Security chiefs are trying to block the release of documents that would shed fresh light on how Britain and the US came close to provoking a Soviet nuclear attack.

They are insisting that a report, The Detection of Soviet Preparations for War Against Nato, must remain secret. The report was drawn up by the joint intelligence committee (JIC) after a Nato military exercise codenamed Able Archer 83.

The US has released a number of documents relating to the crisis, specifically about Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB officer who defected to Britain. He played a key role in warning Washington about the effect of president Ronald Reagan’s dangerous rhetoric on Moscow, and the Kremlin’s equally dangerous paranoia.

The latest American document to be released describes how US-Soviet relations were on “hair-trigger” alert in 1983, with a watchful air force general acting “out of instinct, not informed guidance” to prevent the crisis from escalating, and Reagan calling the situation “really scary”.



Officials in the Cabinet Office have agreed to release just the title page of the JIC document but nothing more. The document was requested more than a year ago by Nate Jones, of the US National Security Archive attached to George Washington University. His request has been supported by the former head of GCHQ’s Soviet division.

After months of internal debate, the Cabinet Office said the document was covered by section 23 of the Freedom of Information Act, which imposes an absolute exemption from disclosure – with no public interest defence – of material “directly or indirectly supplied” to the security and intelligence agencies.

Jones appealed to the information commissioner, Christopher Graham, who rejected his request on the grounds of national security. Graham accepted there was “a public interest in understanding the lessons learned from Able Archer 83, and that disclosure could potentially add some value to what was already publicly known regarding the exercise.” However, he agreed with Cabinet Office security and intelligence officials that there was “a strong public interest in safeguarding national security”, and said the JIC report was “still relevant to national security today”.

The dispute over the JIC document comes at a time when Nato is resuming “transition to nuclear strike” exercises.

A heavily censored witness statement by Dominic Wilson, director of operational policy at the Ministry of Defence and previously a senior official in the National Security Secretariat, says the JIC report must remain firmly closed.

Last month, Oliver Letwin, the Cabinet Office minister, told the Labour MP Paul Flynn: “It would not be appropriate to release this [the JIC report] on grounds of national security.”

One of those calling for the release of the report is Michael Herman, former head of GCHQ’s Soviet division. He said last year: “A weakness in the UK was that the [intelligence] assessors didn’t know the extent of US confrontation/provocation in Reagan’s first administration. The Russians were quite right to be frightened. But how big was the crisis? Until all the evidence is declassified how do we judge?”

Jones argues that while it was the British – mainly through Gordievsky – who discovered the dangers of the Nato war game, it has been the US that has released much more information about what its National Security Agency described as “the most dangerous Soviet-American confrontation since the Cuban missile crisis”.

Roger Smethurst, head of the Cabinet Office knowledge and management unit, told Jones: “Other states and UK government departments are entitled to make their own judgments as to what of the information they hold on a subject it is appropriate to make public.”

Records previously released in the US include photographs of Gordievsky debriefing Reagan. It was Gordievsky who originally alerted the UK and US to Operation Ryan, launched by the Kremlin in 1981 to detect and pre-empt a western “surprise nuclear missile attack”. The existence of Operation Ryan contributed to the risk of nuclear war through miscalculation during the 1983 Able Archer scare.

Jones has now appealed to the information rights tribunal for the release of the JIC report in the interests of what he calls “governmental accountability and transparency”.

The British government released one file in 2013 in response to an FoI request from Peter Burt, of the Nuclear Information Service, an independent UK-based research group. It showed that the JIC report was drawn up in response to what the MoD called “an unprecedented Soviet reaction to Able Archer 83 and other reports of alleged concern about a surprise Nato attack”.

Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, was reported to have instructed officials to “urgently consider how to approach the Americans on the question of possible Soviet misapprehensions about a surprise Nato attack”.