Category
Cold War Files
Operation Gladio, Stay-Behind, Project Sunshine, U-2.
13 articles
Able Archer 83: The NATO Exercise That Nearly Started a Nuclear War
In November 1983, at the tensest moment of the late Cold War, NATO conducted a command-post exercise called Able Archer 83, simulating the procedures for escalating a conflict all the way to nuclear war. It was, on its face, a routine drill. But it took place against a backdrop of extraordinary danger: a year in which President Reagan had branded the Soviet Union an 'evil empire' and launched his 'Star Wars' missile-defense plan; in which NATO was deploying Pershing II missiles in Europe that could strike Moscow in as little as six minutes; and in which the Soviets had, weeks earlier, shot down a Korean airliner, killing 269 people. Above all, it took place while the Soviet leadership, under the ailing and deeply suspicious former KGB chief Yuri Andropov, was in the grip of a genuine fear that the United States was preparing a surprise nuclear first strike — a fear so acute that the KGB was running a vast intelligence operation to watch for the signs. Into this atmosphere came Able Archer, so realistic in its simulation of a march to nuclear release that some in Moscow reportedly feared it might be the real thing, a cover for an actual attack — and the Soviets may have begun to ready their own nuclear forces in response. Whether the world truly stood on the brink, or whether the danger has been exaggerated, is debated to this day. This is the story of Able Archer 83 — the exercise that may have brought the world closer to nuclear war than anyone realized at the time.
Corona: The Secret Spy Satellites That Watched the Cold War
In August 1960, months after a Soviet missile brought down an American U-2 spy plane and ended the era of manned overflights of the USSR, the United States achieved something that would prove far more important: it retrieved, from a capsule that had been ejected from a satellite in orbit and parachuted down over the Pacific to be snatched from the air by a passing aircraft, a roll of film containing photographs of the Soviet Union. That single mission photographed more Soviet territory than all the U-2 flights combined. It was the first success of Corona, a top-secret American reconnaissance-satellite program run jointly by the CIA and the Air Force and hidden behind a cover story about a scientific satellite called Discoverer. Over the following twelve years, Corona satellites would photograph the Soviet Union, China, and other closed societies from orbit, returning their film to Earth in a series of astonishing mid-air recoveries, and would transform the ability of the United States to see inside its adversaries. In doing so, Corona did more than gather secrets: by letting each superpower verify the true size of the other's forces, it punctured dangerous myths, made arms-control treaties possible, and, in its quiet way, helped stabilize the terrifying balance of the nuclear age. Classified for decades, its existence was revealed only in 1995. This is the story of Corona — the secret eyes that America put in the sky, and how they changed the Cold War.
The Cuban Missile Crisis: Thirteen Days on the Nuclear Brink
In October 1962, the Cold War came within a hair's breadth of becoming a nuclear one. For thirteen days that month, the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other over the discovery that the Soviets had secretly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles from the American coast, capable of striking much of the United States within minutes. American reconnaissance had caught the deployment while the missile sites were still being built; President John F. Kennedy imposed a naval blockade of the island and demanded the missiles' removal; and for the better part of two weeks the world held its breath as the two superpowers, each armed with the power to destroy the other and much of humanity, edged toward the abyss. It was, and remains, the closest the world has ever come to full-scale nuclear war — closer, it later emerged, than even the participants understood at the time, with more than one moment in which a single decision, or a single frightened officer, might have triggered catastrophe. That it ended not in annihilation but in a negotiated settlement was the product of nerve, restraint, back-channel diplomacy, a secret deal, and no small amount of luck. This is the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the secret deployment, the discovery, the standoff, the near-catastrophes, and the fragile bargain that saved the world.
Project Azorian: The CIA's Secret Salvage of a Soviet Submarine
In 1968, a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine, the K-129, sank in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii, carrying its crew, its nuclear missiles, and its secrets to the bottom, nearly three miles down. The Soviets searched and failed to find it; the United States, using its network of undersea listening posts, located the wreck. And then the CIA conceived one of the boldest schemes in the history of espionage: to raise the submarine — or a large part of it — from a depth of some 4,900 meters, a feat of deep-sea salvage far beyond anything ever attempted, in order to seize the Soviet nuclear missiles, warheads, and, most tantalizingly, the code machines and cryptographic materials aboard. To do it in secret, the agency built a purpose-designed salvage ship equipped with an enormous mechanical claw, and hid the entire enterprise behind an elaborate cover story: that the vessel, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, belonged to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and was mining valuable metals from the sea floor. In the summer of 1974, the ship attempted the impossible. It succeeded in lifting the submarine partway to the surface — before a portion broke off and fell back into the abyss. Exactly what was recovered remains, in part, classified to this day. And when journalists exposed the operation, the CIA's refusal to comment gave the world a phrase that has been with it ever since: that it could 'neither confirm nor deny.' This is the story of Project Azorian.
The Rosenberg Case: Atomic Spies and a Contested Execution
On 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York, convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. They were the only two American civilians ever put to death for spying during the Cold War, and they left behind two young sons. Their case had become, by the time of their deaths, one of the most bitterly divisive in American history: to their defenders, they were innocent victims of anti-communist hysteria, framed and killed to feed the Red Scare; to the prosecution and much of the public, they were traitors who had handed Stalin the atomic bomb and deserved to die. For decades the truth was fiercely contested, the two camps talking past each other. Then, in 1995, the United States released the Venona decrypts — intercepted Soviet intelligence cables — and, with the later opening of Soviet archives, the picture finally came clear, and it satisfied neither side. Julius Rosenberg had, in fact, been a Soviet spy, running a significant espionage ring. But Ethel's guilt was another matter entirely: the testimony that sent her to the chair was later admitted to be a lie, and she appears to have been, at most, a knowing bystander, executed to pressure her husband. This is the story of the Rosenberg case — of real espionage, real injustice, and the hard truth that lies between the two myths that grew up around it.
The U-2 Incident: The Spy Plane That Wrecked a Summit
On the morning of 1 May 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft — a strange, glider-winged spy plane built to fly higher than any fighter could reach — was cruising at some 70,000 feet over the heart of the Soviet Union, its cameras photographing military installations, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploded near it and sent it spinning out of the sky. The pilot, a CIA contract flyer named Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to earth and was captured alive near the city of Sverdlovsk. What followed was one of the most humiliating episodes in the history of American Cold War diplomacy. Believing the pilot dead and the plane destroyed, the United States put out a cover story: that a NASA 'weather research' plane had strayed off course after its pilot reported oxygen trouble. Then the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sprang his trap, revealing that the pilot was alive, had confessed, and that the wreckage — cameras, film, and all — was in Soviet hands. President Eisenhower was exposed in a lie before the world, and, breaking with precedent, ultimately acknowledged that the United States had been conducting espionage overflights. The incident detonated days before a long-planned summit in Paris, which it duly destroyed, ending a fragile thaw and plunging the Cold War back into deep freeze. This is the story of the U-2 incident — the secret program, the shootdown, the collapsing lie, and the summit it took down with it.
The Building of the Berlin Wall, 1961
For more than a decade after the Second World War, Berlin was the great open wound of the Cold War and its most dangerous flashpoint. The city lay deep inside communist East Germany, yet it was itself divided into a Soviet-controlled east and a Western-controlled west, and the border that ran through it remained, almost uniquely, open. Through that gap, across the 1950s, millions of East Germans simply walked to freedom — boarding a train or a tram in the east and stepping off in the west, and from there flying out to a new life. They were disproportionately the young, the skilled, the educated: doctors, engineers, teachers, the very people a struggling socialist state could least afford to lose. By 1961 this haemorrhage threatened the survival of East Germany itself, and its leaders, with the backing of the Soviet Union, resolved to stop it the only way they could — by closing the door. In the early hours of Sunday 13 August 1961, East German troops and police moved into position along the sector boundary and began to seal it with barbed wire, tearing the city in two while most of its people slept. Within days the wire was giving way to concrete, and a permanent wall was rising through streets and squares, separating families, neighbours, and workplaces with a suddenness that stunned the world. The Western powers protested furiously but did not intervene, for they understood that the wall, monstrous as it was, did not threaten their own position in West Berlin — and that to challenge it by force risked a war that might go nuclear. The Berlin Wall would stand for twenty-eight years as the physical embodiment of a divided world. This is the story of the weekend it went up.
Kyshtym: The Soviet Nuclear Disaster Hidden for Thirty Years
On 29 September 1957, a tank of high-level radioactive waste exploded at the Mayak plutonium complex, a secret Soviet nuclear weapons facility in the southern Ural Mountains. The cooling system on the tank had failed and gone unrepaired; the waste inside overheated, dried, and detonated in a chemical explosion powerful enough to hurl off the tank's heavy concrete lid and fling a plume of radioactive material high into the air. The fallout drifted northeast on the wind, settling over thousands of square kilometers of farmland, forest, and villages in what became known as the East Urals Radioactive Trace. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in the contaminated zone; thousands would eventually be evacuated, their villages bulldozed and their crops and livestock destroyed, often with little or no explanation of why. By the measure of radioactivity released, it was one of the worst nuclear accidents in history — surpassed only, decades later, by Chernobyl and Fukushima. And yet almost no one outside a tight circle of Soviet officialdom knew it had happened. The facility was so secret it did not officially exist, located in a closed city that did not appear on maps; the disaster took its name, Kyshtym, from the nearest town that could be publicly named. The Soviet Union concealed the catastrophe almost completely for thirty years, denying it even as rumors leaked west, until the openness of the late 1980s finally forced the truth into the light. This is the story of the nuclear disaster that the world was not allowed to know.
The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB Clerk Who Stole the KGB's Secrets
Vasili Mitrokhin was not a spy in the usual sense, and that is exactly what made him so dangerous to the organisation he served. He was a KGB officer who, after years of disillusionment, had been moved sideways into the archives of the First Chief Directorate — the service's foreign-intelligence arm — and given responsibility for supervising the transfer of its entire secret file collection to a new headquarters. It was the most sensitive paper in the Soviet Union: decades of records on agents, operations, and informants spread across the West and the wider world. For roughly twelve years, from 1972 until his retirement in 1984, Mitrokhin used his extraordinary access to commit one of the most audacious acts of intelligence defiance in history. Alone, by hand, he copied and summarised thousands of the KGB's most secret documents, scribbling notes on scraps of paper that he hid in his shoes and clothing and carried out of headquarters past the guards, day after day, year after year. At home he transcribed them, and then he hid the growing archive — sealed in milk churns and tin containers and buried beneath the floor and in the garden of his dacha outside Moscow. He could not get it to the West while the Soviet Union stood. But when the USSR collapsed, in 1992, Mitrokhin travelled to the newly independent Baltic states, walked into a Western embassy, and offered his life's secret work. British intelligence grasped what he was holding, spirited him, his family, and six cases of material out of Russia, and acquired in a single stroke the most comprehensive record of Soviet foreign intelligence operations ever to reach the West. This is the story of the quiet archivist who stole the KGB's own history.
The USS Pueblo: The Spy Ship North Korea Captured
On 23 January 1968, a lightly armed United States Navy intelligence ship called the USS Pueblo was gathering electronic and signals intelligence off the coast of North Korea when it was surrounded by North Korean patrol boats and a submarine chaser, fired upon, boarded, and captured. One American sailor was killed in the assault; the other eighty-two men aboard were taken prisoner and carried into North Korea, where they would be held, beaten, starved, and paraded for propaganda for the next eleven months. The seizure was a profound humiliation for the United States — a commissioned warship taken on the high seas, its crew held hostage, its cargo of secret cryptographic equipment and documents falling into the hands of a hostile communist state. And yet the world's most powerful nation found that it could do almost nothing about it. The United States was at that moment consumed by the war in Vietnam, where the Tet Offensive was about to erupt, and it could not risk a second war on the Korean peninsula to recover one small ship. So instead of force, it turned to negotiation, and after eleven agonising months of talks the crew was freed only when an American general signed a humiliating false confession admitting the ship had been spying inside North Korean waters — a document the United States publicly repudiated even as it signed. The men came home; the ship did not. To this day the USS Pueblo remains in North Korean hands, a trophy of the Cold War moored in Pyongyang, and it is still, officially, a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy. This is the story of its capture, its crew's long ordeal, and the strange, unresolved standoff it became.
The Cambridge Five and the Spies at the Heart of British Intelligence
In the 1930s, Soviet intelligence undertook one of the most ambitious recruitment operations in the history of espionage: rather than buying secrets from disgruntled clerks, it would cultivate brilliant young Britons at the start of their careers, men of the right schools and the right accents who could be guided, over decades, into the very heart of the British establishment. The most famous of these recruits were five Cambridge University men — Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross — who became known as the Cambridge Five. They were not desperate or marginal figures but charming, talented members of the elite, and that was precisely the point. Over the following decades they penetrated the Foreign Office, the security service MI5, the secret intelligence service MI6, and the wartime codebreaking establishment, passing a torrent of British and American secrets to Moscow. Philby rose so high within MI6 that he was considered a future chief of the service — while serving the entire time as a Soviet agent, even as he was nominally in charge of countering the Soviet threat. The ring began to unravel in 1951, when Burgess and Maclean vanished to Moscow one step ahead of exposure; Philby fell under suspicion but was protected by an establishment unable to believe one of its own could be a traitor, and he did not flee to Moscow until 1963. Blunt, by then a knighted royal art adviser, secretly confessed but was not publicly named until 1979. The damage they did — to operations, to agents, to trust between Britain and its allies — was immense and, in places, fatal. This is the story of how five men of the establishment betrayed it from within, and how the establishment's own blindness let them.
Venona: The Secret Code-Break That Exposed the Soviet Spies
In February 1943, in a converted girls' school outside Washington, a small team of American codebreakers began an attack on a target almost everyone believed was hopeless: the enciphered cable traffic of Soviet intelligence. The Soviets encrypted their most secret messages using a one-time pad, a system that is, in theory, mathematically unbreakable — and the Soviet Union was, at that moment, an ally of the United States in the war against Hitler. Yet the project, later given the codename Venona, would become one of the most consequential intelligence operations of the twentieth century. Exploiting a wartime mistake by Soviet cipher clerks, who had reused pages of supposedly single-use pads, the American cryptanalysts slowly, painstakingly began to read the unreadable. What they found, message by fragmentary message across years of labour, was staggering: the Soviet Union had run a vast espionage campaign inside the United States during the war, with hundreds of sources reaching into the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, the State Department, the Treasury, and the heart of the intelligence services of both America and Britain. Venona helped expose the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, the ring around Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the British traitor Donald Maclean of the Cambridge Five. But the decrypts were guarded with such obsessive secrecy that they could not be used as evidence in open court, and for decades the government knew truths it could not prove and could barely speak. The project remained classified until 1995, when the release of its files rewrote the secret history of the early Cold War. This is the story of the code-break that saw into the heart of Soviet espionage, and of the silence that surrounded it for fifty years.