It was barely 24 hours after the shoot-down. Ray’s emphasis on the need for calm statesmanship and restraint contrasts with the blacken-bad-Putin campaign launched almost immediately by the White House and its house organs in the “mainstream media.” It was reminiscent of the way the Reagan administration chose to exploit to the hilt the Soviet shoot-down of KAL007 on Sept. 1, 1983.
Horse’s-mouth type intelligence showed that the Russians were in the dark – literally as well as figuratively – about what kind of aircraft had intruded deep into Soviet territory. Intercepts showed, that they thought they were downing a U.S. spy plane of the kind that had been not far away just hours before the incident. Moscow eventually fessed up its terrible mistake, but the Reagan administration mantra remained, “The Soviet Union deliberately shot down a civilian airliner, murdering 269 people.”
Ray had a front seat for that incident and its aftermath. He also had learned to say, when ueberfragt (“over-asked” is the way the Germans put it), to respond, “I don’t have a clue,” as he did in disappointing the RT interviewer with this unusual response to his last question.