Washington, DC
ARMY CAPTAIN STEPHEN SCHWALBE’S FIRST assignment out of school—he was just twenty-three—took him into the heart of the dispute within the intelligence community. He monitored the Soviet general staff for the Defense Intelligence Agency. His specialty was Soviet military exercises.1
When he first reported to the agency, his division chief dumped a thick folder of reports on his desk. Figure out if there’s anything to see here, Schwalbe was told. He began to sift through the reports. There were lots of dots. A missile launch, out of character, in November.2 Curious. The trajectory was retrograde—toward the United States. That was weird. But there was no follow-up on behalf of the intelligence community. Another report from the navy reported an increase in Soviet submarine readiness. There were NSA reports about anomalous patterns of Soviet air defense traffic. A dense packet of reporting, most of it from open sources, filled him in on what Soviet military officials were saying.
He pulled out a report from March 26, a few weeks earlier. His eyes jumped to two words: “polar route.” It was describing the path taken by a Soviet ICBM, an SS-X-25, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Polar meant, obviously, over the North Pole. The missile had landed somewhere in the Arctic.
But the Soviets never launched missiles over the North Pole during tests or exercises—in fact, so far as he could tell, they had never before used that trajectory, period. Not once. A polar route offered the shortest trajectory to the United States from the Soviet ICBM fields; US early-warning systems were sensitive to the mere quiver of a leaf in those areas, and because it would take at least a few minutes after launch before NORAD could determine where the missile came from and where it would land, no Soviet commander in his right mind, Schwalbe thought, would test a missile that way. Analysts called it the “strategic corridor,” because that route was saved for war. But here it was—the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces had launched a missile toward the US with the deliberate intent to scare the US early-warning system for several minutes, without any advance warning.
The missile launch had been detected by NORAD, a missile threat conference was initiated, an alarm at SAC on Offutt had sounded, and for a few moments, the global nuclear enterprise had prepared for war. And then—nothing. No follow-up reports to ask why the Soviets had launched the missile, at that time.
A fragment from a NATO intelligence summary caught his eye. The British held their first nonpublic dispersal exercise with their new ground-launched cruise missiles on at night on March 10. Sixty-odd vehicles, part of the convoy, received an order to move to a forward position somewhere in the British countryside and set up for launch. It came as a surprise to some in the Pentagon. Even Richard Perle assumed that the UK would never actually move missiles around once they got them. The GLCMs were mobile in the way an elephant is mobile; it could move, but not without everyone knowing it. They had a massive logistics tail: “Dozens of vehicles, actually hundreds if you deployed them,” Perle said later. “The idea that in a moment of tension we should start moving missiles off their bases was crazy. There’s no way to hide them. They were highly vulnerable once they moved. The idea was that if they moved, they would diminish their vulnerability to a missile strike, but once they moved, a rifle, a hunting rifle would go right through the fuel tank.”3
Schwalbe saw reports that the Soviets had detected the dispersal exercise. Then, a few days later, that anomalous missile launch.4 Another sign: nearly a million residents of the Western Siberian city of Omsk were marched to the edge of their city, and one thousand were asked to march another 50 kilometers. Neither the US nor the Soviet Union had conducted exercises of this magnitude since the 1950s.5
The test from Baikonur was significant enough to make the President’s Daily Brief on March 27. Reagan’s reaction was not recorded. An aide told Reagan that he would ask Weinberger to look into whether the Soviets had failed to notify the US in advance, or whether the Pentagon had made some clerical error.6
Later that day, Reagan convened his senior national security staff to draw up a response to Chernenko. The president wanted to move toward a coherent and workable position on arms control even if the Soviets had nothing to offer in return at the moment. Time was too precious. His next letter to Chernenko would propose a turning point, of sorts.
Once again, Weinberger and the Joint Chiefs were not on the president’s wavelength. They saw the exchange of views as exercises in mutual grandstanding. The Soviets had proposals. Chernenko’s March 19 letter had four bullet points, but these were, in reality, just framing devices, ways to spin future negotiations to the benefit of the Soviet Union.
Weinberger had prepared a position paper urging Reagan not to move forward on any of this, including intermediate nuclear forces talks, until the Soviets had made significant concessions or had admitted their treaty violations. He had a valid point. When Reagan had agreed that the Soviets had made enough movement toward the Western position in January, he had someone to negotiate with: Andropov hadn’t died yet. But General Secretary Chernenko didn’t even seem there; he was even sicker than Andropov had been. Sure, Weinberger said, “we can negotiate notification of ballistic missile launches and hotline improvements,” but “if we become too eager, the Soviet Union will sense weakness.”7
Having heard Weinberger make that same argument before, Shultz came prepared. He spoke from notes, presenting a list of ten do’s and don’ts. Don’t make concessions for the sake of concessions, but don’t let that mean that you do nothing; it would be a mistake to move away from a positive position on arms control, and if you do so, he told Reagan, you’ll risk losing the support of Congress, the public, and American allies. Move forward, he urged Reagan, on confidence-building measures, like notification of launches, and the hotline improvements, and above all, don’t stop working the issue because the Soviets have stopped. It was a rah-rah message aimed at Reagan’s better angels, who nodded appreciatively, according to a witness in the room. Ken Adelman, Reagan’s chief arms control negotiator, ticked off a list of concrete steps Reagan could work on.
General Jack Vessey, the Joint Chiefs chairman, urged caution. He wanted Reagan to focus his election-year capital on the defense buildup. The Soviets “can’t or won’t” negotiate until after the election, he said, and the allies “aren’t carrying their load.”
“There is no question,” Reagan replied, “that the Soviet Union is trying to make us look noncooperative. I believe the Soviets want to avoid the onus for having walked out of Geneva.” But his letter to Chernenko should be “substantive and positive.” The US wouldn’t make “unilateral concessions to get them back to the table, but I believe we must have a full credible agenda on arms control. Maybe we could build a record.”
Maybe, for instance, having a limit on launchers isn’t so bad, “so long as it is matched by warhead and throw-weight limits. In short, we need a position that takes part of their approach and melds it with ours so that they have a fig leaf for coming off their positions.”8
Weinberger warned Reagan that his announcements might be misunderstood as new proposals, which would undercut the basic idea of not conceding to get the Soviets back into negotiations. Reagan was interested in something else: “My letter to Chernenko is an opportunity to get their attention. Have we given enough attention to the fact that they have a climate of insecurity?” It was time, Reagan thought, for a true turning point.9
The British noticed it first: Soviet ships were crawling out of their bases around the horn of the Kola Peninsula. It was only when they pushed past the North Cape, at Norway’s tip, that the size of the fleet was detected. NATO first got a read on a passel of antisubmarine frigates on March 28; a day later, spotters observed the mammoth Kirov-class battle cruiser, the Soviet Navy’s biggest surface warship, along with a protective cordon of a dozen others.10
On April 4, the US began the military exercise that Matlock and Cobb had been asked to approve in December; it was so large that it had three names: Night Train, Global Shield, and Rex ’84. Night Train was run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and tested communications between ground, mobile, and aerial nuclear and presidential command posts, as well as the logistics involved in handling mass US casualties associated with war. Global Shield tested the nuclear forces themselves. Rex ’84 stressed FEMA’s continuity of government preparations and involved hundreds of US officials secretly moving to their various agencies’ emergency relocation sites.
The Soviets were officially notified in advance by the Pentagon, and the military’s public affairs officers worked overtime. The media was invited to watch and cover certain parts of the exercise, to broadcast to the world the might of the Strategic Air Command as it assumed its war footing. Much of the exercise would be conducted in the open ocean, where only foreign governments with reconnaissance and intelligence capabilities could watch.11
The exercise began when the US responded to a Soviet conventional invasion of Central Europe by using “non-SIOP” nuclear weapons—that is, intermediate-range missiles like the Pershing IIs. The world collapses into chaos. The Soviets then try to blind the US command and control system, first with a few select nuclear weapons, and then by destroying, via electronic warfare, the main Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) connections, which linked headquarters to missile control centers. Lines from March AFB in California went dead, and a second later the links from Otis AFB, MA went down. A gamma-radiation sensor network broadcast an alarm, and all hardened nuclear control sites across the US went into emergency shutdown. Before the gamma sensors could be cleared, another wave of sensors in Florida and Northern California lit up, and the four primary communication systems used to transmit emergency war orders sustained crippling volumes of traffic.
The president (or National Command Authority) authorized the employment of the SIOP, and the live-fly portion of the exercise began.
DEFCON 1: all of the primary strike bombers and refueling aircraft nationwide took to the air in full-blast combat climbs. B-52s launched cruise missiles.
The standby (post-retaliation) crews mobilized and were transported by bus to alternate locations (in a real war, the primary and secondary command and control facilities would be glowing craters).
Aircraft loaded with pallets of communications gear stayed near alert pads at a dozen US bases. “All of us already had gear on the aircraft, so all we had to do is jump into the alert trucks and fly to the aircraft (these trucks were to stop for nothing), and get the aircraft rolling into position to get off the ground and away from the base,” according to one Global Shield participant.
For days, the Strategic Air Command alert panels were in an almost constant state of alarm.
“We went on full lockdown, full generator power, and prepped evacuation vehicles to evacuate the post-detonation crews to the flight line,” a crypto technician recalls. “We also power-upped the giant bulldozers and got them idling at the command post to be able to open a path to the flight line, and the crews on the flight line brought their bulldozers [normally used for open-pit mining] and got them idling for near-term use.”
In the Atlantic Ocean, a Trident submarine surfaced at Guam, surprising even the stationmaster there. Its task was to serve as the ship of last resort for nuclear retaliation, so its secret pre-exercise disappearance was all part of the plan. For the first time, the navy was exercising its SCOOP plan. The acronym was classified at the time of Global Shield; it stood for Submarine Continuity of Operations.12 At about the same time, a sub in the Pacific live-launched a Poseidon C3 missile with multiple warheads capable of reaching targets 2,500 miles away. Two carrier battle ships tracked north from the Sea of Japan, clearing routes ahead of an imagined attack into Siberia.13 On April 5, two Minuteman missiles launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.14 In the skies of over Western Massachusetts, enormous K-135 Stratotankers tested their limits at altitudes of 40,000 feet and practiced refueling the nuclear bombers at speeds of more than 600 miles per hour.15 The crews at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota practiced loading nuclear air-to-ground missiles called AGM-69s, several of which could fit into a B-52 Stratofortress alongside with three MK-28 nuclear missiles, carrying 350 kilotons of explosive force in a shell not much larger or thicker than a human.16
In the past, when either side exercised its strategic forces, the other side watched. That had been a Cold War rule, informal, surely, but just one of the norms that both sides happened to agree on. The bigger exercises, the ones well publicized and inflected with the purpose of real-world deterrents, were excellent opportunities to gather intelligence. Whenever one side would exercise its strategic forces openly, to be sure, the other would hedge—a few forces mobilized, extra sensors turned on, intelligence notices distributed—but there was one thing that had never been done, because to do it in the middle of an exercise would break the logic chain that both kept the superpowers in perpetual cold conflict and prevented it from turning hot. They never counter-exercised to the same degree, ever; they never shot missiles at the same time; they never rehearsed their nuclear procedures concurrently. It was plainly, nakedly dangerous, and both sides had understood this for thirty years.
But on the morning of April 4, just as Global Shield began, the Soviet Union again broke with convention. Without warning, the Soviet ship movements that NATO had been monitoring suddenly turned into an armada. The Northern and Baltic fleets launched 200 ships, 20 nuclear submarines, and 25 major surface warships on a path that set them streaming out of home ports; several began to cross the Atlantic.
Analyzing a war game in progress creates new grooves even in experienced brains. Schwalbe and his colleagues at the DIA had to figure out who was attacking whom, and who “whom” actually was. It was doubly difficult because NATO had not prepared for this exercise and had few reconnaissance assets in the region. Intelligence officers had to resort to an emergency mobilization plan they had assumed would never be used until a war began. Spy planes began to report back: there were Backfire bombers practicing antisubmarine warfare off the coast of Norway. Naval activity was reported in the Mediterranean, in the Baltic Sea, and even in the Indian Ocean. The British sent armed fighters and established a combat air patrol in the sea lane between the exercise area and its coast. NATO launched an airborne electronic warning plane. A NATO official told the New York Times that day that the exercise “had been mounted with surprising speed.”17 According to one source, Soviet bombers orbited continuously, practicing bombing raids on surface ships.18
The exercise included live-fire games in the North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea, with ships visible off the coast of Scotland and Norway. It surpassed any previous show of naval strength by the Soviets. Several hundred warplanes supported the fleet.19 At the same time, another Soviet surface squadron departed the Baltic Sea and headed toward the Norwegian Sea. Backfires deployed to the Kola Peninsula and began flying simulated strikes against this force.
At the same time, Soviet ground exercises “appeared” in several of the Baltic states. Advanced Soviet electronic warfare planes strafed the Berlin corridor, causing West Germany to lodge a formal complaint with East Germany. Soviet alternate command centers were activated. Strategic bombers flew to reinforcement airfields in East Germany. American and NATO reconnaissance asserts monitored integrated strategic strike operations, including multiple launches of SS-20s and SLBMs.20
The British and NATO were worried. This behavior was unusual, and provocative. They fed stories about the surprise Soviet exercise to American journalists. An article by R. W. Apple Jr. in the New York Times suggested as much. To the Associated Press, though, US officials “denied the Soviet maneuvers caught Western allies napping. Sources said the ships were under surveillance almost from the moment they left port.”21
Schwalbe saw it differently. What if the Soviet Union, anticipating the West’s biggest annual nuclear and general war exercise, suddenly and without warning, held their own massive worldwide war games? What did it mean that both superpowers rehearsed their nuclear release procedures in real time, in the middle of the biggest exercises they’d ever held, a month after Andropov dies? “This was just insane,” he remembered years later. “It had never happened before. All that you needed for war at that moment was someone to drop a match down in a dry forest.”22