The Dead Hand

regiment and gave us a dressing-down. They really berated us.” When the commission left, the commander told the pilots that if there was ever air combat over the Kurils, they would not have enough fuel to get back home and would have to eject from their planes somewhere over land to save their own lives. The stress was enormous. “For several weeks we kept our guns at the ready and waited,” Osipovich said. The tension only abated some in the months that followed. He was so stressed out, he said, that he was urged to take a vacation.

After the three-carrier battle group exercise at the end of April, the Enterprise steamed for San Francisco Bay. The carrier had been away from a port for thirty days, the longest single stretch of the year. When the navy studied the Soviet reactions to the exercise, they were puzzled. While the Soviet air monitoring was heavy, the surface surveillance was “nearly non-existent,” Kelly noted in one report. Another commander recalled that despite the unique nature of the exercise—the only one using three carriers in decades —“the Soviet reaction was mild.” The Soviets sent their standard Bear and Badger aircraft by every other day. “The primary adversary for all considered was the weather,” the commander said, which included fog, low temperatures, high winds and low visibility.

After the exercise, however, the Soviets learned much more about what the Americans were doing. The ship had sent 57,000 messages and received more than 243,000 during the year; encrypted electronic communications were the backbone of the navy’s system of command. In the communications room, some of the sensitive paper messages were quietly spirited away by Jerry Whitworth, forty-four, the senior chief radioman, a lanky, bearded sailor who had served more than twenty years. He hid the messages in his locker. Whitworth had been spying for the Soviet Union since 1976 as part of a ring led by another navy veteran, John Walker. Whitworth met Walker between two and four times a year, giving him twenty-five to fifty rolls of undeveloped film from a small Minox camera carrying some of the most ultra-secret information of the Cold War, including the cryptographic keys that unlocked the navy’s electronic communications around the world. Thus, for years, the Soviets had been reading the navy’s mail.¹⁷

On this cruise, undetected, Whitworth stole paper copies of the messages about the fleet exercise. He also made tape recordings of his observations. “We’ve been playing a lot of games with the Russians while we were in the I.O.,” or Indian Ocean, he dictated one night. “There was a Russian carrier, Kiev… It was down there and we played a lot of games with her. And now we’re up in Japan and Korean area and we’ve been surveiled every day by the Russians. Every day. Flashed messages all over the place. They’ve been disrupting our flight operations too. Which pisses off the air devils. It kind of makes me laugh to tell you the truth…”¹⁸When the Enterprise returned to its home port in Alameda, California, on April 28, 1983, Whitworth possessed nearly the entire playbook of the exercise, including messages about the F-14 flyover. Whitworth had decided to end his espionage, but he had one more load of documents to share with Walker. Whitworth photographed about one-third of the messages he had taken from the ship with the Minox camera, but he deliberately put the lens out of focus so the film would be useless; he was holding back, perhaps as an insurance policy to get more money in the future. However, wanting to give Walker something valuable, he included the actual documents about the F-14 intrusion into Soviet airspace. They met June 3, 1983, and Whitworth gave Walker a large envelope filled with films and documents. Walker scribbled notes on the back of the envelope as Whitworth briefed him. “All messages… secret and one top secret,” Walker wrote. He delivered the film and documents to the KGB wrapped in a plastic garbage bag at a dead drop on June 12, 1983.

At a time of profound worry about nuclear war, the Kremlin had been given an original, firsthand look at U.S. war games. Vitaly Yurchenko, a top KGB official who defected to the United States in 1985, told U.S. officials that the Walker spy ring was “the most important operation in the KGB’s history,” and had led the Soviets to decipher more than one million encrypted messages. Whitworth provided the Soviets with a full year of operational message traffic from the U.S.S. Enterprise, some of it top secret, and compromised the operations order for FLEETEX 83-1, a navy damage assessment later discovered.¹⁹ Among other things, Whitworth compromised the plans for “primary, secondary and emergency communications” to be used by the president to link up with military forces. The damage assessment found the information given the Soviets by the Walker spy ring would “give the Soviets an ability to make almost real-time tactical decisions because they knew the true strength of our forces, their plans for combat, the details of our logistic support and the tactical doctrine under which our forces operated.”²⁰

Four days after Walker’s drop of the plastic garbage bag of secrets to the KGB, Andropov told the Central Committee that there had been an “unprecedented sharpening of the struggle” between East and West. And Moscow KGB headquarters sent an alarmist telegram to residencies in the United States and other European capitals, stressing the high priority of the RYAN intelligence-gathering operation, and claiming the Reagan administration was continuing preparations for nuclear war.²¹

Reagan was buffeted by one crisis after another in the spring and summer of 1983. On April 18, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was destroyed by a massive explosion, which killed seventeen U.S. citizens, including the senior CIA analyst for the Middle East, and forty others. When the caskets came home on Saturday, April 23, it was a traumatic moment for Reagan. “I was too choked up to speak,” he recalled. Shultz was pushing for greater engagement with Moscow while Clark was resisting. At one point Clark proposed to Reagan that he take over the Soviet account. Shultz threatened to resign. Reagan was “visibly shaken,” Shultz recalled, and asked him to stay on.

In early July, Reagan decided to write a personal letter to Andropov, perhaps another test of whether he could reach out on a human level to a Soviet leader. Reagan drafted his letter in longhand. He wrote,

Let me assure you the govt & the people of the United States are dedicated to the cause of peace & the elimination of the nuclear threat. It goes without saying that we seek relations with all nations based on “mutual benefit and equality.” Our record since we were allies in W. W. II confirms that.

Mr. Sec General don’t we have the means to achieve these goals in the meetings we are presently holding in Geneva? If we can agree on mutual, verifiable reductions in the number of nuclear weapons we both hold could this not be a first step toward the elimination of all such weapons? What a blessing this would be for the people we both represent. You and I have the ability to bring this about through our negotiations in the arms control talks.

Scratched out by Reagan, after the last words of his longhand draft, was another mention of his goal, “reduction talks that could lead to the total elimination of all such weap.” Had he sent the letter he wrote, it would have been an extraordinary document, the first time any president ever tabled such a sweeping proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But the letter never left the White House. The next morning, Reagan gave the draft to Clark, who consulted experts on the White House staff. They were astonished that Reagan would suggest wiping out all nuclear weapons. On July 9, Clark wrote to Reagan suggesting that references to nuclear weapons be taken out of the letter, so the Soviets wouldn’t be tempted to raise the ante at the stalled Geneva arms negotiations. Reagan agreed, and sent a formulaic letter to Andropov on July 11.²² Andropov and Reagan exchanged two more letters that summer, but nothing came of them. Andropov told a group of visiting U.S. senators that the Soviet Union would ban anti-satellite weapons if the United States would do the same, but the offer was brushed off by the Reagan administration. Reagan headed for his 688-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez mountains. After August 12 he wrote nothing in his diary for the rest of the month. For two weeks, he concentrated on building a wood fence at the ranch. It was finished August 30, 1983.²³

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Kremlin fears of a nuclear missile attack were growing ever more intense. On August 4 in Moscow, Andropov insisted at a Politburo meeting that “maximum obstructions” be put in the way of the deployment of American missiles in Europe. “We must not waste time,” he said.²⁴ On August 12, new instructions from Moscow landed at the London residency. These instructions, marked “top secret” and signed by KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, were an attempt to figure out if the intelligence services of the West were somehow helping prepare for a nuclear attack.

The sixteen-point checklist was largely a mirror image of the Soviet contingency plans for war with the West. The KGB agents in Bonn, Brussels, Copenhagen, London, Oslo, Paris, Rome and Lisbon were told to watch out for such things as “a sharp increase in the activity of all forms of intelligence,” especially on the readiness of Warsaw Pact forces; possible positioning of agents to awaken sleeper cells in the East to “operate in wartime conditions;” closer coordination between the CIA and Western spy agencies; an “increase in the number of disinformation