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 editoriaclass="underline"
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.”