The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by Hoffman David E

Author:Hoffman, David E. [Hoffman, David E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 1848312997
Amazon: B002PXFYPQ
Barnesnoble: B002PXFYPQ
Goodreads: 7047474
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2009-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

The most devastating defeat for the Soviet military in 1987 came not directly from Gorbachev, but he exploited it. It came at the hands of a dreamy nineteen-year-old youth who lived in Hamburg, Germany. Mathias Rust was deeply disappointed by the failure of Reagan and Gorbachev to make a deal at Reykjavik. He decided to make a personal protest. He rented a single-engine Cessna 172P, a sports airplane, and told his family he was going to tour Scandinavia. He flew it to the Faroe Islands on May 13, and the next day to Keflavik, Iceland, the airfield from which Reagan and Gorbachev had departed after the summit.

After further travel, on May 28, he took off from Helsinki, having filed a flight plan for Stockholm. Twenty minutes into the flight, he switched off his communications gear and turned east. Finnish air traffic controllers feared he had crashed and launched a rescue effort. Rust disappeared into the clouds.

It was a holiday in the Soviet Union: “Border Guards Day.”30 At 2:25 P.M., the Cessna, with a small German flag on the tail, flying low, crossed a beach into Estonia and Soviet airspace. Thirty-one minutes later, Rust passed near the town of Kohtla-Yarve, at approximately three thousand feet. He set a course for Moscow. The Soviet air defense system picked up the plane, alerted the antiaircraft batteries and scrambled a fighter jet. The Soviet jet pilot zoomed past the small Cessna—flying seven times the speed of the small craft—and reported that it was a light plane, white, with a blue stripe, at under three thousand feet. Rust saw the Soviet jet, recognized the red star, and could spot the oxygen mask and coveralls of the pilot. He feared he would be shot down. “My heart fell into my pants,” he recalled. But then nothing happened, the fighter disappeared and Rust flew on toward Moscow.

On the ground, Soviet air and ground defenses, built up over decades to warn of American bomber fleets bearing nuclear weapons, went limp. Radar operators made no effort to determine the type of airplane that had just invaded their space. They made no immediate report to the headquarters of the Air Defense Forces. The rapidly changing weather and a certain blurriness on the radar screen caused the operators to doubt whether it was a plane at all; they thought it might be a flock of birds.31The fighter jet had only forty minutes of fuel at low altitudes, and could not remain aloft longer to search. Another group of jets were scrambled; one spotted Rust, but they did nothing. Then the radar operators lost track of Rust altogether at 3:58 P.M. No further action was taken. At 6:38 P.M., the Moscow regional air defenses switched to “routine watch duty.”

At exactly that moment, Rust was approaching Moscow, confused by its sprawling size. He spotted the cubelike Rossiya Hotel, and near it, Red Square. He approached for a landing, but there were people in the square, and he feared casualties, so Rust pulled up and circled again, and again.

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