The Third World War - The Untold Story (17 page)

Then, for no apparent reason, the red fire-warning light from No. 2 port inner engine began to flash on the main instrument panel in front of Makhov at the same moment as the warning hooter blasted in his headset. Makhov was no beginner, with 2,500 hours on IL-76 aircraft behind him. He swiftly reached down, closed the No. 2 throttle and watched the flashing red light. It stayed on. So he reached across and flicked the No. 2 fire extinguisher switch, at the same time closing the No. 2 stopcock. The flashing light disappeared and the hooter stopped.

Major Makhov noticed, with amusement, that an ashen-faced Colonel Gregorian in the right-hand seat was staring with stupefaction at the panel. But Makhov had no time to enjoy the commissar’s discomfiture. Even as he began to call to his flight engineer to check the port wing visually, No. 1 port outer light flashed and the hooter blared a second time. This time he could sense the tension on the flight deck as he swiftly killed this engine too and released the No. 1 extinguisher.

“No visual signs of fire,” reported the flight engineer.

Makhov had no doubts about his ability to handle
Cooker
on the two starboard engines only and he strongly suspected that the problem was simply an electrical fault. But the
Cooker
carried fourteen men without parachutes who were depending on him; his professional competence was on the line.

“Where is our nearest field?” he asked the navigator.

“Gdansk Civil,” came the nervous reply, “Forty kilometres on heading 355.”

Gregorian picked this up on intercom and began to shout objections to the use, without authority, of a Polish civil airfield. Makhov ignored him and switched to the international distress frequency. In quiet but good English he began to describe his emergency and his intention to make a straight-in two-engined approach to Gdansk Civil Airport. He then switched back to his own operational channel and informed his base of the situation.

In fact, the next few minutes, though tense, were comparatively uneventful. Major Makhov again demonstrated his professional skill by putting the heavy
Cooker
down without mishap. As he taxied towards the main apron in front of the terminal building he called the tower to arrange a guard on the plane while the port wing and engines were examined. He knew from long experience that even if it had only been an electrical fault, his Soloviev turbo-fans would need flushing from the effects of the fire extinguishers and the
Cooker
could be on the ground for several hours. But this was a civil airport; there were no Soviet soldiers or airmen stationed there. Since the troubles began in 1980, all Soviet military personnel in Poland had kept as far as possible a low profile, restricted to military airfields or barracks. To the conscript crewmen of the
Cooker
the bright lights of the civilian terminal looked very inviting. Colonel Gregorian had recovered his composure sufficiently to begin thinking about the possibilities of the duty-free shop.

The
Cooker
was marshalled to a halt some 30 yards beyond the last Polish civil airline TU-134 at the end of the dispersal area. As the white-overalled ground crew of the Polish state airline LOT pushed the trolley ladder up. against the forward door, a dozen armed Polish soldiers fanned out around the aircraft and the Gdansk Aeroflot agent hurried across the tarmac towards it. The conversations that followed were overheard by both Lot ground crew and the guards, but by what means they were so quickly relayed to London has not yet been made known.

Colonel Gregorian described to the agent and the senior Polish NCO the emergency they had come through and how single-handed he had overcome the panic of the rest of the crew and brought this valuable aircraft safely to earth. Major Makhov went pale and was clearly very angry. He said nothing until one of the Polish guards, in quite good Russian, asked him what had really taken place on the flight deck, and was told.

What exactly happened in the next hour is not public knowledge. What is known is that just before the outbreak of war, details of
Cooker’s
IFF codes, operating frequencies, transmitters and receivers, all of absolutely critical importance, reached the Radar and Signals Research Establishment at Malvern in England for analysis by British scientists. According to press reports at the time, the crew of a Polish LOT TU-134 made a scheduled run from Gdansk to Copenhagen late on the evening of 27 July and the crew then asked for political asylum in Denmark. Passengers on that flight described how Soviet airmen led by a portly, noisy Colonel were allowed into the duty-free shop of the Gdansk terminal and also said that as they were taking off they saw Soviet troops replacing Polish guards and Soviet uniformed ground crew taking over from the Polish engineers in their overalls who had been examining the port wing of a Soviet military aircraft near the front of the terminal. Whether there were disaffected men among the Polish guards, or among the ground crew, or whether Major Makhov allowed his anger at the bragging behaviour of the Colonel to distract his attention from his aircraft for a few minutes we do not know. But an elderly Polish cloakroom attendant, born in the Ukraine, alleged that while he was on duty one night just before war broke out an SAF Colonel was in the lavatory in the terminal building when a highly excited Soviet airman rushed in.

“The operating and maintenance manuals have gone from the aircraft!” he is alleged to have said.

His excitement was understandable. These were classified documents of high importance. Their loss was a serious matter. He was shortly followed into the lavatory by a grim-faced Major. Unaware that the attendant could understand Russian, the three men argued furiously for several minutes about whether and how the manuals could have disappeared and who was responsible.

Then the Colonel said: “Understand one thing:
NO
documents have been removed from my aircraft. If it is necessary to replace certain damaged manuals on our return to base, you will do so; but if one word of this reaches the ears of the regimental commander I will personally ensure that every member of this crew sees nothing but a Gulag for the rest of his life.”

History, therefore, had almost repeated itself. In 1939 the Poles had given
Enigma
to the West; in 1985 they seemed to have passed over the secrets of
Cooker.
Because of a political commissar’s fear of his superiors, and the airmen’s fear of the commissar, it looks as if the loss was never reported. By 3 August NATO commanders began to receive complete operational and technical data on
Cooker.
This did not get down to squadrons for another forty-eight hours, which was only just in time.

Soviet hopes and aspirations for a world position of compelling power had by the beginning of the 1980s passed through two phases and entered a third. In the early days of the revolution it was confidently hoped that Marxist-Leninist ideology would prove an irresistible magnet to the peoples of the world and the Soviet Union would sit supreme above all nations as its unique source and sole interpreter. In the background, of course, would be the additional solid support of powerful armed forces. Hopes of ideological supremacy were never realized. There has never been a mad rush on the part of other nations to follow the example of Soviet Russia and set up Marxist-Leninist states. These hopes were before long replaced by the equally confident expectation that the Soviet Union would become an economic superpower. It would easily overtake the United States and exercise thereafter unchallenged authority as the world’s richest and most productive nation. There would, of course, still be the support of powerful armed forces. These hopes too were disappointed. The gross national product (GNP) of the Soviet Union by 1984 had not yet reached $3,000 per head of population, which put it in nineteenth place among European nations. By the early 1980s the Soviet Union had indeed become a world power of truly formidable might and influence, not through the attractions of its revolutionary ideology, nor yet through its economic performance. The Soviet Union’s power, which was very great, was almost exclusively military.

Its development, and above all the desperate efforts to achieve military parity with the United States, had been costly. The economic growth of the USSR was at this time slowing down. None the less, its defence expenditure continued to rise at rather more than 5 per cent per annum and was probably taking up more than the whole increase in gross national product. One-third of all mechanical products in their final form were for military stocks, which was a serious handicap in an economy gravely short of equipment and machines. Most of the available research and development effort went to defence, as well as one-fifth of all metal production, together with one-sixth of the chemical output and about the same proportion of all energy consumed. Though the figures were made to look smaller by the Soviet Union’s internal pricing system it seems likely that by 1983 defence expenditure was absorbing something between 15 and 20 per cent of total GNP.

The Soviet Union’s ageing leadership, the character and outlook of which had been formed in the great patriotic war, had always relied heavily upon, and been very close to, the military. On grounds of age alone changes at the top were inevitable before long. Brezhnev had never made the mistake (from which, when it was made by others, his own career had so signally benefited) of indicating an heir apparent in the leadership, but change in the mid-1980s there would certainly be and with the introduction of younger men into the Politburo and the military high command, men who had not been conditioned in the same way as their predecessors, a shift in outlook and priorities could be expected.

Newcomers would hardly be likely to adopt more liberal policies. They would be hard-line realists, to whom the absolute supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and the safeguarding of their own positions in it, would override all other considerations whatsoever. Nevertheless, changes in structure, organization and style would certainly take place, if only to demonstrate that the leadership had changed. For the old guard, therefore, time was running out. They had until about the mid-eighties and probably no longer to extract full benefit in their own way from the Soviet Union’s military strength and its recently developed capability for projecting that strength at a distance, and to consolidate the world position this created. Beyond that time the distortion demanded of the economy for maintaining that position could not be indefinitely sustained, even with a populace long accustomed to its drearier consequences. Moreover, the growth in Soviet military strength had quickened defence expenditure in other countries and this in turn had reacted on the Soviet Union which, even if it had been inclined to recast priorities and spend less on defence, found itself, as the direct result of its own policies, constrained to spend more.

There also loomed the spectre of an extensive and costly military re-equipment programme to replace material, much of which had been developed more than twenty years before to embody a rather different war-fighting philosophy. This would not happen all at once but could not, without encouraging growing weaknesses in the whole defence structure, be long deferred.

There were other tendencies which also pointed to an approaching climacteric. The population of the Soviet Union increased in the years between 1974 and 1984 by some twenty-five million, but only about a quarter of this was Russian. Most of the rest was Asiatic, in which the increase was at about four times the rates found among Muscovites. The greatest increase was in Central Asia. By the early years of the 1980s the population of the USSR included some seventy million Moslems. Impermeability to external influences continued, as always, to be a prime factor in the maintenance of the supreme objective - the total dominance of the CSPU. The complete exclusion of such influences, however, could not be guaranteed, even in the Soviet Union itself.

Hunger for Western-style consumables was found everywhere. Listening to Western broadcasting was common. Probably as many as fifty million people in the Soviet Union in 1981, according to Vladimir Bukovsky, were already receiving the BBC, the Voice of America,
Deutsche Welle
and other Western radio stations. Very often listeners tuned in for the music and then stayed with the news.

The other Warsaw Pact states were even more open than the USSR to outside influences, especially in view of the inability of COMECON to satisfy their consumer needs and resultant closer contacts with, as well as indebtedness to, Western economies. In the event, therefore, that the USSR should seek a direct military confrontation with the USA it would clearly be unwise to defer this beyond, say, 1985. In the more likely contingency of consideration in the Soviet Union of how far it could proceed with high-risk policies, in which the danger of a military confrontation would be considerable, it would clearly be more prudent to pursue such policies in the early 1980s than later on. The window of opportunity would not remain indefinitely open.

The Soviets in their international relations after the Second World War and before the collapse of Soviet imperialism in the Third, though they were thought by so many to be masters of a shrewd and far-sighted strategy, often demonstrated a quite surprising degree of maladroitness. This was often so striking as to arouse comment at the time. Their extraordinary mismanagement of affairs in Austria in 1946 was a very early example, when their conviction that Austrian gratitude for liberation by the Red Army made it safe to allow free elections, in the confidence that a communist majority would be returned, resulted in the election of an Assembly without a single communist member. There was also their mishandling of affairs in Yugoslavia, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in the Middle East, in the Indian sub-continent and with China, and their dramatic expulsion, lock stock and barrel, in 1972 from what looked like a deeply entrenched position in Egypt. Rarely, however, has the history of international relations shown a more outstanding example of maladroitness than the bringing about of the NATO Alliance and West German rearmament. The Reich lay prostrate before its four principal enemies - the USA, Britain, the Soviet Union and France - totally defeated. Within four years of that time, Soviet policy had so antagonized its former allies that, with their patience exhausted, the other three saw no alternative but to form a defensive alliance and then bring in the defeated enemy re-armed. Pro-Soviet fantasists in the West sought in vain to disguise the simple truth. NATO, a purely defensive structure, was brought into being by the USSR and by the USSR alone. The Soviet Union was itself the only begetter of what was to become its greatest bane.