The Third World War - The Untold Story (60 page)

But this is to run ahead a little. The dramatic events of late August 1985 did not always lead to such readily acceptable solutions. When the Government in Moscow was toppled, Washington was diplomatically very active around the world. The American ambassadors in the various Asian capitals were kept fully informed all along, of course, and normally provided the local governments with the fastest, sometimes the only, news of what was happening. The US Ambassador in Peking had kept his eye on what was going on in Vietnam, with which he broadly agreed but about which he could have done nothing if he had not, and he had intimated to the Chairman that Washington would quite understand if China had certain ambitions for Mongolia. This was by way of a sweetener, because he also made it clear that the surrender of the Soviet forces in the Far East, which he confidently expected any day, would be handled by the United States. It was, after all, the United States that had been at war. China had no standing in the matter, so to speak, 'but its interests would naturally be carefully safeguarded in whatever arrangements were made'.

Similarly, the US Ambassador in Tokyo carefully let loose the offhand remark that he imagined Japan would have views about the Northern Islands, but if so he would rather not know about them, at least not officially. He conveyed the message that the US troops that had been on their way to Korea would, in all probability, now be diverted to the Vladivostok area, to accept the surrender of Soviet forces there. The timing of this was, however, a little uncertain and he formally asked, under the terms of the Japan-US Security Treaty, for agreement to their staging in Japan if need be.

The hint about the islands fell on receptive ears. The Northern Territories - four islands close to the east coast of Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands - were claimed by Japan as its territory but had been occupied by the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Soviet garrisons were installed there then and substantially built up in the early 1980s. Japan badly wanted them back, but the Soviet Union was totally unyielding; Moscow was not and never had been in the business of returning territories it had acquired. The issue united all Japanese; even the mildest section of the press was fiercely nationalistic about the islands.

The Cabinet in Tokyo had naturally been watching matters closely. Whatever arguments there might be about the Soviet title to the islands (and there were unresolved legal arguments, though not in Japan), Tokyo had no doubt at all that if the Soviet forces vacated them then they would revert to Japan one way or another. Accordingly, Japanese reconnaissance aircraft had been watching the islands closely, and on 22 August, or thereabouts, reported that amphibious landing vessels were leaving them. There were still some guns there and some aircraft, but it seemed as if the Soviet garrison might be moving out.

As we now know, that is indeed what was happening. The unfortunate Soviet commander of the Far Eastern Military District, under whom the garrison came, had been without any coherent orders from Moscow for days. Most of his forces had not been involved in the war so far, the fighting having been essentially confined to the Pacific Fleet and various maritime and other aircraft in support. Marshal P. Y. Pavlovsky was understandably a worried man, not merely because of his unhappy situation but also because he felt that the new men in Moscow would be no friends of his. He clearly could not continue a war by himself - setting aside any question of whether his men, in all the circumstances, would be willing to fight. But he did not care at all for the idea of having, perhaps, to surrender to Chinese forces. Nor would his men. Far better to hand over to the Americans, or even to the Japanese, though that thought did not give him much pleasure either.

It was then that he decided that there were at least some problems that could be solved. He would bring in his outlying garrisons and get them under his own hand. So he gave orders to the divisions in Mongolia to move back into Soviet territory, and for the troops to come back from the Northern Islands. He did not want to have to hand them back to the Japanese forces who would almost certainly arrive before too long.

The return of the Northern Territories did not take long. Before August was out the Japanese self-defence forces were in. It was an emotional occasion. Quite a flotilla went there, with the Japanese Prime Minister on board the flagship (his words hit the headlines: 'Prime Minister Sato Eisaku secured the return of Okinawa; I am deeply honoured that it has fallen to me to secure the return of our Northern Territories'). Garrisons were installed. The Japanese press went wild.* There were some murmurings in the corridors of the United Nations about premature, some said 'illegal', acts, but Tokyo was content to deal with that little difficulty some other time. Ambassador Kunihiro in New York would have no problem with that.

* For a splendid account of all the excitement, see the article by T. Sakanaka in Asahi Shimbun, 30 August 1985.

But to return to Marshal Pavlovsky, sitting in Headquarters, Far Eastern Military District, at Khabarovsk with a group of officers around him, including the Deputy Commander of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. By now, into the early days of September, some things were beginning to fall into place, others were falling about his ears.

The Marshal had, several days ago, received very clear instructions from the Americans that he was to arrange the surrender of his forces to emissaries who would arrive very soon. In the meantime he was held responsible for their good conduct and so on. The Commander of the Pacific Fleet had also received orders to recall all his ships to Vladivostok, Sovetskaya Gavan, Magadan and Korsakov. These orders had come from the Americans too. Moscow had been told about them and had simply wired back 'Comply'. That was clear enough, no problem there. But was Moscow in charge? And what of? Pavlovsky had also received news that was altogether more unsettling and heady: in Omsk, Colonel General Chervinsky, whose guts he detested but who was, he had grudgingly to admit, a man not without a certain panache, had set himself up as a sort of independent military leader and taken over his area. As far as he could gather this was tolerated by the Americans - fools they must be - perhaps so that he could keep law and order. If he knew Chervinsky he would keep lots of other things as well. All the same, it was an interesting idea.

Pavlovsky had been musing over it for days and had made up his mind; he now had to carry others with him. He would copy Chervinsky. It might not last for long, but it could achieve what he was intent on doing, which was to ensure that the Soviet Far East came under whatever administration the US had in mind, and not under the Chinese. He was quite sure he would have no problems with his staff on that particular point. Much more difficult would be to persuade the Americans to let him keep his weapons. He was chilled at the thought of his forces being disarmed and left facing China and its millions. There was no future in that.

The Marshal was in fact surprisingly successful. Washington had also been wrestling with the problem of how to keep China from demanding all the Soviet equipment. Of course, not all of it was still there; many men had simply left their units, with their own weapons, and gone home. Aircraft had flown off too, to airfields further away from the Chinese. All Soviet soldiers, certainly those of Russian origin, wanted to get away from the Chinese. Two warships had been scuttled and more might be yet; it was hard to put guards on everything. The Americans decided that Pavlovsky could be left with most of his forces for the time being and should operate a sort of military government in the Far Eastern coastal region - a Chervinsky under licence, so to speak. All the heavy equipment and the important naval vessels were under strong American guard, mounted by troops diverted from South Korea. Some of the latest submarines were towed off by the US Navy.

That raised the question - a vital one - of the nuclear warheads with both the ground and air forces in the Far East. The naval ones were less of a problem - it was clear where they were - but the warheads with the ground and air forces were less easily located and accessible. Acutely worrying at the beginning, of course, was the fear of unauthorized nuclear action. Peking sent very urgent signals to Washington and was, it was plain, more than anxious to get hold of warheads itself. In fact this whole question of what was to happen to the Soviet weapons caused great friction with China. The United States was left in no doubt by any of its allies in Asia that they did not want China to get more than a very small proportion of them, and no nuclear weapons. The Chinese readiness to invade Vietnam for the second time had been disturbing. Some weapons the Americans wanted themselves, naturally.

Peking was rebuffed by Washington; China had not been at war, but some conventional weapons would certainly be handed over. In the meantime China had nothing to fear, Soviet forces would be separated from their heavy weapons before their formations were disbanded altogether. Nuclear weapons would be guarded by special US units and later on handed over to the United Nations, to the UN Fissile Materials Recovery Organization (UNIFISMATRECO). Marshal Pavlovsky and the Pacific Fleet staff did in fact work admirably to trace warheads and see that they were handed over.

Soviet soldiers and sailors in the Far East were thus left initially under their own command, to be demilitarized eventually. Pavlovsky, an efficient and tough man, remained in charge even when a civilian administration was slowly formed. He looked balefully at the Chinese and they at him, but his business was essentially with the Allied Demilitarization Commission, made up mostly of Americans. On these China had no more than liaison groups. But the American head of the commission had many a difficult time with the Chinese; their aims and his were not exactly coincident and the strains were evident.

The map of Asia was, as a result of all these events, 'tidied up' a little. Some problems were solved, some were probably merely moved on to the back burner. What would happen in the region in the decades ahead was hard to predict, since it depended in large measure on the policies of a China steadily growing in power and confidence and no longer checked by its Soviet adversary.

As it became more and more evident that the Warsaw Pact programme of operations on the Central Front had fallen critically short of achieving its main objective in time and more and more cracks were opening up in the Eastern bloc, it was abundantly clear that a completely new situation was developing.

Debate at the highest level raged in both East and West as to what to do next. There was pressure in the US, with some German support, to allow the momentum of warlike preparation in the West, and above all in the US, to follow its logical path, to mobilize the national aspiration long dormant in the Soviet Union's subject peoples and move Allied forces in to push the Soviets back where they came from and restore freedom in Eastern Europe. Agreement among the Allies on a matter so complex and of such far-reaching importance was unlikely to be reached easily. In the first place it would be a mistake to suppose, as was very quickly pointed out, that the forces of the Warsaw Pact had been defeated. In spite of the desertion, almost
en masse,
of General Ryzanov's 3 Shock Army in the Netherlands, Warsaw Pact forces continued to be far more powerful than those facing them on the battlefields in Europe. Moreover, the Soviet Union's nuclear capability was still intact. But time was running out. There was something approaching open revolt in Poland and in the forward area a Polish regiment, following the example set in 3 Shock Army, had surrendered en bloc to the Americans. Defections from Warsaw Pact armies were increasing daily, in spite of the KGB. The total now ran into many thousands. It was not only in countries of the Warsaw Pact that there were signs of growing discontent. In the Baltic states of the Soviet Union itself, as well as in Belorussia and the Ukraine, there was mounting disaffection.

None the less it was certainly not a foregone conclusion that subject nations would everywhere be easily aroused to revolt. The habits of servitude and resignation were deeply ingrained. The Communist Party had been actively engaged for so long and with such assiduity in the detection and ruthless liquidation of any source of opposition that leadership would be difficult to establish and response to it might be sluggish - unless truly dramatic events provided a powerful stimulus. Just such a stimulus, as events proved, was not far off.

In the Soviet Union the Defence Council had been since early July in complete control, though the full Politburo was summoned from time to time to broaden the scope of discussion, to allocate responsibilities and review the performance of individuals. The Politburo was now summoned for 8 am on 19 August to meet in the VKP, the Volga Command Post built into the granite near Kuybyshev, 600 kilometres south-east of Moscow, in Stalin's time and greatly enlarged and improved since then. The most urgent requirement was to discuss the possibility of nuclear action.

The five members of the Defence Council had met the previous night but had been quite unable to agree. The pattern of disagreement formulated in a meeting of the Politburo on 6 December 1984, when the Operational Plan for 1985 had been discussed, had persisted essentially unchanged ever since. Aristanov, Chairman of the KGB, and Marshal Nastin, Minister of Defence, both members of the Defence Council, had always supported the view that operations against the West should be nuclear from the start. The Supreme Party Ideologist Malinsky, who was also a member of the Defence Council, had strongly opposed this, ably supported by two members of the Politburo, who were not, as it happened, also members of the Defence Council. These were Berzinsh, Leader of the Organization of the Party and State Control, and the Ukrainian Nalivaiko, responsible for relations with socialist countries. The milder view had prevailed in December and was later accepted as official policy. There would be no nuclear opening to an offensive against the West and nuclear weapons would not be used as long as victory could be seen to be certain without them. It was agreed, however, that if there were a setback in the operation, and the plan did not look like being completely successful in a non-nuclear mode, the matter would be urgently re-opened. The moment to re-open it had now come.