Murder at 37,000 feet / By David Reed

Murder at 37,000 feet / By David Reed

“ There was no distress call, no warning. The airliner, its 115 passengers and crew, simply vanished. Here is the story behind the detective work that solved the mystery.”

            Charlie Cho, the 54-year-old president of Korean Air, was at his Seoul home on Sunday afternoon, November 29, 1987, when the phone rang. “Boss, our 707 from Baghdad is an hour and a half late arriving at Bangkok,” an employee reported. Cho immediately drove to the airport.

            KAL Flight 858, a four engine Boeing 707, had originated in Baghdad just before midnight. It stopped briefly in Abu Dhabi in the Persian Gulf, then took off for Seoul with a scheduled refueling in Bangkok. The pilot had last reported to air-traffic control at 2.01pm Korean time while over the Andaman Sea, approaching the coast of Burma: “I will be landing in Bangkok in 45 minutes. I’m flying at 37,000 feet. Everything is normal.”

            Minutes later, KAL 858, carrying 115 persons, including a crew of 20, vanished.

            In 1969, Korean Air, then known as Korean Air Lines, was a small government-owned airlines, losing money, when Charlie Cho’s elder brother, Cho Choong Hoon, took it over. Since then, it has grown by leaps and bounds—and has been plagued by disasters not of its own making. In 1978, two passengers were killed when Soviet fighters forced a KAL 707 to land on a frozen lake in the USSR. Then, in 1983, a Soviet fighter shot down KAL Flight 007, killing all 269 on board.

            Now KAL 858 was missing.

            Cho wondered why the pilot had not sent a distress signal, an operation that would have taken him only a second or two. The captain had more than 5,000 hours of civilian flying experience, and Cho had complete confidence in him. He had similar faith in the aircraft, which only a few weeks earlier had received a thorough mechanical check.

            That there had been no distress signal suggested the plane had been destroyed suddenly, perhaps by a terrorist bomb. Cho asked for a list of passengers who had left the plane in Abu Dhabi.

            Most were Arabs, but there were tow Japanese names on the list—Shinichi, a man’s name, and Mayuni, a woman’s name. Cho, who speaks Japanese, knew that these were first names. He cabled KAL offices in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain and asked for their last names and passport numbers. Cho had his staff dig out the couple’s flight coupons. He learnt that the pair, whose last name Cho now knew was Hachiya, had flown from Vienna to Belgrade where they had spent five days. They then flew to Baghdad where they boarded Flight 858, deplaning later in Abu Dhabi. There was one leg left on their tickets: from Abu Dhabi to Bahrain, also in the Persian Gulf/

            “It doesn’t make sense,” said Cho, “The Persian Gulf is no place for sightseers. And they spent five days in Belgrade, which is full of North Korean agents. I don’t like all this zigzagging, around.” The couple could have flown to Bahrain directly from Belgrade on another carrier.

            Cho got Japanese officials to check the passports, which they found had been forged.

            Mysterious woman

            Cho discovered that the couple had flown to Bahrain and checked into the Regency Inter-Continental Hotel. The man appeared to be about 70; the woman, a striking beauty, was in her mid-20s.

            Bahraini authorities were notified. When the pair arrived at the airport for a flight to Rome, their passports were seized, and they were told, “You have forged passports. You’re not going on this flight.”

            The man took out a cigarette, bit into the filter, swallowed something and fell into a fatal coma. The woman bit into the filter of her cigarette, but a security officer snatched it away before she could swallow all of the contents. None the less, she fell unconscious from what was later determined to be cyanide and was rushed to a hospital.

            South Korean and Japanese officials maintained a round-the-clock vigil, hoping that if the woman who called herself Mayumi Hachiya survived, she might talk. She had become a human black box, a key to the mystery of what happened to KAL 858.

            All the evidence, investigators felt, pointed to North Korea. Kim II Sung, the Stalinist dictator, has long record of terrorist outrages against South Korea, including several assassination attempts on its presidents.

            Now Kim nursed a new grudge. He was incensed that Seoul had been chosen as the site of the 1988 Olympics, and many feared he would resort to terrorism to disrupt planning for the games.

            An astonishing confession

            Mayumi remained unconscious for two days, and when she finally revived she said nothing. Bahraini authorities agreed to extradite her to South Korea. On December 15, a special KAL jet flew her and the body of her accomplice to Seoul. After arriving in South Korea, Mayumi still refused to talk, and investigators maintained a 24-hour-a-day suicide watch.

            The next day Mayumi finally began to speak. First she pretended to be Chinese, from Heilungkiang Province, but she did not have the right accent for the region and was not thoroughly familiar with Chinese cuisine. Nest she said she lived in Japan. She spoke the language fluently and gave an address in Japan as hers, but a check proved it was false.

            Mayumi undoubtedly thought she would be tortured. But South Korean officials treated her gently and even took her on car rides through Seoul.

            All her life Mayumi had been told that South Korean lived in poverty. So she was to be astonished at the obvious affluence of ordinary citizens. Watching television, she was astounded to hear people criticize the government. In North Korea even a hint of dissent results in prison or death.

            No one can say with certainty why Mayumi confessed. The kind treatment, as well as glimpses of South Korean wealth and freedom, may have played a role. Perhaps she realized that the game was up. On her eight day in Seoul, she touched a female investigator, subbed and said in Korean, “Elder Sister, forgive me. I’m truly sorry.”

            She told stunned investigators that she and her late companion had destroyed KAL 858 on orders from the head of North Korea’s overseas spy agency. In fact, she had been told the directive originated with Kim Chong II, the son and designated successor to Kim II Sung. The aim was to wreck the Olympics by frightening away potential participants, according to official South Korean findings.

            The confession came in a torrent of words. She told them her real name is Kim Hyon-hui, and that her father is a high-ranking North Korean government official. As a child actress, she appeared in two films. When she was an 18-year-old college student majoring in Japanese, she was chosen for what North Korea regards as a high honour: acceptance as a trainee for North Korea’s overseas spy agency. During nearly eight years of intensive training, she learnt hand-to-hand combat and how to handle firearms and bombs.

            For two years Mayumi lived with a Japanese woman in Pyongyang to improve her Japanese and learn the country’s customs. In 1984 she was paired with veteran agent Kim-Sung-il, the man who had committed suicide in Bahrain.

            The order to destroy a KAL plane was given to them on October 7, 1987. After a month’s advance training in explosives, they stood before a photograph of Kim Jr and vowed to carry out their mission. They flew to Moscow, then on to Budapest. From there, they drove to Vienna where they bought their air tickets.

            Next they flew to Belgrade and checked into the Metropol Hotel, where a North Korean agent gave them the bomb, which consisted of a small Japanese-made radio containing 340 grams of a high explosive and a timing device. The agent also provided them with a liquor bottle filled with a powerful explosive. When the radio exploded, it would set off a far more destructive blast from the bottle.

            Carrying the radio and bottle in a vinyl shopping bag, the couple flew to Baghdad on Iraqi Airways. As a security precaution, airline personnel confiscated the batteries in the radio before take-off and returned them after landing. When the couple started to board KAL’s Flight 858, an Iraqi security official tried to take the batteries away, but the old man protested indignantly. The official relented and let him keep the batteries. Twenty minutes before boarding, the man set the timer so that the bomb would explode nine hours later.

            As the couple boarded the plane, the purser asked them in Korean for their seat numbers. They did not respond. He asked them again in Japanese, and they responded—7B and 7C. They put the vinyl bag in the overhead compartment. Then Mayumi and the old man got off in Abu Dhabi, leaving the bomb behind. Fifty-six minutes later KAL 858 took off to Bangkok with 115 people condemned to death.

            Charlie Cho reckons that the flight crew undoubtedly was killed at the moment of the initial explosion and that the fuel tanks probably exploded as well, sending bodies and debris 11 kilometers to the sea.

            The destruction of KAL 858 was a monstrous crime, but as an act of terrorism it proved to be a monumental failure. No country was frightened away from the Olympics. On the contrary, 161 countries have announced they will attend, more than at any previous games.

            Mayumi now shows remorse. “I deserve to die a hundred times over as I committed an unpardonable crime,” she says. A death sentence is unlikely, but Mayumi will spent the rest of her days looking over her shoulder. As she knows only too well, North Korea’s spy agency neither forgets nor forgives an agent who talks. It might well have been a perfect crime but for the detective instincts of Charlie Cho.

“Maturity is the ability to do a job whether or not you are supervised, to carry money without spending it and to bear an injustice without wanting to get even”                                                                                 -Ann Landers