The Tragedy of Flight 655 : Soviets Call on U.S. to Withdraw Forces From Gulf Region

MOSCOW — The Soviet Union, describing as a tragedy the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the U.S. Navy over the Persian Gulf, called upon the United States on Monday to withdraw its military and naval forces from the region immediately.

“The tragedy yet again confirms that the American fleet must leave the waters of the Persian Gulf without delay,” a Soviet government statement said.

The incident resulted directly, the statement argued, from “the unprecedented buildup of American warships and planes in the area . . . making for an explosive situation there that is fraught with the most unpredictable consequences.”

Perhaps ‘Trigger-Happy’

Gennady I. Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that the responsible crew members of the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes must have been incompetent not to have seen that a large, slow-moving Airbus was not an attacking jet fighter--or perhaps they were simply “trigger-happy.”

Recalling Moscow’s past warnings about dangers in the region, Gerasimov said that just deploying so many warships there increased the possibility of such incidents. The Soviets have said they would prefer instead, as an interim measure, a multinational naval force under the United Nations.

Gerasimov’s comments and the government statement were equally moderate in tone, reflecting the general Soviet desire to continue the improvement of Soviet-American relations despite Sunday’s incident.

1983 Incident Cited

Moscow did not want to follow “the bad example . . . of the totally wild anti-Soviet reaction” in the United States to the Soviet downing of a South Korean airliner in 1983, Gerasimov said.

That incident, in which 269 passengers died after the plane had flown into militarily sensitive airspace in the Soviet Far East, brought angry denunciations from President Reagan and a freeze in relations between Washington and Moscow.

Yet an angry commentary broadcast by Radio Moscow described the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 as “a deliberate mass murder in cold blood.”

“It is futile for the U.S. authorities to play down the tragedy with lavish hypocritical expressions of compassion for the families of the dead,” the commentator, Alexander Pogodin, said, “and claiming that this was just a deeply deplorable incident.”

Soviet officials and commentators were also insistent that there was no real parallel with the Soviet downing of the South Korean airliner five years ago.

Reagan spoke at the time of “the barbarity of the Soviet government in shooting down an unarmed plane.”

While the South Korean plane had intruded into Soviet airspace and was approaching some of the country’s key defense facilities, Gerasimov noted, the Iranian airliner was shot down in an international air corridor. The United States maintains that the jetliner was a number of miles outside the established flight corridor.

The Iranian plane had been flying alone, in daylight and perfect visibility, Gerasimov added, recalling that KAL Flight 007 was heading for Seoul at night, that its lights were off and that it did not answer radio calls.

In its commentary, Radio Moscow said: “There is a difference between a true act of self-defense--protection of a nation’s borders--and deliberate, cruel murder.” It claimed that the KAL flight was on a spy mission and had received warnings that it ignored.

Civilian Air Corridor

Neither Gerasimov nor official media accounts mentioned U.S. contentions that the Airbus had flown into a war zone. The radio, quoting Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency, said the jet was in “a corridor reserved for civilian aviation.”

The separate views appeared designed to satisfy the Soviets’ friends and allies in the Muslim and developing worlds while not chilling improved Soviet-American relations.

Gerasimov said Sunday’s aerial incident was an outgrowth of American policy in the Persian Gulf, where Iran and Iraq have been at war since September, 1980, and proved that U.S. actions there were dangerous.

Another Soviet official said the incident strengthened the Soviet contention that U.S. forces in the gulf should be replaced by a U.N.-sponsored international peacekeeping unit.

‘Was It Threatened?’

“What was the American cruiser defending itself from?” a Soviet official commented. “Was it threatened by the 66 children and 52 women who were among the nearly 300 passengers of the airplane?

“If these warnings had been taken into account, then most of what happened would not have come to pass.”

Aides to Air Force Secretary Edward C. Aldridge had feared that the event would make his current visit to Moscow difficult. A U.S. official said it was not mentioned in meetings that Aldridge had Monday with the Soviet air force chief, Marshal Alexander N. Yefimov, and Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov.