1. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (1983)Korean Air Lines Boeing 747SP at EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg in 1985; the plane that crashed in 1983 was a 747-230B. (Sangil)
Also known as "that time the Soviet Union killed a sitting US Congressman." KAL007 was shot down by a Soviet fighter plane on September 1, 1983, killing all 269 passengers and crew, including Larry McDonald, a Congressman from Georgia then in his fourth term. An ardent anti-Communist and believer in various conspiracy theories about the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations plotting to bring about a socialist world government, McDonald also was president of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right-wing conspiracist group.
The fact that the crash killed McDonald would fit perfectly into his particular set of conspiracy theories, but there's no evidence that what happened was more complicated than KAL007 entering Soviet airspace and being shot down as an intruder. This International Civil Aviation Organization report from 1993, incorporating documents released by Russian president Boris Yeltsin that Soviet leaders had previously withheld, summarizes what we know well, and finds Soviet personnel appearing baffled and concerned by the presence of an unknown aircraft, rather than determined to strike intentionally, though their decision to strike without attempting to establish contact with the plane was reckless.
The direct response to the attack — and subsequent Soviet attempt at a cover-up — was largely rhetorical. President Reagan condemned the shoot-down as a "crime against humanity" which "must never be forgotten." The US responded to Soviet intransigence by releasing substantial amounts of classified material to back up the charge that the Soviets (accidentally or not) shot the plane down. An unintended side effect of that was to weaken the US's ability to monitor Soviet communications through Japan "According to various unnamed Japanese officials, changes made in the Soviet codes and frequencies following the American disclosures reduced the effectiveness of Japanese monitoring by 60 percent," David M. Johnson noted in a write-up on the intelligence losses for Harvard and the Center for Information Policy Research.
The shoot-down led to the expansion of the Global Positioning System to civilians, which Reagan announced in the wake of the shoot-down. It would have been harder for the KAL pilots to drift into Soviet airspace with satellite navigation technology.
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