Fight To The Finish - World War Three, Round Two

Thirty–Six – Risk Versus Reward

March 23rd 1990
Pendock, Worcestershire, western England, Great Britain

General-Major Alexander Ivanovich Lebed was brought in for another interrogation.

The English spooks – ‘British’ they had corrected him before – had their questions again. They wanted to tell them all of the secrets which they believed that he knew. They asked him about this person, that event and certain places. They wanted him to confirm some things and tell him that others weren’t true. They asked about the shootings of freedom fighters – terrorists – in the Netherlands and who had ordered that above him. They made him promises on one hand and issued threats on the other.

They kept telling him to cooperate with them.

As before, Lebed would tell them nothing. He stated after the first question that he was a prisoner of war and had the right to not cooperate with them. After that he said no more to them. Many of his men had been foolish and believed that they had to talk or face death at the hands of their captors, but he understood that the English wouldn’t do that to him. They had their rules and their moral obligations; they wouldn’t even hand him over to the Americans as they had alluded to with the unspoken dire hints of what that would mean for him.

This morning, the interrogation went differently from usual though past the first question – one concerning who were those KGB people in the Netherlands who he had had dealings with – in a rather unexpected manner.

The English spook in-charge laid out a pair of photographs as well as a piece of paper. He turned the photos around after briefly looking at them so that Lebed could see them and told them that they were of his brother Colonel Aleksey Ivanovich Lebed, another Airborne Troops officer. That was his corpse there in the two images and he had been shot by the KGB. The piece of paper was a typed official report on his arrest and execution written by the KGB: it said when and where he had died as well as why and who had ordered him to be shot.


The pictures could easily have been fake. The report could have been a fake. All of them could have been true too.

For a moment, the barest of moments, Lebed had a shortness of breath followed by a feeling of bile rising up in his throat. He breathed in and swallowed hard. His fists tightened and then he relaxed them. His eyes watered but no tears fell.

The English spook had stepped back and Lebed got the feeling that the man had been momentarily alarmed at his reaction. The spook had been worried about violence coming his way and Lebed gained more than a small amount of satisfaction at that. This fool had thought that he would break him with what he had shown him but all he had done was inflame him as Lebed had nearly lost control for a moment.

Lebed looked right at the man before turning over the photographs and the report. He had no interest in studying them. His focus instead was on the man who had brought them here to him so as to cause Lebed grief and personally gain from them. Lebed locked eyes with the man as to show him that he wouldn’t give in.

Yet… behind the front he showed Lebed was scared he was about to do just that.


They sent him out for a late breakfast and then Lebed was taken to see a doctor again. The doctor was supposed to be a non-military volunteer with the Red Cross: another spy as far as Lebed was concerned. He was told that the flu he was suffering from was still non-responsive to medication and asked if he had any idea what it was. Lebed thought that as a doctor surely he should know that rather than asking him! There came the usual comment from the English military officer who was always in the room when the doctor was treating Lebed that it was either a side-effect of inoculations given pre-war to Soviet forces or an unidentified biological weapon as seen in others. Lebed chose not to give his usual response that if it was a biological weapon it would have been one used by NATO.

He hadn’t wanted to converse with the doctor/spy.

When he came back into the interrogation, they waited until he sat down before the pictures and the KGB report were removed from the desk, one which was placed in the middle of the classroom with one chair either side. The second English spook, the young woman, removed them and then went back to her own chair in the corner of the room while slipping them into a file folder. Lebed watched as she handed the first spook another cream-coloured folder and then from that out came more photographs.

Lebed told himself that they weren’t going to show him more pictures of his family members. No, no, they were safe and well…

These were colour photographs and of men standing with a plane behind them. Eight pictures were laid out in front of him and at once he recognised two of the faces. The English spook asked him if he knew who they were and what could Lebed tell him about them. They were KGB men who had been in the Netherlands like he had been, he was told, but had managed to escape to Zagreb in Yugoslavia. They had run away while he and his men had been taken prisoner.

Who were they, the question came again, and why would Lebed protect them when the KGB had murdered his brother like they had?

Lebed didn’t respond. He took his eyes off the photographs and stared at the wall behind the spook ahead of him. On that wall of the classroom were drawings done by the children who would usually be here in this school somewhere in the English countryside. There were hand-drawn pictures of families and houses and trees and animals. There was a chart too of numbers and writing in the Latin Alphabet which Lebed didn’t understand. Of the children, they were long gone and Lebed could only assume that they hadn’t been at school since the start of the war. They weren’t coming back anytime soon due to their school and its grounds being used for what it was now: a prisoner of war camp. The school itself had rooms for questioning and others for offices. In the playgrounds and the playing field there were the wooden huts where men like him were kept; there was too a steel fence all around with razor wire atop. Lebed had seen the armed guards and heard the barking of the dogs. There were twenty to thirty men here, all senior officers like him. He had spoken to only a few in whispered conversations when the guards relaxed their watch – or had they? – and learnt their names. One of them, General-Lieutenant Anatoly Vasilyevich Kvashnin, who’d been the deputy commander of the Netherlands Front, had reminded him that the KGB had been serious with their threats about surrendering: Kvashnin had feared for his wife and children, just as Lebed did.

He’d had been captured in Dordrecht. He hadn’t surrendered. Lebed had begged his captors then to not lie and say in their propaganda that he had surrendered. They had asked why and he had told them: he had been far too talkative when first in custody which he didn’t blame on any personal weakness but due the effects of the knock on the head he had taken there when his command post was overrun. Afterwards, he’d witnessed what the KGB were also capable of more than shooting anyone they wished to: the nuclear blast there in the Netherlands had been their handiwork. Those here with him in England had shared brief stories of the KGB and how they were the enemy more than the English or the Americans, even the Germans.

The English were now saying that they had killed his brother for questioning orders when it came to shooting partisans – women and teenagers – in West Germany. These were the people whom the English spook was asking him to identify for them from pictures taken when they had escaped from the fighting in which he had been captured in and men under his command had died horrible deaths.

Grief was making him think of doing as they wished. The English spook had gotten to him. Lebed knew their game and knew that it was winning him over. He tried to stop himself from thinking that he could gain a measure of revenge on the KGB by telling them what they wanted. But that wasn’t working.

He opened his mouth to speak names even though he had serious worries over the outcome. He couldn’t help himself. Lebed wanted to see them pay for what they had done.


After Lebed had pointed out General-Lieutenant Lebedev and Colonel Putin, the English spook first asked him about the ranks of both men. They were not the pre-war ranks, no? Correct, Lebed replied, they and many others in the KGB all received a promotion before the end came in the Netherlands. Was that an encouragement for them to not surrender? Maybe, Lebed speculated. He was then asked about the others in the pictures. Surely Lebed knew them too?

He repeated what he said: he only knew the KGB commander in the Netherlands and the lieutenant-colonel promoted to colonel who had been acting as a sort-of trouble-shooter for the senior man. Of the others, Lebed didn’t recognise them. If there were more pictures, Lebed might know more names, but not of the others from this aircraft.

Lebed was asked if he was telling the truth. If he was going to cooperate, he should fully cooperate, not pick and choose what he wanted to reveal. The combative, accusational attitude of the English spook was back and Lebed glared at him first before giving him a response. He told him that he was telling the truth about the men he knew and the men he didn’t. How was Lebed every going to see his family again and return home to his country if he kept lying came the reply. Again, Lebed told him that he wasn’t lying: this was all that he knew. Moreover, he added that he didn’t believe he ever would see him family or the Rodina again. What did he mean? Lebed told him that the KGB would never allow the war to be lost in a manner which NATO wanted that would bring about the chance of Lebed going home and not being killed on the suspicion of being a traitor just for being held prisoner. Hadn’t the English spook learnt anything? That wouldn’t happen, not while the KGB had any influence anywhere. Then why was Lebed cooperating? Because, Lebed told the fool, you have made me mad and wanting to get even with the KGB so I have told you all that I know about the men in the photographs.

He added too that it was only the KGB he was turning on, not the rest of the Rodina either. The retort came that if what he was saying about the KGB was true than the KGB was the Rodina now. This time, Lebed had nothing to reply with.

The argument ceased at that point between Lebed and the first spook but the second one spoke up. The young woman got up out of her seat and came over to him. She smiled while Lebed averted his gaze from her ample cleavage… clearly an English trap there! The question was spoken in a classical form of Russian showing a different education in Lebed’s native tongue than that of the first spook with his rather rougher Russian. She asked what was his thinking when it came to risk versus reward in helping them? What did he hope to achieve in comparison to his previously expressed fears? How had he made this judgement? Moreover, what did he mean about the KGB never giving in – could he explain further on this and tell of the KGB’s thinking behind the war? Could Lebed explain why the war had been started because it really didn’t make sense to anyone here in the West?

Lebed opted not to repeat himself on why he had done what he had: he’d already told them that they had made him want revenge and he had given up hope too. As to her question about why the war had started he was a bit thunderstruck at that. The West had fermenting all of the unrest throughout Eastern Europe with the aim of occupying East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Balkans to further surround the Rodina like they did with their ring of military bases. When that didn’t work, they had killed Gorbachev and marshalled their troops ready to invade Eastern Europe. That was the truth, he knew that was case despite despising the KGB. When explaining, like one would explain something simple to a child, the pair of English spooks gave him incredulous stares.





March 23rd 1990
Hohenschönhausen, East Berlin & Waldsiedlung, Brandenburg, East Germany and Nörvenich Airbase, North Rhine–Westphalia, West Germany

The Stasi facility at Hohenschönhausen lay to the northeast of East Berlin. It was a secretive prison and not somewhere the ordinary East Germans knew anything about. Those who had previously been held there and managed afterwards to leave alive had no idea of where they had been held. There had never been allowed visitors to those imprisoned here. Hohenschönhausen wasn’t on any official maps and there was hardly a big sign outside announcing what was behind the walls.

Intelligence agencies in the West knew about it and there were now NATO helicopters above depositing armed men to seize those inside – prisoners and guards alike – and take them out of here.

It had just gotten dark when the helicopters had come in from the north, this deep inside East Germany though a path cleared of anti-air threats, and launched their assault. There were a few firings of machine guns mounted to some of the helicopters to knock out guard towers, but after from some guards on the ground who had rifles, there was no real defence put up by those here at Hohenschönhausen. The surprise of the attack was paramount. Who would have ever thought that NATO would strike here?

British soldiers (who’d used some of their own but also American helicopters) swarmed all over the place. They had rappelled from hovering helicopters to land atop buildings and also into inner courtyards. Special forces men from 22 SAS and paratroopers from 3 PARA – the latter who’d recently fought in the Netherlands – shot down anyone who wanted to put up a fight and nabbed anyone who didn’t. They smashed through the prison using violence and above all speed. There were Soviet troops in East Berlin they had been told, a brigade of them with tanks and heavy weapons who’d earlier in the war overrun West Berlin, and apparently they were meant to come nowhere near Hohenschönhausen this evening. The East Germans themselves were a different matter and they would have trained men. That assurance on the Soviets might or might not have been true and they didn’t fear East German paramilitary men, yet still they moved as fast as possible to complete their mission. If the enemy reacted fast enough they all knew that they were doomed being this far behind the frontlines.

There were some rather unpleasant sights which the British troops saw and there were a few cases of captives being shot while resisting. Take your own prisoners for intelligence the troops had been told, but don’t let others slow you down: the assault force remembered their rules of engagement and interpreted them as they saw fit.

Prisoners held here were removed from cells and German-speaking SAS men shouted questions at them to get their identities and who were the top Stasi people. There was a lot of confusion and in the darkness not everything was done perfectly with the operation. No former captives were left behind in their cells alive nor in the hospital wing either but some of them had been killed in the crossfire in-places where more than a few Stasi people stood their ground and died surrounded by captives rather than be taken alive.

Pre-mission intelligence had said that only fifty prisoners in cells and the hospital could be expected here. When the shooting stopped and they were to be loaded into the helicopters, thirty-five were brought out along with captives taken numbering eighteen. There were at least a hundred, one hundred and twenty dead bodies left behind including prisoners and prison staff. The British also took out their own dead: nine of them had lost their lives.

The flotilla of helicopters now had to get out of East Berlin and back to the occupied territory away to the west.

The first part of Operation Black Ghost had been a success.

*

The second part of Operation Black Ghost was conducted by the Americans at the exclusive Waldsiedlung residential complex outside of Berlin. Again, it was helicopters that made the assault with Green Berets and Rangers used here.

KGB security troops from their 105th Independent Motorised Rifle Regiment (wholly separate from the Soviet Army’s 6th Independent Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade) which had been stationed at Waldsiedlung had departed only an hour beforehand: pathfinders on the ground had watched them leave and observed the confusion on the part of the very few and under-armed East Germans left behind at that. Still, several helicopters acting as strike escort fired their machine guns and rockets at what little resistance came their way in a bit of an overkill. They had come expecting the worst and had rather liberal free-fire rules for this mission.

The Americans assaulted multiple houses throughout the area. The helicopters dropped off teams of men atop and around several buildings which were the homes of the East German’s political elite. There came some gunfire from East German bodyguards… men who only one magazine of eight rounds for their Makarov-PM pistols. The Green Berets and Rangers used assault rifles and outgunned the surprised East Germans who couldn’t match their firepower. Afterwards, the Americans would learn about the standing orders allowing the bodyguards to have such a shortage of rounds – it had been a Stasi bodyguard who had done the killings here last October – but for now that didn’t matter. They shot their way into certain homes where they were told they could find certain people.

Just as the British found at Hohenschönhausen, cross-fire killed some of those they were here to take out. Some targets were missing too with no one inside the homes they burst into. Still, many of their targets were in place and those were nabbed. Soon they were hooded and bound while escorted to helicopters taking them and the assault force out of here.

Casualties for the Americans had been remarkably light – three dead and four injured – yet on the way out one of the helicopter was downed. The MH-47D was hit by an anti-aircraft gun which poured 57mm high-explosive rounds into it: it crashed in a fireball taking the lives of all five aircrew, eighteen Rangers and three captives with it.

*

Black Ghost was commanded from Nörvenich Airbase in the Rhineland, the big NATO special operations there and far back from the frontlines. The raiding forces used against the Stasi prison on the edges of East Berlin and the homes of the East German leadership had staged from and would return to air-strips inside occupied territory though many prisoners released and captives taken would eventually end up here.

Lt.-General de la Billière (DLB) and Maj.-General Garrison started receiving news of how the raids were going the moment they crossed the frontlines and were kept abreast of the ongoing situation. It was the two of them who had had their staffs plan the raid and whose assets were taking place. Both senior officers from the British Army and the US Army had serious reservations about Black Ghost on many levels, which they had expressed up the chain-of-command as was the right and their duty. Still, it had gone ahead as the wishes of the politicians and intelligence figures came out on top.

One of the latter was here with DLB and Garrison as the news came in that the assault forces were on the way out, including that of the downed American helicopter. US Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates was back in Europe again. He had come up to Nörvenich after being with SACEUR earlier in the day done in the Saarland. Gates had listened to Schwarzkopf’s complaints about Black Ghost and then told DLB and Garrison to tell him their concerns too. It had been explained that there was a severe risk of failure with the whole mission where a major loss of lives could occur with the plan to assault targets so deep in enemy territory. Moreover, the assurances come through intelligence means that Gates had refused to reveal that there would be no active Soviet interference had worried them… along with his hints to them that the Soviets themselves had provided all of the intelligence on the places, the defences and who could be found at each site. Gates had explained the judgement when it came to risk versus reward to them though they hadn’t been happy at all when he had explained that the prizes were judged to be worth it at the risk of losing several special forces teams and their associated helicopters plus aircrews.

Yet the mission was a success, a stunning success.

Helicopters arrived back in NATO-held East German territory laden with captives taken and rescued prisoners. Names started coming to Nörvenich as to who they had taken out of enemy control.

From Hohenschönhausen, the British had rescued West German political figures Walter Momper (the mayor of West Berlin) and Bjorn Engholm (the Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein). Inexplicably, the Stasi had had in their captivity too the Danish politician Anders Fogh Rasmussen: he was junior minister thought dead – alongside Engholm – when Flensburg was atomised in that Soviet nuclear attack breaking the mid-war ceasefire. Some of the East Germans held there by their countrymen included politicians such as Manfred Gerlach, Hans Morrow and Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski – all of whom had appeared to upset the regime – while there were others like the lawyer Wolfgang Vogel known for links with West Germany in exchanges of defectors and the Lutheran pastor Rainer Eppelmann who had bravely led domestic opposition in the churches. No NATO senior military officers or spooks who’d been in West Berlin when the city fell were found there as had been the hope though.

Neither General Secretary Friedrich Dickel, Defence Minister Heinz Kessler nor Minister of State Security (Stasi) Werner Grossmann were at Waldsiedlung: intelligence said that they were at the far more secure Prenden bunker. However, at the residences raided there were others from the East German leadership who hadn’t been in East Berlin for some time now but retained their positions either as ministers or behind the scenes. Chairman of the Council of Ministers (effectively the Prime Minister) Willi Stoph was there and so too was Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer and Interior Minister Lothar Ahrendt. Also present in homes raided were high-level figures such as Peter Florin, Gerald Götting, Kurt Hager, Erhard Krack, Hannelore Mensch, Günter Mittag, Horst Sindermann and the big prize of Günter Schabowski. Many were old men while Mensch was a woman and Mittag was a recent amputee (both legs). East Berlin Mayor Krack was killed in the cross-fire, Hager dropped dead from a heart attack and Ahrendt shot himself rather than be taken prisoner. The Americans wanted Stoph, Fischer and SED party boss Schabowski especially while the rest were regarded as second-tier but taken regardless. Florin – once the President of the UN General Assembly and a big figure in East Germany’s diplomatic relations pre-war – pleaded with the Americans to be left behind so he could lead a coup to topple the regime: one of the Green Berets had shut him up with an accidental whack and he’d been hooded like the rest.

On the crashed helicopter, Mittag in his wheelchair along with a male nurse assigned to him (the Americans had taken him prisoner too for he’d know who Mittag had met with recently) were killed as well as former prime minister and current head of the East German parliament Sindermann. These losses were not regarded as of great importance; the NATO casualties were what would be mourned.


Once the operation was over with an initial debriefs were going on, Gates spoke with DLB and Garrison again. He expressed sorrow for the loss of men under their command but told them that he regarded Black Ghost as a success. The intelligence came from a source called ‘Replay’, nothing more about it than that he could tell them. President Bush and both the leaders of Britain and France had agreed to it despite some objections made along the way. If the bunker at Prenden could have been targeted for a similar raid then it would have been too for there was no need to leave someone in charge in East Germany for war termination negotiations: anything like that would be done with the Soviets not the East Germans.

East Germany was being overrun. Eastern Storm called for a stop-line on the Oder-Neisse. He reminded them that East Germany had already been heavily-targeted with regime targets in East Berlin hit – the Stasi headquarters at Lichtenberg along with the buildings housing the State Council, the Foreign Ministry, the Parliament and the SED headquarters; plus Soviet targets in East Berlin with their embassy and the KGB’s Karlshorst facility – and there was no concern about leaving any institution there left to settle and end to the conflict inside East Germany with. From now on, it was people targets instead of buildings.

There was much more about Black Ghost which Gates didn’t say to the two special forces commanders. He didn’t tell them the whole details of the package of goodies which Replay – Rainbow, Redbeard, Reunite etc., all the same source – had recently arranged to have transferred to the CIA when it came to matters of strategic national intelligence. In relation to Black Ghost he had said who could be found and where plus that the defending Soviet forces at both the prison and the residential complex would leave at a certain time so that only weak East German forces would be left behind.

But Replay wanted something in exchange this time. It wasn’t directly related to these two raids but far bigger. Gates hadn’t gone any further forward than the Rhineland because of the knowledge in his head concerning that and other matters due to the danger that maybe he could accidently end up in enemy hands and be forced to reveal that. What the CIA’s intelligence source wanted was something under discussion so far only among the highest reaches of the US Government back home. The Europeans had no idea and they damn well would be rather mad if they knew it was even being considered. The risk versus reward there was again tilted a favourable way and it would end the war…

…but the cost would be immeasurably expensive.





March 23rd 1990
Meiningen, Thüringen, East Germany

The best thing would have been to only fight in daytime where there was enough light to not just see the enemy to be engaged but also to have a clear view of the terrain.

Oh, how Brigadier-General Roméo Dallaire would have been pleased if that had been the case!

Unfortunately, this was war and wishes like that were for another time and another place. There were still enemy forces all across the area around the occupied town of Meiningen and through the nearby Thüringenwald. They weren’t being kept back in their defensive positions at night by their own commanders and were sent out of their hiding spots to engage the Canadian troops under Dallaire’s command. Soviet regulars and reservists along with East German reservists and paramilitaries took the opportunity to make attacks in the darkness and also try to escape from where they were. These men were all cut off at the operational level as most of the US Seventh Army had struck deep into Thüringen behind the Thüringenwald but on a tactical level there was still plenty of room for them to operate in. Dallaire’s 5th Mechanised Brigade–Group and the rest of the 1st Infantry Division was spread far too thin over a large area to control. The areas already under occupation were expanding daily but even then, with so few troops, there were gaps which the enemy were making use of. Dallaire had explained all this to his divisional commander who had passed that up the chain-of-command to the US VII Corps (which the Canadians still reported to despite the growing geographical gap and a different mission for those American units) but for now there wasn’t much else available.

Keep the enemy pinned down, the word came back down, and unable to escape any deeper into East Germany.

Dallaire could have stamped his feet and whined, but he got on with the job instead. Everyone else – the 3rd Infantry & 4th Mechanised Brigade–Group’s plus divisional-level assets – were having a tough time too. The enemy was being crushed slowly and they were going to be defeated in the end: for now there were orders to follow as everyone did their bit.


The town of Meiningen had fallen yesterday after a bitter fight. There had been a false surrender which had taken place, something which Dallaire had been warned about before coming into East Germany but it had still been pulled off by the bad guys. A supposed East German reserve officer with what remained of their 10th Motorised Rifle Division (a regiment from that formation had been around the town) had been in contact with his brigade headquarters and offered an unconditional ceasefire. Dallaire had been weary over such an easy victory when evidence pointed to the enemy been well-positioned in the town yet he was pushed by his divisional headquarters and his own eagerness to get on with it. The mistake had been costly: there had been an ambush with Soviet forces ready and waiting. They hadn’t been as clever as they thought though and Dallaire’s soldiers had been fighting long enough now to not be as foolish as he was when seeing things with their own eyes. The ambush had been turned on the ambushers and a fierce fight had erupted. Dallaire had considered withdrawing but the enemy had been on the run and caught unawares for such a fightback. Meiningen had been taken though with far more casualties than Dallaire would have liked to have seen.

Several senior East Germans and Soviets, including that Stasi man pretending to be a military officer, had paid the price for what they had done. They had broken the recognised rules of law and faced a battlefield punishment: a firing squad had followed a court martial.

From this town, the 5th Mechanised Brigade–Group was spread out across the countryside. The main road coming up from Bavaria was guarded and so were key-points throughout the area. Dallaire had his headquarters here for now along with some brigade assets while the battalions under his command – merged into mixed units of infantry, armour, engineers and support troops – were in other locations away to the northeast and the east. Across there was the forested series of high hills which was the Thüringenwald. Enemy forces had been pushed back into that cover when not caught outside and engaged within too along the edges. The 4th Mechanised Brigade–Group was to the north of where Dallaire had his men while the 3rd Infantry Brigade–Group was to the southeast.

All Canadian soldiers involved were tired and weary. The professional, reservists and Militia alike had fought hard to get into East Germany after clearing the last occupied areas down in Bavaria and there was an awareness that the war was being won elsewhere and not here. It was a struggle to keep morale up. Dallaire knew that the men weren’t ready to give in but they weren’t about to see themselves die for no reason either. His junior officers allowed fire support to be called in more times than was necessary rather than have the men advance forward and take more casualties when falling bombs and shells would do the job. That slowed things down a lot yet the willingness to sacrifice lives for enemy territory behind the lines was judged not great enough. The thinking on the risk versus reward factor when it came to that was allowed by Dallaire: his men had been through enough already in this long war. He didn’t want his men to die for no reason and there was always the knowledge that there could come the need to move later elsewhere into fights were the enemy would be stronger and the effort needed to be increased, which couldn’t be done if too many men were killed here.


Tonight, as Dallaire had his men out on patrol in some places and on watch elsewhere, he was in his command post listening to incoming reports coming up from the battalion task-groups out near the frontlines. In the darkness and in the rain, there was activity in many locations.

2 R22R (second battalion, Royal 22e Regiment) reported in that one of their patrols had been attacked with hidden snipers and they had shot back before trying to chase the enemy. A minefield had been run into and losses taken. Another lure had been laid and a rifle squad had walked right into it… but they were fast getting their own back.

3 R22R (third battalion, Royal 22e Regiment) had several patrols out and one of them had come across an American pilot making his way south; he had pointed out an enemy position nearby too which he avoided but one the soldiers who rescued him move to attack. Another nabbed themselves an unarmed, wounded Soviet straggler in a bad way who died soon after capture from his injuries.

1 FSL (first battalion, Les Fusiliers du St.-Laurent) had men out too yet their main activity of the night was when the Militia soldiers faced an attempted attack at one of their company bases instead of combat in the field. A sentry was killed with another wounded as he raised the alarm for that attempt to be fought off and the assault force of Soviets killed and captured.

2 RCR (second battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment) had a patrol of theirs come across a group of civilians moving southwards who were seeking aid. The call came in that they had dozens of East Germans in a bedraggled state located and out in the open exposed to the elements.

From out of here, a RCD (Royal Canadian Dragoons) patrol had run into a trio of East German paramilitary deserters who gave themselves up when located. They were checked very carefully for hidden weapons and treated with extreme care when brought back into the RCD base camp.

Dallaire ordered those civilians, who were in effect refugees in their own country now, brought towards Meiningen. They were women, children and some elderly people he heard – no military-aged men – who needed food, shelter and medical care. Meiningen was the centre at the moment for all such people which his brigade came across: East Germans fleeing the fighting. They were generally always in a bad state after coming from wherever their homes were and aiming to either walk west or south where they believed that safety would await them. They had left the fortified areas where East German and Soviet military units were encamped and under occasional air and artillery attack. In leaving their homes, they faced many risks starting from punishment when caught fleeing to the elements to being caught in cross-fire when in the open to the dangers of mines & unexploded ordnance & remnants of persistent chemical weapons. Sometimes there would be men in civilian clothes on their own or within groups of refugees: each time it was found that they were East German deserters who feared that when NATO troops discovered their identity they would be shot out of hand.

Many, many East Germans feared such a fate, deserters and civilians alike. They believed that Dallaire’s Canadian troops were Americans first of all and when told they were Canadians that didn’t mean any difference to them as they thought both were the same (how outrageous!) and would shoot them anyway. They had been told that NATO had been massacring civilians since the war begun and while choosing to flee where they had been there was still a fear that it might happen to them. Dallaire had questioned his military intelligence people over why then they had left where they had been to be told that those civilians believed NATO might kill them when they fled but they were sure they would die if they had stayed in-place.

There were a lot of civilians now as refugees too. The 5th Mechanised Brigade–Group had been coming across them since Dallaire had moved his command into East Germany. They were eventually sent south and down into Bavaria where a big effort was underway to prepare for more of them to come that way. They couldn’t be stopped by the East Germans and the Soviets nor NATO and so it wasn’t tried by the latter for the effort would be wasted. They were kept off the roads used as supply routes and directed towards camps run by the Red Cross and West German volunteers. A major watch would be put upon them in case there were Stasi sleeper agents among them: that had happened before. In addition, military intelligence people would talk with them to see if there was anything useful they might know as well.

Furthermore, when this latest group arrived in Meiningen Dallaire issued an order that they at once go through medical checks at the civilian aid post set up here: his divisional commander had reminded him earlier this evening that checks for what was being called ‘German Flu’ took place all the time from those coming out of enemy-held territory. Neither he nor his men had been told what German Flu was, though there were plenty of rumours.

Dallaire believed that it had to be the effects of a biological weapon... ours or theirs.

Thirty–Eight – German Flu

March 25th 1990
The White House, Washington D.C., the United States

Brent Scowcroft told President Bush and the rest of the National Security Council (NSC) that German Flu – also known as ‘G-Germ’ – was not a Soviet biological weapon.

The various illnesses affecting Dutch, Belgian, West German and East German civilians as well as many soldiers from both sides who were fighting in selective locations across Western Europe were a combination of diseases and afflictions brought about by multiple factors all combining. Environmental factors, weaknesses in immune systems created by full-scale war and war-effects themselves had created a perfect storm for the outbreaks of multiple, independent illnesses to occur. Looked at from the outside, the appearance came of one disease but this was not true. There were people unwell with various afflictions showing all sorts of symptoms and with varying levels of effects on their health.

The National Security Adviser stated that the areas where German Flu had showed up should point to how it was not a biological weapon. Through certain areas of the Low Countries and across both Germanies, people where ill where there had been large-scale static fighting and with that a lot of physical destruction. German Flu hadn’t shown up apart from in isolated cases elsewhere – such as in France, Denmark, southern parts of West Germany and Austria – and only then the people had recently arrived from the areas where it was prevalent. In the areas where it was seen on a massive scale, civilians and soldiers alike were weak from lack of food, clean drinking water and shelter. Basic sanitation and personal hygiene had suffered because of the ongoing fighting. Then came all of the poison in the air being breathed in from countless fires burning, including those pouring dangerous particles into the sky, and also lingering effects of chemical weapons. Add this atop of the bad weather at this time of year and regular late winter influenza, and along came German Flu. Furthermore, many civilians who had preexisting medical conditions had no access to medications while soldiers had been given multiple doses of inoculations against chemical weapons.

German Flu wasn’t being passed on from person-to-person and, of great importance Scowcroft affirmed, no one had died of German Flu either. People had died who were suffering from German Flu, but the various currently occurring illnesses all put down as German Flu hadn’t killed anyone directly. Autopsies had been done and lungs were found to be covered in poisons while internal organs were in a bad way in some cases with unnatural afflictions, but German Flu was not a killer itself.

Elsewhere in the world where biological weapons had been used, people had died in their tens of thousands. In Pusan, Tokyo and selective parts of Pakistan, the germs spread there had killed civilians on a massive scale. Those three attacks had brought about the shorthand terms K-Germ, J-Germ and P-Germ. The first two were very similar weapons with the germs being employed selectively killing Korean and Japanese civilians in a short period – less than two days – from multiple organ failure with the source of the plagues unleashed not being directly identified. In Pakistan, P-Germ was a weapon delivered in aerosol form when rockets burst over rural areas near the Afghan border that struck at Pakistani civilians by killing them by heart failure within a week. Samples of K-Germ and J-Germ had been studied extensively by US military and civilian scientists; not so much P-Germ. When they were looked at and compared to G-Germ (or, more correctly, G-Germs) German Flu was nothing like them on a biological level nor a killer either; in addition, if it had been a weapon targeted at civilians well it had failed for so many of those ill from it were Soviet soldiers as well as East German civilians.

The few unhelpful comments made in certain elements of the American media who were stretching their interpretation of self-censorship in the national interest were nothing compared to the rumours about German Flu sweeping through Europe. The name had caught the imagination of so many. There were all sorts of exaggerations, false information and outright lies going on there. Troops were talking about it, so too were civilians and politicians. Everyone was convinced German Flu was a biological weapon, if not Soviet them maybe American. Scowcroft told of how true information was being used to fight the fake news, but it was a struggle there. A lot of people believed that it was the third in the trio of NBC weapons being used: first it had been chemical weapons, then nuclear weapons and now biological weapons.

The narrative needed to be changed because the already identified effects upon morale were only going to grow stronger. It needed to be made clear what German Flu actually was and that message spread in a way to gain credence widely. Scowcroft couldn’t put it any stronger to his president when he stated that there was a pressing, urgent need to take control of this situation now before the effects from the fear of and the lies about German Flu got beyond the point where it was just rumours and not outright mass panic/hysteria.

Meeting for the first time since the outbreak of the war below the White House in the Situation Room, almost all of the NSC was present here apart from a couple of notable exceptions. Raven Rock had been the site of recent meetings with Bush and others tele-conferencing in from here or elsewhere. Now they were almost all here. After Scowcroft’s statements, there was discussion afterwards on how to combat German Flu on several levels. There would be a massive medical increase to treat people – civilians and soldiers, friendly and unfriendly – who were laid low by the various diseases. On an information level, an understanding of what was causing the spread of illnesses would be put into play. Strategically, the message would be need to rammed home that German Flu was not a bio-weapon and those who needed to pay attention made to.

Some of the ideas expressed here by decision-makers were far from ideal and really needed work done on them before implementation, but it was a start. It was recognised that doing nothing and allowing the rumours to carry on like they were about German Flu would only make things worse. How could people recover through medical attention if they believed they had been afflicted with a humanity-ending plague unleashed by a nefarious enemy?


Moving on, the NSC addressed the assassination attempt in Defence Secretary Dick Cheney. He was alive but hurt after that helicopter crash. The US Navy Sea Knight had been brought down with a man-portable SAM not very far off the ground and when the helicopter crashed several people aboard had died. He had suffered injuries like other survivors though had lived. From Jamaica to Panama Cheney had been flown first at a high-priority medical evacuee and then on to Bethesda in Maryland.

Cheney had spinal injuries and some internal bleeding as well as other minor wounds. The very best doctors had been called in and his status quickly downgraded from ‘critical’ to ‘serious’. He was conscious through most of his ordeal and still had his wits about him despite the crash. A desire expressed by Cheney to leave Bethesda and get back to his duties hadn’t been taken seriously as he was so very banged about and hardly in the correct state to undertake them. Bush had been briefed on the situation fully with his Defence Secretary and refused the notion floated by his chief-of-staff first to temporarily remove him from his role and make his deputy Rumsfeld Acting Defence Secretary. John Sununu had done so because he believed that Cheney would take too long to recover and the role needed filling.

Bush had declined though. First of all, he believed that Cheney would recover quickly and secondly… Rumsfeld was not who he wanted to see as Defence Secretary. He had fast realized his mistake in bringing him into the Administration and was actually considering removing him. He would catch plenty of political heat and the embarrassment of the about-face on the man would be heavy so the decision on how and when to get rid of Cheney’s deputy was something he was delaying. Either way, Cheney was staying in his role.

As to who had been behind the effort to kill Cheney and what that meant in regard to the then-proposed solution to the conflict with Cuba, there were answers Bush asked now of the NSC. What had been discovered as to who had carried out the shoot down (of the correct helicopter too as there had been two), who had ordered it and what did it all mean? Responses came that evidence pointed to KGB involvement on the ground in Jamaica and also across in Cuba too. More information as needed though, especially the situation there on that island. This was all going to take some time and it was recommended that the bombing campaign stay halted for another day at least until answers could come. The blockade was still in-place and the B-52s, with nuclear weapons, would go back should things go that way.

The war with Cuba was not over.

One of the senior NSC staffers, US Air Force Colonel John Gordon, gave a presentation on the Soviet nuclear posture and images were shown of missile fields plus information given about what was known about their mobile missiles. The ICBMs remained ready to go, they just needed an order to send them from out of the Soviet Union and over the North Pole down into the United States. Gordon also gave a briefing on other missiles: those which the Saudis had and were reportedly now fitted – some of them anyway – with Pakistani nuclear warheads. They were supposed to be pointed at Iran and to make sure that Saudi territorial sovereignty wasn’t infringed. Scowcroft spoke of the concerns that those warheads might not go bang if they were ever used… or might go bang during lift-off.

Israel, fresh from its victories early in the war, was worried about those missiles despite a back-channel – all unofficial – with the Saudis saying they were pointed at Iran. They could just as easily go west rather than north, to Tel Aviv rather than Tehran. The Israelis had spoken with the Pakistanis too about the nuclear warheads and asked if those toys could be taken away from the Saudis in exchange for Israeli medical aid in combatting the massive civilian casualties inside Pakistani with P-Germ: a nice quid pro quo. Elizabeth Dole told the NSC that the Pakistanis were still officially denying that they had a problem in their border regions with Afghanistan because they feared that India would smell weakness and ally with the Soviets leading to an invasion. So they turned down the Israeli offer – a stupid move, everyone here agreed – though let it slip to the Israelis that they had some sort of control over those missiles in addition to the warheads and they wouldn’t fly towards Tel Aviv.

There was concern expressed in the NSC that the Israelis might soon enough decide they didn’t like those greasy assurances and take their own action.

The situation in North Korea was addressed with the Chinese moving deeper – hiccups aside – into the country from the north and the long-awaited invasion coming up from the south with South Korean and United States forces. Pyongyang was the goal for the South Korean First & US Eighth Armys and there was already hard fighting. The North Koreans were not giving in even when invaded from all sides and clear defeat on the cards for them. They were beaten but won’t accept it.

Elsewhere in the Pacific, with most of the ocean a US-Allied lake, intelligence had come in that Vietnam had ‘asked’ the Soviets to move their aircraft and ships out of their country. Chinese pressure had been exerted and they had, surprisingly, caved in to that. Hanoi didn’t want to but they feared not an invasion by either China or even the United States but a nuclear strike eventually against Soviet military facilities. There were no plans to do that here from the NSC and it wasn’t believed that the Chinese had made any sort of threat to do that due to what it would mean in response for them from the Soviets, but the Vietnamese appeared to be taken with the notion that that would happen. Where would those warships, submarines, aircraft and personnel all go? That was a situation to watch.

General Colin Powell was asked to give a briefing on the overall fighting in Europe and he updated the NSC on the war there. NATO forces were deep inside East Germany and had also broken open the front in Czechoslovakia: due to West German continued raiding in the rear the French had moved past Plzen.

Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces were finished in East Germany. Most of the western parts of the country were under occupation or hostile forces bottled up in encirclements. The path to Berlin was open now. Soviet forces trying to defend in static positions had failed just like previous attempts in mobile warfare. Those reserve forces kept in the eastern side of the country near the Polish border still hadn’t moved forward and showed no sign of doing such a thing: the CIA’s source had said they were given last-minute orders not to and that was shown to be true. East German paramilitaries were fighting but they were dying when faced with victorious NATO armies on the advance. In Czechoslovakia, there were Soviet forces behind Prague staying still and those few Soviet & Czechoslovak troops fighting the French-led invasion were falling apart. The skies above the battlefield and increasingly moving further east belonged to NATO; the enemy still had fighters and many SAMs but they were a beaten force too.

Powell did warn that there were still a lot of difficult fighting to come, the liberation of West Berlin and by extension the push into East Berlin too especially. That victory needed to come soon. Replacement troops and equipment were still generally there with shortages in some places but available stocks in others. Reservists and retirees were still being fed into the battles in Europe and factories were starting to turn out gear in numbers now: with the latter, complicated equipment would take a lot longer though. America’s mobilization was moving fast but the New Army being built was still months off being ready even with shortcuts made.

The war was being won in Europe yet there was no walkover taking places. Losses were still coming in and at the minute there was the bonus of injured men hurt early in the war coming back into service after a period of recuperation. These things couldn’t last. A lot depended on how the fighting went and if there was a decision to go further east into Poland. Should that happen, a pause would be needed.


After those discussions here in the very early hours below Washington, something else was covered by the NSC: Replay and what was deemed (rather too dramatically for some) the ‘Moscow Option’. At the behest of the CIA Director, several people were politely requested to leave the Situation Room so that only those with the highest of security clearances were left behind when William Webster spoke.

Several days ago, Webster began, Replay had delivered his latest package of intelligence material through an intermediary via the CIA station inside the US Embassy in Helsinki. Within that had been all the information concerning how the United States could take out much of the East German leadership (but not those at the very top) in their homes plus liberate prisoners from the Stasi’s main detention facility on the edges of East Berlin. There had been a timescale given for when the perfect moment was to strike and assurances that if it was done when Replay said it could be that Soviet defensive forces around those locations would pull out of their immediate areas right beforehand. Operation Black Ghost, when conducted by US and British forces, had been an almost complete success and Replay’s information plus promises had been kept. That mission had been approved by President Bush and the NSC and there had been other ‘goodies’ in the intelligence package given over. There was an American traitor which Replay suggested should be detained (a former US Army Reserve military intelligence specialist recalled to uniform and serving in West Germany by the name of Colonel George Trofimoff) and intelligence concerning the order-of-battle of Soviet military forces throughout their country east of the Urals facing China and the Pacific had been checked out.

On top of this, Replay stated that he could provide accurate information on the bunker beneath the outskirts of Moscow where Kryuchkov and his top people could be found including how to destroy it from the air and a time when Soviet defensive forces would be ordered to stand down. Replay wanted the United States to get back in touch about doing this so that when Kryuchkov was eliminated there would afterwards be a coup d’état to topple was left of the regime after the Soviet dictator was killed. The Moscow Option had the potential to end the war… but also bring about a nuclear holocaust if one of seemingly a million different things went wrong either before, during or after a strategic-level attack inside the Soviet Union like Replay wanted doing.

When discussed beforehand, there had been an immediate decision to check out the facts and feasibility. Caution had been expressed by many, outright concern by others. Bush had asked for several days to be taken to gather information and for him to think on it before the Moscow Option was discussed again as it was now.

As his president asked him to, Webster spoke now about Replay: who was he, who did he represent and could he be trusted Bush had asked. The CIA Director’s answers were at once, like they on the same subject beforehand with his organisation’s source inside the Soviet Union, rather disappointing to hear.

The CIA didn’t know who their source was. He had made extraordinary efforts to keep his identity secret. He had first approached them leaving packages after cryptic phone-calls first through a retired CIA officer living in India and then later making use of dead-drops in Switzerland, China and Finland. The globe-hopping in the midst of a war made it impossible for one man to be delivering the information which Replay (known through various codenames) to be undertaking. What was handed over was all sorts of military and intelligence-related information which had generally immediate or medium-term value. Soviet advances on the battlefield and behind it as well as KGB activities worldwide were foiled using that information sent. Replay had told the CIA that counter-invading Eastern Europe would mean nuclear war yet that had been decided to be ignored based upon other factors. He had told too of the chaos inside the Soviet Union with the ongoing war where the Communist Party was barely important and there were rebellions taking place on the edges of the empire run from Moscow. When pressed for information, Replay refused to give what was asked for: he sent what he wanted to and it was made use of with the CIA disguising the source when it fed it to those who acted upon it.

While there had to be couriers who could travel freely running the information and taking those careful steps to avoid discovery, there was believed to be one man collating it and dealing with the CIA’s written requests and declining them indirectly by refusing to go along with them and sending what he did. Through other means which Webster didn’t discuss here, he spoke of an identification effort to find that one man. There was evidence pointing to a retired GRU colonel, other information suggesting that a former air force general was behind it and more suspicion cast upon a serving KGB counter-intelligence figure known to be at odds with Kryuchkov (but still alive). Webster didn’t say the names Shlykov, Rutskoy nor Kalugin here even when in the controlled confines of the Situation Room.

But… Webster admitted that for any of the suspects which the CIA believed to be Replay, that would mean that their man was part of something bigger. The information was too much, the power to influence events – recently in East Germany one thing, what he said about the Moscow Option even greater – far more than expected. The CIA couldn’t say for sure that this was all a maskirovka: the clues to an identity, and everything else too, could just be a complicated game being played by STAVKA, the GRU or even the KGB themselves. The riddle was too much to uncover and the deeper their agents dug the further away from the truth they got. There was recent evidence suggesting that a civilian organisation supporting democracy inside the Soviet Union to be fronted by the recently-reappeared Boris Yeltsin was behind Replay and were desperate to end the war and were engaging in these back-channel intelligence moves with some support from military & intelligence people to end the war and save their people.

The exasperation shown on Webster’s face was matched by those listening when it came to what the CIA was dealing with when it was engaging in just gaining intelligence from Replay and finding out who he was… let alone having to trust him. Bush himself had been in Webster’s position as CIA Director back in the Seventies during the last year of the Ford Administration. In that short-term post, a political role rather than operational, he had heard some crazy things yet nothing like this!

Powell was asked to summarize what it would take to conduct the Moscow Option and hit a leadership bunker outside the Soviet capital. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had had his planning people look into this despite not knowing where the target was and only with the knowledge of other fortified strategic command bunkers encountered so far outside the Soviet Union: he warned that without proper, solid information there would be much more to it. To strike at a bunker like that, one protected against a nuclear attack deep inside the enemy homeland, he’d need to have at least six F-117s in the sky. They would have to go into well-defended enemy air space through separate avenues of approach where detection would set off all sorts of worrying reactions. One would drop earth-penetrating bombs to smash overhead coverage, the second would drop bunker-busting bombs to tear through the bunker itself and the third would deliver more bombs containing the most-lethal nerve gases the United States had to work through chemical warfare suits and get into every internal room inside the bunker: the other three would be there in case one of the first trio was lost. All would then have to get out of enemy air space afterwards, especially the reserve aircraft with the nerve gas bombs. If the bunker was to be destroyed and those inside killed, this would be what it would take to deliver the ordnance on target. Before that, there would have to be perfect intelligence on the facility and all sorts of defences nearby and distant. The attack would be very difficult to do, including supporting strikes also inside the Soviet Union against air defences despite what Replay might want to ‘guarantee’ wouldn’t interfere.

Not impossible, Powell said, but damn hard.

Adding to this, Scowcroft stated that even if the air attack went perfect, that didn’t mean much. Kryuchkov might not be there, he might even somehow survive even if the bunker was drenched in lethal nerve gases made into a cocktail out of someone’s worst nightmare. Then there was the risk that should the Moscow Option work, Replay’s other plans might not work so it would all be for naught. How would the United States react to such an attack here in the Situation Room? Yes, the strategic attack would be met with a strategic counter-attack. Furthermore, when there were all of these very worrying signs that Replay might be a Soviet intelligence ploy for outcomes unknown, why would the United States want to work with him in this manner. Taking his intelligence and using it was one thing, but working with him was something else. Black Ghost had been a risk when special operations forces were used in areas suddenly left defenseless, but going after Kryuchkov at home in his country was a whole different and very dangerous move.

Dole asked Powell if Replay’s intelligence had so far been vital for the war effort. If he was cut off as useful, if he gave over no more intelligence, would that be fatal for the war effort? Put on the spot with such a leading question where the outcome would mean a cut-off on the useful goodies delivered but having to give a truthful answer, Powell gave the Secretary of State an honest response: it was nice to have, but none of it had been absolutely vital.

Jim Webb asked the same of Webster and was told the same thing: what information on an intelligence level had been given had been helpful yet overall it wasn’t going to lose the war for the United States if it ceased. Regardless, he urged the NSC that should the Moscow Option be refused, Replay to be told a ‘no’ in a polite way so as to see if his reaction was as before to carry on sending over goodies in his packages.

On the line connecting him from Raven Rock, Donald Rumsfeld spoke up. He had been in support of the Moscow Option since it was first mentioned and stated that with Kryuchkov gone the war would be over with. It was his war and there was massive opposition to it inside the Soviet Union and outside in supposed allies as well. Kill him and the war was over with, he said; moreover, after Kryuchkov is dead the relationship which had been created with Replay could be used to bring down the whole Soviet empire. He agreed that there were risks, but didn’t believe that they were that severe. The centralized command and control which the extremely paranoid Kryuchkov had imposed meant that with his death there would be no reaction from a confused regime when opposition to him moved to pick up the pieces after his demise. If there was doubt over whether the bombs from the F-117s would do the job, then double the strike force or the bomb-load.

Webster told the NSC that despite all of his worries over Replay’s identity, he still believed that the Moscow Option should be done like the Deputy Defence Secretary did. Black Ghost had proved the reach of Replay: the defences there had been either moved away or issued firm instructions (which were obeyed too) to not interfere. Even if Replay was a front for something bigger, possibly even a KGB off-shoot opposed to their leader, his or their intention was to bring an end to the war by eliminating Kryuchkov. The war could be over with the bombing of that bunker and the killing of those inside.

Dole and Webb voiced their disapproval of the attack and warned of the dangers. Scowcroft asked Robert Gates, who’d only hours before returned from Europe where he’d overseen Black Ghost, to explain what would be the reaction of the United States’ allies in NATO. The Deputy National Security Adviser said that they would be in uproar in opposition. They feared nuclear warfare even more than the United States – well… they believed their fear was greater than the ‘reckless’ Americans – and would at once protest the moment they found out the Moscow Option was to take place. To do so and tell them afterwards, or even not tell them, would just be worse. The evidence for this was their continued caution themselves, the British and the French especially, around the edges of the Soviet Union itself in their actions and with what the United States did too: this stood in contrast to what the Soviets had done to their countries. Rumsfeld cut in and said that the Europeans were hardly likely to cut and run from the war because of the Moscow Option but Gates’ reply as he held his ground was that while that was true they might do something else instead. There wasn’t cowardice there, just the knowledge that a Soviet reaction not foreseen or ignored by killing Kryuchkov could easily mean the thermonuclear destruction of their countries.

Once he had heard all that he wished to on the subject, Bush gave his own thoughts. He spoke of how Kryuchkov had been personally responsible for this war which had killed so many Americans. He had been behind the assassination of Vice President Dan Quayle plus the slaughter of his friend and Secretary of State James Baker: both men’s deaths had hurt him. There had been Soviet Spetsnaz active on American soil killing innocent civilians and the Cubans had been directed by Kryuchkov to invade the Florida Keys (so certain intelligence said). There was too all of the American military personnel worldwide who had lost their lives in this unprovoked war launched at the behest of this one man.

Kryuchkov deserved to be killed and in doing so there was a chance that the war would end. There was still no indication that without his death how long this war would last and every day that it did the risk of an inter-hemisphere nuclear exchange remained extremely high. The United States faced economic collapse soon unless action was taking to move from the half-in/half-out war economy to a full-scale one. There were moves in Congress to start holding hearings on Cuba to try to force an end to the war with that country and Bush told the NSC that he wanted to focus on that conflict rather than having grand-standing congressmen try to fight that war: by ending the war with the Soviets the full attention Cuba deserved could be melted out to them until they surrendered.

However…

…no, he didn’t want the Moscow Option to happen. Too much could go wrong and the risks were far too great, Replay was untrustworthy and he had a very bad feeling about it. The response from allies, old as well as new, wouldn’t be one which was worth it. This war could be won on the battlefield and even if it wasn’t then at least that wouldn’t bring with it the dangers involved by dropping bombs on Kryuchkov’s bunker outside of Moscow. Webster would be allowed to try to assuage Replay’s feelings and maybe if something else came back from the source, something he didn’t have a terrible dread over the unforeseen consequences, then maybe they could work with him on that. For now though, the Moscow Option was not happening.





March 25th 1990
Above East Germany

Flight Lieutenant’s Nichol and Peters were distracted by the hell being unleashed on the ground which they couldn’t help but observe taking place outside of their Tornado. Out over the port wing and off in the distance, there were the flashes from countless explosions down beneath the plumes of rising smoke. Both RAF aircrew tried their hardest to concentrate on their mission but again and again there was the continued distraction. They couldn’t see the aircraft dropping the bombs nor those being hit down below yet sure could imagine what was going on there.

East Germans dug-in across the Fläming Heath were being hit with a tremendous aerial barrage. Dozens of B-52s were dropping hundreds upon hundreds of bombs with high-explosives and napalm used. Tactical aircraft from several air arms were joining in as they delivered their own bomb loads including a lot of chemical weapons. Across the whole area where there were defensive forces dug-in trying to protect the approaches towards Berlin, there was one big target being hit by massed air power in the middle of the afternoon just as had been the case last night and all through today without pause.

Peters remarked to his navigator that it was all of the smoke coming from air attacks like that which caused German Flu. Imagine breathing that in, he said over the intercom linking the front-seater with his back-eater, all of the time: that would make you seriously ill. Nichol added agreement and told his pilot to keep them far away from the unnatural clouds which had formed and were blocking out most of the natural light coming from high above.

Their Tornado wasn’t going anywhere near the smoke nor the massed air attacks on the way in though, they had a strike mission on the other side of the Fläming Heath.


Heading north now after previously flying east above part of the Elbe Valley, Nichol and Peters closed-in upon Jüterbog Airbase. They came in low and fast pulling their attention towards the target and the final stages of their bomb-run. Peters had his eyes looking outwards towards where his wingman was and also for any sudden enemy air activity (which wasn’t supposed to be a danger anymore) while Nichol focused on the attack systems as the last of the checks were made on the bomb release equipment and he waited for the correct moment to arm them.

The final countdown to the target was starting…

The MiGs which flew from Jüterbog Airbase in peacetime and before the war were all gone: there would be no Soviet Air Force Floggers or Fulcrums there. The usual missile defences weren’t there either and only anti-aircraft guns were meant to be defending the place now. It had been hit before, many times indeed, but NATO air power and was no longer a functioning frontline combat airbase. Soon enough, Jüterbog Airbase would probably be overrun by the British Army or maybe the French Army. Before then though, it was being used by enemy helicopters – mostly East German though some Soviet – and they had been making themselves known in the fighting along the Elbe. Many would be under cover yet others could be expected to be out in the open if the intelligence was right as the rear was nighttime NATO air strikes. That was a misapprehension which Nichol and Peters were about to put right.

Once the last waypoint was reached, Nichol armed the bombs ready to be dropped. Unlike the massive loads carried by those hitting the Fläming Heath, he and Peters were carrying a smaller arsenal of weapons today. They had taken a longer flight than other aircraft and wanted to maintain high speed. There was a Sidewinder air-to-air missile under each wing and a trio of CBU-87 cluster bombs attacked to the Tornado’s belly. Those latter weapons were all activated ready to go and Nichol let his pilot know. Peters gave his acknowledgement and made a final check that he was exactly on the right course before he eased back the flight stick and started to gain height ready for the upcoming drop.

Moments later, the bombs fell away with the second Tornado just off the starboard side and slightly behind doing the same less than a second later.

Those six bombs – three from each aircraft – fell towards Jüterbog Airbase and each started a furious spin. The CBU-87s started releasing the submunitions contained within over a wide area: two hundred and two came out of each bomb. These twelve hundred plus fragments fell upon the target below and would soon start to explode. They were explosive-tipped with a shaped charge and designed to fragment as well as having incendiary effects. There were all sorts of helicopters below across the already-bombed airbase and plenty of military personnel who had just started running to see some shelter when an air raid siren wailed. The warning was far too late as the explosions started to occur through Jüterbog Airbase and nearby into fields and woodland too.


Directed by an AWACS aircraft assigned to support 2 ATAF strike missions inside East Germany this afternoon, Nichol and Peters were brought westwards over the Fläming Heath after their attack. The Tornado climbed higher and above the clouds though went through them first. The flight suits both men wore protected them against chemical weapons as well less they fly through such weapons in the air though neither was happy as they shot across the sky where all that smoke coming up from below was. Each told themselves that they and their aircraft needed a decontamination when back on the ground because of all of the poisons in the sky.

Their Tornado was kept out of the way of attacking aircraft still dropping all of those bombs down across the area of East German countryside below crisscrossed with improvised defensive works. Neither knew exactly when or how the NATO armies were due to go over the Fläming Heath on their final run towards Berlin but it had to be soon with all the attacks coming from above. There would surely be a tasking for them with that too but one which was sure to be a high-level strike rather than coming in low.

Nichol and Peters spotted more B-52s in the sky as well as a lot of F-4s and F-16s as well. There were aircraft like them heading back west after their attacks but it seemed like more were heading east and into bomb-runs. Distant fighter cover wasn’t seen and both men remembered the assurances given when on the ground before their attack today about enemy air activity being a low-risk. Neither had been so sure of that then, suspicious of such a claim that the daylight skies now belonged to NATO as the night skies did too, but there had been no sign of Soviet fighters or warnings heard over the radio link. It appeared that they couldn’t stop all of this air power and so had given up trying.

Returning to base, Nichol and Peters wondered what did that all mean…?





March 25th 1990
Near Rudolstadt, Thüringen, East Germany

The three American officers walked casually into the command tent for General-Major Rokhlin’s shattered 19 MRD and were brought across to him by one of the German-speaking staffers whom he had sent forward to talk with them. Rokhlin first noticed that their pistol belts each held a weapon before taking note of the weathered uniforms which they wore showing they had come straight from the fight rather than been sitting comfortable in the rear. There was a little arrogance in the face of one of them, the colonel by his uniform insignia, and curiosity shown by the other two: a pair of majors.

Upon reaching him, with Rokhlin flanked by a pair of trusted sergeants, all three Americans gave a firm salute.

Rokhlin had been expected a lot of different things to have happened when the Americans came here, but not that. He was rather taken aback but it all. He knew that if he had been in their shoes, if the situation had been reversed, he wouldn’t be saluting them!

Using German as the language to converse in, one known by many of his command staff and also these Americans too, the discussions began after Rokhlin’s chief-of-staff moved everyone to some chairs around a fold-down table. The Americans were seated to the left; Rokhlin and three of his staffers to the right. Without any preamble, Rokhlin got straight to the business of trying to negotiate the surrender of his division…

…or what was pitiful remains there was of the once-proud formation that the 19 MRD had been before it had fought for last ten days against such overwhelming odds to ultimate defeat.

***

Since the Americans had begun their invasion of East Germany, which opened with that immense gas attack nearby, the 19 MRD had been engaged in a series of awful fights with not just the attacking enemy but higher command too.

Rokhlin had kept his division supposed hidden and waiting for several days under cover. There had come air attacks nearby but the 19 MRD hadn’t been directly struck at. From up in the Thüringenwald, deserters from the mobilization-only 113 MRD had come down and told tales of woe where they had been gases and bombed and gassed again. The KGB detachments assigned to both Rokhlin’s division and the Fifty–Eighth Army had shot all of them and anyone who wanted to repeat their ‘lies’ that their whole division had been as destroyed as it was. There had come no attack across the Thüringenwald – through the passes in the midst of the forest – as Rokhlin had been told to repel though. It turned out that they had gone around the massive terrain feature just back from the borders between the divided Germanys and also landed paratroopers in the rear deeper inside Thüringen.

New orders had come: join with the 14 TD in attacking the Americans by striking northwards. Rokhlin had started to move his division from out of hiding positions just as the Fifty–Eighth Army instructions demanded that he do. His command was made up of regulars and reservists with three quarters being in the latter category yet they weren’t useless and nor was none of his equipment. The tanks, other armoured vehicles and self-propelled artillery the 19 MRD fielded wasn’t that old; the air defence and engineering gear was weaker but again not useless. He had stocks of fuel and ammunition and believed that his scouts would lead him to the enemy where he could take on and smash their light forces long before any of their own armour could interfere: the 19 MRD had almost two hundred tanks, all T-72s, and what could the American paratroopers do against them? Air attacks had worried him and he had expected losses to come yet believed that when closing up with the enemy close and moving with haste those could be limited.

How wrong he had been!

The moment that the 19 MRD had started moving, the air attacks had come. His Strela-1 and Osa mobile missile-launchers, plus their radar platforms, had been hit by incoming missiles straight away. The S-60 anti-aircraft guns which were towed being prime-movers were next to be hit leaving Rokhlin with only man-portable weapons to protect his division from above. Trying to get forward fast, his reconnaissance units were ambushed by the Americans who seemed to know exactly where to find them. It was almost as if the instructions on deployment routes issued from his headquarters to his reconnaissance battalion had been correctly predicted by the enemy. The divisional KGB political commissar had denied that they could have broken the radio communications to listen in and so the scouts must have given themselves away rather than walked into a trap. From the air with armed helicopters and then on the ground, the lead elements of the 19 MRD had been beaten back when what they had planned to do to the Americans had been done to them.

That first attack towards Erfurt had been beaten off before it had gotten started.

When facing what little armour the American paratroopers had, Rokhlin had been correct in how the 19 MRD would fare: their Sheridan armoured vehicles were hit and burnt while their four-wheeled jeep-type vehicles mounting TOW missiles couldn’t take any damage without being knocked out. Yet, there were only a few victories won before in came more armed helicopters – Apaches and Cobras – and men moving on foot carrying their own man-portable missiles which had hit his tanks so hard. After taking immense losses, Rokhlin had been denied permission to redeploy and told to stay where he was after his division’s failed attack. Staying still, the Americans had first attacked from the air until they had gotten bored of doing so and moved on to tearing apart the 14 TD which was to Rokhlin’s right. American paratroopers on the ground had continued to fight his men as Rokhlin just had to stay where he was and take everything they wanted to throw at him. His tank strength had dwindled to nearly a hundred and his divisional guns had been a favorite target too. It had been a massacre.


Several days later, the 19 MRD had been ordered to move to the east and down to Rudolstadt. No reason had come for this: the Fifty–Eighth Army just told him to move and only during the night so his division would apparently be unobserved. He had assumed the idea had been for his division to eventually move against the American heavy forces which had gone around the Thüringenwald to the east. The Americans, when spotting the 19 MRD on the move, had apparently come to the same conclusion. Their aircraft returned and between Arnstadt to Rudolstadt, those two East German towns, there was a trail of burning vehicles and dead men left as Rokhlin did as he was told and tried to make that redeployment. By the time he reached there, only forty per cent of the 19 MRD remained combat effective.

Wait until ordered to attack again had come the new orders.

Suffer under air attacks and be cut off was what those orders had meant.

Positioned around Rudolstadt and across the Saale Valley down to Saalfeld too, Rokhlin had been told that when the correct moment came he was to push back northwards again, not east as he had believed. There was a major highway running west-east across Thüringen behind the Thüringenwald which the US Seventh Army would be using for their main supply route – so the Fifty–Eighth Army staff told him – and once that was defended by lighter forces he would strike against it and move up to the Jena area. He would have to spread out his division and attack on multiple avenues of attack in rapid fashion. Other units from the Fifty–Eighth Army (who were those units, he had wondered) and elsewhere too would take part in this upcoming operation.

During the wait, the 19 MRD had started to suffer from other wounds not coming from direct enemy action which further weakened Rokhlin’s command. There had been a sudden and very unwelcome presence of East German guerillas who had attacked his men. West German special forces, the political commissar had said they were at first in spite of all evidence to the contrary, before finally conceding that they were East Germans. Deserters and counter-revolutionaries had come the new KGB conclusion, and traitors too. Kill them, he had said, with no mercy shown to them nor anyone who helped them. Fighting guerillas who knew this area very well hadn’t been something which Rokhlin’s men had had any luck against. They had killed sentries, butchered men in their sleep and blown up a lot of the fuel and ammunition so carefully hoarded ready for the assault northwards. The KGB had been determined to crush them, though not with their own hands where exposure of Chekist lives would come, and Rokhlin had been told that new ‘evidence’ had come that they were West Germans after all just disguised as East Germans. The sudden about-face came after the political commissar had spoken to his own superiors where Rokhlin’s understanding was that they were denying that there was any opposition from the locals here despite everything showing the opposite. That guerilla activity was very small but ever-so deadly when it occurred and it took the lives of more than two hundred troops with the 19 MRD.

Rokhlin was informed by an East German Army reservist, an old oberstleutnant past his prime who was attached to the 19 MRD for local support, that those guerillas were active because they had seen what the Soviets had been doing in their country recently. They were fed up of the raping, robbery and outright murder and were striking back. It might be the beginnings of something bigger, the lieutenant-colonel had warned.

Other men started getting ill with German Flu.

Again, that didn’t exist officially. The men needed to wash their hands after using the latrines (open holes in the ground for the use of many), they were told by Rokhlin’s officers under KGB instruction, and to stop drinking untreated water from the Saale River. It was more than though that their commander knew. The air being breathed in was making everyone cough and drowsy. Those with the crippling headaches, stomach pains and diarrhea were also breathing in what everyone else was. German Flu came because it just affected them more because of the other factors such as those infections they gained were added atop what was floating in the air. The few doctors and medical staff with the 19 MRD were overwhelmed and couldn’t handle the number of men being sent to them with all of the illnesses keeping them combat-ineffective. Rokhlin’s chief-of-staff told him that as none of the men were dying from German Flu and the numbers kept on growing, that made the situation worse when there were hardly enough medical personnel. He also spoke of the inability to treat other injured men who had combat wounds when the aid stations were swamped with those non-fatal but debilitating illnesses who kept on arriving.


Late yesterday, Rokhlin had been told by the Fifty–Eighth Army headquarters to commence his attack at dawn this morning north towards Jena.

While he was unwilling to disobey direct orders, Rokhlin had sent to his superiors a message containing the terrible state his division was in. The 19 MRD was weakened by previous engagements, air attacks and now German Flu. There was little chance that it would reach that highway, let alone go past it and up to Jena on the other side. He suggested at a regiment-sized force be sent instead, an ad hoc one where what strongest available troops were sent north and the rest of the division held their position here. This was sent by Rokhlin when his divisional Chekist was away from the command post dealing with the latest captive guerillas: he wouldn’t have sent it when the political commissar was present.

The reply came the Fifty–Eighth Army was clearly written by the head Chekist there. The 19 MRD was to obey orders fully and attack with everything possible in the morning. Every man who could hold a rifle and every vehicle which could move, regardless of overall fuel or ammunition capability, was to be sent forward into combat. If not, ‘the officers’ would all be held responsible for the ‘treason’… and their families at home too. The divisional Chekist received his own orders separate from what Rokhlin did and he hadn’t seen what those contained.

With no other choice, Rokhlin had started to get the 19 MRD ready to make that attack as he personally feared the consequences. However, there had come another message into his headquarters and one from the South German Front – to which the Fifty–Eighth Army reported to – which jumped that chain-of-command. This wasn’t from the KGB but rather from the Soviet Army leadership, passed on down from even higher than that army group command too.

Rokhlin was told to attack with all that he could but if he faced defeat than he was to ‘remember the honour’ of the Soviet Army. He was to fight until no more could be done and if he ‘chose’ to give in he should destroy all radio equipment and secret intelligence documents. No cooperation with the enemy in any way was to be given; in addition, if anyone wanted to make a break for it to carry on fighting then they should be allowed to be given the chance to get away before the end came.

No orders like those had ever been seen by Rokhlin before. He hadn’t known what to make of them nor what had brought about them. He didn’t show them to his political commissar nor anyone else apart from his chief-of-staff and his divisional first officer. The latter, Colonel Gennady Nikolayevich Troshev, gave a speech about how he was a Russian and Russians never gave in. The nationalism expressed by the man, someone whom was a late appointment to the 19 MRD before it entered East Germany, and what Rokhlin understood to be from the Chechen region, wasn’t something shared by many here at the divisional headquarters yet Rokhlin knew that there were others who subscribed to his view. Since that had all started – Rossiya! – Rokhlin and many others had been appalled, especially since so much of the 19 MRD wasn’t ‘Russian’ as interpreted either by their internal Soviet passports nor by people like Troshev. There were ethnic factors at play as well as residence within the Soviet republics… oh and whether one had Jewish heritage like Rokhlin did.

On one of the very few things which Rokhlin had agreed with his divisional Chekist with, those who espoused this new Russian nationalism as they practically screamed ‘Rossiya!’ every chance they got were all neo-Nazis.


Attacking this morning, the Americans had been waiting for them. Rokhlin had finally convinced that his communications weren’t secure. An ambush had been laid ready for the attack by what was left of the 19 MRD and there had come a slaughter of his men when they struck north.

The enemy had been American national guardsmen. Rokhlin had been told many things about them. They were meant to be pampered Internal Troops (like the MVD) for individual provinces within the United States used to crack the heads of the oppressed workers in ghettos when those people rose-up on a regular basis in heroic fashion. No, someone else had said, they were elite national guards under national government control to secure the American system of government like the KGB’s elite units. Another description he had been given was that they were just reservists like his division was assigned to shore-up regular US Army troops in wartime.

After they had smashed apart his attack, a few prisoners were brought back from the fight as the 19 MRD made a hasty retreat. Rokhlin’s Chekist took away those he wanted – officers and certain enlisted men involved in skilled roles – and a couple were spoken with by the division’s GRU military intelligence staff to identify their unit and any useful tactical information. He learnt that they were from Washington – the American capital? No, a province named the same – and part of the 81st Brigade serving with the American 9th Infantry Division. They were reinforcing that division as it secured the rear of the US Seventh Army. None knew anything about how the attack by the 19 MRD had pre-empted, just that they had been told one was coming up to six hours before it did.

That had done it for Rokhlin.

He had what he saw as permission from above to give in when all hope was lost. He had attacked as ordered but the enemy had been waiting and beaten back his division. There was no more fight in the 19 MRD.

A small group of trusted officers had been sent to make contact with the Americans: Rokhlin’s chief-of-staff had suggested that they take a pair of captured prisoners with them (less beat-up men) to show good faith. Rokhlin showed his political commissar his orders from the South German Front allowing him to do this and also told Troshev he had permission to leave with anyone he wanted to flee with. Radios were smashed and documents quickly burnt. The KGB officers were watched by Rokhlin who had brought in a company of riflemen to the divisional headquarters but they strangely put up no resistance: Rokhlin realized that when he had received those last instructions, his Chekist had been told something else giving him warning and orders. The KGB left with Troshev. They went south on foot into the Thüringenwald. Rokhlin had been surprised that they didn’t take any prisoners with them as hostages.

He found out afterwards that they had killed every single prisoner they had: thirteen of those national guardsmen taken earlier in the day and thirty-four others (soldiers and airmen of several nationalities) held from previous engagements and not sent to the Fifty–Eighth Army’s detention camps.

***

Rokhlin had washed his hands and face and put on his best uniform. His medals had been pinned on and his boots shined by one his junior aides. He had hoped to be meeting with an equal, a general officer not a colonel, but the colonel would have to do.

Plus, Rokhlin outranked the man, surely the reason for the salute even from an enemy?


Once he had offered his surrender and that of his division, the American colonel asked first where the rest of the prisoners who’d been taken along with those already returned to them could be found. The colonel wanted to have access to them and take them back to his brigade. If they were injured as he said he had heard they were after being roughed up upon and after capture, then they would be treated here when he brought down medical units to deal with American and Soviet wounded alike: weren’t many of Rokhlin’s men suffering from German Flu?

So, where were the prisoners?

Rokhlin had really wished to start these negotiations off with something else! Yet, he had no choice but to have them told that the KGB had shot all prisoners held. Fury erupted at once with the Americans. Rokhlin had his own personal weapon and his men (including that rifle company) were all armed nearby meaning that his side would win yet he really feared a shootout would occur and didn’t want that at all. His staff officer who had been dealing with them was fast to explain that there had been no stopping the Chekist’s and they had done that without Rokhlin’s knowledge. They had left too, before the Americans had arrived.

Which way did they go?

When exactly did they leave?

How many of them were there?

And where were the bodies of the shot prisoners?

Such was the start to the negotiations. This, Rokhlin knew, was going to be a long night and not an easy process now. All he wanted to do was to no longer have his men killed for no reason and to give up with honour.

He cursed the KGB aloud and had the Americans told his feelings on the matter by his translator. Through the translator, they said something he didn’t understand though: command responsibility.

PART SIX

Forty – Escape From Berlin

March 27th 1990
Occupied West Berlin, West Germany

NATO aircraft were active above Berlin. They were on strike, reconnaissance and counter-air missions. Warsaw Pact aircraft joined them in the skies above both sides of the city, justifying the counter-air aspect of the NATO attacks.

Missiles and shells coming up from the ground, SAMs and anti-aircraft guns, joined both in the sky and they weren’t fussy who they struck against. If it was up above Berlin, there was a good chance that it was going to be shot at.

One of those missiles, a 2K11 Krug (NATO codename SA-4 Ganef) fired by a Soviet Army battery some distance away from the city to the northeast, smashed into one of those Warsaw Pact aircraft: friendly fire. The East German Air Force – Luftstreitkrafte – had been ordered to put fighters above Berlin and use whatever aircraft they had left in their inventory to defend the reunited city. They were down to older aircraft and training jets at this stage of the war. The one struck this morning was a two-seat MiG-21UM Mongol B trainer flying from Rothenburg air base near the Polish border carrying just a pilot and armed with shells for the 23mm cannon plus four air-to-air missiles. The incoming SAM exploded in the fighter’s wake and the detonation of the warhead at once caused immense, fatal damage. The engine went out and so did many flight systems, part of the starboard wing was blown off as well. The pilot ejected as he knew that to do so would mean death for him and after he was blown clear of the MiG-21 he watched as it spun towards the ground below.

Into West Berlin the fighter went.


Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen were among a group of twenty prisoners in KGB custody, male and female, out in a courtyard about to be shot. The two women were handcuffed together and they were waiting to be blindfolded like the others. The firing squad was nearby and there could be heard laughter from among those Russen as they got ready. Neither Merkel the East German nor von der Leyen the West German had met each other until a few moments ago when they were brought out of their cells, handcuffed to one another and led out here into this blood-stained area where they were about to soon join the pile of bodies already present.

Merkel saw it first… whatever it was. She looked up and saw something coming towards her from out of the sky. She lifted her arm, dragging that of the woman beside her upwards too, and tried to shout out a warning. Seconds later, von der Leyen realized that something was falling out of the sky too behind where the KGB firing squad was: she closed her eyes and thought of her children.

A fantastic explosion rocked the KGB detention centre being ‘emptied’ of prisoners who no longer had any appreciable value. Those not killed by the impact of the aircraft and then the detonation of its fuel in a furious blast were either gravely wounded or knocked unconscious.


Upon waking up, Merkel found that the woman who she had been handcuffed to was no longer forcibly attached to her. That woman had the same left forearm wrapped in red-coloured clothing and was doing something to it which caused Merkel sudden immense pain the moment she looked down.

“I’m a doctor; you’re hurt.”

Merkel’s ears were ringing and she felt rather dizzy as she sat up. She wasn’t sure exactly when she had seen or heard.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“I’m a doctor, I am helping you. I have to stop the bleeding.”

And Merkel finally understood.

“What happened?”

“An explosion… I think.” The way that other woman said it showed displeasure at being interrupted in her work. “Whatever it was, it blew the handcuffs right off. I am fine but you are not.”

Merkel didn’t look down again at her arm, but at the woman beside her. She had no idea who she was. She knew now that she was German by her accent though it sounded like she was from the Federal Republic rather than the Democratic Republic. Around her, she heard screams and crying. There was a horrible smell in the air and a lot of smoke forming. Someone was barking orders in Russian too: orders for men to get their weapons and form up.

“We must leave. We have to run.”

“I need to tend to you first.” Another short-tempered answer, then a softer tone. “I am Ursula. What is your name?”

“Angela. Ursula, there is no time, none at all. The Russen will start shooting us any minute now.”

“No, you must stay still. We will wait here until help comes.”

Merkel tried here best to keep her cool but she understood the urgency. She had to make that clear to this doctor, this Ursula, or they were both about to die when the shooting started again.

“We have to escape right now or we will both be killed here. Come with me, Ursula, or stay here and be killed by these Russen.”


von der Leyen let Angela drag her away. She hadn’t wanted to get up off the ground for she had felt that she would fall down should she have tried to stand but she had been wrong. Her legs hadn’t been numb even though they had felt like it; she had even helped the other women up and to start walking.

Angela led the way and von der Leyen followed in blind hope of freedom from the gunfire which very soon erupted behind them. They went through a door and down a passageway. The injured woman, certainly an Ossie, didn’t know where she was going for they double-backed not once by twice. They both froze and stood against the wall when a terrified guard ran past them: the man in KGB uniform ignored them and shot past as if he was running for his life. Angela carried on, calling after von der Leyen to hurry up, and then they went out another door and across another courtyard. There were bodies stacked there too and blood on the ground. She looked away, staring at Angela’s back, and following her lead.

Then it was out through yet another door and all of a sudden they were out in the open. They were out of the prison! It couldn’t have been that easy, von der Leyen thought, but it seemed that way. Whatever had happened with that explosion had set them free! She dropped to her knees, overcome with relief and called out to Angela.

“Angela, thank you!”

“Get up,” Angela screamed at her, “we must keep going! They’ll be after us. Run with me!”

Like a scolded child, von der Leyen got up. She read the urgency in the face of her savior and responded to the instructions given by standing. She looked around first before moving though.

“We are in Zehlendorf.”

“Where is that?”

“You are an Ossie, are you not? From the Democratic Republic? Zehlendorf is in the southern part of West Berlin.”

“You can show me around after we get further away.”

Angela started to run and von der Leyen followed her. The two women were dressed in rags and barefoot on this cold morning. They were fleeing through occupied West Berlin where there were Soviet and East German forces all around them. If they didn’t very quickly find a change in their circumstances, then they would face death or capture and then death.

This was how their escape from Berlin started though.





March 27th 1990
East Berlin, East Germany

General-Lieutenant Zavarzin couldn’t believe that Berlin was being given up like it was. The capital of the DDR on the eastern side and the propaganda value of holding the western side both had meant something when under Soviet control. But, now they were being abandoned. NATO’s armies could have East Berlin and West Berlin while Soviet troops withdrew from such a doomed fight as one for the city would certainly be.

The East Germans were more than incredulous. They refused to believe it and were adamant that there was some sort of Western deception going on with false orders being transmitted. They came to Zavarzin and his officers and told them that there must be some mistake. Withdraw away to the east? No, move forward into new defensive positions to the west, surely? They were ready to fight for Berlin and wanted the Soviet Army to stand with them. Berlin could be denied to NATO!

Zavarzin had his orders though, those to pull back towards the Polish border. He was here to supervise the temporary withdrawal because currently Berlin was indefensible with the few forces available to defend it. There were reinforcements coming, he told the East Germans, but until they did those currently around Berlin needed to redeploy. Again, following his orders, with a nod and a wink as he pretended that he was acting on his own initiative though, Zavarzin said that if the East Germans wanted to stay and fight for Berlin then he wouldn’t stop them.

Marshal Gromov had chosen him for this job, overseeing the pull-out from Berlin, and instructed him to give the East Germans the impression that he was sympathetic to them and would look the other way. Zavarzin had understood the unsaid meaning behind this and agreed with the thinking: let NATO take their ire out on the East Germans. So he let the East Germans believe that and withdrew Soviet forces – plus supplies, so many of them – out of the city.

Do svidaniya, tovarishchi.


Following a warning order sent out to prepare for redeployment the day before, a final instruction had come last night for all Soviet Army, Soviet Air Force, Soviet Air Defence Force and GRU units within the Berlin area to leave had been issued late last night: the KGB received their own orders. Unit commanders were informed where they were to move to and when. This was sent to combat, combat support and service support units with radio instructions delivered in code and messengers delivering written orders as well.

Regardless, problems had been anticipated even with such firm orders going out and the methods employed to make sure everyone received those instructions. That was where Zavarzin came in: Marshal Gromov had sent him to Berlin to personally make sure that his orders were obeyed. Get everyone and everything out of Berlin, Zavarzin had been told, and do it fast.

What combat forces there were in Berlin were at once moving when the order had been sent to them. The 6th Separate Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade – the ‘liberators of West Berlin’ – and the 58th Separate Tank Regiment were moving straight away with the former heading towards Müncheberg and the latter for Fürstenwalde. The various units of Airborne Troops, which included two divisions and many separate regiments of merged units worn down by battles and their parent divisions defeated as a whole, were on the move too. They were coming out of Berlin by road using their light armoured vehicles and a lot of trucks too, some of them liberated from civilian uses in Berlin. Zavarzin found that artillery, air defence and combat engineering forces were also all on their way to new locations spread along the eastern side of the Odra like the Airborne Troops from Seelow to Eisenhüttenstadt. There were Polish troops which had come across the border and they were on their way to link up with them just inside East Germany.

Aviation forces, which were made up of mainly ground units instead of aircraft which could easily fly away, were also completing their redeployment just as ordered. Maintenance staff, aircraft engineers, flight controllers, radar operators and so on were all doing as they were told and moving east. The GRU had pulled out its people and equipment (radios, computers and signal antennas) just as they were meant too.

However, it was the service support elements inside Berlin which were causing the problems. Marshal Gromov had foreseen this and told Zavarzin that they wouldn’t refuse to obey orders – like he said many East Germans would – but instead there would be technical difficulties everywhere. Those who maintained military equipment and provided the necessary rear-area services weren’t used to rapid movement like others. To pack up all of their equipment and move their men about from where they had gotten comfortable would be delayed by those incapable of responding to orders even when given warning. These were those who hadn’t seen urgency all throughout the war and wouldn’t be able to fathom the need for speed. Zavarzin could expect to be met with obstruction in the form of reasonable delays incurred, he was told, but was not to put up with it.

Soviet forces were conducting their escape from Berlin today and no one was to be left behind.


Travelling across Berlin in one of the HMMWVs that the Americans had left behind – he had no idea where their soldiers had gone, nor the British or French troops here at the start of the war either –, Zavarzin visited the places where there was delay in pulling out. Using the full weight of his personality (get right in their face, as the Americans say, he had been told) and his rank too, Zavarzin got those who were being slow to speed up. He shouted at junior officers and threatened to shoot them himself or even let the KGB find out that they were disobeying orders. He had to relive some officers still and promote those below them: his threats about the Chekists hadn’t been ones he had intended to follow through on so those officers relived of duties joined penal units as privates. What couldn’t be moved in terms of equipment was either to be destroyed in-place with explosives or handed over to any nearby East Germans who wished to stay and defend Berlin.

Zavarzin made sure that ammunition, fuel and food supplies came out though. His orders were that they were to be taken out of the city second only to men. It wasn’t as if much of that was coming across Poland recently and it would all be needed for the fight along the Polish border.

There were a pair of colonels who were under Zavarzin’s supervision also moving through Berlin and they had the task of securing ‘special munitions’: nuclear and chemical weapons. None of those were to be handed over to the East Germans and nor where they to be destroyed either. One of the colonels ran into a problem where they came across nerve gases being handed over to an East German Stasi unit by the KGB. Zavarzin was fast on the scene, racing across the city in his jeep with his escort struggling to catch up, and he put a stop to that. The Chekist had flimsy orders; Zavarzin had the full authority of STAVKA behind him. The artillery and mortar rounds contained that nerve gas went into the custody of his men and a helicopter was called-in to lift them out of the immediate area.

If the East Germans wanted to fight for Berlin then that was fine, they could take the full consequences of NATO retribution. They weren’t doing it with Soviet special munitions though.


While all of this was going on, as Zavarzin was personally pulling the last Soviet forces out of Berlin as they made their escape, he was also in contact with those who had already left and reached the new defensive positions away to the east.

Those were positioned from up at Eberswalde-Finow, down across the Barnim Plateau, through Strausberg, to Fürstenwalde and then along the Spree River as far as Lübben. There were Polish forces which had moved across from their own country over the Odra and had taken up position there. Either side of this area where those from Berlin were falling back to, from the Baltic coast and down to the Czechoslovak frontier, there were further defensive positions where more men were withdrawing into.

Those in the centre of that defensive line run inside East Germany to stop NATO entry into Poland were getting into position ready to hold it. The troops which came out of Berlin earlier in the day were arriving just as they were meant to. There had come some air attacks upon them as they moved out of Berlin but the damage hadn’t been that strong; Zavarzin was told that NATO bombers were active to the north, the south and the west instead of to the east of the city. Soon enough, that would change but for now he had to complete this redeployment of all those out of Berlin, not just those who had been ready to move out.

There was still time to do so before the deadline to complete the evacuation imposed upon him expired. Zavarzin wasn’t one to let down those who gave him orders, not when he believed in them and understood their future implications. He would spend the rest of the day hurrying along those who had no concept of having to do things in a hurry.





March 27th 1990
Frankfurt an der Oder, Brandenburg, East Germany

The conspiracy against the Soviets – and the East Germans too – undertaken by the Polish WSW would in later years be called the ‘White Eagle’ resistance: using the national symbol of Poland as a name. There was a lot of romanticizing of what occurred, whitewashing some detractors said. The effects of what the Polish did in acting against what they regarded as their enemies, not their military opponents in NATO, were devastating overall and gave Poland back its pride. However, at the time, when the Poles did turn against the Soviets, the motives later depicted weren’t those of all of those involved at the time. Dashing, honest heroes there were few of. There were good and bad people part of the conspiracy… and a lot of the latter too.

The WSW had to work with what they had though. They were a small organisation focused upon military intelligence and internal security within the Polish Armed Forces. They were not a true intelligence agency with unlimited reach and immense power. Many of those bound in loyalty to the White Eagle acts were coerced or tricked into helping. The self-proclaimed patriots at the top had their own reasons too, many selfish even if they were fighting for Poland overall. The patriotism expressed shouldn’t be regarded as the only reason for the WSW stabbing their erstwhile allies in the back like they did.

‘For Poland first, for me second.’


The WSW had had a plan. That plan came with a timescale so that they could be ready to act as they wanted to. Their enemies, the Soviets, didn’t cooperate with that timescale.

The KGB started to get wind that something was going on in Poland. Krakow had just been the start and following the wave of attacks there in that city there had come others spread across the country. The transport links were shut down by sabotage and overt acts of terrorism. It became apparent that there was widespread coordination. When using the SB (Poland’s internal security & intelligence agency) to assist them in tracking down those responsible, the KGB started to come across links with Polish military personnel to the acts working against the war effort. The WSW had people in the working for them within the SB and they reacted fast, maybe carelessly, but because they saw the need.

In Warsaw, the KGB chief there responsible for security throughout Poland was assassinated in a gruesome murder. Evidence was planted to blame others for the act but the White Eagle had been caught glimpse of. The WSW had understood it was running out of time and would need to do what it must with haste.

Contact was established with the West.

The SB had been engaged in a delicate dance with an Israeli connection at the behest of the KGB where they were trying for some time to feed strategic disinformation to the West using this conduit. That connection was turned for WSW use and real intelligence sent to establish bona files: what the CIA would call Barefoot when it was passed on. The Poles planned to talk more with the West and negotiate from a position of friendship with them at a later stage.

Where Polish low-grade reserve troops had been formed up into the misnomer that was the Polish Third Combined Arms Army to be sent into East Germany, the WSW attached several of their people who were part of their conspiracy in headquarters roles there. The troops were meant to be deploying just inside East Germany to link up with Soviet forces protecting the Odra-Neisse frontier against a NATO invasion: those troops would follow their standing orders but with people there ready to make sure that when new orders came those would be obeyed instead of Soviet ones.

As part of White Eagle, the WSW became aware of exactly where the plans were for to send an East German government-in-exile to inside Poland. They knew there would be East German leaders heading for the Soviet military base at Legnica and their method of travel as well as their timescale for movement across by air. The Polish patriots (and others) weren’t willing to see a German presence such as that on their soil. The Soviets were one thing, but Germans…


The motives behind what the WSW were doing in turning against the Soviets were wide and varied. They wanted to take their country out of the war and not see it fought over. There was hatred of the Soviets and the East Germans but more than that was a desire to not see the country a war zone more than it already was where full-scale ground combat would replace the limited NATO air attacks.

White Eagle was all about stopping a repeat of the mid-Forties.

What had happened across in Germany, east and west, had been witnessed by the Poles. The WSW had seen for itself the fantastic defeats incurred, which included the destruction of most of the professional elements of the Polish Armed Forces in battles with NATO. They had then watched as NATO’s armies drove eastwards and heading for Poland. As the Soviets prepared to fight to defend the East German–Polish border, and fight across Poland too, the WSW got wind of their plans for how that would take place. Conventional and unconventional warfare would take place as the Soviets defended their own country on Polish soil; the latter included not just chemical weapons being used in abundance but also thermonuclear ones too.

The Poles were aware of German Flu. They had access to their own information which pointed to the true causes of that rather than the official propaganda line that it was a NATO biological weapon. They feared how it would debilitate the Polish people and that further down the line that it would be fatal even if it currently wasn’t. Full-scale fighting across Poland, added with the effects of chemical & nuclear weapons, would be fatal for millions of Poles.

The East Germans were another factor with their plans for the ‘temporary’ seat of government in Legnica after their escape from Berlin. To give the East Germans legitimacy, the thinking on the part of the WSW was that there would be a move to declare the military base, maybe part of that town, maybe all of it, maybe an area around it, sovereign territory of the German Democratic Republic. That was where it would start with the Germans, the Poles feared: afterwards they would want a greater area of sovereign Polish soil which had been rightfully recovered in 1945. They were on the run, but the WSW was not going to give them comfort and shelter.

And then there was the Soviets and how they had made Poland their plaything to be fucked over again and again.

What had happened in the past had happened in the past: that was how the WSW saw it. Recent events though, starting with how the KGB destroyed the transition to democracy in Poland late last year had been key to the beginnings of the White Eagle. Government and opposition figures had been illegally arrested and taken out of Poland to Siberia… to be shot. In their place had come puppets who had first ordered paramilitary forces and then Polish troops to shoot their own people. The Soviets had been giving the overall instructions and making sure that they were obeyed too: those who refused to what they said faced the same fate as those killed last October. The Soviets had then killed their own leader, created a crisis with the West where they blamed them for Gorbachev’s death and then launched a war against NATO. Poland had been dragged into that and many lives lost. Every day that that war continued, Poland faced destruction in nuclear war either at the hands of the Soviets, NATO or both.

No more could this carry on, had been the decision: Poland had to stop this and if no one else was going to then the WSW would.

*

Frankfurt an der Oder sat on the border and was just inside East Germany; the Polish town of Słubice was on the other side. The road and rail connections had been important for the war effort and been struck at many times. Dummy bridges had been hit by NATO aircraft first when that deception had held before later the real fixed crossings had been knocked down. Further temporary bridges and ferries had been bombed afterwards from the air. During those air attacks, civilians in both Frankfurt and Słubice had been killed as the damage done had extended beyond the bridges & ferries as well as the links to the highway and the railway lines beyond either side.

Still though, the crossing sites were being used for movement of men and equipment both ways. Those going west though, Polish troops heading into East Germany, were having problems moving as fast as they were meant too… creative problems.

With the Polish Third Army were two Polish Army junior officers (of many) working for the conspiracy which was White Eagle. Major Franciszek Gągor and Captain Tadeusz Buk and had been ‘co-opted’ by the WSW into serving the interests of Poland, not the Soviets. They were attached to the field army command staff in lower-level roles with Soviet-issued orders to make sure that the five light infantry divisions got across into East Germany to defend the border on the western side of the river frontiers. Both of them were following different orders though. The deception weighed heavy on them both as they knew that their fellow Poles would suffer in some ways, but they would be acting for Poland rather than any one person. Each had committed themselves to the cause before they linked up with the troops supposed to be moving into East Germany and were following those.


Major Gągor was a career staff officer. He had trained Polish troops due to take part in international peacekeeping operations under UN auspices and recently taken part in one himself to the Golan. His current posting with the Polish Third Army was in logistics to oversee supplies going forward for the infantry divisions to use when the expectation was that they would see combat.

From the WSW, he had received instructions to make sure that those supplies didn’t go through. They were to be sent to the wrong place and moved to the correct location. They were to be lost and then eventually found again. Slow everything down he was told and without the ammunition and fuel stocks, the Polish Third Army wouldn’t cross the border in a timely fashion as envisioned by the Soviets. Every legitimate excuse which could be given was to be put into play to bring everything to a halt.

Moreover, Gągor was told about the bridging units coming forward before they arrived within the area near the crossing points to be used. The WSW told him misdirecting them and then making sure that their new instructions were muddled too was important. As few troops of the field army as possible were to get over into East Germany and this could be done by physically stopping them from getting over the River Oder. Working from inside Frankfurt, Gągor was doing just that. There were five divisions, all light units, but only one, and an incomplete one, was going to get into East Germany by the end of today.

The Soviet plan called for three to be across from Poland already, not one.


Captain Buk, a tanker now assigned to coordinate the efforts of the lone tank battalions assigned to each infantry division (instead of a full regiment and with old tanks too), was given a more pressing task and one he didn’t expect. Rather than slow down the movement of men like his co-conspirator was, he was ordered by his WSW contact to leave the army command post and go out to supervise the movement of some of those tanks over the Oder.

In doing so he was to assassinate Generaloberst Horst Brünner.

The East German military officer led the PHV: the Main Political Administration of the East German Armed Forces, which had spent the pre-war period arresting hundreds of Nationale Volksarmee soldiers who had had a conscience. He was on his way to Poland and coming through Frankfurt, travelling in a road convoy where the colonel-general was meant to be well protected. Kill him and those with him, Buk had been told, and before he could reach Poland to get as far as Legnica presumably to make sure what military presence came with the East German leadership was ‘politically loyal’. While Buk wasn’t told the reasoning behind his order to kill the man, he could assume that it was to slow down the movement into Poland of the East German leadership and by killing Brünner that would be achieved.

There was a terrible ‘accident’ right near a pontoon bridge. A trio of T-54 tanks were given an order to fire their guns to make sure they worked. The firing was meant to be done with blank rounds just as others had done before and after them. Shells – live ones! – from those particular tanks blasted apart the East German column and killed a lot of those in the vehicles after they had swept through Frankfurt and started crossing the river. Brünner was among the dead in the accident which occurred on a bridge (destroying it too). Apologies were made and punishments of those involved promised. Buk had followed his orders from on high and kept his own hands clean of direct involvement and was pleased to see that while the East Germans were mad, the Soviets hadn’t really given a damn about the death of an East German general: they had more important matters to deal with.


These were the first two acts where the WSW began attacking Soviet interests outside of Poland itself. They were just the beginning and only the warm up of what was to come. When the right moment arrived, when all of the necessary preparations were made at home, and before the suspicious KGB could catch up with them, anyone looking back at what happened today in Frankfurt would see just what had begun.

Those who believed that they were fighting for the greater interests of Poland above immediate concerns were moving the final pieces into place. They would make sure that the Soviet-led defensive line strung along the border with East Germany was fatally weakened when Polish troops which had made the journey would be ordered to fall back to link up with those who had been ‘delayed’. They would strike all across Poland hitting KGB and Soviet security forces adding to the already done destruction against the transport network linking the Soviet Union with East Germany.

And they would too get rid of the subservient, traitorous fellow Poles of theirs keeping the country in this war at the behest of the Soviets. There was a blood reckoning coming in Warsaw.

Forty–Two – Coup d’état

March 29th 1990
Arroyo Naranjo, outside Havana, Cuba

General de Cuerpo de Ejército Delgado had been nominated by his fellow generals to be the acting Jefe of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. There were a few surviving generals of four-star rank (General de Ejércitos) yet they were down in the southeast of the country; they were arguing over who would be the next national leader or thinking of trying to flee the country to elsewhere in the Hispanic world. Here in the west of Cuba, everyone else of substantial pre-war standing was either dead or with the rebels operating from Mariel…

…with the rebels being subservient to the KGB there.

Throughout the war, General Delgado was regarded by his peers as having fought for Cuba, not any one person. He had argued with Raúl Castro (not Fidel, naturally) and stood firm in opposition to Soviet influence. Moreover, when traitors had killed Raúl, it had been him who had discovered the betrayal and led the first moves against the coup d’état. The political non-entity appointed by the DGI at the behest of the KGB had been shot by General Delgado himself – so the story which everyone believed went – and he had then gathered troops loyal to Cuba to fight against the intervention of outsiders; everyone conveniently ‘forgot’ how he had (from afar) commanded those men sent north at the beginning of the fight and off to their doom.

He had promised his fellow generals that he would regain Cuba’s honour by finishing off the traitors as well as bringing an end the war too. These were big promises made by General Delgado and not ones which would be easy to achieve, yet he set out to do them. He won’t let Cuba down, he had told his fellow generals, and would die in the attempt rather than see failure.


Cuba’s Western Army Command was the strongest military force in the country pre-war. It controlled all forces on the western side of the island which including a majority of the most-capable elements ready to fight for Cuba at home or abroad.

Between the igniting of World War Three and Cuba’s late intervention – a two-week period – much of that strength had either been transferred to the southeast down to near Guantanamo Bay or readied to be sent away from Cuba’s shores in the landing operations against the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, the Turks & Caicos Islands and the Cayman Islands. Armoured forces and lighter airborne/amphibious units had therefore moved out of the Western Army Command area. Infantry units as well as a few heavier forces (the latter to defend Havana against a surprise counter-invasion) remained with the command. American attacks first with their bombers dropping immense loads of conventional fire power had hurt those military units but far more damage had come with the nuclear strikes. Small, tactical weapons had been used with the norteamericanos hitting combat support and service support elements where they were concentrated rather than dispersed troops themselves. The Western Army Command had lost its headquarters staff in these attacks as well as suffering severe damage to its communications too. The troops were still there but commanding and coordinating any major movement had been made difficult.

General Delgado knew the difficulties yet the Western Army Command was regardless the only hope that Cuba had. He gave the newly-appointed commanding general (a three-star ranking general like himself) two tasks to be carried out with immediate effect. Firstly, move troops into Havana – starting at the outskirts first – to restore order there and stop the city being a tempting target for the norteamericanos with a mercenary army for some sort of ‘liberation’. Secondly, attack the traitors and the Soviets to the west of Havana, spread out from their Mariel base, and crush them no matter how hard of a tough fight that would be. There were enough troops to do both, General Delgado had instructed his subordinate, and he would personally be on-hand to oversee each task completed.

The troops committed to the fighting in Havana were doing just what he expected of them. His small mobile command column (bunkers were death traps as exemplified by Fidel’s fate) hidden in civilian vehicles though armed to the teeth had come forward into the city’s outskirts and not far from the advancing troops sweeping all opposition before them. Criminal gangs and rioting civilians were either dead or running for their lives. They no more looted, burnt and fought the security forces as justice was being delivered against them. They had risen up right when Cuba was on its knees and were paying the price for that now. Some innocents were being caught up in the fighting, General Delgado knew, but he recalled what French saying on that: c’est la guerre. The norteamericanos had a similar saying too about smashing eggs to make an omelet but his English wasn’t as good as his French. Either way, needless deaths aside, he foresaw the complete pacification of Havana within the next few days, maybe even by the end of tomorrow.

Mariel was going to be much harder.

The Soviets had their 7th Brigade encamped around that port town and they had been joined by other Soviet elements in-place in Cuba all gathered in one area rather than spread out across the island. Joining them at the behest of the KGB had been those who had rebelled against the regime and launched their aborted coup d’état. These were DGI people in the main but also Cuban military officers and political figures as well. Where they were positioned was a distance of forty miles away from the capital, but they might as well have been ten times further. The A-1 highway, the western section of the Autopistal Nacional, had been subject to repeated air attacks hitting river crossing points and also striking vehicle convoys on it making it impassable without a major effort to repair damage and clear it of wreckage too. There were a pair of smaller, less modern coastal roads from Havana to Mariel: again, the norteamericanos had been busy with their air attacks to make them impassable. Hit with nuclear weapons to the south was what was once San Antonio de los Baños air base; a wide area around that destroyed military facility was extremely dangerous to traverse by military forces at the moment.

The norteamericanos had effectively cut off Mariel for their own reasons but making it an extremely difficult place to send a force of loyal Cubans against. That mattered for naught though. General Delgado wanted those traitors and Soviets there crushed and beaten. There was a good chance that they had given the norteamericanos the location of Fidel so he could be killed and they had certainly murdered Raúl too. Their aim was keep Cuba in the war for KGB strategic goals even if that meant that all of the Cuban people would die when the norteamericanos eventually got around to massacring everyone with their nuclear weapons.

There was a smaller highway which ran from the south of Havana westwards in the direction of Mariel: the Cerretera Central. It had received ‘attention’ from the air but wasn’t as heavily damaged as the other roads. This road, built by the norteamericanos in the Machado era, came close to San Antonio de los Baños though not too close. There were Soviet and rebel Cuban forces at Caimito as a forward position and then more in larger numbers further behind at Guanajay. The road ran through both of those towns and they were going to be more battlefields as Cuba was liberated. Further innocents were going to be caught up in the fighting like they were in Havana. Again, as General Delgado saw it, their deaths would be the price of Cuba’s freedom.

Here in Arroyo Naranjo, he received news that the lead attacking units heading for Mariel had come under fire around Caimito. There had come an ambush where the Soviets were waiting but they had mistimed their attack. General Delgado’s men had been stung and slowed down but they were still moving forward.


It had begun, Cuba was now fighting against the Soviets just as they were fighting the United States too. Foolish to outsiders, of course, but necessary for Cuba.





March 29th 1990
The Prenden Bunker, near Wandlitz, Brandenburg, East Germany

Danger from NATO air attack and the presence of traitors everywhere imperiling East Germany’s leadership meant that they were safe in their bunker to the north of Berlin. The National Defence Council was protected here by their fraternal comrades of the KGB who could do what the Stasi couldn’t and make sure that there were no more assassinations. The Soviets were helpful in identifying threats to the regime from those who would betray their country at its weakest moment. They screened who came in to the bunker and all communications went through them too. They provided the defences to stop an attempt to assault the bunker with NATO commandos as well, one which had recently been conducted against the nearby Waldseidlung residential complex.

What would the East Germans in the bunker have done without their friends in the KGB?


There were ten senior members of the National Defence Council at Prenden.

Former Interior Minister and current General Secretary Friedrich Dickel was present underground along with a host of senior political figures from the regime such as Wolfgang Herger, Günter Kleiber, Egon Krenz, Herbert & Werner Krolikowski (two brothers), Alfred Neumann and Fritz Streletz. Defence Minister Heinz Kessler and Stasi chief Werner Grossmann, both who were always in uniform, were also at Prenden. Along with these people at the top, there were middle- & lower-ranking figures who worked for the leadership at the bunker too.

Kessler and Grossmann had been out of the bunker in recent weeks while the other senior people, especially Dickel, had been here continuously since the beginning of February. As could be imagined, the atmosphere in the bunker was rather unpleasant after those here had been here for so long without going outside in the fresh air. The air was thick with cigarette smoke which the air conditioning (meant to protect against chemical and biological threats) was struggling to deal with. Deliveries of fresh food had been slowed down and the water from the tanks made several people ill. The KGB had managed to send in cigarettes and alcohol and had promised to do something about the food situation too as no one wanted to keep eating the canned meat for any longer. As to the air filtration, that was being fixed today by Soviet engineers and so while turned off for a short while when it came back on later in the day all the previous problems with air quality were meant to be solved. Regardless, sometime tomorrow they were all meant to leave here and travel across to Poland where somewhere safer was waiting for their arrival.

Adding to the physical matters of being in the bunker, confined underground in tight proximity like they were, the atmosphere was thick with suspicion and tension too.

A coup d’état was feared. The politicians looked at those in uniform led by Kessler and Grossmann in fear that at any moment they would shoot them and take over. They looked at each other too, waiting to see who would try to turn the military and security services against them as pawns instead. Dickel himself feared that no one respected his authority as head of state because the rumours that the Soviets had put him in power were widely-known not to be the ‘lies’, ‘slanders’ and ‘falsehoods’ which it was proclaimed they were but actually true. He was busy today arranging for medals and awards to be given out, including making Kessler a marshal: East Germany’s highest military rank at a time when there really wasn’t anything much of the military left.

As to the Defence Minister and Stasi head, the two of them had their own concerns. They understood far more than the politicians of how recent events were to be the downfall of East Germany. The Soviets had abandoned them and were massing their troops along the Polish border ready to take that step back while leaving NATO armies to finish off what East German forces were left who were kept fighting under KGB orders. Kessler had no time to be thinking about taking over here as there was no authority to be gained. On the other hand, Grossmann was plotting a coup d’état: he just needed more time to get it going. The fools here would be shot and he would leave to set up a seat of government in the northeast of the country, even Rugen Island if necessary.


The news came today that Generaloberst Horst Brünner was dead. Their fellow National Defence Council member had been killed though when away from here and the excuse that he died in an accident was in no manner believed.

Polish tanks meant to be practice firing their guns but using live ammunition instead of blanks? What a load of rubbish! It had been an assassination clearly arranged by someone here or elsewhere who wanted to take charge of East Germany.

Krenz and the Krolikowski Brothers used the excuse of the meeting which covered the news that Brünner had been killed to talk of other matters. They said what hadn’t been said openly here before: the war was lost. Krenz called for some sort of dialogue to be opened with the West, on favourable terms for East Germany of course. The Krolikowski Brothers said that East Berlin was soon to be in NATO hands and they needed to spare the people there the suffering which would come with hostile foreign occupation by a vengeful West and the only way to do that was to arrange a ceasefire before all there were slaughtered in a NATO bloodlust.

The others accused them of ‘factionism’ and denounced them as ’traitors’.

Grossmann, the former chief of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm, the HVA, before he had stepped into the shoes of the dead Mielke and taken over as State Security Minister, allowed the three of them to talk and encouraged a debate on the merits of that. His thoughts were on weakening the politicians and seeing them openly divide: the best way to get rid of them was to have them at each other’s throats.

Kessler told them that infighting here did them no good. He said that the end was coming and they all needed to think about their futures. He spoke of a message he had received from Berlin via a military courier who had come here and out of sight of ‘die Russen’ had passed clandestinely word of events there. Generalmajor Lothar Engelhardt was not able to hold onto the city and was having severe difficulties holding his forces together. Berlin was lost, even if the final shots had yet to be fired. Their country was doomed and they needed to decide what they were going to do. Did they really all want to go to Poland where the Poles weren’t going to be very welcoming especially if they had nothing to bring with them of any value to continue the fight?

Dickel spoke up as he demanded that they all held firm together as representatives of the people and supporting their allies. He was passionate in his speech to them all. He banged his fist on the table as he called for unity in such desperate times as these and urged everyone to stop thinking of themselves. Unity, he called for, unity in spite of everything!

No one listened to him.


After lunch was served – a very unappetizing meal fully eaten by few – out came the alcohol and cigarettes. The leadership and those working for it relaxed some from earlier tensions and several people noticed that their air conditioning had come back on.

None of them noticed though that the KGB people usually present inside the bunker had all suddenly disappeared.

Many in the bunker became drowsy. Others started to feel a shortness of breath. These were people with pre-existing medical complaints. Then others, well people, started to feel off too with headaches first then problems breathing as well as a lack of control over their bladders.

Panic came when it was noticed that the exits to the ground above were shut and there was no one manning them. They had all been locked in!

People starting falling unconscious and into a coma which they would never awake from. The air conditioning kept going with the system working through every room and passageway inside the bunker where before it hadn’t been as effective: the engineers had done their job very well.

‘Gas’ someone screamed; ‘treason’ called out another. Slowly, they all started to realize that they were going to die here, trapped underground and being killed by whatever was coming through the air conditioning. Desperate attempts were made to try to escape but there was no way out. Kessler and Grossmann both had their people try to use the telephones and the radio links yet those didn’t work. Dickel died first before Krenz not long after him and then Grossmann. Kessler struggled on as he directed military officers to try and break down one of the exits yet he and those with him soon fell down too.


There was to be no coup d’état in East Germany though. This was not the work of their fellow countrymen. Their protectors had decided that they were no longer worth the trouble yet didn’t wish for such people to end up in the hands of the West where their secrets would be revealed. The KGB had cut off their communications and access before gassing the lot of them as they were trapped underground.

Ironically, the KGB could have saved itself the time: the Poles had a very good plan to kill the East German leadership by shooting down their plane when it headed towards Legnica tomorrow. The KGB didn’t know about that though, nor did they know about other Polish intentions. Moreover, those parts of the KGB who acted to ruthlessly here at Prenden were preparing to move against other parts of their own organisation elsewhere today as well.

What hadn’t happened in East Germany was about to happen elsewhere.





March 29th 1990
Moscow Oblast, Russian SSR, the Soviet Union

The bell couldn’t be un-rung.

Kryuchkov had showed that a coup d’état in the Soviet Union was possible with his own strike against Gorbachev and the former General Secretary’s supporters. How it had been done was one thing; of more importance was that someone had shown the will to do it and be successful. That state order had been seen to be capable of being forcibly changed.

Since then, there had been few stern measures imposed to close of avenues for a similar move to be made again. The country was open to a second coup d’état as long as someone else decided too that they would dare to do it again.


Nine days ago, up in Leningrad, the GRU and the KGB had struck a deal.

Handshakes had been exchanged between bitter personal enemies which came following promises to let bygones be bygones, to not forget what had happened but put it aside for now. The top people in both organisations, those with the all-powerful KGB and the not-quite neutered GRU, had agreed that Kryuchkov needed to go. He had been given the opportunity to peacefully step aside yet had refused. He had gathered up those loyal to him and was secure in the belief that he and his position was unassailable. He wanted to continue the war to the very end; his war which he had started and aimed to see it through until a finish which the GRU and the KGB came to realize would ultimate mean the nuclear destruction of their country.

Kryuchkov was preparing for a fight with his intelligence organisations, relying on the military now (the irony!) to protect him along with what few KGB people he had left as he made a stand. That fight to the finish he sought was one which the security services would give him.


The KGB’s Spetsgruppa A led by General-Major Karpukhin assaulted several targets in Moscow this evening. The moment it got dark, they were moving to attack several locations within the city itself. They had been planning to act later in the night but there had been ominous signs that Kryuchkov’s supporters had got wind of what was coming. Aircraft were being marshalled in Poland around where paratroopers who had pulled out of Berlin were gathered: the fear was that those men would fly back home and defend Kryuchkov’s regime and those capable, veteran troops would pose a challenge which Karpukhin’s Alpha Group wouldn’t be able to overcome. Moves were underway through other means to stop those flights without resorting to serious bloodshed (a few deaths here and there would have to occur) but nothing major.

Once again, the irony of this was glaring. The KGB when it was wholly loyal to Kryuchkov had made sure that the Soviet Army was all sent abroad to fight so it couldn’t pose a risk at home. Now, Kryuchkov had been aiming to bring back troops to fight for him!

The large and heavily-expanded Alpha Group were veterans themselves. There were more than three hundred of them in Moscow. These men had crushed rebellion and revolt – real and imagined – throughout the country in recent months. They had killed their fellow Soviet citizens in Vilnius, Novosibirsk, Kursk, Tbilisi and so many other places. Now, they killed others here in Moscow.

The Soviet Ministry of Defence Main Building on Arabatskaya Square was assaulted by men coming from helicopters flying extremely low over the city. They came across the Moskva River on their last leg before they hovered above parts of the roof: men abseiled out and down. There was a meeting going on down below in the basement of senior military personnel who were loyal to Kryuchkov including his hand-picked Defence Minister; others were sought elsewhere in the building for these hardened killers to murder in their place of work.

A slaughter begun. Anyone who stood in the way of the Alpha Group was shot down as they hunted for those they came here to kill.

Karpukhin oversaw other assaults in Moscow too. The KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square and the Lefortovo Prison were left alone but a similar assault to the one which hit the Ministry of Defence struck at the KGB facility at Yasenevo. This was where Kryuchkov had his power base – not at KGB headquarters – with the First Chief Directorate having their offices. The all-powerful foreign intelligence arm was packed with his supporters and most of them could be found at Yasenevo.

Another slaughter occurred there.

In less dramatic moves, smaller Alpha Group detachments, these in vehicles, arrived at Moscow’s train stations and airports as well as civilian communication sites including the Ostankino Tower. There was no fighting at these locations but the groups of armed men firmly took control to cut off Moscow from the outside world.


General-Lieutenant Trofimov had been appointed by Kryuchkov to his old role when the latter made himself General Secretary. Trofimov was regarded as loyal by his former boss (a mistake indeed) and someone not interested in gaining anything for himself but rather defending the state against those who would bring it down from within: Trofimov had built his career on crushing internal political dissent against the state, not seeking to gain high office.

Well… Trofimov had decided that Kryuchkov posed more of a risk to the Soviet Union than any writer, poet or human rights activist.

The KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, its counter-intelligence arm, was dispatched by Trofimov to take care of people considered Kryuchkov loyalists but who didn’t pose a serious danger like those at the Ministry of Defence and Yasenevo did. These men and women who specialised in following around foreign spies on Moscow’s streets before the war had been tailing such people for some time now so that they were all kept in sight. Word had come from them that there was a move afoot to bring back Airborne Troops units from Poland and they had also discovered the plans made by some of Kryuchkov’s allies to flee (complete with stolen state funds) aboard should things go awry. This evening they started arresting those they had been following. Some violence came including physical assaults, gunshots and a couple of suicides from those who didn’t want to be detained. Still, what was done was done quietly and efficiently.

Trofimov was informed that a few had gotten away and wasn’t best pleased to not see complete success yet the vast majority of Kryuchkov’s supporters here in Moscow had been rounded up. Those who hadn’t been caught weren’t going to get very far away either in the long run.


Colonel Putin was down at the Nikonovo Bunker. Lebedev (who he had escaped from the Netherlands with) had sent him here to join the GRU efforts to break in and remove Kryuchkov from his hiding place. There were Spetsnaz men who’d arrived from the Russian Far East and they glared at him in his KGB uniform with undisguised malice. Putin knew all that had happened with how the GRU had been mistreated and humiliated so he kept himself in check: he met those stares like a man but was ready to take a step back if the situation forced it.

The cooperation of the GRU was vital, Lebedev had told him, and we have to let them get their hands dirty in dealing with Kryuchkov to bind the new alliance together… for now at least.

Using explosives and even power-drills, the Spetsnaz were forcing the entrance open to this bunker. This was somewhere built to protect those inside from not just air attack but a commando assault too: it wasn’t an easy task. Booby-traps had already killed several Spetsnaz and those inside knew what was coming. Putin had been informed that through deep-buried communications links which were being listened to, they were calling for help – any help! – to come and stop the assault as well as having their weapons inside ready. A shootout was coming but there were enough men here all well-armed with more-powerful weapons as well as maps of the inside to make that defence futile. Gas would have been a better weapon to be used here yet Kryuchkov was wanted alive and so this was going to have to be done the hard way. As the work went on, Putin stood back at a safe distance watching absentmindedly as he thought about what would happen when the Spetsnaz got inside.

Before fleeing from imminent NATO captivity as they had closed-in upon Arnhem, Lebedev had spoken with a Stasi man about a grand scheme drawn up by the East Germans to maintain their position and lives should the worst ever happen and their country fall. That was currently not something they were doing, but once back in the Rodina and engaged with Trofimov’s schemes that had been brought up again. There were several things which needed to be done to make that work for the KGB, one of those being having Kryuchkov delivered gift-wrapped to the West. He would be brought out alive, given some ‘medicine’ to allow his memory to quickly fade and then later handed over for punishment by those out for his blood. The West would want to push for vengeance for all that he had done and they could have him.

Everyone else inside the bunker was unimportant and would be quickly disposed of.

Putin had been told that initially the idea had been to have Kryuchkov killed here, by the Americans too. Lebedev had taken time to have all of his schemes – ones which Putin fully endorsed – agreed upon by the other plotters against Kryuchkov with the idea back then that he should be killed. There had been a KGB disinformation game being run throughout the war against NATO but it hadn’t worked out as planned: the West had been confused as to who was behind it and didn’t fully trust it for reasons unknown to the KGB. Regardless, through that intelligence link a request had been sent to have them hit here with their magic aircraft dropping bombs to smash the bunker apart. They had refused to do so, not saying why, and then the plot against Kryuchkov had evolved into what it now was with a better outcome determined as one which would be sought. Putin thought that much better for he knew how much the West would like to get their hands upon the man underneath the ground for the war that he had started and all the deaths he had caused in his mad quest for global power. He would be no good to them though for what was in his head: he’d just be a puppet for one of their international trials where he’d eventually be a senile old man.

His attention went back to the bunker entrance. A cheer went up and Putin realized the Spetsnaz were making more progress. He wished them well getting in and hoped they would remember to be damn careful when inside and start shooting everyone but the one man who they were here to remove alive. He looked up at the dark sky above and hoped too that there was no satellite looking down here at the minute!

This was all meant to be a secret before the lie to be sold to the West was ready with all pieces in place.


The GRU and the KGB, working hand-in-hand, had done what Kryuchkov had done: completed a successful coup d’état. Like the first, this second one was initially all out of the public eye. A lot of people involved didn’t know what else was going on. Only a few people were meant to know everything.

The belief was that it had all gone perfectly and the next stage was to follow it up with the lies which were due to come as to what had actually occurred. The war was to be ended in a way which wouldn’t see the thermonuclear destruction of the Soviet Union yet also not in a manner which saw the state brought down and on its knees begging to a victorious West. This was a delicate balancing act yet there was a conviction that it was achievable because everything had been done to make sure of success.

However… there were some things which the plotters hadn’t taken into account.

There was more than one intelligence asset that the West had giving them information and this one wasn’t a maskirovka too convoluted to work as desired.

The Poles were rushing their final preparations too, ready to throw Soviet plans off.

And there had been certain orders for the defence of Soviet territorial integrity issued by Kryuchkov unknown to many apart from his closest people, people who the GRU and the KGB were busy killing.

Forty–Four – Disarray

March 31st 1990
Above the Russian SSR, the Soviet Union

As part of the staff of the Committee of Three, Colonel Putin had come aboard the emergency aircraft late last night. From out of Chkalovsky air base, the Ilyushin-80 aircraft had rapidly climbed into the sky with two of the trio that made up the Soviet Union’s new leadership aboard along with others who had been involved in the coup d’état. There had been an urgent rush when the news had come in of the initiation of nuclear warfare with United States military forces to get airborne and others had been left behind.

Putin wished now that he had been one of those; anything would be better than to be aboard this aircraft with all of the crazy events going on in the sky.


Circling high above the clouds this morning, the Il-80 was being kept away from locations thought to be targets in a nuclear exchange. Il-78 airborne tankers had met with it several times to refuel the emergency command post so that there was no need yet to land. There were also a pair of MiG-31 interceptors always nearby, just in case.

Putin was feeling air sick and knew he needed to be back on the ground. The air he and everyone else was breathing was terrible. There was no natural light inside the aircraft either with the Il-80 (a military version of the civilian Ilyushin-86) having no windows apart from those up in the cockpit. Since being aboard, he had been party to many briefings and strategy meetings though cut out of many others too as those who were more important than he discussed matters to which he wasn’t privy. There were fellow spooks like himself aboard as well as military officers; no civilians, politicians or not, had flown out of Chkalovsky. Sleep was needed by him and so many others yet the geo-political situation remained tense and there was concern that something would be missed by those who slept.

News continued to be sent to the aircraft from the ground of events pertaining to that tense situation. There had been no more nuclear explosions but there were warning signs everywhere that more were about to occur unless the diplomacy employed worked to avert that. There was no news yet to be received here on the effects of that diplomacy and so everyone was waiting impatiently for communication from the ground to come.

Putin waited like the rest of them, eager to hear something, anything to say whether or not the world wasn’t about to end.


The nuclear explosions in the Baltic Sea and the Barents Sea had thrown all Soviet plans for bringing an end to the war to a satisfactory conclusion into sudden disarray. From out of nowhere, two submarines in the service of the Soviet Navy had opened fire with nuclear weapons against American naval forces. Details were only forthcoming on why the first one (the submarine off Kaliningrad) had done so with word having not yet come from the second. Each had attacked the US Navy due to standing orders to defend the shores of the country against an amphibious invasion; such orders had been put into place by Kryuchkov and the Soviet Navy had taken far too long to see them confirmed as retracted.

Amazingly, but also alarmingly, the Americans had yet to make a retaliation.

Putin didn’t believe that they had been cowed and were frightened like some aboard this aircraft had asserted that they were. Yet, neither did he believe that they were waiting ready to retaliate with a massive strike once they had marshaled all of their forces and lulled the Soviet Union into a false sense of security as others were so sure of. His belief, his personal feeling based upon what he knew of the West, was that they were still trying to figure out what had gone on and were also debating the wisdom of retaliating as they feared nuclear war like his country’s new leaders did too. He had been part of the effort to remove the threat of nuclear war by getting rid of Kryuchkov who the Committee of Three and supporters such as himself believed was about to cause that: no one here wanted to see that occur and he joined them in hoping that the Americans saw things in the same light.

From multiple sources of intelligence, there were signs coming from all over the place that American and other Western nuclear forces – those of Britain, France and Israel – were on alert and ready to attack. They had missiles, aircraft and submarines all with nuclear weapons pointed at the Soviet Union. Again though, the interpretation of that could be either that they were making ready to strike either first or if there was another use of nuclear weapons against them by Soviet forces unauthorized like before or deliberate. Chess with hand grenades, Putin had heard the current stand-off with nuclear forces described: both sides trying to gain an advantage while holding explosive pieces. His country had been forced to do the same and he had been briefed on the moves to ready their own missiles, aircraft and submarines too.

Averting that nuclear war was what was wanted though and so the diplomacy employed had been contacting the Americans several times over night and through the early hours of this morning.


Making use of the Hot Line – the facsimile system which had recently replaced the teletype system: there was no ‘red phone’ – to establish contact from the system’s location at the Communist Party headquarters building in Moscow near to the Kremlin to the Pentagon outside Washington, messages had been sent to the Americans. They were told that both firing of nuclear weapons had been unauthorized (no exact details given) and there was no intention to have that repeated. Putin had been present when it was explained aboard the aircraft that it would take time for a reply as there would be confusion and panic in the United States among their leadership though not all had understood that and there had bene concerns over the delay in getting a first response. When that had come, the Americans had said that they would respond in kind to any nuclear attack upon them as had been the case with the attack in the Baltic Sea; they hadn’t mentioned the Barents Sea. They had also queried the meaning of ‘unauthorized usage’.

Back to the Americans, the reply had been that the Soviet Union would too respond in kind yet there was no desire to see any more nuclear attacks take place. With regards to the issue of authorization, after much debate here on the aircraft over whether it was wise to admit what many saw as weakness, the Americans were told that there were some orders wrongly issued to individual Soviet forces that were urgently being corrected. There was another delay before the next Hot Line message from the Americans asked whether Soviet forces in Cuba armed with nuclear weapons were under Soviet national control or answerable to either Cuban forces or local commanders there.

An event fiercer argument had raged aboard the aircraft about how to answer such questions. Putin had been on the side of those who wanted to tell the truth – well… some of it anyway – to the Americans. Others though were alarmed at the knowledge that the Americans had about what weapons had been sent to Cuba in secret and the implications of the Americans asking about them to assert who controlled them: the belief was that they wanted to know what would be the effects of attacking those weapons before their use. What decision was eventually reached was sort of a compromise and the reply sent to the Americans told them that issues concerning control over Soviet nuclear weapons deployed for defensive-only purposes abroad were being urgently addressed. The thinking was that to admit that there were nuclear weapons in Cuba would be too much yet it was hinted at so that if those weapons were used without authorization then the Americans would already be aware of control issues. No one was happy with this compromise… including the Americans who responded that if those weapons there, or anywhere else, were used against their own military forces or their homeland then they would respond and the Soviet Union should be in do doubt about that.


Following that last message received from the Americans, there had been a decision not to send another reply for now. There had come no more messages from the Americans either and talks had commenced aboard this aircraft about what to do. Putin hadn’t been party to them but had been told afterwards that it was decided that ever-so-slowly certain Soviet strategic nuclear forces – those which the Americans were known to monitor – would be stood down from the very highest alert to the status that they were before the attacks had taken place. It was hoped that the Americans would do the same, actions which could be observed, and things would revert to how they were yesterday where both sides were ready to annihilate the other though not with fingers on triggers.

Confirmation had yet to come that the Americans were shadowing Soviet de-escalation moves yet neither had they fired off their nuclear arsenal either. Putin had been tasked that while he was still on the aircraft with others appointed to support the leadership, he should return to the duties he was preforming before the evacuation from Moscow. There would be challenges as the aircraft remained in the sky but he was to make do for now.

The Committee of Three consisted of the new heads of the KGB, the GRU and STAVKA. The two spooks had brought down Kryuchkov while the military officer had been appointed by them to temporarily co-rule with them to placate the Soviet Armed Forces. They had all made a firm pact to end the war and hand over rule of the country to a new civilian leader, one who was amenable to the West but also under their control behind the scenes so that he wouldn’t sell out them, their organisations of their nation when dealing with a victorious West. Putin was one of many junior people assisting them in helping to achieve this goal and his duty – before being taken aboard the aircraft – had been to address issues which would work against the desired peace with the West when his country was in a position internally to bring that forth: he had been working on the matter of POWs held by the Soviet Union.

The paperwork he had brought with him (he had grabbed what he had in front of him when ordered to evacuate Moscow) concerned three numbers. The first was how many NATO prisoners had been taken by Soviet military forces into captivity, the second was how many had been turned over to the custody of MVD paramilitary forces who ran detention facilities inside the Soviet Union and the third was how many were currently alive in confinement. There were differences between those numbers, real large ones and they were going to cause immense problems with ending the war in a manner which his country wanted… that being if the current nuclear-ceasefire with the West didn’t suddenly fall apart.





March 31st 1990
Sperenberg Airbase, Brandenburg, East Germany

Yesterday afternoon, General Schwarzkopf had left his headquarters at Kaserne Husterhoeh and flown into East Germany. It had been a temporary move with the majority of his staff left back near the West German–French border and SACEUR only planning to stay at a forward command post at Sperenberg ready and waiting for him for less than twenty-four hours… such had been the plan.

The move into occupied territory had been done so that Schwarzkopf would be in a position to easily go forward and make an arrangement in person with the Soviets when they would surrender their remaining forces in East Germany. That expectation had come about due to the surrenders of major pockets of resistance cut off behind the lines and then the collapse of enemy forces in Berlin too. Initially, SACEUR had been planning to send his deputy but word had come from Powell and the NSC back home that he should go himself to make any deal with the Soviets.

Sperenberg Airbase had been heavily-damaged during the war with repeated NATO air attacks made against the large facility yet again and again the Soviets had made improvised repairs. However, they had abandoned it a couple of days ago and French tanks had swept through the area afterwards. It had been regarded as a good location for Schwarzkopf to operate from as it was close to Berlin as well as Soviet forces away to the east in addition to being located in an isolated area where there was protection against enemy activity was offered. There had been some consideration given to using the military facilities at Wünsdorf (near Zossen) instead yet there were still NATO intelligence teams all over that area along with specialist engineers disarming demolition charges which failed to go off. Sperenberg had been considered safer.

SACEUR was still here after the nuclear incidents last night, though eager to get back to Husterhoeh soon enough.


Whilst he remained inside East Germany waiting for either the Soviets to go all-out with a massive nuclear attack or to surrender their troops – he didn’t know which way it would go –, Schwarzkopf had been busy.

A planned halt order to the continuing offensives to complete Operation Eastern Storm had been fought off; there had been the same panic among certain politicians at home and in Europe just like there had been after the blast at Deest. Thankfully, there were more voices of intelligence than stupidity on that matter. To stop moving forward in East Germany and Czechoslovakia would have been foolish and maybe what the Soviets had wanted if their attack against the USS Iowa had been planned rather than an apparent ‘accident’. SACEUR had the US Third Army and NORTHAG start to move some of their troops out of Berlin – those no longer needed to deal with security and securing prisoners – and eastwards while re-arranging other troops ready to make that final push on the Polish border. More of the US Third Army, plus the US Marines and some British amphibious forces too, were in the northern part of East Germany while there was the US Seventh Army pushing through Saxony in the south. In addition, there were French and West German forces in Bohemia who were pushing for Prague; in Austria, the multi-national forces there were liberating more of that country with an aim for twin advances east to Vienna and the Hungarian border.

Schwarzkopf hadn’t wanted to see any of their advances brought to a halt. The enemy was defeated and the front was opened right up. If things changed, then any halt would be extremely detrimental to the conduct of the war. SACEUR had been told who exactly had voiced the idea for a halt order, especially the main proponent back in the United States, and wasn’t happy. Just who was this Jim Webb character who had been made Vice President and kept having ideas such as this that were taken seriously?

Schwarzkopf had his staff give him a briefing on the latest news on where the Soviet forces left in East Germany were positioned and their capabilities. He also wanted to see if there was any more intelligence on Marshal Gromov, the Soviet commander who he intended to take the surrender of. There was little additional information on that latter issue though and he made sure that his displeasure was shown. He needed a further understanding of the man, especially his personal character, if he was going to have dealings with him.

There had been a media event which SACEUR had done too. Selected elements of the press, those who had come with him the last time he was in East Germany along with a couple of others, all of whom were vetted for security purposes but mainly with him because they were ‘friendly’, were given a walk-around by Schwarzkopf of Sperenberg and then briefed by him on some of the latest war news. He told them how Berlin had fallen easily and there had been a return to West Berlin of NATO forces. Civilians had been liberated there while in East Berlin there was an effort underway to work with locals too in the form of feeding and giving medical attention to those in need. Some East German forces, led by the Stasi, were holding out in Potsdam, he told the media, but they had no hope of lasting very long. In addition, SACEUR spoke of how earlier this morning US national guardsmen had gone into the town of Brandenburg an der Havel and taken it against heavy resistance again from Stasi-led forces. There was information of mass shootings of political prisoners at the Brandenburg-Görden Prison (which his staff would be making them aware of) included in the final bloody events yet the town was now liberated.

None of those talks with the media had been done for live broadcast and would all have to go through censorship scrutiny first. The information security issue was still a big deal and none of that was going to change. Physical security was also something which demanded attention, especially since Schwarzkopf was this deep inside East Germany. At Sperenberg with him was his usual team of bodyguards though now reinforced by extra men. SACEUR had spoken with Major McChrystal, one of those additions, and learnt about the special forces missions he had made deep into enemy territory during the war. One of those had been to assassinate a Soviet field army commander and Schwarzkopf was informed how – hypothetically! – McChrystal kill him in such a manner too. The Soviets would do so if they could, SACEUR was informed, and keeping him safe so he continued to lead NATO forces in Europe was of vital importance.


General Hans Henning von Sandrart arrived at Sperenberg just before midday. He commander Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT) and was one of Schwarzkopf’s principle subordinates as all those fighting through both Germanys and into Czechoslovakia were under his command, those on the ground and in the air. A British general and a US Navy admiral led Allied Forces Northern Europe and Allied Forces Southern Europe, but von Sandrart’s position was superior due to the larger number of assigned forces plus the geographic factor as well. The previous SACEUR, General Galvin, had had a better relationship with von Sandrart than Schwarzkopf currently did. The man had overseen the collapse of large parts of the West German Army last month and then been resistant to efforts to bring reorganized parts of the Bundeswehr back into battle claiming that they had needed more time. These had aggravated the current SACEUR to a great degree but due to political needs he had been unable to get rid of the man. Instead of relieving him of his duties, Schwarzkopf had appointed people to his staff who he believed were more responsible than some of those (from many nations, not just West Germans) previously serving under von Sandrart for the role they needed to perform there in AFCENT’s headquarters.

Speaking with his subordinate, SACEUR made sure that von Sandrart was fully up to speed on the current plans for continuing operations going forward to rid East Germany of Stasi hold-outs leading groups of paramilitary troops at Potsdam and in the north as well as defeating the last of the Soviets here. In addition, Schwarzkopf told him how important operations in Czechoslovakia were too. There was no intention yet to go over into Poland due to political wishes, but if the need did come, then SACEUR wanted to be ready to do that. There was also a reminder given to make sure that there was sufficient measures being taken to make sure that NATO units weren’t bunched up too tight when not in combat: if the worst happened and the Soviets started using tactical nuclear weapons, then NATO forces didn’t want to be in a position where it was made easy for such targeting to get the most bang-per-buck.

After that discussion, von Sandrart joined Schwarzkopf in a closed meeting (away from their staffs) about some of the latest intelligence coming out of Poland. Warning signs of something big about to occur there, which would more than just throw the enemy into disarray in their defensive efforts but have big political effects, were becoming more and more visible. If what looked like was about to happen did happen, then NATO needed to be ready for that.





March 31st 1990
MacDill AFB, Florida, the United States

At 21:04 local time a OTR-21 Tochka (NATO designation SS-21 Scarab) short-range ballistic missile was fired from outside of Mariel on Cuba’s northern coast. Less than thirty seconds later it exploded just above the ground outside of the town of Guanajay where there was ongoing fighting.

A second OTR-21 missile was fired by another mobile launcher which had rolled out of a sheltered position at 21:07 local time. Two minutes later the warhead detonated over the Marianao district of Havana, high ground southwest of the city centre.

There was a firing of a third missile at 21:09 by another launcher also from near Mariel which raced eastwards like the others. The warhead atop the OTR-21 failed to detonate when it was meant to over the Havana district of Arroyo Naranjo.

Between 21:11 and 21:14 – again local time in Cuba – six Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired by the US Navy cruiser USS Arkansas from the Straits of Florida against targets on land. Each Tomahawk exploded soon after a short flight across the wider Mariel area; the firing of three more OTR-21s was halted by the arriving Tomahawks as they made their own detonations.

Each missile, the OTR-21s and the Tomahawks alike, carried a thermonuclear warhead with yields of one hundred kilotons for the former and between sixty and seventy-five kilotons for the latter. The explosions in Cuba were nuclear blast numbers #29 to #36 of the war: most of which had occurred in Cuba.

The thirty-first of March 1990 would be known in Cuba afterwards as ‘la noche de los misiles sin misericordia’.


Dick Armitage was at MacDill during the night of the merciless missiles. As the president’s special envoy for Cuba and at SOUTHCOM’s forward headquarters in Florida, he had no role in making the decision to instigate Operation Sudden Fury. He supported the immediate counterstrike against Soviet forces which had fired on the Cubans yet that decision was made aboard the Doomsday Plane with President Bush and his top people.

Information flooded in here at MacDill when it came to the first blast which hit Cuban forces who’d just overrun Guanajay pushing the Soviets out of there and blowing their defensive plans into disarray. There had then come the explosion over Havana followed too the reports that a third missile observed heading for Havana didn’t appear to have detonated. Afterwards, Armitage was party to the reports concerning the effects of the Arkansas’ missiles as they hit the Soviet missile-launchers. Those Tomahawks which the cruiser had sent against Cuba were part of Sudden Fury, an operation which had been on hold throughout the day. From what he understood, those Soviet missiles had been recently detected where they were hidden and there had been a lot of urging on the part of some at the highest levels of the Bush Administration to hit them first while at the same time other voices urged caution. The SS-21s didn’t have the range to hit the United States and they were Soviet-manned, something which Armitage understood had been confirmed in recent Hot Line communications with the Soviets in a nod-wink fashion.

But then the missiles had been fired.

Planning for Sudden Fury had first been in the form of a counter-strike against them (wherever they were targeted against with use) using other United States military platforms in the form of ICBMs or SLBMs but eventually a naval option using a warship off Havana had been settled upon. The other two means of attack were believed to increase the chance of a Soviet retaliation from their homeland when they observed those launches taking place; they shouldn’t be able to see the Arkansas opening fire like it did. With the aim of the mission, Sudden Fury had been drawn up and then executed because it was believed that the missiles in Cuba were not under central Soviet control. They didn’t threaten the United States directly nor American military interests in the area due to their short-range yet there was no scenario where it was thought that it would be in the long-term interests of the United States to see them used. They might be used to threaten a peace deal between the United States and Cuba or against American forces which might move into Cuba after such a possible agreement. There was a belief too that should the Cubans be attacked by them as they turned against the Soviets inside their country that would too effect the United States in the long-run as well with an end to the war desired in Cuba only possible by having someone in charge in Cuba to talk to; less of a concern was on Cuban casualties, especially since Cuba had occupied United States territory and taken so many lives in doing so.

Soviet communications with their forces on Cuba had first been intercepted before being jammed. The United States knew where those missiles were and understood that they were not under direct control from Moscow. The local commander had orders which they weren’t able to discover and so when the jamming had commenced there had been concern expressed by some – Armitage later included along with SOUTHCOM’s commander – that perhaps that wasn’t a good idea; that line of thinking had been discounted by above as not reasonable.

Once the firings of them had taken place, first those by the Soviets against the Cubans and then the United States striking the Soviets, it was clear who had been in the wrong and who had been in the right with regard to those arguments over whether or not to strike and also if it had been a good idea to cut communications for the Soviets in Cuba.

The Cuban people paid with their lives for the decisions made by others.


A couple of hours later, as midnight approached, Armitage was preparing to leave MacDill and go back to Andrews. The Secretary of State was there and he was to report to her to be briefed as to what the plan was now with regards to how to deal with the fallout from Sudden Fury and Cuba overall when everything else previously discussed had bene thrown into disarray. He had been told that she hadn’t joined Bush when he and others had evacuated yesterday following the destruction of the USS Iowa in the Baltic Sea and remained airborne since then. His relationship with Bush was far better than it was with Dole… one remarkably better than he had with the Vice President, the main opponent of acting against the Soviet missiles in Cuba before they had struck and even afterwards from his understanding of that situation.

General Thurman had him urgently called back from the flight-ramp as he prepared to board his aircraft. Alarmed at the haste shown by the aide to the commander of SOUTHCOM, Armitage asked what was going on. He was told that there was something on the television which he had to see.

ABC’s Ted Koppel was reporting from Moscow. It was early in the morning of April 1st there in the Soviet capital and the host of Nightline was with his production crew filming on Moscow’s streets. Armitage recalled (before another of General Thurman’s aides informed him of the fact) that Koppel and his crew had been in West Berlin at the beginning of February filming a special edition of their show when the air corridors had been closed and contact had been lost with them – along with so many others: soldiers, diplomats, civilians and the media – when war erupted. Clearly, he and those with him had been held prisoner since then but now they were broadcasting from Moscow.

What they were showing was what Koppel declared was an uprising against Kryuchkov’s regime. The security services were nowhere to be seen and Koppel was claiming that the crowd was marching on Red Square. They were calling for an end to the war and declaring their support for Boris Yeltsin. There were thousands of them apparently, maybe tens of thousands.

Armitage wasn’t as stunned at the images as those around him but it was quite something to see. His thoughts were of looking at this in more than what was being shown though. The presence of a missing American media team broadcasting this to the world supposedly freely when they were meant to being held by the KGB (even feared dead) was one thing. Another was the lack of Soviet security forces everywhere right in the middle of Moscow. There was too the issue of this crowd suddenly urging for Yeltsin of all people: Boris Who? a lot of people would say. In addition, another matter of immediate suspicion as far as he was concerned was the timing.

This was happening now.

Forty–Six – Dirty Tricks

April 2nd 1990
Camp David, Maryland, the United States

General Scowcroft had been foremost in wanting his president to stay mobile, on the E-4B – the Doomsday Plane – and circling high in the sky, so as to not be caught on the ground if there was a sudden Soviet nuclear strike on the mainland United States. Serving generals such as the head of SAC and some from the Joint Chiefs of Staff joined with the retired military officer who served as National Security Adviser in urging for this. They hadn’t been happy with their president being on the ground at any point during the war either though.

Bush had refused to stay airborne. The forty-first president didn’t want to remain onboard such an aircraft as the Doomsday Plane for any longer than he saw as necessary. He had wanted to go to the White House but had compromised on Camp David. He and the other senior people in his administration weren’t known to be here and if a strategic attack was made against the country, they could be airlifted out of here fast: the Secretary of State and the Treasury Secretary among them. Not everyone was at Camp David either. The Vice President remained on one of the four E-4Bs active in service and Defence Secretary Cheney was still at Bethesda. The Speaker of the House was at The Greenbrier and the Senate president pro tempore was elsewhere in West Virginia.

Worries over the line of succession – serious concerns during the war especially since the assassination first of Quayle then later of Baker – were eased by the gathering of not all the country’s leaders at Camp David though not fully solved in the opinion of many.

However, events in the past couple of hours, what those here were discussing, made the possibility of nuclear strike occurring now almost non-existent. The new Soviet General Secretary Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin had just declared that peace was at hand after he publicly requested a ceasefire to bring to an end World War Three.


The time difference between the United States and Europe, gaining in length the further east the location, had been rather annoying all throughout the war. The US East Coast was five hours behind London, six hours behind most of Europe and eight hours behind Moscow. Events that happened there throughout early parts of the day occurred during the night for those reacting to them back here. It wasn’t much of a commiseration that for those who were in time zones ahead, they had the same problem with needing access to decisions from those either asleep or annoyed at being awoken.

Things had been different this time around. Yeltsin had made his televised appeal late last night from Moscow; it had been the early afternoon at Camp David so everyone had been fully awake. Decision-makers in Europe had wanted to get some rest and sleep a few hours later – Yeltsin had spoken at ten at night, eight o’clock in mainland Europe – but those with the president were fully awake. Their talking had gone on and on… and on. It was gone midnight now and finally Bush was able to start getting his people to make their positions on the matter final so he could make a decision. The plan was for afterwards everyone to get some sleep before the results of what had been decided here would be implemented.

That decision was on whether Yeltsin’s offer was genuine and whether too it should be one that the United States – therefore everyone else with the Allies by default – should accept.

*

Yeltsin had declared that he was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (a mouthful indeed) and that made him the new leader of his nation as that position was the de facto head of state in the USSR. He hadn’t spoken of how he had risen to that post nor made any claim as to any legitimacy he had: Yeltsin spoke on Soviet state television and said that he was in-charge and that was that!

He stated afterwards that he wanted an immediate end to the war and said that that was the wish of all of his people, including the families of those who had lost their lives fighting for the Soviet Union. There was no blame apportioned to any one person or any country – his or another –, just an expressed desire to bring it to an end. At midday European time on April 2nd, Soviet military forces would stop fighting. There would only be combat met if the Soviet Union itself was attacked after that and such would only come in self-defense. The Allies were invited to abide by this ceasefire too but Soviet forces would stop fighting regardless: Yeltsin would like to see an agreement made between military leaders made soon after that ceasefire came into action but it wasn’t a condition of that ceasefire which he said several times was soon to happen.

There were to be no ‘dirty tricks’ by the Allies. Yeltsin promised that the Soviet Union would react to any harshly as it was being ‘gracious’ in calling for this ceasefire and stating a firm intention to abide by it. An end to the fighting is what he wanted. Still speaking in Russian while on live television, during the broadcast Yeltsin had appealed to the ‘ordinary people’ in the countries of the Allies (he said ‘Allies’, not NATO nor the West each time) to make sure that their national leaders didn’t betray this chance to stop the fighting and all the deaths that were coming with that. Each national leader was being sent urgent communications, he had added, signed in his name and on behalf of the Soviet people.

Throughout his speech, Yeltsin not once mentioned his own countries allies.

At the end of the broadcast, Yeltsin told his own people that he believed that the war would end tomorrow (today now) as the ceasefire was something everyone wanted. He promised them too that those who had committed ‘crimes’ and ‘betrayed the people’ across the Soviet Union would be punished: Kryuchkov was in custody and there would be an international-supervised trial of the man for all that he had done. There were negotiations underway between the heads of the leaders of the various Soviet republics concerning a new union agreement yet warned that there might be a situation where parts of the country on the edges undertook legal succession from the USSR. Domestic liberalizations would be coming very soon too, after the ceasefire and once the Allies signed a peace agreement that made sure that they wouldn’t restart the war again.

He asked for his countrymen and women to support him in ending the war and have faith that the coming ceasefire would hold in his parting comment.

This broadcast had been seen by the American public. Following on from the massive street protest covered by that previously-missing ABC news crew which had reported that they had been released by ‘Yeltsin loyalists’, they covered it for broadcast to the United States. There had been a warning that Yeltsin was to speak on Soviet television and Ted Koppel – who had a story to tell of his time in captivity – was going to be there with his crew. Bush and his advisers had considered whether getting the Federal Communications Commission (the FCC had been busy throughout the war overseeing voluntary censorship which the US media imposed upon themselves) to make sure that wasn’t carried live but had decided not to do so. There had been some indications that he was going to call for an end to the war though the details of what he ended up saying hadn’t been known. Canada and the Europeans, under stricter censorship, had made the decision not to allow for a live broadcast fearing what Yeltsin might say in the form of frightening their citizens into panic if Yeltsin had issued a direct nuclear threat.

Which decision had been the right one?


Those at the top of the Bush Administration were split on whether Yeltsin was genuine and whether the ceasefire should be accepted. There was a lot of suspicions on how he had suddenly ended up in charge and a clear recollection on what had happened with the last ceasefire.

Yeltsin was a drunk, it was said, and a nobody: he had no so-called ‘loyalists’ to stand with him or fight any cause of his. The sudden people-power revolution on the streets of Moscow which had preceded his announced assumption of leadership of the Soviet Union stunk of a deception. Only two weeks ago, he had been featured in that short-lived Russian newspaper which the CIA had gotten ahold of with a clear indication that he was being used by the Kryuchkov regime to aid Russian nationalism over Soviet unity. That regime had then suddenly disappeared overnight and here was Yeltsin in-charge. Rumours had been flowing out of the Soviet Union that there were those in the KGB who had wanted Kryuchkov to step aside peacefully and he was willing to accept that; then the CIA had been asked by plotters against him to assassinate him with an air or missile strike. Yeltsin, who had no position of power or influence until he took over in unclear circumstances, was now saying he was ready to hand him over to for an ‘international trial’.

The mid-February ceasefire had been arranged between the then West German government and the Soviets. The West German leadership had been forced into that through kidnappings of family members of senior people (the French had broken open this revelation) who had taken over and started dealing with those invading their country… ignoring how their allies had been assisting in their defence. That ceasefire had then been broken off in a nuclear strike against a civilian target in the form of Flensburg, a commando assault on NATO diplomats in Paris and a resumption of full-scale warfare everywhere.

This was all a KGB ploy, a very sophisticated act of maskirovka. There were declarations that Yeltsin was a puppet put in-place by them. Maybe they had his wife or one of his daughters in custody? Maybe they had fed him a whole load of lies… and passed him a bottle of vodka? Yeltsin didn’t have to know he was being used or even if he did he might not have a choice. There were puppet-masters behind the scenes pulling his strings and these were people who didn’t want to let all they had in terms of personal power go nor answer for their crimes in a scenario where the war was truly won by the Allies.


These remarks made by those at Camp David who were very opposed to the idea of going along with what Yeltsin was effectively demanding didn’t meet waves of hostile opposition in such opinions from others. Yes, there was some disagreement as to the scope of the falsehood which might have taken place, but no argument that there was unnecessary paranoia. Everyone was aware of what the KGB was capable of and what they had done already with their dirty tricks. They had subverted governments. They had killed so many innocents. They had committed organised acts of torture. They had been behind the war.

The KGB would do anything to escape the consequences of those actions.

But there was now an opportunity to end the war. It was argued that Yeltsin’s offer was genuine in the form that it would bring an end to the ongoing war. The Soviets were beaten on the battlefields of East Germany after previous disasters in West Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Greece and Turkey. Their troops in western parts of Czechoslovakia were pulling back and those in Austria were either surrounded already or soon to be. Their ability to operate in the air over Europe was almost non-existent and their sea power was gone. Poland’s rebellion and brewing trouble in Hungary meant that they couldn’t fight in Europe anymore. Elsewhere, the Soviets were surrounded by forces of the Allies in many regions around their country through the Barents Sea, in the Black Sea and along the Pacific. They had lost and they had finally understood it enough to make this move to end the war.

What would happen if the United States led the reaction to refuse it?

First, there was a good chance that some partner nations might drop out of the war. Their losses wouldn’t be fatal but still a blow to the cause of the Allies. Adding to this, military options for continued warfare either meant an ultimately very-costly air campaign operating aircraft very far forward over Soviet territory or an advance on land through Eastern Europe. Both of these ran the risk of nuclear warfare breaking out, either limited like it already had or going all the way. A fight to the finish meant sending tanks and infantry as far as Red Square… maybe all the way to and over the Ural Mountains.

Lastly, there was the issue of why had the war been fought. That had been to defend NATO nations in Europe and also to stop North Korea overrunning South Korea. Those two objectives had been achieved with parts of Eastern Europe under NATO occupation and a good chunk of North Korea too. Soviet military forces weren’t going to come back as they had been more than just defeated, but wholly destroyed in battle with those not killed otherwise in captivity. The war had been won so why continue fighting it even ignoring the nuclear dangers?

The Soviets weren’t going to easily recover from this war. They had no military capability left for external actions against their neighbours. Their international trade was over and would be stopped from taking place by the Allies unless the plans for reparations in any peace agreement were settled. If they wanted diplomatic relations and any form of relationship with the large chunk of the world they had been fighting – there were a lot of countries in the Allies – then they were going to have to pay damages and hand over wanted war criminals: Kryuchkov would only be one of many. Internally, their economy was in the toilet and they were already willing to admit they were going to lose parts of their empire. They were on their knees, they were finished for as a world power for the foreseeable future.

Something else was noted: Yeltsin had just promised his people ‘domestic liberalization’. Even if he or his puppet-masters didn’t mean much by that, the public statement was going to do a lot of damage to the dictatorship which was the Soviet Union. The United States could help in that making sure that if it didn’t get what it wanted in all the proposals already waiting to be presented come a peace agreement, or even if it did get them, the Soviet Union would eventually be brought down internally.


From the leading figures in uniform and from the Intelligence Community, there was caution about dealing with Yeltsin and his peace but a general agreement to go with the ceasefire proposal. They stated that before that deadline expired certain things needed to be done though and instructions should go to SACLANT, SACEUR and PACCOM to make sure that they happened. There was a last chance to destroy certain elements of the Soviet military and Soviet foreign domination in select places. Now, in the hours before midday arrived in Germany, those needed to happen there and elsewhere in the world.

As to the politicians and the president’s top advisers, there was some division.

Vice President Webb – calling in via teleconference like Cheney would – said that this was a bad idea. The Soviets were going to get away with this and the United States would pay in the long run for their short-term focus on stopping the fighting. He said he wanted the killing to stop and feared nuclear warfare like everyone else, but this was all wrong.

Secretary of State Dole, Treasury Secretary Brady and Defence Secretary Cheney were all in favour of the ceasefire. They shared the opinion that the war was won and there was the real risk of a nuclear apocalypse if it continued. The strike against the USS Iowa in the Baltic Sea and then the massacre of Cubans by the Soviets responding as they turned against them showed those very real dangers, especially with the Soviets not having full control over their nuclear weapons. Poland faced the same risk as Cuba if the war continued, but more so cities in the United States.

When asked his opinion, Scowcroft said that he didn’t like what had happened in Moscow and he was concerned about the long-term. Pressed for an answer by his president, he eventually settled on the position expressed by Dole, Brady and Cheney. His deputy Gates stated that he would have liked to have seen the Soviets beaten more than they already had and was worried that the last-minute actions to fully-exploit the scale of the victory the Allies were about to win wouldn’t be enough; he also remained firmly welded to the view that Yeltsin was nothing more than a puppet and the KGB had their hooks deep in him.

Deputy Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, here at Camp David, agreed with Webb (something quite different from how the two of them had previously clashed on other matters) that the Soviets were going to get away with this war. Rumsfeld said that United States forces needed to go up to the Soviet borders in Europe all through Poland and down into eastern Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even Romania. If not, in five years or maybe ten years, the Soviets would be back for another go because they wouldn’t have their defeat rubbed in their nose. Counter Yeltsin’s offer, he proposed, and while talks were happening drive through Eastern Europe will maintaining a full nuclear posture.

Bush listened to all the expressed ideas, even the ones he didn’t agree with. Then he made up his mind and decided to go with the consensus view: the war needed to be brought to a close. He issued instructions that the ceasefire was to be abided by and actions taken to first get an official agreement on that then move things forward to seeing where an eventual peace treaty would end up.

He told those with him and listening in through secure communications links from elsewhere that he didn’t want to end the world by keeping the fighting going.

World War Three was over bar the shouting.





April 2nd 1990
Sperenberg Airbase, Brandenburg, East Germany

SACEUR answered to the North Atlantic Council (NAC) now based in Luxembourg when it came to strategic decisions. It was the collection of permanent representatives – in effect ambassadors – who set out directives that were to be followed by the holder of the role of Supreme Allied Commander Europe. In theory, General Schwarzkopf did everything he did under their authority. In reality, he answered to General Powell and President Bush back home.

Some idiot on the NAC, some armchair strategist with a degree in international relations and real-world experience in nothing more than being foolish, had had his hair-brained thought listened to by part of the NAC late yesterday. After the Soviets declared they wanted a ceasefire, a suggestion had come from the NAC that SACEUR should consider allowing what Soviet forces were left along the East German–Polish border and inside western Czechoslovakia to retreat back east. They could take all of their equipment with them too and be allowed to fall back unmolested in the last hours of the war, probably down and across Czechoslovakia. It would stop further NATO casualties occurring when fighting them before the ceasefire would come into effect and show the Soviets that NATO wanted peace as much as them.

The outburst from Schwarzkopf would afterwards become legendary for the profanity expressed over a radio link which many people overheard when they shouldn’t have. In short: no fucking way was that happening!

The idea was squashed not by SACEUR alone. It had been an unauthorised action taken to send the suggestion on to his forward at headquarters at Sperenberg and not something agreed by the NAC as a whole: they countermanded the idea pretty damn fast. From Raven Rock and Bethesda back in the United States, the Joint Chiefs and the Defence Secretary were quick to tell Schwarzkopf that that was a no-go – they in fact wanted him to do the opposite – and they would act to cut out such silliness from happening again in the last hours of the war and afterwards.

SACEUR hadn’t even pretended to go through the motions of preparing to act on such a stupid idea. He’d already been issuing orders for those Soviet forces to be smashed apart before the fighting was to stop and when the instructions came from home to carry on with that and take selective other actions on a similar theme elsewhere he was already ahead of the curve on that.

Those Soviet forces still left combat-capable were being taken apart on the ground and from the air – did someone say ‘ARC LIGHT’? – in devastating fashion. There were the Third Guards & Ninth Guards Combined Arms Armys left in East Germany (the Ninth Combined Army was already destroyed) and north & east of Prague in Czechoslovakia the Thirty–Second & Forty–Sixth Combined Arms Armys were still there. The third one of the four consisted of regular troops from Central Asia (the Thirty–Second Army was a pre-war standing command) while the others were reservists from across the Carpathian, Volga and Siberian Military Districts. In addition, behind Berlin where Polish troops were meant to have been making a final stand before they withdrew in the manner they did, there were Soviet paratroopers and their Berlin Garrison (including those who had taken West Berlin at the beginning of the war; the 6th Guards Independent Motorised Rifle Brigade) in-place. This was the last of the enemy left standing as an effective fighting force…

…all of which Schwarzkopf was busy making sure was annihilated as best as he could do.


With the skies full of attacking aircraft – many flying from forward bases close to the frontlines to allow for larger bomb-loads and maintain a high turn-around rate – above them, NATO ground forces were pouring forward towards the Polish border in the last bits of East Germany which the enemy held. He had ordered the US Third Army and NORTHAG out of Berlin and used them alongside the US Seventh Army to attack head-on all through the night and right up until midday today. Forward, he had ordered, keep going forward and don’t stop until you either reach the Polish border or the ceasefire comes into effect. Free-fire rules were in effect and if you encounter anyone surrendering, go past them and keep moving.

Powell had told SACEUR that he was to also make sure that there were no more hasty evacuations made by air of select people out of East Germany. There were airfields still in enemy hands and between attacks against them, every effort was being made to get important people out. KGB personnel would be among them but so too military specialists who were very valuable to the Soviets. The order from Raven Rock came to Schwarzkopf telling them to use chemical weapons against them (if he wasn’t already) when it came to airheads out of reasonable reach of NATO airmobile troops; any that could be taken with light forces using helicopter assaults should be seized. On this matter, SACEUR had clashed with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – no profanity was used in these exchanges – because he did not like the idea at all of assaulting such places on-the-fly like Powell wanted. Impromptu airmobile missions without adequate reconnaissance of the ground and enemy forces was a recipe for utter disaster. Powell said he understood that and said that he wasn’t asking for the impossible, just for Schwarzkopf to do that where there was judged to be low risk to the attacking forces: there would be war criminals at such places who the Soviets were getting out before they could be captured and he would like to see them taken alive where possible.

If they couldn’t be captured, SACEUR was told, then make sure they are killed in repeated chemical strikes.


There had been a stream of incoming news about events in Poland since yesterday and much of that had been confusing and sometimes contradictory: corrections to reported events had come aplenty.

The Poles had rebelled in a coordinated nationwide fashion but their rebellion hadn’t overnight rid their country of the Soviets. They had struck in many places, including inside East Germany, with plenty of success though their attacks had been reversed in a couple of places. They had certainly shut off their country to access across it by the Soviets including any notion of a withdrawal being made through Poland. Where they had pulled back their little field army out of East Germany and over the Oder that had worked as well as closing many Soviet-operated airbases inside their country too. They hadn’t been able to take control of the Soviet headquarters complex at Legnica nor all of the river crossing sites along the border – many had been taken, just not all – with East Germany.

When it came to their status as a country in regard to whether they were a friend or foe, Schwarzkopf had been trying to get that clear in an official manner. He had issued instructions down the chain-of-command that Polish forces encountered were not to be fired upon unless they attacked NATO forces – the burden of proof on that would have to be high too, SACEUR made that clear – first and directly. In the other direction, to the NAC and also back home, Schwarzkopf had asked for clarity on the issue with Poland.

Had they joined the Allies? Were the Poles a co-belligerent in the war? Or, was the rebellion a revolt against the Polish government (and occupying Soviets) limited to just certain military personnel so the Allies were still at war with Poland?

What came back to SACEUR was that there was a rebellion underway, a bloody one too, and it was far from over. Poland remained part of the Warsaw Pact officially and a nation which a state of war with continued. How this would change in the long-run still wasn’t certain: the Polish rebels looked certain to win but there was an issue over what form that ‘win’ would be. Nothing really was going to change before the ceasefire anyway.

Schwarzkopf was to do as he was and make sure that there were no clashes with Polish forces unless they attacked NATO units first. He was to make an effort to reach the border and engage in dialogue with any Poles encountered, but not have his troops go across into Poland without explicit authorization. More information would follow including arrangements to send a diplomatic party with a heavy military escort to talk with the Poles at a high-level, but again that was something which would certainly occur after the ceasefire with the Soviets.


With more time to use before the war ended, orders would have come from SACEUR to have part of the US Seventh Army move out of Saxony after they had reached the River Neisse yesterday and cross the Ore Mountains heading south. Schwarzkopf would have liked to have seen the US VII Corps at the very least go down into Czechoslovakia (attaching them to the French First Army for ease of command) and go after those two Soviet field armies behind Prague. The distance and the geographic factors – passes through the Ore Mountains would have to be taken – involved made that impossible though.

Air power was thrown at the Thirty–Second & Forty–Sixth Armys instead, a lot of it including B-52s making daylight air attacks much to the chagrin of CINC-SAC again being in contact in his usual robust manner when word came back of losses incurred among those bombers. Still… a ground attack would have been better to truly eliminate them.

As to the French and West Germans inside Czechoslovakia, they held large parts of Bohemia west and south of Prague as well being in the progress of surrounding Prague when word came that there was to be a ceasefire implemented at midday on April 2nd. Powell had informed SACEUR that there was a desire to see Prague taken before that occurred. Maybe a nationwide rebellion would get going in Czechoslovakia in addition to the small-scale insurgency against the regime and Prague would eventually fall to rebels… but maybe it wouldn’t.

Prague was to be taken, Schwarzkopf had been told, and NATO forces needed to take it urgently.

The French First Army had attacked at first light and charged forward in multiple attacks using armour, mechanised infantry and airmobile units. They had had a tough fight on their hands as Czechoslovak resistance – stiffened by some Soviet forces caught there – had occurred to hold the city. They took the centre of the city though, the historic heart of Prague was in French hands by the end of the morning. Yet, it came at a cost. There was a lot of destruction done as the French had been given free-fire rules on artillery and rocket strikes (no chemical weapons though) and a lot of bodies. Czechoslovakia casualties, military and civilian, were very high but so too were those incurred by the French. With not all of the city taken and ongoing fighting as the defenders weren’t giving up, it looked like no matter that there was a ceasefire coming, fighting would still continue in Prague even if NATO units didn’t want it to.

There would be many who would say that the assault on Prague, launched with haste and with such violence employed, was a mistake and even a war crime afterwards when the number of civilian losses were fully realized…

*

Midday fast approached and with that the ceasefire was about to come into effect.

Schwarzkopf had fought a hard fight to keep up the advance right before that with many subordinates sending word up the chain-of-command across Central Europe – in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and into Austria – that their men knew it was coming and there was an unofficial slowdown starting to occur as the hours and then minutes had ticked away. Keep going, he had ordered, destroy as much of the enemy as you can and push the rest back east as far as you can before then! He understood why so many had wanted to not take part in any more killing before then, risking their own lives too, but it was necessary. In their shoes, he might have wanted to do the same, yet it was imperative that the war be won.

When all that was over with and midday arrived, the fighting came to an end.

It was over.


Into SACEUR’s headquarters less than a minute later there came a message over open radio links from the commander of the Western TVD. There was a communique from Marshal Gromov which came from Legnica requesting a meeting to sign a ceasefire agreement.

Schwarzkopf’s immediate question to his staff was how the hell did the Soviets know he was here at Sperenberg? His second question was why was his opposite number at Legnica still? The thinking was that he had been at the Soviet military base outside Milovice in Czechoslovakia; if it was known that Gromov wasn’t there at the latter, that facility would have been flattened by bombs and then anyone left alive gassed. Powell had instructed him to leave someone alive to negotiate with so Milovice had been spared the rain of fire which SACEUR had wanted to pour atop it.

He was far from happy at that development even if his chief-of-staff’s explanation that intelligence like that matter which came from the CIA was often faulty.


Gromov invited Schwarzkopf to come to Legnica. He promised ‘no dirty tricks’, giving his word as an officer as to SACEUR’s safety.

No, thank you. Schwarzkopf sent back a demand dressed up as an invitation to Gromov that he should instead come to Sperenberg. He would guarantee the Soviet officer’s personal safety in the visit. Did Gromov know where the NATO-occupied Soviet airbase south of Berlin was?

An agreement for Gromov to come was sent and then acknowledged. Gromov said that he would come in a transport helicopter escorted by another half a dozen of them for security purposes. SACEUR told him that that couldn’t be done: three helicopters could come over the Neisse and NATO aircraft would escort them along an agreed flight path to Sperenberg. There would be no accidents, but if there were any accidents, Gromov had Schwarzkopf’s word as an officer that he would personally make sure they were dealt with in the proper fashion.

There was a short pause and then a final acknowledgement that Gromov would do what SACEUR wanted. He would be at Sperenberg by two o’clock and would turn the conversation over to one of his aides now so that details on flight arrangements could be made including radio codes and securing a no-fire zone in the sky.

Schwarzkopf told his opposite number he would see him at fourteen hundred hours.


There had been no intention of SACEUR going over into Poland to meet with Gromov. There were lots of reasons why ranging from Powell losing his famous cool and probably relieving him on the spot for being so stupid to the danger that elements of the KGB might not be fully onside with the ceasefire. Hell, the Polish rebels might even shoot down Schwarzkopf’s helicopter!

More than any of that, SACEUR’s wish – mirrored by those of his political masters – was that the Soviets come here to occupied territory for a meeting to discuss post-ceasefire terms for proper disengagement and how to resolve ongoing matters now that the fighting had stopped. They had to see how what was once theirs NATO now controlled. Sperenberg would certainly do for that purpose. It was a Soviet facility inside East Germany and one they had exclusive use of. It was right near the former headquarters complex at Wünsdorf as well: both places had been taken by NATO forces during the victory which was Operation Eastern Storm.

Going over to Poland, or down in Czechoslovakia where Gromov was thought to have been rather than at Legnica, would give the opposite message. Ram it home to them that they had been beaten, Schwarzkopf had been instructed to do when dealing with the Soviets, so that in the future when anyone had any silly ideas about a resumption of a fight they would recall just how badly they were beaten beforehand. Smashing apart the remaining Soviet forces right up until the last second before the ceasefire had been part of that: this was in addition to bringing Gromov to Sperenberg where SACEUR was going to be setting terms, not Gromov.


There were no accidents on the way and no dirty tricks pulled.

Gromov came in a Mil-8 transport helicopter with specialist antennas for communications and there were also two Mil-24 attack helicopters. NATO soldiers present trained weapons on all three, especially the pair of Hinds carrying external weapons, but no one opened fire despite many itchy trigger fingers. When they were on the ground, Major McChrystal went out to them with a mixed detachment of NATO personnel of several nationalities to provide ‘security’ around them while the Briton Lt.-General Peter de la Billière was sent to meet with Gromov as he got out of his helicopter.

DLB went in Schwarzkopf’s place as he was expendable (compared to SACEUR), a combat officer and held enough rank not to show disrespect but just not enough either: Gromov held the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union while DLB had a three-star rank. SACEUR had put some thought into this and sending his special operations commander out to meet Gromov as he arrived hadn’t been an accident either for the man had led so many operations to hurt the Soviets.

Gromov and a couple of his aides came out of the Hip and were shadowed carefully by some of DLB’s men in the form of West German commandos (again a deliberate choice). They crossed the flight-ramp and were treated to a ‘perp walk’: there was a very select group of the media from the West present. This hadn’t been something Schwarzkopf wanted to have done but it’s inclusion had come direct from his president. SACEUR made sure the cameras were kept back and the press there weren’t able to shout any questions at Gromov in their usual fashion yet a perp walk it was.

Make them understand they were beaten, that was the instruction given, and the recording for historical purposes of this event would later show what many would see as a surrender just happened to be called a ceasefire.

Then Gromov was brought to see the man who led NATO’s victorious armies which had beaten his.


The meeting between Schwarzkopf and Gromov was a closed affair: they were no cameras there and only the minimum number of aides present. The negotiations were tough. The two men spoke through translators and a deal was thrashed out. Each kept making the other give their word on each matter agreed upon after suspicions were raised upon whether what they worked out would be abided to by others. There wasn’t any chance of any friendly relations between them beforehand though: not after all that had happened. The pair of them did avoid making accusations of past action taking place and have the other refute them leading to arguments. Still, it was a tense meeting.

Stopping a resumption of the fighting through misunderstandings was the first issue addressed. On the ground in East Germany, all Soviet forces – no matter what the uniform – were to turn themselves over to NATO custody along with all weapons. Any East German, even Polish, troops with the Soviets were to be included. There was to be an immediate effort to locate minefields and unexploded munitions. Casualties would be treated by both sides though with NATO having more medical units present they would take the lead. Weapons of mass destruction left in Soviet hands were at once to be handed over NATO: Gromov said there were only chemical agents left, no nuclear warheads after they had all been flown out several days ago.

In Czechoslovakia and Austria, Soviet forces were to withdraw if they were not surrounded by NATO units. They were to leave both countries and return to the Soviet Union with haste. Gromov explained that there were ‘problems’ with a full-scale rebellion in Poland and the start of one in Hungary too. SACEUR told him that those were Soviet problems, not ones for NATO or the Allies. Soviet forces needed to leave all of those countries: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria. If they didn’t, the war was going to have to continue. Schwarzkopf made Gromov aware that the Allies were committed to resuming the fighting if the Soviets didn’t leave Eastern Europe. In addition, when the Soviets pulled out of Austria, they were to leave all of their equipment behind: everything they had in terms of weapons, ammunition and transport. Austria had been invaded in an outright act of aggression despite being a neutral and everything Soviet forces brought into their country was to be left behind for them.

Prisoners of war. This issue was one that caused the meeting to go on for some time.

NATO held a lot of Soviet and Warsaw Pact POWs. They were taxing in terms of the need to secure them, feed them and treat them for countless medical conditions. The majority of them were not wanted by NATO apart from the ones guilty of war crimes or who had intimate knowledge of such acts. A lot of them didn’t want to go home either yet not as many did after some time in captivity as might have wanted to when they were first detained due to thoughts of the consequences of such an act. Now NATO was about to take a lot more of them too. When it came to those from non-Soviet nations, SACEUR would later deal with them when arrangements were made with whoever ended up in-charge of their countries apart from East Germany as the illegal regime there no longer existed and nothing was rising in its place. Schwarzkopf told Gromov that the Allies had no wish to keep the vast majority of those Soviet POWs and there should be an agreement made now for their return soon. How to get them home would be an issue but diplomats could later work that out. In exchange for those POWs, NATO and the Allies wanted all of theirs back too.

Everyone captured in uniform or not, military personnel & paramilitaries & civilians, were all to be returned. There would be no holding any of them and there would be no acceptance of any notion that they might wish to defect to the Soviet Union. Those who had died in Soviet custody should have their remains returned no matter where they were now: how their deaths had occurred would be dealt with later by diplomats and there would be war crimes trials before any peace agreement occurred, but with these post-ceasefire talks, SACEUR told Gromov that he wanted the POWs back without any excuse.

Those who were to be returned were the military personnel from each NATO country and Austria too. Missing diplomats from Moscow and the capitals of Eastern Europe and intelligence operatives as well. Then there were the civilians caught behind the lines and also those kidnapped for whatever purposes the Soviets had seen fit on this side of the frontlines.

If that didn’t happen, then the war was going to resume just as it would if the Soviets didn’t pull out of Eastern Europe. Diplomats could sort out the results of war crime allegations as well as matters like economic reparations and restoration of diplomatic relations, but those prisoners were to be given back.


An official document was signed by Schwarzkopf and Gromov at the end. There had been a handshake, an awkward one, but that was in private between the two men where they gave their word on abiding by the terms of the agreement they agreed to. When the media recorded images of the two military officers who’d ended the fighting, they didn’t have any images of a handshake.

The war had been won by one side and lost by the other: which was which was clear by the terms of the Sperenberg Agreement.

Would those terms, the ones on POWs especially, be upheld though?

That question was one for later. Meanwhile, celebrations already underway concerning the passing of declared midday ceasefire had already begun when news was spread that the war really was over. The peace had yet to be won by diplomats, yet ordinary people were celebrating everywhere.

Some later news was to dampen those celebrations though among those at the highest-levels who received validation on something they could only suspect before they received unpleasant intelligence confirmation of it: they’d been had.





April 2nd 1990
Beneath Whitehall, London, Great Britain

With the war over with, there were celebrations ongoing across London. Up above and across the city – throughout Britain and most of the world too – there was an outpouring of relief that it was over with and the end hadn’t come in the form of nuclear apocalypse. There was singing and dancing. There was alcohol consumed and some baby-making starting.

This wasn’t universal though. There were no celebrations among those family members grieving for the loss of loved ones and those missing & feared dead.

In addition, the British War Cabinet wasn’t celebrating tonight either.


Foreign Secretary Hurd was still in Luxembourg – he’d be flying home during the early hours – though almost all of the War Cabinet met with the Prime Minister tonight. There was one notable absence though and that had been brought about by a very disturbing recent event: Neil Kinnock wasn’t here because he had been poisoned like others had been.

Several British and European political figures had been poisoned by an unknown agent and source. Both the First Secretary of State (a member of the War Cabinet) and the Labour Party’s health spokesman (who wasn’t) were each on death’s door in London hospitals. Tom King, the Defence Secretary, another victim of suspected KGB poisoning like Kinnock and Robin Cook – plus others in Western Europe like the Dutch Prime Minister and the Danish opposition leader foremost among the targets –, had survived an attack against him with little overall effects apart from initially being violently ill but his fellow National Government members hadn’t been so fortunate. There was still little intelligence on such an event, especially the ultimate motive behind it, and there were plenty of personal concerns among the War Cabinet members about that. They meet tonight all in good health yet all would have liked to have answers on that. However, there were none forthcoming on that matter as a major investigation was still underway. When or if answers would come was an unknown and attention at the moment was on something else which might or might not have been related to that: further dirty tricks done before the ceasefire.

The MI-6 Director-General Colin McColl was briefing them all on what his organisation had found out from their intelligence source within the KGB who had just been exfiltrated from the Soviet Union following his request for an urgent defection. He didn’t use the code-name ‘Carronade’ to them to not give anything away even to those in such positions of authority as he was talking to, but it was the source from the KGB’s First Chief Directorate office in Leningrad who had provided so much intelligence throughout the war whose information he passed on.

When he’d spoken with the MI-6 men who’d gotten him to Stockholm, Carronade said that the West had been had. They had been tricked by his colleagues who he’d ran from to save his own life. There had been a regime change in Moscow but it wasn’t the one which they had seen. Kryuchkov had been deposed by the KGB and the GRU working together and then they had put Yeltsin, who they wholly controlled, into power afterwards. He would do exactly what they wanted at home in the Soviet Union while saying all the right things to the West.

It was a maskirovka, the biggest maskirovka ever pulled upon the West.

McColl said that his defector – who came with a wealth of knowledge in his head – had spoken of something called Plan 0008-6/86. This initially came from the East German Stasi, a plan of theirs drawn up four years ago. They drew up a concept as to how to maintain power if the situation in East Germany ever became dire for them – not a NATO invasion as such as had just happened but a domestic revolt – where they would step into the shadows and control a government of their puppets to put a public face on a change. The KGB knew about this and one of their top people who had escaped from near capture in the Netherlands had come home with such an idea as workable to sell to his colleagues. MI-6’s defector had been working with another opposition group against Kryuchkov and those such as him were being ‘dealt with’ by the KGB who were on-side with 0008-6/86. The puppet-masters had too much to lose and chose maskirovka rather than allowing their country to fall the way it appeared to have done.

It might have all been fanciful, McColl told those with open mouths and doubting looks, but there was evidence now to back what a lot of people had thought might have happened. He introduced a British Army officer he had brought with him to the War Cabinet meeting: Brigadier Mike Jackson, the man who’d been heading up the interrogation of senior Soviet and Warsaw Pact POWs held in Britain (those who’d been high-up in command and intelligence roles). Jackson, who those in the War Cabinet had heard about and been recommended by Tom King for that role despite his wartime injuries, told the politicians that independent of McColl’s defector, he’d spoken with a pair of POWs who had separately told him of 0008-6/86. One had been a Stasi man caught in West Germany very early in the war; another was a KGB officer named Ivanov who his colleagues had been about to shoot before a Dutch guerilla attack had occurred. Ivanov had been hurt bad in a gunfight but the Dutch had handed him over after recognizing the uniform insignia with the knowledge that if he lived he would help the NATO war cause. Very upset at how he had nearly been executed by his own side, and stroked the right way to bring his cooperation as a defector in all but name, Ivanov had spilled his guts. He had put names to faces of KGB people who had got out of the Netherlands (he’d been more helpful than General Lebed of the Soviet Airborne Troops) including a friend of his, someone named Putin who despite having a low-rank was well-connected to the decision-makers at the top.

The Soviets really had done this, McColl told them. The KGB had pulled the wool over the eyes of the West in showing them what they wanted to see. Yeltsin was a man of strings, a sock who others were elbow deep inside. The maskirovka had been planned and executed just at the KGB had wanted with the West swallowing the lie.


The War Cabinet hadn’t met tonight to talk about the maskirovka they were informed about.

Prime Minister Thatcher and John Smith (who was now acting in the stead of Kinnock) had asked for the others to come to the meeting to discuss matters such as the Sperenberg Agreement signed earlier in the day as well as matter such as British military casualties, the state of the country with regards to the economy & social affairs, what decisions should be made when it came to how to punish traitors and some other important world events such as the recent falls of Baghdad & Pyongyang. In addition, there was too the issue of whether it was wise to bring to an end to the War Cabinet and the wider National Government now that the conflict was over but there was no peace treaty yet. These were serious issues that needed attention and decisions to be made upon them.

The terms of the Sperenberg Agreement – where Schwarzkopf had met with Gromov – affected Britain in many different ways when it came to military matters and POWs.

When and how to release the numbers in terms of casualties – dead, missing / presumed dead and seriously injured – inflicted to the British people as an overall number was a hot potato issue.

Starting to fix economic and social damage nationwide caused by direct and indirect war effects had to begin with earnest; none were going to be easy fixes either.

British nationals who were being detained after betraying their country – some even unintentionally – were going to have to start being punished beyond those few who were shot in wartime court martials as serving military personnel.

Baghdad had just fallen to Iran – therefore Iraq was no longer an active nation – and the North Korean capital was in the hands of the American & Chinese armies inside that country; this all affected British interests.

With World War Three ended, the national government was considered to be needed by some until there was a peace treaty with the Soviets; others wanted it dissolved and for politics to go back to how they had been before.


Britain’s political leaders were going to be engaged in these discussions throughout the night. There would be no celebrating the end of war for them as civilians and soldiers alike were doing. The war wasn’t technically over and none of these issues were going to be solved in a couple of hours like the talks at Sperenberg achieved with just ending the fighting.

Hanging over their heads too was the knowledge of the poisonings which had taken place in a deniable fashion by the KGB before the end came and so too the dirty trick of the maskirovka which they had been told now was real, not just suspected.

As they had done since the beginning of all of this, and now at the end, they argued among themselves and decisions didn’t come easy.