S1E7: Where the Mind Starts to Melt

Okay, stop me if you've heard this one. What do you get when the former head of the KGB and the former head of the CIA walk into a funeral.

Hi atop the Kremlin to night a Soviet flag at half staff, a symbol of mourning for Leonide ilitch Reshnev. Reshnev will be laid to rest in Red Square beside the Kremlin wall.

They came to Red Square today to bete Reshnev, and not particularly to praise him. So it is when dictators die.

Okay, so it's not actually a joke. It's nineteen eighty two, Moscow, almost two years before able archer, former Soviet leader and now dead corpse leon At Brezhnev is being carried in an open coffin procession through Red Square and.

His companions and friends and rivals watched their last glimpse.

Software Heads of state from across the world flocked to Moscow to attend the funeral. It was the ultimate Cold War invitation. I mean, who's who of who might press the button? Western leaders are there to pay their respects to their longtime adversary leon At Brezhnev, but also there to meet their new one, Yuri and drop off CenTra, and drop Off delivers Brezhnev's eulogy, which is really more

And Andropov says some pretty extraordinary things.

This is Simon Miles, cold War historian.

He says to Bush, look, you and I both know that we need to say things for public consumption in our countries that we don't necessarily meet, primarily mean things about one another.

Is this en coded language?

Says this explicitly, and then he goes on to say, you know, we have the responsibility as leaders of the two nuclear armed superpowers to understand the difference between when I'm just saying nasty things about you because I've got to because that's what you do it parades, and when you are actually threatening me.

And drop Off is essentially saying, I know that Reagan will talk shit about me, and you know that I will talk shit about him, but we both need to know that sometimes it's just for show.

Two leaders reminding one another about the nature of the Cold War, that it is this kind of two level game where you have your public consumption and then you have your policy.

Does this mean that and drop Off knew the entire time that Reagan's speeches were only speeches es Does it mean the reaction to Able Archer was just theater. So far this season, we've talked about how Reagan's tough guy rhetoric pushed the Soviets to the brink, and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire. How the Soviets became blinded by their own paranoia and sent their spies looking for signs of an impending attack.

And count the number of lights on in the Pentagon at night.

How the US sent spyplanes to poke the Soviet bear.

Putting the fear of God like literally into the Soviets.

How the Soviets were so jumpy they shot down a commercial plane.

I bought a Korean jumber jip that drifted into Soviet territory.

How the Soviets deployed a faulty missile detection system that tested one man's resolve.

He said it was like sitting in a frying pan.

How the Soviets believed that an attack was actually happening during Able Archer and so they put their nuclear arsenal on a hair trigger.

US wasn't too much moment.

And after all that, how the CIA was convinced that the whole snaffoo was really no big deal. It's just propaganda, until one man, Lieutenant General Leonard Breudes, begged the intelligence community to take Able Archer seriously. You might want to look into this because it's too important not to. And how finally, after decades of denial, the intelligence community had come to believe that they had made grave errors and that Able Archer truly was a nuclear near miss.

I think it was a serious matter. It deserves more attention than it's received.

But what if that version of the story is all wrong? What if the Able Archer war scare really was just an act inside an act Rapp did an even bigger act man if only Russia had some sort of nesting folkloric toy that we could use as a metaphor here. Oh well, so, once again, what do you get when the former head of the KGB and the former head of the CIA walk into a funeral? You get mine games of a nuclear proportion?

Or do you.

I'm ed Helms and this is Snafu? A podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On season one, we're telling you the story of a snafu that is gigantic, absurd, and terrifying. Able Archer eighty three, the nineteen eighty three NATO military exercise that almost led to a real nuclear war? Or did it? This episode, we're pulling apart the fabric of the able Archer story and asking the question, what if we've got this story all wrong.

I went looking for these documents not with a mind to disproving the able Archer thesis, but rather just to get even more insight on this amazing Cold War story.

It was twenty fourteen. Historian Simon Miles, a young researcher with a nose for Cold War mysteries, caught a severe case of the able Archer bug.

I was excited to try to find even more of the picture on how we all almost perished.

His plan was to hit the archives in order to figure out what the Soviets were actually thinking during Able Archer KGB archives in Moscow were still locked down, but Simon could look in the archives of former Soviet allies where they had helped the Soviets with Operation Ryan. That proverbial tic tac toe Board of Death used to gauge whether the US was preparing for a nuclear attack.

In the archives of some of those former Allied states who were participants in Project Rion, who were feeding information into this thing, we actually have amazing insight into what's going on.

The first leg of his journey takes him to the Czech Republic, former Soviet state, czech Isslovakia, where he starts to dig into the files of the STB, the Czechoslovakian secret police.

In Prague, right by the river, in this pretty sort of staid reading room. It's very sort of communist chic because it was, you know, an official STV facility, so it's a very sort of atmospheric place to work.

So Simon walks into the communist chic archive. Imagine his excitement, right, He's going to pull back the iron curtain and find all the frantic messages the Soviets were sending back and forth, the flash telegrams and panicked alerts.

I remember it pretty well actually, because the archive staff, who were all very very young, we're having a party, and then kind of behind these doors you can hear laughing and classes clinking.

Hey, archivists like to party too, right and check archivists. Oh my god, don't get me started anyway, somehow, ignoring the chance to attend the greatest party of his life, Simon takes a seat at a big table and begins to dig in.

And so I got my hands on a exercise report on the entire Autumn Forge series of exercises. And you know, when they give that to you, you think, oh, wow, I mean, this is it. This is the document. Let's see how close we all got to blowing ourselves up.

Simon opens the folder and begins scanning.

I am reading through this Booklet you know, it's got these green kind of card paper covers, and you know, things are tracking with what I knew about what had happened, and in real granular detail, I should say.

It has the full accounting of Autumn Forge eighty three, the nineteen thousand troops flying into West Germany under complete radio silence, the massive rehearsal for war, all leading up to the final act.

And then I get to the able Archer piece. And the first thing that strikes me is how short it is. So the conversation about able Archer is barely a page long. When I'm thinking to myself, wow, this is really really weird.

Well, if this is.

A big deal, yeah, this should be we should have a lot of the play by play here. Did these guys miss it?

Spoiler alert? They did not miss it.

What it does not talk about is any sense that there was heightened danger, that there was sort of something more pernicious afoot behind what the NATO and the Americans were doing. Rather, it traces, with a striking degree of accuracy, exactly what was happening and why it was being done.

And that's it. That's it. No panic that Able Archer was an insidious cover for a re nuclear attack, just an accurate account of a routine NATO nuclear exercise, with an apparent recognition that it was all simply an enormously violent game of let's pretend. So what Simon discovered in that archive wild Czech historians were next door sipping champagne and making flirty remarks about Franz Kafka, was that, according to the East, there was nothing unusual about Able Archer eighty three at all.

And so that didn't sort of change my mind, but it made me start asking some really hard questions.

It wasn't what Simon was expecting, but maybe the Czechs were just out of the loop. Maybe the Russians were like, nah, why bother filling them in? They never invite us to their cool archive parties. But the East Germans, on the other hand, they went together like Sonny and Cher, chocolate and peanut butter. If the Soviets were scared of a nuclear attack during Able Archer, the East Germans would know, Oh, so Simon headed to Germany.

The East German military records are all in a beautiful town in Baden Wurtenberg called Freiberg and Breisgau. They're in a suburban area next to a kind of the German equivalent of home depot, across the street from a brothel. But it's a phenomenal place to work, naturally, And I start looking through all of these materials, and here again we have access to briefings and intelligence reports on what

And it actually says explicitly.

That none of this means that the West sort of anticipates a heightened threat of war or anything like that. The big messages able archer another phase of Autumn forge. Really basically there's nothing to see here.

Simon begins to pour over transcripts of interviews with Soviet officials.

And what I'm reading from these people who would be in the know by virtue of their positions, they're saying that we're not at the brink from apocalypse.

So on the one hand, we have Leonard Brud's account of the Soviet Air Force loading nuclear weapons onto planes and standing by on high alert, and on the other hand, the Soviet records show nothing.

It's very possible that US intelligence saw those signs. It's very possible that leaders in the US intelligence community, the US military, maybe even in the US political system drew those conclusions.

But it's still.

Possible that they were all entirely wrong.

What so, no misinterpreted NATO messages, no nuclear near miss.

I think in order to make those claims, we really need a strong piece of evidence from the Eastern Block, from the other side of the Iron Curtain, and that doesn't exist. So now I've kind of got a problem on my hands. If you will, because we have this universally almost accepted story about a near miss with nuclear war, and I've got this body of evidence that's saying the opposite.

What the hell happened here? If the Soviets were as terrified as we thought, with the nukes on planes and the tic TAC toe board and the readiness to end life on Earth, why was there no record of it in Eastern documents? Simon decided to look at all the evidence side by side and try to figure out where this story, what he came to believe was a myth, came from.

I was funneling down from what's commonly presented as sort of this overwhelming body of evidence. Dozens and dozens and dozens of sources are saying this, well, really, dozens and dozens and dozens of sources are repeating this one pretty sketchy claim by a Soviet double agent.

The double agent with the sketchy claim, you already know him well, Oleg Gordievsky.

The Americans exercise may be preparation to a sudden new play attack, But what.

Reason would Gordievsky have to lie about able archer. I'm so glad you asked. It's nineteen eighty five. The world is in slack jawed wonder at Sylvester Stallone's pex in both Rocky four and Rambo two. And it's been a year and a half since Oleg Gordievski met with his MI six handler warning that the United States and the Soviet Union were on the precipice of nuclear war. Since Able Archer eighty three, Oleg has further risen in the

Asked why he did what he did, Aims said money was his main motivation.

That's the case you bill runs as it was abregistration, and yes, they decided to play contain mouse game with me.

The KGB knew they were compromised by a double agent, and they suspected it was Gordievski, but they didn't know it was him for sure, not yet. One day, they scooped him up and drove him to a bungalow. They spiked his drink and interrogated him for hours. Gordievski was in a daze, hallucinating. He tried to tell himself to deny, deny, deny, but he wasn't really aware of what he was saying. After five hours, he blacked out. To this day, he

I started to look on tho there was behind me. It was very intimidating. During the Cold War, everybody who was in touch was the foot of the Intelligence Service, the service Union, each officer, all the court, and all were shot all.

Gordievski would later describe this moment in his life as utterly hopeless. He was thinking, instead of even trying to escape, he might as well just give up, wait for the bullet in the back of his neck. But his days passed constantly looking over his shoulder. Gordievski somehow found his resolve.

And then they started to preparation to the game.

But if he had any chance of survival, he'd need to leave alone, leave his family behind. There was no time to second guess his decision. Gordievski was in a race against the clock. Each day he failed to get out of the Soviet Union was another day for the KGB to confirm his identity as their traitorous double agent. Gordievsky activated his escape plan on a Tuesday, at seven thirty pm, Gordievski stood under a lamppost outside a bread

This was a scheme. It meant I would be picked up on Saturday the same week at two.

O'clock, which meant by Saturday at two pm. Gordievsky had to get himself to the pickup point, a boulder by the side of the road in the countryside near the Finish border, and he had to do it without being detected by the KGB. On Friday, July nineteenth, Gordievsky did the hardest thing he'd ever have to do. He packed his bags and said goodbye to his family.

I shook up the Currells Court trained to Lenongrad.

Gordioevsky had shaken the kgbtail for now, but they could catch up at any moment. On the overnight train to Leningrad, Gordioewski settled into his top bunk and took to sedatives because you know, he was feeling a little anxious. Apparently, the sedatives knocked him out so hard that when the train abruptly stopped, he rolled right off the top bunk and bashed his head. Now blood was dripping down his face,

About thirty miles before the border. I was hiding in the woods at an appointed time, which was two o'clock to British cars stopped just exactly where I was lying.

You can still hear the wonder in his voice. This one in a million miracle had happened.

I jumped into the boots of the car and they went to the border.

Gordioevsky's brush with death was even closer than he knew. He would later learn the KGB had confirmed his identity as the double agent the week before he escaped. To this day, we still don't know why they waited to pound, but they did, and after a miraculous and somewhat claustrophobic escape, he was now on his way to building a new life. A former KGB spy defected to England. Except it wasn't over for Gordievski. Sure he was free, he escaped the

I'm afraiden and I met George Bush.

On July twenty first, nineteen eighty seven. Oleg Gordievsky was invited for a meeting with Ronald Reagan and then Vice President George H. W. Bush at the White House. I guess Nancy's astrologer said, Olegg was chill. Yeah, no, I'm not letting that go. Reagan's diary that day talked about attending an event with Clint Eastwood and getting his contact lenses cleaned. Then he writes, forgot this morning had a meeting with Colonel Oleg Gordievski, the Soviet KGB officer who defected to England.

Did Reagan ever talk to you about your reports? No, the Reagan didn't talk to me about my reports, but he short good knowledge how me and my significance. But he was not such a brainy man.

Okay, don't know why you had to throw that burn in there, as Gordievsky remembers that their conversation was a sober one because Gordioevsky had a favor to ask. He wanted to get his family out of Russia. Not actually a lot to ask when your calling card is the guy who saved the world from nuclear annihilation, and Reagan decided to help him.

He said an important thing, I will give the instruction to all the bodies to fight for your family. That was enough because immediately the National Security Council, the States Department, and the CIA started to also for the family.

Reagan later wrote in his diary Margaret Thatcher is working on the Soviet says we are. We're going to hold back and see if she can get his wife and two children out of Russia. Continuing on, he wrote, I just hope Oleg appreciates this enough that he never makes a snide comment about the size of my brain. All Right, I made that up. It took four years for them to succeed. In the end, it all came down to a show of good faith by a new Russian leader

Gordievski is, in many ways the er source for the Able Archer story.

Here's Simon Miles again. He says that even though the Archer story became larger than life in the West, it all goes back to one single source. It was all from Oleg Gordievsky. He was the one who told six that Soviets were afraid of nuclear war. It was Gordievsky's account that prompted the CIA to look into Able Archer. And it was Gordievsky's story that spurred Leonard Perutz to write his dramatic retirement letter which led to the PIVAB.

And so you could imagine a situation in which a spy is saying, hey, look at what I did.

I saved you from nuclear war.

And you won't get my wife and children, whom I left behind out of the Soviet Union for me.

But hold on a second. There's proof, right, definitive proof. That flash telegram that Gordievsky says he received on November eighth or November ninth, he didn't remember, which, you know, the one that said the kg BE believed that the countdown to nuclear war had begun under cover of Able Archer. Now all at Gordievsky and his handlers kept meticulous records. He would go on to publish two books that included hundreds of actual cables he received from Moscow during his

Little they're afraid, really, they'll think, because it's regularly as capable. But it does mean that, says they will bring it to the NUCLEU. That's why it was. I was never in panic and didn't drunk to the officers as it reports about Abel Archer, because I felt this was not hundred percent serious? Is missing sense? It will never come, will come to freition.

Here Gordievski is actually contradicting the Able Archer story and saying that really it wasn't a moment of acute danger. There wasn't really a sense that this was preparation for a surprise attack, and so on and so forth.

So what does all this mean for the Able Archer story? If the Soviet documents don't make Able Archer sound all that serious, and Gordievsky may actually be, you know, exaggerating a little, Is this whole story just a bunch of bullshit?

Rolled around, got a message of a top level spy in the organization.

Eh boy, NATO knew there was a mole, some guy who went by the code name Topaz. The intel suggested that this Topaz was a senior NATO official, not some paper pusher. Allowing a Communist spy into the innermost circle was beyond humiliating. The discovery was catastrophic.

As a result, they started to search for this Toolpus.

So while everyone else in Brussels was roasting chestnuts on an open fire and getting busy under the missiletoe like they were Czech archivists, Rupp was hurrying to cover his tracks. And then shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the people raided the stazi's headquarters in Berlin. What they found shocked the world. Mountains of files. Somewhere married in those Stazi files was the truth about agent Topaz's identity repro but it wouldn't be easy to find. Papers had

And for reasons I don't want to go into, I could follow all their work.

Remember, Rupp was still on the inside. He was even participating in meetings about the Topaz hunt. Hey guys, got a hot lead on this Topaz guy. Pretty sure he's either in Buenos Aires or Singapore. Anyway. For a while, he was able to remain just barely one step ahead. NATO began to get desperate.

They've been big cash rewards offered to my former case officer. I mean like in this that spy films, a case of cash put on the table.

Honestly, despite the danger, NATO just couldn't seem to make progress, and rhiner Up began to believe maybe he'd make it out of this thing unscathed.

They got closed, but they never got close enough. Eventually thought I was basically safe, and I was already looking for a new job, because quite clearly I didn't want to stay at NATO.

But piece by piece, those shredded documents were coming together, the codes were getting cracked, and NATO was closing in.

And so they waited until I came back to Germany for the anniversary of my mother.

He means his mom's birthday. It was July thirty first, nineteen ninety three. Seventy German agents hid around Rupp's parents' house as Rup and his wife and Christine arrived to celebrate. They were both arrested.

What happened to you once you were caught, Well, i'ment to prison.

Happy birthday, mom, I'm going to prison. Ryaner And and Christine Rupp were charged for their crimes, and they each faced life in prison.

It was not easy.

And Christine was allowed to be home with the Rupp's children as she awaited trial, but he would await his fate in a prison cell. Rhyiner Rupp would later say that in a way he was glad the jig was up. He didn't want his kids somehow caught up in his double life. Eventually, and Christine Rupp was found guilty of a betting treason, but when the judge considered her sentence, he noted that she was caring for her children and that the damage she did to the West was ultimately

I was sentenced to.

Twelve years.

Eventually twelve years. The judge said that Reiner rupps espionage created a danger of particularly grave disadvantage for Western Germany. He said, if the Cold War hadn't ended, he would have sentenced him to life. So Briner Rupp began his twelve year prison sentence, and it's then that he and his handlers immediately got to work on a pr campaign, a campaign designed to enlist public support in getting RUP's

He said the KJB was convinced that there's gonna be an attack.

That's the German Spy Museum's Florian Schimakowski. Grossman's account was credible. He was, after all, a big dog in the STAZI, the KGB's most trusted intelligence ally, and he was trying to use RUP's insider NATO intelligence to diffuse all the tension. But he said the KGB was so paranoid he couldn't get them to see reason.

When I'm telling a fisherman that there are no fish in the pond and they should actually stop fishing, but the KJB didn't do it. They just were very, very nervous. So they actually, from from their point of view, it was very dangerous.

So dangerous that during NATO's annual Able Archer exercise, the Soviets were utterly convinced that the time for a nuclear attack had finally arrived.

And he said that the Russens were actually responding to the whole situation at that time in an active way and not in a reactive way. So he said, from what they know, the Soviet Union was preparing to strike.

Grossman backed up the story that at the precise moment the Soviets were convinced and attack was imminent, rain Or Rupp sent a coded message from a calculator, a message that may have saved the world.

Grossmann is convinced that Rubb played the whole part, a huge part in that in calming the KJB down.

Grossman's claim was this, Yeah, Rupp was technically a trader to West Germany, but his espionage actually wound up saving West Germany, along with the rest of the world, from the catastrophe of nuclear war.

He was not spying to harm anybody, buddy, and he was never spying actually to prepare a Soviet attack. And that's quite without a doubt. He was always spying to prevent war from happening.

It was a sexy story and a very convenient one. Maybe it could get Rupp's sentence reduced. Petitions began to circulate advocating for Rhiner RUP's release. Even the winner of the German Peace Prize appealed on RUP's behalf and eventually it worked.

So in the end, the political situation kind of I think, softened up so that I was released after seven years in jail.

In July of two thousand, Rhiner Up was released from prison five years early. He reunited with his wife. They're still together to this day, living a long and by all accounts, happy life in Germany.

But of course you have to keep in mind it's hard to actually figure out if everything is one hundred percent.

Two thanks to them.

For example, Rhiner Rupp can say, well, look, we help preserve the peace. Actually you should thank because we helped you stop a nuclear war.

This is Douglas Salvage, an historian and probably the world's foremost expert on the Stazi. Douglas is one of many historians who aren't really buying what the Stazi are selling. If you catch my meaning, I'm saying he thinks it's bullshit.

Now, there are a couple of problems with this. First of all, there's a database of basically incoming intelligence reports, including black writer. Rupp is sending, we can use this and for the year that we're talking about nineteen eighty three. It's a very good database of incoming information for Eastrum and foreign intelligence. I checked and there's like no new incoming intelligence regarding nuclear weapons from Rupp before November of nineteen eighty three.

Not only that, there was no record in the archive of Rupp's emergency calculator message during Able Archer. All we have is the word of Rupp and the Stazi.

I suppose it's possibly gave a film called of role for Maybe there's something they forgot to record. I don't think that's the case. I won't say he's intentionally aligned. He might just be mistaken, or he might remember it a certain way.

I don't know, Doug, he seems pretty sure.

Do you remember sending a message I remember sending.

At the time of Abe Lacha. Yeah.

By the time ryaner Rupp began telling his story, Oleg Gordievski had already published a couple of books where he told his able larger story. It all begs the question did Rhiner Rupp hear about Olegg's account and see an opportunity to rehabilitate his own image by manufacturing a corroboration.

I am a firm believer, and the idea that you can't say just because you haven't found the evidence or the evidence doesn't exist, that it disproves something. So I'm not going to say that it disproves that there was this heightened sense of thread, or the absence of evidence disproves that you Rubb played this important role. Maybe it's even true, but there's no other supporting evidence that I've

Rubb had a motive. He wanted to shorten his prison sentence, and he had the opportunity because he could basically just piggyback on the story Gordievsky was already telling. Gordievsky also had a motive. He needed to get his family out of the Soviet Union, and coincidentally, neither of them have been able to produce the key evidence supporting their able Archer heroics. Gordievski he was never able to produce a

It went through the mail slit, so there's kind of a thud onto the floor that was about one hundred pages thick with government and dress government stamps.

So I knew it might be good. My heart started beating a little bit. Snaffoo is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Golan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chubb, and Whitney Donaldson. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, Associate producer Torry Smith. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis, and so I can say any damn thing I want.