Word: sakhaliners
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Thus began one of the strangest and least expected confrontations between the superpowers in the annals of U.S. postwar diplomacy. Though the aircraft so wantonly destroyed near the Soviet island of Sakhalin was not American, the distinction scarcely mattered: Flight 007 had left from U.S. territory and carried at least 61 American passengers, including a U.S. Congressman. The incident, moreover, seemed to be a crime against all humanity, a violation of the most fundamental rules of the air on which all the nations of the world, including the Soviet Union, depend in the busy, crowded skies...
According to the account of Secretary Shultz, Flight 007 first crossed the Kamchatka Peninsula, then the Sea of Okhotsk and the island of Sakhalin. Unless it changed course, the airliner apparently would have approached the area around Vladivostok on the Soviet mainland. This cold and bleak region is ordinarily off limits to foreigners...
...systems. The port of Petropavlovsk is home base for some 90 nuclear-powered submarines. The Soviets hope to turn the Sea of Okhotsk, between the peninsula and the mainland, into a private sheltered lake for submarines armed with missiles that could strike the continental U.S. The southern half of Sakhalin bristles with at least six Soviet airfields and is merely 27 miles across the Strait of Soya from Japan's Hokkaido Island. The strait is a choke point for Soviet naval vessels moving from the Sea of Japan into the North Pacific. Vladivostok and Sovetskaya-Gavan are the main...
...reddening skies over the southern coast of Sakhalin, a chain of events began unfolding that was far from normal. Japanese radar operators saw the blip of an unidentified plane close in rapidly on another blip they now knew represented the Korean airliner. The two symbols merged. The time...
Near the island of Moneron, 30 miles off the Sakhalin coast, Japanese fishermen heard at least two thunderous noise from the sky above them. They reported seeing a fiery flash denoting what one called "some awful explosion." It was an explosion that would soon echo, in disbelieving protest, around the world...