The Brink by Marc Ambinder

Author:Marc Ambinder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, had a few choice words for KGB deputy chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov when the latter made a visit to Berlin in late September. The Soviet response to the KAL 007 downing was not aggressive.

“This event had exceptional elements of surprise,” Mielke thundered. “What could have come out of this? We have to be extraordinarily vigilant. Nobody can say in advance what is going to happen; whether this plane incident could lead to a provocation transforming into a war. I note the problem of surprise over and over again. This surprise can lead to a war.”

The prevailing (yet private) Soviet theory, as articulated by Kryuchkov: The Americans had fiddled with the electronic flight computer of the Korean Air plane and had forced it to go off course. That, or the Americans knew the flight was off course and failed to warn the Koreans, smelling a chance to score a coup against the Soviets.

“We did not know that the downed plane was a civilian airliner. Our pilots were not aware of that. We were convinced that it was a military aircraft. When the regional ground command issued its orders, it did not know it was a civilian airliner. We are not going to make this public, but this was just how it was. We were convinced that this was a special aircraft on a specific reconnaissance mission,” he said, according to a secret East German cable.

“Our radar detected the plane prior to its violation of our airspace, about 600 to 800 kilometers before Kamchatka. The dot on the radar approached Kamchatka—the area where we have military bases. Some of them are nuclear bases. Our services were to a certain extent shocked that the plane headed directly towards Kamchatka. Such a brazen incident had never happened before. Thousands of planes fly through the air corridors there. Previous violations were just about between 1 and 5 kilometers. Yet until 1 September 1983, there had been no single incident involving a direct flight over Kamchatka.”17

Proof?

Kryuchkov said that a US reconnaissance satellite had made three passes over the area that night. Clearly, the US was watching it intently, waiting for the launch of the Soviet missile. Kryuchkov implied that the detection of the satellite passes was the reason why the SS-25 missile that day was canceled.

Mielke’s immediate concern was the Pershing II deployments. From his vantage, they threaten the defense of the state he was charged to protect. He asked Kryuchkov for assurance that Andropov was still intent on negotiating. It might be propaganda to say that the US was holding everyone else in Europe hostage for its own agenda, but that applied to the East Germans, too.

“You have to talk with everybody and argue against the missile deployment. Everybody, even the biggest enemy, has to be addressed in order to make it clear that a nuclear inferno will leave nothing behind of him,” the Stasi chief said.18

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