— Ch. 1 · Origins Of Operation Ryan —
Able Archer 83.
~6 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
In May 1981, a closed-session meeting of senior KGB officers and Soviet leaders took place. General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov bluntly announced that the United States was preparing a secret nuclear attack on the USSR. To combat this threat, Andropov ordered the KGB and GRU military foreign intelligence arm to begin Operation RYaN. This operation became the largest, most comprehensive peacetime intelligence-gathering operation in Soviet history. Agents abroad monitored figures who would decide to launch a nuclear attack. They tracked service personnel who would implement the attack. They watched facilities from which an attack might originate. The goal may have been to discover first intent and then preempt it. Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB official ever to defect, attributed the initiative to a lethal combination of Reaganite rhetoric and Soviet paranoia. He believed Brezhnev and Andropov were old-fashioned men easily influenced by Communist dogmas. They truly feared Ronald Reagan would push the nuclear button. A Czechoslovak intelligence officer working closely with the KGB noted his counterparts were obsessed with the historical parallel between 1941 and 1983. That feeling was visceral and deeply affected Soviet thinking.
Escalating Cold War Tensions
Psychological operations by the United States began in mid-February 1981 and continued intermittently until 1983. These included clandestine naval operations that stealthily accessed Soviet territorial waters. In 1981, a group of 83 American, British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships sailed through the Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom gap undetected by Soviet radar. They reached the Kola Peninsula without being seen. US intelligence ships were regularly posted off the coast of the Crimean Peninsula. American bombers flew directly towards Soviet airspace, peeling off at the last moment. Dr. William Schneider saw classified after-action reports indicating U.S. flight activity. He said it really got to them because they did not know what it all meant. FleetEx '83-1 occurred in April 1983 as the largest fleet exercise held to date in the North Pacific. Approximately 40 ships carried 23,000 crewmembers and 300 aircraft. On April 4, six U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat fighters flew over a Soviet military base in Zeleny Island. The Soviets ordered an overflight of the Aleutian Islands in retaliation. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down on the 1st of September 1983, killing all 269 passengers and crew. Larry McDonald, a sitting member of Congress from Georgia, died aboard that plane.