13.

Operations Plan 10-1

One of the KGB’s most sensational disinformation operations came to light for the first time in December 1967, packed as a present under a Christmas tree in Norway. The operation was part of a campaign, code-named STORM by the KGB,¹ that would rage for more than a dozen years, striking all across Europe and causing vast reputational damage to the United States. The main document in play was a war plan—outlining America’s strategy for a European guerrilla war.

By 1957, American military and intelligence planners anticipated and began to plan for a “hot war” with the Soviet Union. Europe’s forests and rivers and cities would be the battlefield. U.S. Air Force planners populated their target list with hundreds of cities and bridges and junctions and airfields, including many targets in West Germany and Austria, complete with appropriate nuclear yield requirements for each target. The army planned to blow up bridges on the Rhine to slow advancing Warsaw Pact troops. The CIA prepared for action behind enemy lines. The Agency’s Clandestine Services division staged a series of “politico-military war games” to understand what would happen in Europe in the case of an all-out Soviet invasion.²

The most impactful leak of the Cold War contained U.S. military war plans with a “cosmic” classification level, and began in a Socialist newspaper in Norway at Christmas 1967.

(Sosialistisk Venstreparti)

The CIA would contribute to European defense through a number of different projects. One early focus was recruiting and training potential resistance fighters and saboteurs in Eastern Europe, including Germany. These projects had various code names, such as LCPROWL, KMHITHER-C, or AEDEPOT, a U.S.-based clandestine paramilitary training program in irregular warfare techniques, so that assets could recruit and lead indigenous insurgent forces behind enemy lines. The projects were so secret that they had no liaison with allied or other friendly governments and their intelligence services; even U.S. special forces in Europe would be informed on the details only once war broke out.³

The Department of Defense, in May 1955, had created a new command for special forces in Paris, the Support Operations Task Force Europe, abbreviated SOTFE. SOTFE was in charge of unconventional warfare, and controlled all special operations forces in Europe, including the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group, a new and secretive Detachment “A,” and early Air Force special operations squadrons. Some of these elite U.S. units were effectively guerrilla sleeper cells, trained in urban warfare. The soldiers would usually not wear uniforms but rather fashionable civilian clothes, with shades and beards, even during heavily armed exercises in German cities. The U.S. Army’s guerrilla units would, in turn, depend on the CIA’s successful recruitment of insurgents. In the event of a hot war, the U.S. commandos, fluent in local languages, would stay behind or deploy forward behind enemy lines, and secretly rendezvous with the CIA-trained indigenous insurgents. The plan foresaw that they would fight in more than one hundred local theaters at once, in twenty-three European countries.⁴

The initial planning was optimistic. Thirty days after the outbreak of war, newly created U.S. special forces units could arm 14,000 European insurgents (2,000 in East Germany alone); after half a year, the number of anti-Communist guerrillas could be as high as 112,500.⁵ One American special operator later admitted that those plans were “ambitious and extremely dangerous,” even “suicidal.”⁶ The blueprint for unconventional war had different titles at different agencies. The CIA named it the “Global War Plan for Clandestine Operations.” SOTFE called it Operations Plan (OPLAN) 100, with later versions, sections, or annexes designated as 100-1, 100-2, or 10-1.

The American war planners had no illusions about what all-out war would look like: “General war will include tactical and strategic employment of nuclear weapons and can be expected to enhance conditions in which unconventional warfare (UW) will be pursued,” the U.S. planners wrote in the Global War Plan, an exceptionally aggressive document. The CIA was also prepared to use a range of “exceptional” measures, including the overthrow of hostile governments through political action and even eyebrow-raising methods such as “counterintelligence, psychological warfare, or political action against allies of the United States.” Even worse, once war had broken out and partisan forces were confronting the Soviets, the guerrilla fighters were supposed to be ready to escalate to the most drastic measures: “CIA will be prepared to use nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons in clandestine operations in general war as feasible, subject to approval by the President before actual use is undertaken.”⁷

West German and Austrian cities, U.S. war planners foresaw, would be behind enemy lines in this scenario. The plan was a reaction to the United States’ worst nightmare at the time.

The top-secret SOTFE document first surfaced in a Norwegian newspaper in late December 1967. “This can happen here,” read the headline, over an illustration that depicted the top-secret war plan wrapped like a present, alongside a bomb disguised as a bauble, beneath a Christmas tree crowned with a NATO tree-topper.⁸ The leaked document had been sent anonymously to Oslo from a Rome address. About a month later, the war plan appeared in Paese Sera, an Italian newspaper with pro-Soviet sympathies.⁹ On March 3, 1968, the Hamburg-based far-left politics-and-sex magazine Konkret—edited by Ulrike Meinhof, who would soon achieve notoriety as a co-founder of the Red Army Faction terrorist group—published excerpts of a six-page document that, its editors claimed, they found “in Norway.”¹⁰ The document and the excerpts appeared to be genuine, apparently without forged content slipped into the file. Two weeks later, the UK periodical Peace News noted it also had received the “top-secret” document and quoted from it.¹¹

The Department of Defense reacted at once. The U.S. commander-in-chief of Europe immediately proposed briefing allied delegations to NATO on “the authenticity of certain pages” of the operations plan. But on March 8, 1968, the State Department in Washington sent an urgent telegram to U.S. embassies in all NATO capitals, declining the commander’s request. The cable, classified as secret and signed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, bore as its subject line “COMPROMISED USEUCOM OPLANS.” Most diplomats who received the telegram themselves did not know what kind of information these operational plans contained. But the message was clear: no U.S. diplomat was authorized to speak about the document’s authenticity. “In event of public or press queries, you should take line that USG neither confirms nor denies authenticity of documents,” the telegram concluded.¹²

The story, perhaps as a result of the U.S. government’s swift action, did not catch on that March. Ivan Agayants and his busy operators in the KGB had failed, for now. However, the U.S. government anticipated that their highly sensitive documents would surface in other NATO countries in the near future. And indeed they would, under the most dramatic circumstances.

On October 8, 1968, Major General Horst Wendland, the deputy director of West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, was found dead at his desk in Pullach, not far from Munich. The general had shot himself. The German police closed off the cemetery for Wendland’s funeral so that nobody could take pictures of Germany’s top intelligence officers, almost all of whom were in attendance. Munich’s criminal police accepted “incurable depression” as the cause and did not investigate further,¹³ yet the intelligence chief’s suicide came at a suspicious moment. On the very day of his death, a German Navy rear admiral, Hermann Lüdke, had also killed himself with a gun. Two weeks before that, a microfilm with nine photographs of top-secret NATO documents had been traced to him, and Lüdke was suspected of working for a foreign intelligence agency.¹⁴ Four additional suicides among German military officers and civil servants, in the space of just a few weeks, set alarm bells ringing in Bonn. Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger ordered a high-profile investigation.

The highly publicized suicides sent shock waves through the NATO security establishment. By December, one former French intelligence officer, Philippe de Vosjoli, publicly articulated the fear that the KGB had deeply penetrated the German security establishment, and that recent suicides among military and intelligence officers were the acts of desperate men who feared they would be burned by recent Soviet bloc defectors.¹⁵ But neither the CIA nor MI6 had any reason to suppose that Wendland’s suicide was based on more than his known issues with depression.¹⁶ They were right.

Wendland was not, in fact, a mole. But when Service A heard of his suicide and the surrounding theories, they immediately spotted an opening for an actual conspiracy implicating the dead general in relation to the OPLAN. But to pull off such a maneuver, Service A needed some inside knowledge from the time when the OPLAN was stolen. Agayants needed some truth to flank his lie, and he was in luck.

Forged page added to OPLAN 10-1. The forgery claimed that low-level military commanders were authorized to use nuclear weapons against European targets.

Heinz Felfe was an operative for the BND; a confidant of its legendary founder, Reinhard Gehlen; and one of the most damaging spies in postwar Germany. He passed thousands of documents to Moscow.¹⁷ Felfe, who had also been an SS-Obersturmführer in the Third Reich, was convicted of treason by federal judges in Karlsruhe in 1963 and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Only six years later, with the BND still roiling from Wendland’s recent suicide, Felfe was released, and he immediately slipped through the Iron Curtain into what conservative West Germans called the Soviet Occupied Zone. Soviet intelligence immediately reactivated the former SS officer, probably with the intention to use him for ongoing active measures.¹⁸ “Every day in jail I will pay back,” said Felfe.¹⁹

In 1969, Felfe naturally no longer had access to current documents. But the former mole still knew the inner workings of the BND, and he had known Wendland years before, around the time when the OPLAN was stolen from the Americans. Felfe and the American war plan, in short, had two things in common: neither had much immediate intelligence value, yet both offered very high disinformation value. Agayants’s team in the KGB had a brilliant idea—they could use an obsolete German asset to relaunch an obsolete American war plan.

Still, Service A’s specialists knew from experience that enhancing the documents with some creative writing would make them even more controversial. Dark truths were even darker when flanked by a dark lie. Therefore the KGB included a confusing single page instructing specific edits to the existing SOTFE plan. The edits page was marked “TOP SECRET.” Most of the edits were banal (for example, “page 3, the words ‘Berlin Command’ are changed to read ‘US Army, Berlin’”). Then the forgers snuck in an edit to one longer paragraph, with each sentence underlined for emphasis. The paragraph in question read:

Paragraph 3j(3), page 4, is changed by deleting everything after “messages” and substituting the following:

Use of nuclear weapons with yields of 10 KT or less is authorized in friendly and neutral countries provided: R-hour has been declared, and military necessity dictates. The rise of nuclear weapons of larger yield than 10 KT requires the specific approval of CINCUSAREUR.²⁰

The final abbreviation referred to “Commander in Chief of United States Army Europe.” To the trained eye, this paragraph stood out as forged for several reasons: the corrections page appears to be slotted into the collection of documents; the font and layout of the classification markings are different; line breaks are not uniformly indented, as was customary then; U.S. Army documents at the time were never underlined for emphasis (only for headlining); finally, and most important, the delegation of nuclear release authority becomes highly suspicious in a “leaked” document when accompanied by a fake cover letter written solely to stress the delegation of nuclear release authority.

It was Felfe, the German double agent who fled to Moscow, who had helped write that well-crafted and convincing cover letter. The thrust of the letter was that Wendland, already depressed, had shared top-secret files with a friend, confided in him, and instructed this anonymous friend to release the documents to the public should something happen to him.

Service A planned to release the letter and the accompanying leaked-and-forged documents in a number of European countries simultaneously, and therefore drafted the cover letter in English. Posing as Wendland’s friend, Felfe wrote: “Major General Wendland reached a prominent position in the German intelligence service (BND) and had access to top-secret documents and other information which severely depressed him. Shortly before his untimely death, he entrusted me with copies of several documents and asked me to publish them at an appropriate time.”²¹

The cover story implied that the documents contained a secret so dark that it helped push the depressed Wendland over the brink into suicide. The letter went on:

My friend was particularly disturbed by the fact that the Americans could use atomic, chemical, and radiological weapons without prior consent of the U.S. Congress or the President since permission to use them follows automatically when those weapons are supplied to special groups.²²

The targets to be destroyed are determined by the commanders of these groups … In other words, the lives of millions of people depend on the decisions of a handful of American officers … It well may be that knowledge of this was one of the reasons that led to my friend’s tragic death.²³ He wanted to make these facts known, but could not do anything because of his duty.²⁴

The secret documents in the letter were titled O-Plan 10-1.

Next, the KGB softened the ground. In June, the Soviet news agency Newa reported that the Wendland affair was “very serious.” Newa implied that the BND general had killed himself not because he was suffering from depression but for a more sinister reason. “In Bonn the rumor is making the rounds that Wendland was involved in an espionage affair,” Newa reported, correctly;²⁵ the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung had even covered that rumor.²⁶ Then came the lie: “Linked to his name is the leak of important secret information from the Bundesnachrichtendienst and NATO intelligence services.”²⁷

ABC, a far-left Italian sex-and-politics magazine, reported on actual U.S. war plans based on a forged KGB cover letter in July 1969.

ABC was an Italian far-left illustrated broadsheet not averse to mixing large pictures of nudes with risqué political news.²⁸ On U.S. Independence Day 1969, the magazine’s cover featured a topless model accompanied by the headline “Here Are NATO’s Secret Plans.” The story, which included menacing pictures of tanks and nuclear missiles, followed the KGB’s script to the letter. Opening with Wendland’s suicide, ABC noted the general’s known severe depression, but then added that “a few days before his death, Horst Wendland confided in a friend.” ABC concluded, “the use of atomic weapons is entrusted to groups of officers engaged in local activities, as can be the American military leaders in Europe. In other words, it may be a temptation for an American to decree the destruction of Milan, Rome, Vienna or Frankfurt, in the hope of preventing the destruction of New York.”

The same package that ABC received in Milan was also mailed to two British peace journals, Sanity, the monthly magazine of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and again Peace News.²⁹ Their copies also arrived anonymously, postmarked from Rome, with the forged cover letter from Wendland’s “friend.”³⁰ Both peace magazines carefully considered the possibility that the aggressive U.S. Army war plan was an Eastern forgery, and both concluded that it wouldn’t really make a difference whether the top-secret document was forged or not; “in the end it hardly matters whether it is or not,” wrote Peace News, “since if COMSOTFE OPLAN NR 10-1 is a fabrication, we can guess there is a document almost exactly like it.”³¹ Sanity’s justification was more eloquent but equally twisted. “If they are forgeries they should not be regarded lightly,” wrote Sanity, “for the authors must consider them near enough to the truth to be accepted; close enough to be a convincing basis for deception.” And that close-enough-to-truth, the magazine’s lead article reasoned, was “a dreadful indictment” of where things stood in Europe.³² One day after the UK peace magazines and ABC in Italy revealed the American nuclear war plan, The Times of London picked up the story from the excerpts published by the peace magazines and ran it under the headline “U.S. to Hand Out H-bombs,” although the piece also acknowledged the possibility of a forgery. One British peace activist then forwarded the full document to Ramparts, a far-left Berkeley magazine. The “frightening document,” Ramparts’s editors wrote not long after, had triggered a “tremendous controversy” in the United States and Europe over the last few weeks.³³

The revived operation was already a stellar success.

In Germany, the weeklies Der Spiegel and Stern received their copies. The latter magazine, the editor of which, Henri Nannen, had served in a Wehrmacht propaganda unit, was favored as an outlet by the Stasi and the KGB. Stern was the embodiment of sensationalism, drawing a circulation of 1.8 million with the combination of pinups and intrigue typical of Germany’s sexually and politically liberated 1960s, where voyeurism often masqueraded as liberation. When Stern’s reporters peeled open the voluptuous Italian envelopes that June, they could not believe their luck. An anonymous leaker had mailed a particularly indecent secret American war plan. The magazine headlined its sensational story “Treason by Mail,” and opened by calling Wendland’s suicide into question, immediately adopting the KGB’s framing and credulously quoting the fake cover letter, but stopping short of reproducing the leaked documents.

U.S. defense policy in Europe and, to an even greater extent, the BND were getting pummeled by this unusually successful active measure. The Wendland affair was an extremely unpleasant situation for German intelligence already, and now a hostile power was taking ruthless advantage of the tragedy, implying that West German intelligence had compromised highly classified U.S. war plans. After multiple news outlets in three countries had blamed the American leak on the BND, Der Spiegel revealed the true source of the leak: Robert Lee Johnson, a former U.S. Army sergeant already infamous for stealing documents for the KGB.

Johnson, disappointed by not getting a promotion, had offered his services to the Soviets in Berlin back in 1953. He met with officers from KGB’s Karlshorst rezidentura, was recruited, and worked as a spy, off and on, until he deserted in 1964 and his wife reported him to the FBI. The KGB trained the sergeant in basic espionage techniques during his honeymoon in the town of Brandenburg (he had told the army he was in Bavaria). Years later, Johnson would become one of the best-placed spies of the entire Cold War.

In 1961, Johnson received a top-secret security clearance, and soon applied to work at the Army Forces Courier Center at Orly Field, Paris, “a sort of post office for top-secret materials,” as one receptionist explained to Johnson when he inquired.³⁴ There the KGB’s Paris station invested months in Johnson’s painstaking work to breach the high-security vault at Orly Field. The prep work included making imprints of a security key, X-raying a number lock with a miniature radioactive device, and Johnson volunteering to repaint the vault in order to examine the entire building inch by inch. From mid-December 1962 to April 21, 1962,³⁵ Johnson breached the high-security vault several times, snapping pictures on his miniature camera of some documents with “cosmic” classification levels. The intelligence value of these documents would change when the FBI caught Johnson in late 1964. He pled guilty in the spring of 1965. By 1967, some of the documents were ready for recycling.

“Disinformation,” announced Der Spiegel’s headline. The magazine delved in remarkable detail into Service A and its use of Felfe to frame the dead Wendland. Der Spiegel’s source, most likely, was somebody with links to West German intelligence.³⁶ A veritable spy-versus-spy game began to play out in the glossy pages of competing Hamburg weeklies.

The exposure of the active measures in Der Spiegel did not end them—it enhanced them. Der Spiegel, likely with help from the BND, solved a problem for the KGB: it proved the leak was real. Service A now also knew that it could count on Stern’s anti-American inclinations. Stern had reported that German generals would consider insubordination in the case of nuclear war, for the German generals knew that their own families and communities would be incinerated if they acted in support of the American plans.³⁷ The KGB rewarded Henri Nannen’s magazine with another major story sourced from the American vault at Orly Field.

In early January, Stern received an envelope stuffed with undeveloped film negatives. Reporters took the negatives to the darkroom and discovered an even more extraordinary top-secret document that Johnson had passed on to Russian intelligence: an extensive handbook of European and Middle Eastern targets for American atomic weapons, titled “Nuclear Yield Requirements.”

The cover page of a major leak of top-secret U.S. military documents

Stern claimed that “high U.S. officials” had confirmed the “absolute authenticity” of the yield requirements, and proceeded to list a remarkable number of targeting details. Among the numerous West German targets were Kiel (target number 0737E), Flensburg (0740E), Schleswig (0736E), Lübeck (0741E), and many more. The story laid out how large populations would be killed or “slowly and painfully languish and die” in the aftermath of an attack. There were Austrian targets, including Vienna, Linz, and Innsbruck, and targets in Iraq, Egypt, and Syria.³⁸ Nannen knew well that he was doing the KGB’s work. Justifying his use of the leaked files, he wrote, “STERN is only fulfilling its duty to inform the public with facts,” adding that not even the German defense minister in Bonn was allowed to see these documents. In response, the German government called the plans “outdated,” implicitly confirming their authenticity. Both the State Department and the Pentagon refused to comment.³⁹

For Nannen, the material was simply too valuable not to report. The magazine ran one more feature story on the leak,⁴⁰ pointing out an angle of particular German interest: it was outrageous that the secret document had been passed to the Russians by an American spy, which meant that even Moscow knew about U.S. war plans that would set “Rhine and Main ablaze,” while West Germany, a NATO ally, and its Ministry of Defense in Bonn were kept in the dark.

An excerpt from a thirty-page leak of top-secret U.S. Air Force nuclear yield requirements, here listing West German targets (“GW”). The listing is likely genuine.

In fact, Nannen had the better arguments on his side, and Western intelligence officials indirectly helped him make them. The revelation that the secret plans were actually sourced from an infamous U.S. spy (and not from Wendland) added credibility to the next, even more disturbing batch of documents, the Nuclear Yield Requirements, and both the KGB and Stern knew it. But the U.S. government, paralyzed by its own classification restrictions, never identified which sections of the document were authentic and which were not. The OPLAN would reemerge; it was only a matter of time. U.S. authorities would later count at least twenty different surfacings of Robert Lee Johnson’s stolen documents, according to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.⁴¹ The cache was a disinformation gold mine. In many ways, the leak, enhanced with a dash of forgery, foreshadowed the future of disinformation.