As regular readers of this web site know, I'm always recommending books for people to read that I feel are well documented and present the facts in a truthful manner. For about a year now I have had one of the most remarkable books I've ever read, Incident At Sakhalin: The True Mission of KAL Flight 007.

For those who might be unfamiliar with this tragedy, on September 1, 1983, KAL Flight 007 was allegedly shot down by the Ruskies with all 269 civilians perishing in this crash, including United States Congressman Larry McDonald. Of all the accounts I have ever read, no luggage and no bodies or remains have ever been found. Incident at Sakhalin is not only compelling, it screams with cover-up, deception and demonstrates how this puppet government has decayed almost beyond redemption. Like Waco, OKC, TWA Flight 800 and Vince Foster, just to name a few major incidents in America, KAL 007 is another reprehensible and immoral cover-up. When enough Americans find out the truth about these tragedies, they will shed their final innocence and recognize how evil this puppet government has become over the past 90 years.

I have found this particular incident quite fascinating since 1994 and have done a great deal of reading up on it from various sources, trying to sift through the conspiracy people's fantasies to on- site investigation of the crash site and surrounding terrain. However, nothing prepared me for Incident at Sakhalin - the truth literally jumped from the pages and left me stunned. Sometimes it's strange how things sometimes happen but I recently did a book review for this site regarding a new 1999 publication titled War Scare. Dr. Pry's work reinforces what the author of Incident at Sakhalin discovered. These cross-references of some material between these two works lends a great deal of credibility to a massive cover-up.

I personally wish to say God bless you Mr. Brun for all the sacrifices you had to make to bring the truth to light. The same applies to Mr. & Mrs. John Keppel for their sacrifices in helping bring the light of day on this travesty kept from the American people.

So, let's get started as I usually do by giving some background on the author of the book:

Michel Brun is a French aviation expert who has been a captain in the Merchant Marine, piloted multiengined aircraft on long over water flights, and has been an aircraft accident investigator and the chief executive officer of an airline based on Tahiti. As a boy, Brun was commended by Charles de Gaulle for leading raids on supplies and weapons in German Army camps in North Africa during World War II. He is the author of The Tragic Fate of the Tahiti-Nui, which chronicles a raft voyage from Tahiti to Chile that he undertook with one of his brothers. In addition to his native French, Brun is fluent in Japanese, English, Spanish, and Polynesian.

The book:

The KAL 007 tragedy was one of the most dramatic and dangerous episodes in the last phase of the Cold War. Despite two official investigations, innumerable television reports, newspaper and magazine articles, and books, the startling truth of this incident - in which 269 civilian passengers and crew lost their lives, and the world came closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis - has been obscured by a brazen and on-going cover-up.

Here, as a result of more than ten years of research, Michel Brun reveals the truth, which at least four governments have colluded to conceal. Incident at Sakhalin not only demolishes the official story of a lone civilian airliner flying innocently off course. It does much more. The book establishes that as the Korean Boeing 747 approached the Russian island of Sakhalin, so too did a number of U.S. military and reconnaissance aircraft in an ill-conceived intelligence and provocation operation that turned into a two-hour battle in which thirty or more U.S. Air Force and Navy personnel were killed and ten or more U.S. aircraft were shot down.

Contrary to "official" reports from the United States and the International Civil Aviation Organization, KAL 007 was not shot down over Sakhalin but was destroyed off Honshu, the main Japanese island, nearly an hour later than the reports claimed and by means and for reasons still not clear.

Incident at Sakhalin is an astonishing chronicle of a Cold War catastrophe that raises questions about a democracy and its relationship to its military and intelligence agencies. For anyone interested in politics, aviation, or international intelligence, Incident at Sakhalin is a must read.

One of the biggest questions that jumped into my mind after I read this book for the second time (just to make sure I had all the details firm in my mind), how did the U.S. government and the Department of Defense explain the deaths of these military fly-boys and crews to their families? Come one, this is as gross a cover-up as I've ever seen and being married to a retired Army Colonel, I know how that system works. What did they tell the wives, dads, brothers and moms of our dead military, killed by the Russians during peacetime over a Reagan-gone-sour deal?

Brun takes the reader meticulously through the events as they unfolded, as history has recorded them and then just as painstakenly, rips the lie to shreds. To set the scene a bit further, the Preface to this book was written by a man named John Keppel. I am going to quote him a bit from the Preface so you can get an idea of his role in Brun's book:

"Among the crises of the Cold War, the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 incident has been the most widely misunderstood. The story of how the truth has been kept from the public is astonishing, and unjustifiable, as the events of the disaster itself. The black boxes that have been produced and are supposed to tell us what happened to the airliner are from other planes. ...Many of the factors that gave rise to both the disaster and the cover-up remain dangerously in place.....

As a Foreign Service Officer at our Moscow embassy, I had analyzed Soviet statements during the Stalin and Khrushchev periods. Both Grace and I had learned to look at statements with a skeptical eye in the effort to separate information from disinformation. As a member of an interagency working group in Washington after Francis Gary Powers' U-2 went down over Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960, I had taken part myself in official lying. Not realizing that the Soviets had the U-2's cameras virtually intact and Powers himself alive, we (the members of the working group) very stupidly recommended that President Eisenhower stick to the cover story that the U-2 was a weather plane that had inadvertently strayed off course. It is hard to realize today that when Eisenhower got caught in the lie we thrust upon him, it was the first time many Americans realized that a U.S. president would lie to them on an important subject....

I had already been worried that the Reagan administration was pushing the Soviet Union too hard and that the situation might go wholly off the rails. We had overflown a Soviet island in the Kuriles with carrier aircraft and had stopped a Soviet ship on the high seas in the Caribbean. The Soviet minister of defense had spoken of the dangers of "appeasement" in terms reminiscent of 1939......

Before I discuss the successive stages of his (Brun) achievement in the KAL 007 case, it may be worth mentioning some of the larger bodies of source material he analyzed. They have included the tape of the intercepted voices of the Soviet pilots over Sakhalin, the FAA and Japanese Ministry of Transportation tapes of air-traffic-control communications between Anchorage and Tokyo on the one hand and KAL 007 and hits sister ship KAL 015 on the other, the archives of the Japanese press in the Diet Library in Tokyo, as well as the relevant proceedings in the Diet, Japanese Maritime Safety Agency situation maps showing the successive positions of the U.S. Soviet, and Japanese ships during the naval search off Sakhalin, the after-action report of the U.S. Navy task force taking part in the search, the sixty or so articles Izvestiya printed on the KAL 007 case, the documents Boris Yeltsin turned over in November 1992 to the U.S. next of kin and the Republic of Korea, and the two reports of the International Civil Aviation Organization issued in 1983 and 1993 concerning its investigations of the KAL 007 case, misleading but accompanied by useful documentation......

The first thing that let Michel understand what no other writer or investigator had understood, and to see evidence they had passed by, was his realization that the early statements of Japanese Air Self- Defense and intelligence officers simply could not be fitted into the single-intrusion, single- interception, single-shootdown story insisted on by the United States......

As to the continued importance of the KAL 007 case: The lives of ordinary airline passengers were put at risk without their knowledge or consent. Two hundred and sixty-nine civilians, of whom sixty were American citizens, were killed, as were some thirty or more U.S. Air Force and Navy officers and enlisted men. All this was the result of a wholly unjustified and badly planned intelligence and provocation mission. The government lied to the next of kin of both of these groups and has failed to show them the consideration it owes them. A substantial risk of World War III was run for inadequate reason - if, indeed, there could have been an adequate one for rising a nuclear holocaust.

Through the manipulation of evidence, lying, and the subordination of witnesses, the Reagan administration turned its own ghastly blunder into a renewed political attack on the Soviet Union. In doing so it further committed itself to its mistaken quest for a decisive victory rather than striving for a gradual way of brining U.S.-Soviet relations into a viable accommodation. The disastrous results are only now beginning to dawn on us - Chechnya, economic disintegration, the spread of disease, the illicit sale of nuclear materials. In turning the truth of its own blunder in the KAL 007 operation into an aggressive fiction tailored to its purposes, the administration committed itself (and, sad to say, it successors) to years of lying to the very people from whom in a democracy it derives its powers......" John Keppel, August 15, 1995

To say Incident at Sakhalin had me riveted to my reading chair is an understatement, it also raised the specter of absolute fear in my gut. Fear for something so lost in our great Republic, fear of how close America came to nuclear war and fear that the American people have become so apathetic, so dumbed-down and so "I, me, my" that they no longer care who this government kills as long as it doesn't disturb their self-induced coma that protects their comfort zone. As you read the report below, let me quote from page 4 of Incident at Sakhalin:

"At precisely ten o'clock, the South Korean minister of foreign affairs announced that he had received confirmation from the CIA that "the plane had landed at Sakhalin. The crew and passengers are safe."

Pg 5: "Let us examine the CIA announcement about which so much as been written: The aircraft did not explode in flight and did not crash, but is known to have landed on Sakhalin. The passengers and crew are safe and the aircraft is undamaged."

It goes without saying that I had to special order this remarkable work by a little man whose courageous work makes him stand tall among the giants who tried to slap him down. If you'd like to order Incident at Sakhalin, the ISBN number is: 1-56858-054-1

I mentioned earlier that I had recently ordered and read a book titled War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink by Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA spook who is currently a professional military advisor to the U.S. House of Representatives on national security issues. For a re-fresher, I quote Dr. Pry out of the Introduction to his book:

"What were you doing on October 4, 1993? I was making a desperate phone call from the headquarters of North American Air Defense and Space Command, near Colorado Springs, to my wife in Washington, DC. I told her to take our kids out of school and head for the hills, because the Russians might launch a nuclear attack."

My mother and I were on our way back from the march I held on September 29, 1993 at the nation's capitol in Washington, DC. Little did mother and I realize as we drove across America's heartland on the way back to Denver, that at that moment, here was someone on the inside so terrified of nuclear war, that he called his wife in distress and told her to get out of Dodge.

What does this have to do with KAL 007? In Dr. Pry's book, beginning on page 27, I was shocked to see Chapter 5: The KAL 007 Crisis, September 1983. I read the next two chapters like a starving person suddenly presented with a feast. Pg. 28:

"The Su-15 pilot reported, "The target is destroyed.""The Soviet pilot who destroyed KAL 007, Gennadi Osipovich, recalled thirteen years later in an interview in December 1996: "I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing. I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing. It is easy to turn a civilian plane into one for military use."

[Osipovich is a proud Communist]

... "In a twist of fate, North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, waiting for another flight in Anchorage, Alaska, had met the Grenfell girls in the airport lounge while KAL 007 was refueling for the last leg of its doomed journey."

These little girls were among the doomed passengers of KAL 007. In Chapter 6, Dr. Pry moves to the escalation of tensions described as ABLE ARCHER.

Dr. Pry chooses to rely primarily on Seymour Hersh's book about KAL 007: The Target is Destroyed, but that does not negate War Scare as some pap - it is detailed, it is specific and it is based on first-hand knowledge. War Scare starkly takes us step-by-step how close we have been to World War III while the government of our country continues stripping us blind to enrich the coffers of our enemies disguised as "foreign aid." These people in Washington know that this money is being used to aggressively build up the Ruskies' military while ours is left floundering. Meanwhile Washington, DC continues to crank out the lies like it's no big whoop on even trivial matters. In the Preface to Incident at Sakhalin, Frank Keppel had this to say about Hersh's book:

"How does Michel Brun's book differ from that written by Seymour Hersh, The Target is Destroyed, generally held by the media to be the last word on the subject?....."

"As to Hersh, some of whose other work I admire, in The Target is Destroyed he dismissed the obvious possibility that KAL 007's diversion from course had been intentional in a footnote saying that he found no evidence that it was. I will deal with his book almost as briefly but more factually. He missed the two most important things about the case: that there had been a battle over Sakhalin between U.S. and Soviet military aircraft; and that KAL 007 itself was not shot down there but was destroyed four hundred miles to the south, off Honshu."

At first sight, the story seems a little too wild and too much in conflict with Soviet reports.

The message above gives us the preface of the book. A better synopsis of it you can find
http://geocities.com/ke007us/index.html

Note the anti-Soviet undertone in the note" [Osipovich is a proud Communist]"

What the pilot meant is that a civilian airliner can be empty of passengers and used for military surveillance operations, which were actually going on at the very same time not far away. The soviets were at that very time testing missiles.