The KGB chief, Leonid Kliatchko, dressed in the light blue uniform of his office, shifted nervously in his chair. This did not escape Yermolov, who now directed his attention to him.
“I will deal with you soon, Comrade Kliatchko, but right now, just listen to me”, Yermolov admonished, pointing a finger at him.
The General Secretary continued, all the while glaring at the KGB chief. “We must operate on two levels simultaneously. First of all, we must personally attack all those individuals abroad who are fomenting trouble and encouraging the traitors in our midst. These people are being organized, financed, and directed by the secret services of the Federal German Republic, France and the United Kingdom, which all follow the directives of the Americans and the CIA. As I see it, there is no difference between intelligence agencies and the governments that operate them. We will therefore punish these countries.
“Within 24 hours, I want a plan of action from each of you for undermining the stability and internal security of these Western states. We operate well-developed KGB infrastructures in all these countries, and we have plenty of Spetnez[2] sleeper fighting cells planted in them. These should be awakened and given a chance to justify their reputations and our investment. I am not ruling out any means or methods, from encouraging labor union strikes, to physical sabotage of transportation networks, utility infrastructures and anything else you may come up with. I want anarchy there! Anarchy — no less! I want chaos that will ruin the lives of their citizens and drive them to loathe their own capitalist regimes. We have to expose these governments’ impotence. Is that clear?”
The General Secretary’s fist again pounded the table as he looked for any sign of disagreement among the officials at his desk.
“I will appropriate any resource that is needed. You can assume that you have unlimited means from this moment on.”
“Is that clear to you?” the secretary was now addressing the KGB chief.
“This work must be neat. All sabotage in these countries should be attributed to local organizations and domestic underground movements. Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigades, anarchists, whatever. Nothing should point back to us. You may use your friends from Muslim countries to transport arms and explosives. This you can do rather well”, Yermolov remarked sardonically to his KGB chief.
The General Secretary removed his eyeglasses and rubbed his cheeks.
“And now, to our own internal affairs, and I mean those of our sister states, Yugoslavia, Romania, and especially the German Democratic Republic. Here we need immediate remedial action. We must use our iron fist! In Germany, we will deploy tanks and troops, but carefully, because of the proximity to West Germany which is full of foreign armies. Do you remember Operation Donau in August 1968? Two thousand, not twenty thousand, tanks, were enough to take over all of Czechoslovakia. Do you know why? Because we were creative. We used our brains. We acted wisely”, Yermolov expounded, pointing a finger at his temple.
“We sent one hundred of our agents, dressed in civilian clothes, on a commercial flight to Prague International Airport. They seized the airport within minutes and opened it to hundreds of our transport planes, and the rest is history. That is how I want our forces to deal with the GDR; primarily with creativity and logic. If we operate swiftly and forcefully there, eliminating the traitors, the other countries will understand what awaits them. Then you will see all this agitation dying out by itself.”
The General Secretary had said enough. He took a break, sipping tea from a glass that had been served to him. He then turned his sharp eyes to Marshal Budarenko, the Minister of Defense.
“Well, Marshal”, he said. “I’m sure you have not wasted any time and have already prepared a plan to crush the GDR. We would like to hear it.”
Everyone waited for the marshal to speak.
The Defense Minister’s oversized military cap, with its huge gold- trimmed visor, lay on the table in front of him. Marshal Nikolai Sergeevich Budarenko, of medium height and with a solid, muscular torso, was well into his sixties and still had the build of a medium- weight boxer. His close-cropped dark hair emphasized his square face and unusually high, protruding cheekbones. His bushy, unkempt brows were already graying. His appearance reflected his character, warning those who crossed his path that his reputation as a tough, opinionated and confrontational man was indeed justified. Few would challenge him in debate or discussion, and none dared to argue with him outright. With one exception — his sole superior, Yermolov.
Budarenko had made a name for himself as a brave infantry commander in the Second World War, fighting the Wehrmacht’s vastly superior Sixth Army for eight horrific months in Stalingrad. Budarenko, then a lieutenant colonel, was in charge of an ill-equipped unit of tank destroyers. In a series of battles that marked a turning point in the balance of power on the eastern front, Budarenko’s poorly-outfitted forces used daring tactics to spread havoc and fear among the German Panzer troops. It was a time of great heroism. The Soviet Union lost more than a million soldiers and Russian civilians in and around Stalingrad. Many more, including Budarenko, were wounded. Although forty years had passed since then, the Defense Minister still had a limp, a souvenir from those terrible days of Stalingrad.
For his courage in Stalingrad, the Marshal had been awarded the prestigious Меdal Za Otvagu[3]. This medal, made entirely of silver, featured a silhouette of a T-34 tank and the red Cyrillic letters Za Otvagu and CCCP, for USSR. Now, as he sat at the conference, the medal, not just the ribbon, was pinned to his jacket, almost lost among the dozens of other medals and ribbons covering the entire front of his army jacket.
The Defense Minister cleared his throat and turned to the increasingly impatient General Secretary.
“Comrade General Secretary Vladimir Petrovich Yermolov”, the Defense Minister rasped in a voice roughened by years of heavy smoking. “Regarding the first signs of rebelliousness here at home, I am not at all worried. Comrade Politruk and the Comrade Chief of the KGB know exactly what to do, and they have already informed me of the arrest of seven hundred and fifty hooligans. The main problem, as I see it, is in Western Europe, not in our sister states. All the poison and incitement are coming from these countries. There lies the head of the serpent and there we should hit hard.”
The General Secretary leaned back in his seat, expressing no surprise or emotion at what he had just heard, as if to say he had not expected the marshal to propose a worldwide peace initiative.
“Has the Minister finished speaking?” Yermolov asked, somewhat irritably.
“No, Mr. General Secretary”, the minister shot back. “I wish to elaborate further. Mr. General Secretary has explained that we occupied Czechoslovakia with two thousand tanks. I was there, commanding an army, and I can tell you that we could have completed the work there in the same time frame even with five hundred tanks. But dealing with NATO is totally different. We will certainly have to deploy a large portion of our armored forces, which we built up precisely for this purpose. I wish to remind you that we have thirty thousand tanks at our disposal. Our numerical advantage over them is so great that we can overwhelm them within three weeks and their regimes will fall like dominos. Even the Americans can’t stop us. Their only answer to our massive forces is to deploy tactical nuclear weapons, but they will not dare, because we also have nuclear weapons and it can turn into World War III…”
“What the hell are you talking about, Marshal?” Yermolov snapped, both angry and impatient. “If we invade with thirty thousand tanks, are we not starting a third world war?”