by Jeremy Duns
For the purposes of my story, I have engineered it so that the Kremlin would consider retaliation more seriously than they may have done in reality. As well as the B-52s heading for Soviet airspace, I’ve invented a separate incident: the leaking of chemical weapons to the bases at Paldiski and Hiiumaa. Unlike GIANT LANCE, no such incident ever took place, but it is also inspired by historical fact. At the end of the Second World War, Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union formed the ‘Continental Committee on Dumping’ and disposed of some 296,103 tons of captured German chemical weapons, many of them in the Baltic Sea. Several countries continued to dump chemical weapons in the Baltic and elsewhere until around 1970. Most governments kept the extent of these programmes secret until the 1980s, when details began to emerge, but there are still notable gaps in the record.
At the time, it was argued that these chemical weapons would dissolve in water and therefore not harm anyone, but that has not proven to be the case. During the war, German scientists created Winterlost, a new formulation of mustard gas made with arsenic and phenyldichloroarsine that was more viscous and was capable of withstanding sub-zero temperatures. I have invented the idea that Winterlost was carried by U-745, but the substance itself is real, and a powerful chemical weapon. This type of mustard gas is insoluble, and leaks of it can still cause harm today. It is estimated that one fifth of the Nazis’ production of toxic gases was dumped in the Baltic, including almost all of their Winterlost. Over the years, mustard bombs have been recovered on beaches in Poland, Germany and elsewhere, and many fishing nets have been contaminated and, in some cases, people harmed. In July and August 1969 four fishermen near Bornholm were seriously injured when mustard gas leaked from an object pulled onto deck. According to retired Soviet General Vello Vare, chemical weapons may have been dumped at two sites near Paldiski in the 1960s. I’m indebted to Dr Vadim Paka of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanography in Kaliningrad and John Hart of the Chemical and Biological Security Project in Stockholm for discussing these and related issues with me.
The Åland islands are a demilitarized Swedish-speaking part of Finland, and lie in a crucial strategic position in the Baltic. Hitler planned to invade the islands in 1944, but abandoned the idea after the Finnish armistice with the Soviet Union. Stalin also had plans to invade Åland, and also abandoned them. On 23 December 1944, U-745, a German type VIIC U-boat under the command of Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm von Trotha set out from Danzig into the Gulf of Finland. On 11 January 1945, it sank the Soviet minesweeper T-76 Korall off the Estonian island of Aegna. On 4 February, it sent its last radio signal, probably after being hit by a mine. On the evening of 10 March, von Trotha’s body was discovered by fishermen frozen in the ice on the tiny island of Skepparskär in Föglö, in the south-east of the Åland archipelago. He was buried in the foreigners’ section of Föglö church, at which members of his family placed a small plaque in 1999.
I have invented that U-745 had Winterlost as a cargo, and that the Soviets and British sent agents to Åland to investigate, but the description in Chapter III of the discovery of Wilhelm von Trotha’s body, its recovery from Skepparskär, autopsy in Degerby, the appearance of the body and the details of the effects found on it are all taken from the police report written on 12 March 1945. I have imagined that the notebook mentioned in the police report was a Soldbuch. Several other details were provided to me by Eolf Nyborg, the son of the chief constable at the time, who saw the body, his wife Astrid, and Uno Fogelström, all of whom were living in Föglö at the time. I am very grateful to them for their help, as well as to Stefan Abrahamsson, Gunnar and Gunnel Lundberg, Karl-Johan Edlund, Kenneth Gustavsson and the staff of Föglö church, Mariehamn library, Nya Åland and Ålandstidningen. A special thanks to my parents-in-law, Karl-Johan and Anne-Louise Fogelström, for all their help and advice.
Some believe that the wreck of U-745 is near Hanko, but it has not yet been found. Neither has U-479, which went missing in the Gulf of Finland on 15 November 1944 with all fifty-one hands lost, nor U-676, which went missing somewhere between Åland and Osmussaar, with its last radio signal being received on 12 February 1945. U-679 was also sunk by depth charges from a Soviet anti-submarine vessel near Åland on 9 January 1945. In 2009, the Soviet submarine S-2, which sank in 1940, was discovered by a team of divers off the coast of Märket in the Åland archipelago.
I would also like to express my thanks to Gunnar Silander, Fredrik Blomqvist and Dan Lönnberg of the Åland coastguard for arranging the visit to their abandoned station in Storklubb – and for showing me the sauna there, built in 1961, which features in Chapter XVI.
The bunker described in Chapter II is the Reserve Command Post of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, better known as Stalin’s Bunker, near Partizanskaya Metro station. Now a part of the Central Museum of Armed Forces, it opened to the public in 1996. The decor I have described is inspired by the session hall in the museum, itself an estimate of how it looked when built. The bunker in Miehikkälä can also be visited, as can many others along the Salpa Line.
Despite the mass of material published about the Cold War, our perceptions of it are changing almost by the day. While I was writing this novel the first authorized account of MI6 operations was published, and several key documents about Britain’s nuclear contingency plans were declassified. As a result, some of the information in the books in the bibliography that follows can now be seen as flawed or obsolete. The two reports mentioned in Chapter II are the Strath Report of 1955, declassified in 2002, and ‘Machinery of Government in War’, also from 1955 and declassified in 2008. Exercise INVALUABLE took place in September and October 1968, and FALLEX-68/GOLDEN ROD in October of that year.
All the details of the United States’ and Britain’s contingency plans for nuclear war mentioned in Chapter II are based on declassified files, with the exception of the locations earmarked for central government in Britain after 1968, which are informed speculation. Construction work on the bunker in Corsham began in 1957, but the plan to relocate the country’s elite was exposed by an article by Chapman Pincher in the Daily Express in 1959, and a D-notice was hurriedly issued to stop more information leaking out. No further articles were written about it, and the plan was given a succession of codenames to protect it, including SUBTERFUGE, STOCKWELL, TURNSTILE and BURLINGTON.
In April 1963, a group of activists, ‘Spies for Peace’, discovered the existence of several bunkers that had been earmarked for regional government following a nuclear attack, and published pamphlets exposing some of their locations, to widespread media interest. As a result of this – and perhaps also, as Paul Dark speculates, the defection of Kim Philby – the plan to use the Corsham bunker as a post-strike shelter was abandoned. It seems it may have been kept as a cover story to discourage anyone from searching for the new sites, and many articles, documentaries and books have repeated disinformation about it since its existence was declassified by the Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office in 2004. But documents declassified in 2010 show that a new plan, codenamed PYTHON, was put into place in May 1968. This involved senior officials being separated into groups and dispersed to several locations. While I was writing this novel, it was revealed that the royal yacht Britannia was a PYTHON site, but the number and location of the remaining sites is currently unknown. The fact that limited information about PYTHON is now being declassified may mean that this plan has also now been superseded or altered enough that it can be revealed without jeopardizing the security of the new arrangements. The idea that Welbeck Abbey is a PYTHON site is my speculation based on conversations with Mike Kenner, who has conducted an enormous amount of research on this topic. I’m grateful to him for taking the time to clarify many of the issues surrounding this and for sharing his research material with me, including many documents that were declassified as a result of his requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
That act has affected the way in which we understand our recent history, both for the better and
for the worse. As a result of decades in which very little was revealed, a mountain of material is now being declassified. As an inevitable result, the National Archives gives more prominence to, and even issues press releases for, only a selection of the material it declassifies. It is the information in these files that is most often reported in newspapers and reproduced in books. However, an enormous amount of material is declassified by the National Archives, most of it with no fanfare, and much of this is not analysed or explored by journalists or historians.
It would be impossible for the National Archives to provide analysis for everything it declassifies, but the result is that information that may substantially change our view of history is hidden away in files that very few people are aware have even been released. Researchers keen to explore the ramifications of so much material must wade through it seeking to understand its context and, often, its secrets. After requesting that a government file be declassified, it goes through vetting to ensure it does not endanger national security. But once released, an eagle-eyed researcher might notice a passing mention to an appendix that has not been attached. A request is sent for the appendix to be declassified. After vetting, it is. The appendix mentions a codeword in passing – this leads to questions about the meaning of that codeword, and attempts to figure out which unclassified files might contain information about it. In other words, this is something of a maze, and there are still large gaps in our knowledge of what really happened in the Cold War.
Nevertheless, the British, American and other governments have declassified an enormous amount of material about the era in the last two decades. Much less has been declassified by the Russians. An exception is the report that Paul Dark reads in Chapter VII written by GRU chief Pyotr Ivashutin in 1964. The quoted excerpts are translations from the original document, carried out by and quoted courtesy of the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (www.php.isn.ethz.ch), the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich and the National Security Archive at the George Washington University on behalf of the PHP network. My thanks to the Parallel History Project and the Cold War International History Project for their work in analysing and making available so many documents, and in particular to Dr Vojtech Mastny for his helpful answers to my queries, and for his scholarship.
Also in Chapter VII, Dark reads a fictional document, but one in which several real Soviet agents are mentioned. Melita Norwood was exposed as HOLA in 1999, and ERIC was revealed to be Engelbert Broda in 2009. Both passed the Soviets documents about Britain’s nuclear research programme. The East Germans’ spy codenamed MICHELLE was Ursula Lorenzen, who was recruited by a honey trap in 1962. In 1967 she was appointed assistant to the British Director for Operations in NATO’s General Secretariat in Brussels.
During the Cold War, the British press became obsessed with the identity of ‘the Fifth Man’, but the known double agents now number many more than five – and even those may only represent the tip of an iceberg. In Chapter XI, Paul Dark names several British agents who served the Soviet Union, but does not mention Melita Norwood, Ivor Montagu, J. B. S. Haldane, Goronwy Rees, Raymond Fletcher, Geoffrey Prime, Arthur Wynn, Leo Long, Tom Driberg, Bob Stewart, Edith Tudor Hart or others who passed information to Soviet intelligence before 1969 but had not yet been exposed. I believe the Soviet Union may have recruited many more agents in Britain and elsewhere than have been revealed to date, as part of a wide-ranging plan to plant long-term sleepers in the West.
Donald Maclean was discreetly involved with dissidents in Moscow after his defection, and was a friend of Roy Medvedev. The old acquaintance from Cambridge who was asked if he might be a sleeper ‘they’ had never got around to waking up was Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit – this incident is discussed in Robert Cecil’s biography of Maclean, A Divided Life.
The instant camera used by Anton is a Foton, which was produced in very limited numbers in the Soviet Union in 1969. Paul and Sarah’s method of crossing the Soviet– Finnish border is inspired by a successful attempt made by defector Georgi Ivanov, described by Nigel Hamilton in the 1990 book Frontiers. The pistol fired underwater in Chapter XVIII is a prototype of a Spetsialnyj Podvodnyj Pistolet (‘Special Underwater Pistol’), or SPP-1. Vladimir Simonov began work on the design in 1960, and it was finally accepted for use by the Soviet Navy in 1971.
The thinking behind Yuri’s attempt to provoke a nuclear war in the novel was inspired by an aspect of Cold War nuclear strategy mentioned by Nigel Calder in his 1979 book Nuclear Nightmares:
Many people, including experts in weapons and strategy, comfort themselves by imagining that the superpowers will consider a ‘counterforce first strike’ only if it can be overwhelmingly disabling. But ‘damage limitation’ in American parlance and the ‘counter-battery’ operations of Soviet doctrine remain desirable goals for the military men on both sides. If there is going to be a nuclear war, it is better to be hit by 5,000 warheads than by 10,000. Such reasoning leads to pitiless arithmetic: ‘If I can kill a hundred million on his side with a loss of only fifty million on my side, and smash his industry more thoroughly than he smashes mine, I have not lost, because we can restore the damage faster and our ideology will prevail in the world.’ The Soviet military leaders have reasoned in that sort of fashion at least since the fall of Khrushchev …
Finally, I would like to thank Helmut Schierer, John Dishon, Emma Lowth, Arianne Burnette, my agent Antony Topping and my editors Mike Jones in the UK and Kathryn Court in the US for their wealth of helpful insights and suggestions on the novel, and my wife and daughters for their unending patience as I wrote it.
Select Bibliography
Declassified documents
Cable from Strategic Air Command Headquarters to 12 Air Division et al., Increased Readiness Posture, 23 October 1969, Top Secret (Air Force, FOIA Release)
‘Government War Book Exercises Held During 1968: INVALUABLE’ (The National Archives, PRO, CAB 164/375)
‘Machinery of government in war: Report of working party and related papers’ (The National Archives, DEFE 13/46, 1955)
Memorandum, Secretary of Defense Laird to National Security Adviser Kissinger, 25 June 1969, Subject: Review of US Contingency Plans for Washington Special Actions Group (FOIA release)
Plan of Actions of the Czechoslovak People’s Army for War Time, 14 October 1964 (Central Military Archives, Prague, Collection Ministry of National Defense, Operations Department, 008074/ZD-OS 64, pp. 1–18. Translated by Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive, Washington DC, and Anna Locher of the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research, Zurich)
Soviet Study of the Conduct of War in Nuclear Conditions: Memorandum from Ivashutin to Zakharov, 28 August 1964 (Central Archives of the RF Ministry of Defense (TsAMO), Podolsk. Translated by Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive)
‘Soviet Wartime Management: The Role of Civil Defense in Leadership Continuity’, Vol. II – Analysis, Interagency Intelligence Memorandum NI IIM 83-10005JX (Washington DC: Director of Central Intelligence, December 1983, Top Secret; partially declassified in 1997)
Speech by Marshal Grechko at the ‘Zapad’ Exercise, 16 October 1969 (VS. OS-OL, krab. 2915, 999-154, cj 18004, VUA. Translated by Sergey Radchenko for the National Security Archive)
‘Thermonuclear weapons fallout: Report by a group of senior officials under chairmanship of W. Strath’ (The National Archives, CAB 134/940. Records of the Cabinet Office: Minutes and Papers, 1955)
Articles and books
‘An Observer’, Message from Moscow (Jonathan Cape, 1969)
‘At Home with the Frazers’ (in Time, 3 February 1958)
Charles Arnold-Baker, For He is an Englishman: Memoirs of a Prussian Nobleman (Jeremy Mills Publishing, 2007)
J. Beddington and A. J. Kinloch, ‘Munitions Dumped at Sea: A Literature Review’ (Imperial College London, 2005)
Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (The Brookings Institution, 1993)
George Blake,
No Other Choice (Jonathan Cape, 1990)
Genrikh Borovik, ed. Phillip Knightley, The Philby Files: The Secret Life of the Master-Spy – KGB Archives Revealed (Little, Brown and Company, 1994)
Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle (André Deutsch, 1978)
S. Ye. Bulenkov, et al., Soviet Manual of Scuba Diving (translation of April 1969 Soviet Ministry of Defence document, University Press of the Pacific, Hawaii, 2004)
William Burr and J. E. Rey Kimball, ‘Nixon’s Secret Nuclear Alert: Vietnam War Diplomacy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969’ (in Cold War History, 2003)
Nigel Calder, Nuclear Nightmares: An Investigation into Possible Wars (BBC, 1980)
Robert Cecil, A Divided Life: A Biography of Donald Maclean (Coronet, 1990)
Ron Chepesiuk, ‘A sea of trouble?’ (in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1997)
Bob Clarke, The Illustrated Guide to Armageddon: Britain’s Cold War (Amberley, 2009)
Dick Combs, Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008)
Patrick Dalzel-Job, Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy (Pen & Sword, 2005)
Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight (Arrow, 2009)
Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (Touchstone, 2000)
Ronald Eyre, et al., Frontiers (BBC, 1990)
George Feifer, Moscow Farewell (Viking, 1976)
Benjamin B. Fischer, ‘A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare’ (Center for Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, September 1997)
Fodor’s Guide to Europe (Hodder and Stoughton, 1969)
M. R. D. Foot, SOE: The Special Operations Executive, 1940–1946 (BBC, 1984)
Kenneth Gustavsson, 80 År på Havet: Sjöbevakningen på Åland, 1930–2010 (PQR, 2010)