Revolution 1989 (16 page)

On board the 747 Captain Chun Byung-in and his colleagues on the flight deck had no idea they had wandered more than 300 miles off-course and had drifted over forbidden Soviet territory. The captain had mistakenly flicked a wrong switch. The Boeing was flying on its automatic magnetic compass rather than its more accurate inertial guidance system. The Korean pilot and his navigator believed they were in international waters 100 miles off the northern coast of Japan. They never knew what was about to happen to them.

Osipovich was ordered to flash the interceptor’s lights to attract the Boeing’s attention, but he was not spotted. Then he fired warning shots from his cannons - 243 rounds in all - but Chun did not hear them. For a short while, as Osipovich explained later, he was unsure about the ‘target’. ‘I could see two rows of windows which were lit up,’ he said later. ‘I wondered if it was a civilian aircraft. Military cargo planes don’t have windows like that. But I had no time to think. I had a job to do. I started to signal to him [the pilot] in international code. I informed him that he had violated our air space. He did not respond.’
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But, increasingly, the generals on the ground were convinced the Boeing was a military target. They worried that if they allowed it to get away they would be in trouble from their superiors and possibly lose their jobs. There was no time left before the plane left Soviet air space and Osipovich’s interceptor ran out of fuel. At 6.21 a.m. the commander of air defence on Sakhalin Island, General Anatoli Kornukov, issued his order: ‘The target has violated the state border. Destroy the target. Get Osipovich to fire and soon.’
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Osipovich spun around behind the 747 and at a distance of five miles stubbed his index finger to release the R-98 heat-seeking missile. ‘I have executed the launch,’ Osipovich radioed back to his base. About thirty seconds later he saw flame from KAL-007’s tail section and as he veered off to the right, back to his base, he could see the plane disappear into the sea. ‘The target is destroyed . . . I am breaking off attack.’

The destruction of a civilian aircraft was a disaster for the Soviet Union’s reputation. It was compounded by the obtuse way the magnates in the Kremlin handled the aftermath. They lied and at no point accepted any measure of responsibility. There were many officials in the Soviet Foreign Ministry who urged the leadership to admit the truth. Sergei Tarasenko, for long a senior diplomat who later became an adviser to future foreign ministers, said: ‘We came to the conclusion that we simply had to be honest and admit something along the lines of “an unfortunate incident has occurred. There was a pilot error, bad weather, one thing led to another. It was not a pre-planned action.” We went to [Georgi] Kornienko, the Deputy Minister, who agreed with us . . . But he was unable to convince the leadership. It was a question of prestige, and the military didn’t like to admit mistakes.’
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The Defence Minister, Ustinov, categorically opposed admitting that the Soviet military had destroyed a civilian airliner. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told Andropov, who was extremely ill in his hospital room. ‘Everything will be all right. Nobody will be able to prove a thing. The Americans can never find out.’ He might also have thought that it could be wise to deflect attention from his generals’ role in the affair and what was revealed about air defence failures. The 747 had been in Soviet air space for over two hours before it was approached. Even more disturbing, eight of the eleven Soviet tracking stations on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin had not detected the plane.
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Andropov was still in hospital the next day when the Kremlin magnates met in private to consider the consequences of the disaster. Konstantin Chernenko, Brezhnev’s great friend, whose main function had previously been to keep Brezhnev amused and light his cigarettes, led the discussion. ‘One thing is clear . . . We cannot allow foreign planes to overfly our territory freely. No self-respecting state can allow that.’ Ustinov was determined to defend the military and he told a bare-faced lie. He said the Boeing had been flying without warning lights, flatly contradicting the pilot. Nor was it true, as he claimed, that there were ‘repeated instructions’ to the Korean pilot to land at a Soviet airfield. ‘My opinion is that in this situation we must show firmness and remain cool. We should not flinch. If we flinch it gives all kinds of people the opportunity to overfly our territory.’ The Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, did not stand up to this, though he might have done. He knew the damage that downing a civilian aircraft could do to the USSR’s image abroad, but he did not challenge the military. He said it had been ‘correct’ to shoot down the plane, though he added that the USSR should anticipate what ‘imperialist propaganda’ would make of the incident.

One of the last to speak was the up-and-coming Mikhail Gorbachev, known to be Andropov’s favourite and a strong candidate to succeed him. The rule in the Kremlin for an ambitious apparatchik trying to progress up the ladder was, when in doubt about what to say or do, attack the ‘forces of imperialism’. Now Gorbachev said: ‘The Americans must have been aware of the unauthorised incursion into Soviet territory. The plane had been in Russian air space for over two hours, showing clearly that this was a well-planned provocation . . . It is no good keeping quiet now. We must go on to the offensive.’
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The rhetoric grew increasingly alarmist. A day after the plane was shot down President Reagan described it as ‘an act of barbarism born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life . . . This was a crime against nature.’ Andropov responded three weeks later, continuing to brazen out Soviet actions. He accused the US of an ‘insidious provocation involving a South Korean plane engineered by US special services’. He blamed Reagan personally for a ‘conspiracy that’s an example of adventurism in politics’ and for using ‘inadmissible propaganda methods’ and he warned that America was a country where an ‘outrageous militarist psychosis is being implanted. If anybody ever had any illusions about the possibility of an evolution for the better in the policy of the present American administration they are completely dispelled.’ The propaganda was noisier, echoing the worst days of the Cold War in the 1950s, but it was still rhetoric. Now the chilliness went beyond words.
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Towards the end of September Soviet satellite surveillance repeatedly picked up warnings of strategic missile launches from the US mainland. They were all false alarms - there was a glitch in the Soviet radar system that was quickly put right - but with the atmosphere between the superpowers so poor, they increased the tension. As did the American invasion of Grenada on 25 October to liberate the island from a coup by a Marxist guerrilla band. The Soviets did not care about a tiny Caribbean island, whose Communists they knew very little about. But almost at the same time the first Cruise and Pershing intermediate-range missiles began arriving at bases in West Germany. These were introduced in response to the Soviets’ deployment of similar missiles in Eastern Europe, yet Andropov felt ‘encircled’. His limited vision of the world was ‘a bizarre mixture of grim realism and worst-case mentality’, one of the most astute analysts of Soviet foreign policy observed. Now the latter took over.
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He sent a message to Communist Party chiefs in the Warsaw Pact warning them that ‘Washington has decided on a crusade against socialism as a system. Those who have now ordered the deployment of new nuclear weapons on our threshold link their practical policies with this reckless undertaking.’ He summoned to his sickbed his most senior Kremlin and KG B officials. ‘The international situation is very tense . . . The US wants to change the existing strategic situation and they want an opportunity to make a first strike. The Soviet Union must prepare itself for every possible contingency in the short run.’
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Then came the Able Archer exercise, a nine-day-long test starting on this day of Nato’s command and communications readiness for nuclear war. Andropov and his top intelligence advisers, hand-picked by him, were convinced that it was no exercise, but the real thing, a preparation for a strike against the Soviet Union or its East European empire. The Soviets had their own war plan which would disguise a move to the use of nuclear weapons with an apparently routine conventional exercise. The Soviet military assumed a Nato attack would begin the same way. But there were a myriad of other signs which the Kremlin and the KGB misread in ‘the fog of cold war’, as one intelligence analyst described it.

Able Archer 83 was on a far larger scale than previous war-game exercises. It was a more realistic drill than ever before. Nato leaders took part, including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. KGB spies discovered their participation and alerted Moscow. President Reagan, his Vice President George H.W. Bush and US Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger were intending to be involved but withdrew at the last minute. Reagan’s National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, was worried that superpower relations were so tense that their presence at the exercise could be misunderstood. Their non-participation was itself misinterpreted. Sudden disruptions to politicians’ schedules and the swift movement of generals around Washington were precisely the kind of signs KGB officers were told to look out for as part of the RYAN project. Soviet military intelligence discovered that American communications formats had been substantially changed from previous exercises, which again was reported to the Kremlin as highly unusual.
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Andropov concluded that all this information could mean only one thing: that his fears and warnings about an American attack were coming true. He placed Soviet forces on the highest level of alert, and warned his Warsaw Pact allies that for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviets would deploy nuclear submarines along the US coastline.

The Americans could not believe the Soviet reaction to a straightforward drill. They assumed it was political posturing. One of the CIA’s most senior Soviet experts, Melvin Goodman, recalls seeing some ‘clandestine reports that suggested great alarm in Moscow. But frankly they weren’t taken seriously by anyone except the analysts.’
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A KGB officer working as a spy for the British, Oleg Gordievsky, urgently warned his controllers in London of the mood at the top in the Soviet Union. He recalled: ‘When I told the British, they simply could not believe that the Soviet leadership was so stupid and narrow-minded as to believe in something so impossible . . . I said to them OK I’ll get the documents.’ His information went direct to Thatcher, who insisted that the Americans be told. ‘Only a tiny handful of people knew the full details of how fearful they were,’ said Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, Charles Powell. ‘We knew then, through some extremely well-placed agents, that the Russians actually feared that the West was preparing for an aggressive nuclear war against them.’
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The CIA, late in the day, accepted that the Soviet fears may have been paranoid and misplaced but were for real. Former Director of Intelligence Robert Gates admitted: ‘I don’t think the Soviets were crying wolf . . . They did seem to believe that the situation was very dangerous. And US intelligence had failed to grasp the true extent of their anxiety.’ When Reagan was finally told, the news had a profound effect. He saw how the superpowers could blunder into a war through a combination of overblown rhetoric, muscle-flexing, misunderstandings, naïvety and accidents. Immediately he made overtures to Moscow to assure them that Able Archer really was an exercise, and he dispatched retired General Brent Scowcroft, a future National Security Advisor, for face-to-face diplomacy ‘to assure that we have no intention to [attack the USSR]’.
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The tension eased slightly, the Soviets stood down from maximum alert, but relations remained deeply sour. In December, the Soviets walked out of talks in Geneva on missile reductions, which were in any case meandering along with no prospect of success and had only been continuing for show. Andropov remained angry, frustrated and bellicose in the few months remaining to him.

The episode radically changed Reagan, who confided in his diary: ‘Three years has 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.’ The realisation turned him from a harsh Cold Warrior into a far more emollient statesman.
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NINE

Washington DC , November 1983

 

AMERICANS DEEPLY MISUNDERSTOOD the man they elected twice as President in the 1980s. Even some of his close advisers did not realise until late into his presidency that Ronald Reagan was a closet nuclear disarmer, a radical heretic. He ceased to believe in the theories of nuclear deterrence which most of the hawkish people around him uttered with such grim certainty. Reagan was an optimist, a dreamer. In private, he called the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, the conventional wisdom on which the defence of both superpowers and their allies rested, ‘irresponsible, totally abhorrent . . . a suicide pact’. He was convinced that he could rid the world of weapons of mass destruction. In public - even to some of his aides - he dared not say it. He was the darling of the right and his supporters would not have understood him. In domestic affairs he acted as a conservative. On the world stage, though he crafted his rhetoric to sound bellicose, he became America’s leading dove. His great contribution to the world was not as the fire-breathing anti-Communist and Cold Warrior that so many of his most zealous admirers portrayed him. It was Reagan the negotiator, the dealmaker, the visionary man of peace who was successful.

At sixty-eight, Reagan was one of the oldest men to achieve supreme office in the US. He was a man who famously did not read a great deal, or deeply. But, equally famously, he was easy to underestimate. He learned a vast amount about the Soviet Union towards the end of his first term though, typically, he wore his learning lightly. He still spoke in simple terms, often in anecdotes and old jokes. But it is clear from his private correspondence and recently declassified papers that while his folksy charm, sense of humour, sunny disposition and immense calm were genuine, his simple, straightforward demeanour was not. He was far more complex, clever and calculating than he seemed. In his first term, Reagan oversaw an immense American arms build-up, in line with his belligerent 1980 campaign rhetoric about ‘peace through strength’. But the massive increase in defence spending was not all the new President’s doing. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had ordered much of it in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The new range of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe had been approved by the Carter administration. Yet in the first four years of Reagan’s presidency, the Americans built and deployed at least 700 new nuclear missiles and placed scores of thousands of additional men and women under arms. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, said defence spending reached US$ 1.46 trillion and ‘they were screaming with delight throughout the military industrial complex’. Reagan was not a details President so he never questioned a cent of the extra expenditure until later. In his first term he spent nearly as much on defence as Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter combined and more than the cost of both the Korean and Vietnam wars.
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