It was now more critical than ever for Naval Intelligence to spread what it was learning about Soviet tactics and strategy throughout the sub force. The captains and spooks on regular surveillance subs were filing thicker patrol reports than ever, and even much of the information from the cable taps, once tightly guarded, was being distributed to submarine officers, although first sanitized to disguise the source. Naval Intelligence was so desperate to out-think the Soviets that it was even willing to rely on a little knowledgeable guesswork. A group of submariners and analysts were gathered and told to write up what they thought would be found in a Soviet submarine operating manual. When that was done, they were sent to visit and brief attack-submarine commanders on what they might expect to face at sea.
By now, it was clear that no one else was going to champion Rickover's idea for a special class of Arctic subs. Instead, the Navy had decided to try to give ice capabilities to nearly two dozen remaining Los Angeles-class subs, still scheduled for construction. Conceived as open-ocean aircraft carrier escorts, the original LA-class subs lacked some of the sophisticated electronic-surveillance equipment and icecapable sonar that had been built into Parche and other Sturgeon boats. That had left the nation's newest subs unable to handle what had become the most crucial spying operations as easily as the boats they were replacing.
Lyon had been asked to help research what changes were needed to allow the LA boats to do better under the ice, but his funding never seemed to come through. While under-ice operations were increasingly focused on attempts to develop torpedoes and sonar that could better distinguish between ice ridges and missile subs in the deep polar regions, Lyon kept arguing that the fleet commanders were ignoring the greatest problem-that no U.S. sub had the ability to hunt or maneuver well enough to fight within the marginal ice, where he was certain the Soviets were most likely to hide. Nobody of rank, it seemed, wanted to hear it.
Just as the Soviet sea threat was growing, relations between the superpowers were disintegrating. Yuri V. Andropov, a former director of the KGB who had succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the Soviet leader in 1982, was spinning apocalyptic visions of a U.S. first strike that even many KGB experts saw as alarmist.
Then Reagan began stirring Soviet fears. On March 8, 1983, he outpreached the preachers at the convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, held that year in Orlando, Florida. He offered a laundry list of national and international evils: abortion, teen pregnancy, clinics providing teen birth control. After an impassioned plea for school prayer, he turned his attention to the Soviet Union.
"Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness, pray they will discover the joy of knowing God," Reagan intoned. "But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world."
Moments later, he concluded, "So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
Reagan had equated the fight against communism as the fight between good and evil before. But the phrase "evil empire" became one of those sound bites that gets repeated over and over. It definitely captured the fearful attention of the Soviets. Their concern that Reagan might consider a first strike was bolstered on March 23 when, less than two weeks after his "evil empire" speech, the president went on television to introduce the world to "Star Wars"-the strategic defense initiative (SI)l).
At first, the Soviets saw this plan to orbit lasers designed to blast Soviet missiles out of the sky as impractical. But Reagan's rhetoric, as interpreted by the KGB, further convinced some Soviet officials that the president was capable of ordering a first strike.
The Soviets weren't calmed either when, shortly after the evil empire and Star Wars speeches, the U.S. Pacific Fleet began its largest maneuvers since World War II. Navy warplanes from the carriers Midway and Enterprise flew over Soviet military installations on the Kuril Islands that mark the entrance to the Sea of Okhotsk. The show of force was another step in Lehman's efforts to get the Soviets' attention.
Following that, crucial arms control talks stalled as the Soviets protested a U.S. plan to place low-flying cruise missiles and Pershing lI intermediate-range ballistic missiles in West Germany and Italy. Then, on August 3 1, the Soviets shot down a Korean Airlines passenger plane, KAL 007, which had veered over Soviet military bases near the Sea of Okhotsk. All 269 people on board were killed.
Reagan accused the Soviets of premeditated murder, of knowingly shooting down the civilian airliner. Rather than admit that they had made a lethal mistake, the Soviets claimed that the airliner was a CIA reconnaissance plane. Following the KAI, incident, Soviet students at U.S. universities were called home on the grounds that anti-Soviet sentiment put them in physical danger. By the time Lech Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize on October 6, the KGB was convinced that the award was part of a Western-Zionist plot to destabilize Eastern Europe.
Tensions mounted further on October 26, when Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada. The United States claimed it was rescuing American medical students. But in the process, it overthrew the infant Communist government.
As all this was going on, the KGB was actively looking for signs that NATO and the United States were considering a first strike. The search, now a top priority, had been started by Andropov when he was still heading the KGB. It was code-named "Operation RYAN" for the Russian term for nuclear missile attack, Raketno Yadernoye Napadenie. According to Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who later defected to England, the KGB, throughout 1983, was pressuring Soviet agents around the globe to feed RYAN, to report alarming information even if they were skeptical of it themselves.
In the wake of the KAL shoot-down, the KGB Pushed RYAN agents even harder. By now, Andropov had fallen gravely ill, and one of his kidneys had been removed. He had not been seen in public since mid-August. But he was still in charge, and he still believed the world could be heading toward nuclear Armageddon.[21]
With Operation RYAN running wild and nearly unchecked, Gordievsky says there was a real danger of a catastrophic mistake. That was never more true, he says, than during November NATO exercises, code-named "Able Archer." From November 2 to November 11, the NATO forces were practicing release procedures for tactical nuclear weapons, moving through all of the alert stages from readiness to general alert. Because the Soviets' own contingency plans for war called for real preparations to be shrouded under similar exercises, alarmists within the KGB came to believe that the NATO forces had been placed on an actual alert.
RYAN teams were given orders to look for signs that NATO was about to start a countdown toward nuclear war: last-minute crisis negotiations between Britain and the United States; food-industry efforts to stockpile, such as mass butchering of cattle; or evacuations of political, financial, and military leaders and their families. The Soviet alerts eased after November 11, when Able Archer came to an end.
But there was little easing of the paranoia. That December, Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, made a stunning public pronouncement. He said that the Soviets believed the United States "would still like to launch a decapitating nuclear first strike."
21
In the midst of all this tension, the Soviets sent a Victor III submarine to waters somewhere between the Carolinas and Bermuda. The Americans countered, sending a frigate, the USS McCloy, and a submarine, the USS