Brussels, Belgium
RAINER RUPP LEFT WORK AT NATO headquarters and drove to the outskirts of the city. He found a telephone booth and dialed a number. When he heard a “hello,” he held a device up to the handset that looked like an electronic calculator. The calculator emitted a crackle. Then he heard a beep. He hung up.
In a few seconds, he had transmitted a coded response. It was decoded at HVA headquarters. TOPAZ had confirmed to Wolf a key bit of information that Moscow needed to know. Nothing was happening. NATO was not preparing for war. But the Soviets kept up their alert status.
November 10—Tokyo, Japan
On the day before he left for Korea, Ronald Reagan told the Japanese Diet that the United States was frustrated by “the other side’s unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. We wanted to cut deep into nuclear arsenals, and still do. But they’re blocking the dramatic reductions the world wants.” Japan had lived horrors of nuclear annihilation.
“Despite this bleak picture,” he said, “I will not be deterred in my search for a breakthrough. The United States will never walk away from the negotiating table. Peace is too important. Common sense demands that we persevere, and we will persevere.”
“We are people of peace,” he continued. “We understand the terrible trauma of human suffering. I have lived through four wars in my lifetime. So, I speak not just as president of the United States, but also as a husband, a father, and as a grandfather. I believe there can be only one policy for preserving our precious civilization in this modern age. A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.”1
Once upon a time, Reagan mused, “[W]e had rules of warfare. War is an ugly thing, but we had rules in which we made sure that soldiers fought soldiers, but they did not victimize civilians. That was civilized. Today we’ve lost something of civilization in that the very weapons we’re talking about are designed to destroy civilians by the millions. And let us at least get back to where we once were—that if we talk war at all, we talk it in a way in which there could be victory or defeat and in which civilians have some measure of protection.” He pledged he would not stop trying to negotiate with the Soviets until the world began to travel down the road to the total elimination of nuclear weapons.2
November 11—In the North Atlantic
Gary Donato, an assistant weapons officer on the ballistic missile submarine USS Kamehameha, assumed that Able Archer would be like every other exercise he had endured since he got to sea just a year earlier: a simulated simulation. The Kamehameha had sixteen nuclear missiles onboard, each of them bearing a couple of independently targeted warheads. The firepower Donato helped tend was the most lethal, most stealthy, and most survivable deterrent in the United States arsenal. The Kamehameha was twenty years old. Its home port was Charleston, South Carolina, its name an homage to the first king of Hawaii. Its crew called it “Kamfish.” They called themselves King Kam’s crew.3
Depending on the plan being exercised, several of those missiles were released to NATO targeteers for use in their general defense plan. While they cruised the North Atlantic in November, more than half of them were. Released. Donato thought the arrangement was weird. He had been taught in weapons school that only the National Command Authority—the president—could send a nuclear control order. On the boat, NATO—the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Bernard Rogers—had the same authority. Donato assumed that the US president would know well in advance if NATO ever decided to use the missiles and knew from unclassified literature that NATO’s political committee had a lot of permutations to debate before it would formally request permission from the US to authorize the SACEUR to use missiles—but still—it was just a bit eerie to be taking nuclear release orders from a commander whose face he had seen in a black-and-white photo. The Kamehameha could spin up (bring the missiles online, in naval parlance) and launch nuclear missiles with just that NATO code.4
Every day, on every shift, the Kamehameha and its crew practiced. Sometimes, the captain, L. M. Jacobi, would make the practice more realistic by not telling the crew that the message received from the Joint Chiefs of Staff or from NATO wasn’t real. For the first several days of Able Archer, the Kamehameha practiced diving and surfacing, diving and surfacing, moving here and there, practicing evasion techniques. The crew was operating at DEFCON 4.
Then, on November 11, it was cruising near Iceland, when an Emergency Action Message from NATO squawked on several radios at once. The first message directed its crew to load the NATO-committed nuclear missiles with their targeting package, bringing them to DEFCON 3. General quarters sounded.
Lieutenant Donato pushed the buttons to spin the missiles up. This was normal for an exercise. And usually the exercises ended there—a message ordering the submarine to spin down its missiles would arrive within fifteen minutes.
But then came another decoded order: “Release Authority Pending.”
For the first time on his tour, the Kamfish was simulating DEFCON 2.
Donato did not know it was a simulation. The Captain and XO knew, but the weapons technicians like him did not. He was a few minutes away from releasing four of the nuclear missiles.
The release trigger was contained in a safe-within-a-safe. Donato opened the outer safe. He compared an enabling code he found on a laminated card with the one that had been sent over the radio from NATO. The codes matched. The order was authentic. One by one, the missiles registered in green on his console. They were spun up and ready. His junior officers were jittery at this point.
“I’m just hoping that we’re going to get the spin down code,” Donato told them. He was trying to reassure his men, because he was pretty sure this was all part of the exercise, but he really just didn’t know. Donato went over the final firing with the procedure in his mind. The second safe was open, and the release trigger—a key—was ready.
If the final order came in, he would take the key, insert it into the launch-enable panel, punch in another code that came over the radio, and, with the captain simultaneously performing an identical procedure at a different console outside of his reach, twist the key.5
The Kamehameha’s missile hatches were open, as they were during any test, and Donato presumed that the Soviets were listening, probably from a sub hidden somewhere close by.
The longer the hatches stayed open, the more noise the sub produced. Usually, the Soviet submarine following it would send an active sonar ping, like a warning message, telling the Americans: We’re here, we know what’s going on, so don’t try anything cute.
The pings were almost comforting. But the longer the hatches stayed open, the more alarmed the Soviets would be.6 The Kamehameha was highly vulnerable to attack at launch depth with its hatches open. And there were no Soviet pings.
The exercise finally ended late in the day on November 11. Able Archer had involved no actual combat sorties, no actual movements of aircraft, no elephant trails, as the tanker planners would say. In later years, NATO’s chief historian would insist that Able Archer involved no field units. SHAPE officers, members of the Able Archer Directing Staff, the nuclear operations cell at NATO, evaluators from SACEUR—all would express astonishment that the Soviets found anything unusual about this particular exercise.7 But even they didn’t see the whole picture.
A second, much smaller exercise was taking place in Europe at the same time. But it involved real troops and real flights. The US Air Force wanted to make sure that B-52s in Europe could be refueled efficiently during war. Under the new SIOP, these units had been given added responsibility to protect sea lanes of communication—inelegantly called SLOCs in naval terminology—from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.
In early September, the air force approved a concept of operations for a joint air training exercise they called CRISEX 83. In late October and early November, five KC-135 Boeing Stratotankers would practice refueling B-52s in the air above Europe. And the B-52s would practice “high-altitude air target changes against a contingency target area”—meaning they’d move around quickly and change direction suddenly.
Beginning on October 28, the B-52s and KC-135 flying gas stations practiced their missions, at least two full sorties per day. These continued through November 7, when King Carlos of Spain witnessed a refueling near the coast after a B-52 marine beach assault practice. Other B-52s practiced postattack reconnaissance missions using a special intelligence platform called BUSY OBSERVER.8 The tactical communications between the fighter jets and their command posts were not secured. None had the right type of encryption device.9
The Soviets listened. They had no way of knowing whether CRISEX and Able Archer were linked.
A few days later, an air force colleague told Jeffrey Carney, who had now been spying for the Stasi for six months, about a highly sensitive intelligence operation. A specially equipped C-130, normally used for the reconnaissance flights, would travel to West Berlin, sending out electronic signatures resembling the radar returns given off by a B-52 bomber. The Soviet Air Defense radars would light up.
Carney’s team was asked to intercept the panicked communications from the Soviet operators that would result. “Believing that the event on their radar screens was a viable threat, they would inform superiors using actual emergency procedures.” The test was designed to see how the Soviets reacted in conditions resembling the first stages of an invasion.10
Carney’s face felt wet. He had to notify the East Germans. As he described it, he slipped away from work, went home, changed clothes, grabbed a train, and ran to the house of a contact whose job it was to talk to the Stasi on his behalf. The man greeted Carney in his bathroom. “Listen, get a pen and paper. You have to go to the East,” Carney said. The man protested; he had a class to teach that morning.
Carney was insistent. The Soviets would think they were under attack in just five hours’ time.11