The local Soviet air defense commander appears to have made a serious but honest mistake. The situation in the region was not normal; his forces had been on high alert and in a state of anxiety following incursions by US aircraft during the spring 1983 Pacific Fleet exercise recounted above. A Soviet demarche contended that US planes had flown some 32 kilometers (20 miles) into Soviet airspace and remained there for up to 20 minutes during several overflights.80 As a result, the Soviet air defense command was put on alert for the rest of the spring and summer--and possibly longer--and some senior officers were transferred, reprimanded, or dismissed.81
The KAL 007 incident was not only a tragedy; it also touched off a dangerous episode in US-Soviet relations, which already had been exacerbated by the war scare. As Dobrynin put it, both sides "went slightly crazy." For Washington, the incident seemed to express all that was wrong with the Soviet system and to vindicate the administration's critique of the Soviet system. For Moscow, the episode seemed to encapsulate and reinforce the Soviets' worst case assumptions about US policy for several reasons:
* President Reagan was quick to seize on the shootdown to broadly indict the Soviet system and its leaders. Andropov, notwithstanding whatever he actually may have believed about Soviet responsibility, was forced onto the defensive and evidently felt compelled to justify the USSR's actions at all costs.
* The US follow-on campaign at the UN and in other channels to embarrass and isolate the USSR in the international community undoubtedly contributed to Moscow's penchant to see an anti-Soviet plot.82 In the Soviet view, a campaign of this scope and magnitude that just happened to dovetail with the Reagan administration's moral critique of the USSR must have been more than simply a chance opportunity seized by Washington in the heat of the moment.83
* President Reagan's decision to use the KAL 007 shootdown to persuade Congress to support his requests for increased defense spending and the new MX missile pointed in the same direction, in Moscow's view. Given the Soviets' predilection for conspiracy theorizing, it was not farfetched that they would see a US design behind the combination of circumstances.
The net effect of the crisis was to close off whatever debate was still going on within the Soviet leadership over US intentions. On 29 September, Andropov issued an unusual "declaration" on US-Soviet relations that brought the war scare into sharper public focus:
The Soviet leadership deems it necessary to inform the Soviet people, other peoples, and all who are responsible for determining the policy of states, of its assessment of the course pursued in international affairs by the current US administration. In brief, it is a militarist course that represents a serious threat to peace.... If anyone had any illusion about the possibility of an evolution for the better in the policy of the present American administration, recent events have dispelled them completely.84 [emphasis added]
Dobrynin says the last phrase was the key one; the word "completely" was carefully chosen to express the Politburo's consensus that the USSR could not reach any agreement with the Reagan administration.85 In sum, the aftermath of the downing of KAL 007 heightened Soviet anxiety. Within weeks Soviet intelligence and the Soviet military, almost certainly with the KAL 007 episode in mind, would overreact to a US/NATO military exercise.