KGB Rezidentura, London, England
OLEG GORDIEVSKY KNEW THAT SOMETHING unusual was happening. Fourteen of his colleagues in the GRU station in the embassy basement were scurrying around like mice. Couriers bearing top-secret cables from a communications station in an annex next to the Soviet embassy came in and out all day. Their work was so segregated that even Guk did not know what was happening. Gordievsky knew well enough not to ask.
The cipher clerk rushed out of his locked room with a Flash Telegram. He had never seen one before. It had the highest precedence over all other communication traffic. A Flash Telegram meant “pay immediate attention.” He remembers the gist of the text:
The American exercise may be a cover for a supreme nuclear attack. Watch the signs and report immediately to use anything unusual—any special signs of preparation, including the evacuation of the ambassador or families from the American embassy.
The cable also noted that American bases around the world had beefed up their security.
Gordievsky kept calm. “What can we do? We know some panicky people in Moscow as critical, but we here regard the situation, in London, sitting in a major Western capital, we don’t see anything critical.” Still, he said, “I knew it was a dramatic moment, I knew Moscow was nervous.”1
A separate version of the cable went to the Soviet’s allied intelligence agencies.
Markus Wolf passed a query to his best source, the NATO intelligence officer Rainer Rupp, codenamed TOPAZ. Wolf waited for an answer.2
November 8 and 9—Moscow
General Colonel Ivan Yesin, the commander of the SS-20 Pioneer regiments for the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, spent the night in a special bunker. Just months into his first assignment as a general officer, and here he was, at ground zero of the global nuclear conflict. The Pershings and GLCMs were deployed specifically to counter the missiles he supervised. Large-scale NATO exercises were fraught with danger because he believed the Soviet intelligence assessments that the Pershing II warheads could reach Moscow within six minutes and decapitate the leadership. “It was under the pretenses of those exercises that a sudden nuclear strike could be delivered,” he recalled.
Since November 2, his mobile regiments had been on alert—secretly. During peacetime, 10 percent of the SS-20 Pioneers were forward-deployed. During Able Archer 83, fully half—about 75—had been moved to their wartime positions, hidden by camouflage, near mountains 100 kilometers from their bases.3 Some poked out of swamps. Special radar-absorbing paint covered all of them. Each missile had three warheads with 200 kilotons of nuclear explosives on board—“fifteen Hiroshimas, to the public,” Yesin said.
If the order came, Yesin’s men could have launched the missiles in 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Every six or eight hours, Yesin would receive a briefing from the GRU, and the frequency of the briefings increased as the exercise reached its climax. The commanders of his rocket regiments were in their command centers, kept in contact by radio link.
And he kept in contact with his boss, the chief of the general staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov. Yesin recalls that Ogarkov spent at least one night in a command bunker during Able Archer. “During the climax of the NATO exercise, when the strategic missile forces were on the heightened . . . combat alert, I can say with a high degree of confidence that Marshal Ogarkov was in the protected central command point of the armed forces of the USSR,” he said.4 The SS-20 Pioneer regiments would stay on secret combat alert until November 14, as would a dozen fighters capable of using nuclear ordinance.5
Mikhail Gorbachev insists he celebrated the October Revolution that week as planned and said he knew nothing of a war alert. But several of his colleagues betrayed a different understanding of the world. “Comrades, the international situation at present is hot, thoroughly white hot,” Politburo member Grigory Romanov, told a large plenum of Soviet officials that day. Romanov’s speech was officially sanctioned by the Politburo.6 The Soviet Union would respond to American provocations by “the very highest vigilance.”
Yuri Andropov was battling an infection and did not attend the speech. In its Top Secret National Intelligence Daily, the CIA noted that he had last been seen in public in August and had taken steps in the interim to keep rivals like Chernenko from taking anything more than a ceremonial role. “Andropov’s absence in the current ceremonies many represent prudent medical caution rather than evidence of a totally incapacitating illness,” the CIA concluded.7
Sergei Tarasenko, a top foreign ministry official responsible for relations with the United States, was taken aside by his boss, the First Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Kornienko, and shown “a top-secret KGB paper . . . In the paper, the KGB reported that they had information that the United States had prepared 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.”8
At around the same time, Colonel Vitaly Tsygichko was asked to come up with new political approaches to deal with what he was told was the threat of imminent nuclear war from the United States and NATO. Tsygichko was a longtime Soviet defense analyst who, in retirement, had spent time in the United States and remained an informal advisor to the General Staff and spoke regularly with Andropov. “We had a perception that our enemies . . . surrounded us, and this mentality of a possible attack resulted in the bloated defense industry,” he said.9 He thought the war scare rhetoric was self-reinforcing—a way for the Soviets to scare themselves into uniting, a way of avoiding the serious difficulties that were breaking the country apart.
Andre Babian was a first-year cadet in the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. He looked forward to the long November weekend. It coincided with the anniversary of the October Revolution, when the Soviets would celebrate the advance of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. For Babian, it meant three days’ liberty. For the first time since he left for Moscow, he was going to see his parents. They’d come all the way from the Republic of Georgia. On Friday, November 4, the school shut down—all the gates closed, suddenly.
All weekend passes were canceled. Married cadets could take a twenty-four-hour leave; the rest had to stay in their barracks. “No one would give us an explanation about what was going on, but they seemed really nervous.” On Sunday, he was allowed to leave barracks, but he had to remain on the grounds of the Institute. A military geography professor later clued him in: NATO was conducting scale military exercises that might be a cover for a first nuclear strike.10