On September 1, 1983, a Korean Air Lines civilian jet, flying off course over Russia's Sakhalin Island, who shot from the skies by a Russian interceptor - killing all 269 passengers and crew. The shooting of Flight 007 was a tragedy that shocked and mystified the world.
The next morning, an agitated Secretary of State George P. Shultz branded the event an "appalling act." In tones of outrage he announced that the Soviet interceptor had actually "moved itself into position where it had visual contact with the aircraft, so that with the eye you could see what it was you were looking at." In other words, the Soviets had deliberately shot down a passenger plane.
The Target is Destroyed tells why Flight 007 was off course why the Russians argued among themselves moments before the shooting, why the Regan administration maintains to this day a stance of shock and revulsion; why the Russians never once backed down on their insistence that 007 was a spy plane; and most important, what American intelligence knew - and how soon.
After two years of investigation in the United States, Japan, and Russia, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh supplies the answers in a report that is detailed, harrowing, and replete with evidence of incompetence, prejudice, and deliberate deception.
"The Target is Destroyed" is a cautionary story of how the United States and the Soviet Union reacted to each other and, indeed, perceived each other during a crisis in which neither side understood the truth about what had taken place.