The Dark Chronicles (96 page)

These are perhaps the best-known examples of the world coming to the brink of nuclear war, but there are others. In April 1969, after an American reconnaissance plane was shot down in the Sea of Japan, the United States placed tactical fighters armed with nuclear weapons on a 15-minute alert in the Republic of Korea to attack airfields in North Korea. In June of that year, the Americans’ contingency plans for North Korea included the possibility of an attack with 70-kiloton nuclear weapons, codenamed FREEDOM DROP.

Another close call took place in October 1969, when President Nixon raised the United States’ nuclear alert level by launching a series of secret manoeuvres that included implementing communications silence in several Polaris submarines and Strategic Air Commands and halting selected combat aircraft exercises. The most
alarming manoeuvre was Operation GIANT LANCE. At 19.13 Coordinated Universal Time on 26 October, thermonuclear-armed B-52s took off from bases in the United States and headed towards the northern polar ice cap in the direction of the eastern border of the Soviet Union, where they flew in precisely the same pattern they would have done had they been launching a nuclear strike. Several more took off the next morning.

Officially referred to as the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, these measures were part of Nixon’s so-called ‘Madman Theory’: by posing as unpredictably volatile, he hoped to push the Soviet leaders into weaker positions for fear of provoking him. His objective in October 1969 was to stop the Vietnam War spiralling out of control by making it appear that the United States was considering a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The idea was that the generals in the Kremlin would be so shocked by the development that they would put pressure on the North Vietnamese to negotiate a peace settlement. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Colonel Robert Pursley both expressed opposition to the operation, fearing that the Soviets might interpret it as a real attack.

It is not yet known how the Kremlin interpreted Nixon’s raising of the nuclear stakes in this dramatic manner. Melvin Laird has suggested that US intelligence intercepted Soviet communications expressing concern, and this has been supported by, among others, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, who has confirmed that the leadership in Moscow was informed of the American alert. On 20 October 1969, Dobrynin met Nixon and offered to start the long-delayed Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Further discussions of this may have helped defuse the situation: the talks went ahead in Helsinki in November. But it seems Nixon and his staff may have underestimated how preoccupied the Soviets were with their border conflict with China. On 17 October, the Chinese government was preparing to be attacked by the Soviet Union: 940,000 soldiers were moved, and China’s nuclear arsenal was readied. On 20 October, the same day Dobrynin met Nixon,
authorities in Peking let it be known that they would open border negotiations with Moscow, as they were not prepared to let a ‘handful of war maniacs’ in the Kremlin launch a pre-emptive military strike over the issue. It may be that the Soviets successfully pursued their own ‘Madman’ strategy with China – it may also be that the Chinese went on alert in response to the Americans’ manoeuvres, or the Soviets’ response to them.

Nixon halted GIANT LANCE on 30 October. Thankfully, none of the B-52s entered Soviet airspace or crashed. This is especially lucky because an after-action report revealed that several of the B-52s had been orbiting in close contact with other planes in an air traffic situation that was deemed ‘unsafe’. Had an accident taken place, the Kremlin would almost certainly have read it as an American attack, in which case global nuclear conflict would probably have ensued.

My main sources for information on GIANT LANCE were the declassified documents about the operation and several articles by William Burr, J. E. Rey Kimball, Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Suri for taking the time to answer my questions about the incident.

For the purposes of my story, I have engineered it so that the Kremlin would consider retaliation more seriously than they may have done in reality. As well as the B-52s heading for Soviet airspace, I’ve invented a separate incident: the leaking of chemical weapons to the bases at Paldiski and Hiiumaa. Unlike GIANT LANCE, no such incident ever took place, but it is also inspired by historical fact. At the end of the Second World War, Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union formed the ‘Continental Committee on Dumping’ and disposed of some 296,103 tons of captured German chemical weapons, many of them in the Baltic Sea. Several countries continued to dump chemical weapons in the Baltic and elsewhere until around 1970. Most governments kept the extent of these programmes secret until the 1980s, when details began to emerge, but there are still notable gaps in the record.

At the time, it was argued that these chemical weapons would dissolve in water and therefore not harm anyone, but that has not proven to be the case. During the war, German scientists created Winterlost, a new formulation of mustard gas made with arsenic and phenyldichloroarsine that was more viscous and was capable of withstanding sub-zero temperatures. I have invented the idea that Winterlost was carried by U-745, but the substance itself is real, and a powerful chemical weapon. This type of mustard gas is insoluble, and leaks of it can still cause harm today. It is estimated that one fifth of the Nazis’ production of toxic gases was dumped in the Baltic, including almost all of their Winterlost. Over the years, mustard bombs have been recovered on beaches in Poland, Germany and elsewhere, and many fishing nets have been contaminated and, in some cases, people harmed. In July and August 1969 four fishermen near Bornholm were seriously injured when mustard gas leaked from an object pulled onto deck. According to retired Soviet General Vello Vare, chemical weapons may have been dumped at two sites near Paldiski in the 1960s. I’m indebted to Dr Vadim Paka of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanography in Kaliningrad and John Hart of the Chemical and Biological Security Project in Stockholm for discussing these and related issues with me.

The Åland islands are a demilitarized Swedish-speaking part of Finland, and lie in a crucial strategic position in the Baltic. Hitler planned to invade the islands in 1944, but abandoned the idea after the Finnish armistice with the Soviet Union. Stalin also had plans to invade Åland, and also abandoned them. On 23 December 1944, U-745, a German type VIIC U-boat under the command of Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm von Trotha set out from Danzig into the Gulf of Finland. On 11 January 1945, it sank the Soviet minesweeper T-76 Korall off the Estonian island of Aegna. On 4 February, it sent its last radio signal, probably after being hit by a mine. On the evening of 10 March, von Trotha’s body was discovered by fishermen frozen in the ice on the tiny island of Skepparskär in Föglö, in the
south-east of the Åland archipelago. He was buried in the foreigners’ section of Föglö church, at which members of his family placed a small plaque in 1999.

I have invented that U-745 had Winterlost as a cargo, and that the Soviets and British sent agents to Åland to investigate, but the description in
Chapter III
of the discovery of Wilhelm von Trotha’s body, its recovery from Skepparskär, autopsy in Degerby, the appearance of the body and the details of the effects found on it are all taken from the police report written on 12 March 1945. I have imagined that the notebook mentioned in the police report was a
Soldbuch
. Several other details were provided to me by Eolf Nyborg, the son of the chief constable at the time, who saw the body, his wife Astrid, and Uno Fogelström, all of whom were living in Föglö at the time. I am very grateful to them for their help, as well as to Stefan Abrahamsson, Gunnar and Gunnel Lundberg, Karl-Johan Edlund, Kenneth Gustavsson and the staff of Föglö church, Mariehamn library,
Nya Åland
and
Ålandstidningen
. A special thanks to my parents-in-law, Karl-Johan and Anne-Louise Fogelström, for all their help and advice.

Some believe that the wreck of U-745 is near Hanko, but it has not yet been found. Neither has U-479, which went missing in the Gulf of Finland on 15 November 1944 with all fifty-one hands lost, nor U-676, which went missing somewhere between Åland and Osmussaar, with its last radio signal being received on 12 February 1945. U-679 was also sunk by depth charges from a Soviet anti-submarine vessel near Åland on 9 January 1945. In 2009, the Soviet submarine S-2, which sank in 1940, was discovered by a team of divers off the coast of Märket in the Åland archipelago.

I would also like to express my thanks to Gunnar Silander, Fredrik Blomqvist and Dan Lönnberg of the Åland coastguard for arranging the visit to their abandoned station in Storklubb – and for showing me the sauna there, built in 1961, which features in
Chapter XVI
.

The bunker described in
Chapter II
is the Reserve Command Post of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, better
known as Stalin’s Bunker, near Partizanskaya Metro station. Now a part of the Central Museum of Armed Forces, it opened to the public in 1996. The decor I have described is inspired by the session hall in the museum, itself an estimate of how it looked when built. The bunker in Miehikkälä can also be visited, as can many others along the Salpa Line.

Despite the mass of material published about the Cold War, our perceptions of it are changing almost by the day. While I was writing this novel the first authorized account of MI6 operations was published, and several key documents about Britain’s nuclear contingency plans were declassified. As a result, some of the information in the books in the bibliography that follows can now be seen as flawed or obsolete. The two reports mentioned in
Chapter II
are the Strath Report of 1955, declassified in 2002, and ‘Machinery of Government in War’, also from 1955 and declassified in 2008. Exercise INVALUABLE took place in September and October 1968, and FALLEX-68/GOLDEN ROD in October of that year.

All the details of the United States’ and Britain’s contingency plans for nuclear war mentioned in
Chapter II
are based on declassified files, with the exception of the locations earmarked for central government in Britain after 1968, which are informed speculation. Construction work on the bunker in Corsham began in 1957, but the plan to relocate the country’s elite was exposed by an article by Chapman Pincher in the
Daily Express
in 1959, and a D-notice was hurriedly issued to stop more information leaking out. No further articles were written about it, and the plan was given a succession of codenames to protect it, including SUBTERFUGE, STOCKWELL, TURNSTILE and BURLINGTON.

In April 1963, a group of activists, ‘Spies for Peace’, discovered the existence of several bunkers that had been earmarked for regional government following a nuclear attack, and published pamphlets exposing some of their locations, to widespread media interest. As a result of this – and perhaps also, as Paul Dark speculates, the defection of Kim Philby – the plan to use the Corsham
bunker as a post-strike shelter was abandoned. It seems it may have been kept as a cover story to discourage anyone from searching for the new sites, and many articles, documentaries and books have repeated disinformation about it since its existence was declassified by the Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office in 2004. But documents declassified in 2010 show that a new plan, codenamed PYTHON, was put into place in May 1968. This involved senior officials being separated into groups and dispersed to several locations. While I was writing this novel, it was revealed that the royal yacht
Britannia
was a PYTHON site, but the number and location of the remaining sites is currently unknown. The fact that limited information about PYTHON is now being declassified may mean that this plan has also now been superseded or altered enough that it can be revealed without jeopardizing the security of the new arrangements. The idea that Welbeck Abbey is a PYTHON site is my speculation based on conversations with Mike Kenner, who has conducted an enormous amount of research on this topic. I’m grateful to him for taking the time to clarify many of the issues surrounding this and for sharing his research material with me, including many documents that were declassified as a result of his requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

That act has affected the way in which we understand our recent history, both for the better and for the worse. As a result of decades in which very little was revealed, a mountain of material is now being declassified. As an inevitable result, the National Archives gives more prominence to, and even issues press releases for, only a selection of the material it declassifies. It is the information in these files that is most often reported in newspapers and reproduced in books. However, an enormous amount of material is declassified by the National Archives, most of it with no fanfare, and much of this is not analysed or explored by journalists or historians.

It would be impossible for the National Archives to provide analysis for everything it declassifies, but the result is that information that may substantially change our view of history is hidden
away in files that very few people are aware have even been released. Researchers keen to explore the ramifications of so much material must wade through it seeking to understand its context and, often, its secrets. After requesting that a government file be declassified, it goes through vetting to ensure it does not endanger national security. But once released, an eagle-eyed researcher might notice a passing mention to an appendix that has not been attached. A request is sent for the appendix to be declassified. After vetting, it is. The appendix mentions a codeword in passing – this leads to questions about the meaning of that codeword, and attempts to figure out which unclassified files might contain information about it. In other words, this is something of a maze, and there are still large gaps in our knowledge of what really happened in the Cold War.

Nevertheless, the British, American and other governments have declassified an enormous amount of material about the era in the last two decades. Much less has been declassified by the Russians. An exception is the report that Paul Dark reads in
Chapter VII
written by GRU chief Pyotr Ivashutin in 1964. The quoted excerpts are translations from the original document, carried out by and quoted courtesy of the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (
www.php.isn.ethz.ch
), the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich and the National Security Archive at the George Washington University on behalf of the PHP network. My thanks to the Parallel History Project and the Cold War International History Project for their work in analysing and making available so many documents, and in particular to Dr Vojtech Mastny for his helpful answers to my queries, and for his scholarship.