Revolution 1989 (15 page)

But the military and the industry that supported it appeared to have slipped out of any rational control. Vitali Katayev, an official in the Defence Ministry at the time, said the Soviets’ military ‘was a bull in a china shop, a sort of Soviet Texas. It always demanded as much weaponry as possible. A decision to introduce a new weapon was made not on the basis of military needs or technical merit, but rather on the basis of the authority of its sponsors and their relationship with the political leadership. Soviet military industry was supposed to increase by three per cent a year - it was in the Plan that it must do so - therefore “production of many types of weapons was not stopped even after the army was saturated with them”.’
²⁵

The USSR was ‘massively overproducing armaments’, according to Georgi Arbatov, the influential head of the US and Canadian Studies Institute and chief adviser to a succession of top Kremlin magnates. ‘It undermined Western trust towards us . . . our actions encouraged the Americans to intensify the arms race.’ Accurate figures were extraordinarily hard to come by, but according to some numbers Brezhnev was shown in the last months of his life, direct military expenses such as the cost of armed forces and equipment were at least 15 per cent of the state budget, and direct defence-related spending was probably two and a half times that sum. A good estimate was that defence ate up around 40 per cent of the Soviet Union’s budget - far more than when the USSR was preparing for World War Two. When the rest of the economy was stagnating, this was a huge drain on the nation’s resources. Some of the leaders knew it. But there is no evidence they did anything about it - or even discussed it. There seem to have been no debates within the Kremlin on this most vital of issues for the country’s future. Even some of the most senior men in the army realised the military budget had become bloated. In the early 1980s Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, head of the Soviet General Staff, began to argue that there was too much waste in the military-industrial complex, too much inefficiency and far too many gigantic projects that did not seem worthwhile. He said it was ‘suicidal’ automatically to pursue the US in the arms race. Instead of initiating a debate on future Soviet military and geopolitical strategy, the Marshal was unceremoniously fired.
²⁶

EIGHT

Washington DC, Wednesday 2 November 1983

 

JUST A HANDFUL of people knew how close the world would come to nuclear obliteration over the next few days. The Cuban Missile Crisis of twenty-one years earlier was a drama played out in public. It had a gradual build-up, a centrepiece and a dénouement seen on live TV when a stunned and terrified world could breathe a sigh of relief. Everybody who lived through it would remember the fear and intensity they felt. The story of Able Archer 83 was entirely different. Barely anyone outside a few military bunkers and espionage headquarters knew anything out of the ordinary was happening. While the world went on as normal, the Soviet leaders in the Kremlin became convinced that the US and Nato were about to mount a surprise nuclear attack against them and ordered the Soviet military to begin a countdown to retaliate. Only since the collapse of communism have documents surfaced which establish that, through a series of misunderstandings and miscalculations, Armageddon was averted more by luck than sound judgement towards the end of 1983.

 

Yuri Andropov finally achieved his lifelong ambition about a year earlier, on 10 November 1982, when he succeeded Brezhnev as Soviet Communist Party boss. But he was already a dying man, bitter, frightened and deeply pessimistic. His character and political convictions had been formed as a rising apparatchik in the years of Terror. ‘He was deeply traumatised by his years working under Stalin, like the majority of his generation,’ a long-time colleague said. Andropov was a master of ‘spin’. Somehow he had maintained a reputation as a ‘liberal’, though it is hard to see on what possible basis. It is true that he wrote some occasionally pretty lyric verse; in earlier days he liked to dance with attractive women - and they liked to dance with him. He had an entourage near him of bright, youngish cadres, some of them with progressive views, for whom he acted as mentor. However, he was a man of his era, austere, absolutely convinced in his own ideology and in the final victory of communism. He believed that for prestige and strategic reasons the USSR needed a ‘buffer’ zone - its European empire - and he was not going to be the General Secretary who lost any part of it. He was a resolutely orthodox Bolshevik. As KGB chief for nearly two decades it was he who enthusiastically orchestrated the campaigns against dissidents in the 1970s and Jewish refuseniks who wished to go to Israel. He had wanted to jail the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn rather than send him into exile. He supervised the trials of figures such as Yuri Orlov and Natan Sharansky, and approved the harassment of the physicist and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov, who was sent into internal exile with his wife Yelena Bonner. Much of this was down to Andropov’s insistence that ‘communism needed permanent vigilance’.
^I

Andropov as KGB boss knew the real and parlous economic condition of the Soviet Union. He proposed a few economic reforms and he launched a big public relations drive for more ‘workplace discipline’, but he was as closely associated with what some Soviets were already calling ‘the years of stagnation’ as any of the other old men in the Kremlin. He did nothing to challenge the basic flaws in the Soviet system - the dead weight of central planning, the dominance of politics over economic reality. He imagined that all he needed to do was cleanse the system of the corruption and indolence of the Brezhnev years, fire a few of the more sleazy bureaucrats, and communism would return to the true path for which it was destined by history.

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:

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:

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 240 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.