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What is ASA
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On September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines flight 007, on its way from Anchorage, Alaska to Seoul, Korea, carrying 269 passengers and crew, strayed off its intended course and entered into Soviet airspace. A Soviet Sukhoi 15 fighter jet, piloted by Major Gennadie Osipovich, was sent up to destroy the intruding Boeing 747.
This, at the height of the Cold War era, was a major international incident. At the time, it was - and still is - widely believed that the plane "exploded", "plummeted uncontrollably" into the ocean, and was "destroyed", killing all aboard, including Lawrence ("Larry") Patton McDonald, Representative (D), 7th District, Georgia.
The evidence, however, tells another story. Japanese radar trackings, Soviet ground-to-ground and ground-to-air communications, KAL 007's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, the debris (and lack thereof), eye-witness testimonies... All these and more, when pieced together, tell of a plane which was, indeed, damaged, but which managed to land safely, and of passengers who survived and were rescued by the Russians -- only to be imprisoned to this day.
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Of the litany of painful cold war skirmishes that indelibly burned the Soviet Union upon my psyche, the mysterious downing of KAL OO7 was by far the worst. It was the point at which the road diverged for me, and the force that impelled me down a path that would one day, enigmatically, lead to: the pilot’s seat of the very Sukhoi 15 fighter jet that destroyed the hapless flight; encounters with Vladimir Zhirinovsky and God; a miracle; and something that seemed to be an annunciation of the coming of the Christ.
This stream of consciousness precipitated an insatiable desire to do whatever was necessary to get to know and love this violent neighbor, and to help democratic rationale prevail over the planned madness somehow capable of such wanton disdain for human life. And after helping my wife through school, and her having three beautiful children, it eventually also led to a cross-disciplinary major at the University of California, focusing on entrepreneurial development in the Russian Far East.
While at Cal, I happened upon an article in the New York Times describing the vision of two visionaries, Dr. Valentine P. Fedorov, then governor of Sakhalin, and Dr. Fred Kiesner, professor of entrepreneurship at Loyola Marymount University, to establish a market economy on Sakhalin Island. At the behest of president Gorbachev, Russia's first tentative experiment with capitalism was serendipitously to take place in my Russian Far East.
On my way to class one morning, quietly chanting carpe diem to myself, I overcame a considerable case of the butterflies and gave Dr. Kiesner a call from a pay phone in Sproul Hall. I asked if he might consider taking a look at my work occasionally, and to my very pleasant surprise, not only did he agree, he became an academic advisor, as well as a dear friend.
Some months later, on New Year's Day, 1994, I received a phone call from Fred, who said, "Happy New Year, Kenth. How are you my friend? Well, do you remember the micro business incubator that governor Fedorov and I started last summer? How would you like to manage it for a year?"
Born of Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to establish a special economic zone on Sakhalin Island, where market economic models could be evaluated before national implementation, the Sakhalin International Center for Entrepreneurial Development was founded by Dr. Fred Kiesner and Sakhalin governor Dr. Valentin Fedorov, and funded by George Soros.
To remain a student, I structured the position as Field Study and Supervised Independent Study courses at Berkeley. And to receive credit, my advisor Dr. David Hooson, professor emeritus, College of Geography, asked me to keep a journal of extraordinary occurrences I witnessed on this journey, of which there was no shortage. ASA is a book based on this journal.
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