Ninety Seconds Of Terror

OVER AND OVER, IN ENGLISH, JAPANESE AND KOREAN, the voice on the passenger- cabin intercom repeated, "Urgent descent. Fasten seat belts. Put on masks." Those chilling words and others from the "black box" voice recorder, recovered from the wreckage of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, put to rest the nine-year-old question of whether the 269 passengers died instantly after Soviet fighters shot them out of the sky on Sept. 1, 1983. The crew's response to the disaster provided further evidence that they had no idea they had been attacked by air-to-air missiles. The transcripts of the tapes, made public in Moscow, also put the lie to claims by the Soviets that they never recovered the plane's flight recorder.

No less incriminating to the Soviet Union's communist rulers were minutes of a March 5, 1940, Politburo meeting making plain that it was Joseph Stalin who ordered the massacre of Polish officers whose bodies were later found in the Katyn Forest. Almost simultaneously with the release of the KAL transcripts, Moscow released documents showing that Stalin signed the minutes, which contained an order for "execution by a firing squad" -- without trial or indictment -- of 25,700 Polish officers and other notables.