The Dead Hand (11 page)

Andropov and the Politburo met on May 31, the day after Reagan and leaders of the Western industrial democracies had concluded a summit in Williamsburg, Virginia. Although they quarreled privately over the missiles, the Western leaders issued a statement calling on the Soviet Union to “contribute constructively” to the arms control talks.

The statement triggered irritation in the Politburo. According to minutes of the meeting, the aging Soviet leaders wrestled with how to stop the Pershing IIs and ground-launched cruise missiles. Not one word was spoken in the meeting specifically about Reagan’s antimissile speech or his grand dream. The Politburo members sounded uncertain, without new ideas. Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov insisted, “Everything that we are doing in relation to defense we should continue doing. All of the missiles that we’ve planned should be delivered, all of the airplanes put in those places where we’ve designated.”
⁴

Andropov’s fear of the Pershing II missiles ran through his instructions to the KGB to keep watch for signs of a nuclear attack. The February document that Gordievsky had leaked to the British described, in an attachment, how advance knowledge of a possible attack would give the Kremlin precious minutes to ready retaliation. The instructions said, “For instance, noting the launching of strategic missiles from the continental part of the USA and taking into account the time required for determining the direction of their flight in fact leaves roughly 20 minutes reaction time. This period will be considerably curtailed after deployment of the ‘Pershing 2’ missile in the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany], for which the flying time to reach long-range targets in the Soviet Union is calculated at 4–6 minutes.” The instructions added, “It is thus
fully evident that the problem of uncovering the threat of RYAN must be dealt with without delay.”
⁵

Gordievsky said the KGB agents in London were constantly being urged by Moscow to spread propaganda against the Pershing II missiles. “We discussed it quite a lot in the meetings in the morning with the military attaché,” he recalled. “He said, ‘They fly from Britain to Moscow in eight minutes! And they penetrate underground bunkers.’ Apart from that, there were a number of telegrams.
Develop a campaign! Develop a campaign! Use all your contacts in order to develop a propaganda campaign against the Pershings and the cruise missiles as well!
They were very worried.” The Kremlin leaders “knew they would be the first to die, and didn’t want to die.”
⁶

The Soviet quest for intelligence about a possible attack also extended to East Germany. The KGB assigned a major role in the operation to East German intelligence under Markus Wolf. By the early 1980s, Wolf said in his memoirs, “with the U.S. rearmament program and the advent of the aggressive Reagan administration, our Soviet partners had become obsessed with the danger of a nuclear missile attack…” His intelligence service “was ordered to uncover any Western plans for such a surprise attack, and we formed a special staff and situation center, as well as emergency command centers, to do this. The personnel had to undergo military training and participate in alarm drills. Like most intelligence people, I found these war games a burdensome waste of time, but these orders were no more open to discussion than other orders from above.” In 1983, the East Germans completed five years of construction on project 17/5001, an underground bunker near the village of Prenden, outside of Berlin, to house the leadership in the event of nuclear war. The bunker was a sealed mini-town that would have protected four hundred people for two weeks after a nuclear attack.
⁷

Of Andropov’s fifteen months in power, half his time was spent in the hospital. During a working holiday in February 1983, Andropov’s health suffered a sharp decline. “He had had kidney trouble all his life, and now it seemed his kidneys had given up altogether,” wrote Volkogonov.
⁸
The Kremlin doctor, Yevgeny Chazov, recalled that Andropov’s kidneys failed completely. Andropov’s doctors decided to put him on an artificial kidney. A special ward was set up for treatment twice a week at a Moscow hospital.
⁹
Andropov started to have trouble walking. That summer,
Andropov’s colleagues had an elevator installed in the Lenin Mausoleum so he would not have to endure the stress of walking eleven and a half feet up the steps.

At the May 31 Politburo meeting, Andropov called for tougher propaganda against Reagan and the West. “We need to show more vividly and broadly the militaristic activities of the Reagan administration and countries of Western Europe supporting it,” he said. Andropov also suggested that such propaganda would “mobilize the Soviet people” on the economic front. But at the same time, there was a downside.

“Certainly,” he said, “we shouldn’t frighten our people of war.”

Ever since the previous autumn, as Andropov’s paranoia deepened about a possible nuclear missile attack from Western Europe, there had also been ominous new threats on the Pacific horizon. The United States carried out extensive war games, realistic and provocative, off the Soviet coast in the Far East. In late September 1982, two U.S. aircraft carriers, the U.S.S.
Enterprise
and the U.S.S.
Midway
, sailed within three hundred miles of the Soviet Union’s major Pacific Fleet base at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. This was the only Soviet base in the Far East with direct access to the open ocean and home to the Delta-class ballistic missile–carrying submarines. The base was at the end of the sparsely populated Kamchatka Peninsula. After brushing by the peninsula, the American ships sailed south along the Kuril Islands, including four islands held by the Soviets since World War II but claimed by Japan, before entering the Sea of Japan on October 3. During the exercise, the
Enterprise
was the subject of extensive Soviet air, surface and underwater surveillance, according to the records of the commanding officer, R. J. Kelly.
¹⁰
Later in the autumn, while in the Indian Ocean, the
Enterprise
happened upon a Soviet aircraft carrier, the
Kiev
. The commander decided to use the ship to carry out “a practice long-range strike against the surface force.” The
Enterprise
sent several aircraft on a mock attack against the Soviet ship. A navy intelligence official said the planes flew “seven hundred nautical miles toward the
Kiev
, made contact, visual contact, with the
Kiev
and then came back.”
¹¹

In these war games, the
Enterprise
, a nuclear-powered supercarrier,
1,123 feet long, was the center of Battle Group Foxtrot, made up of a dozen ships, accompanied by bombers and refueling tankers in the skies and submarines below. They were secretly collecting electronic intelligence, watching how the Soviet forces responded, monitoring their communications and radar. The exercises reflected the “forward strategy” of the navy secretary, John Lehman, to confront the Soviets in waters close to home. Lehman said his “forward strategy” meant always “keeping the Soviets concerned with threats all around their periphery.” Lehman sought to build a six-hundred-ship navy, including fifteen carrier battle groups, and the navy had been a major beneficiary of Reagan’s rearmament program.
¹²

Reagan had also secretly approved psychological operations against the Soviets. The point was to show the United States could deploy aircraft carrier battle groups close to sensitive Soviet military and industrial sites, apparently without being detected or challenged early on. In the Pacific, the U.S. forces charged toward Soviet bastions to see how they would react. As one intelligence official put it, they wanted to go up Ivan’s nose.
¹³

In the weeks after Reagan’s speech on strategic defense, the United States ratcheted up the pressure. In April and May 1983, the U.S. Pacific Fleet conducted its largest exercises since World War II in the North Pacific, off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Forty ships, including three aircraft carrier battle groups, participated in a massive exercise code-named FLEETEX 83-1. The
Enterprise
left Japan on March 26 and was joined by the
Midway
four days later. They sailed north through the Sea of Japan and out the Tsugaru Strait together, meeting the U.S.S.
Coral Sea
on April 9. For about two weeks, all three carriers conducted a counterclockwise sweep of the northwestern Pacific Ocean. The exercise involved twenty-four-hour flight operations off the
Enterprise
, attempting to force the Soviets to react by turning on radars and scrambling aircraft to meet intruders. The exercise was explicitly aimed at rehearsal for antiaircraft and antisubmarine warfare, showing how the three-carrier battle group would support other forces in the event of all-out conflict. Watkins, chief of naval operations, later told Congress that such exercises were designed to show the Soviets that the United States would not be intimidated. “Our feeling is that an aggressive defense, if you will, characterized by forward movement, early deployment of forces, aggressiveness
on the part of our ships, is the greatest deterrent we can have,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1984. “And the Soviets really understand that. We can get their attention with that concept … We can make a difference. Kamchatka is a difficult peninsula. They have no railroads to it. They have to resupply it by air. It is a very important spot for them, and they are as naked as a jaybird there, and they know it.”
¹⁴

On April 4, the Americans flew up Ivan’s nose. According to author Seymour M. Hersh, the
Midway
slipped away from the other carriers after shutting off all electronic equipment that could be monitored by the Soviets. The
Midway
steamed south toward the Kurils and the Soviets did not track it. A group of at least six navy planes from the
Midway
and the
Enterprise
violated Soviet borders by flying over the island of Zelyony in the Kuril archipelago, which stretches between Kamchatka and Japan. Hersh described it as “a flagrant and almost inevitable error, triggered by the aggressive fleet exercise and the demand of senior officers for secret maneuvers and surprise activities.” The navy subsequently told the State Department the flyover was an accident. But the larger, more aggressive maneuvers were clearly a part of Lehman’s deliberate strategy. The Soviets protested in a formal message to the American Embassy in Moscow on April 6.
¹⁵

At the time of the flyover, Gennady Osipovich, an experienced pilot, was stationed at an air base, Sokol, on Sakhalin Island, a long, thin volcanic peninsula that stretches north-south along the other side of the Sea of Okhotsk from Kamchatka. Osipovich, a stolid man with thick black hair streaked gray, was deputy commander of a regiment. For thirteen years he had been flying the Su-15 interceptor, a fast but fuel-guzzling, twin-engine fighter designed in the 1960s to stop enemy bombers in an attack. The interceptors could reach twice the speed of sound but not remain aloft for long; they had limited auxiliary fuel tanks. Moreover, once airborne, pilots had to follow precise orders for their every move from the ground controllers. The job of the interceptors was to scramble fast and stop the intruder. There was little individual discretion or initiative.
¹⁶

In the spring of 1983, Soviet pilots were haggard from the war of
nerves with the Americans. They were constantly chasing and responding to spy planes that buzzed the Soviet borders. Osipovich had flown more than one thousand missions to intercept them. Unfortunately, the navy F-14 flyover of Zelyony Island in April caught them by surprise. According to Osipovich, the American planes zoomed in for fifteen minutes during a period when fog shrouded the island. The violation of the Soviet border brought trouble for the pilots; an investigating commission was established to probe how they failed. “After that incident,” Osipovich recalled, “a commission flew out to the regiment and gave us a dressing-down. They really berated us.” When the commission left, the commander told the pilots that if there was ever air combat over the Kurils, they would not have enough fuel to get back home and would have to eject from their planes somewhere over land to save their own lives. The stress was enormous. “For several weeks we kept our guns at the ready and waited,” Osipovich said. The tension only abated some in the months that followed. He was so stressed out, he said, that he was urged to take a vacation.

After the three-carrier battle group exercise at the end of April, the
Enterprise
steamed for San Francisco Bay. The carrier had been away from a port for thirty days, the longest single stretch of the year. When the navy studied the Soviet reactions to the exercise, they were puzzled. While the Soviet air monitoring was heavy, the surface surveillance was “nearly non-existent,” Kelly noted in one report. Another commander recalled that despite the unique nature of the exercise—the only one using three carriers in decades—“the Soviet reaction was mild.” The Soviets sent their standard Bear and Badger aircraft by every other day. “The primary adversary for all considered was the weather,” the commander said, which included fog, low temperatures, high winds and low visibility.

After the exercise, however, the Soviets learned much more about what the Americans were doing. The ship had sent 57,000 messages and received more than 243,000 during the year; encrypted electronic communications were the backbone of the navy’s system of command. In the communications room, some of the sensitive paper messages were quietly
spirited away by Jerry Whitworth, forty-four, the senior chief radioman, a lanky, bearded sailor who had served more than twenty years. He hid the messages in his locker. Whitworth had been spying for the Soviet Union since 1976 as part of a ring led by another navy veteran, John Walker. Whitworth met Walker between two and four times a year, giving him twenty-five to fifty rolls of undeveloped film from a small Minox camera carrying some of the most ultra-secret information of the Cold War, including the cryptographic keys that unlocked the navy’s electronic communications around the world. Thus, for years, the Soviets had been reading the navy’s mail.
¹⁷