Tag
#cold-war
24 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.
The Umbrella Murder: The Poisoning of Georgi Markov
On the afternoon of 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré writer, was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in London, on his way to his job at the BBC World Service, when he felt a sudden sharp sting in the back of his right thigh. Turning, he saw a man behind him bending to pick up a dropped umbrella; the man apologised in a foreign accent, hurried across the road, and got into a taxi. Markov thought little of it at first, but by that evening he had developed a high fever, and over the next three days his condition collapsed catastrophically. He died on 11 September, aged forty-nine. A post-mortem examination found, embedded in his thigh, a tiny metal pellet no larger than a pinhead, drilled with minuscule cavities that had held a dose of ricin — one of the deadliest toxins known, and one for which there is no antidote. Markov had been assassinated in broad daylight on a London street, murdered for the crime of broadcasting the truth about the communist regime in his homeland. The method — a poison pellet delivered, it is believed, by a specially engineered umbrella — became one of the most infamous images of Cold War espionage, and the killing itself one of its clearest examples of a state reaching across borders to silence a dissident. This is the story of the umbrella murder.
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.
Project Blue Book: The Air Force's Long Study of UFOs
In the years after 1947, when the sighting by Kenneth Arnold and the events at Roswell launched the modern UFO era, the United States Air Force found itself confronting a steady stream of reports of unidentified objects in the sky — some from credible witnesses, some tracked on radar, all demanding some kind of official response in the anxious atmosphere of the early Cold War. The Air Force's answer was a series of official investigations, culminating in the longest and most famous of them: Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 until 1969 and became the definitive government study of UFOs of its era. Over those seventeen years, Blue Book collected and examined more than twelve thousand reported sightings, seeking to determine what people were seeing and whether any of it threatened national security or represented technology beyond human capability. Its investigators concluded that the overwhelming majority of sightings had ordinary explanations — misidentified aircraft, weather balloons, stars and planets, atmospheric effects, and hoaxes — and that none of the cases provided evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles. Yet Blue Book also left behind a residue of several hundred cases that it could not explain, and it became the focus of a lasting controversy: was it a serious scientific effort that reached an honest, if unexciting, conclusion, or was it, as critics including its own scientific consultant came to argue, more a public-relations exercise designed to explain sightings away and reassure the public than to study them seriously? This is the story of Project Blue Book, of what it found and what it did not, and of the argument over how a government should investigate the unknown.
The Rendlesham Forest Incident: Britain's Most Famous UFO Case
In the last week of December 1980, in Rendlesham Forest on the coast of Suffolk in eastern England, something happened that has been argued over ever since. The forest lay between two adjacent airbases, RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters, then used by the United States Air Force at the height of the Cold War, and it was American servicemen stationed there who became the witnesses to what is now often called 'Britain's Roswell.' In the small hours of 26 December, security personnel at the base saw strange lights descending into the forest, and, thinking an aircraft might have crashed, went in to investigate. What they reported finding — a metallic, structured craft with lights and strange markings, hovering or resting among the trees — became one of the most famous UFO accounts in the world. Two nights later the base's deputy commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, led his own investigation into the forest and recorded it on tape as it unfolded, describing pulsing lights and objects in the sky. His subsequent official memorandum, released years later under freedom-of-information laws, gave the case a documentary weight that few UFO stories possess. And yet the incident has a strong and well-argued mundane explanation, centered on a nearby lighthouse, a bright meteor, and misperceived stars — an explanation the witnesses have always rejected. This is the story of what happened in Rendlesham Forest, and of why, more than four decades later, it remains unresolved.
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.