AS THE director of worldwide television for the U.S. Information Agency, I was summoned to a secret meeting at the State Department over the Labor Day weekend 13 years ago to discuss a TV production. Entering a small conference room through a heavy metal door with a combination lock at its center, I was given an audio tape. I was instructed to produce a video document based on the contents of the tape that would be shown two days later at the U.N. Security Council.

Korean Airlines Flight 007, with its 269 passengers and crew, had strayed off course over a Soviet missile installation in the far Pacific and was shot out of the sky by Maj. Gennady Osipovich, in his Sukhoi-15 fighter. Minute by minute, top secret American intelligence stations near the Soviet border had monitored Osipovich's pursuit of Flight 007 as it cruised on the last leg of its journey to Seoul, and its destruction at 2:26 p.m. Washington time, Aug. 31, 1983. Working with other producers, we fashioned a slick video which was played at the Security Council Sept. 6, and beamed around the world by satellite -- marking some thing of a new era of government-to-people diplomacy.

The video was powerful, effective and wrong.