COSMIC TOP SECRET
The world came to within inches of nuclear war in 1983. An act of treachery helped avert it. This is the story of Agent Topaz.
Evil Empire
On 8 March 1983, while addressing the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an evil empire.
Reagan also argued against a nuclear weapons freeze and in favour of deploying nuclear-armed Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (Pershing-II) in Western Europe. This would cut the amount of advance warning the Soviet Union’s would get after launch from 30 minutes to just 8. Since Soviet missiles required at least five minutes for launch, the deployment of Pershing-II missiles made the Soviet leadership extremely nervous.
The next month, a three-aircraft-carrier task force (40 naval ships) carried out exercises just off the Kamchatka Peninsula. They carried out anti-submarine exercises in an area where Soviet subs conducted patrols.
The US Air Force, meanwhile, even sent its bombers on patrols right to the edge of Soviet airspace in simulated bombing runs.
Soviet concerns
A section of the Soviet leadership had anticipated something like this. Since the late 1970s, the Soviet leadership had become concerned about the US and NATO launching a sudden strike. Key members of the Soviet leadership believed that the US had set out to achieve decisive military superiority which would enable it to launch a sudden attack on the USSR.
USSR’s response included improving Warsaw Pact combat readiness, forward deployment of SPETSNAZ forces, improving readiness of Soviet ballistic missile submarines, forward deployment of nuclear capable aircraft, and massive military exercises that emphasised surviving and responding to a sudden enemy strike.
VRYAN
In 1979, they also had the KGB set up VRYAN, a computer model that used 40,000 weighted inputs. 300 KGB employees were responsible for collecting and inputting fresh data — military, political, and economic — into the model on a continuous basis.
VRYAN had one purpose: determine the differential between USSR and USA, and warn the Soviet Leadership when the differential became large enough that a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union was imminent.
The ultimate goal was to provide a simple numeral assessment of the two states’ (US, USSR) relative power. The United States political-economic-military power had a fixed value of 100 while the Soviet Union’s was presented as a percentage of the United States.
If the Soviet Union value was 60 or higher, it would be considered strong enough to prevent a preemptive strike, and if it was below 40, the USSR’s security could not be guaranteed, and a preemptive attack against the United States was strongly recommended.
Brezhnev’s death at the end of 1982, and with Reagan’s provocations added to its inputs, VRYAN was outputting values in the mid 40s, terrifying those in the Soviet leadership who were in the know.
The leadership responded to each simulation result by leaning on KGB and GRU to gather more data. And each time this additional data was fed to VRYAN, the simulation result deteriorated. The Soviet leadership was caught in a downward spiral of confidence.
At this point, as if things couldn’t get worse for Soviet confidence, the US invaded Grenada and wiped out Cuban troops aiding the leftist regime there.
All this coupled with Reagan’s announcement of a missile defence initiative in March 1983 and the VRYAN simulations fed into the Kremlin’s paranoia, and the ‘Evil Empire’ began preparing for the worst.
ABLE ARCHER 83
Soviet Military Intelligence — GRU — was tasked with obtaining information about a major NATO military exercise named ABLE ARCHER 83. A recurring command post exercise, ABLE ARCHER had been conducted every year to practice nuclear release procedures. But the exercise in 1983 was to occur under special circumstances.
Large demonstrations had erupted in Germany and other NATO countries against the recent deployment of American ballistic and cruise missiles in Western Europe. The Soviet Union had shot down a Korean passenger jet KAL-007. And Hezbollah had bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut.
ABLE ARCHER 83 followed two other NATO exercises — AUTUMN FORGE and REFORGER, both involving tens of thousands of NATO troops. It differed from previous ABLE ARCHER exercises in the inclusion of intermediate range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles deployed in Western Europe.
All this was seen by the Soviet leadership as prelude to war. They conducted significantly more reconnaissance flights as compared to previous years, placed their aircraft and troops in East Germany and Poland on alert, and had KGB and GRU residencies report any unusual military activity. They even transported nuclear warheads to launchers and assigned priority targets.
NATO leadership completely missed these signals, and continued with ABLE ARCHER 83, further fuelling Soviet fears that the exercise would lead to a devastating nuclear strike against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries.
The Soviet Union began a larger scale counter deployment to either dissuade NATO or preempt it. Oleg Gordievsky, who worked for British Intelligence while serving as head of the KGB in London, warned MI6 that the Soviets were inches away from launching a preemptive nuclear strike on NATO.
The world came closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Moderating intelligence
Around that time, the East German intelligence service — Staatssicherheitsdienst, commonly known as the Stasi — reached out to the KGB with intelligence from the heart of NATO. Their agent, codename Topaz, had sent them copies of NATO documents related to ABLE ARCHER 83. The documents were classified COSMIC TOP SECRET, NATO’s highest level of classification.
This was credible intelligence. Not only were the documents numbered and complete — assuring the KGB that nothing had been omitted — the Stasi explained that Agent Topaz was working in the nerve centre of NATO as head of the Current Intelligence Group. This was the one office in NATO that consolidated all intelligence, whether about the enemy or NATO itself, in a single location.
Effectively, the Stasi told the KGB, not only did Agent Topaz know everything that NATO knew about the Warsaw Pact countries, he also knew everything that NATO knew about itself.
Agent Topaz’s intelligence aligned well with reports sent back by KGB and GRU Residents in Western Europe and the US, who were bewildered by the requests they were receiving. Moscow Centre kept asking them how imminent a NATO attack was, and these Residents saw & reported zero signs of any mobilisation.
Taken together, these data points convinced the Soviet leadership to hold off on pressing the launch button. ABLE ARCHER 83 ended, and Soviet forces were ordered to stand down. It was only a couple of weeks afterwards that NATO noticed.
Agent Topaz
Agent Topaz continued working for the Stasi until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that point, Stasi officers destroyed as many documents as they could, and went to ground. The Stasi ceased to exist, and Agent Topaz believed the assurances of his handlers when they told him that the documents that could identify him no longer existed.
Many other Stasi documents survived. In 1990, German authorities found references to Topaz in surviving files, and tried to identify him. But in the absence of crucial documents that could map the codename to an actual name, and with former Stasi officers unwilling to cooperate, they remained stuck at the codename.
As 1993 rolled in, German intelligence found a trove of Stasi documents that had previously remained hidden. This enabled them to investigate 2,000 Stasi agents in Germany. Among them was Topaz.
In July that year, German authorities located and arrested Rainer Rupp.
Rainer Rupp
Rupp was a 22-year-old economics student who was active in anti-establishment politics. After eating a bowl of ghoulash at a restaurant one day, Rupp realised that he was 50 pfennigs short. A man seated at the next table paid the balance amount, and they became friends.
As their friendship grew, the man brought Rupp to East Berlin and introduced him to Stasi officers. Rupp agreed to spy for them, and returned.
But as a student, he had very little intelligence to deliver. So he recruited his girlfriend who worked as a secretary at the British military mission in Brussels. She later joined NATO as a secretary in 1971, and helped Rupp smuggle documents from NATO to East Germany from 1972 to 1980.
She stopped spying after the birth of their child.
By then Rupp had joined NATO in the economics unit, and began smuggling documents he came across himself. The duo would photograph them in the basement of their home using a microfilm camera, and smuggle the microfilm to his handlers via dead drops by hiding them in a modified Tuborg beer can.
From 1977 to 1989, Rainer Rupp delivered more than 1,737 NATO documents to the Stasi. These included:
such potent secrets as plans for the use of nuclear weapons in the event of a war; catalogues of various troop strengths and armament levels; reports on military exercises; descriptions of NATO alarm systems, and reports on the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, the planned missile-defense system known in America as “Star Wars.”
At his trial, Rupp claimed he had done it for ideological reasons. But prosecutors pointed out that the Stasi had paid him $400,000 for his efforts.
If you enjoyed reading this post, you might also enjoy reading my spy novels: The Let Bhutto Eat Grass series of spy novels deals with nuclear weapons espionage in 1970s India, Pakistan, and Europe.
Further reading
The Soviet “War Scare” — President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (warning: PDF file)
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