THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE 51America and its allies and the Warsaw Pact. It involved an attempt to
experiment with new methods of silent communication, and the idea
was to test out how the Western powers might eventually opt to attack
the Soviet Union. As reports reached Moscow about what was afoot,
the worry arose that the exercise might be a subterfuge disguising a
build-up towards a real war. The series of American declarations and
actions earlier in the year appeared to confirm the Politburo’s worst
fears.
Andropov ordered his successor as KGB Chairman, Viktor Cheb-
rikov, to organize a campaign to gather any evidence that this was
what the Americans were planning. Every Soviet intelligence official in
America and Western Europe was told to prioritize ‘Operation Ryan’.
Ambassadors were informed by the resident KGB chiefs in each
capital. Andropov did not want the country to be caught napping, as
had happened in June 1941.^38 General Staff veterans would recall this
period as the most worrisome since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.^39
But not all of them felt that the world was truly on the brink of war.
Colonel General Andrian Danilevich later explained ‘that the KGB
may have overstated the level of tension because they are generally
incompetent in military affairs and exaggerate what they do not
understand’.^40 In the Party Defence Department, if not in the General
Staff, the possibility of war breaking out, was taken very seriously –
and the work of officials was reorganized so that some of them stayed
on site through the hours of night.^41 The USSR was put on a high level
of alert. The slightest untoward accident could have induced Andropov
to decide to strike before the Americans struck. The difference
between this emergency and the Cuban crisis was that Moscow and
Washington were barely communicating with each other in 1983 –
and this was a difference that made for even greater danger.
Urgent messages passed between the two capitals before some
kind of calm returned. Earlier in the year Reagan, agitated by the lack
of progress in relations with the USSR, had tried to prevent things
from spinning out of control by inviting Ambassador Dobrynin for
a meeting at the White House. Shultz arranged for Dobrynin to be
spirited into the building by the back entrance. Everything was done
in strict secrecy because Reagan wished to preserve his reputation for
standing up to the Soviet leadership. He talked to Dobrynin for a
couple of hours. It was a productive meeting, as Reagan noted: ‘I told
him I wanted George [Shultz] to be a channel for direct contact with
Andropov – no bureaucracy involved. George told me that after they