Sea of Secrets

By David Knight

1983. Australian navy officer Max Kaplin is invited to go to sea onboard a British warship carrying the latest high tech sonar system to hone his skills in detecting submarines. He has no idea that he will soon become involved in a game of cat and mouse with a Soviet nuclear attack submarine and a downed Soviet spacecraft carrying an illegal nuc

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Knight Novels
• Release date: Jan 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648305347

David Knight

David has helped to conduct Spiritual Development and healing circles for over 25 years. He has also been a guest speaker - sharing his enlightened experiences to promote ‘oneness’- at various Mind, Body and Spirit engagements across the UK. Through inner-dictation, dream interpretation, meditation, mindfulness, pre-cognition and healing, the books he co-writes with Spirit provide you with the foundation to discover your own path of truth. With a renewed sense of purpose, the Spiritual Guidance and Education you receive can help you reach the goal of self-realization and bliss within the permanence of love and light.David is tee-total and a vegetarian, who loves sunshine, nature, animals and his wife!

Book preview

SEA OF SECRETS

The Cold War Ignites

David Knight

This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, dialogues, situations, events and incidents, and places are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published by David Knight in 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Copyright © David Knight

This book is copyright under the Bern Convention

and the ‘Copyright Act 1968’ of Australia.

No reproduction without written permission of the Author.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Author:       David Knight

Title:            Sea of Secrets/David Knight

Edition:       1st ed.

ISBN:            978-0-6483053-2-3

Subjects:      Suspense/thriller fiction.

David Knight Novels

www.davidknightnovels.com

Also by David Knight

The Diabolicum Series

The Stalking Horse (fiction)

Skin for Skin (fiction)

Non-Fiction

The Other Jersey Boys

To my children-Andrew, Mark, Josh and Julia

‘Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.’ Ancient mariner’s rhyme

‘The survivors [of a nuclear war] would envy the dead.’ Nikita Khrushchev

‘If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.’ James Lovelock

Prologue

Anchorage, Alaska, August 31, 1983

Korean Airlines Flight KAL 007, outbound from New York, had made a scheduled refuelling stop at Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city, before its final leg into Seoul, South Korea. With all passengers back on board, at 1300Z in military terminology, 0400 local time, the jet was sitting near the end of the main runway awaiting clearance for take-off from Air Traffic Control. Departure had been delayed by an hour because of forecast strong tail winds at the designated cruising altitude of 35,000 feet that would give the plane a big boost making the arrival time in Seoul too early. Airline policy was for aircraft in the fleet not to arrive in the South Korean capital before 0600 local time on September 1, 1500Z on August 31, when customs and immigration staff would start work.

Notwithstanding this the chief pilot was impatient to be in the air. KAL 007, a Boeing 747 Jumbo, had 246 passengers and 23 crew on board for the scheduled nine-hour flight. The passenger list included three US politicians: a senator, a congressman and a state representative. Although the First and Business Class cabins were almost full, the Economy Class section had plenty of spare seats. Quite a few of the passengers had already fallen asleep when the tower finally gave the clearance for take-off.

The captain immediately taxied onto the duty runway then accelerated the Jumbo jet down the tarmac. When the ground speed reached 155 knots the co-pilot called ‘rotate’ and the pilot pulled back on the stick, causing the plane to lumber into the night sky. It almost immediately banked to the left in response to a request from Anchorage ATC to adopt an initial heading of 220 degrees to intersect its first waypoint over the tiny fishing village of Bethel, Alaska. From that point the autopilot would navigate the aircraft on a course diagonally across the Bering Sea designed to take the aircraft to the east of Soviet airspace around the Kamchatka Peninsula north of Japan. This safe course would take KAL 007 into Japanese airspace, crossing over the large island of Honshu north of Tokyo before swinging west across South Korea and into Seoul. 

Unfortunately, Flight KAL 007 was not to follow that safe course.

Through either a computer or human error KAL 007 began to deviate further to the north of its planned route, on a course of 245 degrees, a crucial error that remained unnoticed by the pilots. By the time KAL 007 should have been over Bethel, it was in fact just under 13 nautical miles north of the village. 

As the aircraft continued on the incorrect course out into the Bering Sea, the pilots tried to routinely contact ATC at Anchorage on short range VHF radio but were unable to raise them as, on the wrong course, they were too far away. However, a sister flight, KAL 015, was trailing behind KAL 007 and the sister flight was asked to transmit KAL 007’s reports. The fact that KAL 007’s pilots weren’t able to raise Anchorage ATC didn’t seem to bother them and on they flew, gradually drifting further north of their intended track.

The flight passed across the invisible International Date Line and the local date advanced to September 1, 1983. As time passed KAL 007 moved further and further from its planned path and began heading towards the eastern edge of the Soviet controlled Kamchatka Peninsula. At 1551Z the aircraft, flying on the incorrect bearing of 245 degrees, penetrated the 120-nautical mile boundary of Soviet airspace. Unbeknown to anyone on board, the plane was now a long way off course.

With escalating Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the West, the incursion by KAL 007 into Soviet airspace was immediately viewed with deep suspicion by the Soviet Far Eastern Command, still smarting from the rebuke handed to them by the Soviet hierarchy after repeated incursions by US military aircraft during a recent Western military exercise called FLEET EX ’83. As the exercise progressed the Soviet interceptor aircraft were unable to find the offending American fighters, a deficiency that resulted in the sacking of key Far Eastern Command senior officers by the Soviet military high command. So, this time, the new command team was determined that the previous shortcoming would not be repeated.

There was another, more sinister reason why the Soviet Far Eastern Command was on full alert at the time KAL 007 entered prohibited airspace. A test launch of a Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from a missile base in northwest Russia was imminent. The ICBM, to be fired from a mobile launcher, was due to return to earth in a designated target area on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The launch, illegal under the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreement between America and the Soviets, had resulted in increased Soviet security and electronic jamming in an attempt to hide it from the Americans.

To their chagrin, this ploy was not working. Two US spy planes, specially equipped RC-135 Boeing 707s bristling with electronic surveillance hardware and software had been lurking off that same peninsula and at least one had passed near the track of KAL 007 as it was proceeding on the wrong bearing. In addition, a US Ferret ‘radio-technical’ reconnaissance satellite had just appeared over the horizon on the first of three passes over the peninsula at the time KAL 007 first penetrated Soviet airspace.

With the sophisticated array of electronic surveillance equipment on board the RC-135s, it is unlikely that the American crews would not have known the position of KAL 007 and which way it was heading. However, the US aircraft were under the operational authority of the National Security Agency which unfortunately had no mechanism in place to notify civilian aviation authorities about the likely threat to KAL 007 from its actions, unintended or otherwise, in breaching Soviet airspace. With no-one able to warn the Jumbo pilots of the danger they were placing themselves in, the chess pieces were now positioned on the board with the unfortunate Flight KAL 007 the pawn about to be sacrificed.

When KAL 007 was around 80 nautical miles off the Kamchatka Peninsula, four Soviet MIG 23 fighters were scrambled to intercept the perceived threat. Onward flew the unsuspecting KAL 007 pilots, poised to intersect the coast and overfly the Soviet landmass.

As the 747 Jumbo jet crossed the coast of Kamchatka, the Soviet Far East District Air Defence Forces Command tried unsuccessfully to vector the four MIG 23 fighter planes to intercept the intruder. Once again to the Soviets’ embarrassment, the fighters were not able to find the Jumbo. KAL 007 flew on steadily, unaware of the drama surrounding it, and before long crossed temporarily back into international airspace over the Sea of Okhotsk, still without being intercepted or challenged. This was a major humiliation for the local Soviet hierarchy, adding to the pressure from earlier failures. However, the Korean aircraft’s track was going to take it back over Soviet airspace as it overflew Sakhalin Island, just north of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

An argument erupted between General Valery Kamensky, Commander of the Soviet Far East District Air Defence Forces, and his deputy General Anatoly Kornukov, Commander of the Sokol Air Base on Sakhalin Island, towards which Flight KAL 007 was headed.

‘The intruder could be an American RC-135 spy plane,’ Kamensky argued, ‘or it might be a civilian airliner. In any event, I want a confirmed visual identification’.

‘Comrade General, I respectfully disagree,’ replied Kornukov forcefully. ‘This mystery aircraft has already overflown sensitive Soviet airspace and therefore cannot be innocent. It must be destroyed.’ 

Implacably Flight KAL 007 continued on its path, soon crossing over the coast of Sakhalin Island. Again, four Soviet fighters were tasked to intercept the unidentified plane, with orders to fire warning shots in order to force the plane down. Unlike their predecessors, all four fighters rapidly obtained visual contact with KAL 007 and the lead fighter fired 200 armour-piercing shells at the jetliner. Somehow, they were not detected by the crew or passengers on board KAL 007.

Suddenly the 747 Jumbo aircraft started to climb from its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, gradually slowing as it did so, eventually reaching 35,000 feet. This unexpected manoeuvre, which in fact was an attempt by the pilots of KAL 007 to conserve fuel, was reported as an attempt to evade the attack by the pursuing pilots to Soviet Air Defence Forces Headquarters. 

The lead Soviet pilot also identified the aircraft as being a civilian airliner, although he was suspicious: it could be a civilian plane being used for military use. Crucially, he didn’t identify the aircraft as a Jumbo jet.

Fearful that he was going to overshoot the mystery aircraft because of its lower speed, the lead Soviet fighter pilot requested permission to fire air-to-air missiles. This was given, and two K 8 missiles leapt from their pylons under the wings. One, armed with a proximity fuse, exploded near the tail of the Korean airliner and immediately caused damage to the aircraft’s control mechanisms as well as rapidly depressurising the main cabin.

Amazingly, flight KAL 007 did not fall out of the sky after the explosion. Instead, it began a slow descent to around 16,000 feet. Strangely, the pilots transmitted no Mayday message. Twelve minutes after the attack, radar and radio contact was lost.

What happened to the plane once it disappeared from the radar screens became the subject of intense speculation in the Western press, with some hypothesising that the plane had actually landed, and the passengers and crew taken prisoner by the Soviets. Others were convinced the plane had crashed into the sea with all on board killed. It remained a mystery why no Mayday message had been transmitted by the pilots.

The Soviet Union remained tight lipped about the fate of flight KAL 007 for a long time, at least externally. However, inside the upper echelons of the Soviet hierarchy, it was a different story.

PART ONE

OFFICIAL SECRETS

1.1

The Kremlin, Moscow, September 2, 1983

Marshall Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, sat straight backed in his chair and scanned the room. With a full head of dark greying hair, hooded eyes and full cheeks, Ogarkov oozed authority. He was dressed in full military regalia, his drab khaki coloured uniform pressed to perfection, an impressive array of medals on display on his left breast. The face of Stalin stared malevolently down at him from a large portrait that dominated one of the walls of the chamber located in a very heavily guarded area of the Kremlin.

Normally meetings of the 25th Politburo, the principal policy making organ of the Soviet Communist Party, were scheduled on Thursdays, but the downing of Korean Airlines Flight KAL-007 had thrown this schedule into disarray. To allow the collection of vital information about the plane’s actual flight path and the events leading up to it being fired upon, the meeting was put back 24 hours, starting on Friday at 0900Z, 1200 local time. 

In the absence of the indisposed General Secretary Yuri Andropov the meeting was chaired by his deputy Konstantin Chernenko. Around twenty men, members of the Nomenklatura or government appointees, were in attendance, most seated around a large polished wooden table while several support staff stood in close proximity behind the chairs of Politburo members.

Ogarkov’s eyes came to rest on the 72-year-old Chernenko as he struggled to address the meeting. The senile old fool can hardly put two words together, he thought contemptuously. There he sits, doing Andropov’s bidding. Andropov the puppet master, pulling the strings from his sick bed.

Yuri Andropov’s illness was common knowledge amongst Politburo members, although to those outside that circle, including the Americans, the Soviet leader was believed to be fit and well. In fact, Andropov, who had only assumed the highest office in the Soviet Union in late 1982 after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, was suffering from kidney failure. His condition had deteriorated so much that he was largely confined to bed rest along with frequent dialysis at a clinic in Stalin’s old Moscow summer house. However, his ill health did not stop the General Secretary from ruling in absentia, and many of the items on the Politburo agenda were there at his behest.

Ogarkov admired and respected Andropov. In his view Andropov was a proper leader, the first since Stalin to take control of the Rodina, the Motherland, and to shake it up after too many bosses with indifferent talent and aptitude had ruled before him. He was as tough as nails, politically savvy, and as smart as a whip. Just the man to stand up to that blustering, warmongering ex-cowboy Ronald Reagan, Ogarkov thought.

Nikolai Ogarkov, an engineer by trade, was an old school communist and believed that a strong Soviet Union was necessary to counter the hegemony of the West, particularly its leader the United States of America. Having taken part as a young man in the Motherland’s battles and final victory over Hitler in the Great Patriotic War, he strongly believed that meeting force with force was the only way to keep the Rodina’s many enemies at bay. However, the application of brute force, as Stalin used in driving the Germans back from Stalingrad, was not necessarily the best way to fight and win. No, there were other, subtler, ways to do this.

Sighing quietly, Ogarkov once again studied the faces of the Politburo members, ignoring the candidate members who had no vote, focusing on those who actually wielded power. His boss, the bespectacled Defence Minister Dmitri Ustinov, was seated next to him, also clad in an immaculately tailored uniform. Despite the fact that Ustinov had never served in the Soviet military but had been promoted to the same rank as Ogarkov by Brezhnev, Ogarkov respected the seventy-five-year-old. Respected, yes, trusted, no.

There was one thing that Ogarkov and Ustinov saw eye to eye on: modernising the Soviet military to meet the threat of America’s technological advances. To this end, Marshall Ogarkov was a strong supporter of the development of space-based particle beam and laser weapons as a means of countering the threat of Western intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Ogarkov was the architect of the push to put such weapons into space to be used as a shield to destroy attacking missiles.

Even though Chernenko was nominally in charge of the Politburo, Ogarkov knew that Ustinov, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, were in control in the absence of Andropov. As Ogarkov watched Ustinov, the Defence Minister glanced at him and rolled his eyes at Chernenko’s bumbling.

Next to Ustinov sat the much younger Mikhail Gorbachev with the curious strawberry coloured birthmark that drew attention to his forehead. Gorbachev, a protégé of Andropov’s, had done much to refresh the lower and middle ranks of the Nomenklatura, replacing older members with younger, more vibrant personnel with fresh ideas. This, in Ogarkov’s view, was more than overdue. The Soviet Union had been allowed to stagnate for too long. A new broom was essential to equip the Motherland for the challenges presented by the likes of Reagan and that bombastic Englishwoman Margaret Thatcher.

Seated across from Ogarkov was the recently appointed Head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov. He had been Andropov’s deputy when Andropov ran the KGB prior to assuming the position of General Secretary. Although inexperienced in the machinations of the Politburo, Chebrikov had his uses, sitting as he did on the Defence Council, the body that provided defence policy advice to the Politburo. Ogarkov did not like or trust the KGB; that organ of State security in his view wielded too much power. He much preferred to source information and analysis from the military, notably through the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Armed Forces. Still, Ogarkov was prepared to concede that the KGB did provide helpful intelligence at times. 

As the acting chairman droned on, Ogarkov’s thoughts turned to the agenda items. To avoid any expressions of overt dissent by Politburo members, agenda papers were normally distributed well in advance of the meeting and the Central Committee apparatus addressed any dissenting view before the meeting took place. Reflecting the paranoiac view about security, official minutes of meetings often did not reflect the outcomes from the most important or most sensitive matters on the agenda. Instead they were placed into special files and marked ‘Sovershenno Sekretno’, or top secret. 

The most important topic of today’s meeting was similarly treated. Hastily prepared by staffers from the Defence Council who had met in emergency session at various times over the previous 24 hours, this topic was very sensitive indeed. It concerned the shooting down of a Korean Airlines passenger plane near Sakhalin Island during mid evening on August 31, Moscow time. Ogarkov had been tasked to provide a brief verbal report on the circumstances leading up to the incident. The detail was contained in the agenda paper for those who wished to read it. Ogarkov was relaxed-he wasn’t in the least concerned about the death of innocent civilians or the international fallout. In fact, he was rather pleased. It was about time the Rodina acted in a manner that left no doubt in the West about Soviet resolve in the face of repeated aggression.

While he waited for his turn to speak Nikolai Ogarkov picked up several of the special files and arranged them in a pile. He opened the first one and began to browse it, even though he was familiar with its contents. It was headed ‘Deployment of Pershing II Missiles’, and it contained the latest intelligence on the placement of the NATO Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles in West Germany ostensibly starting in November 1983, less than three months away. Although other intelligence sources suggested that the Americans may have already secreted a small number in place in Western Europe.

Ogarkov considered the implications of this development. Intelligence analysts believed that these highly accurate IRBMs were capable of destroying key command -and-control bunkers across the Rodina, including those in Moscow. If that wasn’t concerning enough, with only a four- to six-minute flight time from Germany to Moscow the placement of these missiles would provide the West with an unsurpassed first strike capability, leaving the Motherland with little or no time to react. The only counter presently available for the Rodina would be to hit the Pershing launch sites first.

With no emotion showing on his face Ogarkov put this file down and picked up another, slimmer one. A small frown appeared on his face as he skimmed the contents. It was a heavily censored report from the GRU rezidentura in London providing information on a new American cruise missile system called the Gryphon which was about to be deployed across Britain and Western Europe. Extremely accurate and equipped with a small tactical nuclear warhead, the Gryphon, like the Pershing II, was almost impossible to counter. 

The report conjectured that the Gryphon and the Pershing IIs were designed to counterbalance the Soviet’s ascendancy in Europe on tactical nuclear weapons. The Soviet RSD-10 Pioneer two stage missile, NATO code name SS20 Saber, had for several years been the envy of the West because it permitted the Soviet Union to hit, with an accuracy of around 500 metres, targets in Western Europe including missile sites, defence bases, headquarters, and vital infrastructure such as power stations. The new NATO twin threats, stealthier and more accurate than anything in the Soviet arsenal, were about to provide a formidable tactical advantage for the West. 

But, how likely were America and its allies to strike first? Ogarkov was in two minds as he picked up another file entitled ‘Operation RYaN Update’. Operation RYaN had been initiated by Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, in mid-1981. He had managed to convince Brehznev and Ustinov to launch an intelligence gathering operation to probe the suspicion that America and its NATO allies were planning a decapitating nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan had been recently elected President of the USA and had campaigned aggressively against the USSR, upping the ante in the Cold War stakes game of move and countermove.

Ogarkov was aware that Andropov strongly believed there was more to this than just the rhetoric of a former Hollywood movie actor. The roots of Andropov’s concern lay in the past – specifically with Operation Barbarossa, the double cross of Stalin by Hitler to launch a surprise Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Hitler had come within a whisker of success and those that succeeded Stalin were determined never again to be the victims of a surprise attack. 

In gaining support for Operation RYaN Andropov had presented convincing evidence that the Soviet Union was falling behind the West in the arms race. Other factors were at work too. Soviet communist initiatives in Cuba, Angola and Nicaragua were draining the Soviet coffers, and then there was the mess that was Afghanistan. Here the early successes of the 1979 Soviet invasion had been nullified by overt support in the form of arms and cash by the American CIA to the rebel Mujahedeen forces. All in all, it was a discouraging picture, which the Soviet leadership was determined to change. Hence, Operation RYaN.

RYaN, the acronym for Raketno-Yadernoe Napadenie, or Nuclear Missile Attack, saw the KGB and the GRU cooperatively gather raw intelligence from a variety of sources, notably human intelligence, called humint. KGB and GRU assets in Soviet rezidentury, or bases of operations, in major countries of interest including the USA, Britain, Europe, and Japan were given priority directives to task existing agents or to cultivate new ones to collect information on this subject. was in play and an enormous amount of data, some directly relevant, some indirectly, and a fair proportion with absolutely no relevance, started to roll in.

Unfortunately, the raw intelligence was not backed by analysis from those on the ground who were best placed to gauge its accuracy. Ogarkov, although supporting the RYaN concept, was wary of drawing too many conclusions from it. Others in the Politburo weren’t so cautious.

Andropov’s concerns appeared to be borne out in the following two years. During that period the Americans and NATO allies pushed hard to keep the Soviets guessing about what they were up to. However, there was a significant pointer towards the West’s military intentions arising from significant increases in incursions by NATO forces into Soviet airspace or across territory boundaries. It was clear that the West was actively testing the Motherland’s early warning defence systems. Andropov’s concerns seemed to be vindicated.

As an example of this, a Soviet intelligence review after a major NATO fleet exercise in the Norwegian Sea in late 1981 revealed disturbing results. The large flotilla of NATO ships was able to evade both a purpose launched Soviet spy satellite as well as long-long Soviet maritime patrol aircraft tasked to find the fleet. Of even more concern was that, during the exercise, several NATO ships had entered the Barents Sea, considered by the USSR to be its territory, and had lingered undetected near the Kola Peninsula, home of the Soviet Northern Fleet, for over a week. The ease with which these ships had penetrated the Soviet defence shield still gave Ogarkov, the head of the Soviet military, the shivers. 

Then, not six months previously, another large-scale US Navy exercise, named ‘Fleet Ex 83’, had been conducted in the northwest Pacific Ocean within striking range of the strategically important Soviet nuclear ballistic missile submarine pens at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the western Bering Sea. Simulated bombing runs were conducted by American planes on a small Soviet naval base in the Kuril Island chain. The Soviet military’s inability to prevent or even to counter this provocative move had raised consternation in the ranks of the Politburo. 

If the revelations about the impending Pershing II and Gryphon deployments weren’t bad enough, Regan’s announcement in March 1983 of the so-called ‘Star Wars’ program stunned even the most hardened members of the Politburo. Its proper title was the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI for short, and when deployed, it would armour plate US land-based missiles by protecting them using a space-based, laser-armed antiballistic missile system. This spurred Andropov into denouncing Reagan as a warmonger and the Politburo became even more convinced that America was planning to initiate a nuclear first strike.

A related indicator of US aggression was the RYaN intelligence on the reconfiguration of the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to be able to launch clandestine US military space shuttle missions into a low earth polar orbit. This potentially would allow the US to target Soviet military installations or even Moscow itself using weapons carried by the space shuttle. Ogarkov felt this was Star Wars in another form.

Then there was the annual NATO exercise code named ‘Autumn Forge 83’, details of which had been unearthed through RYaN sources. GRU intelligence analysts suggested that the current ‘Autumn Forge’, which had kicked off only a few weeks previously, would be the greatest threat yet to the Motherland. It was going to involve substantial NATO troop deployments into Western Europe in the next few months, including US soldiers being airlifted into Western Europe from their bases in the USA. NATO ships and submarines were to be involved as well. And some very senior people in the US and allied governments and military would be involved. Chillingly, RYaN intelligence suggested that an exercise named ‘Able Archer’, the culmination of ‘Autumn Forge’, was to include a scenario involving the ‘simulated’ use of nuclear weapons by NATO in response to escalations in the conventional war with the ‘Orange’ force (the NATO codename for the Soviet Union).

What better way to prepare for a nuclear first strike? Ogarkov thought worriedly. Under cover of the exercise, NATO could pre-position its troops close to Soviet borders, press the nuclear button for real rather than pretend, and then send its troops in to clean out any remaining pockets of resistance. The scenario was entirely plausible.

But what if ‘Autumn Forge’, including its finale ‘Able Archer’, was in reality just an exercise? Was Andropov being paranoid? Admittedly, Reagan in his public posturing had labelled the Rodina as an ‘evil empire’, but confusingly in private correspondence with first Brezhnev and then Andropov the US President had suggested meeting to resolve the issue of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Intrigue and double-dealing were games the Politburo members knew how to play; that was how they had risen to where they were today. Reagan seemingly was a master at the game as well. Where did the truth lie? Ogarkov, a hawk when it came to a choice between aggression and conciliation, was inclined to believe that Reagan had nuclear first strike on his mind. 

Unfortunately, his opinion wasn’t shared by Ustinov and Gromyko, who were more dovish about Reagan’s intent. Chernenko’s opinion didn’t matter. Andropov’s star, although waning as his kidney failure became more serious, still shone brightly enough to sway the doubters. Importantly for Ogarkov, Andropov thought as he did, and wasn’t about to sit on his hands in the face of the worsening threat to the Soviet Union.

The mounting evidence of NATO aggression was clear for all to see and Ogarkov was convinced that the Rodina should fight fire with fire. What was needed were more assertive acts like the KAL-007 response that would give America and its lackey allies in NATO reason to think twice about attempting to push the Soviet Union around. 

Before he could progress this thought Ogarkov heard his name being called. He rose to his feet, looked confidently about him at his peers and began to speak: ‘Comrades, just over 24 hours ago pilots from our heroic Far East District Air Defence Forces intercepted and destroyed a spy plane near Sakhalin Island after it had earlier overflown strategic defence assets on the Kamchatka Peninsula.