At the May 31 Politburo meeting, Andropov called for tougher propaganda against Reagan and the West. “We need to show more vividly and broadly the militaristic activities of the Reagan administration and countries of Western Europe supporting it,” he said. Andropov also suggested that such propaganda would “mobilize the Soviet people” on the economic front. But at the same time, there was a downside.
“Certainly,” he said, “we shouldn’t frighten our people of war.”
Ever since the previous autumn, as Andropov’s paranoia deepened about a possible nuclear missile attack from Western Europe, there had also been ominous new threats on the Pacific horizon. The United States carried out extensive war games, realistic and provocative, off the Soviet coast in the Far East. In late September 1982, two U.S. aircraft carriers, the U.S.S. Enterprise and the U.S.S. Midway, sailed within three hundred miles of the Soviet Union’s major Pacific Fleet base at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. This was the only Soviet base in the Far East with direct access to the open ocean and home to the Delta-class ballistic missile–carrying submarines. The base was at the end of the sparsely populated Kamchatka Peninsula. After brushing by the peninsula, the American ships sailed south along the Kuril Islands, including four islands held by the Soviets since World War II but claimed by Japan, before entering the Sea of Japan on October 3. During the exercise, the Enterprise was the subject of extensive Soviet air, surface and underwater surveillance, according to the records of the commanding officer, R. J. Kelly.10 Later in the autumn, while in the Indian Ocean, the Enterprise happened upon a Soviet aircraft carrier, the Kiev. The commander decided to use the ship to carry out “a practice long-range strike against the surface force.” The Enterprise sent several aircraft on a mock attack against the Soviet ship. A navy intelligence official said the planes flew “seven hundred nautical miles toward the Kiev, made contact, visual contact, with the Kiev and then came back.”11
In these war games, the Enterprise, a nuclear-powered supercarrier, 1,123 feet long, was the center of Battle Group Foxtrot, made up of a dozen ships, accompanied by bombers and refueling tankers in the skies and submarines below. They were secretly collecting electronic intelligence, watching how the Soviet forces responded, monitoring their communications and radar. The exercises reflected the “forward strategy” of the navy secretary, John Lehman, to confront the Soviets in waters close to home. Lehman said his “forward strategy” meant always “keeping the Soviets concerned with threats all around their periphery.” Lehman sought to build a six-hundred-ship navy, including fifteen carrier battle groups, and the navy had been a major beneficiary of Reagan’s rearmament program.12
Reagan had also secretly approved psychological operations against the Soviets. The point was to show the United States could deploy aircraft carrier battle groups close to sensitive Soviet military and industrial sites, apparently without being detected or challenged early on. In the Pacific, the U.S. forces charged toward Soviet bastions to see how they would react. As one intelligence official put it, they wanted to go up Ivan’s nose.13
In the weeks after Reagan’s speech on strategic defense, the United States ratcheted up the pressure. In April and May 1983, the U.S. Pacific Fleet conducted its largest exercises since World War II in the North Pacific, off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Forty ships, including three aircraft carrier battle groups, participated in a massive exercise code-named FLEETEX 83-1. The Enterprise left Japan on March 26 and was joined by the Midway four days later. They sailed north through the Sea of Japan and out the Tsugaru Strait together, meeting the U.S.S. Coral Sea on April 9. For about two weeks, all three carriers conducted a counterclockwise sweep of the northwestern Pacific Ocean. The exercise involved twenty-four-hour flight operations off the Enterprise, attempting to force the Soviets to react by turning on radars and scrambling aircraft to meet intruders. The exercise was explicitly aimed at rehearsal for antiaircraft and antisubmarine warfare, showing how the three-carrier battle group would support other forces in the event of all-out conflict. Watkins, chief of naval operations, later told Congress that such exercises were designed to show the Soviets that the United States would not be intimidated. “Our feeling is that an aggressive defense, if you will, characterized by forward movement, early deployment of forces, aggressiveness on the part of our ships, is the greatest deterrent we can have,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1984. “And the Soviets really understand that. We can get their attention with that concept… We can make a difference. Kamchatka is a difficult peninsula. They have no railroads to it. They have to resupply it by air. It is a very important spot for them, and they are as naked as a jaybird there, and they know it.”14
On April 4, the Americans flew up Ivan’s nose. According to author Seymour M. Hersh, the Midway slipped away from the other carriers after shutting off all electronic equipment that could be monitored by the Soviets. The Midway steamed south toward the Kurils and the Soviets did not track it. A group of at least six navy planes from the Midway and the Enterprise violated Soviet borders by flying over the island of Zelyony in the Kuril archipelago, which stretches between Kamchatka and Japan. Hersh described it as “a flagrant and almost inevitable error, triggered by the aggressive fleet exercise and the demand of senior officers for secret maneuvers and surprise activities.” The navy subsequently told the State Department the flyover was an accident. But the larger, more aggressive maneuvers were clearly a part of Lehman’s deliberate strategy. The Soviets protested in a formal message to the American Embassy in Moscow on April 6.15
At the time of the flyover, Gennady Osipovich, an experienced pilot, was stationed at an air base, Sokol, on Sakhalin Island, a long, thin volcanic peninsula that stretches north-south along the other side of the Sea of Okhotsk from Kamchatka. Osipovich, a stolid man with thick black hair streaked gray, was deputy commander of a regiment. For thirteen years he had been flying the Su-15 interceptor, a fast but fuel-guzzling, twin-engine fighter designed in the 1960s to stop enemy bombers in an attack. The interceptors could reach twice the speed of sound but not remain aloft for long; they had limited auxiliary fuel tanks. Moreover, once airborne, pilots had to follow precise orders for their every move from the ground controllers. The job of the interceptors was to scramble fast and stop the intruder. There was little individual discretion or initiative.16
In the spring of 1983, Soviet pilots were haggard from the war of nerves with the Americans. They were constantly chasing and responding to spy planes that buzzed the Soviet borders. Osipovich had flown more than one thousand missions to intercept them. Unfortunately, the navy F-14 flyover of Zelyony Island in April caught them by surprise. According to Osipovich, the American planes zoomed in for fifteen minutes during a period when fog shrouded the island. The violation of the Soviet border brought trouble for the pilots; an investigating commission was established to probe how they failed. “After that incident,” Osipovich recalled, “a commission flew out to the regiment and gave us a dressing-down. They really berated us.” When the commission left, the commander told the pilots that if there was ever air combat over the Kurils, they would not have enough fuel to get back home and would have to eject from their planes somewhere over land to save their own lives. The stress was enormous. “For several weeks we kept our guns at the ready and waited,” Osipovich said. The tension only abated some in the months that followed. He was so stressed out, he said, that he was urged to take a vacation.