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PRESSRELEASE: 6
November 2003
EAST
GERMAN SPY REPORTS REVEAL NATO WAR PLANS
Stasi spies in NATO obtained actual war plans of the alliance, yet
East German and Soviet leaders saw these essentially defensive plans
as a cover for a forthcoming first strike-a fear that peaked in the
"war scare" of 1983-according to new documents from the
Stasi archives posted on the http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php
website of the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact
(PHP), an international scholarly network based in Switzerland and
supported by the National Security Archive in Washington.
The documents appear on the 20th anniversary of NATO's "Able
Archer" exercise that may have been the closest moment to nuclear
war since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis because of Soviet suspicions
that the exercise was a cover for a surprise US nuclear attack. Soviet
intelligence desperately tried to discover further details and Soviet
forces went on alert.
Obtained by the Project from the archives of former East Germany's
security agency (Stasi) in accordance with Germany's 1992 declassification
rules, the collection consists of reports about the findings of Stasi
spies compiled by the agency for the information of top East German
and ultimately Soviet leaders.
The reports were selected by Bernd Schaefer, a scholar at the German
Historical Institute in Washington, as the most representative and
interesting from the files that the Stasi intelligence arm had saved
in 1990 as a kind of "trophy case" when the agency destroyed
most of its other files. They include reports about the military posture
and potential of NATO and its members states-the United States, United
Kingdom, West Germany, France, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Spain, and
Greece.
The documents show that most of NATO's closely guarded secrets were
an open book for the communist spies. The Soviet Union was thus able
to learn of its adversary's plans in the event of a war in Europe,
including the 1981 war plan of the United States 5th Army Corps, reproduced
on the website in a German translation. The spies also snatched detailed
technical information about the West's latest military technology,
such as the Pershing-2 intermediate-range missile.
The most important conclusions from the documents are:
- The Western armament policies since the late Carter administration
and especially during the Reagan administration genuinely surprised
and puzzled Soviet leaders, leading them to believe the United States
aimed at blackmailing them or else defeating the Soviet Union in
a nuclear war-a mirror image of how American conservatives tended
to view Soviet intentions,
- Thanks to the reporting by East German agents, the Soviet Union
and its Warsaw Pact allies were aware that NATO's strategy was defensive
yet acted, even among themselves, on the assumption that it served
as a cover-up for a possible surprise nuclear strike, thus justifying
their own offensive strategy on ideological rather than practical
grounds,
- NATO's November 1983 "Able Archer" exercise brought
to a climax Soviet suspicions that such a strike might be imminent,
though not to the extent of prompting the Kremlin to prepare a pre-emptive
strike that might escalate into an all-out war, thus indicating
that no conclusive intelligence of a change in NATO's strategy was
forthcoming,
- The unintended transparency of NATO's military posture, while
not enough to reassure the Soviet adversary about its intentions,
nevertheless had the beneficial effect of generating respect for
the alliance's growing conventional capability, as well as organizational
prowess, which ultimately impressed upon Soviet leaders the realization
that they could not win in a technological competition with the
West
The collection is introduced by Bernd Schaefer, who evaluates the
documents, and by Cold War historian Vojtech Mastny, the PHP Coordinator,
who relates them to the "Able Archer" incident.
All documents published on the PHP website are available for use
by researchers free of charge provided acknowledgment is made of their
PHP origin.
Visit the PHP website at http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch to read other documents and find out more about the PHP's activities.
The website is part of the International Relations and Security Network
(ISN), run by the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich).
PARALLEL HISTORY PROJECT ON NATO AND THE WARSAW
PACT (PHP)
Sponsored by the Center for
Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich,
National Security Archive at the George Washington University in Washington,
DC, Institute for Strategy and Security Policy in Vienna, Machiavelli
Center for Cold War Studies (CIMA) in Florence, and Norwegian Institute
for Defence Studies in Oslo
In association with the Cold War International History Project of
the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, Lyman L. Lemnitzer Center
for NATO and European Union Studies at Kent State University, Institute
for Contemporary History, Munich, Federal Archives of Germany, Berlin
and Freiburg, Danish Institute of International Affairs, Copenhagen,
Association "Diplomatie et Stratégie," Paris, Institute
for Political Studies, Warsaw, Cold War Research Group, Sofia, Center
for Cold War History, Prague, Cold War History Research Center, Budapest,
Institute for Political Studies of Defense and Military History, Bucharest,
Romanian Institute for Recent History, Bucharest, Modern History Research
Center and Archives at Peking University, Beijing, "Pax Mongolica,"
Ulaanbaatar
With support from Institute of International Relations, Prague, and
Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest
Affiliated with the Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies
and Security Studies Institutes
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