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One rule to remember in journalism is that the first reports of something are generally the most accurate, for the obvious reason that the first reporters don't yet know the party line. They don't yet know what they are supposed to say, so they tell the truth; they report what really happened. For instance, in Oklahoma City, many television reports from the crippled Murrah federal building initially mentioned the four bombs they had found. But four bombs would mean a conspiracy, wouldn't it? The one man who was executed for the crime could not have done four bombs alone. Never fear. Within hours, the humanoids with the electronics in their ears arrived from Washington, D.C. The zombies from the Communist News Network, from the Communist Broadcasting System, from the Bazonga Broadcasting Commune in London and so on, showed up, took over and told the local media "what really happened." Now we learned that there were not four bombs. There were no bombs. There was just the usual mixed up kid with a truck and a bag of fertilizer. Soon after the Soviets shot down Flight 007, a man named Orville Brockman, FAA Duty Officer in Washington, D.C., called Tommy Toles, Larry McDonald's media representative in the Seventh District of Georgia. Duty Officer Brockman told Tommy that he had just heard from a Mr. Tanaka, his counterpart in Japanese aviation, who told him that Japanese military radar had tracked KAL 007 to "a landing on Sakhalinska." The brief conversation was recorded and I have a copy of the tape. Indeed, it's no secret; many people have heard it. There was also a report in the New York Times on September 1, 1983. Of course we now know that the New York Times doesnít deserve to wrap fish, but, for what it's worth, the first piece on the shootdown by the Times said that 007 was forced down, that it landed on Sakhalin and that all aboard were safe. The first UPI wire story from Seoul on the same date, said much the same thing. According to these reports, the information originated at CIA. The President of KAL started out for Sakhalin to greet the passengers and crew, and got as far as Tokyo, where he was told they would not be coming. We also know from the transcripts of what was said that, long after 007 was "blown to bits," the Soviet pilot who attacked it reported it had not been shot down, and the general in charge told him to go ahead and destroy it. We know from the transcripts that long after 007 was attacked, the flight deck was still talking to Air Traffic Control in Tokyo, which is hard to do if you have been blown to bits. Flight Seven Captain Chun told Tokyo he was descending to a new altitude. Even the black boxes the Soviets had all along and were eventually forced to turn over prove that almost two minutes after the attack, when the tape mysteriously stopped (because of Soviet tampering?), the crew was still in control and Flight Seven was flying. Since then, many investigators have put the pieces together. Airline Captain Joe Ferguson and journalist Bob Lee did a study that applied Joe's long experience to the facts and found that when the aircraft was hit, it first descended rapidly to a lower altitude where the depressurized passengers could breathe, and then descended slower than it would have in a normal landing, while the captain circled, looked for a place to land. The 747 was aloft for twelve minutes after it was "blown to bits." Enter Avraham Shifrin, a Russian who was a Red Army major. As prosecutor for the Krasnodar Region, northeast of the Crimea, he sent many victims to the gulag. Then another prosecutor sent Shifrin there. He spent ten years in various facilities in the gulag, where he lost a leg. Later, he emigrated to Israel, where he established the Research Centre for Soviet Prisons, Psych-prisons and Forced-Labor Concentration Camps. Avraham became the world's foremost authority on the subject outside the system itself and wrote a book about it, which he sarcastically called a "travel guide" for use by tourists in the Soviet Union. He had a network of spies there who kept him informed. They helped him investigate the fate of Flight Seven. Avraham and his wife Elena, an English teacher, were guests on my nightly radio talk show in Los Angeles. They were the only guests I kept coming back for most of a week. Avraham is gone now, but a man named Bert Schlossberg has taken up the cudgels. His site is www.rescue007.org. Please go there and take a look. His book is Rescue 007: The Untold Story of KAL 007 and Its Survivors. According to people who apparently were there, the crippled aircraft landed successfully in the water off Sakhalin, near a tiny island called Moneron. The Soviets took the surviving passengers off, towed the aircraft to a shallow site near Moneron and sank it. Bert Schlossberg reports that the Soviets separated Larry McDonald from the rest of the passengers and flew him to Moscow about a week after the shootdown with a special KGB guard unit brought from Khabarovsk for the purpose. According to Bert Schlossberg: "The KGB had a fleet of special aircraft, the 910xx series, that was used exclusively for transporting high profile prisoners, VIPs, and others requiring the strictest security. These were used for even very short trips rather than using overland transportation." What happened to Larry in Moscow? Bert Schlossberg reports that the KGB stashed him in the infamous Lefortovo prison and interrogated him for months. The temperature in the Lefortovo cells is deliberately kept near freezing. The cells are a shade under five feet long, the trouble with which is that Larry McDonald is more than six feet tall. It gets worse. Bert Schlossberg writes: "The dirt floors were submerged in water so that the prisoners either stood or lay down in mud. There might be a slanted bench against which the prisoner could lean with his feet against the opposite wall." In middle of 1987, the Soviets moved Larry to a small prison near a town called Temir-Tau, in Kazakhstan. Bert Schlossberg says guards at the prison identified him from a photograph that had been computer-aged to show what he would have looked like at the time. The photograph also showed a scar running from his left nostril to the left end of his lip. In the summer of 1990, he was taken to the transportation prison in Karaganda, where he was known to remain as late as 1995. He may still be in Karaganda; he may have been moved again. Notice that 1995 is long after the Soviet Union was alleged to "collapse." Had it really collapsed, the gulag would have been thrown open and destroyed, like the concentration camp system first used by the British in the Boer War and perfected by the Nazis. The criminals running that system would have been tried and hung. Larry would have been liberated along with all the others. None of that has happened, of course, which is still another proof that the "collapse of Communism" is an utter fraud. Along these lines, new Soviet disinformation was recently extruding from a source in Ukraine and circulating the Internet, to the effect that Flight 007 was indeed "blown to bits" and so were the passengers. Why would the Soviets be saying this now? My speculation is that they anticipate many pieces to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the event, like the brief memoir you are reading now, and that they are trying to neutralize the possible effect of such coverage. Is our dear friend Larry alive? Could Larry McDonald have survived all this? I am confident that I could not. But if any man could, that man would be U.S. Navy Commander Lawrence Patton McDonald, a relative of General George S. Patton, Jr. Larry today would be 68. Other Prisoners of War older than he is have survived. So the answer to my question is that, based on the evidence, I believe he is. I believe he is waiting for us to bring him home, but that will not happen while communist world government traitor George W. Bush is commander-in-chief. It would be immensely satisfying to have to tell you how wrong I was, but I now believe Larry will come home only when Shifrin's spies find out where he is, and a deep cover team of honorably discharged SEALS mean as razorbacks goes in and gets him. When "President" Putrid complains he may do likewise with spetsnaz, Bush can tell him to "bring them on."
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