Revolution 1989 Page 12

  Now he was unrecognisable as the forceful, tall, handsome, smooth, silver-haired dancer at parties. Ailing and skeletal, he barely moved from the special Kremlin hospital room designed for him where he sat in a dentist’s chair with a high head-rest which enabled him to change position - and make telephone calls - at the press of a button. Three months after he became General Secretary his kidneys failed completely. He needed dialysis treatment twice a week, which exhausted him for two days at a stretch. He was never seen in public - the Moscow rumour mill had it that he was dead and the Kremlin was keeping the fact secret while a vicious power struggle was going in the high reaches of the Soviet Communist Party. He was alive - just. But he communicated through statements ‘from the Soviet leadership’ via the official state news agency, Tass, or by interviews in the principal Party newspaper, Pravda.2

  Andropov had been convinced before he succeeded to supreme office that America was planning a sudden first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The election of a tough-sounding conservative, Ronald Reagan, as President of the US was part of the reason, but not the only factor. He was receiving intelligence about American military manoeuvres throughout the globe, and, piecing all the clues together - wrongly - was persuaded that the Americans were preparing an attack. Nothing would dissuade him, certainly not the facts. Andropov believed Reagan meant his anti-Communist propaganda and viewed him with unrelenting suspicion. Soon after he was inaugurated as President in January 1981, Reagan wrote to Brezhnev proposing a meeting to discuss nuclear weapons. Andropov convinced Brezhnev it would be a waste of time. He said it was a ‘phoney gesture’ and he never changed his position.3

  In May 1981 Andropov invited Brezhnev to a closed session of top KGB and military officers where he told a surprised audience of his conviction about the imminent first-strike threat from Washington. He ordered his officers at the KGB to co-operate with the Russian army in the biggest intelligence-gathering operation the Soviets had ever conducted in peacetime, codenamed (in English translation) RYAN - raketno yadernoye napadenie. Intelligence agents abroad were given orders which were, as they clearly stated, ‘a permanent, operational assignment to uncover Nato preparations of a nuclear missile attack on the USSR’. RYA N created a vicious circle. Soviet spies were told to search out alarming information. The Kremlin was duly alarmed and wanted more.4 Many in the KGB and the GRU military intelligence thought Andropov was exaggerating the danger - experienced agents in the field saw no evidence of any American attack.

  But few voices dared challenge him. One who did was the British spy Donald Maclean, part of the ‘Philby’ espionage ring, who had dramatically defected to Moscow in the 1950s and later became a respected analyst on foreign and intelligence policy. He wrote a highly classified memo to his KGB superiors:During the last five years, at certain crucial turning points, the views of the military authorities, with their natural professional interest in maximising the armed strength of the country, have, with the support of the top leadership, prevailed over those who are called upon to assess the overall influence of military policy upon the international interests of the country . . . The result will be, unless the Soviet Union changes its policy, a rise in the level of nuclear confrontation in Europe with no compensatory advantage to itself - indeed, quite the reverse.5

  Andropov was not listening to such sceptics. When he became General Secretary he gave RYAN a yet higher priority. Additional instructions went out to agents in Nato countries to ‘watch for activity at places where government officials and their families are evacuated . . . [identify] the location of specially equipped civil defence shelters . . . [investigate] increased blood from donors and the prices paid for it’. The US had promised that it would not launch any medium-range weapons from European bases without consulting NATO allies first, so the instructions from Moscow to KGB agents in the field say that ‘the most important problem . . . for the apparatus of Soviet intelligence is to ascertain in good time the moment when nuclear consultations begin inside Nato’.6

  In January 1983 Andropov summoned Communist Party chiefs from the Warsaw Pact for a hastily convened secret summit in Moscow at which he issued them with what he described as a direct warning that relations between the two superpowers were at their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. He told the East Europeans:Especially dangerous . . . is the military challenge from the US. The new round of the arms race, imposed by the US, has major qualitative differences. Whereas before, the Americans, in speaking about nuclear weapons, preferred to accentuate the fact that it was above all a means of . . . ‘deterrence’ now . . . do not hide the fact that they are really intended for a future war. From here springs the doctrine of ‘rational’ and ‘limited’ nuclear war. From here spring the statements about the possibility of surviving and winning a protracted nuclear conflict. It is hard to see what is blackmail and what is genuine readiness to take the fatal step.7

  In Washington President Reagan and his advisers had no conception of the fear and paranoia sweeping through Moscow, largely at the instigation of the Soviets’ supreme leader. They did not realise Andropov was taking the presidential rhetoric so seriously. Reagan’s famous speech in Orlando, Florida, on 8 March 1983, where he branded the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’, ratcheted up the tension. Senior military men in the USSR responded. According to General Vladimir Slipchenko of the Soviet General Staff: ‘The military . . . used that speech as a reason to begin a very intense preparation for a state of war. We started to run huge strategic exercises. These were the first in which we really tested our mobilisation. We didn’t just exercise our ground forces, but also strategic arms. For the military, the period when we were called the “evil empire” was actually very good and useful because we achieved a very high military readiness.’

  Less than a month later the Americans began a series of military exercises which the CIA’s leading Soviet analyst, Douglas MacEachin, called ‘America’s biggest exercise in history around Soviet waters’. He said ‘the air force “tested” the Kremlin’s defence systems and the navy . . . its territorial waters’. During this huge exercise the US Pacific Fleet probed for gaps in Russian ocean surveillance and early-warning systems. The Americans practised simulated assaults on Soviet strategic submarines with nuclear missiles on board. The Soviets reacted with their own series of exercises introducing, for the first time, a rehearsal of a general mobilisation using strategic nuclear forces. The Americans increased the numbers of their spy flights and reconnaissance sorties - especially around the Soviet Union’s far eastern border. The war of nerves was about to take a heavy toll.8

  Colonel Gennadi Osipovich was a veteran pilot in the Soviet Union’s Air Defence Force, the PVO, with more than ten years’ experience in the Far East. The PVO was little regarded by the elite among Russian flying aces, but it was the first line in Soviet air defences. ‘At this point, 1982 and especially 1983, we were flying more often than we used to,’ he recalled. ‘There were more spy planes provoking us. We were in a constant state of tension.’ A few minutes before dawn on the morning of 1 September Osipovich was scrambled into his Sukhoi-15 interceptor and ordered to track an unidentified ‘military’ target which was approaching the island of Sakhalin in the Sea of Okhotsk from the direction of Kamchatka.9

  The ‘intruder’ aircraft had already been flying above Soviet territory for over an hour. Four fighters had been following it but had managed to lose touch with it before they could execute their mission, which was to destroy the target. The Soviets believed the intruder was an American RC-135 reconnaissance plane that had been spotted earlier, sent with the Soviets’ knowledge to monitor a Soviet missile test. The Russians had been told the American aircraft would leave the area by 05.00 hours. They thought it had overstayed its welcome on an espionage mission. In fact the American plane had accidentally crossed flight paths with a South Korean Boeing 747 passenger plane, Flight KAL-007, en route to Seoul from New York, having refuelled at Anchorage. There were twenty-nine crew and 2
40 passengers on board, including a US Congressman, Larry P. McDonald of Georgia, the chairman of the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. Colonel Osipovich was now tracking the civil airplane, which he spotted after about fifteen minutes in the air. He and his superiors knew that he would have to act quickly. The Su-15s had limited flying range, and in any case they were deliberately kept short of fuel. Ever since, a couple of years earlier, a pilot of a state-of-the-art MiG-25 flew to Japan and defected there was a standing order that no PVO plane should be loaded with enough fuel to reach a foreign airfield. Osipovich had a maximum flying time of about forty-five minutes.

  On board the 747 Captain Chun Byung-in and his colleagues on the flight deck had no idea they had wandered more than 300 miles off-course and had drifted over forbidden Soviet territory. The captain had mistakenly flicked a wrong switch. The Boeing was flying on its automatic magnetic compass rather than its more accurate inertial guidance system. The Korean pilot and his navigator believed they were in international waters 100 miles off the northern coast of Japan. They never knew what was about to happen to them.

  Osipovich was ordered to flash the interceptor’s lights to attract the Boeing’s attention, but he was not spotted. Then he fired warning shots from his cannons - 243 rounds in all - but Chun did not hear them. For a short while, as Osipovich explained later, he was unsure about the ‘target’. ‘I could see two rows of windows which were lit up,’ he said later. ‘I wondered if it was a civilian aircraft. Military cargo planes don’t have windows like that. But I had no time to think. I had a job to do. I started to signal to him [the pilot] in international code. I informed him that he had violated our air space. He did not respond.’10 But, increasingly, the generals on the ground were convinced the Boeing was a military target. They worried that if they allowed it to get away they would be in trouble from their superiors and possibly lose their jobs. There was no time left before the plane left Soviet air space and Osipovich’s interceptor ran out of fuel. At 6.21 a.m. the commander of air defence on Sakhalin Island, General Anatoli Kornukov, issued his order: ‘The target has violated the state border. Destroy the target. Get Osipovich to fire and soon.’11

  Osipovich spun around behind the 747 and at a distance of five miles stubbed his index finger to release the R-98 heat-seeking missile. ‘I have executed the launch,’ Osipovich radioed back to his base. About thirty seconds later he saw flame from KAL-007’s tail section and as he veered off to the right, back to his base, he could see the plane disappear into the sea. ‘The target is destroyed . . . I am breaking off attack.’

  The destruction of a civilian aircraft was a disaster for the Soviet Union’s reputation. It was compounded by the obtuse way the magnates in the Kremlin handled the aftermath. They lied and at no point accepted any measure of responsibility. There were many officials in the Soviet Foreign Ministry who urged the leadership to admit the truth. Sergei Tarasenko, for long a senior diplomat who later became an adviser to future foreign ministers, said: ‘We came to the conclusion that we simply had to be honest and admit something along the lines of “an unfortunate incident has occurred. There was a pilot error, bad weather, one thing led to another. It was not a pre-planned action.” We went to [Georgi] Kornienko, the Deputy Minister, who agreed with us . . . But he was unable to convince the leadership. It was a question of prestige, and the military didn’t like to admit mistakes.’12

  The Defence Minister, Ustinov, categorically opposed admitting that the Soviet military had destroyed a civilian airliner. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told Andropov, who was extremely ill in his hospital room. ‘Everything will be all right. Nobody will be able to prove a thing. The Americans can never find out.’ He might also have thought that it could be wise to deflect attention from his generals’ role in the affair and what was revealed about air defence failures. The 747 had been in Soviet air space for over two hours before it was approached. Even more disturbing, eight of the eleven Soviet tracking stations on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin had not detected the plane.13

  Andropov was still in hospital the next day when the Kremlin magnates met in private to consider the consequences of the disaster. Konstantin Chernenko, Brezhnev’s great friend, whose main function had previously been to keep Brezhnev amused and light his cigarettes, led the discussion. ‘One thing is clear . . . We cannot allow foreign planes to overfly our territory freely. No self-respecting state can allow that.’ Ustinov was determined to defend the military and he told a bare-faced lie. He said the Boeing had been flying without warning lights, flatly contradicting the pilot. Nor was it true, as he claimed, that there were ‘repeated instructions’ to the Korean pilot to land at a Soviet airfield. ‘My opinion is that in this situation we must show firmness and remain cool. We should not flinch. If we flinch it gives all kinds of people the opportunity to overfly our territory.’ The Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, did not stand up to this, though he might have done. He knew the damage that downing a civilian aircraft could do to the USSR’s image abroad, but he did not challenge the military. He said it had been ‘correct’ to shoot down the plane, though he added that the USSR should anticipate what ‘imperialist propaganda’ would make of the incident.

  One of the last to speak was the up-and-coming Mikhail Gorbachev, known to be Andropov’s favourite and a strong candidate to succeed him. The rule in the Kremlin for an ambitious apparatchik trying to progress up the ladder was, when in doubt about what to say or do, attack the ‘forces of imperialism’. Now Gorbachev said: ‘The Americans must have been aware of the unauthorised incursion into Soviet territory. The plane had been in Russian air space for over two hours, showing clearly that this was a well-planned provocation . . . It is no good keeping quiet now. We must go on to the offensive.’14

  The rhetoric grew increasingly alarmist. A day after the plane was shot down President Reagan described it as ‘an act of barbarism born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life . . . This was a crime against nature.’ Andropov responded three weeks later, continuing to brazen out Soviet actions. He accused the US of an ‘insidious provocation involving a South Korean plane engineered by US special services’. He blamed Reagan personally for a ‘conspiracy that’s an example of adventurism in politics’ and for using ‘inadmissible propaganda methods’ and he warned that America was a country where an ‘outrageous militarist psychosis is being implanted. If anybody ever had any illusions about the possibility of an evolution for the better in the policy of the present American administration they are completely dispelled.’ The propaganda was noisier, echoing the worst days of the Cold War in the 1950s, but it was still rhetoric. Now the chilliness went beyond words.15

  Towards the end of September Soviet satellite surveillance repeatedly picked up warnings of strategic missile launches from the US mainland. They were all false alarms - there was a glitch in the Soviet radar system that was quickly put right - but with the atmosphere between the superpowers so poor, they increased the tension. As did the American invasion of Grenada on 25 October to liberate the island from a coup by a Marxist guerrilla band. The Soviets did not care about a tiny Caribbean island, whose Communists they knew very little about. But almost at the same time the first Cruise and Pershing intermediate-range missiles began arriving at bases in West Germany. These were introduced in response to the Soviets’ deployment of similar missiles in Eastern Europe, yet Andropov felt ‘encircled’. His limited vision of the world was ‘a bizarre mixture of grim realism and worst-case mentality’, one of the most astute analysts of Soviet foreign policy observed. Now the latter took over.16 He sent a message to Communist Party chiefs in the Warsaw Pact warning them that ‘Washington has decided on a crusade against socialism as a system. Those who have now ordered the deployment of new nuclear weapons on our threshold link their practical policies with this reckless undertaking.’ He summoned to his sickbed his most senior Kremlin and KG B officials. ‘The international situation is very tense . . . The US wants t
o change the existing strategic situation and they want an opportunity to make a first strike. The Soviet Union must prepare itself for every possible contingency in the short run.’17

  Then came the Able Archer exercise, a nine-day-long test starting on this day of Nato’s command and communications readiness for nuclear war. Andropov and his top intelligence advisers, hand-picked by him, were convinced that it was no exercise, but the real thing, a preparation for a strike against the Soviet Union or its East European empire. The Soviets had their own war plan which would disguise a move to the use of nuclear weapons with an apparently routine conventional exercise. The Soviet military assumed a Nato attack would begin the same way. But there were a myriad of other signs which the Kremlin and the KGB misread in ‘the fog of cold war’, as one intelligence analyst described it.

  Able Archer 83 was on a far larger scale than previous war-game exercises. It was a more realistic drill than ever before. Nato leaders took part, including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. KGB spies discovered their participation and alerted Moscow. President Reagan, his Vice President George H.W. Bush and US Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger were intending to be involved but withdrew at the last minute. Reagan’s National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, was worried that superpower relations were so tense that their presence at the exercise could be misunderstood. Their non-participation was itself misinterpreted. Sudden disruptions to politicians’ schedules and the swift movement of generals around Washington were precisely the kind of signs KGB officers were told to look out for as part of the RYAN project. Soviet military intelligence discovered that American communications formats had been substantially changed from previous exercises, which again was reported to the Kremlin as highly unusual.18