The Cold War (69 page)

The KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who rose to be the deputy rezident (chief of station) in London, had become a double agent spying for the British. In
KGB: The Inside Story,
which he coauthored with British historian Christopher Andrew, Gordievsky reports a May 1981 conference among senior KGB officials in that agency's foreign intelligence headquarters at Yasenovo, a Moscow suburb. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev addressed the assembly, but his somber speech proved only the warm-up for the astonishing pessimism of KGB director Yuri V. Andropov, who told the Russian spymasters they were to begin a special effort to detect American preparations for nuclear war. The Soviets even gave the operation a name, RYAN, for the Russian phrase raketno-yadernoye napadenie (“nuclear missile attack”).

Planning and central coordination for RYAN became the responsibility of the KGB Institute for Intelligence Problems. When Gordievsky saw the initial orders that summer, he noted that data on actual nuclear weapons received a relatively low priority. A higher premium was placed on indications of U.S. or Western alliance decisions for war. Some Soviet embassies, like that at Helsinki, were instructed simply to monitor the number of windows lit up in Western embassies at night. These and additional requirements applied to KGB
stations in London, Washington, and elsewhere. In 1982 the chief of the KGB institute went to Washington as the new KGB rezident.

According to George Blake, the KGB double agent with British intelligence who defected to the Soviet Union in the 1960s, another member of the small circle of British defectors in Moscow, Donald Maclean, got wind of the consternation at high levels in Soviet leadership. Maclean wrote a paper criticizing Soviet weakness in becoming mesmerized by U.S. nuclear forces. The result, he argued, was undue influence in the Kremlin by the Soviet high command. According to Gordievsky and Andrew, the KGB's American experts believed that Director Andropov's alarmist views were being fueled by the Soviet military. In fact, Russian defense minister Dimitri F. Ustinov was among the most hard-line voices on the Politburo, a fact known at the CIA and among American foreign policy experts as well as at Yasenovo. To make things worse, Brezh-nev's health failed, and before the end of 1982, Yuri Andropov emerged as the new top leader in the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the indications coming from Washington were alarming to the Soviets on both diplomatic and military fronts. On the diplomatic side, the Americans seemed to show no interest in a summit. On the military side, about the time Andropov came to power, the U.S. press featured a leak of a secret Pentagon document, the
Fiscal Year 1984–88 Defense Guidance,
which mandated programs designed to enable the United States to “prevail” in a nuclear war. The leaks dovetailed closely with Reagan administration budget requests for new communications networks designed to function in a nuclear environment and for a new airborne command post to serve the president in time of war. American strategists were simultaneously beginning to talk of “decapitation,” the idea of wiping out the adversary high command through a series of strikes aimed specifically at centers of government and prearranged evacuation sites.

In February 1983 a KGB document later published by Gordievsky shows Moscow giving its rezidenturas (intelligence stations) an overstated briefing regarding U.S. nuclear capabilities, plus a new list of intelligence reporting requirements. These included identifying specially equipped blast and fallout shelters, evacuation data on government officials, data about blood supplies acquired by the government, and places visited by officials most frequently outside working hours. One suggestive instruction: “Keep under regular observation the most important government institutions, headquarters, and other installations involved in preparation for RYAN.”

It is worth noting that these instructions from the KGB's Moscow center, with their hint of immediate alarm, are dated almost three weeks before Ronald Reagan's “evil empire” speech of March 8, 1983. In introductory comments to this text in a collection of his speeches, former president Reagan writes, “At the time [this speech] was portrayed as some kind of know-nothing, archconservative statement that could only drive the Soviets to further heights of paranoia and insecurity.”

On March 23, two weeks after the “evil empire” speech touched off the KGB's latest jitters over Soviet-American relations, Reagan spoke from the Oval Office and proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). As the president's national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, makes clear in a memoir, the SDI program, particularly in the highly technological form President Reagan selected—with such frills as space-based laser weapons—represented more of a wish than a weapon. McFarlane admits, “I was a little worried about the scientific community.” Some of McFarlane's subordinates on the National Security Council (NSC) staff go further and admit that SDI was a piece of gimmickry, more a tool for intimidation than a real program. The hasty launch of the entire program is epitomized in the fact that Reagan's formal decision for an SDI, contained in a directive called National Security Decision Document 85 (NSDD-85), is dated two days after the president's speech.

In contrast to NSDD-85, there was no quality of afterthought about U.S. policy on the Soviet Union. On January 17, 1983, President Reagan had signed NSDD-75, which laid down his Soviet policy. With respect to military strategy, the memorandum had specified: “Soviet calculations of possible war outcomes under any contingency must always result in outcomes so unfavorable to the U.S.S.R. that there would be no incentive for Soviet leaders to initiate an attack.” Reagan's order had much more to say about Cold War competition, technology transfers, economic and geopolitical policy, and the like, but the war scare of 1983 would flow from the military strategic propositions of the policy.

It is a tenet of nuclear strategy that the side in distress, outclassed by the adversary, may maximize its limited chances by shooting first. That is the foundation for such bits of nuclear jargon as “launch on warning” or “preemptive attack.” As 1983 opened, the Kremlin feared an American strategic nuclear advantage, and NSDD-75 shows the Reagan administration indeed intended to act from a position of strength. The addition of SDI to the mix suggested the
United States sought means to neutralize such Soviet forces as might remain following an initial nuclear exchange. Computer models show that SDI might have considerable impact blunting a retaliatory attack (“second strike”) but relatively little against a first strike. No doubt the secret war games of the Soviet general staff (and American Joint Chiefs of Staff) showed the same thing. The net effect of these developments would be that a weak adversary at some point would be forced to choose between launching a nuclear war by preemption, to preserve its “deterrent,” or permitting itself to be disarmed.

This point was appreciated in the Kremlin, and it sparked far more than a debate about esoteric strategies or stochastic nuclear exchange models. In
Pravda,
the Communist Party newspaper, Yuri Andropov commented on Ronald Reagan's SDI just four days after Reagan's presentation. Accurately enough, Andropov summarized Washington's aim as “an intention to secure the potential with ballistic missile defenses to destroy the corresponding strategic systems of the other side, that is, to deny it the capabilities to mount a retaliatory strike, counting on disarming the Soviet Union in the face of the American nuclear threat.”

On top of these developments, the NATO allies were making final preparations for deploying America's Euromissiles as the summer of 1983 began. Two U.S. systems were involved, the ground-launched cruise missile and the Pershing II. The latter would be an accurate ballistic missile with the range to reach Moscow—and with a much shorter flight time than ICBMs based in the United States. The Pershing II posed a threat to Russian command centers, making the possibility of “decapitation” concrete. The Soviets, in turn, might be expected to use force against those places where Euromissiles were deployed, which terrified the peoples of Western Europe. For several years, peaking as the Euromissiles were about to be installed, political protests and demonstrations on nuclear issues roiled around this controversial program. In Bonn, West Germany, alone, more than five hundred thousand people took to the streets in just one of the 1983 demonstrations. But the Reagan administration refused to be deflected and moved steadily toward Euromissile deployment scheduled for the fall. This impending development, combined with lack of progress in arms control talks, cast a pall over the Kremlin. Throughout the summer, the Soviets made private and semipublic threats to walk out of arms negotiations.

Then came KAL 007. The Soviet shootdown of the Korean airliner on September 1, egregious error that it was, proved less damaging to U.S.-Soviet relations
than Moscow's initial inclination to deny everything. Kremlin confusion increased because Yuri Andropov, sick with failing kidneys, had left Moscow for a Black Sea resort, his vacation becoming a convalescence. His absence from Moscow left various sectors of the Soviet apparat adrift. Washington was willing to fish in these troubled waters. Reagan's NSDD-102 declared that “Soviet brutality in this incident presents an opportunity to reverse the false moral and political ‘peacemaker’ perception that their regime has been cultivating.” There followed a series of acrimonious charges in Washington and Moscow, and the release of American recordings of radio chatter by the Soviet interceptor pilot and his controllers, which showed the fighter plane had fired without much thought for the target. Both sides alleged deception.

Secretary of State George Shultz recalls the KAL 007 incident as the end of a superpower “minithaw” summer during which Soviet concessions on human rights had opened a way to progress. That view is far cheerier than the recollections of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who had yet to get in to see President Reagan and who would be prevented from attending the United Nations General Assembly when U.S. authorities refused to assure landing rights and security for his airplane. Gromyko met Shultz in Madrid on September 8 to discuss European issues, but the secretary of state proved determined to press the Russians on human rights and KAL 007. Following a chilly private talk, Shultz heard Gromyko tell the larger group, “Problem number one for the whole world is to avert nuclear war.”

Don Oberdorfer, the distinguished diplomatic correspondent for
The Washington Post,
told an audience in 1993 that “Ronald Reagan was not the man I thought he was. It was a scary time from [my] perspective.” President Reagan had the Russians where he wanted them. He held the high ground in terms of propaganda and had determined to exploit the Soviet error in the KAL 007 incident. He had frightened Moscow with the Strategic Defense Initiative, had continued nuclear programs that posed dangers to Soviet nuclear forces, and had stood at the point of deploying Euromissiles that directly threatened Moscow's command-and-control centers and its political leadership. The question is: Had Reagan thought through the consequences?

According to Gromyko's memoir, at the Madrid meeting the Soviet foreign minister did not confine himself to a simple statement of the main problem. Rather, speaking “in the name of the Soviet leadership,” Gromyko went on, “The world situation is now slipping toward a very dangerous precipice. It is
plain that the great responsibility for not allowing a nuclear catastrophe to occur must be borne by the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. together. In our opinion, the U.S.A. should reevaluate its policies, and the president and his administration should look at international affairs in a new way.”

No one on the American side took the point. The Russians were evil, had massacred innocent passengers, and so on. A number of senior Soviet officials, from Georgi Arbatov to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Moscow's man in Washington, would later agree that the KAL shootdown was a blunder. But Dobrynin would also observe that Washington's criticisms were “hasty and dangerous accusations,” and there can be no doubt that the Soviet leadership as a whole felt the same way. Though sophisticated Russians figured the checks built into the American political system minimized the risk of an unprovoked first strike against the Soviet Union, that never became a uniform belief. Yuri Andropov himself, according to Dobrynin, stood as a
“probable exception”
(my italics) to the view that “an attack could take place unexpectedly at any moment, like Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.” Ominously, in the Soviet system, only Andropov's hand rested on the nuclear button.

As it had been when he was director, the KGB remained responsive to Andropov's moods. Operation RYAN was in full swing. In mid-June 1983, just prior to leaving for what became his sickbed, Andropov remarked that there had been an “unprecedented sharpening of the struggle” between East and West.

KGB stations assumed a posture of increased readiness. Yasenovo followed up on August 12 with a supplement to the list of war indicators KGB officers were supposed to track. Stations were to report every two weeks. Moscow center wanted new items of intelligence that must have had KGB officers pulling their hair out. These included warning of increased intelligence efforts against the Warsaw Pact; dropping of agents and/or equipment into the U.S.S.R. or Pact countries; CIA and National Security Agency liaison with other NATO intelligence agencies; infiltration of sabotage teams; appearance of special security detachments; and increases in Western disinformation efforts. What, if anything, KGB stations reported in response to this directive remains unknown. However, the Soviet practice of fulfilling production “norms,” or quotas, and Moscow's continued alarm suggest that the KGB received at least some data that Yasenovo interpreted as preparation for war.

Other world developments heightened the sense of emergent crisis. Polish
labor leader Lech Walesa, who had defied the Soviet-backed Communist government of his country, received the Nobel Peace Prize in early October. The United States exhibited outrage after a bombing in Beirut that destroyed a barracks and killed almost 250 U.S. Marines. Only days later, the Americans invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada, a friend of Moscow's ally Cuba. Washington appeared to be in an aggressive mood.