The specific organizations named in subsequent investigations of the Flight 367 bombing — the Croatian National Resistance, founded by Vjekoslav Luburić, a former Ustasha general, and the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood — were active in the early 1970s. Their activities were monitored by Yugoslav state security services, which maintained extensive surveillance and intelligence operations targeting Croatian exile organizations. These operations were, themselves, conducted by an intelligence service — the UDBA — whose methods included assassination of exile leaders abroad, which creates its own complications in assessing the reliability of its archival records.
The victims of the bombing — the twenty-seven people who died — died in the context of this political conflict, though most of them were not themselves participants in it. They were passengers on a commercial flight caught in a political violence aimed at the Yugoslav state. The loss of the twenty-seven, which has been somewhat overshadowed in the historical memory of the event by the remarkable survival of the one, deserves acknowledgment as the primary human cost of whatever decision the bombers made on January 26, 1972.
## Survivor’s Guilt: The Psychology of the Impossible
In the months and years after her recovery, Vesna Vulović dealt with the psychological dimensions of what she had experienced. The survival was, objectively, extraordinary. The deaths of her twenty-seven fellow travelers and colleagues were real and proximate. She had been on the flight. She had been doing her job. She had been in the same aircraft as people who were now dead. The question of why she had lived when they had not was one she could not answer and that she carried with her.