Operation RYaN

In May 1981, at a major KGB conference in Moscow, ailing Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev denounced the aggressive policies of new US President Ronald Reagan. The head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov then took the stage and dropped a political bombshell on those assembled: The Soviet leadership, he announced, was convinced that the Americans were now actively preparing to launch a nuclear war. As a result, he was launching Operation RYaN — a worldwide KGB operation aimed at providing as much warning as possible as to the timing of that attack.

Almost as soon as Andropov had finished talking, orders and instructions were secretly dispatched to KGB station officers at key locations throughout the West. These detailed, at great length, various signs and actions that could be taken to mean that a NATO attack was imminent. All stations were ordered to begin reporting these signs as soon as they occurred.

Psychologically, the phrasing behind the RYaN orders was both interesting and potentially catastrophic. In them, Andropov didn’t ask for evidence that an attack might happen — that was simply taken for granted. Instead he asked for signs as to when.

Soon, keen to demonstrate their ability and efficiency, station chiefs were passing on information they claimed identified the latter, despite the fact that (as many would later admit after the fall of the Soviet Union) the feeling on the ground was that Moscow was misreading the mood of NATO and there was no chance of such an attack actually happening.

That Andropov was so sensitive about an impending attack was not entirely surprising. A hardliner who believed in flexing military muscle from a position of strength, it made complete sense to him that the US would aim to do the same. How closely Brezhnev’s own beliefs matched Andropov’s ultimately didn’t matter, because in November 1982 the Soviet Premier died, and KGB chief Andropov was chosen to take his place.

Warning signs

By 1982, Andropov was already 67 years old and — like Konstantin Chernenko, who would succeed him just 18 months later — already unwell. Both his age and his past as head of the KGB meant that, of all Brezhnev’s potential successors, he was the man most likely to be convinced of the possibility of a US attack.

A veteran of the Second World War, like many of his political generation Andropov was determined never to make the same mistake as Stalin, who had been caught off guard by Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. As head of the KGB, Andropov was also intimately aware of the truth behind that surprise — it wasn’t that the intelligence hadn’t been there, it was that Stalin had refused to accept it. If placed in the same position Andropov was determined to act based on data and not ignore the information in front of him.

Andropov (standing) during WW2

Andropov believed he had made this attitude clear to the US both publicly and privately. Unfortunately his public pronouncements were, again, largely taken by most of the West as part of the Cold War game. Increasingly, however, one NATO power was starting to suspect that things were more serious than the US and others believed — the British.

British doubts were based on a rather fortuitous promotion. In 1982, KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky was promoted to Colonel and transferred to the Soviet embassy in London, where he was ordered to take over as KGB Resident — station chief.

Unknown to Moscow though, Gordievsky had already been turned by British intelligence agency MI6.

Gordievsky’s new role opened him up to the full workings of Operation RYaN. It immediately became obvious to both Gordievsky and his handlers that politically the Americans were playing an incredibly dangerous game. Unfortunately, MI6 was unable to persuade the CIA that the Soviets genuinely believed that the US was contemplating a pre-emptive attack. With only a few exceptions, the CIA’s analysts were unwilling to even consider it. America, they insisted, didn’t do “Pearl Harbours.” The whole world knew that!

They asked for direct access to MI6’s source but, worried about compromising such a high-profile asset, the agency refused and for now at least the warning was dismissed.

A most dangerous year

In 1983 the situation went from bad to worse.

First, on the 8th March, in a heated speech before the British Parliament, Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” and described how nuclear war could be seen as an extension of the old battle between good and evil.

Unknown to the US, the speech sent shockwaves through Moscow. Combined with US plans to deploy Pershing II nuclear missiles to Germany, to the Soviets this seemed to be the strongest indication yet that nuclear war was imminent.

Then, later that month, Reagan announced plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative — “Star Wars” — a system which would destroying Soviet missiles before they reached their targets.

In the West, the SDI announcement was greeted with a more than a little cynicism. To the Soviet leadership though, now gripped by a technological inferiority complex, the idea that Star Wars might not work was barely considered. From their perspective in just one month the US had announced a willingness to attack, plans to move missiles so close that the USSR would have little time to respond in an emergency, and long term plans to remove the Soviets’ ability to retaliate at all.

Publicly, Andropov announced that the US were undermining the very principles of deterrence. He did exactly the same privately when ex-US Ambassador Averell Harriman visited the new Soviet Premier off-the-record in June. As Harriman would report back to the White House, not only did Andropov seem genuinely worried about American intentions, but he also insisted that the US might force the Soviets to adopt a principle of Launch on Warning, and in doing so the risk of an accidental war as much as a deliberate one.

A tired-looking Andropov (centre) at the Supreme Soviet in June 1983

Once again, the warning signs were ignored. The Soviets, the US analysts insisted, were still just playing the game. Andropov was posturing in a desperate attempt to get the Pershing II missiles withdrawn. Nothing more, nothing less.

Countdown to war

On 1st September 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (KAL 007) from New York to Seoul via Anchorage took to the air. Unbeknownst to its crew, from the moment it had departed Alaska the flight had begun to drift off course. By the time it had crossed the Pacific it was almost 300km north of where it was meant to be — right over Soviet Kamchatka. What followed was nothing less than a tragedy.

In March 1983, the US Navy had once again engaged in a series of simulated attacks on Soviet territory aimed at probing their defences. This included overflights of Soviet bases on the disputed Kuril Islands. In the aftermath of these exercises, Soviet high command had dismissed the commanders at those bases for failing to respond with adequate force. Andropov had also quietly changed the Soviet rules of engagement nationwide for unknown aircraft. Paranoid and embarrassed, both globally and locally, the Soviets were determined not let the same thing happen again.

For the crew and passengers of KAL 007, the results of this policy were to prove fatal. Their course deviation took them into the same vicinity and the local Soviet forces reacted with brutal efficiency. Whether the plane was civilian or not didn’t matter. From the General in charge of Sokol Air Base to the pilots themselves, no one stopped to question their orders. KAL 007 was shot down, and 269 people died.

In the aftermath of the disaster neither the US nor Soviet governments covered themselves in glory. The Soviets initially denied their role in the plane’s destruction, then deliberately misled rescuers as to the location of its remains and interfered with the international search and rescue effort.

Meanwhile, sensing an almost unprecedented opportunity for a major propaganda advantage, the US released a wealth of intelligence and recordings making the Soviet Union’s culpability clear. On the 5th September Reagan condemned the flight’s destruction as a “crime against humanity [that] must never be forgotten.”

On the 9th September the Soviets publicly defended their actions and refused to apologise. They protested, farcically, that the plane had been a CIA spy plane. The evidence to the contrary was so overwhelming that the suggestion was treated in the West with the scorn it deserved. This was just Soviet propaganda, the US insisted, just another lie and part of the Cold War game.

The trouble was, as documents released after the collapse of the USSR would later show, once again the West had badly misread the situation. Driven to the point of absolute paranoia about US intentions, such a nadir had been reached in US / Soviet relations that Andropov himself actually believed this was true.

As New York airports began denying Soviet flights permission to land in the city for the UN, in direct contravention of the UN Charter, Andropov and the Soviet leadership felt that there was now no question about what was coming. The Soviet press, acting as a voice for the government, declared Reagan to be a madman and, ominously, compared him to Hitler.

In the US, the comparison was dismissed as tasteless and disgraceful, once again though the meaning beneath the insult was entirely missed. It wasn’t Hitler the dictator that the Soviet government were comparing Reagan to, it was Hitler the surprise invader.

As far as Andropov and the Soviet leadership were concerned, they had been manoeuvred into a corner. The US had manufactured a casus belli, and they were about to declare war.

Petrov makes his decision

All the above may seem like a particularly lengthy diversion from our main story, but it is vital context if one is to understand the enormous consequences of what Petrov did next.

If Lieutenant Colonel Petrov followed his orders, then with five missiles apparently in the air he had to issue a Launch Warning. It didn’t matter whether he believed it or not. It didn’t matter that the Soviet leadership had already decided that the Americans were about to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack. It didn’t matter that as a result, either literally or figuratively, the Soviet Union was operating at a state of Launch on Warning.

Petrov, like the men who had shot down flight KAL 007 had one job to do. Follow his orders. Accept the data. Issue a Launch Warning.

And, as he sat there amidst the chaos and alarms, with an intercom in one hand and the phone in the other, that’s exactly what Lieutenant Colonel Petrov didn’t do.

Because he’d finally realised what was bugging him.

“When people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles,” He told the Washington Post many years later. “You can do little damage with just five missiles.”

Ignore the data. Ignore the alarms. There was no nuclear attack, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov told the anxious, senior officials on the other end of the phone. It was a bug in the system.

“I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”

Petrov put down the phone, and waited for the world to end.

The aftermath

The world didn’t end, of course. Because Petrov was right.

It would take some time to discover what had happened that morning. Eventually though, Soviet technicians worked it out.

Unwilling to use geostationary satellites as part of their early warning system, the Oko designers had instead opted for a number of satellites in high elliptical orbits instead.

Only seven of the planned nine satellites had been in space and operational at the time of the false alarm, and because of the nature of their orbits only one, Cosmos 1382, had been in position to get line-of-sight on Malmstrom Air Force Base.

The satellites themselves relied on infrared heat detection in order to establish a launch and the system’s designers had naturally been careful to ensure that another source of heat — such as, say, the sun — couldn’t accidentally be picked up instead. The trouble was that in a very specific set of circumstances, with a single satellite at a specific angle, the sun at a specific position in the sky, and the wrong type of cloud at a very specific attitude, it turned out it was entirely possible for one of Oko’s satellites to register a false positive. Multiple false positives, in fact.

Which was exactly what had happened that morning.

Once the flaw in the warning system had been identified, it was quietly fixed. Geostationary satellites were also added, in order to ensure there was always a second position from which to take a reading.

Not that this would help Petrov of course. Initially praised by his superiors for his actions, once it became clear that there was a flaw in Oko the need to cover up their own embarrassment exceeded their desire to recognise that the officer in charge had made the correct call. Also, it was impossible to ignore the fact that whilst Petrov had in fact done the right thing, in order to do so he had actually disobeyed orders — a worrying trait in a Soviet officer.

Eventually, after a gruelling investigation process, Petrov was quietly admonished and removed from command on a technicality — he hadn’t written up his war diary as events unfolded during those critical minutes.

“I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other,” he explained, futilely, to the investigators, “and I don’t have a third hand.”

His protestations landed on deaf ears. Reassigned to lower grade work, his path to further promotion blocked, Petrov left the army shortly afterwards to take care of his ailing wife and work as a defence contractor. Today, he lives on a small pension in Moscow.

At the time, few people realised how close the world had come to nuclear war, indeed that obliviousness would, just a month later, almost result in disaster again during a military exercise called Able Archer. By that point, however, enough evidence had begun to mount in the West that the Soviets weren’t acting. In a final, desperate effort to convince the US of what was happening MI6 also finally gave the US full access to Gordievsky. It was a decision that would nearly prove fatal for the KGB officer, but that’s a story for another time. What mattered was that US analysts finally realised that the Soviets really did think the US was out to get them.

Neither then though, nor since, has the world ever truly come as close to nuclear war as it did that September night in 1983. A fact that would remain unknown until well after the Cold War had ended.

“Foreigners tend to exaggerate my heroism,” Petrov said much later in an interview with The Register. “I was in the right place at the right moment.”

He went on to insist he was just doing his duty.

That may well be true, but it is also slightly misleading. On that September morning Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov stopped and thought, rather than blindly followed orders. In doing so he did indeed do his duty, but it was not just to his country — it was to the human race.

And for that he deserves to be remembered.

Stanislav, in his old uniform, at home.

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