Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War

© 2016 by Nate Jones

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2016

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Jones, Nate, author.

Title: Able Archer 83: the secret history of the NATO exercise that almost triggered nuclear war / Nate Jones; with a foreword by Thomas S. Blanton.

Other titles: Secret history of the NATO exercise that almost triggered nuclear war

Description: New York: The New Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016023458 (print) | LCCN 2016032122 (ebook) | ISBN 9781620972625 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Europe—History, Military—20th century. | Military maneuvers—Europe—History—20th century. | Nuclear crisis control—History—20th century. | United States—History, Military—20th century—Sources. | Nuclear weapons—Government policy—United States—History—20th century. | North Atlantic Treaty Organization—History—20th century. | Europe, Western—Defenses—History—20th century. | Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States—Sources. | United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union—Sources. | Cold War—Sources.

Classification: LCC UA646 .J656 2016 (print) | LCC UA646 (ebook) | DDC 355.5/209409048—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023458

The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

www.thenewpress.com

Book design and composition by Bookbright Media

This book was set in URW Palladio

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my family, Durl, Wendy, Ben, and Eric

CONTENTS

Foreword by Tom Blanton

Introduction: Two Spiders in a Bottle

Part I: Standing Tall, the Mirror-Image, and Operation RYaN

Part II: Thoroughly White Hot, Able Archer 83, and the Crux of the War Scare

Part III: Aftermath, One Misstep Could Trigger a Great War

Conclusion: Why Is the World So Dangerous?

Acknowledgments and Notes on Sources

Document 1President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Report, The Soviet ‘War Scare,’ February 15, 1990, Top Secret, UMBRA GAMMA WNINTEL NOFORN NOCONTRACT ORCON

Document 2CIA Studies in Intelligence Article by Benjamin Fischer, The 1983 War Scare in U.S.-Soviet Relations, Undated (Circa 1996), Secret

Document 3KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov to General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, Report on the Work of the KGB in 1981, May 10, 1982

Document 4Central Intelligence Agency Biographical Profile of Yuriy Vladimirovich Andropov, January 11, 1983, Classification Redacted

Document 5Memorandum of Conversation Between General Secretary Yuri Andropov and Averell Harriman, CPSU Central Committee Headquarters, Moscow, 3:00 p.m. June 2, 1983

Document 6U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command Daily INTSUM, November 10, 1983, Secret

Document 7Air Force Seventh Air Division, Ramstein Air Base, Exercise Able Archer 83, SAC ADVON, After Action Report, December 1, 1983, Secret NOFORN

Document 8Memorandum for National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane from Soviet Expert Jack Matlock, Subject: American Academic on Soviet Policy, December 13, 1983, Confidential with Attached EXDIS Cable from the American Embassy in Moscow

Document 9UK Ministry of Defence, Soviet Union Concern About a Surprise Nuclear Attack, May 9, 1983

Document 10Central Intelligence Agency, Special National Intelligence Estimate, Implications of Recent Soviet Military-Political Activities, May 18, 1984, Top Secret

Document 11Central Intelligence Agency Memorandum for the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from CIA Director William Casey, U.S./Soviet Tension, June 19, 1984, Secret

Document 12Small Group Meeting of November 19, 1983, 7:30 a.m., The Secretary’s Dining Room, Department of State, Secret/Sensitive

Document 13Reagan’s Handwritten Addition of Ivan and Anya to His January 16, 1984, Speech on United States–Soviet Relations

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

READ THIS BOOK AND YOU will make the world a safer place. Read these former secrets—many of them classified above Top Secret—and you will see how truly scary the War Scare of 1983 was. Read this book and you will understand how the Cold War dangers that flared in 1983—and could have produced a nuclear war through miscalculation and misperception—are still with us today.

You don’t have to take the author’s word for it. Nate Jones has personally led the cutting edge of scholarship, breaking loose the primary sources, the classified contemporaneous notes, the highest-level intelligence assessments, from all sides, through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and through archival research in collections ranging from the East German Stasi to the Soviet Politburo to the CIA’s database of declassified records. Here in this book, Nate shows you the actual documents, along with his own narrative and analysis, so you can judge for yourself.

This book effectively resolves a heated controversy that divided the CIA in the 1980s and has led to sharp exchanges between scholars ever since. The debate over the 1983 War Scare secretly raged for years inside the classified conference rooms of U.S. and British spy agencies, and inside the closed briefing sessions with presidents and prime ministers. Word of the War Scare of 1983 only reached the public domain in the 1990s, and scholars took up cudgels on both sides of the debate, some expressing serious alarm and others pooh-poohing the fright factor, but all lacking the firsthand evidence that you will read about in this book.

Here’s how President Ronald Reagan summed up the key question about the 1983 War Scare (in a query to his ambassador to Moscow, Arthur Hartman, in March 1984): Do you think Soviet leaders really fear us, or is all the huffing and puffing just part of their propaganda? In other words, did the Soviet leadership and military actually worry in 1983 that the United States might be planning a decapitating first strike, a nuclear blitzkrieg, or were the Soviet public statements about the hostile West just PR meant for the court of public opinion?

As you will see in the documents, President Reagan himself was getting contradictory answers to this core question in 1983. On the one hand, the KGB station chief in London, Oleg Gordievsky—who had defected in place to British intelligence—was providing truly alarming evidence of Soviet paranoia: a massive intel collection effort that assumed a U.S. first strike was in the works and focused on indicators of imminent attack.

On the other hand, the top CIA analysts of the Soviet Union assured the president there was no such danger. In their view, the Gordievsky information just showed how dysfunctional the communist system was, and since we knew we wouldn’t launch such an attack, all the Soviet statements were just propaganda, meant to keep the Soviet population mobilized, the European peace movement energized, and the Americans blamed for warmongering. This became the official position of the CIA in their highly classified National Intelligence Estimates, which argued that training exercises like Able Archer were so routine that the Soviets couldn’t have been really scared.

Years later, this line of argument showed up in the scholarly debate over the 1983 War Scare as the position adopted by scholars most critical of the Soviet Union and least worried about nuclear accidents or misperception. One scholar even titled his conference paper The Able Archer Non-Crisis.

Interestingly, President Reagan did not share the CIA view. Nate Jones quotes a Reagan diary entry from December 1983—after Gordievsky’s initial warnings—to the effect that Reagan had learned something new, something he should have realized before: that despite all good American intentions, the Soviets were genuinely scared of us, and that made it even more important for Reagan to get them in the same room and convince them to work with us to get rid of nuclear weapons.

Huffing and puffing or real fear? This book concludes that the answer is both. Just because the Soviets turned U.S. and NATO actions into propaganda does not eliminate the likelihood they were also scared—and that fear could have led to a ratcheting up of alarm and alert and mobilization to the brink of war.

This book presents extraordinary evidence from the other side of the Cold War in 1983 to make these points. For example, in the Averell Harriman papers at the Library of Congress, Nate Jones found Harriman’s own notes from the meeting with Soviet general secretary Yuri Andropov in July 1983 where the Soviet leader expressed his fear that nuclear war would come not from either side attacking the other, but from miscalculation or inadvertence. This volume includes the interview evidence from conversations with Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev and other Soviet generals about the dangers inherent in the masking effect created by NATO exercises—such as the big Autumn Forge package, of which the Able Archer nuclear command exercise was a small part—that could hide preparations for an actual attack.

The genius of this book is the combination of all source information, Soviet, U.S., East and West German, NATO, and after-action reporting. Together with the firsthand Andropov and Akhromeyev quotations, Nate Jones presents detailed comparisons with other routine exercises that prove, for the first time, how unusual many elements of Able Archer turned out to be, well beyond previous maneuvers, in ways that could indeed look more dangerous than the planners intended.

Perhaps most chilling of all are the documents showing how the Able Archer exercise ramped up right into pretend nuclear war, in a matter of days, when Blue’s use of nuclear weapons did not stop Orange’s aggression. This is the way the world ends.

Old intelligence hands will complain that Nate Jones does not have all the inside scoop, that there are reams of sources not yet declassified—and indeed, most of the signals intelligence and overhead photography from the fall of 1983, both American and Soviet, remains in classified vaults today. But this book publishes the next-best thing to having it all: the one retrospective study that did have access to the all-source intelligence, years later, in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) made its own sober assessment of how well U.S. spy agencies had performed in 1983, and concluded, not so well. But the study itself stayed under wraps for twenty-five years, labeled Top Secret UMBRA GAMMA WNINTEL NOFORN NOCONTRACT ORCON.

When Nate Jones got this PFIAB study declassified in 2015, it proved to be a blockbuster. The Washington Post put the study’s conclusions on the front page, under the headline In 1983 ‘War Scare,’ Soviet Leadership Feared Nuclear Surprise Attack by U.S.

In this book, you will finally read the Top Secret assessment for yourself. With access to all the intelligence and lots of hindsight, the president’s board concluded that the CIA was wrong and the United States may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger during Able Archer 83.

Fortunately, as the PFIAB found, the military officers in charge of the Able Archer exercise minimized this risk by doing nothing in the face of evidence that parts of the Soviet armed forces were moving to an unusual level of alert. So you will find some heroes in this book, like the Air Force lieutenant general Leonard Perroots, who just decided to do nothing.

Nate Jones draws important lessons for today from this previously secret history. At the top of the list is the continuing danger posed by nuclear weapons in the hands of fallible humans. We can reduce that danger by knowing our own history, getting rid of the hair triggers, and controlling those nukes and the fissile material in them. That’s where reading this book will help make the world a safer place.

The final lesson is about empathy. The U.S. intelligence community went wrong on the 1983 War Scare because it mirror-imaged the enemy—well, we Americans are never going to launch a Pearl Harbor–style surprise attack, especially not a nuclear attack, so that Soviet huffing and puffing can’t reflect real fear!

This book will teach us, if we let it, to put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries—what do our actions look like to them? What motivations must they have? What fears do they feel? Empathy doesn’t mean identifying with the adversary, no indeed, but understanding them. And ourselves.

Tom Blanton

Director, National Security Archive

George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

July 4, 2016

Introduction: Two Spiders in a Bottle

THE COLD WAR TURNED HOT in 1983. The impetus was a sudden change of leadership in the Kremlin, which had taken place the previous year. A new Kremlin faction aimed to reverse recent Western geopolitical and economic gains by asserting greater Soviet power in the petroleum-rich Gulf States. By March, Moscow was fighting proxy wars against the United States in the Middle East by providing political support as well as arms to Iran, Syria, and South Yemen.¹

By June, conflict spread from the Middle East to Europe. The fledgling Soviet leadership was unable to continue providing its usual levels of aid to its satellites in Eastern Europe. Despite Moscow’s desperate efforts to utilize planted political parties, pressure groups, and propaganda campaigns to quell dissatisfaction and unrest throughout its Eastern European sphere of influence, the region’s economic situation continued to worsen. The East’s military preparedness, however, improved. Warsaw Pact forces conducted frequent field training exercises, stockpiled equipment, and increased activity in naval dockyards, while factories producing materiel went on round-the-clock schedules.

Then, in August, nonaligned Yugoslavia shifted toward the West, formally requesting economic and military assistance from several NATO countries. Moscow, fearing Yugoslavia’s shift could herald the further defection of its Eastern European allies and buffer states, dooming the worldwide communist movement, chose to invade. After a month of mobilization exercises and forward deployments, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces entered Yugoslavia.

On October 31, the ground war broadened. Soviet forces invaded Finland and, the next day, Norway. The Soviets commenced massive air and naval attacks against NATO’s European forces and bases. In southern Europe, Soviet ground forces invaded Greece while its navy carried out attacks in the Adriatic, Mediterranean, and Black Seas.

By November 4, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces crossed through the Fulda Gap while bombarding the entire eastern border of West Germany with air attacks. Because NATO forces provided strong resistance to these Soviet invasions, conventional war turned unconventional; by November 6, Soviet forces had launched chemical attacks. The next day, NATO forces responded in kind.

The war soon spread to Britain. On November 10, attacks on UK airfields disrupted B-52 and KC-135 operations as well as destroy[ed] some aircraft. Eight KC-135 Stratotankers in the United Kingdom were launched for survival; they would later be available to refuel nuclear bombers.² Under attack, NATO headquarters was forced to relocate its Mons, Belgium, headquarters to an Alternate War Headquarters at the Heinrich Hertz Kaserne in Birkenfeld.³

Unable to repel the Soviets’ ground advance, NATO attempted to send a message to the Warsaw Pact via nuclear signaling—the nuclear destruction of one city in the hope of averting total nuclear war. On the morning of November 8 NATO requested permission from its members for initial limited use of nuclear weapons against pre-selected fixed targets on the morning of November 9.⁴ The Western capitals granted NATO permission to destroy Eastern European cities with nuclear attacks.

But this did not stop the Warsaw Pact. As a result, the next day the leader of NATO’s military, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), requested a follow-on use of nuclear weapons. Washington—and the other capitals—approved this request within twenty-four hours, and on November 11 the follow-on attack was executed. A full-scale nuclear war had broken out.

Then, with nothing left to destroy, Able Archer 83, a NATO war-gaming exercise designed to practice the release of nuclear weapons during wartime conditions, came to an end.

While NATO