hilaire duBerrier, for "to compete with the CIA--and he was succeeding." (duBerrier, personal interviews, Clarendon Towers, Phoenix, AZ, May 1985)   Despite the presence of a United States Congressman aboard the craft, no formal report on KAL 007 was ever issued by the executive branch (White House/State Department) or either branch of Congress. The only official report released by any agency--domestic or international--was that of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)--an agency of the United Nations, of which McDonald was its most vehement critic in Congress. The State Department wrapped up its investigation after only ten weeks--in contrast to the investigations of the airline bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland and the more-recent TWA-800 crash which would proceed for years.   Again, who was Larry McDonald? What was Western Goals Foundation? Why did McDonald, as a U.S. Congressman, persist in reading into the Congressional Record on the floor of the House of Representatives the various failings of the State Department in combatting the then-Soviet threat, and who took it upon himself to expose the private Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission and the various Bretton-Woods-founded institutions as being harbingers of One-World Government ideology? And why are both friends and foes so reluctant to talk about any of this today?     _____   Fahey, a strategic writer stationed in South Korea, has served as aide to Central Intelligence Agency agent Theodore L. "Ted" Humes, Division of Slavic Languages, and to the late-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief Lt. General Daniel O. Graham; to former Arizona Governor Evan Mecham (R-AZ), former Congressman John Conlan (R-AZ) and others.

 

 
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