Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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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Okay, stop me if you've heard this one. What do you get when the former head of the KGB and the former head of the CIA walk into a funeral? High atop the Kremlin tonight, a Soviet flag at half-staff. A symbol of mourning for Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. Brezhnev will be laid to rest in Red Square beside the Kremlin wall. They came to Red Square today to bury Brezhnev and not particularly to praise him. So it is when dictators die.
Okay, so it's not actually a joke. It's 1982, Moscow, almost two years before Abel Archer. Former Soviet leader and now dead corpse Leonid Brezhnev is being carried in an open coffin procession through Red Square. And his companions and friends and rivals watched their last glimpse of him.
Heads of state from across the world flocked to Moscow to attend the funeral. It was the ultimate Cold War invitation. I mean, a real who's who of who might press the button. Western leaders are there to pay their respects to their longtime adversary, Leonid Brezhnev, but also there to meet their new one, Yuri Andropov.
Andropov delivers Brezhnev's eulogy, which is really more of an unofficial inaugural address. And afterward, Andropov, the former head of the KGB, takes a private meeting with the former head of the CIA and now U.S. Vice President George Bush Sr.
And Andropov says some pretty extraordinary things. This is Simon Miles, Cold War historian. He says to Bush, look, you and I both know that we need to say things for public consumption in our countries that we don't necessarily mean. Primarily mean things about one another. This is encoded language, says this explicitly.
And then he goes on to say, you know, we have the responsibility as leaders of the two nuclear armed superpowers to understand the difference between when I'm just saying nasty things about you because I've got to, because that's what you do at parades. And when you are actually threatening me.
Andropov is essentially saying, "I know that Reagan will talk shit about me, and you know that I will talk shit about him, but we both need to know that sometimes it's just for show." Two leaders reminding one another about the nature of the Cold War, that it is this kind of two-level game where you have your public consumption and then you have your policy. Does this mean that Andropov knew the entire time that Reagan's speeches were only speeches?
Does it mean the reaction to Able Archer was just... theater?
So far this season, we've talked about how Reagan's tough-guy rhetoric pushed the Soviets to the brink. "...history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire." How the Soviets became blinded by their own paranoia and sent their spies looking for signs of an impending attack. "...go and count the number of lights on in the Pentagon at night." How the U.S. sent spy planes to poke the Soviet bear. "...putting the fear of God..."
like literally into the Soviets. How the Soviets were so jumpy they shot down a commercial plane. Aboard a Korean jumbo jet that drifted into Soviet territory. How the Soviets deployed a faulty missile detection system that tested one man's resolve. He said it was like sitting in a frying pan. How the Soviets believed that an attack was actually happening during Abel Archer.
And so they put their nuclear arsenal on a hair trigger. "I knew it was a dramatic moment." And after all that, how the CIA was convinced that the whole snafu was really no big deal. "It's just propaganda." Until one man, Lieutenant General Leonard Perutz, begged the intelligence community to take Abel Archer seriously.
You might want to look into this because it's too important not to. And how finally, after decades of denial, the intelligence community had come to believe that they had made grave errors and that Able Archer truly was a nuclear near-miss. I think it was a serious matter. It deserves more attention than it's received. But what if that version of the story is all wrong? What if the Able Archer war scare really was just an act inside an act?
wrapped in an even bigger act. Man, if only Russia had some sort of nesting folkloric toy that we could use as a metaphor here. Oh well. So once again, what do you get when the former head of the KGB and the former head of the CIA walk into a funeral? You get mind games of a nuclear proportion. Or do you?
I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On season one, we're telling you the story of a snafu that is gigantic, absurd, and terrifying. Able Archer 83, the 1983 NATO military exercise that almost led to a real nuclear war. Or did it?
This episode, we're pulling apart the fabric of the Able Archer story and asking the question, what if we've got this story all wrong?
I went looking for these documents not with a mind to disproving the Able Archer thesis, but rather just to get even more insight on this amazing Cold War story. It was 2014. Historian Simon Miles, a young researcher with a nose for Cold War mysteries, caught a severe case of the Able Archer bug. I was excited to try to find, you know, even more of the picture on how we all almost perished.
His plan was to hit the archives in order to figure out what the Soviets were actually thinking during Abel Archer. KGB archives in Moscow were still locked down. But Simon could look in the archives of former Soviet allies, where they had helped the Soviets with Operation Ryan, that proverbial tic-tac-toe board of death used to gauge whether the U.S. was preparing for a nuclear attack.
In the archives of some of those former allied states who were participants in Project Riyadh, who were feeding information into this thing,
we actually have amazing insight into what's going on. The first leg of his journey takes him to the Czech Republic, former Soviet state Czechoslovakia, where he starts to dig into the files of the STB, the Czechoslovakian secret police. In Prague, right by the river in this pretty sort of
So, Simon walks into the Communist Chic Archive. Imagine his excitement, right? He's going to pull back the Iron Curtain and find all the frantic messages the Soviets were sending back and forth.
The flash telegrams and panicked alerts. I remember it pretty well, actually, because the archive staff, who were all very, very young, were having a party. And then kind of behind these doors, you can hear laughing and glasses clinking. Hey, archivists like to party too, right? And Czech archivists? Oh my God, don't get me started. Anyway, somehow ignoring the chance to attend the greatest party of his life, Simon takes a seat at a big table and begins to dig in.
And so I got my hands on the exercise report on the entire Autumn Forge series of exercises. And, you know, when they give that to you, you think, oh, wow, I mean, this is it. This is the document. Let's see how close we all got to blowing ourselves up. Simon opens the folder and begins scanning. I am reading through this booklet. You know, it's got these green kind of card paper covers. And, you know, things are...
tracking with what I knew about what had happened and in real granular detail, I should say. It has the full accounting of Autumn Forge 83, the 19,000 troops flying into West Germany under complete radio silence, the massive rehearsal for war, all leading up to the final act. And then I get to the Abel Archer piece. And the first thing that strikes me is how short it is. So the conversation about Abel Archer is
is barely a page long when I'm thinking to myself, wow, this is really, really weird. If this is a big deal, yeah, this should be. We should have a lot of the play-by-play here. Did these guys miss it? Spoiler alert, they did not miss it.
What it does not talk about is any sense that there was heightened danger, that there was sort of something more pernicious afoot behind what the NATO and the Americans were doing. Rather, it traces with a striking degree of accuracy exactly what was happening and why it was being done. And that's it.
That's it. No panic that Able Archer was an insidious cover for a real nuclear attack. Just an accurate account of a routine NATO nuclear exercise with an apparent recognition that it was all simply an enormously violent game of let's pretend.
So, what Simon discovered in that archive, while Czech historians were next door sipping champagne and making flirty remarks about Franz Kafka, was that, according to the East, there was nothing unusual about Able Archer 83 at all.
And so that didn't sort of change my mind, but it made me start asking some really hard questions. It wasn't what Simon was expecting, but maybe the Czechs were just out of the loop. Maybe the Russians were like, nah, why bother filling them in? They never invite us to their cool archive parties. But the East Germans, on the other hand, they went together like Sonny and Cher, chocolate and peanut butter. If the Soviets were scared of a nuclear attack during Able Archer, the East Germans would know.
So, Simon headed to Germany. The East German military records are all in a beautiful town in Baden-Württemberg called Freiburg and Breisgau. They're in a suburban area next to a kind of the German equivalent of Home Depot and across the street from a brothel. But it's a phenomenal place to work. Naturally. And I start looking through all of these materials. And here again, we have access to briefings and intelligence reports on what is happening.
And the most important one, I think, comes to the desk of the East German defense minister. And it is a report on the impending Able Archer exercise. It also talks with pretty impressive accuracy about what is going to happen. And it actually says explicitly that none of this means...
that the West sort of anticipates a heightened threat of war or anything like that. The big message is, "Abel Archer, another phase of Autumn Forge." Really, basically, there's nothing to see here. Simon begins to pore over transcripts of interviews with Soviet officials. And what I'm reading from these people who would be in the know by virtue of their positions, they're saying that we're not at the brink of an apocalypse.
So, on the one hand, we have Leonard Perut's account of the Soviet Air Force loading nuclear weapons onto planes and standing by on high alert. And on the other hand, the Soviet records show nothing.
It's very possible that U.S. intelligence saw those signs. It's very possible that leaders in the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. military, maybe even in the U.S. political system, drew those conclusions. But it's still possible that they were all entirely wrong. What?!
So no misinterpreted NATO messages? No nuclear near-miss? I think in order to make those claims, we really need a strong piece of evidence from the Eastern Bloc, from the other side of the Iron Curtain. And that doesn't exist. So now I've kind of got a problem on my hands, if you will, because we have this universally almost accepted story
about a near-miss with nuclear war. And I've got this body of evidence that's saying the opposite. What the hell happened here? If the Soviets were as terrified as we thought, with the nukes on planes and the tic-tac-toe board and the, you know, readiness to end life on Earth, why was there no record of it in Eastern documents? Simon decided to look at all the evidence side by side and try to figure out where this story, what he came to believe was a myth, came from. ♪
I was funneling down from what's commonly presented as sort of this overwhelming body of evidence. Dozens and dozens and dozens of sources are saying this. Well, really, dozens and dozens and dozens of sources are repeating this one pretty sketchy claim by a Soviet double agent. The double agent with the sketchy claim? You already know him well.
Oleg Gordievsky. The Americans' exercise may be preparation for a southern nuclear attack. But what reason would Gordievsky have to lie about Abel Archer? I'm so glad you asked.
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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Visit HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603 for more details. Hyundai, there's joy in every journey. It's 1985. The world is in slack-jawed wonder at Sylvester Stallone's Pex in both Rocky IV and Rambo II. And it's been a year and a half since Oleg Gordievsky met with his MI6 handler, warning that the United States and the Soviet Union were on the precipice of nuclear war.
Since Able Archer 83, Oleg has further risen in the KGB ranks. He has just been appointed the chief resident in London, with even greater access to the inner workings of the KGB. He's MI6's prized source, their biggest Cold War accomplishment. And then one day, Gordievsky gets a telegram from the Kremlin. It says, "'Dearest Comrade Gordievsky, "'please return to Moscow immediately.'"
Gordievsky and his MI6 handlers knew that returning home to Moscow was risky. But to defy the order meant ending his KGB career, just when it was getting good. He decided to go. Gordievsky reviewed his escape plan with his MI6 handlers. He would be extracted if things went south. He kissed his wife and two daughters goodbye and boarded a plane for the Soviet Union. When he arrived at his apartment in Moscow, the deadbolt was locked.
He never locked the deadbolt, didn't even have a key for it. At that moment, Oleg Gordievsky knew he had been found out. Because as it turns out, there was a mole in the CIA. The CIA knew it had a traitor. Asked why he did what he did, Ames said money was his main motivation. The KGB learned that there was a British agent. And yes, they decided to play a cat and mouse game with me.
The KGB knew they were compromised by a double agent, and they suspected it was Gordievsky. They didn't know it was him for sure, not yet. One day, they scooped him up and drove him to a bungalow. They spiked his drink and interrogated him for hours. Gordievsky was in a daze, hallucinating. He tried to tell himself to deny, deny, deny, but he wasn't really aware of what he was saying. After five hours, he blacked out. To this day, he still doesn't remember what happened in that room.
Meanwhile, the KGB had retrieved Gordievsky's wife and two daughters from London, and they were now on their way back to Moscow. Gordievsky was released and placed under 24-hour surveillance. I started to look and found I was... people are walking behind me. It was very intimidating. During the Cold War, everybody who was in touch with the foreign intelligence service in the Soviet Union, each officer, all were caught and all were shot.
Gordievsky would later describe this moment in his life as utterly hopeless. He was thinking instead of even trying to escape, he might as well just give up, wait for the bullet in the back of his neck. But as days passed, constantly looking over his shoulder, Gordievsky somehow found his resolve. And then I started preparation to the escape.
But if he had any chance of survival, he'd need to leave alone. Leave his family behind. There was no time to second-guess his decision. Gordievsky was in a race against the clock. Each day he failed to get out of the Soviet Union was another day for the KGB to confirm his identity as their traitorous double agent. Gordievsky activated his escape plan. On a Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Gordievsky stood under a lamppost outside a bread shop near Kievsky Metro Station.
He carried a plastic Safeway bag with a giant red S. He wore a peaked cap, a military hat. It was a signal to MI6 that he needed to be extracted. Get me the fuck out of here. A few minutes later, Gordievsky watched a man in gray trousers remove a green bag from his pocket, remove a chocolate Mars bar, and begin eating it.
This seemingly unassuming, gray-trousered, candy bar-munching dude was an MI6 agent signaling to Gordievsky that his request had been recognized. It was a scheme. It meant I would be picked up on Saturday the same week at 2 o'clock. Which meant by Saturday at 2 p.m., Gordievsky had to get himself to the pickup point, a boulder by the side of the road in the countryside near the Finnish border.
and he had to do it without being detected by the KGB. On Friday, July 19th, Gordievsky did the hardest thing he'd ever have to do. He packed his bags and said goodbye to his family. - I shook off the surveillance, caught train to Leningrad,
Gordievsky had shaken the KGB tail for now, but they could catch up at any moment. On the overnight train to Leningrad, Gordievsky settled into his top bunk and took two sedatives. Because, you know, he was feeling a little anxious. Apparently, the sedatives knocked him out so hard that when the train abruptly stopped, he rolled right off the top bunk and bashed his head. Now blood was dripping down his face, which makes it that much harder to blend in.
From Lenin Station, Gordievsky hopped on a different train, then a bus. The bus approached the rendezvous point. The bus stopped. Gordievsky got off. He looked at his watch. It was 10:30, four hours before MI6 was supposed to pick him up. What do you do? Dive into the shadows and wait, right? Just sit tight. The cavalry is almost there. All you got to do is just keep your head down.
Ugh, that's not our boy Oleg. Instead of hiding in the underbrush and patiently waiting for MI6 to arrive, as he certainly should have done, Gordievsky made the truly insane decision to hitchhike to the town of Vyborg, which is 16 miles away, so that he could have a drink at the local bar. After downing a beer and a chicken leg, he started running the 16 miles back to the rendezvous point.
in corduroys. Even if I wanted to, I could not make this shit up. Evidently, he got tired of running before completing his half marathon in corduroys and decided to hitchhike the rest of the way. Gordievsky stuck his thumb out, a car pulled over. Luckily, it was not a KGB officer, and Gordievsky enjoyed the ride back to the rendezvous point.
As they approached the boulder by the side of the road, literally in the middle of nowhere, Gordievsky asked the driver to let him out here, please and thank you, ostensibly for a booty call, which sounds bonkers, but apparently the driver was just like, oh yeah, classic countryside boulder-hiding hanky-panky, go for it, buddy. Gordievsky climbed into the underbrush, pulled out a bottle of beer from his pocket that he had somehow carried with him during his run,
and enjoyed it while he waited for MI6 to retrieve him. And here's the best part. He got away with it! About 30 miles before the border, I was hiding in the woods. At an appointed time, which was 2 o'clock, two British cars stopped just exactly where I was lying. You can still hear the wonder in his voice. This one-in-a-million miracle had happened.
I jumped into the boot of the car and they went to the border. Gordievsky's brush with death was even closer than he knew. He would later learn the KGB had confirmed his identity as the double agent the week before he escaped. To this day, we still don't know why they waited to pounce. But they did. And after a miraculous and somewhat claustrophobic escape, he was now on his way to building a new life.
A former KGB spy defected to England. Except it wasn't over for Gordievsky. Sure, he was free. He escaped the Soviet Union. But he was alone. His wife and his children were still trapped back in Moscow, and he needed to get them out. Commence Phase 2. Operation Reagan.
After his escape, Gordievsky's identity was officially revealed. He was safe in the UK. There was no reason to hide. He wrote books about his spying. And what did he say? Oh, yeah. Back in 1983, the world almost blew up. Not trying to brag, but kind of helped cool things down a little. No biggie. Just what any super cool double agent super spy would have done. That's when Reagan finally learned who his valuable British source was. I met Reagan and I met George Bush.
On July 21, 1987, Oleg Gordievsky was invited for a meeting with Ronald Reagan and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush at the White House. I guess Nancy's astrologer said Oleg was chill. Yeah, no, I'm not letting that go. Reagan's diary that day talked about attending an event with Clint Eastwood and getting his contact lenses cleaned. Then he writes...
Forgot, this morning had a meeting with Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet KGB officer who defected to England. Did Reagan ever talk to you about your reports? No, Reagan didn't talk to me about my reports, but he showed good knowledge of me and my significance.
But he was not such a brainy man. Okay, don't know why he had to throw that burn in there. As Gordievsky remembers it, their conversation was a sober one because Gordievsky had a favor to ask. He wanted to get his family out of Russia. Not actually a lot to ask when your calling card is the guy who saved the world from nuclear annihilation. And Reagan decided to help him. He said an important thing. I will give the instruction to all the bodies.
to fight for your family. That was enough. Because immediately, the National Security Council, the State Department, and the CIA started to ask for the family. Reagan later wrote in his diary, "Margaret Thatcher is working on the Soviets as we are. We're going to hold back and see if she can get his wife and two children out of Russia."
Continuing on, he wrote, "I just hope Oleg appreciates this enough that he never makes a snide comment about the size of my brain." Alright, I made that up. It took four years for them to succeed. In the end, it all came down to a show of good faith by a new Russian leader trying to rebuild Russia's standing with the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The press covered the Gordievsky family reunion. He and his wife were like giggling schoolchildren, thrilled to be back together at last.
It's a beautiful moment. I mean, the guy had escaped the Eastern Bloc and was separated from his family for six years. This was the moment that Gordievsky had been dreaming about. Maybe it's the kind of moment you'd do almost anything for. Like, maybe even make up a story about saving the world from nuclear destruction.
Gordievsky is in many ways the ur-source for the Able Archer story. Here's Simon Miles again. He says that even though the Able Archer story became larger than life in the West, it all goes back to one single source. It was all from Oleg Gordievsky. He was the one who told MI6 that Soviets were afraid of nuclear war. It was Gordievsky's account that prompted the CIA to look into Able Archer.
And it was Gordievsky's story that spurred Leonard Perutz to write his dramatic retirement letter, which led to the piffy app. And it was Gordievsky's terrifying tale that influenced CIA historian Ben Fisher's work, which totally shifted the Able Archer consensus within the intelligence community. It all goes back to Gordievsky. Is it possible, is it even conceivable, that he's lying?
Is it possible that he exaggerated the story after his defection to save his family? And so you could imagine a situation in which a spy is saying, hey, look at what I did. I saved you from nuclear war and you won't get my wife and children, whom I left behind, out of the Soviet Union for me.
But hold on a second, there's proof, right? Definitive proof. That flash telegram that Gordievsky says he received on November 8th or November 9th, he didn't remember which. You know, the one that said the KGB believed that the countdown to nuclear war had begun under cover of Abel Archer. Now, Oleg Gordievsky and his handlers kept meticulous records.
He would go on to publish two books that included hundreds of actual cables he received from Moscow during his tenure as a spy in London. But the one telegram we've never seen a copy of is this one. Interesting. And convenient. It's also worth pointing out that in the years since Gordievsky was reunited with his wife and kids, his recollection of events got a little less "I saved the world-y."
Back in the mid-'80s, he was adamant that Abel Archer was the peak of Soviet paranoia, that the Soviets were convinced Reagan wanted to obliterate them. And further, he said it was reasonable to assume his contribution had pulled us back from the edge of annihilation. You know that version. That's what you've been listening to this whole time while doing the dishes or driving to Milwaukee or whatever it is you do while listening to this podcast. Years later, though, when he was asked about it all again in 2008...
He doesn't seem quite so sure. He contradicts himself. He hedges a little. They're afraid. Really, they think that Reagan is capable. But it doesn't mean that they will bring it to the nuclear war. That's why I was never in panic and didn't run to the offices with reports about Abel Archer, because I felt that it was not 100% serious. It's missing something.
It never will come to fruition. Here, Gordievsky is actually contradicting the Able Archer story and saying that really it wasn't a moment of acute danger. There wasn't really a sense that this was preparation for a surprise attack and so on and so forth. So what does all this mean for the Able Archer story?
If the Soviet documents don't make Abel Archer sound all that serious, and Gordievsky may actually be, you know, exaggerating a little, is this whole story just a bunch of bullshit? Can we ever know the truth about Abel Archer? Well, don't forget there was another man on the inside. That other spy, the one in NATO, who said that during Abel Archer the Russians panicked and he sent a message that snipped the nuclear fuse with his spy calculator.
Reiner Rupp. Or, as you may remember him, Agent Topaz. So if the Able Archer story is a bunch of nonsense, does that mean that Reiner Rupp is lying too? Oh no, say it isn't so.
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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Life had been pretty good for Stasi secret agent Reiner Rupp. He was 12 years into an undercover stint at NATO HQ. He was good at his job, his NATO job, where he kept getting promoted, and also his Stasi job, where he kept stealing NATO files to destroy NATO. So I guess he wasn't all that good at his NATO job, after all. But then as 1989 came to a close, the ground began to shake underneath his comfortable secret agent life.
November 9th, the Berlin Wall comes down. A massive global event. It signaled the beginning of the end for communism. And then, as Christmas rolled around... NATO got a message of a top-level spy in the organization. Oh boy, NATO knew there was a mole. Some guy who went by the code name Topaz. The intel suggested that this Topaz was a senior NATO official.
not some paper pusher. Allowing a communist spy into the innermost circle was beyond humiliating. The discovery was catastrophic. As a result, they started to search for this toolpath. So while everyone else in Brussels was roasting chestnuts on an open fire and getting busy under the mistletoe like they were Czech archivists, Rupp was hurrying to cover his tracks.
And then... Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the people raided the Stasi's headquarters in Berlin. What they found shocked the world. Mountains of files. Somewhere buried in those Stasi files was the truth about Agent Topaz's identity. Rup, Roe!
But it wouldn't be easy to find. Papers had been shredded into a gajillion pieces. Stasi digital records were encrypted up the wazoo. It would take the West years to piece the Stasi records together. And Topaz himself was trying to derail the hunt. And for reasons I don't want to go into, I could follow all their work.
Remember, Rupp was still on the inside. He was even participating in meetings about the Topaz hunt. Hey guys, got a hot lead on this Topaz guy. Pretty sure he's either in Buenos Aires or Singapore. Anyway, for a while, he was able to remain just barely one step ahead. NATO began to get desperate.
There'd been big cash rewards offered to my former case officer. I mean, like in these bad spy films, a case of cash put on the table, honestly. Despite the danger, NATO just couldn't seem to make progress. And Reiner Rupp began to believe maybe he'd make it out of this thing unscathed. They got close, but they never got close enough.
Eventually thought I was basically safe and I was already looking for a new job because quite clearly I didn't want to stay at NATO. But piece by piece, those shredded documents were coming together. The codes were getting cracked and NATO was closing in. And so they waited until I came back to Germany for the
He means his mom's birthday. It was July 31, 1993. Seventy German agents hid around Rupp's parents' house. As Rupp and his wife and Christine arrived to celebrate, they were both arrested. Happy birthday, Mom. I'm going to prison.
Reiner and Aunt Christine Rupp were charged for their crimes, and they each faced life in prison. It was not easy. Aunt Christine was allowed to be home with the Rupps' children as she awaited trial, but he would await his fate in a prison cell. Reiner Rupp would later say that in a way he was glad the jig was up. He didn't want his kids somehow caught up in his double life.
Eventually, Aunt Christine Rupp was found guilty of abetting treason, but when the judge considered her sentence, he noted that she was caring for her children and that the damage she did to the West was ultimately not that severe. She was given a 22-month suspended sentence. The judge would not be so lenient with Reiner Rupp.
I was sentenced to 12 years eventually. Twelve years. The judge said that Reiner Rupp's espionage created a danger of particularly grave disadvantage for Western Germany. He said if the Cold War hadn't ended, he would have sentenced him to life. So Reiner Rupp began his 12-year prison sentence. And it's then that he and his handlers immediately got to work on a PR campaign.
a campaign designed to enlist public support in getting Rupp's sentence reduced. Among other things, they told the story of Reiner Rupp's involvement with Able Archer 83, a little-known nuclear near-miss. One of his principal advocates was a guy named Werner Grossman, the former deputy head of the Stasi, aka Rupp's boss.
He said that back in 1983, he said the KGB was convinced that there's going to be an attack. That's the German spy museum's Florian Schimakowski. Grossman's account was credible. He was, after all, a big dog in the Stasi, the KGB's most trusted intelligence ally. And he was trying to use Rupp's insider NATO intelligence to diffuse all the tension.
But he said the KGB was so paranoid he couldn't get them to see reason.
When I'm telling fishermen that there are no fish in the pond, then they should actually stop fishing. But the KGB didn't do it. They just were very, very nervous. So they actually, from their point of view, it was very dangerous. So dangerous that during NATO's annual Able Archer exercise, the Soviets were utterly convinced that the time for a nuclear attack had finally arrived.
Grossman backed up the story that at the precise moment the Soviets were convinced an attack was imminent,
Rainer Rupp sent a coded message from a calculator, a message that may have saved the world. Grossman is convinced that Rupp played a whole part, a huge part in that in calming the KJB down. Grossman's claim was this. Yeah, Rupp was technically a traitor to West Germany, but his espionage actually wound up saving West Germany, along with the rest of the world, from the catastrophe of nuclear war.
He was not spying to harm anybody, and he was never spying actually to prepare a Soviet attack. And that's quite without a doubt. He was always spying to prevent war from happening. It was a sexy story, and a very convenient one. Maybe it could get Rupp's sentence reduced. Petitions began to circulate, advocating for Rainer Rupp's release. Even the winner of the German Peace Prize appealed on Rupp's behalf.
And eventually, it worked. So in the end, the political situation kind of, I think, softened up so that I was released after seven years in jail. In July of 2000, Rainer Rupp was released from prison, five years early. He reunited with his wife. They're still together to this day, living a long and, by all accounts, happy life in Germany.
But of course, you have to keep in mind, it's hard to actually figure out if everything is 100% true. Thanks to them, for example, Reiner Rupp can say, "Well, look, we helped preserve the peace. Actually, you should thank us because we helped stop a nuclear war."
This is Douglas Selvage, an historian and probably the world's foremost expert on the Stasi. Douglas is one of many historians who aren't really buying what the Stasi are selling, if you catch my meaning. I'm saying he thinks it's bullshit.
Now, there are a couple of problems with this. First of all, there's a database of basically incoming intelligence reports, including what Reiner Rupp is sending. We can use this for the year that we're talking about, 1983. It's a very good database of incoming information for East German foreign intelligence. I checked and there's like no new incoming intelligence regarding nuclear weapons from Rupp before November of 1983.
Not only that, there was no record in the archive of Rupp's emergency calculator message during "Able Archer." All we have is the word of Rupp and the Stasi. "I suppose it's possible he gave a phone call to Wolf, or maybe there's something they forgot to record. I don't think that's the case."
I won't say he's intentionally lying. He might just be mistaken or he might remember it a certain way. I don't know, Doug. He seems pretty sure. Do you remember sending a message during that time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember sending. At the time of Abel Archer? By the time Reiner Rupp began telling his story, Oleg Gordievsky had already published a couple of books where he told his Abel Archer story.
It all begs the question, did Reiner Rupp hear about Oleg's account and see an opportunity to rehabilitate his own image by manufacturing a corroboration?
I'm a firm believer in the idea that you can't say just because you haven't found the evidence or the evidence doesn't exist that it disproves something. So I'm not going to say that it disproves that there was this heightened sense of threat or the absence of evidence disproves that Rupp played this important role. Maybe it's even true, but there's no other supporting evidence that I've found. Nothing.
Now, if it turns out someday, if I'm going through the Stasi files or some book where they're talking about the messages they sent to Moscow and I find something different, then I'll change my opinion. But I think this has all been overplayed. Rupp had a motive. He wanted to shorten his prison sentence. And he had the opportunity because he could basically just piggyback on the story Gordievsky was already telling.
Gordievsky also had a motive: he needed to get his family out of the Soviet Union. And, coincidentally, neither of them have been able to produce the key evidence supporting their Able Archer heroics. Gordievsky was never able to produce a copy of the flash telegram he says he received from the KGB on November 8th or 9th — the one that said the countdown to a nuclear strike had begun under cover of Able Archer. And there is no record of Rupp's emergency message either.
Which means we found ourselves in quite the pickle. Here's a quick recap. This Able Archer war scare story that the West has finally accepted, there's no record of it in Eastern Bloc archives. And the two main sources of the story, well, they have pretty strong motives to lie and they have no proof. Plus, Soviet leaders were pretty into Cold War performance, so maybe the propaganda theory was right all along.
Nate Jones is still working to prove the opposite. And there's still a key document that hasn't been declassified. One that might prove Abel Archer was a big deal. Next time on Snafu. It went through the mail slit, so there's kind of a thud onto the floor that was about 100 pages thick with government address, government stamps. So I knew it might be good. My heart started beating a little bit.
Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio.
It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug, and Whitney Donaldson. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, associate producer, Tori Smith. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis. And so I can say any damn thing I want. This episode was written by Carl Nellis and 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 Chugg. Some archival audio in this episode originally appeared in Taylor Downing's fantastic film, 1983, The Brink of Apocalypse. Thank you, Mr. Downing, for permission to use it. Special thanks to Allison Cohen and Matt Eisenstadt.
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