Editing Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (section)

===NTSB===
Since the aircraft had departed from U.S. soil and U.S. nationals had died in the incident, the [[National Transportation Safety Board]] (NTSB) was legally required to investigate. On the morning of September 1, the NTSB chief in Alaska, James Michelangelo, received an order from the NTSB in Washington at the behest of the State Department requiring all documents relating to the NTSB investigation to be sent to Washington and notifying him that the State Department would now conduct the investigation.<ref>Pearson, p. 127</ref>

The U.S. State Department, after closing the NTSB investigation on the grounds that it was not an accident, pursued an ICAO investigation instead. Commentators such as Johnson point out that this action was illegal, and that in deferring the investigation to the ICAO, the Reagan administration effectively precluded any politically or militarily sensitive information from being [[subpoena]]ed that might have embarrassed the administration or contradicted its version of events.<ref>Johnson, p. 227</ref> Unlike the NTSB, ICAO can subpoena neither persons nor documents and is dependent on the governments involved—in this incident, the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and South Korea—to supply evidence voluntarily.