La “1983 Soviet War Scare” vue par la CIA (II)

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La “1983 Soviet War Scare” vue par la CIA (II)

Voici la suite et fin de l’analyse de la CIA dont le début et l’essentiel se trouvent sur ce même site, à la date du 21 septembre 2003.

 

The 1983 Soviet War Scare (Suite et fin)

Conclusion: The War Scare Was for Real

The fears that prompted Operation RYAN seemed genuine, even if exaggerated. Ex-Ambassador Dobrynin implied as much to a skeptical US television interviewer in 1995. When the interviewer asked whether Andropov “had really believed” that the Reagan administration might order a first strike, 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 strategic warning system in response to new challenges the Soviets saw looming on the horizon. That response was panicky but not paranoid. One historian, rejecting the paranoia thesis that has often been used to explain Russian reaction to technologically superior (112) Western military power, captured the point when he wrote: “At various times Russian strategists were acutely fearful. But those fears, although at times extreme, were scarcely insane.” (113)

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More Than Just a Scare Tactic

The following remarks were made by former Soviet Foreign Ministry official Sergei Tarasenko at a 1993 conference of former US and Soviet officials:

Around this time [late 1983], [First Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi] Kornienko summoned me and showed me a top-secret KGB paper. It was under Andropov. Kornienko said to me, “You haven't seen this paper. Forget about it.” ...In the paper the KGB reported that they had information that the United States had prepared everything for a first strike; that they might resort to a surgical strike against command centers in the Soviet Union; and that they had the capability to destroy the system by incapacitating the command center. We were given the task of preparing a paper for the Politburo and putting forward some suggestions on how to counter this threat not physically but politically. So we prepared a paper [suggesting] that we should leak some information that we know about these capabilities and contingency plans, and that we are not afraid of these plans because we have taken the necessary measures. (112)

Tarasenko was a senior adviser to Kornienko. He was one of the few officials outside the Soviet intelligence community who had seen the above mentioned KGB paper. His remarks confirm that the Soviet leadership genuinely believed the risk of a US attack had risen appreciably.

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Dobrynin has noted that post-Stalin leaders believed the “existing political and social structure of the United States was the best guarantee against an unprovoked first strike against us.” (114) He claims, however, that in the early 1980s some Soviet leaders, including Andropov, changed their minds. Why? Dobrynin's reply, quoting Andropov, was that President Reagan was “unpredictable.” That answer seems too simplistic — and too “un-Soviet” in that it attaches so much weight to personalities — although it is vintage Dobrynin, who seems to view the Cold War largely as an interpersonal interplay among Soviet and American leaders he knew.

To reduce the war scare to Andropovian paranoia and Reaganite rhetoric is too facile. Otherwise RYAN would not have outlasted both leaders, the KGB, and the changes in US-Soviet relations that led to the end of the Cold War. (115) The Kremlin's thinking was shaped by adverse trends, not just adversarial personalities — that is, by its pessimistic assessment of the ''correlation of forces'' and the ever-widening gap in the USSR's technological lag behind the West. Soviet leaders knew that their nation was no longer even running in place on the treadmill of history; it was beginning to fall back. In this atmosphere, Soviet officials and much of the populace felt vulnerable to the prospect of a US attack.

Many Western observers dismissed the intelligence alert and the subsequent war scare because they considered its worst case scenario — surprise nuclear attack — as out of touch with reality or just plain irrational. They based their view more on their certainty that there was no objective threat of a US attack — Reagan was not Hitler, and America does not do Pearl Harbors — than on their uncertain understanding about how the Soviets saw things. While Western observers were half-right in questioning whether the Soviet war scare was “objective” or “rational,” they were half-wrong in writing it off as scare tactics. Even fear based on a false threat can create real dangers.

Paradoxically, viewing the Soviet war scare as nothing more than a scare tactic may have led the West to underestimate another threat — a Soviet preemptive strike, either as a result of miscalculation or by design to reverse the adverse “correlation of forces.” Was this really a possibility? Some observers think so. (116) For example, Gyula Horn, Hungary's last Communist foreign minister (and current prime minister), claims that Soviet marshals, fortified with a little vodka, openly advocated an attack on the West “before the imperialists gain superiority in every sphere.” (117) The evidence is anecdotal but plausible. Whether this threat was real is likely to remain one of the Cold War's conundrums until or unless still classified documents someday provide an answer.

Appendix A: RYAN and the Decline of the KGB

Operation RYAN revealed much about the KGB in the twilight years of Soviet intelligence. The picture that emerges from Oleg Gordievsky's writings as well as firsthand accounts by other ex-KGB officers is mixed. By the early 1980s the KGB was corrupt and ineffective. But it appears to have been less so than many other Soviet organizations. (118) It was still regarded by Soviet leaders and other observers as an important arm of Soviet foreign policy.

Before being posted to London in June 1982, Gordievsky received 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 was visual observation of “tell-tale indicators” such as lights burning in government offices and military installations late at night, VIP movements, and high-level committee meetings.

The message was clear, even if implicit: the much-vaunted KGB had become largely unable to recruit well-placed agents. Having KGB staff officers serving under official cover do their own spying, rather than recruiting agents to do it, violated basic rules of tradecraft. Lurking around well-guarded official installations during the night seemed almost certain to attract the attention of host-country security services. (120) The KGB's willingness to risk exposure of its officers in this way reflected the 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 acquiring agents in the United Kingdom and the United States. (121) The spy organization's halcyon days of recruiting ideologically motivated agents worldwide were long gone. (122) In the meantime, Western services were recruiting sizable numbers of KGB officers and receiving defectors who in turn identified other KGB officers and operations. (123) Western and some Third World countries were expelling KGB officers in record numbers; the peak year was 1983, when 147 intelligence officers, including 41 in France alone, were ousted for spying. (124)

Some observers argue that the increased expulsions resulted from the high risks the KGB was taking to collect RYAN-related information. There may be something to this, but most of the expulsions in the early 1980s were part of a coordinated crackdown on Soviet intelligence operations designed to collect strategically important Western scientific information and technology.

Inability to recruit well-placed agents compelled the KGB to try to exploit its remaining advantages, such as the relative openness of Western nations and the still-large KGB staffs stationed in many of those countries. Operation RYAN was launched on the assumption that, if the United States did decide to attack the USSR, it would reveal that decision more or less openly — that is, through a variety of actions it could not conceal. The troubles enumerated above also prompted the KGB to look at another advantage it still possessed: it could draw heavily on East Germany's formidable intelligence capabilities for help in implementing RYAN.

Appendix B: The Gordievsky File

Veteran KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky began spying for British intelligence in 1974 while stationed in Denmark. He was the primary — and for a long time the only — source of Western intelligence on RYAN. Two of his fellow ex-KGB officers, Oleg Kalugin and Yuri Shvets, later provided corroborating information.

Gordievsky went to London in June 1982 as deputy rezident. In early 1985 he was appointed rezident. Soon thereafter, based on information from American spy Aldrich Ames, Soviet counterintelligence recalled Gordievsky to Moscow on a pretext, put him under surveillance, and began interrogating him. In late July 1985, using a prearranged signal to British intelligence, he triggered a plan to exfiltrate himself from the USSR. He returned to London in September 1985. By this time he was the highest ranking Western penetration of Soviet intelligence.

The British soon acknowledged publicly that Gordievsky had been working for them, and he came under their protection. He became an informal adviser to Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan and played an important role in persuading them to take Mikhail Gorbachev seriously as a reform-oriented leader.

Despite Gordievsky's efforts to convince the West that the Soviet war scare and Gorbachev were both for real, some skeptics, who believed that he was peddling KGB disinformation aimed at influencing Western policy, question his trustworthiness. In addition, neither Gordievsky nor the British have ever offered a convincing explanation of his motives for betraying the KGB or the circumstances of his recruitment, and this too has prompted some observers to suspect his credibility and even his bona 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 defector proved bona fide (that is, he was who he claimed to be and had access to the information he gave to Western intelligence), but also lied, fabricated, and exaggerated to please benefactors, ingratiate himself, inflate his value, protect himself, or protect his family if he had left one behind as Gordievsky did.

Many US analysts (including the author of this monograph) do not doubt Gordievsky's bona fides, and for the most part his credibility appears solid as well (see exceptions noted below). British intelligence debriefed him 150 times over a period of several months, taking 6,000 pages of notes that were reviewed by analysts. (126) Everything checked out, and no significant inaccuracies or inconsistencies were uncovered. Gordievsky's information before and after he defected led to the identification and expulsion of KGB officers, including 31 who were expelled from the United Kingdom after he was exfiltrated from Moscow. (127) In various books, articles, and interviews, moreover, he did inestimable damage to the KGB by revealing its officers, secrets, and operations and by damaging its reputation.

Gordievsky's track record, although good, is not entirely unblemished. In 1984, he told British intelligence about an alleged spy working at a British signals intercept site on Cyprus. (128) The authorities arrested eight British servicemen--five in the RAF and three in the army--and detained them for a year. Their four-month trial did not begin until after Gordievsky defected and arrived in London in 1985. The Crown's case then collapsed when Gordievsky's information proved wrong.

In several cases Gordievsky has displayed a tendency to shoot from the hip, making accusations about alleged Soviet agents that were 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 of his memoirs in 1995 when he erroneously charged that a UK Labour Party MP and a British publisher were Soviet agents. Because most of the people Gordievsky identified as Soviet agents were Labour Party leaders and/or leftists, he was accused of seeking to serve the interests of benefactors in the Conservative Party and conservative sympathizers in the intelligence and security services. Some Labour officials called for termination of his British pension. (130)

British intelligence has used Gordievsky to reinforce its reputation at home and abroad. Some observers have said the British spy scandals of the 1950s and 1960s did lasting damage to confidence among Western intelligence and security services in their British counterparts. Gordievsky was welcome as living, breathing proof that MI6 was not penetrated and could run a long-term agent safely and securely. A knowledgeable Conservative MP, Lord Bethell, has commented that the decision to exfiltrate Gordievsky from under the KGB's nose was motivated in part by a desire to demonstrate what British intelligence could do:

A successful operation would do wonders for MI6's credibility in the intelligence world and would leave Britain with a valuable ''property,'' a storehouse of priceless information which even the CIA would find useful. It would impress the Americans, and this is something that British intelligence always likes to do. (131)

Despite the somewhat mixed picture of Gordievsky that emerges from all this, his information on RYAN and the war scare seems accurate and objective. His 1991 publication of RYAN cables with commentary underscored the credibility of the bulk of his debriefings. To date no one, either in the West or in the former Soviet Union, has challenged the authenticity of the cables and Gordievsky's account of Operation RYAN. Gordievsky may have exaggerated the gravity of the Soviet reaction to ABLE ARCHER 83 by comparing it to the Cuban missile crisis, but that was a matter of interpretation — intended no doubt to enhance the importance of his own role — rather than a question of fact.

 

Footnotes

1. - See George F. Kennan, ''The State of U.S.-Soviet Relations (1983),'' in At A 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 of the issues and atmospherics in US-Soviet relations during 1983. Time chose Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov as co-honorees. See ''Men of the Year; Reagan and Andropov,'' Time, 2 January 1984, pp. 16-25.

3. - The ''evil empire'' speech is often regarded as a major foreign policy address or even a defining moment in US-Soviet relations, although the venue in which it was delivered--an evangelical ministers' convention in Florida--suggests that it may not have been intended as such. The media seized on the speech primarily for its sound-bite quality and its tie-in with the popular film Star Wars, a futuristic morality play about Good versus Evil in outer space. Former Soviet ambassador to the US Anatoly Dobrynin has written that the speech ''was not intended to be a history-making event in foreign policy, and according to [Secretary of State George] Shultz, no one outside the White House, including him, had a chance to review the text in advance, but the phrase quickly spread throughout the world.'' Dobrynin does not say how he portrayed the speech to Moscow. See Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1995), p. 502.

4. - This was the first personal attack by a top Soviet leader on a US president in many years. Andropov's allegation was in response to President Reagan's assertion that the USSR had violated a self-imposed moratorium on deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles facing Western Europe. The President's statement was technically incorrect; the Soviet moratorium had been cleverly worded to give the impression that all deployments would cease immediately, but the fine print showed that the Soviets did not include SS-20 launchers under construction but not completed.

5. - In a private conversation in Moscow with Vice President Bush, Secretary of State Shultz, and US Ambassador Arthur Hartman in November 1982 after Leonid Brezhnev's funeral, Andropov said: ''Periodically excesses of rhetoric will appear in our relationship, but it is best to pay attention to the business at hand.'' George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner's Son, 1993), p. 126. Andropov did not heed his own advice and soften his own attacks on the United States even after President Reagan moderated his statements on the Soviet Union.

6. - As Harry Gelman put it: ''The [Soviet] oligarchy deployed a degree and volume of propaganda vituperation not seen since the 1950s, and far surpassing Mr. 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 of Forces,'' Problems of Communism, vol. 29 (May-June 1990), pp. 1-18, for a discussion of the rise and fall of Soviet expectations of supplanting the United States as the primary international power. Asparturian (pp. 10-11) defines ''correlation of forces'' as follows: [The] Soviet concept of the ''correlation of forces'' differs fundamentally from the concept [of] ''balance of power.'' While the balance of power can be the product of deliberate policy, the ''correlation of forces'' represents ''balance determined by social and historical processes'' in which policy of states is only a component. As developed by Soviet writers, the ''correlation of forces'' constitutes the 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 ''correlation of forces.'' Even today, this Soviet concept is barely understood in the West, hence the muddle over ''assessments'' and ''military balances.''

9. - As cited in Ibid., p. 1. In retrospect it is difficult to imagine that this was the Soviet perception of the international situation on the eve of Communism's collapse. But it was. Analysis of voluminous writings by Soviet experts on the West shows that: By the mid-1970s Soviet leaders were convinced that they were gaining the upper hand. During the brief period of detente, America was acknowledged to be the dominant force in the world, but its relative strength appeared to be in decline.... Richard Nixon's pursuit of detente was interpreted as evidence of a weakened America's need for peace, markets, and new sources of energy. When Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1972, Soviet specialists on American affairs enthusiastically proclaimed that the USSR was emerging as the victor in the global struggle that had begun a quarter of a century earlier. See Richard B. Day, Cold War 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 1980 speech. He was implicitly referring to the US effort to destabilize the Marxist regime of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. The immediate purpose of the speech was to signal the United States that Moscow was determined to keep a Marxist regime in power in Afghanistan, but the speech was widely interpreted as meaning that the USSR was prepared to apply the Brezhnev Doctrine, formulated to justify the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, outside the Soviet bloc and anywhere in the world.

11. - ''By the early 1970s it was widely believed that the USSR could profit from America'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 straight on this issue in From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents 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 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), p. 583, and also in Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, eds., Instructions from the Center: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975-1985 (London: Stodder & Houghton, 1991), p. 67. Former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, who was stationed in Leningrad at the time, notes that ''in 1981, we received what I can only describe as a paranoid cable from Andropov warning of the growing threat of a nuclear apocalypse.'' See Oleg Kalugin with Fen Montaigne, The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), p. 302.

14. - RYAN is the acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadenie, or nuclear-missile attack. Another ex-KGB officer who was involved with RYAN uses the term VRYAN; the additional letter stood for vnezapnoe or surprise. See Yuri B. Shvets, Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 74. Kalugin, in The First Directorate, p. 302, refers to a ''brand-new program (the English-language acronym was RYAN)'' that ''was created to gather information on a potential American first nuclear strike.''

15. - Shvets, Washington Station, p. 75.

16. - German military authorities found this document in the files of the former East German army and gave it to the media. See Markus Lesch, ''Wie die Phantasie der SED NATO-Divisionen zuhauf gebar,'' Die Welt, 2 February 1992, p. 3.

17. - Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 523. Dobrynin claims he was not officially informed of the alert because it was an intelligence matter, but learned about it from the KGB rezident (chief of station) in Washington. He mistakenly states that RYAN (misspelled Ryon in his book) began in 1983.

18. - Two former East German intelligence officers say that before the early 1980s the collection of indications-and-warning intelligence had been assigned exclusively to military intelligence in the Warsaw Pact. Peter Richter and Klaus Rösler, Wolfs West-Spione: Ein Insider Report (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1992), p. 72. The Czechoslovak rezident in London told Gordievsky that, before RYAN, his service had never been tasked to collect 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 submitted to 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's foreign policy address several days earlier. The Soviet assessment was pessimistic. The Politburo accepted it as the official view of US policy, but in communications with Washington the Soviets continued to seek a dialogue and a summit meeting. See Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 502-503.

21. - The initial probes were aimed at deterring Moscow from using military force to suppress the Solidarity movement in Poland. During 1980-81 Soviet ground forces were exercising on both sides of the USSR-Poland border, both to intimidate the political opposition and to rehearse for an intervention that was called off when the Polish regime declared martial law on December 12/13, 1981.

22. - Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), p. 8. This book first revealed the existence of 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, there has been little, if any, challenge to the author's descriptions of the PSYOP program.

23. - Ibid.

24. - Ibid.

25. - As reported in Seymour Hersh, ''The Target is Destroyed'': What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 17. Hugh Faringdon notes that the Navy ''was the arm of service that benefited most from the Reagan administration, and it is the one that gives the clearest evidence of the ways the Americans thought at the time.'' A new US maritime strategy envisioned a three-stage process of nonnuclear ''horizontal escalation'' in wartime: (1) aggressive forward movement of antisubmarine forces, submarines, and maritime patrol aircraft, 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 Soviet home waters; and (3) complete destruction of Soviet naval forces by US aircraft carriers with airstrikes against the Soviet interior and the northern and/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 summarized the Soviets' assessment of the role of aircraft carriers in American naval strategy as follows: They regard the aircraft carriers not only as the backbone of American general purpose naval forces, but also an important nuclear reserve force that could play a significant role in determining the outcome of the final phases of hostilities. Writings and exercise activity indicate that the Soviets expect US carrier battle groups to undertake vigorous offensive actions in the maritime approaches to the USSR. They believe that carrier battle groups would attempt to use the Norwegian, the North, and the eastern Mediterranean Seas and the northwestern Pacific Ocean to attack Warsaw Pact territory, deployed naval forces, including SSBNs [nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines] and their supporting forces, and Pact ground force operations. Destruction of the aircraft carriers, then, is a critical element of several Soviet naval tasks. (See Director of Central Intelligence, ''Soviet Naval Strategy and Programs,'' National Intelligence Estimate NIE 11-15/82D, March 1983, pp. 18-19.)

27. - This account is based on Gregory L. Vistica, Fall from Glory: The Men Who 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 exercise appears to be accurate and based on sources who had firsthand knowledge. He errs, however, by saying that US naval operations occurred in ''Soviet waters'' or ''Soviet territorial waters'' when they actually took place in international waters.The GIUK Gap is an imaginary line stretching from North America through Greenland and Iceland to Scotland and Norway. In wartime the Soviet Northern Fleet would have had to transit it to reach the north Atlantic, while NATO forces would have deployed naval and air power there to bottle up Soviet naval forces.

28. - The Navy was testing more than its capabilities for defeating Soviet surveillance systems; it also was testing the hypothesis held by some senior admirals that Soviet intelligence was intercepting and reading US military communications. These admirals were vindicated in 1985 when the FBI arrested ex-sailor John Walker and members of his espionage ring, who had been giving the KGB cipher material, among other things, since 1967. For a Soviet assessment of Walker's information, see Pete Earley, ''Interview with the Spymaster,'' Washington Post Magazine, 23 April 1995, pp. 20-22. The spymaster is Gen. Boris Solomatin, who was KGB rezident in Washington when Walker began 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 and length in the history of espionage.''

29. - The fighters ''attacked'' from 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away. Until then, conventional wisdom held that the normal operating range of carrier-based aircraft 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 is Destroyed,'' chap. 2 (''A Fleet Exercise''). Vistica does not discuss the 1983 exercise or cite Hersh's account but does give details of an even larger and more complex US-Japanese exercise in the Seas of Okhotsk and Japan and in the Bering Sea in August-September 1986. See Vistica, Fall from 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 and Programs,'' p. 35: These systems--which are designed to locate, identify, and track the movement of foreign naval forces posing a threat to the Soviet homeland 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-Political Activities,'' SNIE 11-10-84/JX, 18 May 1984. (CIA declassified this estimate in early 1996 and released it to the National Archives and Records Administration.)

36. - RAND Corporation expert Jeremy Azrael also downplayed the significance of the Soviet intelligence alert because it was not accompanied by a military alert or other military actions. He offers two explanations. Either Soviet leaders believed that the threat of war was higher than their public statements indicated, or they had ordered the alert to discredit Cassandras in the high command--including First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov--by showing that even a massive indications-and-warning effort could not yield evidence of US war preparations. Azrael leans toward the former explanation without spelling out his reasons for doing so--that is, he does not clarify what, if anything, Soviet leaders may have found troubling in US actions. Jeremy R. Azrael, The Soviet Civilian Leadership and 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 prearranged and closely coordinated diplomatic script'' whose ''nice-guy, tough-guy counterpoint'' between top Soviet civilian and military leaders was intended for Western consumption--specifically, to support the then-current Soviet ''peace offensive'' aimed at forestalling US intermediate-range missile deployments in West Germany. Ibid., pp. v, 30-31.

38. - The US Intelligence Community remained skeptical about the strategic warning role of the KGB-GRU alert well after Gordievsky had defected and been debriefed. For example, Gordievsky recalls meeting a senior US expert on Soviet affairs in Washington who appeared quite knowledgeable about the alert but ''cast doubt on all my information about Operation RYAN. His theory was that the whole thing had been no more than a deception exercise by the Soviet leadership.'' See Oleg Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky (New York: Macmillan, 1995), p. 377. A US diplomatic correspondent notes that such skepticism was rather widespread:Many senior administration officials scoff now, as they did then, at the suggestion that the Soviet Union 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 propaganda purposes, these officials maintain--a pretext to create siege mentality in the Soviet Union, and to frighten the outside world about U.S. intentions. (Murray Marder, ''Defector Told of Soviet Alert; KGB Station Reportedly Warned U.S. Would Attack,'' Washington Post, 8 August 1986, p. A1.)

39. - In 1970 the United States abandoned the practice of flying into foreign airspace to provoke reactions by air defense and radar installations--so-called ferret missions--after a Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane was shot down off the coast of North Korea. A Defense Department study concluded that the risk of such flights outweighed the gain. The same study recommended that regular reconnaissance missions be closely monitored. See Hersh, ''The Target is Destroyed,'' p. 221n. For recently declassified information on the US overflight program, see ''Secrets of the Cold War,'' U. S. News & World Report, 15 March 1993, pp. 30-50. Official documents show that in the pre-satellite era the US launched some 10,000--and perhaps as 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 flights aimed at determining the precise location and capabilities of air defense and radar systems along approaches to both countries. Most missions targeted against 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 northern borders. President Truman authorized the first ferret missions in late 1950, and President Eisenhower made overflights a national policy in 1954 with the beginning of the U-2 program. At least 30 Air Force and Navy aircraft were 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 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 356.

45. - The phrase ''super-sudden first strike'' was coined by McGeorge Bundy and cited in Ibid., p. 328. Andrew and Gordievsky in Instructions from the Center, p. 74, mistakenly assert that the KGB message was wrong in claiming a four- to six-minute flight time for the Pershing IIs. Western estimates 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 the deployment 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 Europe in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack. The Soviets, however, could not ignore the military implications of the new missiles as a factor in their strategy. The Pershings were sited in an exposed position vulnerable to capture in the event of a massive attack by conventional forces, so that, despite NATO's doctrine of no-early-use of nuclear weapons, the United States would have 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] compelled the Russians to plan on preempting their use early in a war. And it was argued that the Russians could be confident about preempting only by nuclear means.'' See Dana Allin, Cold War Illusions: America, Europe and Soviet Power, 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 Markus Wolf, had so deeply penetrated the West German government, military, and secret services that about all we had to do was lay back [sic] and stay out of Wolf's way. KGB Intelligence naturally had ties with the secret services of all of the 'fraternal countries' of Eastern Europe, though none 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,'' Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14-15 December 1991, p. 5. Translated in Foreign Broadcast Information Service's Daily Report: West Europe, FBIS-WEU-91-242, 14 December 1991, p. 15.

54. - Markus Wolf, Spionage Chef im geheimen Krieg: Erinnerungen (Dusseldorf and Munich: List Verlag, 1997), pp. 326, 330-331. These passages appear in the US edition of Wolf's memoir, but in slightly edited form that omits the reference to Andropov's concern over a nuclear attack. In fact, the German edition contains an entire chapter on the ''war scare'' as it affected the USSR and the two Germanys in the early 1980s that does not appear in the US edition.

55. - See Markus Wolf with Anne McElvoy, Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1997), p. 222.

56. - Ibid.

57. - Wolf, Spionage Chef im geheimen Krieg, p. 331.

58. - Peter Siebenmorgen, ''Staatssicherheit'' der DDR: Der Westen im Fadenkreuz der Stasi (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1993), pp. 197-198. This effort was probably focused on technologies being developed for the US SDI program and its European counterpart EUREKA, which were top priority targets.

59. - Until the war scare, the HVA had rarely felt a sense of urgency in scheduling agent meetings.

60. - Peter Siebenmorgen, ''Staatssicherheit'' der DDR, p. 198.

61. - Jamie Dettmer, ''Stasi lured Americans to spy for E. Germany; moles may be serving Moscow now,'' Washington Times, 14 November 1994, pp. A1, A14. This article refers to a senior civilian employee of the US Army, a retired US Army colonel, an unidentified US citizen, and an employee of a US firm in West Germany as having been ''in agent contact'' with the HVA. This means that agents had targeted but not necessarily recruited these US citizens. In most if not all of these cases, the HVA was probably using West German citizens working for it to elicit information from US contacts 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 the Early Detection of Acute Aggressive Intentions and Surprise Military Activities of the Imperalist States and their Alliance, in particular the Prevention of a Surprise Nuclear-Rocket Attack on the Countries of the Socialist Community, GVS-000,'' 13/85. See Rita Selitrenny and Thilo Weichert, Das unheimliche Erbe: 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 Great Transition: 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 correspondent,'' 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 State Shultz, for example, was not told about it until a few hours before it was delivered. See Schweizer, Victory, p. xix.

70. - See note 67.

71. - Andropov had an unusual fascination with things American and marveled at US human and material potential, especially in military matters. According to a former KGB officer who served on his personal staff, this was not the case with most other Soviet leaders. See Wjatcheslaw Keworkow, Der geheime Kanal: Moskau, der KGB und die Bonner Ostpolitik (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1995), p. 155. Former Soviet ambassador Dobrynin noted that Andropov, more than any other Politburo member, had a broad grasp of Soviet foreign, defense, and domestic policy, thanks to his long tenure as KGB chief. His knowledge of military affairs was especially impressive, and he could hold his own with 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 labs were incapable of producing spy gear comparable to a small transmitter the counterintelligence service had taken from a US agent. Kalugin, The First Directorate, pp. 260-261.

72. - See Leslie H. Gelb, ''Foreign Affairs: Who Won the Cold War?,'' New York Times, 20 August 1992, p. 27. Gelb held this conversation with Ogarkov just days after Reagan's SDI announcement, but he did not report it until 1992.

73. - Hersh, ''The Target is Destroyed,'' p. 161.

74. - By the day after the shootdown, CIA and NSA had concluded that the Soviets probably did not know that the intruder was a civilian aircraft and may have thought that it was on an intelligence mission. See Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, p. 363, as cited in Garthoff, The Great Transition, p. 199, n. 107. The US Intelligence Community briefed this assessment to Congress in early 1988. See Tim Ahern, ''Assessment Says Soviet Probably Didn't Know Plane Was Civilian Airliner,'' Associated Press report, January 1988.

75. - In a presentation to the UN General Assembly, US Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick said: The fact is that violence and lies are regular instruments of Soviet policy. Soviet officials regularly behave as though truth were only a function of force and will--as if truth were only what they say it is; as if violence were an instrument of first resort in foreign affairs. Whichever the case--whether the destruction of KAL Flight 007 and its passengers reflects only utter indifference to human life or whether it was designed to intimidate--we are dealing here not with pilot errors but with decisions and priorities characteristic 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 United States. 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 tried to make radio contact; that he had fired visible warning shots using tracer ammunition; and that the jumbo jet did not have its navigation lights on. In 1991 Osipovich admitted that these assertions were false and that Soviet military authorities had ordered him to lie. The Soviets went to considerable lengths to protect themselves. They recovered three ''black boxes,'' using a phony oil-drilling rig and ''fishing trawlers'' to conceal their diving operation, but denied having done so until 1991. They also planted a bogus flight-data recorder at some distance from the crash site that the US Navy recovered. See Oberg, ''The Truth about KAL 007,'' p. 66, and Michael Dobbs, ''Soviet Journalists Attack KAL Story; Reports Shed New Light On '83 Downing of 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 Intelligence from Brezhnev to the Coup,'' Intelligence and National Security, vol. 8, no. 3 (July 1993), p. 60. The same memorandum warned the Politburo that the Soviet Union should not admit it had the flight voice and data recorders, because the tapes tended to support the US position more than the Soviet one and the KGB and military intelligence had not been able to prove the plane was on an intelligence mission. For whatever reason, the Soviets seemed convinced that there was more to the KAL 007 story than pilot error. When American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh visited Moscow to conduct interviews for a book on the incident, Marshal Ogarkov said: ''I'm sure that the day will come when we know the reasons why this mission was arranged.'' Hersh, ''The Target Is Destroyed,'' p. 191. Five years later, Defense Minister Gen. Dmitri Yazov asked visiting Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci: ''Tell me, why did you Americans use that Korean airliner as a spy plane?'' Carlucci could not convince the Soviet general that his suspicions were unfounded. Somewhat later Ogarkov's replacement, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, adamantly insisted to American journalist Don Oberdorfer that KAL 007 was on a secret mission. See Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War To A New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union 1983-1990 (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), p. 55. This could have been a high-level ''deception'' effort, but it seems more likely that top leaders either believed the United States was behind the intrusion or were captives of their own contrived interpretation.

79. - ''Declaration by Yu. V. Andropov, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet,'' Pravda and Izvestiya, 29 September 1983, p. 1. Publication of the declaration in both of the leading newspapers underscored its importance and the leadership's full endorsement.

80. - Hersh, ''The Target is Destroyed,'' p. 18, says the Navy ''never publicly acknowledged either the overflight or its error; it also chose to say nothing further inside the government.'' The Soviets perceived both political and military machinations in these overflights, which occurred over part of the Kuril Island chain, seized by the USSR and occupied along with the southern part of Sakhalin island in August 1945. Japan refers to the occupied Kuril Islands as the Northern Territories and has refused to sign a peace accord with the USSR until they are returned. The United States has long supported Japan's claim to the Northern Territories.

81. - Ibid., p. 19. According to Oberg, Soviet interceptors based closest to where the Pacific Fleet overflights occurred were fogged in, and those located elsewhere in the vicinity lacked drop-tanks and therefore sufficient fuel to pursue the US planes. Drop-tanks had been removed in 1976 to prevent Soviet pilots from defecting after a pilot flew a MiG-25 equipped with a drop-tank to Japan. Several accounts add that local air defense commanders failed to detect KAL 007 as it flew over Kamchatka and then panicked later when it flew over Sakhalin because key tracking radars were not working properly. Gordievsky says he was told that eight of 11 radars on Kamchatka and Sakhalin were out of commission. See Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 594. A former Soviet pilot who defected in 1991 said that Arctic gales had damaged the radar sites. Oberg, who closely studied the incident, discounts the radar failure explanation, claiming that the local air defense commander at Sokol Air Base on Sakhalin was ''trigger-happy'' after the US intrusion into Soviet airspace on April 6, 1983 and ''was just itching to get back at the next intruder.'' See ''Faulty radar blamed in KAL attack,'' Chicago Tribune, 2 January 1993, p. 16. This implies that the commander ignored Soviet rules of engagement, but there is still another twist to the story. A Soviet investigative reporter who wrote a series of articles on KAL 007 said in 1991 that, after the US air intrusion during the Pacific Fleet exercise, the Supreme Soviet passed a national law declaring USSR borders ''sacred''--an expression Foreign Minister Gromyko used in an official statement after the shootdown--and authorizing local air defense commanders to destroy any intruding aircraft. See Dobbs, ''Soviet Journalists Attack KAL Story.'' If this account is accurate, then the shootdown was due more to calculation and less to confusion, panic, and frayed nerves, and the Soviet leadership bears more responsibility than is generally acknowledged in Russia or in the West.

82. - On 5 September 1983, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 102 on ''U.S. Response to the Soviet Destruction of KAL 007 Airliner.'' This directive ordered a ''major public diplomatic effort to keep international and domestic attention focused on this Soviet action.'' As cited in Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 385

83. - Gordievsky notes that the US response to KAL 007 ''strengthened belief at both the Center and in the Kremlin in a far-reaching anti-Soviet plot by the 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 the full story, which is repeated in Andrew and Gordievsky, Instructions from the Center, pp. 87-88. See also Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1995), pp. 471-478, for a account of ABLE ARCHER and Gordievsky's 1985 post-defection briefing of President Reagan.

87. - For British accounts of ABLE ARCHER, see Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds: The Dramatic Stories of the Top Soviet Spies Who Have Defected Since 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, Spies and 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 through a war danger zone.... This was not a surge of Soviet aggression, but a spasm of Soviet panic.'' Bethell writes on the same incident (p. 191): ''The Soviets did apparently fear that the West might be about to launch a nuclear strike upon them. This was the most dramatic and the most conclusive confirmation there 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 Recent Soviet 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 units Moscow clearly revealed that it did not in fact think that there was a possibility 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 Public Opinion,'' p. 88. The author explicitly refused to speculate on the origins and intended audience of the public war scare. For another example of a carefully 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/East European Survey, 1983-1984: Selected Research and Analysis from Radio Free Europe/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, Kremlin in 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 was preparing the Soviet people for a crisis in US-Soviet relations. This view seems exaggerated.

101. - One response cited in the Soviet press that may or may not have been typical was that of a World War II veteran who said he was willing to go without food if the Soviet Army needed more rockets to defend the country. Whether apocryphal or not, this was the kind of sentiment Soviet domestic propaganda was 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 even than 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 and the high command. Even as late as 1991, for example, when the deputy chief of KGB foreign intelligence was trying to make his case to Gorbachev for countering an alleged US ''plot'' to dismember the USSR, he wrote a memorandum saying (Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 525):The KGB has been informing the leadership about this in time and detail. We would not want a tragic repetition of the situation before the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, when Soviet intelligence warned about the imminent attack of Nazi Germany but Stalin rejected this information as wrong and even provocative. You know what that mistake cost us. (As cited in Andrew, ''KGB Foreign Intelligence from Brezhnev to the Coup,'' p. 63.) During a visit to Moscow, Dobrynin asked Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, Ogarkov's successor as Chief of the General Staff, for a briefing on Soviet military planning for war. '''Soviet military doctrine can be summed up as follows: 1941 shall not be repeated,' the marshal asserted.'' Soviet officials may have used the ''1941 shall not be repeated'' theme for manipulative purposes, but they would not have done so had they not known that it would strike a responsive chord with the political leadership.

104. - For a discussion of the wealth of accurate information that was available to Stalin, see John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions: The KGB Dossier Reveals Stalin's Master Spy (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), pp. 85-90. The authors had access to intelligence reports in the KGB archives. See also Barton Whaley, Codeword BARBAROSSA (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), which lists more than 80 indications and warnings of the German attack.

105. - The German counterintelligence falsely portrayed the military buildup in eastern Germany and occupied Poland as preparation--at a safe distance from RAF bombers and reconnaissance planes--for an invasion of Britain.

106. - Whaley, Operation BARBAROSSA, p. 97, quotes Stalin as saying on June 14, 1941: ''You can't believe everything you read in intelligence reports.'' He does not, however, give a citation for the quotation, which may be apocryphal. See note 110, below, for an example of Stalin's rejection of an explicit warning of the German attack.

107. - Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker: Who Started World War II? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 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 sent to Stalin by a member of the ''Red Orchestra'' spy ring in Germany, giving him a week's notice of Hitler's intention to invade the Soviet Union. Stalin annotated the text with a string of obscenities, dismissing both the intelligence and the source. See ''Another Country,'' The Economist, 24 February-1 March 1996, p. 58.

111. - This was Dobrynin's response to a question about the war scare during an interview by Steve Kroft on the CBS television newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which aired 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 (New York: 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 foreign intelligence noted that even by that late date the alert still ''involved huge material and human resources'' and required biweekly reports from KGB residencies. See Bill Gertz, ''KGB halts lookout for U.S. nuclear attack,'' Washington Times, 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 ''most startling insight to emerge... is not how effective the KGB was, but how bungling, 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: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.,1991), p. 99.

121. - Shvets claims that by the time he joined the KGB in the late 1970s, one could become a general without ''ever having set eyes on a live agent. 'The main advantage of Soviet intelligence service resides in its newly acquired ability 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 International Espionage (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), pp. 100-101, 145-146, and 195-196. Kalugin notes that, under the tutelage of Vladimir Kryuchkov, KGB foreign intelligence was more interested in palace intrigue than operational efficiency with the result that ''in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, we became less aggressive in our battle with the CIA, while at the same time the number of KGB defectors soared.'' Kalugin, The First Directorate, p. 248.

124. - See Sallie Wise, ''1983: A Bad Year for Soviet Diplomats,'' Radio Liberty Research RL 467/83 (9 December 1990), pp. 1-4.

125. - In his various books and articles, Gordievsky repeatedly claims that his decision 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 his mind 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 Delusions of International Espionage (New York: New Amsterdam Press, 1989), pp. 102-104. Rusbridger believes that Gordievsky gave the British a KGB cover story designed to protect another source, either human or technical, at the Cyprus installation. He speculates that Gordievsky may have had doubts about the information, but wanted to please MI6.

129. - For example, Gordievsky asserted that President Franklin Roosevelt's close friend and adviser, Harry Hopkins, was a Soviet agent. The allegation was used to promote the US edition of his book on the KGB and a large excerpt from the book that appeared in Time, which featured the Hopkins story in a textbox. See Time, 22 October 1990, pp. 72-82; the textbox is on p. 72. Gordievsky later withdrew the allegation, saying that Hopkins was an ''unwitting'' asset, not a recruited agent, and that his original statement was ''probably a simplification.'' See Larry King Live, Transcript # 160, 30 October 1990. Hopkins' son Robert and Pamela Harriman (later US Ambassador to France) rebutted Gordievsky in letters to Time. See Time, 12 November 1990, p. 12. Author Verne W. Newton charged Gordievsky with using McCarthyite tactics to smear Hopkins and to promote his 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.

 

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