US secretly told Japan that USSR downed Korean Boeing in 1983 by mistake

[Richard Coleman]

https://www.rt.com/news/326958-korean-bo...lassified/

[Drew Phipps]

From the title, I couldn't tell what the mistake was, the shooting or the telling. Turns out the shooting was deliberate, but the mis-identification of the passenger plane as an American spy plane was the "mistake". There was a spy plane in the area that had flown so close to the passenger plane that the radar returns merged.

Wasn't it also a "mistake", to play a high stakes game of chicken with civilian lives, in order to (presumably) test the Russians' radar capabilities?

[Magda Hassan]

From the title, I couldn't tell what the mistake was, the shooting or the telling. Turns out the shooting was deliberate, but the mis-identification of the passenger plane as an American spy plane was the "mistake". There was a spy plane in the area that had flown so close to the passenger plane that the radar returns merged.

Wasn't it also a "mistake", to play a high stakes game of chicken with civilian lives, in order to (presumably) test the Russians' radar capabilities?

Yes, I read it that way too. And it was definitely a mistake or 'mistake' to use civilian passenger planes as cover in invading sovereign air space for their spy missions. The US cannot even lie straight in bed. If they were honest and not so pathologically anti-communist they would have told Japan they were using the passenger plane as a cover for their spy plane which was in USSR territory and the USSR believed they were shooting at them not a passenger plane.