The latest edition of The Straight Dope has a bit on the Soviet reaction to the Able Archer exercise back in 1983, a period some allege the United States and the Soviet Union came dangerously close to nuclear confrontation due to Soviet ignorance of our intentions.
I've done my fair share of reading about this incident, and Operation RYAN, the Soviet intelligence operation run in order to determine whether or not the United States was planning on launching a nuclear first strike. Reading about RYAN today, one is struck by how bizarre Soviet assumptions were, and how primitive their intelligence analysis was. Much of what we know about RYAN today is thanks to KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky:
Before being posted to London in June 1982, Gordievsky received a briefing on Operation RYAN from a KGB expert on NATO. The briefer paid lipservice to the need to recruit "well-placed agents," but he emphasized that the principal method to be employed in RYAN was visual observation of "tell-tale indicators" such as lights burning in government offices and military installations late at night, VIP movements, and high-level committee meetings.
The message was clear, even if implicit: the much-vaunted KGB had become largely unable to recruit well-placed agents. Having KGB staff officers serving under official cover do their own spying, rather than recruiting agents to do it, violated basic rules of tradecraft. Lurking around well-guarded official installations during the night seemed almost certain to attract the attention of host-country security services. The KGB's willingness to risk exposure of its officers in this way reflected the urgency of its search for ways to implement Operation RYAN.
The book is out-of-print now, but if you ever find it in the library, Gordievsky's autobiography Next Stop Execution is a fascinating read.
Comments