CHAPTER 5
Project RYAN
IN ROME, ON MAY 13, 1981, a little over a Month after the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life, a young Turk named Mehmet Ali Ağca opened fire and nearly killed Pope John Paul II in Saint Peter’s Square. At the CIA, some saw the hand of the Soviet Union, wondering whether the KGB would authorize the political assassination of a man who threatened Communism. The intelligence community threw resources into a campaign to blame the Soviets. Reagan, still recovering from his own brush with death, felt a strong kinship with the new pope, whom he had not met.1
The KGB leadership did not appear to know how eager the CIA was to see a grand design in these recent events. They had something else on their minds that month. Section chiefs from around the world had flown to Moscow for a series of meetings about the future. The first chief directorate, in charge of foreign intelligence gathering, was alarmed by political and military changes in NATO and the United States and had decided to reorient its priorities. In Poland, labor strikes had crippled the economy, and Moscow worried about a revolution that could not be contained by the Polish government.
Marxism in Poland was imposed by force, and Soviet dominion was sustained by the threat of an invasion directed by Moscow. The Soviet military was stretched thin. During the previous five years, a half million troops had moved eastward to contain the threat of China. More than 60,000 Soviet combat troops, and much of its war materiel preordained for use in Europe, were tied up in Afghanistan. In 1979, the Soviets had reluctantly invaded Afghanistan to prevent the takeover of the Afghan government by Islamists; the war became a magnet for Soviet enemies to do whatever they could to enlarge the conflict, sucking in so many resources that war plans for conflicts elsewhere had to be revised. On May 16, 1981, in an auditorium at the Lubyanka, General Secretary of the Politburo Leonid Brezhnev, who was seventy-five and frail, and Yuri Andropov, his bespectacled, pragmatic, and feared intelligence chief, took turns addressing KGB rezidents.2 As a senior KGB officer later recalled: “The new American administration, he declared, was actively preparing for nuclear war. To the astonishment of most of his audience, Andropov then announced that, by a decision of the Politburo, the KGB and GRU were for the first time to cooperate in a worldwide intelligence operation codenamed RYAN.”3
RYAN—Raketno Yadernoye Napadenie (
), RYaN, or “nuclear missile attack”—would coordinate the flow of warning intelligence through a small analysis office in the First Chief Directorate called the Institute for Intelligence Problems. This new bureau would use computer analysis and create a matrix based on unambiguous signs of nuclear war preparation. The minutiae of communication patterns received special priority. From the start of Project RYAN, the opponent’s nuclear exercises would be watched more closely by the Soviet and Warsaw Pact intelligence services, and the Soviet Union would ratchet up its own nuclear alert status, just in case.
What was expected from KGB rezidents around the world would change: the enemy’s counterintelligence was crafty, and the Soviets envisioned that the US and NATO would create fog machines designed to throw the KGB off the scent of any surprise attack. A senior KGB officer later explained: “[i]n practical terms: When we draft the list of indicators, we have to try to include only those who are indispensable for a surprise nuclear missile attack.” The implication: a de-emphasis on regular foreign intelligence work.4
A month later, Andropov signed his name to a coded message to all Russian embassies worldwide. RYAN was to be their top priority. “Not since the end of World War II has the international situation been as explosive as it is now,” he wrote.5
That was the theory, anyway. In practice, it would take more than a year before RYAN got off the ground. The KGB rezidenturas in Western countries did not believe that imminent nuclear war was a threat worth paying attention to.6 Andropov, in particular, although not given to delusions about the domestic situation, saw conspiracies everywhere. And his directives were often met by the bureaucratic equivalent of eye rolling. In 1978, he believed that the CIA had decided to foment internal instability inside the Soviet Union and that the American intelligence establishment created a single secret unit to conduct deep cover sabotage operations. (The CIA had no such intentions, nor the capabilities.)
One reason why Andropov could speculate so freely about Western intentions was that the KGB had few sources of political intelligence.7 He refused to believe what he read in the sources that were available to him, especially the Western press, which often captured US political intentions as accurately as any intelligence could.
When Erich Mielke, the head of the East German intelligence service, the Stasi, visited Andropov in July, he found the KGB chairman in a dour mood. Mielke tried flattery. Muscovites seemed happy, he said. The beautiful stadiums built for the 1980 Olympics were a triumph of socialism, he said. No wonder the Americans would not send their athletes to participate. The notes of the meeting suggest that Andropov had no response, launching instead into a statistics-laden summary of the Soviet domestic economy. Growth was lower than projected. So was consumer goods production. Brezhnev wanted to make the economy more efficient, Andropov said.
Internationally, his principal worry was a campaign of ideological subversion and psychological warfare promulgated by the new Reagan administration, which intended to spend $220 billion to upgrade its military. The correlation of forces, which Andropov found more or less balanced at the time, would shift in the future unless the Soviets responded in kind. “Reagan’s vulgar speeches show the true face of the military-industrial complex,” Andropov said. “They have long sought such a figure. Now, they have finally found it in the form of Reagan.”8 Toward the end of their meeting, Andropov asked Mielke if there was anything the East Germans needed from the KGB. An accurate war plan for NATO, Mielke replied, would be helpful. Andropov did not tell him that the Bulgarians had been passing along those plans for years.
Andropov did not mention the imminent threat of nuclear war, nor did he mention RYAN. His assessment of Soviet prospects reflected his personal ambitions. Brezhnev would die, sooner rather than later. Andropov intended to succeed him. He needed allies from within the Politburo, and, in reluctantly supporting the decision to intervene in Afghanistan two years earlier, he had cast his lot with the Soviet military-industrial complex and its titular leader, Dmitriy Ustinov, the Defense Minister.9 Andropov angled to be the face Soviet military-industrial complex. He had reason to hype the American threat. It was in the interest of his political coalition to do so.10 Andropov might also have been trying to motivate his troops. Soviet officials who had long interacted with the West believed that the invasion of Afghanistan had gutted the Soviet’s last chance to revive détente with Carter. The aging Politburo was saying, in essence, that détente had been killed by Reagan’s election.11 And the inability to collect good political intelligence on American leaders was particularly dangerous for the Soviets: their theory of nuclear deterrence required an accurate assessment of political intentions as much as it did the ability to know whether American ICBM silos could be destroyed by three or five weapons.12
In Moscow, Oleg Gordievsky, another young Andropov protégé, heard nothing about RYAN, even though he was posted to KGB headquarters. Gordievsky looked the part of a KGB operative—square jaw, pursed lips, narrow eyes—except his hair was so blond as to be conspicuous. He looked Nordic. It helped his cover at previous postings, in places like Copenhagen. At one time a rising star in the First Chief Directorate, his career floundered when, while posted to Denmark, he fell in love with a woman who was not his wife.
Oleg Gordievsky’s first pangs of political sentiment came at age fourteen. The police had just arrested fourteen Jewish doctors and charged them with an improbable plot to kill communist leaders. Gordievsky lived across the hall from a Jewish family; they were his friends, levelheaded, patriotic, and rational. He could not reconcile the anti-Semitism he heard from the party with his own experience. He began to question everything. He would eavesdrop on his father’s conversations with friends late at night and left with the impression that the labor camps he read about were full of ordinary people, not traitors. His mother would tell him of the fear she lived with when he was a baby: neighbors would disappear; she could remember the heavy boots tramping upstairs to arrest one, seemingly at random.13
By sixteen, he had no knowledge of the West but knew the Communist system was “neither sincere nor honest.”14 He joined the KGB through his father’s connections. It offered him an escape. He could live abroad and see the world. In August 1962, at twenty-four years of age, he took his oath: “I, entering into the ranks of the Armed Forces of the USSR, commit myself to defend my country to the last drop of blood, and to keep State Secrets.”15 He married his first wife, a Russian-born teacher of German named Yelena, and accepted his first field assignment in Copenhagen, in 1966.
Two years later, when Soviet tanks advanced on Prague, intending to crush the student rebellion that bolstered the reform government of Alexander Dubček, Gordievsky snapped. His loyalty to the Soviet system was dead. He decided to change sides. He called Yelena on an open line, one he knew was monitored by the Danes, and expressed his indignation.16
It would be another five years before he had his first meeting with a Western agent. And then another year of testing his bona fides. The British were skittish. The KGB often ran so-called dangle operations, where they’d send a false defector with damaging information designed to confuse the rival secret service and protect other, more sensitive operations.
Even real defectors often provided fluffed-up information to increase their value. The accusations of one, a particularly knowledgeable and equally paranoid KGB major named Anatoliy Golitsyn, almost singlehandedly destroyed the Soviet operations of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI-6, and the domestic Secret Service, MI-5. The more important Golitsyn became, the grander his stories became, including an allegation that a British prime minister and a deputy head of the SIS were KGB agents. Gordievsky thought Golitsyn was a paranoid fantasist—there were many in the intelligence service.17
Gordievsky grew frustrated with the delays and almost cut contact. But beginning in 1975, trust was established, and secret documents began to flow. He knew his first handler, a gentle but deceptive Scot, by a pseudonym—Michael. His second was an ambitious and clearheaded officer who spoke five languages and impressed upon Gordievsky how valuable he was. Espionage against the USSR became Gordievsky’s passion. His day job became a hobby. In 1977, Gordievsky fell in love with a woman who was not his wife. She was Leila Aliyeva, a typist at the World Health Organization. Divorce was not an immediate option, so an uneasy truce between his first love, Yelena, and his new love, Leila, existed. In the cloistered world of the Soviet embassy, Gordievsky’s colleagues soon learned of the affair.18
He could not be fired for it, but he learned that he would not be promoted because of it.
Gordievsky was assigned to a staff position Moscow; he would be grand errand boy for the puritanical personnel department at KGB headquarters. For two years, he watched the world revolve from inside the Lubyanka, a former insurance company building that had become the headquarters of the secret service in 1918. He spent his days cultivating relationships with party officials, attending lectures on counterintelligence by the likes of Kim Philby, a high-ranking British spy who had long ago defected to Russia, and picking up intelligence gossip but generally keeping to himself. He was biding his time. He had to get to London.
To do so, he had to ingratiate himself—those were his words—with the head of the First Chief Directorate’s British section, Igor Titov, a man whose concept of the West boiled down to its warrant for licentious behavior. Titov would use the special diplomatic pouch from London to amass his own supply of Western pornography, using it for his own gratification as well as to ply subordinates with rewards for favors.19
With Titov’s blessing, Gordievsky learned English and began to consume its literature and history. Having access to the KGB’s library, he could read Winston Churchill’s biographies and Somerset Maugham’s fiction; he became a dilettante. He would later recall raising suspicion by praising Churchill’s gentlemanly manners to a train full of KGB colleagues. His divorce came through, and he and Leila became the parents of two sons. By April 1981, his superiors felt he had done enough penance.
At the time, Moscow could send seventeen KGB officers to its embassy in London. Each visa had to be approved by the host government, no small task because each was slated for an official job, one that would give them diplomatic status and cover. The British knew that around half the embassy’s staff were trained intelligence operatives, but they tended to be young, inexperienced, and junior—on purpose. Veteran KGB officers who had run spies in another European capital would be known to the Western intelligence establishment, and the British Foreign Office, which was in charge of approving all applicants from the Soviet government, would not issue a known KGB spy a work visa. British spy fiction would have the world think that Her Majesty’s secret services would be eager to accept already identified KGB officers to Britain—all the easier to surveil them and perhaps turn them. But in practice, the intelligence services did not have the time, the budget, or the resources to plan such elaborate counterintelligence operations.
So it was somewhat of a surprise to Gordievsky’s KGB superiors, then, that the British accepted Moscow’s appointment of him as counselor, a senior position in the political affairs section of the embassy. A stroke of good fortune, Gordievsky thought. His bosses assumed that Gordievsky would be rejected, but they knew that the British wanted to expand by one position the number of official posts in their embassy in Moscow. This exchange was as friendly as Soviet and Western tit-for-tat got.20
It took more than eight months for the British to vet Gordievsky, a delay the KGB First Chief Directorate attributed more to bureaucratic brinksmanship than anything else. Gordievsky polished his English and prepared his family for the move.