**History Staff****Center for the Study of Intelligence****Central Intelligence Agency****1997**A Cold War Conundrum***By Benjamin B. Fischer***
 
**Summary****Introduction****Context:Soviet Cold War Setbacks****TheSoviet Intelligence Alert and Operation RYAN****Whyan Intelligence Alert?****Spookingthe Soviets****PSYOP****RYAN,Phase II: A New Sense of Urgency****RYANand East German Intelligence****TheWar Scare Goes Public****"StarWars"****KAL007****ABLEARCHER 83****The"Iron Lady" and the "Great Communicator"****WarScare Frenzy in the USSR****TheEnduring Trauma of BARBAROSSA****Conclusion:The War Scare Was for Real****AppendixA: RYAN and the Decline of the KGB****AppendixB: The Gordievsky File**
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SummarySoviet intelligence services went on alert in 1981to watch for US preparations for launching a surprise nuclear attack againstthe USSR and its allies. This alert was accompanied by a new Soviet intelligencecollection program, known by the acronym RYAN, to monitor indications andprovide early warning of US intentions. Two years later a major war scareerupted in the USSR. This study traces the origins and scope of OperationRYAN and its relationship to the war scare.
Some observers dismissed the alert and the warscare as Soviet disinformation and scare tactics, while others viewed themas reflecting genuine fears. The latter view seems to have been closerto the truth. The KGB in the early 1980s saw the international situation--inSoviet terminology, the "correlation of world forces"--as turning againstthe USSR and increasing its vulnerability. These developments, along withthe new US administration's tough stance toward the USSR, prompted Sovietofficials and much of the populace to voice concern over the prospect ofa US nuclear attack.
New information suggests that Moscow also wasreacting to US-led naval and air operations, including psychological warfaremissions conducted close to the Soviet Union. These operations employedsophisticated concealment and deception measures to thwart Soviet earlywarning systems and to offset the Soviets' ability--greatly bolstered byUS spy John Walker--to read US naval communications.
In addition, this study shows how:-  The war scare affected Soviet responses to the Reaganadministration's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the administration'scondemnation of the Soviet Union following the 1983 shootdown of a SouthKorean airliner, and a NATO nuclear-release exercise late that same year.
 
-  British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sought touse the Soviet alert/war scare to influence President Reagan's thinkingabout the USSR.
 
-  Moscow's threat perceptions and Operation RYAN wereinfluenced by memories of Hitler's 1941 surprise attack on the USSR (OperationBARBAROSSA).
 
-  The Kremlin exploited the war scare for domesticpolitical purposes, aggravating fears among the Soviet people.
 
-  The KGB abandoned caution and eschewed proper tradecraftin collecting indications-and-warning intelligence and relied heavily onEast German foreign and military intelligence to meet RYAN requirements.
*Never, perhaps, in the postwar decades wasthe situation in the world as explosive and hence, more difficult and unfavorable,as in the first half of the 1980s.*
*    --Mikhail Gorbachev**      February 1986*
IntroductionUS-Soviet relations had come full circle by 1983--fromconfrontation in the early postwar decades, to detente in the late 1960sand 1970s, and back to confrontation in the early 1980s. Europeans weredeclaring the outbreak of "Cold War II." French President Francois Mitterrandcompared the situation that year to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the1948 face-off over Berlin. On this side of the Atlantic, the doyen of Soviet-watchers,George Kennan, exclaimed that the new superpower imbroglio had the "familiarcharacteristics, the unfailing characteristics, of a march toward war--thatand nothing else."**1**
Such fears were exaggerated. Even at this timeof heightened tension, nowhere in the world were the superpowers squaredoff in a crisis likely to escalate into full-scale nuclear war. But a modern-dayRip van Winkle waking up in 1983 would have noted little if any improvementin the international political climate; he would not have realized thata substantial period of detente had come and gone while he slept.**2**
The post-detente "second Cold War" was essentiallya war of words--strong and at times inflammatory words. In March 1983,President Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the "focus of evil in theworld" and as an "evil empire."**3**Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov responded by calling the US Presidentinsane and a liar.**4**Then things got nasty.**5**
Following Andropov's lead--and presumably hisorders--the Soviet propaganda machine let loose a barrage of harsh verbalassaults on the United States reminiscent of the early days of the ColdWar.**6**Moscow repeatedly accused President Reagan of fanning the flames of warand compared him to Hitler--an image even more menacing than that of Andropovas the evil empire's Darth Vader. Such hyperbole was more a consequencethan a cause of tension, but it masked real fears.
Context: Soviet Cold War SetbacksThe Hitler comparison was more than a rhetoricalexcess; war was very much on the minds of Soviet leaders. Moscow was inthe midst of a war scare that had two distinct phases--a largely concealedone starting in 1981 and a more visible one two years later.
In early 1981 the KGB's foreign intelligence directorate,using a computer program developed several years earlier, prepared an estimateof world trends that concluded the USSR in effect was losing--and the USwas winning--the Cold War.**7**Expressed in Soviet terms, the "correlation of world forces" between theUS and the USSR was seen as turning inexorably against the latter.**8**
This assessment was profoundly different fromthat of 10 years earlier, when Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had assertedthat: "Today there is no question of any significance that can be decidedwithout the Soviet Union or in opposition to it."**9**The Soviet ambassador to France, for example, had proclaimed that the USSR"would not permit another Chile," implying that Moscow was prepared tocounter the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America and the Carter Doctrine inthe Persian Gulf with the Brezhnev Doctrine, which the Soviets invokedto justify the use of military power to keep pro-Soviet regimes in powerand "repel... the threat of counterrevolution or foreign intervention."**10**Such rhetoric reflected Marxist theoreticians' conviction in the 1970sthat the correlation of forces was scientifically based and historicallyordained and would endure.
But the Politburo faced a new set of realitiesin the early 1980s. The United States, late in the Carter administrationand continuing in the first years of the Reagan administration, had startedplaying catch-up. To many observers it began to seem that Marxist gainsin the 1970s in such places as Indochina, Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia,and Nicaragua had owed more to US divisions, diversions, and defeats thanto Soviet power and influence.**11**Now it appeared that Moscow had not really gained very much from its foreignadventures. For example:-  In Afghanistan, the Soviet Army was caught in itsown version of America's Vietnam quagmire.
-  Cuba, Moscow's foothold in the Western Hemisphere,was foundering economically and draining Soviet funds.
-  The pro-Soviet regime in Angola was struggling tocontain a potent, sometimes US-backed insurgency.
-  Nicaragua's Marxist government faced a growing challengefrom US-supported opposition forces.
In an even more fundamental reversal for the SovietUnion, US public opinion, disillusioned with detente and arms control,was now supporting the largest peacetime defense buildup in the nation'shistory.
These trends for the most part began under PresidentCarter and accelerated under President Reagan. The Carter administration,moreover, began revitalizing CIA covert action against the USSR. PresidentReagan, in addition to accelerating the US military buildup, expanded programslaunched under his predecessor to support human rights activists in theUSSR and Poland and the mujahedin in Afghanistan.**12**In Western Europe, where the Kremlin had spent a decade trying to win friendsand influence people--especially on the left--with its peace-and-detentepolicies, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany favored installingnew US missiles to counter Soviet SS-20s aimed at his country and otherNATO allies.
In sum, the wheel of history appeared to havestopped in its tracks in the 1980s and seemed to be turning in the oppositedirection--in the West's favor. What a difference a decade makes!
The Soviet Intelligence Alertand Operation RYANThe 1981 KGB assessment was more of a long-rangeforecast than a storm warning, but the Politburo issued what amounted toa full-scale hurricane alert. Andropov and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnevmade a joint appearance in May 1981 before a closed session of KGB officers.**13**Brezhnev took the podium first and briefed the assembled intelligence officerson his concerns about US policy under the new administration in Washington.Andropov then asserted bluntly that the United States was making preparationsfor a surprise nuclear attack on the USSR. The KGB and the GRU, he declared,would join forces to mount a new intelligence collection effort codenamedRYAN.**14**Its purpose: to monitor indications and provide early warning of US warpreparations.
According to later revelations by ex-KGB officerOleg Gordievsky, KGB rezidenturas (field stations) in the United States,Western Europe, Japan, and selected Third World countries received thefirst set of RYAN requirements in November 1981. (GRU rezidenturas presumablyreceived theirs simultaneously.) The KGB Center (headquarters in Moscow)transmitted additional guidance in January 1982, directing those rezidenturasthat were on alert to place a high priority on RYAN in their annual workplans. In March 1982, the senior KGB officer in charge of coordinatingrequirements at the Center was assigned to Washington to oversee collectionof indications-and-warning intelligence.
In discussing the heightened emphasis on RYAN,Yuri Shvets, a former KGB officer in the Washington rezidentura, observedin his 1994 book that information cabled to Moscow from the RYAN collectionprogram was used in daily briefing books for the Politburo. He also notedthat the program required an inordinate amount of time.**15**
RYAN Tasking for Warsaw Pact Military IntelligenceServicesOperation RYAN was the main topic on the agenda ofthe 1983 annual conference of Warsaw Pact military intelligence chiefs.A top secret protocol stated that "in view of the increasing danger ofwar unleashed by the US and NATO," the chiefs of services would assignthe highest priority to collecting information on:-  Key US/NATO political and strategic decisions vis-a-visthe Warsaw Pact.
-  Early warning of US/NATO preparations for launchinga surprise nuclear attack.
-  New US/NATO weapons systems intended for use in asurprise nuclear attack.**16**

**Whyan Intelligence Alert?**Several former KGB officers, among them OlegGordievsky, Oleg Kalugin, and Yuri Shvets, have confirmed the existenceof the Soviet intelligence alert, but its origins are unclear. Gordievskydisclaims any firsthand knowledge of what prompted the Politburo to implementOperation RYAN. His own view is that it was both a reaction to "Reaganiterhetoric" and a reflection of "Soviet paranoia." Andropov and Defense MinisterDmitri Ustinov, both of whom harbored more alarmist views on US intentionsthan other Politburo members, may have urged the alert on Brezhnev, althoughGordievsky has not documented this. Former Soviet Ambassador to the UnitedStates Anatoly Dobrynin mentions RYAN in his memoirs but adds little toGordievsky's account.**17**
In short, something is missing in this picture.Exactly what precipitated the alert and Operation RYAN? The decision toorder an intelligence alert was highly unusual. Moreover, in terms of itsmission, scope, and consumption of operational resources--not to mentioncooperation between Soviet civilian and military services--RYAN was unprecedented.**18**The threat perception on which it was based was new as well; as Dobryninnotes in his memoirs, Andropov was the first Soviet top leader since Stalinwho seemed to believe that the United States might launch a surprise attackon the USSR.**19**
RYAN must be viewed in its temporal context. Itbegan just a few months into the Reagan administration--that is, well beforethe new US administration's policies had been fully formulated, much lessimplemented--and almost two years before the Soviet war scare erupted publiclyin late 1983. As of early 1981, the Politburo was cautiously optimisticthat President Reagan's rhetoric was more a campaign plank than a policyframework. The Soviet leadership was hoping that, as in the past, a more"realistic" attitude would take hold in Washington once diplomacy got downto business.**20**Nonetheless, in international relations as in other spheres of human activity,actions generally speak louder than words, and the well-known proverb aboutsticks and stones applies as much to diplomacy as to the playground. Clearly,the Politburo was responding to something more than verbal taunts. Wasit reacting to taunts of another kind?
Spooking the Soviets**PSYOP**RYAN may have been a response to the first ina series of US psychological warfare operations (PSYOPs in military jargon)initiated in the early months of the Reagan administration.**21**These operations consisted mainly of air and naval probes near Soviet borders.The activity was virtually invisible except to a small circle of WhiteHouse and Pentagon officials--and, of course, to the Kremlin. "'It wasvery sensitive,' recalls former undersecretary of defense Fred Ikle. 'Nothingwas written down about it, so there would be no paper trail.'"**22**
The purpose of this program was not so much tosignal US intentions to the Soviets as to keep them guessing what mightcome next. The program also probed for gaps and vulnerabilities in theUSSR's early warning intelligence system:"Sometimes we would send bombers overthe North Pole and their radars would click on," recalls Gen. Jack Chain,[a] former Strategic Air Command commander. "Other times fighter-bomberswould probe their Asian or European periphery." During peak times, theoperation would include several maneuvers in a week. They would come atirregular intervals to make the effect all the more unsettling. Then, asquickly as the unannounced flights began, they would stop, only to beginagain a few weeks later.**23**Another former US official with access to the PSYOPprogram offered this assessment:"It really got to them," recalls Dr.William Schneider, [former] undersecretary of state for military assistanceand technology, who saw classified "after-action reports" that indicatedU.S. flight activity. "They didn't know what it all meant. A squadron wouldfly straight at Soviet airspace, and other radars would light up and unitswould go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel offand return home."**24*****Naval Muscle-Flexing.*** According topublished accounts, the US Navy played a key role in the PSYOP programafter President Reagan authorized it in March 1981 to operate and exercisenear maritime approaches to the USSR, in places where US warships had nevergone before.**25**Fleet exercises conducted in 1981 and 1983 near the far northern and fareastern regions of the Soviet Union demonstrated US ability to deploy aircraft-carrierbattle groups close to sensitive military and industrial sites, apparentlywithout being detected or challenged early on.**26**These exercises reportedly included secret operations that simulated surprisenaval air attacks on Soviet targets.
In the August-September 1981 exercise, an armadaof 83 US, British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships led by the carrier Eisenhowermanaged to transit the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap undetected,using a variety of carefully crafted and previously rehearsed concealmentand deception measures.**27**A combination of passive measures (maintaining radio silence and operatingunder emissions control conditions) and active measures (radar-jammingand transmission of false radar signals) turned the allied force into somethingresembling a stealth fleet, which even managed to elude a Soviet low-orbit,active-radar satellite launched to locate it.**28**As the warships came within operating areas of Soviet long-range reconnaissanceplanes, the Soviets were initially able to identify but not track them.Meanwhile, Navy fighters conducted an unprecedented simulated attack onthe Soviet planes as they refueled in-flight, flying at low levels to avoiddetection by Soviet shore-based radar sites.**29**
In the second phase of this exercise, a cruiserand three other ships left the carrier battle group and sailed north throughthe Norwegian Sea and then east around Norway's Cape North and into theBarents Sea. They then sailed near the militarily important Kola Peninsulaand remained there for nine days before rejoining the main group.
In April-May 1983, the US Pacific Fleet held itslargest exercises to date in the northwest Pacific.**30**Forty ships, including three aircraft carrier battle groups, participatedalong with AWACS-equipped B-52s. At one point the fleet sailed within 720kilometers (450 miles) of the Kamchatka Peninsula and Petropavlovsk, theonly Soviet naval base with direct access to open seas. US attack submarinesand antisubmarine aircraft conducted operations in protected areas ("bastions")where the Soviet Navy had stationed a large number of its nuclear-poweredballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). US Navy aircraft from the carriersMidway and Enterprise carried out a simulated bombing run over a militaryinstallation on the small Soviet-occupied island of Zelenny in the KurilIsland chain.**31**
**Map: Greenland-Iceland-UnitedKingdom (GIUK) Gap**
In addition to these exercises, according to publishedaccounts, the Navy applied a full-court press against the Soviets in variousforward areas. Warships began operating in the Baltic and Black Seas androutinely sailed past Cape North and into the Barents Sea. Intelligenceships were positioned off the Crimean coast. Aircraft carriers with submarineescorts were anchored in Norwegian fjords. US attack submarines practicedassaults on Soviet SSBNs stationed beneath the polar ice cap.
These US demonstrations of military might wereaimed at deterring the Soviets from provocative actions and at displayingUS determination to respond in kind to Soviet regional and global exercisesthat had become larger, more sophisticated, and more menacing in precedingyears. The projection of naval and naval air power exposed gaping holesin Soviet ocean surveillance and early warning systems. For example, ina Congressional briefing on the 1983 Pacific exercise, the chief of navaloperations noted that the Soviets "are as naked as a jaybird there [onthe Kamchatka Peninsula], and they know it."**32**His comment applied equally to the far northern maritime area and the KolaPeninsula. In short, the Navy had demonstrated that it could:-  Elude the USSR's large and complex ocean surveillancesystems.**33**
-  Defeat Soviet tactical warning systems.
-  Penetrate air defense systems.
***RYAN and PSYOP--A Link?*** Was there aconnection between PSYOP and RYAN? There clearly was a temporal correlation.The first PSYOP probes began in mid-February 1981; in May, Andropov directedthe KGB to work with the GRU to launch the RYAN program (see earlier sectionentitled "The Soviet Intelligence Alert and Operation RYAN"), and the KGBCenter informed rezidenturas about the program's existence.
When Reagan administration officials first learnedof RYAN, they reportedly drew a connection between the US-led militaryprobes and the Soviet alert, noting that the Soviets were increasinglyfrightened.**34**While Moscow presumably took account of the tit-for-tat nature of the USmilitary operations and did not draw hard-and-fast conclusions as to whatthese operations might portend about US intentions, it could not ignoreeither their implications for a surprise attack scenario or the gaps theyexposed in the USSR's technical early warning systems.
In addition, the ability of Soviet intelligenceto monitor US naval operations by reading encrypted communications hadbeen reduced, if not neutralized. Moscow did not know what the US *would*do. Even so, it had learned a disturbing lesson about what Washington *could*do in a wartime situation or other crisis. RYAN, it appears, was designedto test a worst case interpretation of US actions and to compensate fortechnical deficiencies in Soviet strategic and tactical warning capabilitiesby augmenting them with human intelligence operations.
While a narrow circle of US officials may havegained an appreciation of the PSYOP-RYAN cause-and-effect relationshipsuggested above, this apparently was not true of the US Intelligence Communityas a whole. A declassified 1984 Special National Intelligence Estimate(SNIE), commissioned to assess indications of an "abnormal Soviet fearof conflict with the United States," was a case in point.**35**
The SNIE did not refer specifically to RYAN, althoughallusions to war-scare statements suggest some knowledge of the alert.In the absence of other information, the SNIE attributed Soviet statementsto US foreign and defense policy "challenges"; it attributed recent Sovietmilitary exercises to force development and training requirements. TheSNIE played down the significance of Soviet assertions about US preparationsfor a surprise nuclear attack, arguing that the "absence of forcewide combatreadiness and other war preparations in the USSR" apparently meant thatthe Kremlin did not believe war was imminent or inevitable.**36**The "war scare" was more propaganda than threat perception, according tothis assessment.**37**
Nonetheless, the SNIE drafters evidently sensedthat there might be more to the story and raised the possibility that "recentUS/NATO military exercises and reconnaissance operations" might have beenfactors in Soviet behavior. The main clue was the difference between pastand present Soviet characterizations of such exercises and operations.In the past, Moscow had routinely criticized such activities as indicationsof Western hostile intentions, but now it was going considerably furtherby charging that they were preparations for a surprise nuclear attack.In the final analysis, however, the SNIE's authors were unable to makea specific connection between the Soviet alert and Western military moves,noting that a "detailed examination of simultaneous 'red' and 'blue' actionshad not been accomplished."**38**
While the US probes caught the Kremlin by surprise,they were not unprecedented; there was a Cold War antecedent. During the1950s and 1960s, the US Strategic Air Command and the Navy had conductedsimilar operations--intelligence-gathering missions, including "ferret"operations aimed at detecting locations of, reactions by, and gaps in Sovietradar and air defense installations--along the USSR's Eurasian peripheryin preparation for possible nuclear war.**39**
RYAN, Phase II: A New Senseof UrgencyOperation RYAN was assigned a high but not overridingpriority in 1982. Then, on 17 February 1983, the Center notified all rezidenturason alert that RYAN had "acquired an especial degree of urgency" and was"now of particularly grave importance."**40**Rezidents (station chiefs) received new orders marked "strictly personal,"instructing them to organize a "continual watch" using their entire operationalstaff.**41**They also were ordered to redirect existing agents who might have had accessto RYAN-related information; to recruit new agents; and to have operationsofficers put selected targets under surveillance.
KGB Center Pushes Operation RYAN, February 1983 (excerptfrom KGB cable translated by Oleg Gordievsky) No. 373/PR/5217.02.83Top SecretCopy No 1LondonComr[ade] Yermakov[A. V. Guk](strictly personal) Permanent OperationalAssignment to Uncover NATOPreparations for a Nuclear MissileAttack on the USSR In view of the growing urgency ofthe task of discovering promptly any preparations by the adversary fora nuclear missile attack (RYAN) on the USSR, we are sending you a permanentlyoperative assignment (POA) and briefing on this question. 
The objective of the assignment is to see thatthe residentura works systematically to uncover any plans in preparationby the main adversary [the United States] for RYAN and to organize a continualwatch to be kept for indications of a decision being taken to use nuclearweapons against the USSR or immediate preparations being made for a nuclearmissile attack. 

The new orders assumed that a preliminary US decisionto launch a nuclear missile attack, even if made in secret, would requirea variety of consultations and implementing actions that could be detectedthrough a combination of overt and clandestine scrutiny. According to theKGB Center:One of the chief directions for the activityof the KGB's foreign service is to organize detection and assessment ofsigns of preparation for RYAN in all possible areas, i.e., political, economicand military sectors, civil defense and the activity of the special services.
Our military neighbors [the GRU] are activelyengaged in similar work in relation to the activity of the adversary'sarmed forces.**42**Three categories of targets were identified for prioritycollection. The first included US and NATO government, military, intelligence,and civil-defense installations that could be penetrated by agents or visuallyobserved by Soviet intelligence officers. Service and technical personnelat such installations were assigned a high priority for recruitment. Thesecond target category consisted of bilateral and multilateral consultationsamong the US and other NATO members. The third included US and NATO civilianand military "communications networks and systems."
*Rezidenturas* were instructed to focus onchanges in the operations of US/NATO communications networks and in staffinglevels. They also were ordered to obtain information on "the organization,location, and functioning mechanism of all forms of communications whichare allocated by the adversary for controlling the process of preparingand waging a nuclear war"--that is, information on command-and-controlnetworks.**43**
Moscow's new sense of urgency was explicitly linkedto the impending deployment of US Pershing II intermediate-range ballisticmissiles (IRBMs) in West Germany. The Soviets as well as some Western militaryexperts saw the Pershings as a new destabilizing element in the nuclearbalance for two reasons. First, these highly accurate IRBMs were capableof destroying Soviet hard targets, including command -and-control bunkersand missile silos.**44**Second, their flight time from Germany to European Russia was calculatedto be only four to six minutes, giving the missiles a "super-sudden firststrike" capability.**45**In a crisis, the Soviets could be attacked with little or no warning, andtherefore would have to consider striking at the Pershing launchsites beforebeing struck by the US missiles.**46**
The new instructions from Moscow also indicated,without being specific, that the alert was linked to revisions in Sovietmilitary planning, noting that RYAN "now lies at the core of [Soviet] militarystrategy."**47**The alert was designed to give Moscow a "period of anticipation essential...to take retaliatory measures. Otherwise, reprisal time would be extremelylimited."**48**
But the repeated emphasis on providing warningof a US attack "at a very early stage" and "without delay" suggests thatthe Soviets were planning to preempt, not retaliate. If they acquired whatthey considered to be reliable information about an impending US attack,it would not have made sense for them to wait for the attack to begin beforeresponding; it would have made sense to try to destroy the US missilesbefore they were launched. Hence the reference to military strategy probablymeant that the Soviet high command intended to target the Pershings forpreemptive destruction if RYAN indicated plans for a US attack.**49**
RYAN and East German IntelligenceThe KGB's declining effectiveness by the 1980s (seeAppendix A) led the Kremlin to turn to its liaison services in EasternEurope for help with RYAN. It assigned a major role to East Germany's HauptverwaltungAufklärung (HVA), a civilian agency headed by legendary spymasterMarkus Wolf that was probably the best foreign intelligence service inthe Warsaw Pact--"even better than the KGB," according to Gordievsky.**50**
RYAN: Retaliatory or Preemptive Strike? February1983 (excerpt from KGB cable translated by Oleg Gordievsky)No 373/PR/52Top SecretCopy No 1Attachment 2 The Problem of Discovering Preparation for a Nuclear Missile Attack on the USSR Uncovering the process of preparationby the adversary to take the decision for a nuclear attack and the subsequentmeasures to prepare the country for a nuclear war would enable us to increasethe so-called period of anticipation essential for the Soviet Union totake retaliatory measures. Otherwise, reprisal time would be extremelylimited. For instance, noting the launching of strategic missiles fromthe continental part of the USA and taking into account the time requiredfor determining the direction of their flight in fact leaves roughly 20minutes' reaction time. This period will be considerably curtailed afterdeployment of the 'Pershing-2' missile in the FRG, for which the flyingtime to reach long-range targets in the Soviet Union is calculated at 4-6minutes.

The KGB viewed West Germany as its "door to theWest" and to NATO, and the HVA had the key to that door.**51**As a result, the KGB rezidentura in East Berlin was the largest in theworld and produced as much intelligence as a single directorate at theKGB Center in Moscow.**52**Indeed, German counterintelligence officials believe that the HVA by itselfmay have obtained up to 80 percent of all Warsaw Pact intelligence on NATO.**53**
The demise of East Germany, the survival of someHVA files, and Wolf's recently published autobiography have all contributedin some measure to documenting the Soviet war scare and how it affectedSoviet bloc intelligence operations. Wolf gives some insight into the warscare's origins in a revealing conversation he had with Yuri Andropov inFebruary 1980, when Andropov was still head of the KGB:We began discussing the East-West conflict.I had never before seen Andropov so somber and dejected. He described agloomy scenario in which a nuclear war might be a real threat. His soberanalysis came to the conclusion that the US government was striving withall means available to establish nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.He cited statements of President Carter, his adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski,and of Pentagon spokesmen, all of which included the assertion that undercertain circumstances a nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union andits allies would be justified....
Carter's presidency had created great concernin the Kremlin, because he had presented a defense budget of more than$157 billion, which he invested in the MX and Trident missiles and nuclearsubmarines. One of the top Soviet nuclear strategists confided to me thatthe resources of our alliance were not sufficient to match this.**54**[emphasis added]By the early 1980s, Wolf goes on to say, "our Sovietpartners had become obsessed with the danger of a nuclear missile attack."**55**He claims: "Like most intelligent people, I found these war games a burdensomewaste of time, but these orders were no more open to discussion than otherorders from above."**56**Wolf created a special staff and built a round-the-clock situation centerwith a "special communications link" to Moscow dedicated to monitoringa "catalogue" of political and military indicators of an impending US attack.The East German leadership even ordered construction of dispersed commandbunkers for top political, military, and intelligence officials.
Wolf put his extensive West German agent networkat Moscow's disposal. Priority number one was surveillance of PershingII and cruise missile sites, which HVA sources had already located andreported to Moscow.**57**The HVA ordered agents in West German ministries, agencies, and defensefirms to be on the lookout for technical breakthroughs in weapons research.**58**These agents were instructed to report any new information immediately,without waiting for regularly scheduled meetings with their couriers fromEast Berlin.**59**The most important requirement was for sensitive data on the Pershing ballisticmissile and the Tomahawk cruise missile. This data eluded the East Germans,but they were able to obtain information on the construction, transportation,assembly, and stationing of these missiles.**60**
**The control room of an undergroundbunker built for the East German foreign intelligence service (HVA). Thiswas one of five dispersed command centers constructed by the East Germansin 1983 in response to the Soviet war scare.**
The HVA and the VA (the military intelligenceservice) launched an agent-recruiting drive linked to Operation RYAN. Accordingto one news report, the HVA went after "dozens" of US servicemen, businessmen,and students in West Germany and West Berlin.**61**The West German armed services were also a top-priority target for recruitment;German counterintelligence authorities documented at least 1,500 attemptedrecruitments of West German officers and NCOs by East German intelligencebetween 1983 and 1989. Most of those pitched were asked to report on weaponsdevelopments, troop strengths, mobilization plans, and/or alert procedures.**62**
RYAN and HVAThe war scare had a major impact on East German intelligenceand the way it conducted business. At Soviet insistence, State SecurityMinister Erich Mielke made RYAN the overriding operational mission of theMinistry for State Security (MfS), the HVA's parent organization, issuinga ministerial order that outlined the entire Soviet collection program.**63**The East Germans also followed--or were ordered to follow--the Soviet exampleof merging civilian and military intelligence operations. Mielke signeda memorandum of agreement with his counterpart in the Ministry of NationalDefense and the chief of military intelligence (Verwaltung Aufklärungor VA) that called for across-the-board cooperation in running joint operations,sharing tradecraft, and developing agent communications equipment.**64**During the early 1980s the chief of military intelligence became such afrequent visitor of Mielke's (and Wolf's) that he was given his own entrypermit to MfS headquarters.**65**

The War Scare Goes PublicDespite their private concerns, Soviet leaders maintaineda public posture of relative calm during 1981-82. Even President Reagan'sfirst Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, later gave Moscow credit fordoing so. "The Soviets stayed very, very moderate, very, very responsibleduring the first three years of this administration. I was mind-boggledwith their patience."**66**But that patience wore thin in 1983.

**"Star Wars"**The overt phase of the war scare erupted barelya month into the second phase of RYAN. On 23 March 1983, President Reaganannounced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), quickly dubbed "StarWars" by the media. SDI was a plan for a ground- and space-based, laser-armedantiballistic missile system that, if deployed, would create a shield forUS land-based missiles. Four days after the President's announcement--andin direct response--Andropov lashed out. He accused the United States ofpreparing a first-strike attack on the Soviet Union and asserted that PresidentReagan was "inventing new plans on how to unleash a nuclear war in thebest way, with the hope of winning it."**67**
Andropov's remarks were unprecedented.**68**He violated a longstanding taboo by citing numbers and capabilities ofUS nuclear weapons in the mass media. He also referred to Soviet weaponswith highly unusual specificity. And for the first time since 1953, thetop Soviet leader was telling his nation that the world was on the vergeof a nuclear holocaust. If candor is a sign of sincerity, then Moscow wasworried.
The SDI announcement came out of the blue forthe Kremlin--and for most of the Reagan Cabinet.**69**Andropov's advisers urged him not to overreact, but he ignored their advice,accusing President Reagan of "deliberately lying" about Soviet militarypower to justify SDI. He denounced the missile shield as a "bid to disarmthe Soviet Union in the face of the US nuclear threat." Space-based defense,he added:would open the floodgates of a runawayrace of all types of strategic arms, both offensive and defensive. Suchis the real significance, the seamy side, so to say, of Washington's "defensiveconception." ...The Soviet Union will never be caught defenseless by anythreat.... Engaging in this is not just irresponsible, it is insane....Washington's actions are putting the entire world in jeopardy.**70**SDI had touched a sensitive nerve. The Soviets treatedit as an extremely serious development for two reasons. First, despitetheir boasting in the 1970s, Soviet leaders--and perhaps Andropov mostof all--had great respect for US technological capabilities.**71**Second, SDI had a profound psychological impact that reinforced the trendalready anticipated in the new Soviet assessment of the "correlation offorces." In a remarkable *tete-a-tete* with a US journalist and formerarms control official, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, First Deputy Defense Ministerand Chief of the General Staff, interpreted the real meaning of SDI:We cannot equal the quality of U.S. armsfor a generation or two. Modern military power is based on technology,and technology is based on computers. In the US, small children play withcomputers.... Here, we don't even have computers in every office of theDefense Ministry. And for reasons you know well, we cannot make computerswidely available in our society. We will never be able to catch up withyou in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the questionis whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution.**72**This private rumination was all the more remarkablebecause Ogarkov's public statements showed him to be a hawk's hawk whocompared the United States to Nazi Germany and argued repeatedly for moreresources to continue the arms competition. The dichotomy between his publicstatements and his confidential remarks to the US journalist was striking;it indicated that he understood better than most political and other militaryleaders the challenge posed by American military technology.

**KAL 007**At 3:26 a.m. Tokyo time on 1 September 1983,a Soviet Su-15 interceptor fired two air-to-air missiles at a Korean AirlinesBoeing 747 airliner, Flight 007, destroying the aircraft and killing all269 crewmembers and passengers. Soviet air defense units had been trackingthe aircraft for more than an hour while it entered and left Soviet airspaceover the Kamchatka Peninsula. The order to shoot down the airliner wasgiven as it was about to leave Soviet airspace for the second time afterflying over Sakhalin Island. It was probably downed in international airspace.
From US and Japanese communications intercepts,the White House learned about the shootdown within a few hours, and, withSecretary Shultz taking the lead, denounced the Soviet act as deliberatemass murder. President Reagan called it "an act of barbarism, born of asociety which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of humanlife and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations."**73**
Air Force intelligence dissented from the rushto judgment at the time, and eventually US intelligence reached a consensusthat the Soviets probably did not know they were attacking a civilian airliner.**74**The charge probably should have been something akin to criminally negligentmanslaughter, not premeditated murder. But the official US position neverdeviated from the initial assessment. The incident was used to start avociferous campaign in the United Nations and to spur worldwide effortsto punish the USSR through commercial boycotts, lawsuits, and denial oflanding rights for Aeroflot. These efforts focused on indicting the Sovietsystem and the top leadership as being ultimately responsible.**75**
Moscow did not even acknowledge the incident untilSeptember 6, and it delayed an official explanation for three more days.On 9 September, Marshal Ogarkov held a live press conference that ran fortwo hours.**76**The five-star spin doctor's goal was to prove that--269 innocent victimsnotwithstanding--the Soviet Union had acted rationally. Ogarkov assertedthat the regional air defense unit had identified the aircraft as a USintelligence platform, an RC-135 of the type that routinely performed intelligenceoperations along a similar fight path. In any event, regardless of whetherit was an RC-135 or a 747, he argued, the plane was unquestionably on aUS or joint US-Japanese intelligence mission, and the local air defensecommander had made the correct decision. The real blame for the tragedy,he insisted, lay with the United States, not the USSR.**77**
**Map: Korean Airlines Flight007, 1 September 1983**
**Marshal Nikolai Ogarkovduring his September 9, 1983 press conference on the shootdown of KAL 007.Ogarkov gave a good performance, but his remarks were a coverup from thebeginning to end.**
A classified memorandum submitted to the Politburoby the Defense Ministry and the KGB shows that the Soviet leadership heldmuch the same view in private. Released in 1992, the memorandum concluded:We are dealing with a major, dual-purposepolitical provocation carefully organized by the US special services. Thefirst purpose was to use the incursion of the intruder aircraft into Sovietairspace to create a favorable situation for the gathering of defense dataon our air defense system in the Far East, involving the most diverse systemsincluding the Ferret satellite. Second, they envisaged, if this flightwere terminated by us, [the US would use] that fact to mount a global anti-Sovietcampaign to discredit the Soviet Union.**78**Soviet *angst* was reflected in the harsh propagandareaction that followed. Once again Andropov took the lead in bashing theUnited States. Asserting that an "outrageous military psychosis" had overtakenthe US, he declared that "the Reagan administration, in its imperial ambitions,goes so far that one begins to doubt whether Washington has any brakesat all preventing it from crossing the point at which any sober-mindedperson must stop."**79**
Yuri Andropov on KAL-007*The sophisticated provocation, organized by theUS special services and using a South Korean airplane, is an example ofextreme adventurism in policy. We have given the factual aspect of thisaction a detailed and authentic elucidation. The guilt of its organizers--nomatter how they twist and turn or how many false stories they put out--havebeen proved.*
*The Soviet leadership has expressed regretin connection with the loss of human lives that was the result of thisunprecedented act of criminal sabotage. It is on the conscience of thosewho would like to arrogate to themselves the right to disregard the sovereigntyof states and the inviolability of their borders, who conceived of andcarried out this provocation, who literally the next day hurried to pushthrough Congress colossal military appropriations and now are rubbing theirhands in satisfaction.*
As reported in*Pravda* and *Izvestiya*,29 September 1983

The local Soviet air defense commander appearsto have made a serious but honest mistake. The situation in the regionwas not normal; his forces had been on high alert and in a state of anxietyfollowing incursions by US aircraft during the spring 1983 Pacific Fleetexercise recounted above. A Soviet demarche contended that US planes hadflown some 32 kilometers (20 miles) into Soviet airspace and remained therefor up to 20 minutes during several overflights.**80**As a result, the Soviet air defense command was put on alert for the restof the spring and summer--and possibly longer--and some senior officerswere transferred, reprimanded, or dismissed.**81**
The KAL 007 incident was not only a tragedy; italso touched off a dangerous episode in US-Soviet relations, which alreadyhad been exacerbated by the war scare. As Dobrynin put it, both sides "wentslightly crazy." For Washington, the incident seemed to express all thatwas wrong with the Soviet system and to vindicate the administration'scritique of the Soviet system. For Moscow, the episode seemed to encapsulateand reinforce the Soviets' worst case assumptions about US policy for severalreasons:-  President Reagan was quick to seize on the shootdownto broadly indict the Soviet system and its leaders. Andropov, notwithstandingwhatever he actually may have believed about Soviet responsibility, wasforced onto the defensive and evidently felt compelled to justify the USSR'sactions at all costs.
 
-  The US follow-on campaign at the UN and in otherchannels to embarrass and isolate the USSR in the international communityundoubtedly contributed to Moscow's penchant to see an anti-Soviet plot.**82**In the Soviet view, a campaign of this scope and magnitude that just happenedto dovetail with the Reagan administration's moral critique of the USSRmust have been more than simply a chance opportunity seized by Washingtonin the heat of the moment.**83**
 
-  President Reagan's decision to use the KAL 007 shootdownto persuade Congress to support his requests for increased defense spendingand the new MX missile pointed in the same direction, in Moscow's view.Given the Soviets' predilection for conspiracy theorizing, it was not farfetchedthat they would see a US design behind the combination of circumstances.
The net effect of the crisis was to close off whateverdebate was still going on within the Soviet leadership over US intentions.On 29 September, Andropov issued an unusual "declaration" on US-Sovietrelations that brought the war scare into sharper public focus:The Soviet leadership deems it necessaryto inform the Soviet people, other peoples, and all who are responsiblefor determining the policy of states, of its assessment of the course pursuedin international affairs by the current US administration. In brief, itis a militarist course that represents a serious threat to peace.... Ifanyone had any illusion about the possibility of an evolution for the betterin the policy of the present American administration, recent events havedispelled them completely.**84**[emphasis added]Dobrynin says the last phrase was the key one; theword "completely" was carefully chosen to express the Politburo's consensusthat the USSR could not reach any agreement with the Reagan administration.**85**In sum, the aftermath of the downing of KAL 007 heightened Soviet anxiety.Within weeks Soviet intelligence and the Soviet military, almost certainlywith the KAL 007 episode in mind, would overreact to a US/NATO militaryexercise.

**ABLE ARCHER 83**Another notable incident in 1983 occurred duringan annual NATO command post exercise codenamed ABLE ARCHER 83. The Sovietswere familiar with this exercise from previous years, but the 1983 versionincluded two important changes:-  In the original scenario (which was later modified),the 1983 exercise was to involve high-level officials, including the Secretaryof Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in major roles,with cameo appearances by the President and the Vice President. Such high-levelparticipation would have meant greater publicity and visibility than wasthe case during past runnings of this exercise.
 
-  ABLE ARCHER 83 included a practice drill that tookNATO forces through a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons.
According to Gordievsky, on the night of November8 or 9--he was not sure which--the KGB Center sent a flash cable to WestEuropean residencies advising them, incorrectly, that US forces in Europehad gone on alert and that troops at some bases were being mobilized. Thecable speculated that the (nonexistent) alert might have been ordered inresponse to the then-recent bomb attack on the US Marine barracks in Lebanon,or was related to impending US Army maneuvers, or was the beginning ofa countdown to a surprise nuclear attack. Recipients were asked to confirmthe US alert and evaluate these hypotheses.
Gordievsky described the reaction in stark terms:In the tense atmosphere generated bythe crises and rhetoric of the past few months, the KGB concluded thatAmerican forces had been placed on alert--and might even have begun thecountdown to war.... The world did not quite reach the edge of the nuclearabyss during Operation RYAN. But during ABLE ARCHER 83 it had, withoutrealizing it, come frighteningly close--certainly closer than at any timesince the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.**86**[emphasis added]The ABLE ARCHER story has been told and retold byjournalists with inside contacts in the White House and Whitehall.**87**Three themes run though the various versions: The US and USSR came closeto war as a result of Soviet overreaction; only Gordievsky's timely warningto the West kept things from getting out of hand; and Gordievsky's informationwas an epiphany for President Reagan, convincing him that the Kremlin indeedwas fearful of a US surprise nuclear attack:Within a few weeks after ...ABLE ARCHER83, the London CIA station reported, presumably on the basis of informationobtained by the British from Gordievsky, that the Soviets had been alarmedabout the real possibility that the United States was preparing a nuclearattack against them. [National Security Adviser Robert] McFarlane, whoreceived the reports at the White House, initially discounted them as Sovietscare tactics rather than evidence of real concern about American intentions,and told Reagan of his view in presenting them to the President. But amore extensive survey of Soviet attitudes sent to the White House earlyin 1984 by CIA director William Casey, based in part on reports from thedouble agent Gordievsky, had a more sobering effect. Reagan seemed uncharacteristicallygrave after reading the report and asked McFarlane, "Do you suppose theyreally believe that? ...I don't see how they could believe that--but it'ssomething to think about." ...In a meeting the same day, Reagan spoke aboutthe biblical prophecy of Armageddon, a final world-ending battle betweengood and evil, a topic that fascinated the President. McFarlane thoughtit was not accidental that Armageddon was on Reagan's mind.**88**Is Gordievsky's stark description credible? Accordingto a US foreign affairs correspondent, the "volume and urgency" of WarsawPact communications increased during the exercise.**89**In addition, US sources reported that Soviet fighter aircraft with nuclearweapons at bases in East Germany and Poland were placed on alert.**90**But a US expert who queried a number of senior Soviet political and militaryofficials reports that none had heard of ABLE ARCHER, and all denied thatit had come to the attention of the Politburo or even the upper levelsof the Defense Ministry.**91**Moreover, Dobrynin, who argues that the top leadership took the war threatseriously and devotes several pages in his memoirs to the KAL 007 tragedy,makes no mention of ABLE ARCHER.
An important piece of evidence--the Center's flashmessage referred to above--is missing from the RYAN cables that Gordievskypublished in 1991. ABLE ARCHER 83, it seems, made more of an impressionin the White House than in the Kremlin.**92**In any event, it was not comparable to the Cuban crisis, when the superpowerswere on a collision course, US nuclear forces were on full alert, and--asrecently revealed--the USSR had deployed nuclear weapons in Cuba.
The "Iron Lady" and the "GreatCommunicator"Did Gordievsky's reporting bring home the messagethat the war scare in the Kremlin was serious and that it posed a potentialdanger of Soviet overreaction? Gordievsky and British co-author ChristopherAndrew have said so repeatedly. The information Gordievsky provided tothe British "was of enormous importance in providing warning of the almostparanoid fear within some sections of the Soviet leadership that PresidentReagan was planning a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union," accordingto Andrew.**93**
Prime Minister Thatcher herself apparently deliveredthe chilling message to President Reagan, hoping to convince him to moderatehis rhetoric and actions. She evidently believed that US policy towardthe USSR had become risky and counterproductive by threatening to undermineNATO's consensus on deployment of US intermediate-range missiles. Thatcheralso was mindful of the growing strength of the peace movement in Europeand especially in West Germany.
Thatcher publicly urged a shift in policy on 29September in an address at the annual dinner for the Churchill FoundationAward in Washington, where she knew her remarks would attract media--andWhite House--attention. Her theme--"we live on the same planet and mustgo [on] sharing it"--was a plea for a more accommodating Alliance policythat she spelled out in subsequent speeches. She did not, according toa chronicler of the Thatcher-Reagan partnership, pick up the phone or approachReagan directly, because:The essence of the partnership at thisstage was that the two governments were basing their decisions on muchthe same evidence and on shared assessments at professional level. In particular,both governments would have had the same intelligence. A critical contributionin this field was made over a period of years by Oleg Gordievsky....**94**A US journalist who interviewed British intelligencesources believes Gordievsky's reporting had a significant impact on theWhite House.**95**He adds an interesting twist to the story. The British claimed the KGBwas exploiting, and perhaps manipulating, "bluster in Washington" to hypethe US threat to Soviet leaders for the KGB's own bureaucratic purposesand interests. London's message to Washington was: stop helping the hawksand start supporting the doves. Whether the British were acting as analystsor spin doctors is open to question.
President Reagan says in his memoirs--withoutreference to British intelligence reports or ABLE ARCHER--that in late1983 he was surprised to learn that "many people at the top of the Soviethierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans," and "many Sovietofficials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressorswho might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike."**96**
In the broad scheme of things, election-year politicsand polls showing that the President's anti-Soviet rhetoric was his highest"negative" with US public opinion probably played the main role in themore conciliatory tone he adopted in early 1984. But the President himselfsaid the war scare was "something to think about." The British intelligencereports appear to have influenced President Reagan--as they were no doubtintended to do--more than they influenced senior White House policy aides,who remained skeptical of the Soviet war scare during 1981-83 and evenafter Gordievsky had defected and publicly surfaced in 1985.**97**War Scare Frenzy in the USSRIn the months following the September 1983 KAL incident,a full-scale war scare unfolded in the USSR. Soviet authorities clearlyinstigated this through a variety of agitprop activities. Even so, thescare took on a life of its own and threatened to get out of hand beforethe Kremlin took steps in early 1984 to calm public fears.**98**
Soviet attacks on President Reagan reached a feverpitch. Moscow compared him to Hitler and alleged that he had ties to theMafia. The Soviet media hammered home that the danger of nuclear war washigher than at any time since World War II.
Radio Liberty interviews with Soviet citizenstraveling abroad suggested that much of the Soviet public was genuinelyalarmed. A series of officially sponsored activities at home fed the frenzy.Moscow organized mass "peace" rallies; sponsored "peace" classes in schoolsand universities; arranged closed briefings on the "war danger" for partyactivists and military personnel; designated a "civil defense" month; broadcastexcerpts from Stalin's famous 1941 speech to troops parading through RedSquare on their way to defend Moscow from the approaching German army;and televised a heavyhanded Defense Ministry film that depicted a warmongeringAmerica bent on world domination. The Politburo also considered, but rejected,proposals to shift to a six-day industrial workweek and to create a special"defense fund" to raise money for the military.
What were the Soviet leadership's motives? Someobservers who have studied the war scare have written it off as politicaltheater--as an elaborate orchestration to release tensions over KAL 007at home and promote the ongoing Soviet "peace offensive" abroad.**99**But it clearly was more than that. The leadership would not have invokedthe memory of World War II--which is emotionally charged and had an almostsacred significance for the Soviet people--solely for propaganda purposes.It would not have fueled popular fears about nuclear extinction just toboost morale and influence public opinion abroad.
War Scare in the USSR*We have been hearing a lot of rumors about thepossibility of war in the near future. At political information meetingsthey are saying that the United States is getting ready to attack the SovietUnion, and that we should be prepared for an attack at any moment. Fromwhat I could see, those who believed these warnings significantly outnumberedthose who didn't. The simple people are very frightened of war.*
Soviet citizen interviewed byRadio Liberty (Munich)November 1983

The regime appears to have aggravated popularfears of war for a specific purpose: to prepare the population for thepossibility that repeated promises to raise living standards might haveto be abandoned in order to increase defense spending in the face of agrowing danger of a US military strike on the USSR.**100**The Kremlin, it seems, had decided that the only way to make new sacrificespalatable was to play to the public's fears.**101**The ploy was a risky one, not only because the Soviet people had come toexpect improvements in their living standards, but also because developmentsin Poland at that time were underscoring how popular unrest could developinto revolt against a Communist regime.
With the improvement in US-Soviet relations afterMikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the domestic war scare subsidedas quickly as it had emerged. Before it did, however, the leadership apparentlyfelt compelled to allay the public's fears with assurances that the USSRwas in a position to deter war and, if necessary, to defend itself. Thiswas further evidence that the war scare was genuinely felt among the populace.
The Enduring Trauma of BARBAROSSAThe Soviet Union and the United States both enteredWorld War II in 1941 as victims of surprise attacks, but the impact ofOperation BARBAROSSA--the German codename for Hitler's June 1941 attackon the USSR--was even more of an enduring national trauma than Pearl Harborwas for the United States. The German invasion was the worst military disasterin Russian history.**102**It should have been anticipated and could have been countered by the Sovietsbut was not, mainly because of a failure to interpret indications and warningsaccurately.
The connection between ignored warnings and surpriseattack has never been forgotten in Moscow. For decades after the war, Sovietleaders seemed obsessed with the lessons of 1941, which were as much visceralas intellectual in Soviet thinking about war and peace.**103**
The 1941 analogy clearly had an impact on theway RYAN requirements were formulated and implemented. The historical exampleof Operation BARBAROSSA, moreover, may explain the sense of urgency thatKGB officers such as Gordievsky and Shvets attributed to the Kremlin evenwhile these officers themselves discounted the threat. The gap in perceptionsmay have reflected a gap in generations. Members of the Brezhnev-Andropovgeneration had experienced the German war firsthand as the formative experienceof their political lives. But for the younger generation born just before,during, or after the war, BARBAROSSA was history rather than living memory.
The Soviets' intelligence "failure" of 1941 wasa failure of analysis, not collection.**104**Stalin received multiple, detailed, and timely warnings of the impendinginvasion from a variety of open and clandestine sources. But he chose tointerpret intelligence data with a best case or not-so-bad-case hypothesis,assuming--incorrectly--that Hitler would not attack without issuing anultimatum or fight a two-front war. Stalin erred in part because he deceivedhimself and in part because German counterintelligence misled him withan elaborate deception plan.**105**Possibly because of this precedent, Stalin's heirs may have decided thatit was better to look through a glass darkly than through rose-coloredlenses. This, it appears, is why Operation RYAN used an explicit worstcase methodology to search for indications and warning of a US surpriseattack.
RYAN also seems to have incorporated--or in someinstances misapplied--other lessons from 1941. Despite the prowess of hisintelligence services, Stalin distrusted clandestinely acquired intelligence,including agent reporting and even communications and signals intercepts.**106**He did so because he was convinced that such sources could be controlledby the enemy and corrupted by disinformation--a belief that led him toreject accurate as well as inaccurate information. He insisted that Sovietintelligence look instead for indirect indicators of war planning thatcould not be concealed or manipulated. He went along, for example, witha proposal by his chief of military intelligence for surveying mutton pricesin Nazi-occupied Europe; the intelligence official thought the Germanswould need sheepskin coats for winter military campaigning in Russia and,by buying up existing livestock supplies, would flood the market with cheapmutton.**107**This deceptively simple indicator turned out to be simply deceptive; Hitler,believing he could defeat the Red Army by the fall of 1941, did not preparefor wintertime operations.
RYAN requirements reveal the same kind of unorthodoxthinking. For example, the KGB residency in London was instructed to monitorprices paid for blood at urban donor banks.**108**The KGB Center assumed that prices would rise on the eve of war as bloodbanks scurried to stockpile supplies. But there was a problem with thisassumption: British donor banks do not pay for blood--contributions arevoluntary. In another such example of RYAN requirements, the KGB residencyin London was told to visit meatpacking plants, looking for signs of "massslaughter of cattle and putting of meat into long cold storage."**109**The parallel with Soviet intelligence requirements of 1939-41 is closeenough to suggest that the KGB was digging them out of old NKVD (the KGB'spredecessor) and GRU files.
Finally, there was another plausible--althoughunprovable--link between 1941 and 1981. The 1941 disaster was Stalin'sfault, but he blamed Soviet intelligence. This left an indelible stainon the Soviet services, and the subject was so sensitive that it couldnot be discussed openly until the advent of glasnost.**110**One motive behind Andropov's decision to launch Operation RYAN in 1981may have been a determination not to let history repeat itself. Sovietintelligence certainly had a vested interest in promoting a dire threatassessment of US intentions, but professional pride and a wish to avoidbeing a scapegoat may have been involved as well.
Conclusion: The War ScareWas for RealThe fears that prompted Operation RYAN seemed genuine,even if exaggerated. Ex-Ambassador Dobrynin implied as much to a skepticalUS television interviewer in 1995. When the interviewer asked whether Andropov"had really believed" that the Reagan administration might order a firststrike, Dobrynin replied: "Make your conclusions from what he [Andropov]said in telegrams to his*rezidents*."**111**
The alert was a crash program to create a strategicwarning system in response to new challenges the Soviets saw looming onthe horizon. That response was panicky but not paranoid. One historian,rejecting the paranoia thesis that has often been used to explain Russianreaction to technologically superior **112**Western military power, captured the point when he wrote: "At various timesRussian strategists were acutely fearful. But those fears, although attimes extreme, were scarcely insane."**113**
More Than Just a Scare TacticThe following remarks were made by former SovietForeign Ministry official Sergei Tarasenko at a 1993 conference of formerUS and Soviet officials:*Around this time [late 1983], [FirstDeputy Foreign Minister Georgi] Kornienko summoned me and showed me a top-secretKGB paper. It was under Andropov. Kornienko said to me, "You haven't seenthis paper. Forget about it." ...In the paper the KGB reported that theyhad information that the United States had prepared everything for a firststrike; that they might resort to a surgical strike against command centersin the Soviet Union; and that they had the capability to destroy the systemby incapacitating the command center. We were given the task of preparinga paper for the Politburo and putting forward some suggestions on how tocounter this threat not physically but politically. So we prepared a paper[suggesting] that we should leak some information that we know about thesecapabilities and contingency plans, and that we are not afraid of theseplans because we have taken the necessary measures*.**112**Tarasenko was a senior adviser to Kornienko. He wasone of the few officials outside the Soviet intelligence community whohad seen the above mentioned KGB paper. His remarks confirm that the Sovietleadership genuinely believed the risk of a US attack had risen appreciably.

Dobrynin has noted that post-Stalin leaders believedthe "existing political and social structure of the United States was thebest guarantee against an unprovoked first strike against us."**114**He claims, however, that in the early 1980s some Soviet leaders, includingAndropov, changed their minds. Why? Dobrynin's reply, quoting Andropov,was that President Reagan was "unpredictable." That answer seems too simplistic--andtoo "un-Soviet" in that it attaches so much weight to personalities--althoughit is vintage Dobrynin, who seems to view the Cold War largely as an interpersonalinterplay among Soviet and American leaders he knew.
To reduce the war scare to Andropovian paranoiaand Reaganite rhetoric is too facile. Otherwise RYAN would not have outlastedboth leaders, the KGB, and the changes in US-Soviet relations that ledto the end of the Cold War.**115**The Kremlin's thinking was shaped by adverse trends, not just adversarialpersonalities--that is, by its pessimistic assessment of the "correlationof forces" and the ever-widening gap in the USSR's technological lag behindthe West. Soviet leaders knew that their nation was no longer even runningin place on the treadmill of history; it was beginning to fall back. Inthis atmosphere, Soviet officials and much of the populace felt vulnerableto the prospect of a US attack.
Many Western observers dismissed the intelligencealert and the subsequent war scare because they considered its worst casescenario--surprise nuclear attack--as out of touch with reality or justplain irrational. They based their view more on their certainty that therewas no objective threat of a US attack--Reagan was not Hitler, and Americadoes not do Pearl Harbors--than on their uncertain understanding abouthow the Soviets saw things. While Western observers were half-right inquestioning whether the Soviet war scare was "objective" or "rational,"they were half-wrong in writing it off as scare tactics. Even fear basedon a false threat can create real dangers.
Paradoxically, viewing the Soviet war scare asnothing more than a scare tactic may have led the West to underestimateanother threat--a Soviet preemptive strike, either as a result of miscalculationor by design to reverse the adverse "correlation of forces." Was this reallya possibility? Some observers think so.**116**For example, Gyula Horn, Hungary's last Communist foreign minister (andcurrent prime minister), claims that Soviet marshals, fortified with alittle vodka, openly advocated an attack on the West "before the imperialistsgain superiority in every sphere."**117**The evidence is anecdotal but plausible. Whether this threat was real islikely to remain one of the Cold War's conundrums until or unless stillclassified documents someday provide an answer. Appendix A: RYAN and the Declineof the KGBOperation RYAN revealed much about the KGB in thetwilight years of Soviet intelligence. The picture that emerges from OlegGordievsky's writings as well as firsthand accounts by other ex-KGB officersis mixed. By the early 1980s the KGB was corrupt and ineffective. But itappears to have been less so than many other Soviet organizations.**118**It was still regarded by Soviet leaders and other observers as an importantarm of Soviet foreign policy.
Before being posted to London in June 1982, Gordievskyreceived a briefing on Operation RYAN from a KGB expert on NATO.**119**The briefer paid lipservice to the need to recruit "well-placed agents,"but he emphasized that the principal method to be employed in RYAN wasvisual observation of "tell-tale indicators" such as lights burning ingovernment offices and military installations late at night, VIP movements,and high-level committee meetings.
The message was clear, even if implicit: the much-vauntedKGB had become largely unable to recruit well-placed agents. Having KGBstaff officers serving under official cover do their own spying, ratherthan recruiting agents to do it, violated basic rules of tradecraft. Lurkingaround well-guarded official installations during the night seemed almostcertain to attract the attention of host-country security services.**120**The KGB's willingness to risk exposure of its officers in this way reflectedthe urgency of its search for ways to implement Operation RYAN.
Gordievsky and another ex-KGB officer, Yuri Shvets,note that the KGB in the 1980s was having particular difficulty acquiringagents in the United Kingdom and the United States.**121**The spy organization's halcyon days of recruiting ideologically motivatedagents worldwide were long gone.**122**In the meantime, Western services were recruiting sizable numbers of KGBofficers and receiving defectors who in turn identified other KGB officersand operations.**123**Western and some Third World countries were expelling KGB officers in recordnumbers; the peak year was 1983, when 147 intelligence officers, including41 in France alone, were ousted for spying.**124**
Some observers argue that the increased expulsionsresulted from the high risks the KGB was taking to collect RYAN-relatedinformation. There may be something to this, but most of the expulsionsin the early 1980s were part of a coordinated crackdown on Soviet intelligenceoperations designed to collect strategically important Western scientificinformation and technology.
Inability to recruit well-placed agents compelledthe KGB to try to exploit its remaining advantages, such as the relativeopenness of Western nations and the still-large KGB staffs stationed inmany of those countries. Operation RYAN was launched on the assumptionthat, if the United States did decide to attack the USSR, it would revealthat decision more or less openly--that is, through a variety of actionsit could not conceal. The troubles enumerated above also prompted the KGBto look at another advantage it still possessed: it could draw heavilyon East Germany's formidable intelligence capabilities for help in implementingRYAN. Appendix B: The GordievskyFileVeteran KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky began spyingfor British intelligence in 1974 while stationed in Denmark. He was theprimary--and for a long time the only--source of Western intelligence onRYAN. Two of his fellow ex-KGB officers, Oleg Kalugin and Yuri Shvets,later provided corroborating information.
Gordievsky went to London in June 1982 as deputyrezident. In early 1985 he was appointed rezident. Soon thereafter, basedon information from American spy Aldrich Ames, Soviet counterintelligencerecalled Gordievsky to Moscow on a pretext, put him under surveillance,and began interrogating him. In late July 1985, using a prearranged signalto British intelligence, he triggered a plan to exfiltrate himself fromthe USSR. He returned to London in September 1985. By this time he wasthe highest ranking Western penetration of Soviet intelligence.
The British soon acknowledged publicly that Gordievskyhad been working for them, and he came under their protection. He becamean informal adviser to Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan andplayed an important role in persuading them to take Mikhail Gorbachev seriouslyas a reform-oriented leader.
Despite Gordievsky's efforts to convince the Westthat the Soviet war scare and Gorbachev were both for real, some skeptics,who believed that he was peddling KGB disinformation aimed at influencingWestern policy, question his trustworthiness. In addition, neither Gordievskynor the British have ever offered a convincing explanation of his motivesfor betraying the KGB or the circumstances of his recruitment, and thistoo has prompted some observers to suspect his credibility and even hisbona fides.**125**These two issues--bona fides and credibility--are related but not identical.There were cases during the Cold War when a Soviet intelligence defectorproved bona fide (that is, he was who he claimed to be and had access tothe information he gave to Western intelligence), but also lied, fabricated,and exaggerated to please benefactors, ingratiate himself, inflate hisvalue, protect himself, or protect his family if he had left one behindas Gordievsky did.
Many US analysts (including the author of thismonograph) do not doubt Gordievsky's bona fides, and for the most parthis credibility appears solid as well (see exceptions noted below). Britishintelligence debriefed him 150 times over a period of several months, taking6,000 pages of notes that were reviewed by analysts.**126**Everything checked out, and no significant inaccuracies or inconsistencieswere uncovered. Gordievsky's information before and after he defected ledto the identification and expulsion of KGB officers, including 31 who wereexpelled from the United Kingdom after he was exfiltrated from Moscow.**127**In various books, articles, and interviews, moreover, he did inestimabledamage to the KGB by revealing its officers, secrets, and operations andby damaging its reputation.
**President Reagan with ex-KGBofficer Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky was the West's sole source of informationon the Soviet war scare during the early 1980s.**
Gordievsky's track record, although good, is notentirely unblemished. In 1984, he told British intelligence about an allegedspy working at a British signals intercept site on Cyprus.**128**The authorities arrested eight British servicemen--five in the RAF andthree in the army--and detained them for a year. Their four-month trialdid not begin until after Gordievsky defected and arrived in London in1985. The Crown's case then collapsed when Gordievsky's information provedwrong.
In several cases Gordievsky has displayed a tendencyto shoot from the hip, making accusations about alleged Soviet agents thatwere later amended or retracted.**129**In some instances these accusations served to help promote his publications.He became embroiled in a legal battle on the eve of the publication ofhis memoirs in 1995 when he erroneously charged that a UK Labour PartyMP and a British publisher were Soviet agents. Because most of the peopleGordievsky identified as Soviet agents were Labour Party leaders and/orleftists, he was accused of seeking to serve the interests of benefactorsin the Conservative Party and conservative sympathizers in the intelligenceand security services. Some Labour officials called for termination ofhis British pension.**130**
British intelligence has used Gordievsky to reinforceits reputation at home and abroad. Some observers have said the Britishspy scandals of the 1950s and 1960s did lasting damage to confidence amongWestern intelligence and security services in their British counterparts.Gordievsky was welcome as living, breathing proof that MI6 was not penetratedand could run a long-term agent safely and securely. A knowledgeable ConservativeMP, Lord Bethell, has commented that the decision to exfiltrate Gordievskyfrom under the KGB's nose was motivated in part by a desire to demonstratewhat British intelligence could do:
A successful operation would do wonders for MI6'scredibility in the intelligence world and would leave Britain with a valuable"property," a storehouse of priceless information which even the CIA wouldfind useful. It would impress the Americans, and this is something thatBritish intelligence always likes to do.**131**
Despite the somewhat mixed picture of Gordievskythat emerges from all this, his information on RYAN and the war scare seemsaccurate and objective. His 1991 publication of RYAN cables with commentaryunderscored the credibility of the bulk of his debriefings. To date noone, either in the West or in the former Soviet Union, has challenged theauthenticity of the cables and Gordievsky's account of Operation RYAN.Gordievsky may have exaggerated the gravity of the Soviet reaction to ABLEARCHER 83 by comparing it to the Cuban missile crisis, but that was a matterof interpretation--intended no doubt to enhance the importance of his ownrole--rather than a question of fact.
Footnotes**1**See George F. Kennan, "The State of U.S.-Soviet Relations (1983)," in *AtA Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995 *(New York: W. W. Norton& Company, 1996), p. 82.
**2***Time*magazine's "Man of the Year" issue for 1984 provides a good summary ofthe issues and atmospherics in US-Soviet relations during 1983. Time choseRonald Reagan and Yuri Andropov as co-honorees. See "Men of the Year; Reaganand Andropov," *Time*, 2 January 1984, pp. 16-25.
**3**The "evil empire" speech is often regarded as a major foreign policy addressor even a defining moment in US-Soviet relations, although the venue inwhich it was delivered--an evangelical ministers' convention in Florida--suggeststhat it may not have been intended as such. The media seized on the speechprimarily for its sound-bite quality and its tie-in with the popular filmStar Wars, a futuristic morality play about Good versus Evil in outer space.Former Soviet ambassador to the US Anatoly Dobrynin has written that thespeech "was not intended to be a history-making event in foreign policy,and according to [Secretary of State George] Shultz, no one outside theWhite House, including him, had a chance to review the text in advance,but the phrase quickly spread throughout the world." Dobrynin does notsay how he portrayed the speech to Moscow. See Anatoly Dobrynin,*InConfidence: Moscow's Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents *(NewYork: Times Books/Random House, 1995), p. 502.
**4**This was the first personal attack by a top Soviet leader on a US presidentin many years. Andropov's allegation was in response to President Reagan'sassertion that the USSR had violated a self-imposed moratorium on deploymentof SS-20 intermediate-range missiles facing Western Europe. The President'sstatement was technically incorrect; the Soviet moratorium had been cleverlyworded to give the impression that all deployments would cease immediately,but the fine print showed that the Soviets did not include SS-20 launchersunder construction but not completed.
**5**Ina private conversation in Moscow with Vice President Bush, Secretary ofState Shultz, and US Ambassador Arthur Hartman in November 1982 after LeonidBrezhnev's funeral, Andropov said: "Periodically excesses of rhetoric willappear in our relationship, but it is best to pay attention to the businessat hand." George Shultz,*Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretaryof State *(New York: Charles Scribner's Son, 1993), p. 126. Andropovdid not heed his own advice and soften his own attacks on the United Stateseven after President Reagan moderated his statements on the Soviet Union.
**6**AsHarry Gelman put it: "The [Soviet] oligarchy deployed a degree and volumeof propaganda vituperation not seen since the 1950s, and far surpassingMr. Reagan in rhetorical extravagance." See *The Rise and Fall of Detente:Causes and Consequences, Occasional Paper-OPS-002*(Santa Monica, CA:The RAND Corporation, 1985), p. 25.
**7**William T. Lee, "The nuclear brink that wasn't - and the one that was,"*Washington Times*,**February 7, 1995, p. A19.
**8**See Vernon V. Asparturian, "Soviet Global Power and the Correlation ofForces," *Problems of Communism,* vol. 29 (May-June 1990), pp. 1-18,for a discussion of the rise and fall of Soviet expectations of supplantingthe United States as the primary international power. Asparturian (pp.10-11) defines "correlation of forces" as follows: [The] Soviet conceptof the "correlation of forces" differs fundamentally from the concept [of]"balance of power." While the balance of power can be the product of deliberatepolicy, the "correlation of forces" represents "balance determined by socialand historical processes" in which policy of states is only a component.As developed by Soviet writers, the "correlation of forces" constitutesthe basic substructures upon which the interstate system rests. Thus, the"correlation of forces" can be affected only marginally by state policy,but in general, state policies are shaped by the changing "correlationof forces." Even today, this Soviet concept is barely understood in theWest, hence the muddle over "assessments" and "military balances."
**9**As cited in Ibid., p. 1. In retrospect it is difficult to imagine thatthis was the Soviet perception of the international situation on the eveof Communism's collapse. But it was. Analysis of voluminous writings bySoviet experts on the West shows that: By the mid-1970s Soviet leaderswere convinced that they were gaining the upper hand. During the briefperiod of detente, America was acknowledged to be the dominant force inthe world, but its relative strength appeared to be in decline.... RichardNixon's pursuit of detente was interpreted as evidence of a weakened America'sneed for peace, markets, and new sources of energy. When Nixon traveledto Moscow in 1972, Soviet specialists on American affairs enthusiasticallyproclaimed that the USSR was emerging as the victor in the global strugglethat had begun a quarter of a century earlier. See Richard B. Day,*ColdWar Capitalism: The View from Moscow 1945-1975 *(New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. xi and xvi-xvii.
**10**As cited in Asparturian, "Soviet Global Power and the Correlation of Forces,"p. 17. Ambassador S. V. Chervonenko made this statement in an April 1980speech. He was implicitly referring to the US effort to destabilize theMarxist regime of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. The immediate purposeof the speech was to signal the United States that Moscow was determinedto keep a Marxist regime in power in Afghanistan, but the speech was widelyinterpreted as meaning that the USSR was prepared to apply the BrezhnevDoctrine, formulated to justify the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, outsidethe Soviet bloc and anywhere in the world.
**11**"By the early 1970s it was widely believed that the USSR could profit fromAmerica's problems. Evidence of American decline, both at home and abroad,seemed overwhelming." Day, *Cold War Capitalism*, p. 260.
**12**Robert M. Gates makes a major contribution by setting the record straighton this issue in*From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of FivePresidents and How They Won the Cold War *(New York: Simon &Schuster, 1996), pp. 89-96, 135-169.
**13**The briefing is recounted in Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky,*KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev*(NewYork: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), p. 583, and also in ChristopherAndrew and Oleg Gordievsky, eds., *Instructions from the Center: TopSecret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975-1985*(London: Stodder &Houghton, 1991), p. 67. Former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, who was stationedin Leningrad at the time, notes that "in 1981, we received what I can onlydescribe as a paranoid cable from Andropov warning of the growing threatof a nuclear apocalypse." See Oleg Kalugin with Fen Montaigne, *The FirstDirectorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West*(NewYork: St. Martin's Press, 1994), p. 302.
**14**RYAN is the acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadenie, or nuclear-missileattack. Another ex-KGB officer who was involved with RYAN uses the termVRYAN; the additional letter stood for vnezapnoe or surprise. See YuriB. Shvets,*Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America*(NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 74. Kalugin, in *The First Directorate,* p. 302, refers to a "brand-new program (the English-language acronym wasRYAN)" that "was created to gather information on a potential Americanfirst nuclear strike."
**15**Shvets,*Washington Station*, p. 75.
**16**German military authorities found this document in the files of the formerEast German army and gave it to the media. See Markus Lesch, "Wie die Phantasieder SED NATO-Divisionen zuhauf gebar,"*Die Welt,*  2 February1992, p. 3.
**17**Dobrynin,*In Confidence,* p. 523. Dobrynin claims he was not officiallyinformed of the alert because it was an intelligence matter, but learnedabout it from the KGB rezident (chief of station) in Washington. He mistakenlystates that RYAN (misspelled Ryon in his book) began in 1983.
**18**Two former East German intelligence officers say that before the early1980s the collection of indications-and-warning intelligence had been assignedexclusively to military intelligence in the Warsaw Pact. Peter Richterand Klaus Rösler,*Wolfs West-Spione: Ein Insider Report*(Berlin:Elefanten Press, 1992),  p. 72. The Czechoslovak rezident in Londontold Gordievsky that, before RYAN, his service had never been tasked tocollect military intelligence. Christopher and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 588.
**19**Dobrynin,*In Confidence,*pp. 522-523.
**20**The first major assessment of Reagan policies was a joint memorandum submittedto the Politburo by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Defense Minister Ustinov,and the KGB's Andropov on May 12, 1981 in response to the new President'sforeign policy address several days earlier. The Soviet assessment waspessimistic. The Politburo accepted it as the official view of US policy,but in communications with Washington the Soviets continued to seek a dialogueand a summit meeting. See Dobrynin,*In Confidence,*  pp. 502-503.
**21**The initial probes were aimed at deterring Moscow from using military forceto suppress the Solidarity movement in Poland. During 1980-81 Soviet groundforces were exercising on both sides of the USSR-Poland border, both tointimidate the political opposition and to rehearse for an interventionthat was called off when the Polish regime declared martial law on December12/13, 1981.
**22**Peter Schweizer,*Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret StrategyThat Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union*(New York: The AtlanticMonthly Press, 1994),  p. 8. This book first revealed the existenceof the PSYOP program. While the book's main thesis--that a Reagan administration"secret offensive on economic, geostrategic, and psychological fronts"was the key factor in the Soviet Union's downfall--is controversial, therehas been little, if any, challenge to the author's descriptions of thePSYOP program.
**23**Ibid.
**24**Ibid.
**25**As reported in Seymour Hersh, "*The Target is Destroyed": What ReallyHappened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It *(New York:Random House, 1986), p. 17. Hugh Faringdon notes that the Navy "was thearm of service that benefited most from the Reagan administration, andit is the one that gives the clearest evidence of the ways the Americansthought at the time." A new US maritime strategy envisioned a three-stageprocess of nonnuclear "horizontal escalation" in wartime: (1) aggressiveforward movement of antisubmarine forces, submarines, and maritime patrolaircraft, aimed at forcing the Soviets to retreat into defensive "bastions"in order to protect their nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines;(2) destroying Soviet naval forces and pushing the fighting toward Soviethome waters; and (3) complete destruction of Soviet naval forces by USaircraft carriers with airstrikes against the Soviet interior and the northernand/or central NATO-Warsaw Pact fronts. See Faringdon's *Strategic Geography:NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Superpowers,* 2d ed. (New York: Routledge,1989), p. 144.
**26**A declassified US National Intelligence Estimate issued in 1983 summarizedthe Soviets' assessment of the role of aircraft carriers in American navalstrategy as follows: They regard the aircraft carriers not only as thebackbone of American general purpose naval forces, but also an importantnuclear reserve force that could play a significant role in determiningthe outcome of the final phases of hostilities. Writings and exercise activityindicate that the Soviets expect US carrier battle groups to undertakevigorous offensive actions in the maritime approaches to the USSR. Theybelieve that carrier battle groups would attempt to use the Norwegian,the North, and the eastern Mediterranean Seas and the northwestern PacificOcean to attack Warsaw Pact territory, deployed naval forces, includingSSBNs [nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines] and their supportingforces, and Pact ground force operations. Destruction of the aircraft carriers,then, is a critical element of several Soviet naval tasks. (See Directorof Central Intelligence, "Soviet Naval Strategy and Programs," NationalIntelligence Estimate NIE 11-15/82D, March 1983, pp. 18-19.)
**27**This account is based on Gregory L. Vistica,*Fall from Glory: The MenWho Sank the U.S. Navy*(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp.105-108, 116-118, and 129-135. The author's version of the 1981 exerciseappears to be accurate and based on sources who had firsthand knowledge.He errs, however, by saying that US naval operations occurred in "Sovietwaters" or "Soviet territorial waters" when they actually took place ininternational waters.The GIUK Gap is an imaginary line stretching fromNorth America through Greenland and Iceland to Scotland and Norway. Inwartime the Soviet Northern Fleet would have had to transit it to reachthe north Atlantic, while NATO forces would have deployed naval and airpower there to bottle up Soviet naval forces.
**28**The Navy was testing more than its capabilities for defeating Soviet surveillancesystems; it also was testing the hypothesis held by some senior admiralsthat Soviet intelligence was intercepting and reading US military communications.These admirals were vindicated in 1985 when the FBI arrested ex-sailorJohn Walker and members of his espionage ring, who had been giving theKGB cipher material, among other things, since 1967. For a Soviet assessmentof Walker's information, see Pete Earley, "Interview with the Spymaster,"*Washington Post Magazine,*  23 April 1995, pp. 20-22. The spymasteris Gen. Boris Solomatin, who was KGB rezident in Washington when Walkerbegan spying. According to the ex-KGB man (p. 21): "For more than 17 years,Walker enabled your enemies to read your most sensitive military secrets.We knew everything! There has never been a breach of this magnitude andlength in the history of espionage."
**29**The fighters "attacked" from 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away. Untilthen, conventional wisdom held that the normal operating range of carrier-basedaircraft was about half that distance. See Vistica, *Fall from Glory,* pp. 131-132.
**30**Details of the 1983 exercise are recounted in Hersh, *"The Target isDestroyed,"*chap. 2 ("A Fleet Exercise"). Vistica does not discussthe 1983 exercise or cite Hersh's account but does give details of an evenlarger and more complex US-Japanese exercise in the Seas of Okhotsk andJapan and in the Bering Sea in August-September 1986. See Vistica, *Fallfrom Glory,*  pp. 212, 214-218.
**31**For accounts of this incident, see Hersh,*"The Target is Destroyed,"*p.18, and James Oberg, "The Truth About KAL 007," *Air Force Magazine,* November 1991, p. 66. Oberg fixed the date of the overflight as April 6,1983.
**32**Hersh, *"The Target is Destroyed," *p. 18.
**33**According to Director of Central Intelligence, "Soviet Naval Strategy andPrograms," p. 35: These systems--which are designed to locate, identify,and track the movement of foreign naval forces posing a threat to the Soviethomeland and military forces--include land-based signals intelligence (SIGINT)stations, space-based electronic intelligence (ELINT) and radar satellites,intelligence-collection ships (AGIs), and reconnaissance aircraft.
**34**Schweizer,*Victory, *p. 190.
**35**Director of Central Intelligence, "Implications of Recent Soviet Military-PoliticalActivities," SNIE 11-10-84/JX, 18 May 1984. (CIA declassified this estimatein early 1996 and released it to the National Archives and Records Administration.)
**36**RAND Corporation expert Jeremy Azrael also downplayed the significanceof the Soviet intelligence alert because it was not accompanied by a militaryalert or other military actions. He offers two explanations. Either Sovietleaders believed that the threat of war was higher than their public statementsindicated, or they had ordered the alert to discredit Cassandras in thehigh command--including First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of theGeneral Staff Nikolai Ogarkov--by showing that even a massive indications-and-warningeffort could not yield evidence of US war preparations. Azrael leans towardthe former explanation without spelling out his reasons for doing so--thatis, he does not clarify what, if anything, Soviet leaders may have foundtroubling in US actions. Jeremy R. Azrael, *The Soviet Civilian Leadershipand the Military High Command, 1976-1986,* R-3521-AF (Santa Monica,CA: The RAND Corporation, 1986), p. 20, n. 32.
**37**Azrael shares this view, arguing that the war scare was a "carefully prearrangedand closely coordinated diplomatic script" whose "nice-guy, tough-guy counterpoint"between top Soviet civilian and military leaders was intended for Westernconsumption--specifically, to support the then-current Soviet "peace offensive"aimed at forestalling US intermediate-range missile deployments in WestGermany. Ibid., pp. v, 30-31.
**38**The US Intelligence Community remained skeptical about the strategic warningrole of the KGB-GRU alert well after Gordievsky had defected and been debriefed.For example, Gordievsky recalls meeting a senior US expert on Soviet affairsin Washington who appeared quite knowledgeable about the alert but "castdoubt on all my information about Operation RYAN. His theory was that thewhole thing had been no more than a deception exercise by the Soviet leadership."See Oleg Gordievsky, *Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of OlegGordievsky*(New York: Macmillan, 1995), p. 377. A US diplomatic correspondentnotes that such skepticism was rather widespread:Many senior administrationofficials scoff now, as they did then, at the suggestion that the SovietUnion was genuinely alarmed by U.S. military moves or public statements,or that Moscow had any justification for feeling vulnerable. The 'war scare'in the Soviet Union in 1982-1983 was deliberately engineered for propagandapurposes, these officials maintain--a pretext to create siege mentalityin the Soviet Union, and to frighten the outside world about U.S. intentions.(Murray Marder, "Defector Told of Soviet Alert; KGB Station ReportedlyWarned U.S. Would Attack,"*Washington Post, *8 August 1986,p. A1.)
**39**In 1970 the United States abandoned the practice of flying into foreignairspace to provoke reactions by air defense and radar installations--so-calledferret missions--after a Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane was shot downoff the coast of North Korea. A Defense Department study concluded thatthe risk of such flights outweighed the gain. The same study recommendedthat regular reconnaissance missions be closely monitored. See Hersh, "*TheTarget is Destroyed,"*p. 221n. For recently declassified informationon the US overflight program, see "Secrets of the Cold War," *U. S. News& World Report,* 15 March 1993, pp. 30-50. Official documents showthat in the pre-satellite era the US launched some 10,000--and perhapsas many as 20,000--reconnaissance missions along Soviet and Chinese borders.The United States portrayed these missions as "electromagnetic research"and "photographic mapping" operations, but they actually were ferret flightsaimed at determining the precise location and capabilities of air defenseand radar systems along approaches to both countries. Most missions targetedagainst the Soviet Union were flown along the periphery of its borders,but others deliberately penetrated Soviet airspace. One major finding:Until the early 1960s the USSR had no early warning radars along its northernborders. President Truman authorized the first ferret missions in late1950, and President Eisenhower made overflights a national policy in 1954with the beginning of the U-2 program. At least 30 Air Force and Navy aircraftwere lost, most of them along Soviet borders.
**40**Andrew and Gordievsky, *Instructions from the Center,*  pp. 74,75.
**41**Ibid., p. 70.
**42**Ibid.
**43**Ibid., p. 81.
**44**See the discussion in John Newhouse, *War and Peace in the Nuclear Age*(NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 356.
**45**The phrase "super-sudden first strike" was coined by McGeorge Bundy andcited in Ibid., p. 328. Andrew and Gordievsky in *Instructions from theCenter,*  p. 74, mistakenly assert that the KGB message was wrongin claiming a four- to six-minute flight time for the Pershing IIs. Westernestimates used the same numbers.
**46**Of course, Soviet missiles could reach West Germany in the same short time,but this fact did not receive much attention in Western debates over thedeployment of US intermediate-range missiles.
**47**Andrew and Gordievsky in *Instructions from the Center,*  p.74.
**48**Ibid., p. 76.
**49**The West valued the Pershings more for their presence than their capabilities,viewing them primarily as a symbol of US commitment to defend Western Europein the event of a Warsaw Pact attack. The Soviets, however, could not ignorethe military implications of the new missiles as a factor in their strategy.The Pershings were sited in an exposed position vulnerable to capture inthe event of a massive attack by conventional forces, so that, despiteNATO's doctrine of no-early-use of nuclear weapons, the United States wouldhave been forced to use or lose the Pershings sooner rather than later.Thus, the "threat posed by the missiles was so great that they [sic] compelledthe Russians to plan on preempting their use early in a war. And it wasargued that the Russians could be confident about preempting only by nuclearmeans." See Dana Allin, *Cold War Illusions: America, Europe and SovietPower, 1969-1989 *(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 91.
**50**Andrew and Gordievsky, *More Instructions from the Center,* p. 37. Gordievsky and Kalugin both give East German intelligence high marks.According to Kalugi n (see Kalugin, *The First Directorate,* p. 171):The East German Foreign Intelligence Agency, headed by the brilliant MarkusWolf, had so deeply penetrated the West German government, military, andsecret services that about all we had to do was lay back [sic] and stayout of Wolf's way. KGB Intelligence naturally had ties with the secretservices of all of the 'fraternal countries' of Eastern Europe, thoughnone would be as fruitful as our relationship with East Germany and Wolf.
**51**Andrew and Gordievsky, *More Instructions from the Center,* p. 38.
**52**Estimates of KGB officers stationed in East Germany range from 450 to 1,200.The GRU residency, given the presence of the Soviet Group of Western Forces,was probably larger.
**53**See "Observation of Extreme Rightists To Be Improved," *SüddeutscheZeitung*, 14-15 December 1991, p. 5. Translated in Foreign BroadcastInformation Service's *Daily Report: West Europe,*FBIS-WEU-91-242,14 December 1991, p. 15.
**54**Markus Wolf, *Spionage Chef im geheimen Krieg: Erinnerungen *(Dusseldorfand Munich: List Verlag, 1997), pp. 326, 330-331. These passages appearin the US edition of Wolf's memoir, but in slightly edited form that omitsthe reference to Andropov's concern over a nuclear attack. In fact, theGerman edition contains an entire chapter on the "war scare" as it affectedthe USSR and the two Germanys in the early 1980s that does not appear inthe US edition.
**55**See Markus Wolf with Anne McElvoy,*Man Without a Face: The Autobiographyof Communism's Greatest Spymaster *(New York: Times Books/RandomHouse, 1997), p. 222.
**56**Ibid.
**57**Wolf, *Spionage Chef im geheimen Krieg,*  p. 331.
**58**Peter Siebenmorgen, *"Staatssicherheit" der DDR: Der Westen im Fadenkreuzder Stasi *(Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1993), pp. 197-198. This effortwas probably focused on technologies being developed for the US SDI programand its European counterpart EUREKA, which were top priority targets.
**59**Until the war scare, the HVA had rarely felt a sense of urgency in schedulingagent meetings.
**60**Peter Siebenmorgen, *"Staatssicherheit" der DDR,*p. 198.
**61**Jamie Dettmer, "Stasi lured Americans to spy for E. Germany; moles maybe serving Moscow now," *Washington Times, *14 November 1994,pp. A1, A14. This article refers to a senior civilian employee of the USArmy, a retired US Army colonel, an unidentified US citizen, and an employeeof a US firm in West Germany as having been "in agent contact" with theHVA. This means that agents had targeted but not necessarily recruitedthese US citizens. In most if not all of these cases, the HVA was probablyusing West German citizens working for it to elicit information from UScontacts on an unwitting basis.
**62**Friedrich W. Schlomann, *Die Maulwürfe: Noch sind sie unter uns,die Helfer der Stasi im Westen *(Munich: Universitas Verlag, 1993),p. 23.
**63**The full title of the document is Order of Minister Mielke 1/85, "On theEarly Detection of Acute Aggressive Intentions and Surprise Military Activitiesof the Imperalist States and their Alliance, in particular the Preventionof a Surprise Nuclear-Rocket Attack on the Countries of the Socialist Community,GVS-000," 13/85. See Rita Selitrenny and Thilo Weichert, *Das unheimlicheErbe: Die Spionage-abteilung der Stasi*(Leipzig: Forum Verlag, 1991),p. 33, n. 33.
**64**See "Start in ein besseres Leben," *Der Spiegel,* 10 August 1992,p. 54.
**65**Siebenmorgen, *"Staatssicherheit" der DDR,* p. 155.
**66**Roy Guttman, "Bad Tidings: The World According to Haig," *Newsday Magazine,*12 August  1984, p. 18, as cited in Raymond L. Garthoff, *The GreatTransition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War*(Washington:The Brookings Institution, 1994), p. 131.
**67**"Replies of Yu. V. Andropov to questions from a *Pravda c*orrespondent,"*Pravda*,27 March 1983.
**68**This analysis of Andropov's remarks is based on Vladimir E. Shlapentokh,"Moscow's War Propaganda and Soviet Public Opinion," *Problems of Communism,* vol. 33 (September-October 1983), p. 92.
**69**The speech was not coordinated within the government. Secretary of StateShultz, for example, was not told about it until a few hours before itwas delivered. See Schweizer, *Victory,*  p. xix.
**70**See note 67.
**71**Andropov had an unusual fascination with things American and marveled atUS human and material potential, especially in military matters. Accordingto a former KGB officer who served on his personal staff, this was notthe case with most other Soviet leaders. See Wjatcheslaw Keworkow, *Dergeheime Kanal: Moskau, der KGB und die Bonner Ostpolitik (*Berlin: Rowohlt,1995), p. 155. Former Soviet ambassador Dobrynin noted that Andropov, morethan any other Politburo member, had a broad grasp of Soviet foreign, defense,and domestic policy, thanks to his long tenure as KGB chief. His knowledgeof military affairs was especially impressive, and he could hold his ownwith professional military officers. See Dobrynin, *In Confidence,*pp. 512-513. Ex-KGB officer Kalugin recounts an incident in which Andropov,while still head of the KGB, exploded when he realized that Soviet labswere incapable of producing spy gear comparable to a small transmitterthe counterintelligence service had taken from a US agent. Kalugin, *TheFirst Directorate,*  pp. 260-261.
**72**See Leslie H. Gelb, "Foreign Affairs: Who Won the Cold War?," *New YorkTimes,*  20 August 1992, p. 27. Gelb held this conversation withOgarkov just days after Reagan's SDI announcement, but he did not reportit until 1992.
**73**Hersh, *"The Target is Destroyed," *p. 161.
**74**By the day after the shootdown, CIA and NSA had concluded that the Sovietsprobably did not know that the intruder was a civilian aircraft and mayhave thought that it was on an intelligence mission. See Shultz, *Turmoiland Triumph,* p. 363, as cited in Garthoff, *The Great Transition,* p. 199, n. 107. The US Intelligence Community briefed this assessment toCongress in early 1988. See Tim Ahern, "Assessment Says Soviet ProbablyDidn't Know Plane Was Civilian Airliner," Associated Press report, January1988.
**75**In a presentation to the UN General Assembly, US Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatricksaid: The fact is that violence and lies are regular instruments of Sovietpolicy. Soviet officials regularly behave as though truth were only a functionof force and will--as if truth were only what they say it is; as if violencewere an instrument of first resort in foreign affairs. Whichever the case--whetherthe destruction of KAL Flight 007 and its passengers reflects only utterindifference to human life or whether it was designed to intimidate--weare dealing here not with pilot errors but with decisions and prioritiescharacteristic of a system. (Hersh, *"The Target Is Destroyed,"*pp.164-166.)
**76**In the meantime, the KGB's disinformation unit was preparing guidance for"active measures" in the West to pin the blame for the tragedy on the UnitedStates. See Andrew and Gordievsky, *KGB,*  pp. 594-596.
**77**The press conference was a coverup from beginning to end. Ogarkov claimed,among other things, that Soviet pilot Maj. Gennady Osipovich had triedto make radio contact; that he had fired visible warning shots using tracerammunition; and that the jumbo jet did not have its navigation lights on.In 1991 Osipovich admitted that these assertions were false and that Sovietmilitary authorities had ordered him to lie. The Soviets went to considerablelengths to protect themselves. They recovered three "black boxes," usinga phony oil-drilling rig and "fishing trawlers" to conceal their divingoperation, but denied having done so until 1991. They also planted a bogusflight-data recorder at some distance from the crash site that the US Navyrecovered. See Oberg, "The Truth about KAL 007," p. 66, and Michael Dobbs,"Soviet Journalists Attack KAL Story; Reports Shed New Light On '83 Downingof Airliner," *Washington Post,*  26 May 1991, p. A1.
**78**The memorandum was written in December 1983 and published in *Izvestiya*on 16 October 1992. Cited in Christopher Andrew, "KGB Foreign Intelligencefrom Brezhnev to the Coup,"*Intelligence and National Security,*vol. 8, no. 3 (July 1993), p. 60. The same memorandum warned the Politburothat the Soviet Union should not admit it had the flight voice and datarecorders, because the tapes tended to support the US position more thanthe Soviet one and the KGB and military intelligence had not been ableto prove the plane was on an intelligence mission. For whatever reason,the Soviets seemed convinced that there was more to the KAL 007 story thanpilot error. When American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh visitedMoscow to conduct interviews for a book on the incident, Marshal Ogarkovsaid: "I'm sure that the day will come when we know the reasons why thismission was arranged." Hersh, *"The Target Is Destroyed," *p.191. Five years later, Defense Minister Gen. Dmitri Yazov asked visitingSecretary of Defense Frank Carlucci: "Tell me, why did you Americans usethat Korean airliner as a spy plane?" Carlucci could not convince the Sovietgeneral that his suspicions were unfounded. Somewhat later Ogarkov's replacement,Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, adamantly insisted to American journalist DonOberdorfer that KAL 007 was on a secret mission. See Don Oberdorfer, *TheTurn: From the Cold War To A New Era: The United States and the SovietUnion 1983-1990*  (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), p. 55. Thiscould have been a high-level "deception" effort, but it seems more likelythat top leaders either believed the United States was behind the intrusionor were captives of their own contrived interpretation.
**79**"Declarationby Yu. V. Andropov, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee andChairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet," *Pravda*and*Izvestiya,*  29 September 1983, p. 1. Publication of the declarationin both of the leading newspapers underscored its importance and the leadership'sfull endorsement.
**80**Hersh, *"The Target is Destroyed," *p. 18, says the Navy "neverpublicly acknowledged either the overflight or its error; it also choseto say nothing further inside the government." The Soviets perceived bothpolitical and military machinations in these overflights, which occurredover part of the Kuril Island chain, seized by the USSR and occupied alongwith the southern part of Sakhalin island in August 1945. Japan refersto the occupied Kuril Islands as the Northern Territories and has refusedto sign a peace accord with the USSR until they are returned. The UnitedStates has long supported Japan's claim to the Northern Territories.
**81**Ibid., p. 19. According to Oberg, Soviet interceptors based closest towhere the Pacific Fleet overflights occurred were fogged in, and thoselocated elsewhere in the vicinity lacked drop-tanks and therefore sufficientfuel to pursue the US planes. Drop-tanks had been removed in 1976 to preventSoviet pilots from defecting after a pilot flew a MiG-25 equipped witha drop-tank to Japan. Several accounts add that local air defense commandersfailed to detect KAL 007 as it flew over Kamchatka and then panicked laterwhen it flew over Sakhalin because key tracking radars were not workingproperly. Gordievsky says he was told that eight of 11 radars on Kamchatkaand Sakhalin were out of commission. See Andrew and Gordievsky, *KGB,* p. 594. A former Soviet pilot who defected in 1991 said that Arctic galeshad damaged the radar sites. Oberg, who closely studied the incident, discountsthe radar failure explanation, claiming that the local air defense commanderat Sokol Air Base on Sakhalin was "trigger-happy" after the US intrusioninto Soviet airspace on April 6, 1983 and "was just itching to get backat the next intruder." See "Faulty radar blamed in KAL attack," *ChicagoTribune,* 2 January 1993, p. 16. This implies that the commander ignoredSoviet rules of engagement, but there is still another twist to the story.A Soviet investigative reporter who wrote a series of articles on KAL 007said in 1991 that, after the US air intrusion during the Pacific Fleetexercise, the Supreme Soviet passed a national law declaring USSR borders"sacred"--an expression Foreign Minister Gromyko used in an official statementafter the shootdown--and authorizing local air defense commanders to destroyany intruding aircraft. See Dobbs, "Soviet Journalists Attack KAL Story."If this account is accurate, then the shootdown was due more to calculationand less to confusion, panic, and frayed nerves, and the Soviet leadershipbears more responsibility than is generally acknowledged in Russia or inthe West.
**82**On 5 September 1983, President Reagan signed National Security DecisionDirective 102 on "U.S. Response to the Soviet Destruction of KAL 007 Airliner."This directive ordered a "major public diplomatic effort to keep internationaland domestic attention focused on this Soviet action." As cited in JeffreyT. Richelson, *A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century*(NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 385
**83**Gordievsky notes that the US response to KAL 007 "strengthened belief atboth the Center and in the Kremlin in a far-reaching anti-Soviet plot bythe Reagan Administration." Andrew and Gordievsky, *KGB,*  p.597.
**84**See note 79.
**85**Dobrynin, *In Confidence,*  p. 540.
**86**Andrew and Gordievsky, *KGB,*  p. 605. See pp. 583-560 for thefull story, which is repeated in Andrew and Gordievsky, Instructions fromthe Center, pp. 87-88. See also Christopher Andrew, *For the President'sEyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washingtonto Bush* (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1995), pp. 471-478, fora account of ABLE ARCHER and Gordievsky's 1985 post-defection briefingof President Reagan.
**87**For British accounts of ABLE ARCHER, see Gordon Brook-Shepherd, *TheStorm Birds: The Dramatic Stories of the Top Soviet Spies Who Have DefectedSince World War II *(New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989),pp. 329-330; Geoffrey Smith, *Reagan and Thatcher*(New York: W. W.Norton & Company, 1991), pp. 122-123; and Nicholas Bethell, *Spiesand Other Secrets: Memoirs from the Second Cold War *(New York:Viking, 1994), p. 191. Brook-Shepherd writes (p. 330): "What it [the West]was totally unaware of at the time was how far it had really passed througha war danger zone.... This was not a surge of Soviet aggression, but aspasm of Soviet panic." Bethell writes on the same incident (p. 191): "TheSoviets did apparently fear that the West might be about to launch a nuclearstrike upon them. This was the most dramatic and the most conclusive confirmationthere has been of the Soviet need for reassurance."
**88**Oberdorfer, *The Turn,*  p. 67.
**89**Ibid.
**90**Ibid. See also Director of Central Intelligence, "Implications of RecentSoviet Military-Political Activities," p. 4.
**91**Garthoff, *The Great Transition*, p. 139,  n. 160.
**92**An intelligence assessment concluded that, while the Soviet reaction was"greater than usual, by confining heightened readiness to selected unitsMoscow clearly revealed that it did not in fact think that there was apossibility at this time of a NATO attack." Director of Central Intelligence,"Implications of Recent Soviet Military-Political Activities," p. 4.
**93**Christopher Andrew, "We Will Always Need Spies," *Times* (London),3 March 1994, Features, p. 1.
**94**Smith, *Thatcher and Reagan, *p. 122.
**95**Newhouse, *War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, *p. 338.
**96**The quotation from Reagan's memoirs is cited in Oberdorfer, *The Turn,*p.67.
**97**See note 38.
**98**See, for example, Shlapentokh, "Moscow's War Propaganda and Soviet PublicOpinion," p. 88. The author explicitly refused to speculate on the originsand intended audience of the public war scare. For another example of acarefully documented account that does not offer much in the way of explanation,see Elizabeth Teague, "War Scare in the USSR," in Vojtech Mastny, ed.,*Soviet/EastEuropean Survey, 1983-1984: Selected Research and Analysis from Radio FreeEurope/Radio Free Liberty*(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985),pp. 71-76.
**99**One example, among others that could be cited, is John W. Parker, *Kremlinin Transition: From Brezhnev to Chernenko, 1978 to 1985, vol. I*(Boston:Unwin Hyman, 1991),  p. 295.
**100**Oberdorfer, *The Turn,*  pp. 64-65, argues that the Kremlin waspreparing the Soviet people for a crisis in US-Soviet relations. This viewseems exaggerated.
**101**One response cited in the Soviet press that may or may not have been typicalwas that of a World War II veteran who said he was willing to go withoutfood if the Soviet Army needed more rockets to defend the country. Whetherapocryphal or not, this was the kind of sentiment Soviet domestic propagandawas trying to evoke.
**102**"The defeat inflicted on the Red Army by the Axis in 1941 beggars description:far more calamitous than the Napoleonic invasion, far more terrible eventhan the disasters of 1914-17." Chris Ward, *Stalin's Russia (London:Edward Arnold, 1993),*  p. 168.
**103**The 1941 analogy appears to have influenced both Soviet intelligence andthe high command. Even as late as 1991, for example, when the deputy chiefof KGB foreign intelligence was trying to make his case to Gorbachev forcountering an alleged US "plot" to dismember the USSR, he wrote a memorandumsaying (Dobrynin, *In Confidence,* p. 525):The KGB has been informingthe leadership about this in time and detail. We would not want a tragicrepetition of the situation before the Great Patriotic War against NaziGermany, when Soviet intelligence warned about the imminent attack of NaziGermany but Stalin rejected this information as wrong and even provocative.You know what that mistake cost us. (As cited in Andrew, "KGB Foreign Intelligencefrom Brezhnev to the Coup," p. 63.) During a visit to Moscow, Dobryninasked Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, Ogarkov's successor as Chief of the GeneralStaff, for a briefing on Soviet military planning for war. "'Soviet militarydoctrine can be summed up as follows: 1941 shall not be repeated,' themarshal asserted." Soviet officials may have used the "1941 shall not berepeated" theme for manipulative purposes, but they would not have doneso had they not known that it would strike a responsive chord with thepolitical leadership.
**104**For a discussion of the wealth of accurate information that was availableto Stalin, see John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, *Deadly Illusions: TheKGB Dossier Reveals Stalin's Master Spy *(New York: Crown Publishers,1993), pp. 85-90. The authors had access to intelligence reports in theKGB archives. See also Barton Whaley, Codeword BARBAROSSA (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1973), which lists more than 80 indications and warnings ofthe German attack.
**105**The German counterintelligence falsely portrayed the military buildup ineastern Germany and occupied Poland as preparation--at a safe distancefrom RAF bombers and reconnaissance planes--for an invasion of Britain.
**106**Whaley, *Operation BARBAROSSA,*  p. 97, quotes Stalin as sayingon June 14, 1941: "You can't believe everything you read in intelligencereports." He does not, however, give a citation for the quotation, whichmay be apocryphal. See note 110, below, for an example of Stalin's rejectionof an explicit warning of the German attack.
**107**Viktor Suvorov, *Icebreaker: Who Started World War II?*(London: HamishHamilton, 1990),  pp. 320-321.
**108**Andrew and Gordievsky, *Instructions from the Center,*  p. 70.
**109**Ibid., p. 89.
**110**There is an interesting confirmation of this in the KGB museum in Moscow,which is now open to the public:On a wall hangs a copy of the message sentto Stalin by a member of the "Red Orchestra" spy ring in Germany, givinghim a week's notice of Hitler's intention to invade the Soviet Union. Stalinannotated the text with a string of obscenities, dismissing both the intelligenceand the source. See "Another Country," *The Economist, *24 February-1March 1996, p. 58.
**111**This was Dobrynin's response to a question about the war scare during aninterview by Steve Kroft on the CBS television newsmagazine *60 Minutes,*whichaired on 1 October 1995.
**112**William C. Wohlforth, ed., *Witnesses to the End of the Cold War*(Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), p. 71.
**113**William Fuller, Jr., *Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600-1914*(NewYork: The Free Press, 1992),  p. 12.
**114**Dobrynin, *In Confidence*,  p. 523.
**115**The Soviets did not cancel RYAN until November 1991. The chief of foreignintelligence noted that even by that late date the alert still "involvedhuge material and human resources" and required biweekly reports from KGBresidencies. See Bill Gertz, "KGB halts lookout for U.S. nuclear attack,"*WashingtonTimes,*  28 November 1991, p. A9.
**116**See Lee, "The nuclear brink that wasn't - and the one that was," for the"by design" view.
**117**Horn says he first heard this from a Soviet central committee official;he adds that his own experiences in Moscow convinced him it was true. See"Frühe Zweifel," *Der Spiegel,*  2 September 1991, pp. 110-111.
**118**In a review of Gordievsky's memoirs, Alasdair Palmer writes that the "moststartling insight to emerge... is not how effective the KGB was, but howbungling, incompetent, and idiotic." *Wall Street Journal,* 22 March 1995, p. A16.
**119**Andrew and Gordievsky, *KGB,*  p. 584.
**120**Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, *More Instructions from the Center:Top Secret Files on KGB Global Operations 1975-1985*(London: FrankCass & Co. Ltd.,1991), p. 99.
**121**Shvets claims that by the time he joined the KGB in the late 1970s, onecould become a general without "ever having set eyes on a live agent. 'Themain advantage of Soviet intelligence service resides in its newly acquiredability to exist with undercover agents,' ran an old-timers' bitter joke...."Shvets,*Washington Station*, p. 25.
**122**Andrew and Gordievsky, *More Instructions from the Center*, p. 99.
**123**See Nigel West, *Games of Intelligence: The Classified Conflict of InternationalEspionage *(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), pp. 100-101,145-146, and 195-196. Kalugin notes that, under the tutelage of VladimirKryuchkov, KGB foreign intelligence was more interested in palace intriguethan operational efficiency with the result that "in the late 1970s andinto the 1980s, we became less aggressive in our battle with the CIA, whileat the same time the number of KGB defectors soared." Kalugin, *The FirstDirectorate*, p. 248.
**124**See Sallie Wise, "1983: A Bad Year for Soviet Diplomats," *Radio LibertyResearch* RL 467/83 (9 December 1990), pp. 1-4.
**125**In his various books and articles, Gordievsky repeatedly claims that hisdecision to spy was a reaction to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.He does not explain, however, why it took him six years to make up hismind to approach British intelligence.
**126**David Leppard, "The man who panics the left," *Sunday Times *(London),26 February 1995, p. 1.
**127**John Lee and Nicholas Daniloff, "Never Ending Spy Story Keeps Unfolding,"*U.S.News & World Report, *30 September 1985, p. 32.
**128**James Rusbridger, *The Intelligence Game: The Illusions and Delusionsof International Espionage *(New York: New Amsterdam Press, 1989),pp. 102-104. Rusbridger believes that Gordievsky gave the British a KGBcover story designed to protect another source, either human or technical,at the Cyprus installation. He speculates that Gordievsky may have haddoubts about the information, but wanted to please MI6.
**129**For example, Gordievsky asserted that President Franklin Roosevelt's closefriend and adviser, Harry Hopkins, was a Soviet agent. The allegation wasused to promote the US edition of his book on the KGB and a large excerptfrom the book that appeared in *Time*, which featured the Hopkinsstory in a textbox. See Time, 22 October 1990, pp. 72-82; the textbox ison p. 72. Gordievsky later withdrew the allegation, saying that Hopkinswas an "unwitting" asset, not a recruited agent, and that his originalstatement was "probably a simplification." See Larry King Live, Transcript# 160, 30 October 1990. Hopkins' son Robert and Pamela Harriman (laterUS Ambassador to France) rebutted Gordievsky in letters to *Time*.See *Time*, 12 November 1990, p. 12. Author Verne W. Newton chargedGordievsky with using McCarthyite tactics to smear Hopkins and to promotehis book. See "A Soviet Agent? Harry Hopkins?," *New York Times*,28 October 1990, p. 19.
**130**Leppard, "The man who panics the left."
**131**Bethell, *Spies and Other Secrets,*  p. 188.Publications Page | CSI Homepage
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