Reading the Signs of Threat Transformation

Second Prize-Arleigh Burke Essay Contest Sponsored by Northrop Grumman

The event that inspired The Hunt for Red October—the 1975 mutiny on board the Soviet destroyer Storozhevoy—told us much about our enemy 30 years ago. It can also tell us a lot about our enemy today.

This past November marked a little-known but significant anniversary. On 8 November 1975, a mutiny took place on board a Soviet destroyer that would later serve as the inspiration for Tom Clancy's first novel, The Hunt for Red October. Clancy's protagonist, the disillusioned submarine skipper Marko Ramius, was based on a man named Valery Sablin. Sablin was the political officer on board Storozhevoy (Sentry), a Baltic Fleet destroyer that had traveled to Riga, Latvia, in early November 1975 to take part in celebrations marking the 58th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Unlike Ramius, Sablin was a true believer in communism, which he thought Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had corrupted.

In keeping with the long tradition of rebellion in the Russian Navy that stretched back to 1905 and the battleship Potemkin. Sablin led a mutiny on board his vessel that aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of Brezhnev and the Soviet government. He hoped that by his very example he would inspire other units in the armed forces to join him in his quest to redeem communism. His predecessors on the Potemkin had lit a tinderbox of unrest in Russia with their mutiny, and Sablin thought the best place for history to repeat itself would be in Leningrad, the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution. After he convinced half the officers and all the sailors in Storozhevoy to support his mutiny, the ship cast off at midnight and sailed at flank speed for the open waters of the Baltic.

They never made it. Brezhnev was awakened in the middle of the night and told that the crew of Storozhevoy had mutinied and left Riga harbor, destination unknown. He assumed it was Sweden, and ordered his minister of defense to "bomb that ship and sink it."¹ Patrol ships and planes from the Baltic Fleet were dispatched, although several refused the order once it became clear that it meant killing their fellow countrymen and shipmates. For a few minutes in the early morning of 9 November 1975, it appeared as if Valery Sablin's mutiny might spread to the rest of the navy.

Since naval aviators were not reliable, it was eventually the Su-24 fighter-bombers of the Soviet Air Force that attacked Storozhevoy and disabled her. Soviet marines quickly followed, boarding the vessel and arresting the entire crew. Fourteen of the ringleaders, Sablin included, were hustled off to Moscow in the middle of the night to face interrogation and worse. In an effort to cover up this staggering example of insubordination and what it might imply about the discipline and morale of the Soviet armed forces, the KGB pressured the navy to reduce the number of crewmen who would be tried for treason. Only Sablin and Seaman Alexander Shein, his right-hand man during the mutiny, would go on trial for their lives. In secret proceedings, both were found guilty of being "traitors to the motherland." Shein was sentenced to eight years' hard labor; Sablin was sentenced to death. On 3 August 1976, that sentence was carried out in the basement of Lefortovo Prison in Moscow.

On 9 November, the Swedes had monitored events in the Baltic with growing alarm. From their vantage point on Gotland Island, they watched as every ship and plane in the Baltic Fleet headed straight for them. It was a few hours before they realized that the Russians were locked in a desperate hunt for a mutinous vessel, but for several anxious moments that Sunday morning it appeared as if it might be the prelude to World War III. The Swedes refuse to comment on the Storozhevoy mutiny, even 30 years on, claiming that all intelligence they have on the subject is to remain classified until 2045. They undoubtedly passed this information on to U.S. authorities in 1975, but since the Swedes were the originating agency, all the National Security Agency can say on the subject is that it can "neither confirm nor deny the existence of responsive records."²

Gerald Ford was president of the United States at the time, and one can only speculate as to whether he or Henry Kissinger, his secretary of State, heard about the ill-fated revolt aboard Storozhevoy. If so, it raises interesting questions about how the U.S. government viewed its Cold War adversary, and how the myth of Soviet omnipotence pulled the wool over nearly everyone's eyes. Such a lesson should not be lost to history, because it has profound implications on present-day U.S. foreign and defense policy.

The Soviet Threat

Fear of communism existed well before the Cold War, of course, and led to the Soviet Union's treatment as a pariah by much of the West after the Bolshevik Revolution. This attitude distorted European politics in the 1930s. Among other things, it compelled the governments of the United Kingdom and France to pursue a disastrous policy of appeasement vis-à-vis Nazi Germany rather than a more sensible policy of containment through collective security. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain doggedly stuck to this misguided path out of a profound distaste for, and distrust of, Soviet Russia. Some of Chamberlain's contemporaries, Winston Churchill foremost among them, thought that Adolf Hitler could best be contained by a military alliance between France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Although no fan of communism, Churchill recognized Nazi Germany as the greater menace to European peace in 1939. In his opinion, the German dictator only understood "the language of the mailed fist," or at least the will to use force-the critical component of deterrence.

In 1947, after two years of fruitless attempts to court Soviet goodwill following World War II, President Harry Truman officially adopted containment as the U.S. strategy for confronting communism. In gaining congressional approval for the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and aid to anticommunist forces in Greece and Turkey, Truman was putting the Soviet Union on notice that the United States would oppose communist expansion through military, diplomatic, and economic means. He was also burying forever the discredited and uniquely American version of isolationism that prevailed before World War II.

Or so he thought. Just one month after Truman's death in December 1972, the United States withdrew its last combat troops from Vietnam. The war there had brought forth a new strain of isolationism in America. No longer willing to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe," as President John F. Kennedy had put it, "to assure the survival and the success of liberty," the country was content to let the rest of the world sort out its own problems.

Six months after the fall of Saigon-the event that signaled the nadir of U.S. prestige in the Cold War-Valéry Sablin launched his abortive revolution. In the same year that many Americans were washing their hands of the East-West ideological battle, the same year that Soviet foreign policy was chalking up impressive successes far from its own borders, a Russian political officer was sailing to Leningrad to put a stake into the very heart of the communist system. The irony and audacity of his act is breathtaking and should have been a sign to anyone in the Ford administration that the Soviet military had serious discipline and morale problems.

Perhaps someone read that sign, although their name is lost to history. The forebears of what is now called neoconservatism may have had a hint that the Soviet Union was itself a giant Potemkin village-a glittering facade that covered up a rotting structure. Burdened by its own economic and political contradictions, that false front came tumbling down in December 1991, marking the official end of the Cold War.

Apparently no one saw this coming-nobody in the Central Intelligence Agency, National security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, or any of the myriad of other agencies dedicated to national security and defense. If someone did. their name is also lost to history. What followed was a decade in which Americans felt doubly rewarded by the defeat of a longtime foe (the Soviet Union) and the vanquishing of a new one (Iraq in the first Gulf War). The 1990s seemed the point at which the United States could finally take a breather from world affairs.

The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism

The outside world has always had a pesky way of intruding on American life, however, and the seemingly tranquil 1990s were replete with examples of this. The dissolution of the Cold War world order was felt in places as diverse as Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. With the destruction of one of the world's centers of gravity and the indifference of the other to the affairs surrounding it, the weaker bodies of the geopolitical solar system began to drift to other, more sinister poles. In the case of Yugoslavia, it was ethnic nationalism. In Rwanda, it was the African counterpart: tribalism.

The cause that recruited the most troublesome adherents, however, was Islamic fundamentalism, which went through various stages of development before it catapulted itself onto the world stage in Iran in 1979. The Middle East had first to pass through the discredited panArabism of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's corrupted war of national liberation before it was ready to take the message of jihad seriously. Even when it did, the age-old feuds between Sunnis, Shias, Persians, and Arabs were enough to overshadow militant Islam.

That began to change in the 1990s. World communism was not monolithic and neither is Islamic fundamentalism. Even though the leaders of Iran and the Saudi royal family both abide by shariya (Islamic law), the former would like nothing more than to see the latter overthrown and replaced by an antiWestern government like their own. And attempts by Islamic jihadists in the 1990s to portray the civil war in Yugoslavia as part of a greater Muslim struggle against infidels fell on deaf ears throughout the Middle East.

It" we accept the fact that Islamic fundamentalism is a threat to the United States, and if we view the militants who seek to spill American blood in its name as our enemies, then we must recognize that we are at war. We can respect and fear our enemy, but we should also remember that he has weaknesses and disadvantages just as we do; he responds to pressure, experiences fear, and suffers defeats. We should not lose sight of the fact that while the insurgents in Iraq are formidable, they, like any enemy, can be defeated by exploiting their weaknesses. When President Ronald Reagan abandoned the policy of detente and chose instead to end the Cold War by exploiting the Soviet Union's economic and political weaknesses, he helped to set in motion the events that would see the disintegration of that country ten years later. The fact that a nuclear war was averted is testimony enough to the success of Reagan's policy.

On the other side of the coin, it is also useful to remember that hardened Cold Warriors feared and distrusted the Soviet Union because they believed that the men in the Kremlin were liars and subversives who commanded a huge military. The possibility the Soviets might be lying about the size and strength of that military did not occur to them until much later, amid the debris of the Berlin Wall. In the meantime, this fear of communism was used to great and often ill effect at home and abroad. Potential allies who tilted even slightly to the left were often ignored and occasionally driven into the arms of the enemy. The moral of this story: Don't be fooled by the enemy's propaganda, but don't be too impressed by your own, either.

Putting the Threat in Perspective

In every conflict there seems to be a school of thought that falls under the spell of its own predictions of doom and gloom-either doves who agonize that America is getting into another Vietnam or hawks who wonder if the country has the toughness and moral fiber to fight a war. I recently read an article by a columnist in the Denver Post in which the writer wanted to institute a draft, declare war on Syria, put more suspects behind bars in Guantanamo, and generally pull out all the stops when it comes to fighting al Qaeda. A Colorado congressman even suggested on a radio show that if terrorists attack the United States with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, we should consider dropping an atomic bomb on Mecca.

Venting such intemperate remarks may feel good, but they are poor foundations for policy. While the thought of a dirty bomb on the Washington Mall or a suitcase full of smallpox on the New York subway is terrifying, putting this threat in perspective is critical. Al Qaeda has already killed thousands of Americans and can surely kill thousands more, but its main asset is psychological intimidation. It is important to remember that during the Cold War Congress wrestled with civil defense measures that anticipated tens of millions of casualties in an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. I remember watching as a teenager The Day After, a made-for-TV movie that depicted the aftermath of a nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. I recall feeling far more unsettled then by the thought of Armageddon than I do now about Osama bin Laden and his ilk. Life did go on after 9/11, whereas a Cold War nuclear showdown most certainly would have ended life as we know it.

The fear of communism and its expansion throughout the world, which was wholly reasonable, produced a slew of U.S. politicians and commentators who seemed to delight in painting the Soviet bogeyman as ten feet tall and omnipotent. After finishing boot camp in the Marine Corps, I read the book Boot by Daniel Da Cruz, which chronicled the experiences of a platoon of Marine recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina, in the 1980s. Da Cruz made the claim that current Marines (our drill instructors derisively called us the "Pepsi generation") were handicapped by the freedoms and material comforts of modern America. He seemed to admire the harsh training Soviet recruits received and implied that we were no match for them.

It was the same tired old cliché that has always been leveled at democratic armies: Their martial spirit is inadequate compared to their counterparts serving under dictatorial regimes. In fact, as the Storozhevoy mutiny clearly indicates, the poor living conditions and lack of opportunity in Soviet society embittered those sailors and left them receptive to Sablin's appeals for revolution. Far from building a professional military with an esprit de corps, the Soviet Army's severe training methods frequently degenerated into brutal and sadistic treatment of its soldiers that was totally counterproductive to military efficiency. Furthermore, they were conscripts, many of whom did not want to serve in the armed forces at all and were simply biding their time until they were discharged. The substandard conditions prevalent in the Soviet military were well documented in the West but somehow created the impression among U.S. analysts that the Russians were better fighters because of them.

Thinking Against the Grain

There is a scene in the movie The Hun! for Red October when the characters of Alec Baldwin and James Earl Jones (CIA analyst Jack Ryan and Admiral James Greer) attend a meeting with the national security adviser to apprise him of Red October's situation. Sean Connery's character, Marko Ramius, has disappeared with his very quiet and very dangerous submarine into the murky depths of the North Atlantic, and Ryan and Greer have to explain why. To everyone at the meeting, it appears as if Ramius is a rogue captain who is sneaking toward the U.S. coast so that he can launch a surprise nuclear attack. In a fit of inspiration. Jack Ryan suggests that Ramius might instead be trying to defect. Few of the men in the room believe such a thing is possible.

What is ironic is that there was no real-life Jack Ryan in 1975 to make the same case about Valery Sablin and the Stomzhevov mutiny, that perhaps his motives were not what they appeared to be. Everyone at the time assumed he was going to defect because that was what Russians always did. It seemed inconceivable to anyone in the West that he might actually want to make a stand in his home country and change it because he did not like what it had become. Yet ten years later, Mikhail Gorbachev echoed Valery Sablin when the Soviet leader said: "We can't go on living like this any longer."

What would it have taken for a U.S. government official to say in 1981 that the Soviet Union was in terminal decline and would cease to exist within a decade? He most likely would have been hounded from office or forced to resign because such a statement in those days implied only one thing: nuclear war. Even President Reagan, as the architect of the foreign policy that would push the Soviet Union over the edge, never went so far as to claim it would collapse in his lifetime.

What, indeed, does it take to change a government's mind about an enemy? Jewish refuseniks and Soviet dissidents arriving from the USSR in the mid-1970s had plenty of anecdotal evidence that the Soviet Union was in trouble. Intelligence reports documented the Stomzhevov mutiny and other signs of discontent within the Soviet military, but they did not change or even modify the conventional wisdom that our Cold War foe was practically invincible. The same thing is now happening with regard to al Qaeda. We would certainly be foolish to underestimate the scope and savagery of bin Laden's network, but it is far from invincible. Al Qaeda can be defeated and has already suffered major setbacks in its planning and operational capabilities.

It may have been too much during the Cold War to expect our government to throw a train that it had been driving hard and fast for 40 years into reverse. The fact that the intelligence community was caught off guard by the February 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and that it failed to anticipate the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran that autumn may be excusable. President Jimmy Carter was. after all, more worried that the Soviets might use the instability in Iran as an excuse to invade it. But surely the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon (1983), rash of airplane hijackings (1985). PanAm bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland (1988), World Trade Center bombing (1993). Khobar Towers bombing (1996). embassy bombings in Africa (1998). or attack on the USS Cole (2000) would have been enough to concentrate the minds and efforts of the U.S. national security apparatus? More important, would these not have been enough warning signs to energize America's political leaders to inform and prepare their people for the new struggle of the 21st century? We can blame the intelligence community all we want, but in the end it takes its marching orders from our elected leaders. Where were Congress and the presidency?

Instead, it took the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on 11 September 2001—the deadliest day on American soil since the Civil War—to finally understand what we were up against. Then and only then was resolute action taken in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 9/11 Commission Report specifically identified a "failure of imagination"—failure to imagine an attack of this nature and magnitude; failure to identify America's most dangerous and unpredictable post-Cold War enemy—as the intelligence community's greatest shortcoming.

All that is with the benefit of hindsight, but is it too early to imagine a time when we can say that Islamic fundamentalism is no longer a threat to our national security or that one danger is passing while another is forming on the hori/on? Where will this new threat come from? A China bent on asserting its nationalism in Taiwan? A revitalized and rearmed Russia? An overpopulated Nigeria or revolutionary Mexico?

No one knows, of course, but the writing can be on the wall long before any transformation takes place. Like Valery Sablin and the Storozlwoy mutiny of 1975. it can be written in large enough letters for all to see. During our current war on terrorism, we must take care that we do not overlook these messages, as we did during the Cold War.