Authors: Kenneth Sewell
It is also logical to assume that such a plot did not originate with a renegade band of low-ranking sailors, or even a small special operations team as capable of mayhem as a KGB
osnaz
team. A scheme of such terrifying magnitude would have had to originate at a much higher level, among men with powerful motivations. There were such disgruntled men in high positions who were convinced the Soviet Union was about to collapse unless drastic actions were taken. These men bitterly opposed the modernizing influence of the leadership in the Kremlin and the army, and plotted behind the scenes of power in Moscow throughout the 1960s.
The Central Intelligence Agency was aware of this unrest, and vaguely knew some of the key plotters by name and reputation. KGB Chairman Andropov was among this group.
One former U.S. intelligence analyst, speaking in confidence about the K-129 incident, has agreed that it makes no sense that a commander such as Captain Kobzar, who was known to the U.S. Navy as a professional submarine officer with a bright future in the Soviet navy, would suddenly turn rogue on his own and try to attack an American port. To obtain that rank and control of a missile submarine, he would have had to be a dedicated Communist in good standing with the party.
The former analyst also agreed that no one man, or even a few officers on a submarine, could have planned and executed such an outrageous scheme without direction. Even the highest-ranking field officer was closely monitored by political officers working for the KGB. Therefore, the brutish agents who actually attempted the rogue attack had to have been acting on high authority from Moscow taskmasters to whom they owed great loyalty and whom they had vowed to follow blindly, even into the hellish fires of a nuclear war.
T
HE BUILDING AT
N
UMBER
26 K
UTUZOVSKY
P
ROSPEKT
on the west side of central Moscow would not have been worthy of notice among the surrounding gray monumentalist architecture, except for the unusually large number of KGB guards from the Ninth Directorate who were always lurking around it. The multistory apartment building blended into the Orwellian cityscape of the Stalin-era neighborhood, where residences of high officials purposely displayed no distinguishing designs.
Located in a setting of parks and museums along the Moskva River, the building was within walking distance of the famous Kiev train station. And the broad Kutuzovsky avenue provided unimpeded travel by chauffeured limousine to the Kremlin, the Bolshoi Theater, and KGB headquarters.
This drab apartment building housed the plainly decorated flats of the three most powerful men in the Soviet Union—Leonid Illyich Brezhnev, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, and Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov. Brezhnev was the general secretary of the Central Committee and, in 1968, the titular head of Soviet government. Andropov was the newly appointed chairman of the KGB and may have been the first member of the state security apparatus to become a member of the Politburo. Suslov, known as the Red Professor, was the chief ideologue of the Communist Party Soviet Union (CPSU), a shadowy man who eschewed titles of significance. He was, by reputation, the most feared man in the USSR.
The apartment building was important because, more telling than the titles of its occupants, it revealed a hidden hierarchical structure within the secretive sanctums of the Soviet government of that troubled era. Brezhnev’s apartment was located below Andropov’s. Suslov’s apartment was on the top floor of the building, a lofty position, higher than the others.
Each of the three-bedroom flats was deceptively Spartan—only sixteen hundred square feet with one bath. The Soviet leadership could point to these modest living quarters as proof of their austerity, while lavishing the perks of position on their
dachas,
hidden in the forests just outside Moscow.
The building was important for another reason. It was most likely the location where the master scheme involving the rogue submarine attack on Pearl Harbor was conceived and developed.
To carry out and survive such an audacious sneak attack against the greatest superpower on earth, the plotters needed strong motives and a foolproof plan of deniability for themselves and the Soviet Union. The attack had to be executed in such a manner as to prevent overwhelming retaliation against them by the United States. One way to pull off such a ruse was to lay blame on the only other belligerent nation with both nuclear missile and submarine capabilities.
The radical Stalinists in Moscow had strong enough motivation to risk such a brazen act. The plot instigators knew better than anyone else in the Politburo that the Soviet economic system was near collapse under the financial burden of the Cold War arms race. In the mid-1960s, years before vast oil reserves were discovered in Siberia and the Black Sea regions, the Soviets were already secretly spending more than half of the Communist confederation’s gross national product on their military. Additionally, the billions of rubles needed to support poverty-ridden client states such as Cuba and North Korea was fast driving the Soviet Union to bankruptcy. Only a few key leaders in the Politburo knew the USSR was about to be smothered by the Western Alliance’s technological superiority in the arms race.
Some in the Kremlin held an almost paranoid belief that the imbalance of power could tempt the Americans to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union with virtual impunity. To compound these fears, China had become openly hostile.
This double threat was summed up in a U.S. national intelligence estimate issued in September 1969, which noted that increased Soviet military expenditures were “squeezing Moscow’s ability to invest in the future growth of the economy. Events in the Far East and in Europe have posed new military requirements. Thus the perennial problem of resource allocation has sharpened, and promises to sharpen further.”
The cabal also strongly believed that Mao’s Red China had become a more dangerous threat to Soviet world dominion than the United States, and that a nuclear-armed Red China was an imminent military threat to Soviet territory in Asia.
Almost coincidentally, the American naval spy John Walker supplied stolen secrets revealing the Americans’ fear of a solo Chinese nuclear attack delivered by submarine. This intelligence could have been a key factor in the plotters’ scheme, if not providing the impetus for a plan. A plot was likely devised that, if successful, could eliminate the collapsing Soviet system’s problems with one horrendous act. The outrageous scheme was worth great risk because the Soviet Union’s two major enemies, China and the United States, would be dealt with in a single blow.
The plotters had to know that if Pearl Harbor were attacked, the Soviet Union would be the first to be suspected, and that the Americans would certainly retaliate with overwhelming nuclear force. The solution was to devise a plan that shielded the Soviet Union from blame for the attack. The only other country with the motive and capability to accomplish such a horrible deed was Red China. By tricking the United States into a massive retaliatory attack on China, the USSR could simultaneously weaken the Americans and eliminate Mao, without spending a dime from its depleted treasury.
The much-discussed deterrence policy of both the Soviet Union and the United States—known throughout the Cold War years as “mutual assured destruction” or MAD—was always an exaggeration. Certainly, by the mid-1960s, the United States had more than enough nuclear warheads and means of delivery to annihilate every major military, industrial, and population center in the Soviet Union. But the Soviets never had the capacity to completely destroy the United States. At most, they had enough thermonuclear capacity to wreck Europe. Even so, the possibility that a few bombers and missiles might get through to hit even one North American city was, in itself, a powerful deterrent for the Americans.
A sneak attack by a missile submarine firing a low-yield nuclear warhead on Pearl Harbor would immediately cripple the U.S. Navy in the Pacific and throw the Americans into a temporary state of confusion. The plotters rationalized that the source of such an attack would be impossible to determine immediately in the chaotic aftermath.
Mao had often provided a motive in his own anti-American screeds. And China had two Golf-type ballistic missile submarines. In order to successfully place the blame on the Chinese, the plotters relied on the efficiency of American intelligence. The Soviets knew U.S. spy satellites were regularly monitoring their naval facilities, and assumed they were looking down on Red China’s bases, as well. The Americans, therefore, must certainly know about China’s new Golf I submarine, which had been built and launched at Darien, China, in September 1966. Even though the Chinese boat was not as technically advanced as the Soviet Golf II submarine, it was this older version of the Golf, with its ballistic missile capability, that the plotters hoped the Americans would mistakenly blame for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
Another piece of evidence the plotters could count on to further implicate the Chinese in the attack was the fissile material in the warhead. Years earlier, China had provided uranium ores that were refined by the Soviets to make the plutonium in some of their warheads. That material was still used in Soviet nuclear weapons. Later testing of samples from the explosion at Pearl Harbor would reveal the Chinese origin of the nuclear material. The Americans would be unable to distinguish a one-megaton Chinese nuclear blast from a Soviet blast.
If neither General Secretary Brezhnev nor anyone else in the Soviet military leadership were made aware of the scheme, there would be no mobilization of forces for war or preparation for civilian defense anywhere in the Soviet Union to tip off Western spies that the Soviets were plotting a first strike. In fact, the always-nervous Brezhnev could be counted on to be near apoplectic when an angry President Johnson called him on the red phone.
The most reliably convincing culprit in this Machiavellian scheme was the one person that Suslov wanted to tar with the blame for the ruthless sneak attack, Chairman Mao Tse-tung himself. Mao had been hated by the ideological Stalinist element in Moscow since his address before the Fifth Congress of the Albanian Party in October 1966, when the Chinese leader directly challenged the Soviet party for world leadership.
“The revisionist leading clique of the Soviet Union, the Tito clique of Yugoslavia, and all the other cliques of renegades and scabs of various shades are mere dust heaps…” proclaimed Mao. “They are slaves and accomplices of imperialism, before which they prostrate themselves, while you are dauntless proletarian revolutionaries who dare to fight imperialism and its running dogs, fight the world’s tyrannical enemies.”
Mao, likewise, did not spare the Americans. His repeated bellicose threats to unleash a nuclear war against the United States provided blatant proof of Chinese animosity, and automatically pointed the evidence away from the Soviets, whose diplomats were seriously negotiating with the Johnson administration on a nuclear arms limitation treaty. Mao had even criticized the limitation of nuclear weapons and loudly proclaimed that China would never agree to relinquish any part of its growing nuclear arsenal.
In early 1968, Suslov and others in Moscow knew the USSR was not only losing the standoff with the United States and her allies, but was losing ground to Mao in the escalating ideological struggle to dominate the Communist cause in the Third World. Mao Tse-tung had declared the Soviet-style Communism to be a “personality cult” that had deviated from the true Marxist course. The Chinese leader repeatedly and publicly called for the overthrow of the Soviet-style Communist system and the punishment of its current leaders.
The best solution for the survival and rejuvenation of the Soviet Union would clearly be the crippling of both enemies at once—the United States and Red China. But the USSR simply could not do that job, even if its leadership was of a mind to do it. And that leadership, under the weak General Secretary Brezhnev, could never have been persuaded to attempt so bold a move.
The next best thing would be for the United States and Communist China to be tricked into fighting each other. Such a war could easily last many years and slowly drain the United States of its economic superiority. By 1968, the U.S. war in Vietnam, fought against a ragtag cadre of guerillas and a Third World army, had already destroyed the American public’s will to invest any more lives and treasure.
Even if a nuclear war between China and the United States ended quickly, China’s industrial and military centers would be laid waste. The plotters reasoned that the Americans would never attempt to occupy a land as vast as China. The Soviets were in a position to move into the chaos on the ground. At the time, more than half the Soviet army had already been positioned along the Sino-Soviet border.
Red China’s rhetoric against the United States reached a fever pitch in 1967–68. Mao had repeatedly ridiculed U.S. nuclear might and dared the Americans to strike China with nuclear weapons. The Chairman told the world that nuclear war would be useless against his country of one billion people, scattered over the Asian landmass.
At the same time, China was in a state of upheaval, with so-called Red Guards rampaging throughout the vast country. The Americans could be expected to believe that this chaos was a factor in a Chinese sneak attack, since no one seemed to be in charge. Soviet and Red Chinese troops were in open skirmishes all along their common border.
The Soviet leadership was also engaged in low-grade confrontations on all fronts, with the wakening Red giant in China to the southeast, and the ever-stronger European Allies controlling the regions west and south of the country, from Iran and Turkey to Norway.
Not only was there turmoil in the Soviet Union and China, but the United States was facing antiwar riots in many of its cities and universities. The Johnson administration’s military leadership was focused on Southeast Asia and distracted by the escalating war in Vietnam.
Timing was right for heaping another massive burden on the weary Americans; conditions seemed perfect for such a scheme to succeed.
Placing the blame on the Chinese was central to the success of the plot. For that reason, K-129 had to mimic exactly the capabilities of the Chinese Golf I–type submarine by positioning itself within four hundred miles of the target and surfacing to launch the strike. The K-129 had the ability to launch its missiles while submerged and hit a target nearly 850 miles away—a much safer procedure. The difference in submarine missile capacity was critically important if the Americans were to be fooled into believing the attack had been from the PRC and not the USSR.
These slight differences posed no obstacle to the plotters. All the Soviet submarine had to do was move closer to the target and come to the surface to fire its missiles. U.S. satellite technology, while excellent, would not be able to distinguish the Soviet K-129 from a Chinese Golf, even if the submarine were photographed in the act by a satellite camera.
The plotters reasoned that the Americans knew the Chinese version of the Golf did not have the range or the capability of the Soviet Golf to fire while submerged. U.S. military analysts would assume that an attacking enemy would use the maximum technical capabilities of its weapons systems. Therefore, the Americans would conclude that a surfaced submarine attack on Pearl Harbor from 350 to 400 miles off the target was the best the submarine could deliver.