This is a temperate, credible reconstruction of what really happened to Flight 007 and what America knew about it. On the basis of investigative reporting of a high order, Mr. Hersh concludes that KAL 007 was not on a secret intelligence mission but strayed because of gross human errors by the flight crew; that the U.S. Air Force knew almost immediately that the Soviets believed that they had attacked an American military intruder, not a civilian airliner; and that American leaders, most notably Secretary of State Shultz, misrepresented the situation because it served political purposes to portray the Soviets as deliberate murderers of civilians.