Word: tasse
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...responses to the unequivocal evidence of what had happened. After remaining virtually silent on the matter for almost two days, the Soviet Union finally issued a labored account of an "unidentified plane" that had "rudely violated the state border and intruded deep into the Soviet Union's airspace." TASS admitted that Soviet interceptors had "fired warning shots and tracer shells along the flying route of the plane," but refused to acknowledge shooting it down...
...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...
...capsule to form a single orbiting complex. The linking of the Cosmos with Salyut 7 has doubled the amount of working space available to cosmonauts aboard the space station. In addition, the latest Cosmos has thruster jets that enable it to change the orbit of the whole complex, leading TASS to dub it a "space tugboat." It also has a bell-shaped descent module, a detachable section that can ferry materials and experiments back to earth-something that the Soviets previously could not do with the cramped Soyuz...