Today, three years after the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing all 269 people aboard, they remain convinced that some evidence somewhere will prove to the world that the airliner was sent over their skies by the Reagan Administration. In May of 1984, shortly after beginning research on Flight 007, I was granted permission to visit the Soviet Union and conduct interviews about it. My visit to Moscow culminated in a long meeting with M.N.V. Ogarkov, the head of the Soviet General Staff, and Deputy Foreign Minister G.M.Kornienko, in an ornate conference room. I raised what seemed to be obvious questions. Why not simply tell the world, “we made a mistake and shot down the airliner in the belief that it was an American reconnaisance plan”? Why say that it had to be a spy plane when there obviously was no proof? Kornienko answered by telling me why I had been invited to Moscow; he and Ogarkov had agreed to my visa in the hope that they could persuade me, as a journalist, to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) role in the shootdown. Taken aback, but realizing that the two senior Soviet officials were serious, I asked Kornienko with a laugh whether he was trying to be my editor. His response came in English: “Your assignment is to find that it was an intruder.” The Deputy Foreign Minister added that the American public would never accept the shootdown as a rational act on the Soviet’s part unless it could be proved that the overflight of sensitive military installations was deliberate. I spent the next 2 years investigating the very questions posed by kornienko and Ogarkov, and found that Flight 007 was not on an intelligence-gathering mission for the CIA or any other agency of the U.S. or S. Korea. But just why the plane ended up hundreds of miles off course may never be fully understood. How had the sophisticated navigational equipment on the Boeing 747, widely considered one of the safest planes in the world, failed to alert the crew? What basis did President Reagan and his top advisers have for publicly insisting that the Soviet Union had identified the plane as a commercial airliner before shooting it down? I learned many new facts in my researches, and they made clear that the destructions of Flight 007 had its beginnings not in international intrigue but in the ordinary human feelings of the Korean Air Lines crew members who were responsible for the lives of hundreds of innocent airline passengers.