121. Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State1
12494. Subject: The KAL Tragedy and Soviet Political-Military Relations.
1. (C—Entire text).
2. Summary: The KAL tragedy has evoked interest in the role of the military in the Soviet power structure, a question we examine in this message. We find it credible and in keeping with Soviet tradition that a military commander took the decision to shoot down the plane. The authority to deal with intruders has always belonged to the military and was recently confirmed in new legislation. Although it has been speculated that the military took its decision in a defiant mood, to flex its muscle, it seems more plausible to us that in a situation of imperfect information, the military acted at the last moment in accordance with their standing instructions and in the absence of any other guidance on this incident.
3. The question of the military role in subsequent Soviet handling of the episode is more open to question. There is no evidence of differences within the political leadership over the decision to close ranks behind the military after the fact, a common Soviet reaction when confronted with hostile world opinion. The civilians would have shared with the military a sense of the sanctity of Soviet borders, would have seen quickly that the military had acted within its authority, and would have found it difficult to admit to their own public that any component of the Soviet state had made an egregious error.
[Page 417]4. At the same time, we find it significant that the substantial Soviet effort to explain the shootdown and later to shift blame to the U.S. has been a joint undertaking of the propaganda apparatus and the military. Senior civilian leaders—except Gromyko, who couldn’t avoid the issue in Madrid—[garble] clear of public identification with the issue for a month until Andropov put his blessing on the Soviet official version of the incident. Nor was there any public acknowledgement in the minutes of the weekly Politburo meeting that the subject was under discussion in the leadership, although the major public statements of September 2 and 6 were the acknowledged product of leadership deliberation.2 In short, none of the political leaders wanted to hold the KAL hot potato.
5. Whatever the civilian leaders think of the military handling of the KAL issue, they heed closely the views and the needs of the armed forces. They are conscious of the key role played by the military in the Brezhnev succession and the likelihood that a similar role will belong to the armed forces in the next succession. Party control of the army is still a cardinal principle of Soviet politics, but the growing prominence of military leaders in national security decision making in the later Brezhnev years, perhaps epitomized in Brezhnev’s October 1982 meeting with military commanders and highlighted in the new accessibility of top military figures to the press and foreign leaders, has compelled the party to reckon with the military viewpoint and perhaps adopt it as the national consensus on many key issues. End summary.
[Omitted here is the body of the telegram.]
- Source: Department of State, Central Foreign Policy File, Electronic Telegrams, D830568–0222. Confidential; Priority. Sent for information to Leningrad, USIA, USUN, Ankara, Athens, Bonn, Brussels, Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, Luxembourg, Madrid, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome, The Hague, Berlin, USNATO, Bern, Dublin, Helsinki, Stockholm, Vienna, Seoul, Tokyo, Belgrade, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Munich, Prague, Sofia, Warsaw, Department of Defense, and the Mission in Geneva.↩
- For the September 2 statement, see Document 84. For the September 6 statement, see Document 98.↩