MiG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

CHAPTER V “We Will Get You Back”

Viktor Ivanovich Belenko was one defector the Russians were determined to get back. Embarrassing or damaging as defections by artists, intellectuals, diplomats, or KGB officers may be, all, after a fashion, can be explained away to the world and the Soviet people. It is not too difficult for Soviet propaganda organs and the KGB disinformation department to portray an artist or intellectual as an egoistical eccentric or a spoiled degenerate leaning toward lunacy. It is not surprising if an occasional diplomat, having lived and worked in the rottenness of the West, succumbs to that rottenness and sinks into alcoholism, embezzlement, or insanity. And KGB officers? Who gives a damn about them anyway? They spend their lives selling the Soviet people, and each other, and a few are bound to wind up selling themselves.

But Belenko, symbolically and actually, was different — a son of the working class; a toiler in the fields and factories; an elite officer, whose record was strewn with commendations; a pure product of the Party; the quintessence of the New Communist Man. As a Soviet journalist said to Washington Post correspondent Peter Osnos in Moscow, “This was one of our very best people, a pilot in the air force entrusted to fly a top secret plane.” To admit that Belenko was less than the best would be to admit that the Party had been terribly, ludicrously wrong, that the very concept of the New Communist Man might be a myth. Thus, Belenko became probably the only defector in Soviet history about whom the Soviet Union had only good to say.

Were Belenko to remain alive and at liberty abroad, dangerous thoughts and precedents would arise in the minds of the people in general and other pilots in particular. If you cannot trust someone so perfect as Belenko, whom can you trust? Who is loyal? The question was reflected in a joke that spread through Moscow immediately after the British Broadcasting Corporation reported the sensational news of the escape: “Did you hear? From now on they are going to train only Politburo members to fly those planes.” And other pilots inevitably would ask themselves, “If Belenko can do it, why can’t I?” There were additional perils. Belenko was probably the most knowledgeable military man to flee since World War II, and the secrets and insights he could impart to the Americans would harm the Soviet Union. But worse, should he elect to speak out publicly, especially to the Soviet people, his words could be even more devastating than the loss of secrets.

The whole situation could be retrieved if Belenko were enticed back or if the Japanese or Americans were intimidated, duped, or cajoled into delivering him. After appropriate treatment and conditioning in a KGB psychiatric ward, he could be paraded forth as proof of the perfidies of the West, a true Soviet hero who had slipped out of the snares of the Dark Forces and come home to the Mother Country to attest to their perfidies. His staged appearances, the lines he mouthed, would dramatize to all pilots and everybody else the futility of trying to get away.

Thus, within an hour after Belenko and the MiG-25 had plowed off the runway in Hakodate, the Soviet Union initiated a massive, unprecedented campaign to recover him. In the Crisis Rooms of Washington the men who watched and participated in the intensifying international struggle that followed appreciated how great the stakes were.

Steven Steiner, thirty-six, Yale ’63, Columbia Graduate School ’66, slept from noon to eight on Sunday, September 5. He missed a balmy, sunny afternoon and upon awakening regretted anew that he could not take his wife and three children for an outing on that delightful Labor Day weekend. But he had the duty as Senior Watch Officer at the State Department Operations Center beginning at 12:01 A.M. Monday, and his family, having been with him at diplomatic posts in Yugoslavia and Moscow, had adjusted to the inconvenient hours he sometimes had to work. Just the night before he had worked the same shift.

Dressed in blue jeans, a sports shirt, and loafers, Steiner entered the Watch Center located in Room 7516 of the State Department at 11:15 P.M. and put his yogurt and diet cola in the refrigerator for later. He came early because he was required to read all the recent cables and be briefed about the world situation by the outgoing Senior Watch Officer before assuming responsibility for the Watch. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was traveling to Europe, and the Operations Center is the Secretary’s twenty-four-hour link to Washington. So he anticipated a heavy flow of messages and a busy night.

Steiner noted in the log at 12:01 A.M. that he had taken over the Watch and made his second entry at 12:47, recording that the Watch team had obtained and cabled information concerning Africa requested by Kissinger’s entourage in Zurich.

At 1:35 A.M. the special closed-circuit telephone rang in the Watch Center — a “NOIWON” (National Operations and Intelligence Watch Officers Network) alert signaling the entire U.S. crisis-management community that something extraordinary had occurred. As Steiner picked up his phone, other Watch Officers lifted similar emergency phones at the Situation Room in the White House, the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, the Operations Centers at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, and the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland. A male voice announced over the circuit: “The Defense Intelligence Agency is convening a NOIWON alert. On the basis of a preliminary report from the U.S. Fifth Air Force, we understand that a Soviet MiG-25 has landed at Hakodate in northern Japan….” The MiG had touched down at 12:50 A.M. Washington time. The circumstances of the flight and intent of the pilot had not yet been ascertained by American representatives in Japan. Two more alerts from the DIA at 1:49 and 2:06 added a few sparse details but failed to clarify whether the pilot had landed intentionally or of necessity. Meanwhile, the news ticker in the Watch Center typed out an Agence France-Presse dispatch reporting that the pilot had jumped from the aircraft and commenced firing a pistol. To Steiner, that sounded as though the Soviet pilot probably had lost his way or been forced down by mechanical trouble and was hostile to the West.

But at 4:30 A.M. the NOIWON bell rang a fourth time, and the voice speaking from the Pentagon was excited. The Soviet pilot, Viktor I. Belenko, had told representatives of the Japanese Foreign Ministry that he had flown the MiG purposely to Japan and desired political asylum in the United States.

At the National Military Command Center someone shouted, “Goddamn! We’ve got a Foxbat [NATO designation of the MiG-25] and the pilot to boot. Goddamn!”

With this the situation became all the more serious and urgent, especially so because of one of the most shameful incidents of pusillanimity in American history. On November 23, 1970 Seaman Simas Kudirka jumped from a Soviet fishing ship onto a U.S. Coast Guard cutter while the two ships were tied up alongside one another in American territorial waters off Martha’s Vineyard. Ashore in Boston, a Coast Guard rear admiral, acting in what he presumed to be the spirit of detente, ordered officers on the cutter to hand the defector back to the Russians. Contrary to U.S. naval political traditions, the American officers allowed six Russians to board the cutter, beat the defector and drag him back to the Soviet ship.

As a consequence of this disgrace, the U.S. government adopted measures to ensure that no bona fide Soviet defector ever again would be turned away or that, if he were, those responsible would have their professional heads chopped off. Precise instructions were promulgated to be followed from the moment it appeared that a foreign national was seeking political asylum. These included a stringent requirement that all American officials who might be concerned be swiftly notified and that a formal, permanent record of everyone involved be maintained.

Accordingly, Steiner and his Watch team successively and rapidly telephoned at their homes and awakened an aide to State Department Counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Director of Press Relations Frederick Brown, and officials in the Bureau of East Asian Affairs, the Soviet and Japanese Desks, the Humanitarian Affairs Bureau, the Visa Office, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. A full report was cabled to Kissinger. Then Steiner on his own initiative telephoned the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo because from his service in Moscow, he recognized the gravity and potential danger involved. Please emphasize to our Japanese friends, he said, that the physical safety of the pilot is paramount. Probably they already realize that. But it cannot be stressed too much. Protect the pilot. Be sure he is free to make his own decision.

By 6:00 A.M. the Watch Center was crowded with men and women called out of their sleep to study the messages flooding in from the Embassy, the Pentagon, the CIA, the Fifth Air Force in Japan, and the wire services. On a typically active night, the Watch Officer’s log entries noting major events might fill one page; Steiner’s had filled four. Having had no time for his yogurt and cola, he drove home through calm, treelined streets, tired and pleased: pleased that he and the Watch team had done their duty, pleased that people in other agencies had done their duty, that the system had worked exactly as it was supposed to work.

In Paris, reporters accosted Kissinger and peppered him with questions about the fate of Belenko. “The United States will probably grant asylum,” he said. “If we do not, you may assume I have been overruled.”

Actually, once Belenko put his request for asylum in writing, there was no question about American willingness to accept him. The Director of Central Intelligence in consultation with the Attorney General and the Commissioner of Immigration is empowered, without reference to immigration laws or any other laws, to admit up to 100 aliens to the United States annually. But in this case the decision was made instantly by President Ford himself.

He learned of Belenko’s flight before breakfast. His national security adviser, lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, recalls that the President at once comprehended the import of Belenko’s flight, and was extremely interested.

What did appear in question that Labor Day morning was the outcome of the ferocious Soviet pressures to browbeat and intimidate the Japanese into surrendering Belenko and the MiG-25.

Promptly after Belenko landed, the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo announced that the Soviet Union possessed “an inviolable right to protect its military secrets.” The MiG-25 was a secret military aircraft. Therefore, the Japanese must return it immediately and permit no one to look at it. The embassy further declared, as if addressing some Soviet colony, that the granting of asylum to Belenko “could not be tolerated.” The Soviet government lodged repeated protests demanding the immediate return of Belenko and the plane. One was so brazenly and harshly worded that the Japanese characterized it as unparalleled in the history of diplomatic relations with the USSR.

Soviet aircraft swarmed around Japan in a deliberate and insulting display of power. At sea, Soviet naval vessels started seizing Japanese fishing craft and hauling their crews off to Soviet prisons. These blatant piratical depredations were meant to make the Japanese cower by showing them bow the Russians could disrupt the fishing industry on which their island economy heavily depends.

Meanwhile, the Russians tried to get at the plane directly. Late in the afternoon of the sixth, a Russian using a false name showed up at the Hakodate Airport administrator’s office, identifying himself as “a crewman of a Soviet merchant ship being repaired at Hakodate harbor.” He said he had come to interview his compatriot Belenko. A Japanese official stonily turned him away.

The next afternoon three more Russians knocked at the airport administration office. Their spokesman introduced himself as the “Tass bureau chief in Tokyo” and his two companions as “Aeroflot engineers.”

“It’s our job to ship the airplane out, but we understand that its landing gear is damaged,” he said earnestly. “We must have the parts to repair them and would like to ascertain how badly the gear is smashed. So we would like to go on out to the plane, look around, and take some photographs.”

Airport administrator Masao Kageoka smiled politely. “Well, the plane is now under control of the Japanese police, and it is beyond my authority to grant you access. By the way, I don’t quite understand in which capacity you are here.”

“Oh,” said the “Tass” man, “I’m here as a civilian.”

This same indefatigable intelligence officer visited the regional headquarters of the Hokkaido police the next morning and announced that he was reporting for his “briefing” on the plane and pilot. The police said, “We can’t give you any details. Get out!”

On Tuesday, September 7, the White House announced that President Ford himself had decided to grant Belenko asylum in the United States. “If he asks for asylum here, he will be welcome,” said Press Secretary Ron Nessen. Unfortunately, some misconstrued the phrasing to mean that Belenko had not yet asked for asylum.

But, as an official statement issued at the same time by the State Department made clear, there was no doubt about Belenko’s desires: “The Japanese government notified us of the pilot’s request for asylum, and they did it yesterday. We have informed the government of Japan that we are prepared to allow the pilot to come to the United States. We understand that is his desire. I believe the same comment or a comment to that effect was made this morning at the White House.”

The announcements in Washington coupled with indications emerging from a Japanese Cabinet meeting that Belenko was about to be transferred to the Americans, incited the Russians to new fury and desperation. Soviet Ambassador Dmitri Polyansky read to the Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister a statement, the crudity of which exceeded all bounds of conventional diplomatic propriety. The Russians declared that Belenko had made an emergency landing and accused the Japanese of lying about it, or “fabricating a story” to conceal the “physical violence and other unforgivable means” employed to kidnap him.

After the confrontation between Belenko and the KGB officer, Soviet Embassy spokesman Aleksandr Shishaev denounced the meeting as “a farce, a shame on the Japanese government.” He claimed that “it was impossible for him [Belenko] to answer questions. He was under the influence of narcotics. He sat there like a dummy.”

With the departure of Belenko for the United States, the Soviet pressures on Japan did not abate; they merely were refocused on recovery of the MiG-25 before the Americans could study it. Surveillance flights by Soviet fighters and seizure of Japanese fishing craft and their crews at sea continued. Moscow threatened economic retaliation and hinted at all sorts of dire, though unspecified, consequences unless the Japanese bowed at once.

A flurry of secret messages about the MiG-25 bounced back and forth between Tokyo and Washington, many handled through General Scowcroft, who coordinated and mediated between the Defense and State departments. The Pentagon wanted to bring the plane to the United States, test it, fly it, keep it. “Absolutely,” remembers Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense. “We wanted the plane. We wanted metal samples; to fly it, take it apart, then fly it again.”

Some in the State Department, however, were skittish, fearing that retention of the MiG would strain detente and complicate other relations with the Russians. And the State Department was reluctant to pressure the Japanese, who initially were inclined to manage disposition of the plane in a manner that would spare the Soviet Union as much embarrassment as possible.

Out of all the bureaucratic wrangling, a compromise emerged. How long would scientists, engineers, and technicians require to extract all data desired by disassembling and studying the plane on the ground? A minimum of thirty days, the Pentagon said.

The Japanese promptly pledged to make the MiG-25 available at least that long, provided American specialists wore civilian clothes and acted as consultants working under their supervision.

In their threats, insolence, and condescension, the Russians had gone too far and provoked the Japanese government, with widespread support of the citizenry, into a posture of defiance. The Japanese now started subtly taunting the Russians. Rejecting all Soviet protests and charges, the government expressed surprise that the Soviet Union had yet to apologize for violating Japanese airspace. Said Foreign Minister Kiichi Miyazawa: “I realize the Soviet Union is the kind of nation that gets bogged down in red tape in making declarations, but at the very least, the Soviet Union has a duty to control the actions of its uniformed military men. It’s like landing in a neighbor’s garden and not even bothering to say ‘Boo.’”

As for all the strident Soviet demands that the MiG-25 be given back, another Foreign Ministry official said, “The Soviet Union should first explain what it thinks of the incident. It is no way for anyone to try to take back something he has thrown, even though inadvertently, into the yard of his neighbor.”

What then will happen to the plane? Well, the Japanese solemnly explained, that is a complicated issue. There are precedents for returning it and precedents for keeping it. We will just have to see. But for the time being, we will have to retain it as “evidence” while our investigation of the whole matter continues.

The Los Angeles Times summed up the situation in a brief editorial:

The trouble with the Soviet authorities is that they just won’t listen. There they are, kicking, screaming and all but turning blue in the face while they demand the immediate return of their highly sophisticated and very secret MiG-25 jet fighter, flown to Japan by a defecting Russian pilot. And there’s the Japanese foreign minister, trying calmly, and with impeccable legal logic, to explain that the plane can’t be returned now because it’s evidence in a crime, the crime being the violation of Japanese airspace by said Russian pilot, whose punishment — and let no one say he didn’t ask for it — is likely to be a one-way ticket to the United States.

Material evidence in a crime such as this plainly deserves the most careful going-over, perhaps even by experts from several countries. After all, who knows what that pilot could have been surreptitiously carrying? Perhaps a little caviar hidden among the plane’s electronic countermeasures? Maybe a liter of vodka secreted somewhere in the airframe? A hot balalaika or two cached in the turbojet engines? The only way to find out is to take the plane apart piece by piece, as the cops did with the smuggler’s car in “The French Connection.”

The interests of the law must, of course, be served. It all seems very sensible and straightforward to us. Why the Russians can’t understand is a puzzle.

With the revelation that American “consultants” were en route to assist in the Japanese “investigation,” the Russians realized they had no chance now of preventing examination and exploitation of the MiG-25. So they redirected their propaganda toward the Soviet people and their pressures toward the United States.

Tass on September 14 initiated the Soviet efforts to represent Belenko as a hero and patriot abducted and spirited away against his will by the Dark Forces with the connivance of the devious and unscrupulous Japanese. According to Tass, Belenko during a routine training flight strayed off course, ran out of fuel, and made a forced landing at Hakodate. (An unidentified Soviet source attempted to lend credence to this version by telling Western newsmen that Belenko maintained radio contact with his base up until his landing.) Tass asserted that Japanese police clamped a hood over Belenko’s head, dragged him away by his arms, shoved him into a car, and hid him in isolation, refusing Soviet pleas to see him.

On the very day following the landing of the Soviet aircraft in Japan, an official representative of the White House announced that President Ford had decided to grant asylum to the Soviet pilot. The same White House representative was forced to acknowledge that the American authorities did not even know whether the pilot had sought asylum in the U.S.

It is difficult to label this announcement as anything but inflammatory. Even the sensation-oriented American press and television called this “unusual” for the White House, apparently dictated by reason of the election campaign. It is evident that American “special services” were behind this “invitation” to the Soviet pilot. Subsequent events showed their participation in the removal of Belenko to the U.S….

Despite persistent demands on the part of the Soviets, Japanese authorities refused for several days to satisfy the appeal for a meeting between Soviet representatives and the pilot. When such a meeting finally took place, it was reduced to a worthless farce. At a distance of 25-30 meters, fenced off from the representatives of the Soviet Embassy in Japan by a barricade of office tables, sat Belenko, like a mannequin, surrounded by police and other representatives of the Japanese authorities. Not even a Soviet doctor, who would have been able to render a professional opinion as to the physical condition of the pilot, was allowed at the meeting.

This was in no way a meeting conducive to talking with Belenko. His two or three incoherent sentences were hardly confirmation of the Japanese representatives’ assertions as to the pilot’s intention “to receive political asylum” in the U.S. The entire course of the meeting, which lasted only seven minutes in all, including time to translate his sentences into Japanese, demonstrated that Belenko was in an abnormal condition, under the influence of drugs or something else. Immediately following this meeting, he was placed in an airplane owned by an American company and taken, under guard, to the U.S. This is how the Japanese authorities, in collaboration with American “special services,” treated the Soviet pilot.

Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko flew to New York on September 20 and, when asked about the Belenko affair, said, “This is a matter that will come up in discussions between us and the United States.” That evening during a private dinner with Kissinger at the Waldorf-Astoria, Gromyko emphasized that the return of Belenko was an issue of such grave importance to the Soviet Union that Brezhnev himself was personally concerned with it. The Russians, he said, were not at all sure that the man presented to them in Tokyo was even Belenko. The belief that Belenko had been abducted and was being held against his will would continue to poison U.S.-Soviet relations until it was eliminated, and it could be extirpated only if the Russians, with one of their own physicians present, were allowed to talk personally to Belenko at length.

In Washington the Soviets, who sometimes try to lobby in Congress as assiduously as the AFL-CIO or American Medical Association, sought to generate pressures in Congress for the return of Belenko. An emissary from the Soviet Embassy delivered a handwritten letter from Belenko’s wife, Ludmilla, and mother to the office of Representative Dante Fascell, chairman of the U.S. commission that monitors compliance with the Helsinki Accords, especially the human rights provisions. The Russian handwriting was that of Belenko’s wife; the maudlin words almost certainly were those of the KGB. They appealed to the congressman to uphold his commitment to human rights by helping to free this captured son and husband and reunite him with his loving, grief-stricken family. And repeatedly, the Embassy dispatched its second ranking member, Yuly Vorontsov, one of the Soviet Union’s three or four most forceful diplomatic operatives, to demand from the State Department an opportunity to confront, or rather, to have a long, leisurely talk with Belenko.

In Moscow the Foreign Ministry staged a melodramatic conference for the foreign and Soviet press corps, starring Belenko’s wife and his mother, whom he had last seen twenty-seven years before, when he was two years old. Foreign Ministry official Lev Krylov, who presided over the show, declared at the outset that “Western propaganda” stories that Belenko had voluntarily flown to Japan because of dissatisfaction with life in the Soviet Union were malicious fabrications. “All this is a lie from beginning to end.”

Ludmilla spoke emotionally and often wept before the cameras. “We do not believe and will never believe that he is voluntarily abroad. I do not doubt Viktor’s love and loyalty. And this gives me the absolute right to declare that something terrible has happened to Viktor and that he needs assistance, which I request all of you present here to give him.

“On Sunday, one day before the terrible event, Viktor spent the entire day walking and playing with our son, as he usually did on his free days. They worked figurines out of plastic and read fairy stories. I baked pies, and Viktor helped me do it. We had supper in the evening and went to bed. Before going to sleep, Viktor reminded me that our friend’s birthday was several days away and proposed that we give him several crystal glasses at his birthday party. On the morning of September sixth, he told me he would be back early from the flight and would take our son from kindergarten. He kissed me and Dima and went off, as he did every day.

“Nothing bode us ill. I am sure that something happened during the flight, and he was forced to land the plane on foreign territory. I firmly believe that Viktor was and will continue to be a Soviet man. It was his dream to be a test pilot. On September third, actually three days before the incident he sent the necessary papers for appointment as test pilot to the command.

“Western press reports that my husband requested political asylum in the U.S.A. are a deliberate lie. I am absolutely sure that such a statement was fabricated against his will.

“Our family is well-off. We live in a good apartment with every convenience. My husband is well paid. His ability as a flier was highly appreciated by the commanding officers. He is a patriot. He received only commendations during his service. He had excellent marks in school. We have no news from Viktor to this day. Is this not testimony that he is under coercion?”

Pausing to sob now and then, Ludmilla read excerpts from a letter she had sent to her beloved kidnapped husband. “Darling, I am convinced that some incredible misfortune happened to you…. My dear Viktor, we are waiting for you at home; return soon. I was officially reassured at the highest level here that you will be forgiven, even if you have made a mistake…. Take all steps and ensure your return to the homeland.” Tearfully, Ludmilla told the press that in the name of humanity she had addressed a personal appeal to President Ford and quoted further from her letter to Belenko: “I rely on [Ford’s] humaneness. Though this is a personal matter for us, he is also a father and must understand our sorrow; help me, you, and our son to be together.”

The performance of Belenko’s mother, suddenly lifted out of obscurity in the Caucasus, flown to Moscow, handsomely dressed, coiffured, and drilled, was good, if brief, considering that she personally knew nothing of the man she had last seen as a child of two. She did not cry as well as Ludmilla, but did produce some tears, which she dabbed with a white handkerchief. Her few lines were aimed at mothers everywhere, but most important, at Soviet mothers.

“My son, Viktor, has always been a patriot. In the family and his service, he was single-minded and level-headed. I am convinced that some misfortune happened to him. And I, as mother, am deeply pained that someone wants to take advantage of my son’s trouble, to prevent him from returning home. Who but a mother knows her child best? That is why I say that my Viktor is honest before the homeland and myself.”

Krylov concluded the conference with another recitation of the infamous “arbitrary actions and lawlessness” of the devious Japanese and a denunciation of President Ford. Belenko’s behavior in Japan proved that his flight was not intentional. “How else is one to explain his warning shots when unauthorized persons tried to approach the plane and his protests against the plane being photographed? The Japanese authorities used force on Belenko. He was handcuffed and had a bag over his head and was hidden on the back seat of a car when he was moved….”

The combined American-Japanese abduction of Belenko, Krylov charged, was the act of callous homewreckers and flagrantly violated the Helsinki Accords on human rights only recently signed by President Ford himself.

The authors of the script the two ladies acted out understandably made a few factual errors, knowingly and unknowingly. Ludmilla never baked pies. Belenko never kissed his wife and son good-bye in the morning because he had to leave for the base so early that they were still asleep. He did not promise to pick up the child from kindergarten in midafternoon because, no matter when flights were completed, Shevtsov or the Monster required all officers to remain on the base until 6:00 P.M. Like many fighter pilots, Belenko would have liked to become a test pilot. But he and the rest knew that, the right connections in Moscow being absent, such an aspiration was impossible of fulfillment, and he had never applied to be a test pilot.

Yet the appearance of the women, highly publicized in the Soviet Union, served the purpose of saving face for the Party. The faith of the Party in Belenko was not misplaced; the theories the Party followed in making of him a New Communist Man, a “Soviet man,” as Ludmilla put it were not invalid; none of the causes of the whole tragic incident were to be found within the Soviet system or the Mother Country. The trouble, as so many other Soviet troubles, grew out of the plotting of the Dark Forces.

However, the press conference did not produce the desired effects abroad. A succinct editorial in the Baltimore Sun typified much of the Western reaction:

Soviet officialdom is not noted for humor except, on occasion, for the crude and inadvertent kind. A classic example of the latter must be credited to one Lev V. Krylov, a Foreign Ministry official assigned to orchestrate a campaign for the repatriation of Senior Lieutenant Viktor Belenko. Lieutenant Belenko is the Soviet pilot who defected to Japan September 6 in a MiG-25 that has been fondly scrutinized by American intelligence. The Kremlin wants Lieutenant Belenko back — not to punish, heaven forbid, but to reunite him with a wife and mother who wept in front of Soviet cameras. Comrade Krylov apparently was so affected by this display of emotion that he accused Japan and the United States of acts “tantamount to splitting a family by force.”

This would almost be funny if one could put out of mind, for a moment, the tens of thousands of German families divided by the Berlin Wall and the thousands of Russian Jews in exile who wait and wait and wait for the Soviet Union to grant exit permits to their relatives.

The renewed slander of Japan disseminated at the press conference, together with another incident, infuriated the Japanese. In New York Gromyko summoned the new Japanese Foreign Minister, Zentaro Kosaka, to a Soviet UN office and, “offering not even a glass of water,” spoke to him with such condescension that Kosaka, a courtly diplomat given to understatement, described the meeting as “extremely severe.”

The Japanese government in Tokyo made public a specific rebuttal of the Soviet charges:

The Soviets claim that a bag had been thrown over Lieutenant Belenko’s head, but the fact was that he had his jacket thrown over his face by his expressed wish because he didn’t want to be exposed to cameras.

The Soviets claim that he was handcuffed because of the string seen in a picture of him, but the fact was that he held a paper bag containing his belongings, and the string of the bag appeared in the photo.

The Soviets claim that he was kept 25-30 meters away from a Soviet Embassy official who came to see him, and the Japanese police interfered with the conversation. The fact was that the distance was only eight meters, and there was no interference whatever.

The statement written and signed by Lieutenant Belenko was penned in a hotel in Hokkaido, where he landed the MiG-25 Foxbat. It was shown to Ambassador Dmitri Polyansky, but he refused to take it.

[The statement said] “I hereby state that I, Viktor Ivanovich Belenko, do not wish to return to the Soviet Union and hope to reside in the United States. This decision has been made autonomously and out of my own free will. Viktor I. Belenko.”

Privately the Japanese now said in effect to the Americans: Let’s get started. We’ll take it apart and ship it back to them in pieces.

On October 1 at four in the afternoon, President Ford received Gromyko and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in the Oval Office of the White House. The subject of Belenko was not on the scheduled agenda of discussions, and Ford was surprised when Gromyko broached it — suddenly, indignantly, belligerently.

“We were after that plane like a dog in heat,” he announced — not because the Russians cared about the loss of secrets it embodied but because it was stolen. Gromyko declared that Belenko was a thief, a common criminal whom the United States was obligated to extradite in the interests of simple justice. As a criminal, who had absconded with something as valuable as an aircraft, he obviously did not qualify for political asylum. Both international law and the interests of Soviet-American relations required that he be forcibly repatriated to face the prosecution his crime deserved.

President Ford made no attempt to disguise his astonishment or anger. Having been continuously briefed all along about Belenko and attendant developments, he was aware of the press conference in Moscow three days before and the consistent Soviet portrayal of Belenko as a “good man,” a “Soviet man,” a “patriot,” “one of our best people,” a highly commended officer, who, after straying off course, had been kidnapped and dragged away from country and family against his will, an esteemed comrade, who, even if he had made some unknown mistake, would be forgiven. Now, with a straight face, the foreign minister of the Soviet Union told him that this same man was a thief who must be brought before the bar of justice.

Ford was blunt. He was thoroughly familiar with the Belenko case. If ever there was an authentic Soviet defector, if ever anyone merited political asylum, it was Belenko. He was more than welcome in the United States as long as he lived. So far as the United States government was concerned, the issue was closed and not subject to further discussion or negotiation.

Through the decades the Russians have perfected to an art the practice of wresting concessions from other nations by thrashing about, growling menacingly, and acting like a great, frightening, unruly, and unpredictable bear. The reaction of the world often has been akin to that of indulgent parents undertaking to appease a spoiled child in the midst of a temper tantrum.

The Soviet temper tantrum had failed to wrest Belenko from the Japanese or the Americans. Now the only possibility lay in reaching him personally through words or other means.