Race for the Black Box

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The U.S. sailors crisscrossing the northern reaches of the Sea of Japan last week had a name for the risky face-offs: "chicken of the sea." The seamen were aboard a seven-ship U.S. task force that was systematically sweeping a 350-sq.-mi. area of the cold, choppy international waters slightly more than twelve miles from the Soviet Union's Moneron Island and 100 miles northeast of Japan. Hard by the U.S. ships—and sometimes directly under their bows—was a fleet of as many as 40 Soviet vessels, including a missile cruiser, oceanographic ships, trawlers and specialized salvage ships. Both sides were frantically searching for a prize that could unlock some of the mysteries of the last ghastly minutes of Korean Air Lines Flight 007: the "black box" flight-and voice-recording devices that were stored in the tail assembly of the Boeing 747 airliner. Said a U.S. official in Washington: "There is one helluva race going on out there."

At stake is information that may shed light on the question of why the doomed 747 strayed so disastrously into Soviet territory, and also on the bitter U.S.-Soviet quarrel over who was at fault. The two black boxes—actually, they are bright orange—are small (5 in. by 9 in. by 15 in.) but heavily armored to withstand explosion, heat and pressure. Their tapes of conversations in the airliner's cockpit could show whether the crew had any warning before a Soviet Su-15 interceptor knocked Flight 007 out of the sky, killing all 269 aboard. For the U.S., retrieval of the boxes could mean the opportunity to strengthen the Reagan Administration's case about the brutality of the incident. The U.S. fears that if the Soviets find the recorders, they will alter or destroy the information in them.

Using special underwater electronic location devices, sonar and TV-equipped, deep-diving, remote-controlled submersible craft, the two main U.S. search vessels, the U.S.N.S. Narragansett and the U.S.S. Conserver, at times seemed tantalizingly close to their targets. At least twice the ships picked up the distinctive "ping" of special electronic signaling devices within the boxes, which are audible up to five miles under water. The sounds were coming from a depth of about 2,500 ft. Each time, contact was lost.

For their part, the Soviets at one point assembled a dozen fishing and naval auxiliary vessels and apparently tried a concerted sweep of the ocean floor in the search area, using some kind of trawling gear. They were not observed to bring up anything. Nonetheless, the Soviets told Japan that they had "documents and articles" from Flight 007 that they will turn over to the Japanese this week.

The Soviets also tried harassment. Several times during last week's hunt, smaller Soviet vessels dashed at one of the searching U.S. ships, sometimes stopping dead in the water directly in front of it. At other times, Soviet ships would run closely parallel to the U.S. vessels, using the sounds of their engines and propellers to drown out reception from the U.S. underwater listening gear. The U.S. task force commander, Rear Admiral William A. Cockell Jr., told TIME's Tokyo bureau chief Edwin Reingold, "In some cases our ships have had to back off." When they did, their search patterns were spoiled.