The KAL 007 tragedy was one of the most dramatic and dangerous episodes in the last phase of the Cold War. Despite two official investigations, innumerable television reports, newspaper and magazine articles, and books, the startling truth of this incident - in which 269 civilian passengers and crew lost their lives, and the world came closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis - has been obscured by a brazen and ongoing cover-up.

Here, as a result of more than ten years of research, Michel Brun reveals the truth, which at least four governments have colluded to conceal. Incident at Sakhalin not only demolishes the official story of a lone civilian airliner flying innocently off course. It does much more.

The book establishes that as the Korean Boeing 747 approached the Russian island of Sakhalin, so too did a number of U.S. military and reconnaissance aircraft in an ill-conceived intelligence and provocation operation that turned into a two-hour battle in which thirty or more U.S. Air Force and Navy personnel were killed and ten or more U.S. aircraft were shot down.

1. Contrary to "official" reports from the United States and the International Civil Aviation Organization, KAL 007 was not shot down over Sakhalin but was destroyed off Honshu, the main Japanese island, nearly an hour later than the reports claimed and by means and for reasons still not clear.