  We study a new mechanism for hadronic helicity flip in high energy hard
exclusive reactions. The mechanism proceeds in the limit of perfect chiral
symmetry, namely without any need to flip a quark helicity. The fundamental
feature of the new mechanism is the breaking of rotational symmetry of the hard
collision by a scattering plane in processes involving independent quark
scattering. We show that in the impulse approximation there is no evidence for
of the helicity violating process as the energy or momentum transfer $Q^2$ is
increased over the region 1 GeV^2 < Q^2 < 100 GeV^2. In the asymptotic region
Q^2> 1000 GeV^2, a saddle point approximation with doubly logarithmic accuracy
yields suppression by a fraction of power of Q^2. ``Chirally--odd" exclusive
wave functions which carry non--zero orbital angular momentum and yet are
leading order in the high energy limit, play an important role.
