Nuclear War Scare

[seemslikeadream]

Newly declassified documents reveal how America missed a major nuclear war scare

Marc Ambinder
Bettmann/CORBIS
October 23, 2015
A freshly declassified report confirms that the U.S. intelligence community, in 1983 and 1984, gave insufficient weight to evidence that the leaders of the Soviet Union genuinely feared a surprise nuclear missile attack from the West, misinterpreted Kremlin pronouncements as propaganda, and, most critically, failed to provide warning about significant changes to Soviet military and intelligence postures in the wake of "Able Archer '83." That 10-day NATO exercise in November of 1983 is suspected of unintentionally and quietly pushing America and the Soviet Union closer to war. And now, there's new evidence suggesting those suspicions were right on.

Released last week by FOIA's de-facto court of appeals, the 109-page report (read it below), prepared in 1990, offers a searing indictment of the American intelligence community. And its publication, long anticipated by Cold War historians, may open old wounds.

For the past few years, I've been working on a book about Able Archer for Simon and Schuster. My basic question: Was whatever happened during that exercise real enough to deserve the term "war scare"? Did the U.S. and the Soviet Union move closer to the brink without realizing it?

The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board report is as official an answer as we can get from the U.S. government : Yes. The Able Archer war scare was real.

Able Archer '83 — a very realistic military exercise that spanned much of Western Europe — was held just weeks before the planned deployment of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to Europe, and two months after a jittery Soviet air defense force shot down a civilian airliner. Some degree of heightened Kremlin anxiety to Western war rehearsals was expected — and, in the minds of the planners of these war games, unavoidable.

As it turns out, the anxiety level was considerably higher than almost anyone believed was possible. For more than a decade, historians and reporters have debated one major question: Did the Soviets sincerely believe that the U.S. would use a military exercise like Able Archer as cover to launch some sort of first strike on the Soviet Union? Or, was the heightened anxiety part of an elaborate deception to gain concessions when (and if) arms control talks resumed?

The vast intelligence-gathering sensors of the Soviet Union had turned up to indications that the West was planning a nuclear attack. Because the nexus of world events had shifted against the Soviet Union, President Reagan would find a way to exploit their vulnerabilities and undertake some sort of grand empirical adventure — maybe an invasion to save Poland, or even a surgical decapitation attack against the Soviet leadership itself.

Robert Gates, who was deputy director for intelligence at the CIA at the time, told me earlier this year that he regards the downgrading of Soviet war fears as a major intelligence failure. (He has elaborated on this subject in a book). Several Reagan administration officials, including Bud McFarlane, the president's national security adviser at the time, contend that President Reagan's response upon learning that there was even a possibility that the Soviet leadership was that paranoid helped convince him to pursue diplomacy more aggressively, and saber-rattling, less so. But the author of early CIA reports, Fritz Ermarth, contends that hindsight bias makes it easy to second-guess the CIA, and insists that it far overstates the case to say that the world moved closer to actual conflict.

But according to the declassified PFIAB report, there was a consistent body of evidence suggesting this fear was widespread, and that the unusual nature of Able Archer magnified it.

The Soviet military put itself on alert status during Able Archer, and ended it as Able Archer ended; the intelligence community missed this at the time.
Air defense brigades in Warsaw Pact countries were placed on alert; the CIA dismissed this at the time as standard counter-exercising.
Nuclear weapons were transported from storage units to their forward deployed positions.
The Soviets conducted a significantly larger number of reconnaissance flights over NATO territory during Able Archer than during any other similarly measured time period.
The Soviets increased their readiness and alert levels force-wide. (This ended as Able Archer ended, too).
Air traffic in the Soviet Union was suspended during the exercise too.
The PFIAB report gives weight to the reports of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB agent who spied for Britain, and who reported in early 1984 on Soviet fears about the war scare.

Nate Jones of the National Security Archive at George Washington University has written at length about Able Archer, and his primers are worth reading for the full background. Jones also superintended the process to push the document through a mandatory declassification review.

But the upshot of these recently declassified documents is clear: There was a major nuclear war scare in 1983. And American intelligence officials missed it.

President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board report on Able Archer '83

In 1983 ‘war scare,’ Soviet leadership feared nuclear surprise attack by U.S.

Soviet President Yuri Andropov, center, and other dignitaries in Moscow’s Red Square for the May Day parade in 1983. (Boris Yurchenko/Associated Press)
By David E. Hoffman October 24
A nuclear weapons command exercise by NATO in November 1983 prompted fear in the leadership of the Soviet Union that the maneuvers were a cover for a nuclear surprise attack by the United States, triggering a series of unparalleled Soviet military re­sponses, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence review that has just been declassified.

“In 1983, we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger,” the review concluded.

[Read the U.S. assessment on Soviet fears]

That autumn has long been regarded as one of the most tense moments of the Cold War, coming after the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean civilian airliner in September and as the West was preparing to deploy Pershing II intermediate-range and ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe in November. But there has been a long-running debate about whether the period known as the “war scare” was a moment of genuine danger or a period of bluster for propaganda purposes.

The review concluded that for Soviet leaders, the war scare was real, and that U.S. intelligence post­mortems did not take it seriously enough.

The front page of the recently declassified report titled “The Soviet ‘War Scare,’ ” prepared in 1990 for the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. (National Security Archive)
Soviet leaders were particularly alarmed about the NATO exercise, known as Able Archer, carried out in early November 1983 involving forces­ that stretched from Turkey to Britain. Conducted annually to practice the procedures involved in the run-up to a nuclear conflict, the exercise had some new wrinkles that year, including planes that taxied out of hangars carrying realistic-looking dummy warheads, the review said.

The 109-page document, titled “The Soviet ‘War Scare,’ ” was dated Feb. 15, 1990, and written for the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a White House unit that examined intelligence issues. The authors of the review scrutinized classified documents and conducted 75 interviews with U.S. and British officials.

Originally stamped “Top Secret” and containing sensitive signals intelligence, the review was declassified this month in response to a request from the National Security Archive, a non­governmental organization affiliated with George Washington University.

The PFIAB review found that the Soviet Union took unusual military and intelligence precautions at the time of Able Archer that previously had been employed only in actual crises. This included placing air forces­ in East Germany and Poland on higher alert, conducting significantly more reconnaissance flights, and tasking Soviet KGB and military intelligence officers around the world to be on the lookout for signs of nuclear war preparations.

The Soviet actions “strongly” suggest that “Soviet military leaders may have been seriously concerned that the US would use Able Archer 83 as a cover for launching a real attack,” the review concluded. It added that the evidence “strongly indicates that the war scare was real, at least in the minds of some Soviet leaders.”

Some details of the Soviet paranoia about a nuclear attack had come to light earlier, including reports from Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who was an agent for British intelligence. Gordievsky revealed to the British the existence of a KGB intelligence-collection effort to detect indications that the West was preparing for nuclear war. Gordievsky, who defected to Britain in 1985, later published the text of some KGB directives, part of a program known as ­RYAN or ­VRYAN, the acronyms in Russian for sudden nuclear missile attack.

[Oleg Gordievsky: Russia’s Killing Ways]

President Ronald Reagan addresses the nation about his proposed defense budget on March 23, 1983. (Dennis Cook/Associated Press)
Andropov’s worries
Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief who later became Soviet leader, was a major source of the anxiety in Moscow about a surprise nuclear attack. In 1981, Andropov declared to a major KGB conference that the Reagan administration was actively preparing for war and that a nuclear first strike was possible. According to the review, Andropov put “strategic military intelligence” at the top of KGB collection priorities, and he hastily created a special “institute” within the KGB in 1981 to handle it.

His worries about a surprise attack were amplified by “one peculiar mode of intelligence analysis,” a KGB computer model to measure perceived changes­ in the “correlation of ­forces” between the super­powers, according to the review. The computer went online in 1979 to warn Soviet leaders when “deterioration of Soviet power might tempt a US first strike,” the review says. The computer was at the heart of the ­VRYAN system, according to the review, and thousands of pieces of security and economic data were fed into the machine. The computer model assigned a fixed value of 100 to the United States, and Soviet leaders felt they would be safe from a nuclear first strike as long as they were at least at 60 percent of the United States, and ideally at 70 percent. Reports were sent to the ruling Politburo once a month.

Soon, the computer model produced bad news. According to the review, it calculated that Soviet power had declined to 45 percent; it was felt that below 40, the Soviet Union would be “dangerously inferior.” Although “it may seem absurd” to think the Soviet leaders would put stock in such a computer model, the review concluded, “this approach may have been especially appealing to top Soviet leaders at the time” because they craved some kind of scientific evidence of the strategic balance.

By 1983, Andropov had become Soviet leader, succeeding Leonid Brezhnev, and super­power tensions were deepening. According to the review, in January 1983, the Soviet armed forces­ added a fifth level of readiness to the existing four: “Surprise Enemy Attack Using Weapons of Mass Destruction in Progress.” This fifth condition “could be declared regardless of the readiness stage in effect at the time,” the review said.

On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” By late that summer, the Soviet leadership “appeared to be bracing the population for the worst.” Signs were posted everywhere showing the location of air raid shelters; broadcasts suggesting the possibility of a U.S. attack were on radio and television “several times a day,” the review says.

Soviet spokesmen accused Reagan and his advisers of “madness,” “extremism” and “criminality.” After the Korean airliner was downed, tensions grew over NATO plans to deploy the Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe. Near the end of 1983, the 4th Air Army, a Soviet air force unit in Poland, received orders to speed up the transfer of nuclear weapons from storage to the aircraft, with a maximum time of 25 minutes for one weapon, 40 minutes for two, according to the review.

Meanwhile, Andropov, the Soviet leader, had become gravely ill.

New procedures in 1983
Able Archer was conducted every year and “routinely monitored by Soviet intelligence.” But the November 1983 version had new procedures “which we believe probably fueled Soviet anxieties,” the review found. NATO tested new communications methods, with a more graduated escalation. The Able Archer exercise also used live mobilization exercises from U.S. military forces­ in Europe, the review said. All this may have looked more realistic to Soviet spies, who were watching. Both the KGB and Soviet military intelligence were ordered on Nov. 8 or 9 to report on increased alert at U.S. bases in Europe and to check for other indications of an impending nuclear attack.

The Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-dominated defense alliance, also launched an “unprecedented” reconnaissance effort, including 36 intelligence flights, “significantly more than in previous” years. The review said these included flying over the Norwegian, North, Baltic and Barents seas “probably to determine whether US naval forces were deploying forward in support of Able Archer.” Also, the Warsaw Pact imposed a suspension of all military flight operations between Nov. 4 and 10, except for the intelligence flights, “probably to have available as many aircraft as possible for combat.”

The review notes that Soviet doctrine had called for pre­empting a NATO attack by striking first — and that the Warsaw Pact forces­ had long assumed a NATO offensive would start under cover of an exercise. “There is little doubt in our minds,” the review concluded, “that the Soviets were genuinely worried about Able Archer; however, the depth of that concern is difficult to gauge.” Some Soviet units were probably preparing a preemptive counter­attack, but at the same time, there was no overall, large-scale mobilization. This “mixed” approach reflected the deep uncertainty in the Kremlin over Western intentions, the review found.

“This situation could have been extremely dangerous if during the exercise — perhaps through a series of ill-timed coincidences or because of faulty intelligence — the Soviets had mis­perceived US actions as preparations for a real attack,” the review concluded.

In the aftermath of Able Archer, the U.S. intelligence community commissioned two post­mortems, in May and August 1984, looking back at the events. Both intelligence estimates declared: “We believe strongly that Soviet actions are not inspired by, and Soviet leaders do not perceive, a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States.” This conclusion was based on the fact that the West had not seen widespread Soviet mobilization for war.

But the PFIAB review was sharply critical of both of these intelligence estimates for being “overconfident” and overly sanguine. The U.S. intelligence community, the board said, “did not at the time, and for several years afterwards, attach sufficient weight to the possibility that the war scare was real.”

[Washington today could use a dose of Reagan’s pragmatism]

This criticism goes to the heart of a long-running debate about the war scare. Intelligence officials who worked on the 1984 estimates say they were correct: The Soviet Union was making noisy gestures, not war preparations. The PFIAB review challenged that conclusion and said the estimates should not have been so categorical, that “strongly worded interpretations were defended by explaining away facts inconsistent with them.”

The PFIAB review repeatedly criticized U.S. intelligence on Soviet leaders, saying at the time of the 1984 post­­mortems that “the US knew very little about Kremlin decision­making.” It added, “Our own leadership needs far better intelligence reporting on and assessments of the mind­set of the Soviet leadership — its ideological/political instincts and perceptions.” And the review said the 1984 estimates “were over­confident, particularly in the judgments pertaining to Soviet leadership intentions — since little intelligence, human or technical, existed to support them.”

Reagan: ‘Really scary’ events
On a separate track from the two estimates, the director of central intelligence, William Casey, sent a more alarming message to Reagan in June 1984 about the war scare events. Casey’s information came from the intelligence warning staff and showed “a rather stunning array of indicators” of an “increasing aggressiveness in Soviet policy and activities.” Reagan “expressed surprise upon reading the Casey memorandum and described the events as ‘really scary,’ ” former national security adviser Robert McFarlane was quoted in the review.

The war scare marked a turning point for Reagan. He acknowledged that Soviet leaders may have harbored true fears of attack.

He wrote in his diary on Nov. 18, 1983: “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them, we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h--l have they got that anyone would want.”

Reagan later recalled in his memoir, “Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. In fact, I had difficulty accepting my own conclusion at first.”

He said he felt that “it must be clear to anyone” that Americans were a moral people who, since the founding of the nation, “had always used our power only as a force for good in the world.”

“During my first years in Washington,” Reagan said, “I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with the Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike; because of this, and perhaps because of a sense of insecurity and paranoia with roots reaching back to the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, they had aimed a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons at us.”

OCTOBER 27, 2015
The “War Scare” in the Kremlin, Revisited: Is History Repeating Itself?
by MEL GOODMAN

The Washington Post on October 25 published an important story based on a recently-published U.S. intelligence review from 1990 that confirmed Soviet leaders in 1983 believed the Reagan administration was using a mobilization exercise to prepare a nuclear surprise attack. The KGB instituted a sensitive collection effort, Operation RYAN, to determine if the United States was planning a surprise nuclear attack. I was a CIA analyst at the time, and the incident was known to me and several colleagues as the “war scare” in the Kremlin. There are lessons from the “war scare” that can be applied to the unnecessary escalation of tension between Washington and Moscow now taking place.

1983 was the most dangerous year in the Soviet-American Cold War confrontation since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. President Reagan declared a political and military campaign against the “evil empire,” although Soviet leaders were looking to break the gordian knot that was hurting the Kremlin. The intelligence indicated that the Soviet Union was in a downward spiral marked by the quagmire in Afghanistan; the drain of funds in the Third World, particularly in Cuba; the political and military setbacks in Angola and Nicaragua; and the increased cost of competing with the largest peacetime increases in the U.S. defense budget since the end of World War II. Soviet leaders believed that the “correlation of world forces,” Soviet terminology for weighing the international balance, was working against the interests of Moscow and that the U.S. government was in the hands of a dangerous anti-Soviet crowd.

In response to Reagan’s references to the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil in the world” and as an “evil empire,” the new Soviet general secretary, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief, suggested that Reagan was insane and a liar. U.S. media paid close attention to Reagan’s sensational charges, and Soviet media launched a verbal offensive that matched Reagan’s rhetoric. Reagan was compared to Hitler and accused of “fanning the flames of war.” Andropov was portrayed in the U.S. press as a Red Darth Vadar. Reagan’s demonization of Soviet leaders was counter-productive just as Obama’s demonization of Putin has been counter-productive.

In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin, the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon’s risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets.

One of the great similarities between Russia and the United States was that both sides feared surprise attack. The United States suffered psychologically from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor; it has still not recovered from 9/11. Yet, the United States has never appreciated that Moscow has similar fears due to Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion in the same year as Pearl Harbor, a far greater nightmare.

Russia’s fear of surprise attack was accentuated in 1983, when the United States deployed the Army’s Pershing-II missile and land-based cruise missiles in West Europe as a counter to the Soviet Union’s SS-20 missiles. The SS-20 was not a “strategic” weapon because of a limited range (3,000 miles) well short of the United States. The P-II, however, could not only reach the Soviet Union, but it could destroy Moscow’s command and control systems with incredible accuracy. Since the Soviets would have limited warning time–less than five minutes–the P-II was viewed as a first-strike weapon that could destroy the Soviet early warning system.

In addition to the huge strategic advantage from the deployment of P-II and numerous cruise missiles, the U.S. deployment of the MX missile and the D-5 Trident submarine placed the Soviets in an inferior position with regard to strategic modernization. Overall, the United States held a huge strategic advantage in political, economic, and military policy.

The Pentagon’s psychological warfare program to intimidate the Kremlin, including dangerous probes of Soviet borders by the Navy and Air Force, was unknown to CIA analysts. Thus, the CIA was at a disadvantage in trying to analyze the war scare because the Pentagon refused to share information on military maneuvers and weapons deployments. In 1983, the CIA had no idea that the annual Able Archer exercise would be conducted in a provocative fashion with high-level participation. The exercise was a test of U.S. command and communications procedures, including procedures for the release and use of nuclear weapons in case of war.

Nevertheless, CIA deputy director for intelligence Robert Gates and National Intelligence Officer for Soviet strategic weapons Larry Gershwin turned out several national intelligence estimates that dismissed “Soviet fear of conflict with the United States.” They believed that any notion of a Soviet fear of an American attack was risible, and it wasn’t until 1990 that the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board concluded that there had been a “serious concern” in the Kremlin over a possible U.S. attack. Gershwin, who politicized intelligence on strategic matters throughout the 1980s, is still at the CIA as a national intelligence officer.

I believed that Soviet fears were genuine at the time, and Reagan’s national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, was even known to remark, “We got their attention” but “maybe we overdid it.” For the only time during William Casey’s stewardship as CIA director, he believed his intelligence analysts who argued the “war scare” was genuine, and ignored the views of Gates and Gershwin. Casey took our analysis to the White House, and Reagan made sure that the exercises were toned down.

For the first time, the Able Archer exercise was going to include President Reagan, Vice President Bush, and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, but when the White House understood the extent of Soviet anxiety regarding U.S. intentions, the major principals bowed out. In his memoirs, Reagan recorded his surprise that Soviet leaders were afraid of an American first strike. One of the reasons why Secretary of State George Shultz was able to convince Reagan of the need for summitry with Gorbachev was the president’s belief that it was necessary to convince Moscow that the United States had no plans for an attack. Ironically, Soviet military doctrine had long held that a possible U.S. modus operandi for launching an attack would be to convert an exercise into the real thing.

Nevertheless, one year after President Reagan conceded that the “war scare” was genuine, he issued a radio warning into an open mike: “I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Those of us who worked on the war scare were stunned.

Three decades later, history seems to be repeating itself. Washington and Moscow are once again exchanging ugly broadsides over the confrontations in Ukraine and Syria. The Russian-American arms control and disarmament dialogue has been pushed to the background, and the possibilities of superpower conflict into the foreground. Pentagon briefers are using the language of the Cold War in their congressional briefings, referring to Putin’s regime as an “existential threat.” Presidential candidates in the United States are using confrontational language, and promising to go on the offensive to knock Putin on his heels. President Obama seems to recognize the false security of military power, but he needs to act on his suppositions.