Stasi Documents Provide Details on Operation RYaN, the Soviet Plan to Predict and Preempt a Western Nuclear Strike; Show Uneasiness Over Degree of “Clear-Headedness About the Entire RYaN Complex.”

Regrettably however, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions included a facsimile reproduction of only the first page of this document. The additional pages were translated and typeset into English with no Russian corroboration of their authenticity.  Nevertheless, the KGB annual reports, as well as documents from other former Eastern Bloc (Czechoslovakian and Bulgarian) archives have helped to substantiate Gordievsky’s accounts.

The recently released Stasi documents go much further than previous Eastern Bloc sources.  Key revelations include:

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  KGB chairman Victor Chebrikov.

  Hard numbers revealing that within the KGB, 300 positions were created so that RYaN operatives could implement the real-time “transmission and evaluation” of reported indicators showing the likelihood of a Western first strike.  This puts an actual number on the people required to conduct Operation RYaN, previously called “the largest peacetime intelligence gathering operation in history.”  In July of 1984, KGB chairman Victor Chebrikov created a new division within the First Department (Information) of the KGB’s First Main Directorate (responsible for foreign intelligence and operations) to implement Operation RYaN throughout the KGB and world.  This coordinating division was composed of 50 KGB officers.  It is possible (see below) that this new coordinating division was created as a reaction to the false alerts generated by Operation RYaN in November 1983 incorrectly warning that a NATO nuclear release drill, Able Archer 83, could have been an actual nuclear attack.[2]

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  KGB Chairman and General Secretary Yuri Andropov circa 1983.

  Further acknowledgment that the Stasi was the KGB’s primary source of foreign intelligence.  In July 1981, Andropov thanked Stasi head Erich Mielke for providing information on “West German tank production, defense technology, and the NATO manual [as of now the contents of this manual is unknown].”  Andropov then complemented the Stasi, lauding, “We rate your information very highly” and forebodingly requested Stasi sources to procure “an assessment of the NATO manual and NATO’s preparations for war.”

• A possible reference to a primitive computer that the Soviet Union was using to track and calculate the coalition of world forces, including the risk of nuclear war.  The KGB reported to the Stasi that it had “revised its planning for scientific-technological research and industrial procurement” of new “reliably working technology.”  The notes of this meeting do not use the term “computer,” but Gordievsky had earlier reported of  “a large computer model in the Min[istry] of Defense to calculate and monitor the correlation of forces, including mili[tary], economy, [and] psychological factors, to assign numbers and relative weights.”  Four days after the conclusion of Able Archer 83, US Defense and Intelligence officials circulated an article entitled, “In pursuit of the Essence of War” that described a Soviet method which “cataloged and computerized” the world’s “correlation of forces.” The results, it claimed, were “highly objective, empirically provable and readily adaptable to modern data processing.”
• 

  Deputy KGB Chairman (later Chairman) Vladimir Kryuchkov.

  A confirmation that, as of September 1983, Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, remained in charge of the Soviet Union.  Deputy Chairman of the KGB Vladimir Kryuchkov told Stasi head Erich Mielke that although Andropov was officially on vacation in the Southern USSR, it was “no actual vacation… For half the day he is reading information, including ours [KGB] and what we received from you.”  This account squares with those provided by Soviet historian Roy Medvedev and Marahal Nikolai Ogarkov that describe how Andropov would summon his advisors, generals, and Politburo members to his hospital bed to govern the Soviet Union. It was there that Orgarkov described Andropov as “fully engaged in the leadership of the country and the army, and the defense of the country.”  Despite his absence from public view, Andropov remained the leader of the Politburo. However, key discussions during Andropov’s tenure as General Secretary did not occur in formal Politburo meetings, but at his hospital bedside.

• 

  Stasi head Erich Mielke.

  Evidence showing the Soviets believed KAL flight 007 –which was shot down by a Soviet jet over the sea of Japan on September 1, 1983– was a military, rather than civilian aircraft.  Deputy Chairman of the KGB Vladimir Kryuchkov opened the September 19, 1983, meeting by quipping “you do not shoot down such a type of airplane once a month,” and spent the majority of the meeting attempting to explain the Soviet rationale and decision to shoot down the plane.   Kryuchkov explained to Mielke that “we were convinced that it was a military aircraft” and that Soviet radar vulnerabilities prevented real time tracking of the aircraft and contributed to the Soviet’s horrific decision to mistakenly kill all 269 passengers aboard.  The inability of Soviet radar to track incoming aircraft (a vulnerability tested repeatedly since the beginning of the Reagan administration) contributed to the USSR’s reliance on human intelligence (Operation RYaN) and to their misreading of other indicators during Able Archer 83.

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  “The Man Without a Face,” Marcus Wolf, Head of Stasi foreign intelligence

  Finally, that there was a persistent undercurrent of skepticism about the effectiveness of Operation RYaN detectable from both the KGB and Stasi.  In August of 1984, Lev Shapkin, deputy director of the KGB foreign intelligence, told Marcus Wolf, head of Stasi foreign intelligence, that reforms to Operation RYaN were underway.  Though Operation RYaN’s false reporting during Able Archer 83 was not mentioned in the meeting, the two intelligence officials clearly were worried that false warnings of a Western nuclear first strike could lead to preemptive actions by Soviet nuclear forces.  Shapkin told Wolf that the indicators agents were observing and reporting, “must be complemented, revised, and made more precise” and bemoaned “the problem of not getting deceived” by faulty indicators (say, during a nuclear release drill).[3]   He reiterated that “clear-headedness about the entire RYAN complex” was a “mandatory requirement.”  Marcus Wolf included his concerns in an addendum to the summary of the meetings, stressing the need to know the “actual situation” rather than the picture presented by Operation RYaN’s indicators.  “Constant and ongoing assessments,” he sensibly wrote, “have to be made whether certain developments actually constitute a crisis or not.”[4]

The release and dissemination of these revealing Operation RYaN documents by the German government and the Cold War International History Project are a refreshing departure from the secrecy still cloaking documents about the 1983 War Scare in Moscow, Washington, and other capitals.   These revelations also serve as a clarion call for historians to continue pressing for the declassification of the events and reasons which increased the risk of nuclear war through miscalculation during the 1983 War Scare.

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[1] Other sources vary the spelling of RYaN. Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin spelled it “ryon.” Another spelling includes the word “suprise:” “VRYAN” “vnezapnoe raketno yadernoe napadenie” —surprise nuclear missile attack. Czech Intelligence referred to the operation as NRJAN.  One document shows that the Bulgarians monitored “VRYAN indicators” as late as June 1987, and other East German documents show that the operation continued until 1990.

[2] Robert Fairly once quipped to me on Blogging Heads, that the KGB was not the only national security bureaucracy to lobby for and create large, unnecessary, and ineffective programs to spawn positions for its employees.  See also: Kyl-Lott Review.

[3] New evidence on Able Archer 83 has revealed multiple non-routine elements, including: a 170-flight, radio-silent air lift of 19,000 US soldiers to Europe, the shifting of commands from “Permanent War Headquarters to the Alternate War Headquarters,” the practice of “new nuclear weapons release procedures,” including consultations with cells in Washington and London, and the “sensitive, political issue” of numerous “slips of the tongue” in which B-52 sorties were referred to as nuclear “strikes.” These variations, seen through “the fog of nuclear exercises,” did in fact match official Soviet intelligence-defined indicators for “possible operations by the USA and its allies on British territory in preparation for RYaN.”

[4] Marcus Wolf, “The Man Without a Face,” did not write kindly of the Soviets, or Operation RYaN in his 1997 memoir:  “Our Soviet partners had become obsessed with the danger of a nuclear missile attack,” though he writes that he did not. “Like most intelligent 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.”   CIA historian Benjamin Fischer has astutely noted that the English language version of Wolf’s memoir, omits an entire chapter the “War Scare” that is in the German edition.  According to Wolf’s memoir, Andropov once described to him, “a gloomy scenario in which a nuclear war might be a real threat. His sober analysis came to the conclusion that the US government was striving with all means available to establish nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.”  We can now also read that in a meeting between Andropov (then KGB head) and Mielke in July 1981, Andropov warned, “Reagan’s vulgar speeches show the true face of the military-industrial complex.  They have long sought such a figure.  Now, they have finally found it in the form of Reagan.”

For more on the 1983 War Scare see The Able Archer 83 Sourcebook and Countdown to Declassification: Finding Answers to a 1983 War Scare.