The Institute of the USA and Canada was no independent think tank. It worked closely with and for several parts of the Soviet regime, including the Communist Party Central Committee, the Foreign Ministry, the armed forces, and the KGB. The institute, which housed about three hundred employees, had been set up in the 1960s by Georgi Arbatov, Moscow’s leading specialist on the United States, the official who had opened the way for Massie’s visit. Arbatov was particularly close to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief.3
During the early 1980s, Arbatov and his institute were at the height of their influence in Moscow, not only because of Andropov’s ascent but also because of what was happening in Washington. After Reagan took office, the veteran Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin found that he no longer enjoyed the same access to top levels of the administration that he had held in the Nixon-Kissinger years. From Moscow’s perspective, the Reagan administration wasn’t talking much to the Soviet embassy in Washington, and Dobrynin wasn’t offering much insight. As a result, the job of the USA Institute was to address from Moscow the large questions that were not being answered by the Soviet embassy in Washington: What did the new Reagan administration represent? What were the sources of Reagan’s power? Why was he so popular in the United States? Was he planning to take the United States to war with the Soviet Union?
Radomir Bogdanov, the deputy director, was short, chunky, and balding; he bore a slight resemblance to Nikita Khrushchev. His colleagues at the institute regarded him as crude and vulgar. He had a biting sense of humor and several girlfriends.
He had not come to the institute from academia or the Foreign Ministry, the route taken by some of its specialists. Rather, Bogdanov was a leading intelligence official of the KGB. He had served as the KGB’s resident, or station chief, in New Delhi in the 1960s, during the era when the Soviet Union solidified its ties with India. Within the KGB, he was considered one of the most experienced veterans in “active measures,” that is, the spread of false rumors and other disinformation.4
Bogdanov was a familiar figure to American journalists, embassy officials, and arms-control specialists. He served regularly as an interlocutor for visitors from the United States, offering the official Soviet point of view in words that went beyond the formulations of the Foreign Ministry. From the institute in Moscow and at disarmament conferences overseas, Bogdanov volunteered opinions and themes that fit with Soviet policy objectives. “Throughout the late stagnation and early glasnost years, Bogdanov was one of the few people visiting foreigners could come to for an interview,” observed David Remnick, a Washington Post correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s.5
Many of those who dealt with Bogdanov realized that he was from the KGB. So did Massie, by her subsequent account. She was familiar enough with Soviet institutions to know that the deputy director of an organization was frequently a KGB representative.6 If anything, Bogdanov’s intelligence connections enhanced his status. When Andropov became Communist Party general secretary after Brezhnev’s death in November 1982, his ascent demonstrated that the KGB stood at the top of the institutional hierarchy in Moscow.
Throughout the early 1980s, Bogdanov issued a steady stream of warnings to visiting Americans that the policies of the Reagan administration were going to lead in some way or another to disaster. “In this Reagan administration, you have people who are ready to push the button,” Bogdanov told Nicholas Daniloff of U.S. News and World Report in early 1982. “They are dangerous people, and they are sure there is only one way to deal with the Soviet Union—to destroy it in a nuclear war.” To Strobe Talbott of Time, he declared later that year, “These people in the White House are unpredictable ideologues. They think we are so weak that we can be crushed by economic pressure. They don’t understand how this dangerous illusion might play into the hands of some people here.”7
In the meeting with Massie in September 1983, Bogdanov conveyed his usual message of gloom about Soviet-American relations. This time, he went a step further. “You don’t know how close war is,” he told her. Massie had been observing the Soviet Union from the United States, not Moscow, and her focus had been on Russian culture, not high-level diplomacy. Now she was unexpectedly getting a warning about a potential outbreak of war from a well-connected official at a time when, after the KAL incident, the Soviet Union seemed increasingly isolated from the West.
She returned to the United States in dismay, determined to find some way to ease the hostility. She pursued this quest with her usual tenacity, working the high-level connections she had been relentlessly cultivating for the previous decade. At first, she tried to gain an appointment with Reagan’s national security adviser, William Clark, by going through the famed Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, an acquaintance who knew Clark well. That plan fell through because on October 17, before Massie could land a meeting, Reagan suddenly replaced Clark at the National Security Council, with Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane.
Undeterred, Massie turned to Bill Cohen, one of the senators she had befriended. Cohen and McFarlane were old friends. For a time in the late 1970s, McFarlane had served as a Republican staff aide to the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which Cohen was a Republican member. Massie told Cohen that what she had seen and heard in Moscow seemed to go beyond the usual Soviet truculence. The United States should do something to try to turn things around, she said. Cohen called the new national security adviser, who agreed to see Massie. She relayed to the White House Bogdanov’s mutterings about the possibility of war. The two governments needed to find ways to start talking again, Massie argued. Even small steps, specific steps, would help. She offered to go back to Moscow to try to negotiate a new cultural agreement between the two countries to replace the one suspended when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan.
To McFarlane, Massie’s report of the mood in Moscow was merely one more sign that the climate between Washington and Moscow was becoming dangerous. He had already seen other, more serious indications. That fall, Reagan and his administration were confronted with what became known as the war scare of 1983.
The CIA began receiving reports that the Soviet Union believed the Reagan administration might be preparing to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The principal source was Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB’s resident, or station chief, in London, who nine years earlier had been recruited by MI6, the British intelligence service. Gordievsky told his British handlers that during the first year of the Reagan administration, Andropov, then the head of the KGB, had ordered Soviet intelligence officials throughout the world to monitor American activities for signs of preparations for war; he was afraid the new team would launch a nuclear first strike. In the fall of 1983, Gordievsky reported that Soviet officials had grown even more alarmed as they observed the United States and NATO countries begin preparing for the military exercise known as Able Archer 83. This was a test of the procedures for how the NATO chain of command would obtain approval from member countries for the release of a nuclear weapon. Under the original plans, Reagan himself was going to take part in the exercise.8
The reports that the Soviets were afraid they were about to be attacked began flowing into the White House in the early autumn of 1983. McFarlane at first dismissed the accounts; he believed they represented a Soviet attempt to create divisions between the United States and its allies before the deployment of American Pershing missiles in Europe later that fall. But other reports from the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe and from European diplomats seemed to corroborate what Gordievsky was saying: Soviet officials were openly expressing anxiety about a possible American attack. McFarlane took these accounts seriously enough to tell Reagan not to participate in Able Archer, and the exercise went forward without him.9