After the widely publicized appearance by Ogarkov, Dmitri Ustinov, the Soviet Defense Minister, angrily chastised both the Americans and South Koreans for having endangered the civilian passengers so recklessly.
Most of the pilots in my regiment accepted the official version of this unfortunate event. But as VVS officers, we were scornful of the PVO pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Gennadi Osipovich, who had destroyed the airliner with two missiles. Osipovich’s Su-15 was a typical PVO interceptor, a fast-climbing, rather unmaneuverable fuel guzzler with a short combat radius. The Su-15 was little more than a high-altitude missile platform. Some of my older colleagues dismissed PVO interceptor pilots as “robots” because they slavishly followed the radar vectors and weapons-release commands of the GCI ground controllers. Apparently this was the case in the Korean airliner incident.
My own reaction was that Osipovich certainly had not done everything possible to protect both Soviet territory and innocent lives. Then I began to hear a starkly different version of the events over Sakhalin Island. The Defense Ministry announced that a second Su-15 and a VVS MiG-23 had also been scrambled and were trailing Osipovich when he shot down the airliner. In fact, my link leader, Captain Shalunov, actually recognized the MiG-23 pilot on television. The officer was a friend of his named Litvinov. The pilots in my squadron began to whisper that there was something wrong with the official explanation of the airliner shoot-down. Nobody believed that the Americans would jeopardize hundreds of innocent civilian passengers for a routine espionage gain. The VVS base was in the north of the island. If at least two Su-15s and one MiG-23 had been scrambled, why was the airliner destroyed south of Sakhalin Island?
Later we discovered the shocking truth. A GCI officer named Andrei, reassigned from Sakhalin Island, came to our regiment for a familiarization course. Over dinner one night, he revealed what really happened to the Korean airliner.
Ten days before the incident, Andrei said, an Arctic gale had knocked down the early warning radar antennas on the Kamchatka Peninsula, depriving eastern Siberia and Sakhalin Island of the “air picture” needed to vector interceptors against intruders. Moscow put incredible pressure on the PVO to repair these antennas immediately to regain air-defense coverage for the Soviet Far East. Finally Far East PVO officers reported to Moscow that the radars were up and running. But the antennas were still lying broken on the tundra.
When the Korean airliner strayed into Soviet airspace, it passed right over the strategic peninsula and on toward Sakhalin Island without being properly tracked. One air base on the peninsula did scramble interceptors, but the GCI controllers could not give the fighters the correct vector or altitude for a successful intercept. The PVO on Sakhalin Island did not receive precise data on the “intruder.” The first firm indication they had of KAL Flight 007 was when the airliner flew directly over the base in the center of the island. But the local radar operators did not speak English, so they couldn’t talk to the Korean captain using the international distress radio frequencies of 121.5 or 243 MHz.
By the time they relayed this information to PVO Far East headquarters in Habarovsk in Siberia, the Korean Boeing 747 had already passed over Sakhalin and was on its way out of Soviet airspace. The order to destroy the unidentified narushitel, “violator,” came from Habarovsk in a panicky attempt to conceal the fact that the northern early warning radars were still inoperable.
“They killed 269 people to save their own ass from Moscow,” Andrei said bitterly.
I didn’t know how to answer. Finally I replied, “Those PVO bastards are a bunch of dinosaurs.”
But I knew the fault lay deeper in our military system.
However, I soon had more personal events to consider than the poor leadership of the PVO and cover-ups in Moscow. On November 6, the eve of the annual celebration of the Great November Revolution, five of us from the Armavir MiG-23 program received transfer orders to the 512th Regiment at Vaziani, southeast of Tbilisi. The 512th was definitely not a Potemkin’s village charade, as Colonel Homenko’s unit had been. My new outfit had earned the proud designation “Combat Leadership Regiment.” Almost all of its pilots had First Class ratings, and the unit’s overall combat readiness and skill level was outstanding. Much of this was due to the efforts of our new division commander, Major General Anosov, who worked closely with the talented and energetic regimental commander, a full colonel named Boris “Bimba” Rinchinov.
My new commander was exceptional in many ways. He was a Buryat, one of the Siberian Mongol ethnic groups who lived around Lake Baikal, and had been raised in a State orphanage. Some Buryats had mixed Russian blood and did not appear especially Asian. But Colonel Rinchinov was a pure Buryat. With his big head, flat nose, and barrel chest, he looked like a Mongol horseman from the Golden Horde. For him to have reached the rank of full colonel in command of a Combat Leader Regiment in the VVS — a service that had only a handful of non-Slav pilots — was a testimony to his abilities and dynamism. He was a Sniper pilot in his early forties who had graduated near the top of his class from the Kacha academy. His advancement had been rapid, and his career had prospered from combat service as a MiG-21 adviser in Egypt during the protracted Arab-Israeli wars.
Bimba Rinchinov was both a terrific pilot and a popular leader. But unlike Homenko, he was blunt and demanding. He recognized that pilots were basically hardworking and ambitious, and wanted nothing more than the opportunity to fly. During our first meeting with him at Vaziani, Richinov made it clear that we would, indeed, get that opportunity.
The colonel demonstrated his leadership style by dispatching a four-engine An-12 transport from Vaziani to Tskhakaya to pick up the new lieutenants, their families, and their household effects. When we landed, late at night, the entire regimental senior staff was there to meet us. They had trucks laid on to transport our furniture and trunks to our new quarters. This was a far cry from the 176th.
After we came back to Vaziani from our mandatory annual leave, the colonel himself greeted us in his office.
“I know you fellows,” he said, smiling as he looked us over. His expression was much more open than the habitual cunning blandness of Homenko. “You love flying more than sex. But I promise you that you’re going to be flying so much here that you won’t have any energy left to chase women.”
That was exactly the kind of reception we’d been hoping for. This was the real Air Force, not a holding tank for staff rats.
I was assigned to the 3rd Squadron along with four of my Armavir colleagues. The squadron commander was an energetic young major named Nikolai Kuchkov. He was one of those rare men who are literally natural pilots. Where other experienced pilots might have to sweat through a tricky ground-attack or air-combat maneuver, Kuchkov could perform effortlessly with near perfection. He was an intense, demanding taskmaster, who expected absolute precision from all his pilots, including the new lieutenants who were struggling through their rating sorties toward Second Class.
The 512th Regiment had an excellent simulator center, where we carefully rehearsed all our training maneuvers before actually flying the sorties. Here Major Kuchkov often displayed his incredible flying skill. The simulator had a cockpit mock-up with a computer analysis station beside it. Using an electronic stylus, he could trace the flight path of a desired maneuver — anything from a shallow landing approach to a high-speed spiraling climb to an intercept. Then the students were expected to “fly” the simulator, following the optimal flight path as closely as possible. The only pilot who could actually match the original tracing, every time, was Kuchkov himself.