6. Redacted
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It's the middle of Exercise Able Archer when Leonard Perutz receives an NSA report that Soviet Air Force planes in East Germany are on high alert. At least one squadron is likely loaded with real nuclear warheads, and his boss is asking him to make a decision on whether the U.S. Air Force should escalate in kind. Should we put our aircraft on alert? Should we prepare our nuclear weapons?

To escalate or not to escalate? That is the question. I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu. AbleArcher83.

General Perutz makes a really critical decision at this time, but he's not making this decision based on any knowledge about what's happening. This is Greg Elder, the chief historian of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Greg says at the time that Leonard Perutz was facing this critical decision, he didn't know what was happening, not fully.

He didn't know the depths of Soviet paranoia, that for years under Operation Ryan, the Soviets had been accumulating evidence of an imminent nuclear attack on their proverbial tic-tac-toe board of doom. Seems the craziest of satires that you could ever imagine.

He didn't know the Soviets had intercepted a NATO message approving a fictional nuclear strike upon the Soviet Union. "Blue is requesting use of 25 nuclear weapons, over." He didn't know that Oleg Gordievsky had received a telegram from Moscow saying that the countdown to a nuclear attack might have already begun under the guise of Abel Archer. I knew it was a dramatic moment. I knew Moscow was nervous.

He didn't know that another secret agent, Reiner Rupp, was running to a phone booth to transmit an urgent message via his super high-tech spy calculator that NATO was not planning to attack, and that the KGB didn't believe him. "It might well have just been another form of deception." And he didn't know that Soviet missile commanders were on alert, awaiting instructions to launch. "Are these guys about to attack us? Are they about to launch nuclear weapons?"

Leonard Perutz knew none of this. How could he? We hadn't made the podcast yet. All he knew was that in East Germany, Soviet planes were on high alert, and at least one squadron likely had real nuclear weapons loaded onto their aircrafts. And his boss was asking him a question. You know, Lenny, should we heighten our alert level? To escalate or not to escalate?

If Leonard Perutz does nothing and the Soviets carry out a nuclear attack, he will have wasted precious minutes. Minutes where NATO forces could have prepared some sort of defense.

minutes that could save lives. But if he recommends to his boss to escalate, and it turns out the Soviets weren't actually planning a nuclear strike, well, the very act of escalation could spook them. It could be seen as an act of aggression. It could cause the Soviets to do the very thing he was trying to prevent, launch a nuclear weapon. Once again, to escalate or not to escalate.

And so he recommends to his four-star commander that we not escalate in kind. He says, "Let's watch and wait." He makes the determination that it's very possible the Soviets may just be increasing their own alert and readiness level because of their own concerns about our exercise.

And so General Perutz, although making an uninformed decision, in this case makes a thoroughly rational and what turned out to be the correct decision. In a tense moment, Leonard Perutz didn't flex one single military muscle. He didn't kick the tires and light the fires. He left the fires unlit and the tires unkicked. Instead, he erred on the side of caution.

Here is one of those examples where a U.S. military figure actually took the less hawkish approach, so to speak, and that ultimately helps to alleviate the situation. So on the night of November 9th, as Soviet leaders sat in their bunkers watching to see what the United States military would do next, they saw nothing. So that major indicator that they may have been looking for ultimately wasn't there.

The next morning the sun came up and there were no mushroom clouds on the horizon, just regular clouds, big floaty blobs. And so when Abel Archer's over, the Soviets wait a few days and then essentially stand down. Anticlimactic much? I know you came for explosions, but hey, if there were explosions at this point in the story, you'd be listening to this podcast from an underground mole town living in a community that hadn't seen the sun in 40 years. Be grateful.

Leonard Perutz fortuitously made the decision that brought the Able Archer war scare to a close. And the most absolutely insane part of it is that he wasn't even aware of what he was doing. Perutz may have single-handedly saved all of humankind, and the dude has no clue exactly how important that decision was. He was cool as a kuke. His shift ends, he punches out, grabs a pint and schnitzel at the pub. Just another day at the office.

That decision made is attributed to, out of misinformation, it's even described as out of ignorance. It was the right call, thank God, but it was made out of ignorance of all the other things that were going on. We, not knowing that there was any major significant issue to begin with, go about our daily business, and it isn't for some time that there's a full appreciation of how bad things really were.

It's November 14, 1983, three days after the end of "Able Archer." Reagan is just returning to D.C. from his trip to Japan and Korea. He's exiting a helicopter and walking towards a podium set up on the White House lawn. Nancy is trailing behind him, holding the hands of two small Korean children. "Nancy was out sightseeing or probably even shopping for souvenirs. And knowing Nancy as well as I do, I

wasn't surprised when I came home and found that she had two little Korean friends. - To be clear, these two children were being brought back to the United States for medical care, not because Nancy kidnapped them or something.

Anyway, Reagan's in good spirits. He's flashing his classic Hollywood smile, cracking jokes. In this 10-minute speech, he doesn't mention the Soviet Union. And if he has any inkling of what happened during Abel Archer a few days prior, he doesn't let on. God bless you, and God bless this wonderful country. Thank you. Are you wiped out? I managed to translate pretty well. I got out eight hours sleep on the plane. Oh, really? Yeah.

But the truth is, in this very moment, Reagan couldn't have known much about Abel Archer. Even if he was totally up to speed, U.S. intelligence didn't know shit at this point. Just that over in East Germany, a squadron of planes were on high alert, and they may have loaded nuclear warheads. That information made it to Leonard Perut's desk, sure, but who knows if it got all the way to Reagan.

If only we could know what was in his head. If only there was some document that was a written record of his actual thoughts. November 18th, 1983. I feel the Soviets are so defense-minded, so paranoid about being attacked, that without being in any way soft on them, we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.

What the H-E double hockey sticks have they got that anyone would want? Okay, putting aside my terrible Reagan impression, he really did write that. So, something must have prompted him to ruminate on the Soviets' nuclear paranoia. Nonetheless, that didn't stop what came next.

George is going on ABC right after its big nuclear bomb film Sunday night. We know it's anti-nuke propaganda, but we're going to take it over and say it shows why we must keep on doing what we're doing. Yep, this is when Reagan sent George Shultz on national television to tell an absolutely terrified American public...

that our nuclear policy was working perfectly. The successful policy of the United States. You know what this calls for? Thanks, day after lady.

The thing is, even though Able Archer is over, it doesn't mean that we're safe. It doesn't mean the Soviets have stopped being afraid of a surprise nuclear attack. Think about it. If there's a guy who keeps saying he might literally kick your ass, and then he starts pulling his foot back for a literal kick, and you think, this is it, he's going to literally kick my ass, but then it turns out he's just practicing for his Rockettes audition...

Well, that doesn't mean that he won't still someday take a leave of absence from the Rockettes to come back and kick you in the ass. Uh, guys, I think we have our submission for this year's perfect analogy awards. Anyway, the point is, the Soviets were still on edge.

The day after George Shultz reassured a terrified American public that the U.S. nuclear policy was definitely, absolutely, totally a safe bet, the Soviets reached out with an offer. They said, "We'll destroy half of our intermediate-range nuclear missiles, the ones that could target Europe, if NATO will cancel the Euromissiles." The Reagan administration declined the offer, saying that the conditions of the agreement were unacceptable.

As if rubbing salt in the wound, those Euromissiles were officially installed in Europe mere days later. In response, Andropov scheduled the deployment of new seaborne nuclear missiles pointed at the U.S. and additional nukes aimed at Western Europe. If the president doesn't even know that there's something going on to be concerned about, that's a problem. That's a failure that has to be addressed. And yet,

Despite Reagan's televised message saying that the administration's policy was perfect, absolutely flawless, in the background, they would begin working on an extremely subtle shift in their Soviet strategy. It wouldn't be a policy change per se. They wouldn't cancel the Euromissiles. They wouldn't stop building SDI. And they wouldn't stop being tough. But they'd be less SDI.

adversarial. They'd attempt to let the Soviets know that nobody has any intention of nuking them. Cue the charmingly folksy Ivan and Anya speech. And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would be saying to Ivan, wasn't she nice? She also teaches music. They might even have decided they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon.

But apparently, Reagan didn't feel any urgency to display this new softer side. The speech was originally scheduled for just before Christmas, but Reagan delayed it for nearly a month because someone very important advised him to. Who was it? Why don't you take a guess? Whose advice would President of the United States Ronald Reagan heed in regards to delaying the Soviet friendship speech in the weeks after almost getting nuked?

The Joint Chiefs of Staff? Nope. The Secretary General of the UN? Nope. Mother Teresa? If only. It was Nancy Reagan's astrologer, a San Francisco woman named Joan Quigley. Anyway, while Reagan was waiting for Joan Quigley's permission to extend an olive branch to the Soviet Union, the U.S. intelligence community got some unwelcome news. I think it was two or three weeks before...

actual other reporting came in that started to pique his concerns. Here's John Perutz again talking about his dad, Leonard Perutz. According to John, on December 2nd, 1983, a few weeks after Leonard made the decision to do nothing during Able Archer, a new NSA report landed on his desk. That indicated that their alert level had been much larger than we had assumed.

Hey, funny story. Remember that Able Archer exercise that ended with us fake nuking the Soviets? Well, you're totally going to laugh at this. I mean, it's so ridiculous. But anyway, it turns out the Soviets' alert during Able Archer was just a tad bigger than we thought.

It wasn't just a few planes in East Germany. It was all the units of the Soviet 4th Air Army. The alert was ordered by the chief of the Soviet air forces, and the alert, quote, "included preparations for immediate use of nuclear weapons," end quote.

All right, I want to explain what this means. This is hundreds of airplanes, potentially loaded with nukes, not just a squadron. We're talking potentially the end of the world number of airplanes. It's a pretty big fucking difference. Extraordinarily unusual and alarming events from an intelligence standpoint. Leonard Pruetz was, well, let's just say a little shaken by this news. Wow, that would have been interesting to know at the time.

Gotta hope he wasn't drinking coffee when he read that report, because he would have had the mother of all spit takes. He was wondering, why the hell is he just finding out about this now? This was information that he needed weeks ago. He realized he had made a decision that could have had catastrophic consequences with only a tiny fraction of the picture. And even though it turned out to be the right decision, he was pissed.

Leonard Perutz got on a soapbox about Abel Archer. He complained to any of his colleagues who would listen. He wasn't certain that we, that the community, the intelligence community, had looked closely enough to figure out how we could get better from this scenario. But nobody listened to him. They just didn't think it was that big of a deal. Because even with this new information, U.S. intelligence still didn't know the full picture. And they never would have if it wasn't for one Oleg Gordievsky.

Do you remember meeting the British at any point during the Able Archer exercise? I think I met them at the end of the Able Archer. Yes, I spoke to John Scarlett about everything which I experienced. That's Kordievsky. After Able Archer, sometime in November 1983, he met with his MI6 handler, a man with a name right out of a spy novel, John Scarlett.

brilliant operational officer. Wow, Gordy, fast and loose with the compliments all of a sudden. He handed Scarlett the urgent flash telegram he had just received from Moscow. It said... The Americans' exercise may be preparation to a sudden nuclear attack. When I told John Scarlett, for him it was important. Soon, word that a nuclear war scare may have just unfolded under Exercise Able Archer landed on the desk of the Iron Lady herself.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. To her credit, when she did hear what Gordievsky had told John Scarlett, she was definitely spooked. Hopefully she wasn't sipping tea at the time, or she might have experienced the queen mother of all spit-takes. See how I made a callback, but I made it British? Oh, bollocks! And they realized it was a serious. So the Russians are afraid of something. They're afraid of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and they're afraid of the ideological speeches by Reagan and Schultz.

In March of 1984, Thatcher sent her ambassador to Washington to communicate a warning to the US government. Her message was this: "Reagan needs to cool it with the nukes. The Soviets nearly started a war because of this shit."

The meeting apparently did not go well. The ambassador wouldn't tell the Americans exactly who their secret source was. So the Reagan rep said, we're going to keep doing peace through strength. Thank you very much. But fine, we'll have the CIA look into your concerns about this silly little Abel Archer stuff since you've got your knickers in a twist about it.

Now, given everything we know about Able Archer, it's pretty damn surprising that when the CIA did look into it, they didn't find anything at all.

For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living Associates have been committed to creating a vibrant culture and delivering exceptional services, making Brightview a great place to work and live. If you're looking for a rewarding opportunity to serve your local community and grow, we want you to join our team. Brightview Senior Living is growing and actively seeking vibrant associates to join our community teams, including directors, healthcare, activities, hospitality, and dining. Apply today at careers.brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal employment opportunities.

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You remember Nate Jones, our Able Archer sleuth. The document he's holding is called the SNIE, another acronym, shocker. It stands for Special National Intelligence Estimate. It's the CIA's response to the British request to look into Able Archer.

This top-secret report was written in May of 1984. It's about six pages long. In the document, the CIA analysts list everything unusual they've observed the Soviet Union doing over the past six months. They talk about the construction of new missile sites, big military exercises, and of course, the fact that during Exercise Able Archer, the Soviets escalated their nuclear readiness.

But despite listing all of these concerning things... "Overall, our conclusion is that it wasn't very dangerous and it was not a very big deal." Hmm. You may be wondering, like me and anybody else with a brain cell, how exactly is this not a big deal? Did you watch the day after? I bet when you're reduced to a cloud of dust drifting over a radioactive wasteland, then you'd call it a big deal.

There's only one paragraph that details the Soviet military reaction specifically to Abel Archer. It talks about those planes in East Germany and Poland going on high alert. So how did the CIA explain it? The theory is that the Soviets are doing a massive propaganda campaign to trick the West into thinking that they're very scared of a preemptive nuclear strike, but that they weren't really scared. ♪

Ah, yes, of course. More mind games in the age of nuclear weapons. Love that for us.

The thinking goes that this campaign was to make the West stop deploying the new missiles to Europe is the reason for the campaign. That's what some people believed. You can tell what Nate makes of this theory. But it wasn't altogether implausible. The idea was if the Soviet leaders were very public about their fear of nuclear war with the United States, then American and European citizens would freak out — they

They would call on NATO to take the Pershing 2 and cruise missiles out of Europe. And that would be a win for the Soviets. Some successful mindfuckery. The SNIE report is confident in this propaganda theory. They don't waver. They even say, and I quote, we cannot at this point conduct a detailed examination of how the Soviets perceived recent NATO military activities, but even so, we are confident the Soviets do not fear a military clash with the United States.

So I think they might be writing to a conclusion. So the conclusion is that there's no real danger. Reagan's policy is working. Putting more nuclear weapons into Europe is a good idea. And the Soviet reaction to Abel Archer and the broader war scare can't be real. So therefore, it's just propaganda.

Now, this report, it's talking about what the CIA has seen the Soviet military do. It doesn't cite Gordievsky's account of the KGB flash telegram that he says he received. And apparently that's because the CIA doesn't know exactly who Gordievsky is.

MI6 can't just say, "Yeah, we got a guy on the inside. His name is Oleg. He wears a fake goatee and a wig." Because there was always the chance that Oleg's double-agent super-secret status could get back to Russia if the CIA had a mole. Oooh, foreshadowing. So, the CIA doesn't consider Gordievsky's story when they write the SNIE.

Maybe they thought the source was a plant. Maybe they thought he was just another victim of the Soviet leader's propaganda. Or, and this is the explanation that involves the least amount of Tinker Tailor shadow game Hall of Mirror thinking, maybe they knew that his story made them look really, really bad. And I only say that because of what happens next. After the CIA writes this report, they need to share it with their NATO allies, since they all participated in Able Archer together.

Nate found this version of the report filed in the State Department archives. So there are two versions of this. There's the version the CIA initially put out, and then I FOIAed the State Department and got its version, and its version is pretty interesting.

Nate knew there was a small chance that the State Department's version of this document would be slightly different. Maybe there'd be fewer redactions. Or maybe there'd be some other Able Archer clue. When Nate received the State Department's version of the SNIE, he ripped the envelope open. He quickly scanned through the document and was shocked. Not at what he found, but what he didn't find.

But in this version that they shared with their allies, they cut out all mention of Abel Archer. So if you compare the two, you see where the CIA version talks about Abel Archer, the version that the State Department shared with the British and NATO allies, just cutting out and deleting the most dangerous part of the war scare, Abel Archer. The side-by-side comparison is pretty wild. Word for word, the entire document is exactly the same, until you get to the paragraph about Abel Archer.

In the State Department version, it's just gone. Erased. It actually comes across as kind of absurd.

Absurd is a good word here. Let's break this down. The British ask the CIA to check out Abel Archer. The CIA finds evidence of a Soviet military reaction to Abel Archer, but decides not to share it, going as far as scrubbing all mention of Abel Archer in the report they give back to the British. That's not just absurd. That's weird. And the obvious question becomes, why did they do that?

Well, I think to control the narrative, so to speak. I think every author had their own point of view that they wanted to convey, and they probably thought it was true. And they took the facts that they had from their intelligence and twisted the conclusions about the facts to advocate what they wanted. The CIA, the analysts who are involved in that estimate, have a vested interest in protecting their own reputations. Nobody wants to say they got it wrong, right? I don't want to turn that into like some great conspiracy theory. That's just...

That's human nature. It's really hard to get people to reexamine their opinions at the time. That's nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis. Everyone has a dog in the fight. And those stakes really come down to this question of whether the people who were charged with managing the arms race, whether those people were competent and responsible or whether they were just like everybody else and bumbling their way through.

And so there is an enormous incentive for people to say it wasn't that bad, because if it was that bad, then that discredits their claim to expertise. And we all know there is literally nothing worse in the world than having your expertise discredited. I mean, I can't think of anything worse. I mean, it seems like there should be something. I just can't think of it. Oh, well.

Able Archer would become a hot button issue and create a divide in the intelligence community. It would separate people into two passionate camps, people who bought into the propaganda theory and people who believed that Able Archer was a catastrophic near miss.

The official CIA party line was the propaganda theory, that nothing really had happened. They were happy to shove it under the rug. Big fuck up? Nope, not us. We never make mistakes. And I know you're going to try to bring up the Iran thing and the Congo thing and the Chile thing, but we're not talking about those right now. But walking through the halls of the Pentagon was a particular U.S. intelligence official who just wasn't buying the propaganda theory propaganda.

and he would not remain quiet.

For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living Associates have been committed to creating a vibrant culture and delivering exceptional services, making Brightview a great place to work and live. If you're looking for a rewarding opportunity to serve your local community and grow, we want you to join our team. Brightview Senior Living is growing and actively seeking vibrant associates to join our community teams, including directors, healthcare, activities, hospitality, and dining. Apply today at careers.brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal employment opportunities.

Text BVJOBS to 97211 to apply. Hey, this is Jodi Sweetin from the podcast How Rude, Tanneritos. As a nostalgic voice from your past, I'm here to remind you that amongst the stressful and chaotic existence we live in 2024, you deserve to get away. It's time for a vacation, no matter when you're hearing this. And let me tell you how you'll get there.

The 2024 Hyundai Santa Fe. Want to bring the family to the mountains with the Santa Fe's available H-Track all-wheel drive? Well, it's got standard third-row seating and available dual wireless charging pads for the kids who just want to stare at their phone and not talk to you. You know what I mean. Visit HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603 for more details. Hyundai. There's joy in every journey.

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My father was a unique man. He was full of energy and passion and love. This is John Perutz again, talking about his father, Lieutenant General Leonard Perutz. He was a great man, guys. I mean, I miss him every day. John, like his father, is an intelligence officer. He works at the DIA. As the director of the Defense Debriefing Service at DIA, I'm responsible for

global force posture that conducts strategic debriefings and interrogation missions for DIA. It's human intelligence and beyond that, I can't really tell you a whole lot more. I'm sorry. That's okay, John.

A few years after Abel Archer, Perutz was home from Germany, now the director of the DIA. And one day, he was told a story of a mysterious MI6 source who claimed that in 1983, the Soviet leadership believed NATO was using a military exercise as cover for a nuclear attack. When he substantiated it, I mean, then for Lenny Perutz, the wheels came off. He said, you know, you got to be kidding me.

Perutz was stunned and furious. This was a side of the Able Archer story he had never even known. KGB paranoia, fear, and Operation Ryan. Put that together with what Perutz knew about Soviet military action, and you've got yourself a saucy tango with nuclear Armageddon.

Ol' Lenny went up to his attic, got his old soapbox and plopped it down right in the middle of the Pentagon. He was like, "Guys, we have got to look at this again. We didn't get it right the first time." He was making his point clear that we, you know, let's make sure we learn from this. You know, and people didn't want to hear it. Some had been on record clearly saying,

The Soviets really never feared us. We've looked at it more than once, and we stand by our view that they didn't fear the first strike by the United States. And I don't doubt for one minute that was their professional belief. But this time, Leonard Perutz wasn't going to let it go. I think at that point, Dad had said, you know, I'm leaving. I've got to go on record.

When Leonard Perutz retired from his job as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 1989, he did so with guns a-blazing. He wrote a letter, his final parting shot. Listen here, you motherfuckers. No, I'm joking, obviously. This is the Honorable Leonard Perutz, after all.

but the letter is badass. Leonard wrote his whole story. He says, here's what happened during Able Archer. I didn't have the information I needed. If I did have it, I'm not sure what decision I would have made. Does that not scare you all as much as it scares me? He ends the letter by asking an ominous question. What would have happened that day if I had made the other decision? I read the letter yesterday,

that my father wrote just saying, hey, what if? And I don't think he contended that the nuclear war certainly would have happened. But the notion that we would have inadvertently increased the likelihood that it could happen was the problem. You might want to look into this again because it's too important not to.

On the day of his retirement, he blasted this memo out to anybody and everybody who had the security clearance to read it. And truth be told, most of the recipients were not interested. The institutional wisdom was, let sleeping able archers lie, if you get my meaning. But finally, he caught someone's attention.

Essentially, that memo spurred the PIFIAB, a presidential organization, to undertake this large, very large task. That's Nate Jones again, ever sleuthing behind the Able Archer scenes. PIFIAB is another wonderful acronym short for President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The PIFIAB is a panel of citizens appointed by the president, who by now was George Bush Sr.,

It's important to note these people are not intelligence professionals. They're not even necessarily government people. They're an oversight committee of political scientists, historians, and lawyers who get special security clearance to access all the government's juicy secrets.

When they received Leonard Pruitt's letter in 1989, they read it with as much urgency as Pruitt's had written it. They were terrified by the tale he told, and since they were unencumbered by CIA politics, they were going to investigate Abel Archer, properly this time.

The PIFIAB would spend a year digging into Able Archer. They'd analyze every report, interview dozens of people involved, and compile it all together in a highly classified 100-page report filled to the brim with government secrets. The study was highly restricted. Regardless of security clearance, only those who absolutely needed to know got to read it.

But even intelligence professionals love a little juicy guss. People started whispering. The rumor was that this PIFIAB report was really critical of operational mistakes and that it confirmed, contrary to the SNIE, that we may have been frighteningly close to an all-out war in 1983. And even though almost nobody could actually read the PIFIAB report, this rumor mill elevated it to a kind of mythical status.

Now, certain intelligence officials were questioning the conventional wisdom. If the PIFIAB allegedly said that Able Archer was a disaster, maybe it really was a near miss. Now, at this point, Leonard Pruetz was running up and down the halls of the CIA screaming, I told you so.

Well, I mean, I can't verify that he actually did that, but it's what I would have done. So I guess I'm just projecting. I had heard of it in passing, but I've never gotten into it in any depth. I just knew that people talked about it. Listeners, meet Ben Fisher. My name is Ben Fisher, F-I-S-C-H-E-R, it's the German spelling. And I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for over 30 years.

Ben wasn't involved in the CIA's initial Abel Archer investigations. At that time, he had a very different job at the CIA. I was undercover for a number of years, about 15 years. Pretty exciting, right?

In the 90s, Ben left the undercover world for a much quieter life as a CIA historian. And that's when he decided to look into Abel Archer. There were differences of opinion. The issue had never really been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. And so that's what I set out to do.

When I started the research, a colleague of mine got me aside and he said, "I want you to know that this is a very controversial issue within the intelligence community." That's not just the CIA, that's also the Pentagon, State Department, and people staked out diametrically opposed opinions on this episode.

And he said, no matter what you find, you're going to offend one side or the other. And it's going to hurt your career. That didn't really faze Ben. As far as he was concerned, as an historian, he was already in the sunset of his career. Which, of course, is the beauty of being on the history staff. You don't have anything to risk. You can reach your own conclusions and write it up and let people deal with it.

Ben began his research. Knowing that he eventually planned to publish his work publicly, he was careful to use only declassified sources. He did not read the PIFIAB report. But even so, he was terrified by what he found. It was very disturbing, and it led me to believe that this was a very serious crime.

matter. Ben didn't think his CIA colleagues had gotten it right in the 80s. From what he could tell, the CIA had underestimated the Soviets' fear. It

It was very possible Able Archer was a big deal after all. I will say that on several occasions, people much higher up the food chain than I called me up or asked me to come and see them, and they said, "I want you to know that I thought this war scare thing was a bunch of nonsense for a long time. And then I read your monograph and I decided I've changed my mind. I think it was a serious matter and it deserves more attention than it's received."

The CIA published Ben's work in 1998. They held a conference, invited academics and intelligence officials. The story of the Able Archer war scare left the obscurity of classified government archives. Now, it was public.

And a lot of people then decided to take a second look at the issue. And so I think that I take credit for encouraging other people to go beyond where I was able to go. By the early 2000s, the Able Archer myth had gone through a transformation of sorts. A glow-up, as the kids say. Between whispers about the Piffy Ab's findings and Ben Fisher's work, the propaganda theory receded into the background.

the intelligence community had come around. Many officials in the US government now believed that Able Archer was a truly dangerous near miss. Plus, any CIA folks who had been in power during Able Archer had long since retired or passed away. Basically, by the 2000s, nobody was trying to diminish the importance of Able Archer. Not anymore. But the thing about mysteries is that they have a tendency to linger.

Unless there's 100% incontrovertible, undeniable proof, some needling sleuth with a taste for CIA intrigue is sure to come along and start asking questions again. Yep, I'm talking about my main man, Nate Jones, or as I like to call him, Freedom of Information Act guy.

The government's telling me, no, you can't have the documents, and I want the documents. Does that sound like the kind of guy who's going to let the PIFIAB, the holy grail of Able Archer reportage, sit untouched in a dusty manila folder somewhere forever? Of course not. So this one was a slobber knocker. Just a big, long, nasty fight. Nate knew the PIFIAB could contain information that wasn't found in Fisher's reports or the SNIE.

Information that may lay the mystery of Abel Archer to rest once and for all. He had to get it. It wouldn't take long for the PIFIAB report to become Nate Jones' white whale. I filed a FOIA for that pretty quickly. It went nowhere. Waited, waited, waited. I'd filed my other FOIAs. And eventually I started bugging them and calling them and saying, what is going on? And they said,

kind of politely, but kind of not, said, no, listen, we're not doing one review. It has to be reviewed by essentially six, seven, eight agencies. Something to understand about the PIFIAB report, it was special because it was comprehensive. It used reports and sources from more than a half a dozen agencies. And that, of course, made it nearly impossible to declassify.

There's diplomatic sources. There's satellite sources. There's SIGINT sources. There's CIA sources. It's hard enough to get, for example, one five-page document with only CIA equities reviewed. That's years. So you can imagine a 100-page document

with equities of seven agencies. - It's not that the PIFIAB wouldn't get declassified. It's just that it might take so long that by the time it was declassified, Nate would very likely be dead. - So we were in big trouble. - But Nate wasn't the only one interested in the mythical and mysterious events of Abel Archer. Other historians were probing too, but instead of trying to crack open the US government's files, they were looking east.

I was excited to try to find, you know, even more of the picture on how we all almost perished. And I am extremely excited to tell you what they found. I got my hands on a exercise report on the entire Autumn Forge series of exercises. Oh, wow. I mean, this is it. This is, you know, this is the document. Let's see how close we all got to blowing ourselves up.

That's next time on Snafu. While Nate tries to get his paws on the piffy app, we're going to head over to the Soviet bloc with some historical sleuthing that raises some critical questions about those spies, Oleg Gordievsky and Reiner Rupp, who saved the day during Able Archer. I won't say he's intentionally lying. He might just be mistaken or he might remember it a certain way.

Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, associate producer Tori Smith. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug, and Whitney Donaldson.

Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis. That's fucking true story. This episode was written by Sarah Joyner with additional writing from me, Elliot Kalin, and Whitney Donaldson. Olivia Canney is our production assistant. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Additional research and fact-checking by Charles Richter. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Original music and sound design by Dan Rosato. Additional editing from Ben Chug. Special thanks to Allison Cohen and Matt Eisenstadt.

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