Authors: Kenneth Sewell
Official Soviet reaction following such an attack would also be a factor in shifting the blame to the Chinese. After a strike against Pearl Harbor, an outraged President Johnson would immediately call General Secretary Brezhnev and accuse the Soviets. The plotters were confident Brezhnev could be counted on to react in his usual hysterical way. He had actually once fainted when plotting with Suslov and a small group in the Kremlin to overthrow Nikita Khrushchev. Brezhnev’s shocked response to the furious American president’s call, and the lack of evidence that the Russians had prepared for a counterattack, would almost certainly convince the Americans that the Soviets were not to blame. They would be sent looking elsewhere for the perpetrators.
It would be imperative for Western spies to observe that everything was calm in Moscow on the day of the attack. There would be no military alerts underway anywhere in the USSR. All Politburo members and their families would remain in the cities, going about their normal lives. That aspect of the scheme required no planning. Since only the few closest members of the plot were even aware that a rogue strike was imminent, the citizens of Moscow and their leaders in the Kremlin would be observed conducting business as usual.
If not the Soviet Union, then only Red China was capable of such a sneak attack. Soviet intelligence agents kept track of the Chinese Golfs’ sailing schedule. With careful timing by the plotters, the American satellites should discover that one of the Chinese ballistic missile submarines was somewhere at sea in the first week of March 1968.
It seemed a perfect plan to men who were evil enough to sacrifice tens of thousands, even millions, of lives to achieve their long-held and long-frustrated goal of world dominance by Soviet-style Communism.
The plotters’ line of reasoning almost certainly set as its primary goal the complete obliteration of China’s power structure by an immediate U.S. nuclear retaliation. With that terrible task accomplished by the Americans, Brezhnev would be forced to send the Soviet Union’s million-soldier Far East Army into China. The Soviets would be seen by the rest of the world as marching to restore order in China, while the Americans would once again be branded as the only great power to employ nuclear weapons on an Asian populace.
With most of its ground forces tied up in Vietnam, there was little likelihood that the United States could occupy the vast territory of mainland China, with a hostile and reeling population of nearly one billion. China’s key territories with rich natural resources and hegemony of the entire Communist world would fall to the Soviets.
Suslov, Andropov, and a select cadre in the KGB probably found little in such a plot that could go wrong. They certainly reasoned that their own cover was adequate, and the unfolding revelations on the ground would prevent the Americans from blaming the Soviet Union. But there was one small weakness in their plan that they could not have identified at the time. Like many of the proverbial best-laid plans, this one was doomed to failure from the outset.
The plotters had underestimated America’s spy technology. Soviet intelligence was not yet fully aware of just how good the SOSUS hydrophones, radio intercepts, and satellite spy systems had become in tracking Soviet submarines. The DIA and NSA had been accurately tracking all Soviet submarines for more than a year, and had tracked K-129 from the time it sailed from Kamchatka Peninsula to its arrival in the patrol box northwest of Hawaii. The U.S. Navy knew they had a Soviet Golf II, not a Chinese Golf I submarine, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands on March 7, 1968.
Had the attack on Pearl Harbor succeeded, the mighty American hammer of revenge would have fallen swiftly on the Soviet Union, dooming plotters and innocents alike. But the men in Moscow who sent K-129 on its ill-fated mission were unaware of this small, but fatal, flaw in their horrific plan and proceeded, oblivious to the potential consequences of their deed.
T
HERE WAS NO SHORTAGE OF CYNICAL MEN
in Moscow who would have been perfectly willing to sacrifice a few million comrade citizens for world dominance, if a nuclear exchange could produce Soviet hegemony, or even stave off the impending economic collapse of the Communist system.
Central to the success of a plot of this magnitude was deniability. Even the most brazenly reckless men would know that a scheme to neutralize the United States had to be foolproof. If the plotters were caught, even by their peers in the Kremlin, the end would be swift and certain. If the strike succeeded but the ruse to blame China failed, U.S. nuclear superiority guaranteed that the Soviet population, themselves included, would be blasted back to the Middle Ages. Survivors would be reduced to a collection of nomads living on the fringes of radioactive ruins where the great gray cities once stood.
Still, they felt safe in their furtive meetings. The plotters, limited to a handful of key people, could gather unnoticed in the seclusion of their building at Number 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Because of their high ranks and direct control over the security apparatus, no one dared spy on their activities. But in the paranoid environment of the Soviet Union, even high-ranking officials were careful not to be seen gathering for unexplained meetings too often. Under tight security by their KGB guards posted outside the building, no one in the Kremlin would be aware that Suslov came down from his top-floor apartment to his protégé’s apartment immediately below for extensive planning sessions. Nothing in the scheme required they meet at their offices in the Kremlin, at KGB headquarters, or in any other public place where they might be noticed by rivals within the Politburo. Discussions on the state of the economy or a plan to launch a war between the United States and China could be held without anyone knowing the meetings took place.
The plotters held Brezhnev’s circle in the Kremlin and the Soviet military in utter contempt, for their lack of nerve to take the necessary action against the Western alliance or Mao’s China that would restore the Soviets to leadership of world Communism. Yet the plotters were not strong enough to purge Brezhnev from the Kremlin, nor close enough to penetrate his security to poison him, as some in the scheme had allegedly done to their old mentor, Stalin.
While party boss Brezhnev was indeed too cautious to take aggressive action against the West or China, the Soviet generals and admirals were not constrained by timidity. They were pragmatic and knew that their planes, missiles, and ships were already far outgunned by those of the United States. In the 1960s, the Red Army leaders knew the Soviet army and navy were no match for the nuclear forces of the Free World powers. Though they would have fought to the last tank, ship, or plane—not to mention their willingness to throw millions of soldiers into suicidal assault against any aggressor striking the motherland—they were certainly not about to do anything to cause a showdown between their forces and the Americans. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that such a preposterous scheme would have been overwhelmingly rejected by the designated leaders of the Soviet military and Politburo.
The only way to proceed was by guile. If their plot succeeded, the military leaders would be forced to come to their side. If it failed, no one would be the wiser.
What kind of men were ruthless enough and powerful enough to conceive and carry out such a horrendous plot?
Many hardened survivors of the Stalin era in the party leadership had no qualms about imposing suffering or massive loss of life on their own people. Many who still held leadership positions in the Communist Party and the military remembered—and some had even played a role in—Stalin’s bloody purges and the murder or starvation of thirty million Soviet citizens in the 1930s. Others, particularly in the military, remembered the massive purges of the officer corps just before World War II. Some of these same generals had hurled human waves against the Nazi war machine, resulting in millions of additional deaths during World War II. An examination of the leadership structure, with its mix of old Stalinist and newly educated Red fanatics, reveals no lack of candidates who, without conscience, could kill a half-million Americans in a sneak attack and chance a nuclear holocaust.
Short of a deathbed confession or the secret diary of a remorseful participant, the identity of those who were involved in the mad scheme to send a rogue submarine to attack America will probably never be proven beyond a doubt. In all likelihood, most of the low-level facilitators of the plot either were quietly liquidated in the former Soviet Union or have long since died of old age.
However, some information from inside the old Soviet Union has recently come to light that provides reason to suspect key participants in such a plot. One name seems to surface each time some new dastardly deed is revealed about the Kremlin during that era. Although rarely in the forefront of the leadership, over the years this man was linked to every coup d’état, purge, or liquidation. And he always seemed to have access to both the manpower and the tools necessary for special projects of the darker kind.
The American CIA was aware of this mysterious man and attempted, without much success, to understand his role each time he emerged from the shadows in unexpected power shifts in the Kremlin. Despite his appearance on the scene at key moments, he never took the highest office for himself, and soon disappeared again from public sight. Defectors and exiles to the West almost always mentioned his name with fear and reverence, but until the end of the Cold War the extent of this man’s villainy was never clear.
A retired Cold War–era analyst specializing in Soviet affairs for an American intelligence agency was quick to suggest his name when discussing the K-129 incident.
“A good bet for the leader of such a ruthless plot would have to be a guy named Mikhail Suslov,” the analyst whispered, “along with his handpicked enforcer, Yuri Andropov.”
Recently translated books by Russian dissidents, and newly released Soviet documents from the 1930s to the end of the Cold War, reveal that the relatively unknown Suslov was an evil genius who kept the Communist behemoth functioning for much of the seventy years of its brutal history, particularly since the end of World War II.
Suslov was almost a nonperson in the Soviet hierarchy from Stalin through Gorbachev. Yet every piece of infamy attributed to the Soviet system had his fingerprints all over it. He plotted against Stalin, even though the aging tyrant was his mentor. He was the power behind the emergence of Khrushchev after the death of Stalin, and led the plot in the subsequent ousting of Khrushchev. He manipulated the rise of Brezhnev, and then turned on him. He placed Andropov in all his positions of power, and even mentored Gorbachev before finally disappearing and dying in obscurity.
Suslov was born in 1902, in a small village in the middle Volga region, to peasant parents. He rose through the ranks from youth leader for the Communist League to chief ideologue of the Soviet Communist Party, with an astonishingly eclectic and often contradictory career in between. He was at times a grandfatherly teacher known as the Red Professor, and at other times the jackbooted leader of purges and deportations known as the Grand Inquisitor.
One of the most ardent Stalinist hard-liners, he had survived all the purges from Stalin through Brezhnev, because he had been a participant, perpetrator, and mastermind in most of them. In 1967, at age sixty-five, he was already considered the gray eminence of the surviving original Bolsheviks, although his rise to power did not really begin until after World War II. While his name did not appear prominently in the Soviet government dossiers kept by the CIA, Suslov was one of the American spy agencies’ most watched men in the Soviet Union for decades.
There were several mystery men such as Suslov in high government positions who could have been potential plotters. But Suslov was first among them. During the troubled post-Stalinist, post-Khrushchev era, intrigue was the key to survival. And Suslov was a master of the game.
Suslov was a brilliant, university-trained economist and one-time economics professor at the University of Moscow. While still a professor, he had come to the attention of Stalin himself, who began giving Suslov choice assignments as early as 1948. Although not a scientist, Suslov dabbled in the state secrets of military technology. He was the party liaison to the Third Directorate, the KGB department overseeing the loyalty of the Soviet army and navy.
Still, he was suspected of participating in the widely rumored plot to oust his mentor Stalin. Evidence has recently surfaced that a group of conspirators actually poisoned Stalin to prevent his starting a new purge that would have eliminated them. Suslov is believed to have been one of these conspirators. The men who masterminded that plot replaced the dictator with Khrushchev. They later became enemies of Khrushchev when he launched an ambitious de-Stalinization plan. Suslov was especially angered by Khrushchev’s efforts at economic reform, which aimed at saving the collapsing financial system by introducing privatization of state industries and collective farms. He then led the plot to oust Khrushchev.
Suslov knew, more than anyone else, how near the Communist system of the Soviet Socialist Republics was to complete economic collapse. As editor of
Pravda,
a position he held from 1949 to 1950, Suslov had become expert at hiding facts about the failing collective economy of the Soviet Union. He was not only the guardian of a rigid Marxist ideology, but was the leading expert on the collective-style economic system of the state.
In the 1960s, he was described as grandfatherly, though little is known about his personal or family life, except that he sometimes disappeared from Moscow for months on end. Suslov was a tall, gaunt, bespectacled man who would have stood out among the normally beefy Politburo
apparatchiks,
had he not routinely positioned himself on the shadowy edge of the crowd when it came time for group photographs. This penchant for anonymity may have been the key to his survival. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and in his ill-fitting, double-breasted suits and drab ties, usually went unnoticed among the boisterous, heavy-drinking Red leaders.
Suslov had other well-honed skills that were alien to his image as both a grandfather and a professor. He was described as careful and calculating by those subjected to his darker talents, particularly in the satellite Soviet states, where he was known as despotic and completely devoid of emotion.
Suslov had been one of the most murderous implementers of the Stalinist purges and deportations.
Early in his career, Suslov left his university teaching post to become an
apparatchik
in the party’s Central Control Commission, which was in charge of party discipline and purges. As such, he became a key participant in what came to be known as the Great Purges of the 1930s. He was a staff director in Stalin’s collectivization of the Kulaks, the wealthy peasant farmers of the Ukraine and western Russia. Well over one million farmers died in this ruthless pogrom.
As a regional functionary, he headed a commission that purged the party in the Urals and Chernigov region of Russia in 1933–34, sending hundreds of his Communist colleagues to their death or long imprisonment in frozen gulags. He later headed purges that amounted to ethnic cleansing of several of the indigenous peoples of the Crimean region, and during World War II conducted major purges in the Baltic States.
In 1937, as a chairman in the Central Control Commission, Suslov turned on many of his old comrades in the educated elite and led the Stalinist purges to eliminate all the educated and technical specialists throughout Soviet society who had been held over from the czarist era to keep the country running. Most of the original Bolsheviks were liquidated, to be replaced by the young “new Soviet men” from the peasantry, who had been educated for the first time under the Soviet system.
Until Stalin’s death in 1953, Suslov was in charge of numerous smaller purges of military and governmental leaders who displeased the Red dictator. As long as Stalin was alive, Suslov held top posts as a member of the Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet. He was immediately demoted upon Stalin’s death. But he took his schemes behind cover to become one of the most powerful movers and shakers in the USSR.
In 1956, Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin, brought Suslov out of the shadows and sent him to Hungary to suppress the uprising in Budapest. It was there that Suslov took a rising star, hard-liner Yuri Andropov, under his wing. Later he would use his influence to have Andropov named director of the KGB. Despite his key role in all the important intrigues, Suslov always managed to avoid the limelight and hover in anonymity in the dark corners of the Kremlin.
Suslov was the ringleader behind the plot to oust Khrushchev and place Leonid Brezhnev in the top Soviet leadership position. He was sure he could manipulate the plodding and supposedly cowardly Brezhnev. Suslov himself could never have been named to the top spot by the Communists because of his brutal past as one of Stalin’s chief mass murderers.
His unseen hand in the affairs of Soviet politics made him a valuable player to the leadership. He was called back into service each time there was a problem that needed a fixer without a conscience.
One of the greatest problems to confront the international Communist community was the internecine feud between the Soviet Union and China, which broke out in the early 1960s.
Suslov had personally negotiated much of the Soviet military aid package to China when fraternal relations were at their rosiest. His close ties to Mao and the Red Chinese dated back to the negotiation of the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. The small group of Soviets who had worked for years to establish the alliance with the Red Chinese was especially angered by China’s ingratitude.