Lions Will Fight Bears - Britain in World War Three, Spring 1988[{locked}]

One

Later, the Western media would deem the events of the last day of November the previous year as ‘the Moscow Coup’.

On the November 30th 1987, a coup d’état was launched within the capital of the USSR. Three men who called themselves patriots set into motion a series of violent events that would replace one illegal regime with another: theirs. They had been plotting such an undertaking for the past few months and had proceeded with great secrecy in this. To be discovered in those planning stages would have meant shallow graves for themselves… which was just where they intended to send those that they moved against.

The names of the three men were widely unknown. Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov was the first, Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky was the second and Marshal Sergey Fyodorovich Akhromeyev was the third. These were men of power and also remarkable cunning. They had risen to the highest ranks within the power structure of the Soviet Government and Armed Forces, yet they each wanted more.

Chebrikov was the Chairman of the Committee for State Security, the dreaded KGB. The sixty-four year-old was a career bureaucrat and a secret policeman. He had come a long way from very humble roots after being born in the southern Ukraine, and risen almost to the top. Like most powerful men he wanted more power though. In the position that he was in, as head of the KGB, Chebrikov was one of the most informed people within the Soviet Union. The KGB was known in the West for its external intelligence operations and crushing of any internal sign of revolt from its citizens. The organisation gathered plenty of intelligence from within the country though and as the man in charge, Chebrikov had access to all of that. He knew the state of the country’s economy, the true capabilities of the Soviet military (in comparison to the armed forces of the West) and – what he regarded as of great significance – the vulnerability of the country to fall into civil unrest that would topple the regime. He worried over the General Secretary’s plans for the future; Chebrikov was convinced that the path that Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was leading the country down would bring ruin to them all.

His co-conspirator Shcherbytsky was another Ukrainian. The Party Secretary from the Ukraine was another life-long bureaucrat and someone with great ambitions too. Shcherbytsky had his own little empire down in the Ukraine and had initially been an ally of Gorbachev, especially when it came to the man’s plans for reform of the Soviet Union. That, however, shouldn’t have included any interference in the Ukraine party organisation. Gorbachev’s plans for stern anti-corruption measures and a little bit of democratisation across the country alarmed Shcherbytsky: he saw a future for himself under the General Secretary’s rule as disgrace and exile.

Once these two men begun plotting to do something to rectify what they saw as their personal ruin, they came to realise that the influence that they both held – over the KGB and a significant section of the all-prevalent Communist Party – wouldn’t be enough. They wanted to get rid of Gorbachev and many of the people around him, but the forces at their disposal weren’t enough to guarantee that such a move would work. Neither Chebrikov nor Shcherbytsky were gamblers that liked to take risks, especially if they would be gambling with their lives if they didn’t make a sure move.

They needed the support of a man who commanded many men who had guns behind him.

Before the Moscow Coup was launched, they brought a third man into their plans. Marshal Akhromeyev was the Chief of the General Staff: the most senior military officer in the Soviet Union. He had been a fighting soldier during WW2 and knew the value of the military in protecting the country. In the months leading up to his secret alignment with Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky, Marshal Akhromeyev had had several policy disagreements with Gorbachev. The General Secretary wanted to decrease military tensions with the West (the United States in particular) and this meant signing agreements that would end certain military weapons programmes. The Chief of the General Staff was unhappy at such plans from Gorbachev because he saw a weakening of his country’s military might as a result of such agreements with foreign powers. Fed lies by the men who would become his co-conspirators, he came to believe that Gorbachev’s ultimate aim was a near-demilitarisation of the nation so that the Soviet Union would be left defenceless against a modern day Barbarossa.

Marshal Akhromeyev was manipulated into supporting the other two due to their need for him to make sure that the Soviet Armed Forces, with its millions of armed men, would step aside to allow them to do what they wanted to take charge of the country. He was promised much by them for doing so, chiefly that the military wouldn’t be shrunk and that they both also had no plans for warfare. This final point had been something that Marshal Akhromeyev had made clear: he had no intention of ‘saving’ the Soviet Armed Forces from Gorbachev’s planned reductions so that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky could kill his soldiers in a war.

Of course, things didn’t turn out that way the following year.

*​

The pre-dawn raids in Moscow that started the coup were undertaken by Spetsgruppa A (also known as ‘Alpha Group’). This was a KGB anti-terrorist commando formation with detachments nationwide, though its strength had been concentrated in the Soviet capital in the days before the troika of Chebrikov, Shcherbytsky and Marshal Akhromeyev struck. The men of Alpha Group were highly-trained and well-experienced. Since the inception of the formation in the mid-Seventies, they had been deployed in a variety of combat roles across the Soviet Union fighting off terrorist attacks launched by separatists and armed deserters from the Soviet Army. In addition, elements of Alpha Group had fought in Afghanistan in the opening stages of the invasion there when they had assaulted the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and killed President Amin.

That November morning, seventeen detachments of Alpha Group soldiers (four and six man teams, depending on the target) assaulted residences throughout Moscow and the surrounding areas. They were clad in black and carried assault rifles… along with pictures of the people that they went after. Security agents from the KGB’s ‘Ninth Chief Directorate’ opened the doors – literally and figuratively – that led the Alpha Group to their targets and then stood aside when the commandoes went to work.

Within moments, seventeen of the top political and bureaucratic figures with Gorbachev’s Government were dead. They were either shot while in their beds, bathrooms or kitchens. None were armed and none were in any way prepared for their own assassinations. The hit squads withdrew afterwards, in most cases leaving behind terrified family members of the dead men.

Among those killed were some of the most well-known politicians in the Soviet Union. The Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze was one of them, then there was the Interior Minister Vlasov, the Council of Ministers Chairman Ryzhkov, the Chief of Party Ideology Yakovlev, the Defence Minister Yazov, Chebrikov’s ambitious underling Kryuchkov and other Politburo members like Andrei Gromyko, Ligachev, Solomentsev, Talyzin and Voronikov.

The recently disgraced Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was another victim of the Alpha Group hit squads. When at his apartment, the commandoes also managed to accidentally shoot his wife – Naina Iosifovna – dead too. Viktor Grishin found himself marked for death as well when the Alpha Group murdered another politician who had been previously forced out of his former position by Gorbachev.

Four more targets for the lethal killers that morning were not politicians, but career civil servants. The commander of the Interior Ministry’s OSDMON domestic security troops was gunned down and so too was his deputy. Another assassinated man was the KGB officer in-charge of the Kremlin security forces: someone who when sounded out, had shown an aversion to what would later occur there. A senior personal adviser to the General Secretary was the final target for the Alpha Group’s selected killing.

This wave of carefully-planned murders was only the beginning. A larger detachment of the Alpha Group launched a near-bloodless assault against the Kremlin complex right in the heart of the city simultaneously to those assassinations. Two hundred plus men moved on foot, in vehicles and also in light helicopters against the famous red-bricked seat of the Government. Armed and ready for a fight, they found themselves up against no opposition at all: Chebrikov had managed to convince lower-ranking officers of the KGB-manned Kremlin guard force to have their men leave their posts right at the very last moment.

Nevertheless, the Alpha Group went into the Kremlin expecting trouble. They cleared the huge complex building by building, room by room. Maintenance, cleaning and clerical staff were bound and secured when they were encountered throughout. The General Secretary himself was the ultimate target of this elaborate move and he was snatched from his bedroom rather than killed there.

Gorbachev was taken from the bed that he shared with his wife and the two of them were whisked away with hoods over their heads. The General Secretary had no time to wonder where the security troops who should have been guarding him where or what was going on before he and his wife were loaded into a helicopter and flown away.


Chebrikov had been responsible for the bloody part that the KGB had to play in the Moscow Coup, but where Marshal Akhromeyev acted there was no violence. He was at the Ministry of Defence building when the assassinations were taking place and the Kremlin was being seized, within a security communications room there at the time. He personally made phone calls and signed telegrams to other Generals and Admirals commanding military forces not only in Moscow, but across the Soviet Union ordering their forces to remain in their barracks and stand-by for further orders. No one who he contacted seemed to know what was going on and they did exactly what they were told.

Moreover, Marshal Akhromeyev didn’t receive a single enquiry asking about his nominal superior Defence Minister Yazov.


Shcherbytsky was in Moscow that morning too. He went to the Interior Ministry building and established himself there. Second in number only to the Armed Forces, troops from the Interior Ministry were based nationwide and were quite a force to be reckoned. The bureaucracy in-place within the Soviet Union meant that they took orders from the top though and from the Ministry, Shcherbytsky was able to make sure that there was no hostile reaction on their part to what he and his co-conspirators were doing.

No urgent orders were sent out for OSDMON security troops to come to the aid of Gorbachev’s dead and dying regime.


Throughout that morning, with only a very few people having known what had gone on, further stages of the coup took place. Shooting politicians, snatching the General Secretary and silencing the OSDMON were one thing: there was still much else to do though. There were a lot of people within the country who were not going to be happy at what had just occurred and the instigators of the toppling of Gorbachev knew that it wouldn’t have been easy nor would it be necessary to kill all of them at once. Lists had been drawn up that consisted of names of influential people in the Government, the military, the security forces and the civilian sector who were deemed to be ‘counter-revolutionaries’.

Chebrikov had orders cut for KGB internal security officers to start arresting people nationwide at their places of work or in their homes. Officials and bureaucrats were soon rounded up and placed into custody and so were civilians who worked in the media and the Government-led trade unions. Marshal Akhromeyev had officers throughout the Soviet Armed Forces take their comrades-in-arms into custody and prepare them for court martial: again, those who were suspected to be ready to act against the new regime were seized before they even knew what had gone on that morning.

As to be expected, many innocent people suddenly found themselves facing imprisonment and death due to fears over what they might do… but this was the Soviet Union after all.

*​

Rather than being shot out of hand like his Politburo colleagues, Gorbachev had been taken prisoner for a reason. He was flown away from the Kremlin and out east a short distance to a facility that the KGB quietly maintained in the Preobrazhensky District. The hood over his head was removed and he was shown that his wife was with him in a windowless room along with many people with guns. A piece of paper was handed to Gorbachev with shouted instructions for him to read it in front of the video camera that had been set up.

Gorbachev did as he was told and read out the statement that announced his resignation from the office of the General Secretary on the grounds of ill health. He was scared for the lives of himself and his wife and there was no hint of a lie in what he stated for the benefit of the camera.

Quickly enough, he was re-hooded and he joined his wife in being taken down to a specially-constructed secure cell within the basement of the anonymous building. The plan was to keep them where they were for the meantime in case they were needed again for another public appearance, though it was anticipated that Gorbachev – probably his wife too – would end up being shot.


By lunchtime on November 30th, Chebrikov and his co-conspirators were ready to announce their ‘change of government’.

Shcherbytsky had prepared statements that were to be issued to the main newspapers of the Soviet Union and these were distributed to their editors for immediate publication the following day. Pravda, Izvestiya, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Sovetskaya Rossiya and Trud would each print highly-favourable headlines and editorials the next day which would praise Gorbachev for ‘unselfishly stepping aside due to ill health’ and encourage ‘the people to support his replacements’. No mention would be made of the blood that had been spilt or the hundreds of arrests that had taken place afterwards of many influential people. The official newspaper of the Soviet military, Krasnaya Zvezda (‘Red Star’), would the following day run similar messages though it would say what Marshal Akhromeyev wanted it to: the military needed to obey orders given by the State.

The newspapers would go out the next day, but before then, both Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky went to airwaves. Both men were more suited to the radio, though in the modern era that knew that they would have to force themselves to adapt to the medium of television. There had been mass arrests across the civilian media sector and those had included employees of the central TASS news organisation. Those who remained did exactly what they were told with regard to assisting in the broadcast.

The two public faces of the new leadership of the Soviet Union addressed the country across the stations of Soviet Central Television. They spoke of Gorbachev’s ill health, and the threats to the State from both ‘external enemies’ and ‘internal counter-revolutionaries’. The two of them had been ‘selected by their colleagues’ to ‘guide the nation through this time of struggle’. They promised that little would change within the country and what did would only be ‘for the good of the workers’.

It was typical Soviet domestic propaganda and thus very much a lie.





Two

The news of the turnover of leadership at the top of the Soviet Union came quickly to the West. Media organisations in North America and Western Europe monitored their counterpart television and radio stations that broadcasted from behind the Iron Curtain and thus caught the announcement that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky were now in charge.

The claim the Gorbachev had resigned because he was ill was immediately seen for the falsity that it was. His pre-recorded statement on camera was dismissed by so-called ‘experts’ as being made under duress, while other talking-heads were unconvinced by what his replacements had to say.

They called it the ‘Moscow Coup’ and such a name immediately stuck.

However, those in the West didn’t understand what all of that was about. Gorbachev’s statement and those made by Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky weren’t made for the benefit of the Western media, but rather for the Soviet people. It was those to whom the new men in charge wanted to convince that there was nothing untoward with regard to the General Secretary’s departure.

*​

The governments and intelligence agencies in the West were alerted to what had gone on in Moscow by the media too. Presidents and Prime Ministers asked the heads of their intelligence gathering services why there had been no indication of what was coming: politicians never liked surprises. In turn, those head spooks pushed that question onto their field operatives with the intention that such intelligence officers should at once talk to their agents in the Soviet Union.

Everyone wanted to know why there had been no warning of what had suddenly occurred.

Several days later, a British spook working for MI-6 managed to arrange a clandestine meeting with an agent working in the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The agent was anxious and skittish; he was a man greatly worried for his life. There had been hundreds of arrests, he told his British contact, of anyone suspected of having reformist views. Furthermore, he said the party hierarchy had been killed off in a wave of violent assassinations. He urged the man from MI-6 not to contact him for the foreseeable future.

MI-6 soon spoke with the Soviet defector Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky. The one-time head of the KGB’s London station had known Gorbachev and Chebrikov personally and had also had some dealings with Shcherbytsky. He assured his new masters in the UK that the General Secretary would never have resigned and he agreed with those in the media that the man’s statement had been made under much duress… he had probably been in fear of his life.

The KGB Chairman had the makings of a dictator, Gordievsky furthered, and if there had been killings in Moscow, then he would have been behind them. As to Shcherbytsky, the new Soviet General Secretary was a thoroughly corrupt individual who was the polar opposite of the man that he had replaced. There would be no reform in the Soviet Union under him, instead Gordievsky prophesised a return to ‘the bad old days’ like those under Brezhnev.


Gordievsky was known to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and she asked to speak with him after she had been briefed on his warnings from the Director-General of MI-6 Sir Christopher Curwen. The two of them met alone at Downing Street on the evening of December 8th where Thatcher – an avid and life-long opponent of communism in all its guises – listened carefully to what her guest had to say.

Neither Curwen nor his nominal superior the Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs Sir Geoffrey Howe were happy with Thatcher listening to the dire warnings of future woes that they knew Gordievsky liked to relate, but the PM had forced the issue so that she could talk to him personally and hear him in his own words.

After that meeting at Downing Street, Thatcher’s closest advisers would say that she took a much closer interest in the after-effects of the Moscow Coup than they thought she would have done. Throughout the month, the PM personally reviewed intelligence from MI-6 (and also what was shared by NATO partners) concerning the new leadership of the Soviet Union. The stories of secret trials of alleged counter-revolutionaries – which were similar to those that had taken place under Stalin – that came out from behind the Iron Curtain held her interest and so too did confirmation that senior members of the deposed Gorbachev’s Politburo had been shot on November 30th.

A few days into the New Year, Thatcher spoke on the trans-Atlantic telephone to President Reagan when she was at Chequers in the English countryside and he was at his Camp David retreat in Maryland. The two of them were known for getting on famously when it came to working as a united front against Soviet interests and their conversations when it came to how to act with regard to that nation always brought a smile to the lips of those who were able to listen in on them. Like the UK intelligence services, their counterparts in the United States had been getting patchy but worrying information from out of the Soviet Union.

Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky had violently conciliated their rule, Reagan’s advisers had told him, and that also meant that they brought the military under their control too. Reagan expressed to Thatcher worries that his military and intelligence chiefs had about plans by the new Soviet regime to bolster their armed forces in new weapons, capabilities and size.

Their phone call ended with a suggestion by Thatcher that she should visit Washington sometime in the next month to talk to the President in person. She stated that they would both have more intelligence brought to them by their spooks and that could be shared then too.

Reagan agreed to the proposal and told the PM that he was most pleased at the idea of the United States and Britain continuing to work closely in reaction to the Soviet Union.


Events would overtake plans made by the American President and the British Prime Minister though: namely the so-called ‘Bornholm Incident’ of mid-January 1988.

Five

Since the Moscow Coup, operatives from Britain’s MI-6 had been extremely busy in conducting their business of intelligence gathering across the Eastern Bloc. Hollywood action films aside, the role of a national intelligence service was that of collecting and analysing clandestinely acquired information on what opposing countries were up to as well as their future intentions: it was not about gunfights and pretty girls.

MI-6 had had mixed results in its efforts at intelligence gathering behind the Iron Curtain throughout the Cold War. The early Fifties had seen the infamous betrayals of its trusted men such as Philby, Burgess and Maclean, which had seen damage done that was at first was thought to be irreparable. By the Sixties though, success had come from dealings with Penkovsky onwards. The organisation had returned to great prominence and its operatives knew their business.

There were many people across the Eastern Bloc who provided intelligence to MI-6. Some of what they said was rubbish, other pieces were of great value. Many spied against their country for a long time, some did so only rarely. These men (and a few women) who MI-6 had contact with came from all walks of life and they spoke to their British agent handlers for a wide variety of reasons.

Nothing is ever simple in the intelligence business.

The information that came out from behind the Iron Curtain had been that of a worrying nature for MI-6 since Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky had deposed Gorbachev. Across the Soviet Union, there had been mass arrests and also a wave of executions that had taken place. Gordievsky had warned Thatcher of a return to Brezhnev, but he had been wrong… and the information coming out of that man’s native country pointed to a return to the days of Stalin. There was no longer any hint of reform across the world’s biggest country and thus no glimmer of hope for its citizens.

This bloodshed had spread to Eastern Europe too. MI-6 had good contacts with a pair of agents working within the Wojskowa Sluzba Wewnetrzna (WSW). This was Polish Military Intelligence and the two separate (and independent) spies that MI-6 had within told them of how the WSW had been tasked with supporting elements of the KGB sent to Poland to arrest hundreds of people across the country. The Polish SB was a politically-influenced organisation that the Soviets had little faith in and so had been ignored as Soviet agents roamed across Poland snatching and carrying away people who Moscow wished rid of using the on the ground help of the WSW. The Solidarity movement had been brutally crushed with its leaders dead, its middle ranks rotting in the darkest jail cells and its lower ranks broken by KGB-organised infighting and disinformation. Solidarity had long since moved out of the shadows and into the light… where it was ripe for the KGB to move against it with lethal force.

General Jaruzelski wasn’t going to do anything that he wasn’t told to by Moscow after that.

From Czechoslovakia, MI-6 officers learnt from a senior official with the Communist Party there of the purges that had taken place within that country. General Secretary Husak had seen all internal opposition to him crushed and he now found himself surrounded by ‘advisers’ from the KGB who were at his side at all times. The reformers who had been emboldened to be in a seemingly immensely powerful position to move against him – people such as Adamec, Jakes and Strougal – had found themselves secretly whisked off to prison camps in Siberia on Soviet aircraft.

East Germany remained somewhere that MI-6 was shut out of though. In that particular country, they couldn’t get access to any real intelligence that wasn’t easily discernible Soviet-written disinformation.

*​

Following the Bornholm Incident, MI-6 found itself under great pressure from the UK Government to step up their intelligence efforts behind the Iron Curtain. Long-term strategies for agent exploitation were to be put aside for the time being – against the wishes of many officers within the organisation – so that the threat that was looming could be understood and thus put a stop to.

MI-6 managed to further its contacts in the Soviet Union itself and some startling revelations were discovered.

British Intelligence was to learn the real reason why Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky had seized the reins of government in the Soviet Union from Gorbachev: the economy of the Soviet Union was tottering on the edge of total collapse. Decades of military spending and overly generous foreign aid to friendly nations had gone on and had brought this situation about. When the national economy finally did implode, these two men were of the firm belief that the whole house of cards that propped up their regime, and the one before theirs, would come crashing down with it. Rather than face internal change as Gorbachev had been trying to bring about, the consequences of which were horrifying to men like Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky, they were now trying to expand outwards. Such thinking didn’t have to make sense to MI-6; they could see the evidence of such a thing.

The socialist governments in Eastern Europe were being brought firmly back under Moscow’s control to begin with so that the Soviet Union could further the policy that the Soviet Union had followed since the end of WW2: dominance of their economies and exploitation of their resources. Yet, MI-6 found out that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky were thinking of an even wider expansion to keep the Soviet Union afloat.

The new men in charge in Moscow were making the first steps to do the same to Western Europe.

In whispered conversations with men who spoke in genuine fear of their lives, British spooks learnt that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky had formulated a complicated and long-term strategy to finally bring the rest of continental Europe under their control with all of its human and industrial resources. They wanted to take – through politics, not direct force of arms – Western Europe under Moscow’s grasp by subterfuge. Western Europe was to see ‘events’ occurring throughout the coming year.

Governments across the continent were to be toppled by planned internal disorder. Their peoples were to be tricked into voting them out of office following political crises and into the positions of power would come other politicians that the Soviet Union could directly or indirectly influence. MI-6 officers were left speechless by the bold daring of such Soviet plans… and they knew that they were only being given brief glimpses at some of the moves that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky had ordered to be carried out.

Britain was not to be a target of such Soviet-directed events. Political figures in the UK wouldn’t be discredited by false allegations of bribery or sexual misconduct, nor would there be internal terrorist campaigns launched inside Britain by left-wing guerrilla forces. It was in West Germany, the Low Countries, France, Scandinavia and neutral Central Europe where such events were to take place.

The influence of Britain, and most-importantly the United States, in the affairs of Western European countries targeted for Soviet expansion was to be curtailed and then removed. MI-6 discovered that Chebrikov had instructed the KGB to spend 1988 forcing these two countries to withdraw their military forces from the continent so that eventually Moscow would rule Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. The two leading nations of the Anglo-sphere, with their centuries-old capitalist systems who had been trying to strangle the Soviet Union since its birth, would be eventually ejected from Europe. Socialist-led government would come to power and NATO would collapse when Britain and the United States were forced to remove their troops.

The Bornholm Incident was just the start of it all.

*
​
The reports that MI-6 brought back to the UK Government caused a political earthquake when they arrived. There were many people in Whitehall who didn’t want to believe such a thing. There were so many flaws in an idea like this and thus a great disbelief that Chebrikov and his General Secretary Shcherbytsky (who was seen as a puppet to the KGB Chairman by many) would even contemplate acting like this; it was clearly not going to work.

Yet, others did believe that the Bornholm Incident was the first stage in this grand strategy that had been uncovered: chief among such people was Prime Minister Thatcher. She found herself aghast at the thought of a Soviet domination of Western Europe. The military threat to Britain from that was of great concern and so too were the economic effects, but she was also outraged at the idea of hundreds of millions of European people having their freedom taken away from them in such a scheme.

Britain couldn’t allow this to happen!

The planned trans-Atlantic summit between Thatcher and President Reagan that they had been only talking about planning for before the Bornholm Incident came to pass very soon afterwards because of that shooting engagement. Thatcher flew to Washington on the 15th of January accompanied by Christopher Curwen while Downing Street tried to keep the flight very low-key with regards to the British media. Parliament was in session but normal business there would not reconvene until the following week; it was hoped that by leaving late on Friday and returning early on the Monday, the Prime Minister wouldn’t be missed.

An unwelcome and surprising political development event in the UK would greatly distract Thatcher during her urgent trip to see President Reagan though despite the favourable outcome of her meetings in Washington.




Six

When in Washington, the sharing of intelligence with the Americans by Curwen was far from just one way: there was plenty that CIA Director William Webster informed the Director-General of MI-6 about too. The two men’s junior people who represented their respective organisations in the capitals of their host’s countries always had a lot to talk to each other about, but the two men at the top of both organisations shared information even more freely.

Curwen found that the Americans knew much of what he already did. The CIA didn’t have a wealth of contacts behind the Iron Curtain like MI-6 did, but instead had recently had a senior KGB official defect to them. Codenamed ‘Battery’ even when being discussed with Curwen, this man had told similar stories of mass arrests, executions and a crackdown against any form of dissent – real or imagined – back in his native land.

Webster also told his British visitor some secret nuggets of information that they had gleamed from their intelligence work.

The final decision to move against Gorbachev had been taken right on the eve of his departure to visit Washington where he had been going to sign the long-negotiated Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Reagan. This could have eliminated a whole series of nuclear-tipped medium-range missiles that were operated by both the United States and the Soviet Union; missiles that were seen by many as having that of a destabilising influence on East-West relations. The deposed General Secretary had thus not signed this treaty, one which the men who had toppled him apparently regarded as being the first step towards a one-day complete disarmament of Soviet strategic weapons.

This had come on the back of other policies that Gorbachev had wished to pursue that were seen by some in the Soviet Union as furthering a disarmament agenda. He had apparently been discussing with his Politburo colleagues a withdrawal from Afghanistan of Soviet military forces and, even more shockingly, a gradual and multi-year drawn-down of offensive military arms from Eastern Europe. These ideas had earned him the ire of Marshal Akhromeyev; he, the CIA had learnt, had been instrumental in facilitating the Moscow Coup.

As for Gorbachev himself, the CIA had conflicting information on him.

Battery had said that the deposed General Secretary wasn’t dead like the rest of his Politburo and was being held captive in the city of Tambov (in western Russia) under KGB guard and being kept wholly incommunicado from the rest of the world. One of their sources within the Soviet Union said that he was dead and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the wastelands of Siberia. A third piece of information stated that he was gravely ill (as had been claimed) and in a Moscow hospital.

Curwen took a lot of what Webster told him with a large pinch of salt. MI-6 had been handling itself very well in the past few years with regard to getting information out of the Soviet Union, while the CIA was at the nadir of its fortunes in trying to do the same. The KGB under Chebrikov had been very effective at shutting the CIA out of the business of intelligence gathering inside the Soviet Union and no one was sure why…

*​

Thatcher’s visit was meant to be low key. She would see Reagan for private conversations at the White House and stay at the British Embassy; there was to be no fanfare to her time in Washington.

Someone had tipped off the American media though to the fact that she had flown to the United States for secret meetings with the President. The White House switchboard was bombarded with calls and the British Embassy found itself surrounded by reporters. There was a mad rush by journalists to find out just what was going on and they all wanted to be the one to break the story and claim an exclusive.

Avoiding the media circus, the two heads of government again spoke of their mutual fears over the recent aggressive behaviour from the Soviet Union and what their intelligence chiefs had learnt of conditions inside that country. Each informed the other that they became more and more concerned every day as they were told further worrying news; they both confessed that they were starting to worry over the possibility of war breaking out.

Reagan was focused on the threat of Soviet nuclear arms, especially since Gorbachev had been deposed so that he didn’t sign the INF Treaty. He explained that in his long political career he had had plenty of unfortunate experience with communism in all its forms and he had always known that the only way that such a system could ever hope to survive was by aggressive expansion. He expressed to Thatcher a belief that he had that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky were going to restart the build-up of Soviet nuclear arms that had only recently been halted by Gorbachev. The thought that the Soviet Union might one day use such weapons caused him great distress.

Thatcher explained her worries over MI-6’s discovery of Soviet plans for long-term destabilising of capitalist democracy in Western Europe. Her fear was that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky might bide their time and not rush in the future as they currently were. She and Reagan wouldn’t be around forever – holding office, she explained – and who knew what policies their successors might follow when it came to how to deal with a resurgent Soviet Union that would try another event like the Bornholm Incident.

By the time they had finished their discussions on the Sunday (after two days of informal talks), Reagan and Thatcher had come to an agreement on the course of action that the two of them were to follow. Maintaining the NATO alliance was of great importance; by any means necessary, European countries were to be kept from leaving NATO. Britain and America would retain their troops and aircraft on the European continent and, should the situation warrant it, there would even be reinforcements to those forces already deployed if an apparent danger of Soviet armed intervention to support one of their ‘events’ was tried.

London and Washington were standing shoulder to shoulder.

*​

Thatcher’s flight late on the Sunday night was delayed for a while at Washington Dulles Airport due to a security issue there unconnected to the flight back to London. While she waited on the ground, she had discussions with her aides concerning the resignation back in London of Geoffrey Howe from his position of Foreign Secretary. Howe had requested that David Waddington – the party Chief Whip – meet him at Conservative Central Office that Sunday; Waddington had done so and been handed Howe’s letter of resignation from his Government post. Waddington had thus called Washington and tried to reach Thatcher at the Embassy, but she had only just left. The Ambassador, Anthony Acland, had rushed to Dulles Airport to catch up with the Prime Minister and inform her of this news because he knew that it was important.

The opportunity was taken while the aircraft was on the ground for Thatcher to place calls back to Britain before she flew home to find out why exactly Howe had done what he had… and also to try to figure out why he had resigned when his Prime Minister was out of the country. She spoke to both her Chief Whip and Chancellor Nigel Lawson but neither man could give her a definitive reason as to why Howe had stepped down. His short, hand-written resignation letter had only mentioned a ‘firm disagreement with the policies being followed by H.M. Government in foreign affairs’; Thatcher pondered over that quote that Waddington gave her over the phone during the following flight back.

Right before Britain was about to suffer a foreign policy crisis of immense magnitude, the country had just lost its long-serving and well-experienced Foreign Secretary.

Nine

Replacing Howe in the role of British Foreign Secretary was Tom King. Thatcher had her Northern Ireland Secretary transfer into this new position and, in turn, John Major from the Treasury took King’s old role in Ulster. King was seen as a safe pair of hands; he was very reliable and always did whatever job given in the past to Thatcher’s satisfaction. He was at once challenged by external events beyond his control to live up to the high hopes that Thatcher had for her new Foreign Secretary.

During King’s first week at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office he was put to the test.


President Reagan made a speech in California concerning United States foreign policy that caused near-instant worldwide reactions. The use of the term ‘the evil empire’ with regard to the Soviet Union was once again put to use by the American President and he explained to his assembled audience (and the international media) why he chose to deem the Moscow Government such a thing. Reagan informed the world of the broad strokes of the intelligence that he had received concerning recent events with the Soviet Union: the mass arrests and the extra-judicial killings taking place there.

The regime of Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky was ‘illegal’, Reagan stated, and the two men were at the top of a ‘cartel of murderers’. He spoke of Gorbachev and how the United States had received information that the man was being held prisoner or, even worse, had been killed by those who had toppled him. No national leader had yet to speak openly of the Moscow Coup, but Reagan did.

The American President moved onto talk about the Bornholm Incident and the ‘slaughter of innocent Danish sailors’ there. He directly linked the sinking of the two Danish ships – which, he reminded his audience, had taken place inside Danish sovereign waters – to the Soviet Union rather than East Germany and stated his belief that Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky had given the orders for that incident to take place.

Reagan finished his remarks by announcing that he would be asking Congress to support him in the cutting of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union should it’s leaders ‘continue on their path of lies, terror and murder’.


Worldwide, there were a whole range of reactions expressed in relation to Reagan’s speech. Thatcher had made it clear to her new Foreign Secretary upon taking up his role that the British Government was going to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States when it came to dealing with the Soviet Union and so King had to make sure that the position of support that the UK had with the United States was expressed. When foreign governments started to make statements protesting about what the American President had said, King countered their negative remarks. At the same time he also found himself making statements supporting those countries who backed Reagan’s stated opposition to the new leaders of the Soviet Union.

This was no easy task for King to do, but one that he found himself managing to achieve. Countries like North Korea, Cuba and Iraq were bound to criticise Reagan for what he said while Western-aligned nations such as South Korea, Venezuela and Israel supported the allegations made against the Soviet Union. With those nations, King knew how to deal with them. It was other nations that caused King to show off his talents as a statesman though; countries who didn’t easily fall in either side of the great East-West dividing line in international relations. The Indian High Commissioner in London complained furiously to King about his support of Reagan’s comments, ones which India regarded as ‘undiplomatic’ and ‘unnecessarily inflammatory’. Swedish Prime Minister Carlsson instructed his country’s ambassador in Britain to express his ‘alarm’ at such revelations being made public while at the same time wanting the UK to know that Sweden ‘wanted nothing but peace and prosperity in Europe’ for ‘all nations’.

Thatcher had made a good choice in King because he managed to upset nobody apart from those looking to be upset.


Following on from the reaction to Reagan’s speech, King found himself having to deal with the political fall-out from the resignations of a pair of Dutch politicians.

In begin with, a member of the upper house of the Netherlands Parliament tendered his resignation from the Senate before fleeing from his native country on a flight out of Amsterdam to South America. While a major national news story in Holland, it was only after a second politician acted in a similar manner the following day that King and HM Government started to take notice. That second politician was from House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch Parliament) and represented a seat in the Apeldoorn area of the western part of the country; he quit his position the morning that the newspaper de Volkskrant made shocking revelations about him.

Rather than flee the country, the Apeldoorn politician was taken into the custody of the Dutch security services and at once questioned about what the de Volkskrant was saying. The spooks asked the man in their custody about his personal finances and whether he really had been secretly accepting money for many years from the Soviet Union.

Both Dutch politicians had been regarded beforehand as true patriots of their country and were known as stalwarts of the right-wing in the Netherlands. It was discovered that the one who had fled Holland had been about to face an exposé in the de Telegraaf newspaper about his sexual dalliances with underage foreign prostitutes over the period of many years. Contact had been made with each politician by the form of phone calls from persons unknown before they resigned their posts instructing them to do so or their crimes would be revealed in the media; of course each had done so but still the newspapers had revealed all.

This was a similar story to what King had only recently been told that the KGB had plans to do. The warnings that MI-6 had received from their contacts within the Soviet Union said that there would be many politicians across Western Europe soon to be exposed for all sorts of improper and illegal behaviour so that public faith in the political establishments in Western countries would be slowly but surely destroyed.

Just as the Soviets apparently hoped, King was one of many senior people in the know who could only watch helplessly from the side-lines as this occurred in the Netherlands. He was authorised by Thatcher to inform the Dutch Government of what the KGB was doing and King duly did so.

This was just the start though…




Ten

Reagan’s speech had a major effect upon the campaign by his Vice President to get himself elected the coming November. George H. W. Bush was in the early stages of his campaign to secure the Republican Party nomination and what his President had to say didn’t help that effort one little bit.

The all-important Iowa Caucuses were only a few weeks away and Bush had a strong set of challengers lining up against him. Senator Bob Dole, Congressman Jack Kemp and televangelist Pat Robertson were all after the job that Bush wanted and he needed no distraction. What Reagan said caused real distraction in Bush’s efforts though.

Bush immediately faced questions from the media asking whether he supported his President’s comments regarding the Soviet Union. Of course he supported his President, Bush said through gritted teeth, just as he always had done through the past seven years when it came to foreign policy. He told the questioning journalists that he had seen the same intelligence information that had come out of the USSR and had been left as aghast as it just as Reagan was.

He was firmly behind his President.

Away from the cameras, and with his campaign team, Bush was furious. He understood why Reagan had said what he had, yet he didn’t want the media attention on his campaign to be directed towards foreign events that he had absolutely no control over. The Vice President wanted and needed the nomination process and the subsequent election this coming November to be about the economy and domestic affairs – where he saw himself as having an edge over not only his Republican opponents, but those potential ones from the Democratic Party too.

What was going on with the Soviet Union and the aggressive behaviour of its new rulers was starting to damage Bush’s run for the Presidency.

*​

Across the Atlantic, late January saw a series of deadly terrorist attacks taking place in West Germany.

In what was later revealed to be Soviet-orchestrated co-operation between two different groups, both the Red Army Faction (R.A.F.) and the Revolutionary Cells (R.Z.) detonated a multitude of bombs, made attempts on the lives of prominent West Germans and launched commando-style armed attacks. These terrorist groups were foreign sponsored with a hard-left political outlook where violence was a principle part of their very being.

The bombings that the R.A.F. and the R.Z. carried out targeted American–owned companies operating in West Germany as well as courthouses in Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Mannheim. Politicians, businessmen and journalists were attacked and murdered in their own homes by men with guns throughout Lower Saxony and Bavaria. In Saarbrucken, the building that housed the Landtag of Saarland (the state legislature) was assaulted by a force of six armed men when its members were in session; they were repulsed for their aim of hostage-taking there, but there were many civilian casualties inflicted.

Both terrorist groups were found of the notion of ‘propaganda by the deed’ and sought to generate as much media coverage for their actions as possible. Of course, their causes and goals had near-zero support in West Germany, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t repeatedly make press releases after their attacks. The R.A.F. and the R.Z. claimed credit for all of their strikes and furthermore promised that they would continue to strike again and again.

The West German security services had been caught unawares of the scale of the attacks coming their way; they had little luck in infiltrating these groups despite numerous efforts to do so. Thirty-six people were killed in terrorist attacks in the last week of January – a very large number indeed – and they couldn’t allow the continuation of such a bloody campaign. The gloves came off and members of the R.A.F. and the R.Z. were more actively sought than they had ever been before.

Laws were bent and even broke sometimes, all in the name of defending the West German state.

Eventually something terrible was bound to occur.

Thirteen

Three days later, the West German security services tried a similar operation against one of their own domestic terrorist groups in the southern Rhineland… they weren’t as successful as their British counterparts in not spilling any blood.

Agents from the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) were alerted to a group of R.Z. terrorists gathered in a house on the outskirts of Kaiserslautern who weren’t just sitting around reading up on Marxist political theory.

There were four of them and they were reported to be well-armed with automatic weapons and explosives. The tip that the counter-subversive spooks from the BfV stated that the wannabe revolutionaries were soon to ‘go on a mission’, possibly as soon as the morning of the 7th.

Kaiserslautern was known as ‘K–Town’ to the tens of thousands of US military personnel serving throughout West Germany. Radiating in every direction from the busy city were American military bases including such places as Ramstein Air Base and the Landstuhl Medical Centre to name only a few. The US military in the Rhineland had seen attacks launched against it before from West German domestic terrorists with Ramstein being bombed a few years before by the Red Army Faction.

The West Germans thus feared that the R.Z. were soon to strike again against Americans in an attack that might strain German-US relations in these troublesome times. The BfV informed US Military Intelligence of the threat from the R.Z. group currently in Kaiserslautern – US bases across the Rhineland instantly went on full-scale alert – and then the paramilitary anti-terrorist force GSG-9 was sent into action.


The GSG-9 launched their raid on the suburban house in Kaiserslautern using not only the cover of night-time but also the distraction offered by a pair of fire engines that purposely sailed past blaring their sirens.

Twenty plus policemen hit the building from every side by going through both the front and rear doors on the ground floor as well as a side window on the first floor. Flash-bang grenades were used in this assault to disorientate the terrorists who it was hoped would be sleeping.

The only problem was that there weren’t just terrorists in the assaulted house.

The R.Z. wasn’t using the property as safe-house to hide out in: the BfV had faulty intelligence there. Instead, one of the West German terrorists had a widowed sister who lived in the property with her two young children. The R.Z. wasn’t that well-funded or organised like other communist insurgent groups in the country and they didn’t have an unlimited supply of places nationwide where they could lay low overnight.

The use of the flash-bang grenades didn’t have the desired effect upon two of the terrorists who were inside the Kaiserslautern house: they opened fire towards doors and windows with their AK-47’s in a crazed fashion hoping to hit the unknown intruders that were entering the house. Neither of them knew what was going on but decided that the best thing to do was to fight.

The GSG-9 men restrained themselves as much as they could, though some of their number returned fire to defend themselves. Bullets flew in all directions throughout the house and didn’t care where they ended up.

Both of the young children in the house were struck by bullets that came through internal walls. The four year-old boy was killed and the three year-old girl badly wounded. Their mother escaped the shooting gallery uninjured… unlike her brother and three of his revolutionary friends who were all shot with two of their number being killed.

Also shot during the fire-fight were three members of the GSG-9 assault team, with one of those men losing his life as well.

The bloodbath in Kaiserslautern came too late to make the newspapers the next morning in West Germany but local television and radio news teams reacted to the scene pretty quick. By dawn, there was a media frenzy unfolding as journalists sought to outdo each other in finding out just what had gone on in the bullet-ridden house and how four people – one of them a little boy – had lost their lives there.





Fourteen

February 11th saw the top levels of the British Government – Thatcher, King, Younger and Curwen – briefed on an incident that had occurred the day before in the Black Sea. Preliminary information had come in over the night before, but what Fieldhouse and Bagnall from the MOD had to tell contained much more thorough information.

A pair of United States Navy warships (the cruiser USS Yorktown and the destroyer USS Caron) had been attacked while sailing near the Crimea. They had been less than ten miles off the Soviet-controlled coast when aircraft-delivered bombs had struck them. Both ships were damaged but still afloat – now back in international waters – though there had been casualties on each, especially with regards to the bigger Yorktown.

The politicians listened to the men in uniform as they explained that the Americans had sent their ships purposely through Soviet sovereign waters in a declared mission stating their ‘right of innocent passage’: a technical matter of international naval law. Radio warnings that contained dire threats had been made followed by both American warships being rammed by smaller but heavily-armed Soviet ships. Soviet aircraft had then come into play with one of those dropping bombs to end the stand-off that had turned into an armed engagement.

Fieldhouse had spoken with the Pentagon earlier in the day and they had told him that both ships were heading towards Istanbul… meanwhile the rest of the United States Navy was going on full alert.

It was explained that the Americans were considering the attack to be deliberate. They apparently had signals intelligence that pointed to direct orders being sent to the Soviet aircraft right before it made its attack on the Yorktown and the Caron coming straight over a satellite link-up from Moscow. American warships worldwide were now standing ready in case they faced attack too.

King, Younger and Curwen had been speaking to the Americans overnight too and they told their Prime Minister how their counterparts across in Washington were directly linking the attack on their warships to the Bornholm Incident the previous month. Two Danish ships had been attacked and sunk then in the Baltic Sea and now a pair of US Navy ships had been struck at while out in the Black Sea. The Soviets had gotten away with that first attack and so had made a similar move again.

Thatcher was told how the prevailing mood in Washington, especially among those in Reagan’s inner circle, was that this was the final straw for what the Soviets were going to be allowed to get away with. The political dramas that the Soviets were creating throughout Western Europe were one thing, but to attack United States warships and kill American sailors – no matter what the legality involved of those warships being inside Soviet waters was – was going too far.

The American media had yet to get wind of what had occurred, but soon enough they would find out – probably later in the day. Once the news got out (and it certainly would), it was to be expected that Reagan would be forced to act somehow and there would also be a further knock-on effect with the ongoing Presidential campaign as well.


The briefing afterwards turned towards what had been discussed a few days before with regard to COMPASS. Thatcher had some of the key people with her in Downing Street telling her about the American ships in the Black Sea and so thought it prudent to request whether progress had been made with her instructions as to how discussions were going in modifying the MOD’s war preparation plans.

Fieldhouse and Bagnall explained that they had their people working on what was now being referred to as LION. The Prime Minister had requested that the British military curtail many of its planned deployments on the eve of warfare breaking out and concentrate its strength in certain places where what military assets that the UK had could be put to much more effective use.

Should military tensions with the Soviets increase to the point where warfare was seen as inevitable, then the MOD would now concentrate its deployable forces better. Under LION, attention was to be focused on supporting Britain’s NATO allies up in northern Norway and the Norwegian Sea as well as in the British defensive sector in West Germany and the a-joining North Sea area. These two expected theatres of conflict in a full-scale war were both locations where the British Armed Forces would be better put to use and resources not stretched so thinly. Discussions would be made with NATO allies on this and detailed plans made, but that was what LION envisaged.


The discussion about LION made those present at Downing Street on the morning of February 11th think about the prospect of open warfare erupting more than they previously had.

These were sobering and unpleasant thoughts for anyone to have, let alone those who led their country.

Seventeen

When the French government allowed their allies to be given access to some of the intelligence that their DSGE national intelligence agency had managed to get hold of through an agent of theirs codenamed ROUGE, a lot of questions were answered in London… but so too were plenty of fears brought to life.

The Americans, the West Germans and the British were given debriefings by senior DSGE spooks about what their agent-in-place from behind the Iron Curtain had to reveal on the 16th of February. What was said afterwards sent the military forces of these nations – then later those of other NATO countries – on full alert against possible armed aggression being undertaken against them with little or no warning.

British Intelligence had earlier information from their own agents that the Soviet KGB was trying to exert pressure on Western European countries through fermenting political upheaval so that new governments would be installed that could be subverted by Moscow. ROUGE didn’t give lie to that intelligence, rather he built upon it. That was not the only game that the new Soviet regime was playing.

Apparently, there was a military aspect to the Soviet long-term plan.

The KGB was directly behind the military ‘incidents’ that had been taking place. Just as had been feared, the attack on the Danish Navy in January and the similar strike against the US Navy in February had been coordinated actions ordered from the very top. Other attempts had been made to strike at a Norwegian maritime patrol aircraft and also a West German fighter aircraft, but only those two naval incidents had been the occasions where Soviet plans had actually succeed in working. The intent had not only been to kill NATO military personnel by destroying military hardware, but to use those attacks for a strategic geo-political gain.

The KGB wanted NATO to react; their goal was to force the governments of Western nations to use military force in retaliation to what the Soviet military had done. ROUGE had told his French handlers that the KGB knew that they were playing a dangerous game by trying to goad NATO into selectively hitting back, but that was what they wanted. Once NATO did so then the Soviet Union would be able to score a political victory as its armed forces fought off what would be portrayed as ‘Western imperialist aggression’. There were plenty of people in the Western World who would fall for such propaganda, ROUGE said, and that was the aim of the whole game.

Furthermore, attacking NATO forces and getting them to hit back with their own pin-prick attacks, the KGB was aiming to produce a domestic political reaction within the Soviet Union too.

The regime of Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky wasn’t as secure as the intelligence services in the West believed that it was. Shcherbytsky was the face of the regime while Chebrikov had positioned himself as the ‘man behind the throne’. Yet, both men had different ideas on the future direction of the country and divergent notions on how things should be done with such weighty matters as the national economy, internal politics and foreign relations. There was also the matter of the power base that Marshal Akhromeyev was apparently building himself within the huge Soviet military. Chebrikov, ROUGE stated, was the one who had directed the recent military attacks and they were his brainchild. He wanted to weaken Marshal Akhromeyev by undermining him just as he tried to undermine Western governments too.


In Washington, Paris, Bonn and London this intelligence was received in different ways.

The Americans were outraged at such a scheme that would involve the outright murder of their sailors for internal political gain within the Soviet Union. President Reagan let it be known that he was determined not to let any more American servicemen be killed and he met with his senior military and intelligence people to see what could be done to put a stop to Moscow’s plans.

President Mitterrand was still reeling from the exposure of his extramarital affair and was soon to face an election that he feared he might lose. However, he didn’t want to see a Soviet-backed regime sneak into power anywhere within Western Europe and so promised that France would work with its allies to contain and destroy Soviet plots.

In the West German capital Bonn, Chancellor Kohl feared the worst at such revelations. He could foresee future military incidents taking place that might drag his beloved country into a third war this century with all the attendant death and destruction that that would cause. Like Reagan and Mitterrand, Kohl wanted to stop the Soviets, but not if that would mean the unnecessary loss of German lives. West Germany was home to an immense concentration of NATO military forces – conventional and nuclear – that were poised ready for combat. There had already been mass civil disturbances and terrorist outrages within his country: military combat would be the end of the economic miracle that was West Germany and would shatter the lives of millions of his countrymen.


When Curwen briefed Thatcher on what his French counterparts had told him, he found his Prime Minister seemingly not greatly surprised by what the spy in the service of France had to say regarding Soviet attempts at manipulation through violence.

That was what she had long suspected the KGB was up to with their recent supplying of left-wing terrorist groups of arms and attacks against NATO warships. Her immediate reaction was to have British military forces stand ready to defend themselves against all aggression while at the same time making sure that Britain’s allies knew that they could count upon London should the very worst occur.

In addition, Thatcher suggested that her fellow Western leaders get together to discuss what they knew and how they were going to work as a team to put on a united front against the terrible threat to them all that these Soviet actions represented. She issued instructions that an emergency summit should be arranged as soon as possible and NATO leaders be invited to London where she would host such an event.




Eighteen

The London Summit took place over the weekend of the 20th and 21st of February.

Thatcher hosted three of her fellow Western leaders at Downing Street and they came with their senior military and intelligence advisers. Security was tight and there was an especially strong presence of Secret Service personnel that travelled with President Reagan; the well-adjusted suits and dark sunglasses that those men wore contrasted measurably with the bright police uniforms worn by Diplomatic Protection policemen in Downing Street.

Security personnel came with both President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl to London as well and they added to the crowd of VIP protection around the summit.

By keeping the meeting between the heads of government from Britain, the United States, France and West Germany the summit was initially very successful. Intelligence on what was going on in the Soviet Union and the apparent motives for the actions of that country’s leaders had already been shared and thus time had passed for those Western leaders to consider what they had been told. They all understood that there was a very real threat posed and so discussed this between them.


Kohl made it clear that the civil disturbances that had been taking place in West Germany were causing immense damage to his country… not only in terms of lives lost. The domestic terrorists groups, backed by the Soviets either directly or indirectly, were gaining some sympathy within West Germany. There wasn’t much support for those people, but there was just a little: this came from the misguided and the stupid, but it was happening. The national economy was buckling under increased security measures and worker absenteeism, along with the fears of foreign investors causing them to abstain from bringing money into the country. In addition, many of the reservists that were being called up to assist in providing back-up for the security forces came from vital industries. West Germany was in trouble, Kohl told his fellow national leaders, and he was worried how bad things just might get.

Mitterrand explained that he had fears that the Soviets might actually make a major military effort rather than just the pinpricks that they had already undertaken. He informed the others that France could not brush any attack off and would react with appropriate force to such a thing. Furthermore, France had a long standing commitment to the NATO alliance and Mitterrand stated that his country would honour this.

Advisers surrounded Reagan when he was meeting his fellow NATO leaders and had whispered conversations with him that raised eyebrows all around. Nonetheless, he articulated his views well enough for everyone to understand what he was saying and how serious he was. The American President stated that he had a very real fear that the stand-off between NATO and Soviet forces might come to war; he didn’t want that, he added, but it seemed like the current situation was heading that way. Such a thing had to be stopped from happening because he didn’t want to see a war taking place.

Thatcher was glad to hear that the others all saw the danger posed to their countries and that there was no division between them. She did express her worries though that the leaders of other NATO countries that she had spoken to before the London Summit weren’t as steadfast as those here at Downing Street were in understanding the threat and being willing to stand up against it. What she had heard from the Dutch, Greek and Italian Prime Minister’s hadn’t given her comfort at all when they had each told her that they didn’t regard the current international situation as seriously as she did. Kohl, Mitterrand and Reagan all promised that they would look into such a thing.


At the end of the summit’s first day, after the meetings had broken up and as the national leaders unwound after their flights into Britain before they would talk again on the Sunday, there was trouble in London.

The London Summit had been thrown together in haste, but it wasn’t something that was secret. In the few days between Thatcher arranging for her fellow national leaders to come to London and them arriving, demonstrations had been planned. There were a pair of these and they were organised by people who regarded Reagan and Thatcher as representations of the Devil on earth.

On that cold Saturday evening, scuffles broke out first between the police and this turned into instances of projectiles being thrown before rioting erupted. In Hyde Park, where a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) rally had come to an end after a march through Central London, the most serious violence was short-lived and soon brought under control by riot police; there weren’t that many hard-core troublemakers taking part in the CND rally.

Things were different across in Trafalgar Square where anarchists found themselves penned in by police after their rally had not followed police instructions to disperse and not attempt to head either towards Downing Street or the American Embassy in Mayfair. Those at this march were not easily controlled by the police and many of them revelled in the opportunity to use violence against the forces of law and order. There were injuries throughout the crowd and in the ranks of the police when as the evening grew dark and a fire was started when Canada House – beside the Square in the heart of London – was partially invaded by the rioters. In the end, mounted police broke up the rioters… but there were bodies then later pulled from the mayhem behind.

The British media covered both of these events and images of what occurred both in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square were broadcast on television that night.

Anarchists clad in black being attacked by the police were not something that elicited sympathy from the viewing public, but there were opposite reactions expressed when the Saturday night news on the BBC and ITV showed generally middle-class families – including children – running from advancing riot police in Hyde Park. Some of the coverage of the police breaking up that rally was later regarded as being taken out of context by the media eager to attain viewers, but it was still shown that night on the television.


When the London Summit resumed on the Sunday, there were at once distractions for all of the principle attendees.

Kohl broke away from the talks on what to do with regard to the Soviets by taking telephone calls from Bonn. There was an impromptu march taking place in the northern part of his country where anti-nuclear campaigners were planning to head towards the nuclear waste storage facility at Gorleben in Lower Saxony. His intelligence people were telling him that a big crowd was expected to attend and there was also information to suggest that left-wing terrorists might use the opportunity to target the security forces policing the march.

The French President returned to the talks with a lot on his mind too. His Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, had been on the phone to the Embassy overnight when Mitterrand had been there and had been causing trouble. The man wasn’t from Mitterrand’s Socialist party but rather was a Gaullist and a major political rival. He had informed his President that he would be resigning the following day when Mitterrand returned to Paris due to major disagreements over foreign policy that the two of them had; thus Mitterrand’s government was coming apart while he was out of the country.

Reagan came back to Downing Street fresh from a trans-Atlantic telephone call where he had argued with his Vice President. Bush and Reagan had once been very close, but before that they had been major rivals with great ideological differences between them; the hostility had returned to their relationship since Bush had been on the campaign trail to replace Reagan at the White House. Reagan was noticeably bad tempered after the phone call and couldn’t seem to pay attention to the matters at hand.

The host too had her own difficulties.

The trouble on London’s streets overnight hadn’t been that terrible, but there were political consequences from it. In Hyde Park at the CND rally, an Anglican Bishop – one of the senior people within the CND’s organising staff – had been struck by an errand police baton in the face. A picture of his bruised and battered face was on the front pages of several newspapers; there were no images of the trio of dead bodies of rioters who were found dead in Trafalgar Square. All sorts of political figures from the Left and the Right had jumped to the defence of the Bishop who had been attending what was regarded by many as a peaceful event before it was broken up for not having the required permission to not only take place but also enter the open space of Hyde Park. The Bishop was a man who knew how to relate to the media and he had friends in politics too. Thatcher had been getting phone calls from senior people in her own party – the ‘men in grey suits’ – and none of those calls had been friendly.

Thus, the talks on Sunday led nowhere. No one could agree on a strategy that was anything more than what they had already promised to do: stand up to Soviet aggression. While at first glance such a method of action sounded just what was needed when expressed by a national leader, in reality this was very hollow indeed and only words. There were no plans made between Kohl, Mitterrand, Reagan and Thatcher for the further sharing of intelligence or plans on how to act together in a military fashion to stop any more Soviet attacks on the armed forces of the NATO countries.


Before the American and French Presidents as well as the West German Chancellor flew home to their respective nations that evening, they each were delayed in London to watch a statement made in Moscow by Shcherbytsky that was carried by the international media.

The Soviet leader was not only addressing the Soviet people, but the world at large. He spoke of the West’s leaders meeting in London and asked if they were preparing to make war on the Soviet Union and its people. For more than seventy years since the Revolution in 1917, he declared, the ‘fascists and imperialist of the West’ had been ‘trying to attack the Soviet state and enslave its workers’; the Soviet Union ‘only wanted peace’ he added.

Shcherbytsky spoke of ‘defenders of the workers and peace campaigners’ in Germany being beaten and shot to death by the ‘fascist regime in Bonn’, one which was backed up by ‘guns supplied by London and Washington’. Warships from the ‘imperial navy of the United States’ had ‘illegally penetrated’ Soviet waters as they ‘spied on the Soviet state’ too.

These strong words were then followed by a rhetorical question that Shcherbytsky put: he asked whether it was time for the ‘workers of the West’ to ‘follow the example of the Soviet people’ in what he deemed ‘liberating themselves from illegal puppet governments’.

Such words hadn’t been heard since the years of Lenin and Stalin. It was apparent to all that the Soviet leader was calling for the overthrow of Western governments and no one was in a position to stop him from doing so.

Twenty-One

George P. Shultz was assassinated in the city of Tegucigalpa on February 24th.

The American Secretary of State was about to enter the American embassy in the Honduran capital when the convoy of cars he was travelling in was raked by gunfire and rockets fired from shoulder-mounted launchers. The Diplomatic Security Service bodyguards that were travelling with Shultz didn’t stand a chance and the US Marine security personnel from the embassy grounds were too late to react either.

Shultz died with twelve other Americans in Tegucigalpa.

Guerrillas from the Chinchoneros Popular Liberation Movement (CMPL) were the ones who undertook the assassination of Shultz. This communist terrorist network had been active in Honduras for the past decade fighting against the US-backed government in Tegucigalpa. The CMPL drew inspiration from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the FLMN in El Salvador in the guerrilla struggles of those two organisations as well as being covertly backed by both the Cubans and the Soviet KGB with money, intelligence and smuggled arms.

The gunmen who struck at the visiting American and his bodyguards had been supplied with weapons stolen from the Honduran Army and had intelligence on Shultz’s movements that allowed them to hit his convoy right at the most opportune moment. Three of their own number were killed when Honduran security forces near the American embassy managed to return fire, but the rest of the hit team managed to get away clean leaving nothing but corpses behind them. Orders had come down from high up in the CMPL organisation for the mission that they had undertaken and no explanation was given to the gunmen on the ground as to exactly who they were killing, why their mission was to be carried out and who had ultimately ordered it.

Even if they had known who had originally given them their mission, that information would have done the CMPL gunmen no good. Within the hour, when back at their safe-house in the hills above Tegucigalpa, commandoes from the Honduran Army’s notorious ‘316 Intelligence Battalion’ slaughtered all six surviving gunmen. A furious fire-fight within their hideout took place and the terrorists were all shot dead when apparently ‘resisting arrest’.

CIA intelligence personnel based at the embassy, who were still in shock at Shultz’s murder and in contact with Washington, were not informed about the actions of 316 Battalion. They considered that they were the commando force’s paymasters and indirectly gave the orders for that unit to operate against foreign-backed guerrillas. Much later when they did try to establish who had sent the 316 Battalion into action, they discovered that that senior intelligence officer within the Honduran Army’s hierarchy had taken his own life by shooting himself in the head not once but three times.

All the signs pointed to a first-rate deniable intelligence operation taking place to assassinate Shultz.


Washington learnt of Shultz’s murder very quickly.

Like all embassies worldwide, the one in Tegucigalpa was provided with modern communications equipment allowing the Ambassador to be in constant and secure contact with the State Department. When the Secretary of State was murdered right outside the embassy grounds, the Ambassador to Honduras at once got on the phone to Washington to inform them of what had occurred. He was aghast at the killings and also very concerned at how security had been breached: someone had known that Shultz was in Honduras for what were meant to be secret meetings with the country’s President regarding United States support for the little Central American nation against violent foreign subversion.

President Reagan was on an official visit in South Carolina when he was informed that Shultz was dead. He would later shed a private tear or two for the loss of a man he considered to be a loyal friend and also someone who was extremely effective in his role as Secretary of State, though before that he acted like the statesman that he was.

Shultz would have eventually to be replaced with someone else to fill his position but before then the United States would have to find out what exactly had gone on. Reagan wanted to know who had killed Shultz and why they had done so. He quickly flew back to Washington amid tight security while arranging for his National Security Council to be assembled at the White House.

There would be a price to be paid for Shultz’s assassination…





Twenty-Two

It was meant to be a secret that Shultz was down in Honduras meeting with the president of that small Central American nation and promising him armed military support should forces from Nicaragua attack his nation’s sovereign territory. The Washington press corps knew that the Secretary of State was out of town and had been briefed that he was on his way to the Near & Middle East to meet with the leaders of four allied nations there. He never went to Athens, Ankara, Cairo and Tel Aviv – four capitals in three days had been the plan – but rather was assassinated in Tegucigalpa.

The American media would have a lot of questions about this that they would be demanding answers for… but before then the US Intelligence Community had their own urgent enquires to make.

Both the CIA and the DIA (the Defence Intelligence Agency) had operations people based in Honduras who acted to secure US interests there. Some of these intelligence operatives were very experienced and capable; Honduras wasn’t the ideal posting, but it was one where an intelligence officer would learn his or her trade. They quickly realised how they had been outfoxed by a cunning opponent who had managed to set up the hit upon Shultz and then make a move to get away clean with what had been done.

Looking for whoever was responsible, those American spooks quickly fought that they were chasing ghosts. There was no one for them to get a lead on despite the firm instructions that came down from Washington for them to locate and detain the perpetrator of this infamous act. There was no country to point a definitive, accusing finger at either with the only intelligence they could get no better than an educated guess at which nation might have wanted such an effective diplomat such as Shultz to be gotten rid of in the dramatic fashion that was his murder.

Though they didn’t know it, the CIA and the DIA had only been given just the one day by the Reagan Administration; military options were being considered there in case the spooks failed to achieve the wholly unrealistic goal of solving the murder of Shultz within a twenty-four hour time period. Much time later, several years in fact, the architect of such a short time frame being given to the Intelligence Community before troops were used, Deputy National Security Adviser and former US Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, would face a lot of criticism for pushing for that over the objections of others.

The Pentagon had planning officers who drew up operational concepts for almost every conceivable military scenario. There were many war plans that dealt with Honduras and the latest, most up-to-date plan was named Operation GOLDEN PHEASANT. This was a deployment of quick reaction troops from the US Army to fly down to Honduras if there was evidence that pointed to a grave danger of the country being invaded by neighbouring socialist Nicaragua. Both air and naval assets would be on-hand to support the light infantrymen, bit it was those troops that were the key to GOLDEN PHEASANT.

During the early afternoon of February 25th, elements of both the 7th Light Infantry & 82nd Airborne Division’s left their bases at Ford Ord in California and North Carolina’s Fort Bragg to fly down to Honduras. US Air Force transports took them to Palmerola airbase, which had long been a hub of American military activity in the country.

The US Army troops involved were under orders to deploy into the areas along Honduras’ volatile border with Nicaragua.

Twenty–Five

A squadron of F-16C Fighting Falcon multi-role strike-fighters had been assigned to the mission of supporting the initial GOLDEN PHEASANT forces. The twenty aircraft were from the 429th Tactical Fighter Squadron (429 TFS) based in Nevada who had conducted an emergency flight down to Palmerola airbase that had included a long over-water trip. Once the aircraft and their pilots had been ferried down, the 429 TFS met up with pre-positioned equipment, ammunition and fuel supplies that were safely stored in Honduras over the past year as part of American military contingency plans for just such a scenario as this.

The F-16s weren’t able to go into action as quick as the paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division did: there were several reasons behind this.

The 429 TFS had been selected for the deployment from Nevada all the way down to Central America because they had just finished a full-scale training mission and thus were seen at the peak of their readiness. There were also a high proportion of high-grade officers with the squadron along with many of them being Spanish speakers. Furthermore, the squadron – and its parent wing, the 474th Tactical Fighter Wing – was not directly assigned a NATO reinforcement mission in Western Europe. The 429 TFS was thus seen as being perfect for deploying in support of GOLDEN PHEASANT.

Despite these factors, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world for a squadron of fourth-generation combat fighters to go straight into action abroad instantaneously. After the pilots had flown their F-16s down to Honduras, they needed a rest after the long flight. Those aircraft needed to be checked over by maintenance technicians that had flown down to Palmerola airbase too on other aircraft and then the fuel and weapons in-country needed to be removed from storage. Intelligence and Operations Officers needed to get a lay-of-the-land down in Honduras before the fighters could get into the sky too.

Then there was the attitude of Tegucigalpa to be taken into consideration.

The Honduran Government had been greatly alarmed at the threat to them by the Nicaraguans but also weary of the intentions of the United States too following the death of their Secretary of State in Honduras. The Honduran President and his cabinet didn’t want to have their country being used as a base of operations for a full-scale war that might rage across Central America. They only had to look across at neighbouring El Salvador to see what a warzone was…

Tegucigalpa made a mistake with the paratroopers from the 1/504 INF being given free rein to do practically as they wished on the border and therefore the logistical time-delay involved with getting the 429 TFS in-place allowed the Honduran Government to act. Messages were sent to Washington and also to the US Military Mission setting up in Honduras that no American aircraft based at Palmerola would be allowed to conduct either defensive or offensive air missions outside of Honduran sovereign territory. The wording of this firmly expressed position was designed to politely convey the message to the Americans that they couldn’t attack Nicaragua from Honduras.

The Hondurans really didn’t want to start a war.


The 429 TFS started flying missions at dawn on the morning of February 27th. The prepositioned supplies at Palmerola were small (more were to be flown out as soon as possible) though the first two flights from the squadron took to the skies above Honduras well-armed.

Silver Flight was the radio call-sign for one of the two-aircraft flights that came out of Palmerola and started to patrol the skies over south-western Honduras making racetrack patterns as they did so. This pair of aircraft were fitted for a counter-air mission carrying many air-to-air missiles each and in contact with Honduran radar stations on the ground in case the Sandinistas sent aircraft of their own forward across the border to support their troops on the ground. The Nicaraguan Air Force was regarded as a joke by the Americans and if they did send any fighters northwards, the pilots within would have a short and fatal morning when faced with state-of-the-art F-16s flown by American pilots who knew their business.

The other pair of F-16s were designated Carson Flight and were fitted for the mission of close air support (CAS). These 429 TFS aircraft were loaded with bombs and air-to-ground missiles before leaving Palmerola that morning. The paratroopers on the ground had needed air support the day before when it wasn’t available; now that it was, Carson Flight expected to be called into action as soon as they were airborne.

The troops on the ground soon needed that air support on offer.

At first light, the men of the 1/504 INF again started to find themselves faced with Nicaraguan troops approaching positions at strategic points behind the border where they had set themselves up to defend. Just like the previous day, the Sandinistas were still trying to attack Contra supply bases despite battles the previous day with American troops of whose nationality they were not yet sure off. The American paratroopers followed their ROE and engaged the Nicaraguans as violently as possible.

Carson Flight was called in on two separate occasions to give urgent CAS to two company-level positions that the 1/504 INF were maintaining. Each time, one of the F-16s would swoop down from the skies and drop 500lb and 2000lb bombs with a high-level of accuracy onto the Nicaraguans; the Maverick anti-armour missiles that the F-16s were carrying remained unused in the face of the light infantry that the Sandinistas were fielding.

This air intervention was vital in allowing the 1/504 INF to be protected from heavy casualties, unlike the day before. The Nicaraguans had no counter to the F-16s whizzing through the skies and they were smashed by the falling bombs that fell among them. Carson Flight had great success and the paratroopers on the ground cheered their Air Force colleagues.


Unknown to any of those engaged in the fighting on the Honduras-Nicaragua border, nor yet back in Tegucigalpa and Washington, there were a few senior Sandinista military officers coming over the border with sealed orders for various forward commanders. There was much electronic jamming being undertaken by the Americans over the airwaves that the Nicaraguans had been using and so old-fashioned methods of communication on the battlefield had to be used. The messages being sent forward came straight from the Presidential Palace in Managua and were telling those forward units to withdraw back over the border at once and with no delay.

Operation DANTO was being cancelled in private, but not in public. Daniel Ortega appeared on the radio from Nicaragua – a message that was carried both by Radio Havana and Radio Moscow too to worldwide listeners – declaring that his country was under attack by forces of ‘United States Imperialism’. He stated that American aircraft and troops had been ‘attacking Nicaragua unprovoked’ and that the ‘Revolution needs defending’. This defence of Nicaragua and its people meant that Sandinista military forces were engaged in a ‘police action’ across in Honduras.

Ortega’s lies were deliberate.

Soviet KGB advisers with him in Managua had informed him all about the Honduran Government’s worries over the situation spiralling out of control, but the lies needed to be told: there was the promise of a substantial financial aid package awaiting for Nicaragua from Moscow should Ortega do the bidding of the Soviet Union. The Nicaraguan leader considered himself foremost a patriot and he was willing to do as his foreign backers wanted for now as long as he gained something for him and his country at the end of it all.

All Moscow wanted, he was assured, was a war of words to break out where the United States would be distracted by a brewing conflict in Central America over what else was going on the world. Like his counterpart in Tegucigalpa, Ortega didn’t want a real war to erupt.

How foolish was he.




Twenty–Six

The last thing that London wanted to happen was for Washington to be distracted by events in Central America. Thatcher and her advisers – now meeting in secret on a regular basis in Downing Street as a ‘Crisis Committee’, a War Cabinet in all but name – were gravely alarmed to see Reagan’s attention focused there. Honduras and Nicaragua could go to war for all they cared, just as long as the United States kept its concentration on the threat to peace and prosperity in the West that came from behind the Iron Curtain.

As the fighting on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border intensified, that looming threat from the East became more worrying by the day.


Official pronouncements from Moscow to the contrary, the Soviets were showing no particular interest in Nicaragua. Radio Moscow might have been claiming the an ‘Imperialist war of aggression’ was underway against the ‘impoverished native peoples’ of Central America, but beyond those broadcasts there was nothing that Britain’s intelligence operatives nor diplomats could see as acts of support coming from the Soviet Union to Nicaragua. All that was detectable to agents of the Crown was that there were near hidden acts taking place behind the Iron Curtain that could only be interpreted as direct threats to Britain and its interests.

Signals intelligence reports pointed to high levels of unusual activity around two military command bases that Britain’s Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS: a military intelligence gathering department of the HM Government) had far more than a passing curiosity about: at Legnica in Poland and Minsk in the Soviet republic of Belorussia.

Information gathered from many reliable sources and confirmed over the years pointed to senior command staffs operating from these locations being responsible for both the Northern Group of Forces and the Belorussian Military District. The former controlled Soviet ‘defensive’ forces garrisoned in Poland with the latter responsible for troops stationed across Belorussia. Further sources had shown that in the event of war, these command staffs would direct military operations that would take place across northern West Germany… right where Britain’s military commitment of NATO was mainly focused.

It wasn’t the right time of year for military exercises to be soon to take place – there was thick winter snow across much of Central Europe – as might be expected with an increase in communications from Moscow to both Legnica and Minsk. Unless something terribly unexpected was going on in Moscow, the only explanation that the DIS could give the War Cabinet in Downing Street was that the two command posts were receiving well-encoded orders for them to be prepared to do something.

In addition to this, MI-6 delivered to the War Cabinet details of a debriefing from one of its few remaining left operating behind the Iron Curtain. Recently, the KGB had been suspiciously catching far too many of MI-6’s agents-in-place (though that was a matter for another day) at once but there was one high-level source still in place within the Kremlin and delivering what was regarded as solid information. Curwen’s people had learnt that there had been yet another violent episode in Moscow among those high up on the rungs of power there.

Marshal Akhromeyev had lost his life in what was being sold as a heart attack but had in reality been an execution by a firing squad of KGB men; Chebrikov and Shcherbytsky had had enough of the man’s posturing as an equal partner and ordered his death.

The implication of this was readily apparent: there would be no opposition in Moscow from the high ranks of the Soviet Armed Forces to Kremlin-ordered military action.


Away from what information was coming in from Eastern Europe, those in Downing Street were still dealing with the after-effects of the Grey Terror that had been unleashed on Britain. The fire at Grangemouth oil refinery had finally been put out and bodies recovered from there, but the death toll in Scotland had been nothing compared to that in West London.

When the Sabena airliner smeared itself into the ground all across Isleworth, the Belgian-flagged Airbus-310 jet had been carrying almost two hundred passengers and crew aboard. It had been flying into London-Heathrow from Brussels before being hit by what was suspected to be a missile fired from a shoulder-mounted launcher. Who had fired the missile, where they had got the weapon from and why they had done so were questions that no one yet had answers to.

Thirty-seven people on the ground along with the one hundred and ninety-six passengers aboard the airliner had been killed as a result. There were many witnesses to the incident: a few people claimed to have seen the missile rising up from the ground while many others had then seen the aircraft coming down into a residential area of suburban London. Journalists had been on the scene of the carnage on the ground very soon afterwards and the news of the crash had been widely reported.

The UK Government had decided not to implement reporting restrictions and stuck with that decision afterwards. Thatcher had decided that this was the best course of action to take so that the country would know that the Sabena crash was an act of terrorism launched against Britain and undertaken on the orders of a hostile foreign power; there were coded debriefings given to the media making this clear.

There were people aboard soon to begin to psychologically prepare their people for war, but such a process had already begun in Britain… it was now only a few weeks away.