Word: tass
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Indeed, within hours after Kirkpatrick had played the tape at the U.N. the Soviets switched their line from "Who, me?" innocence to brazen defiance. Yes, said a statement by the official news agency TASS, the Soviets had "stopped" the flight. The reason, it said, was that although the plane was a civilian jet, it was on a spying mission for the U.S. That was a claim just about nobody outside the Communist world believed...
...impossible position by his government, which at that point was admitting nothing. In reply to the playing of the tape, the Soviet Ambassador could only lamely recite a long catalogue of alleged U.S. violations of Soviet airspace. Apparently unknown to him, Moscow was on the point of releasing a TASS statement admitting that the KAL flight had been "stopped." A few hours later, still looking impassive, Troyanovsky read the new TASS statement to the delegates without comment...
Moscow's English translations of the official Soviet statements on the Korean jetliner were sprinkled with quaint and creaky colloquialisms. Ronald Reagan, said TASS, is acting like an "ignoramus" who sheds "crocodile tears." Protesters who picketed the Long Island estate of the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations behaved like "hooligans." All this international outrage amounts to a "hullabaloo." It was as if a Soviet translator had stumbled onto a dusty dictionary of Anglo-American slang, circa...
...TASS implied that the U.S. had planned the course deviations that took Alight 007 into Soviet territory, since "relevant U.S. services followed the flight throughout its duration in the most attentive manner." Hinting that the jetliner was on a spy mission, it added, "So one may ask that if it were an ordinary flight of a civil aircraft. . . then why were there not taken any steps from the American side to end the gross violation of the airspace of the U.S.S.R.?" TASS said that 'leading circles" in the Soviet Union express "regret" over the loss of life...
...including the admission of responsibility and the undertaking of steps to ensure that it never happens again. For its part, the Soviet Union is simply "lying-openly, brazenly and knowingly. It is the face of a ruthless totalitarian state." Ovinnikov, declaring the session "unjustifiable," proceeded to read the TASS account of the episode to delegates...