Operation RYAN

So he was like, you know, seeing a map of the United States being destroyed like in a matter of minutes, like everybody, the whole thing.

So the USSR did a war game called Operation Ryan.

And Ryan, R-Y-A-N, like the name.

But in Russian, it means like nuclear war, whatever.

That's an acronym.

And we learned about Operation Ryan from Oleg Gordievsky.

And did you talk about Gordievsky when you talked about Robert Hansen? I

don't think so.

Not just back to where we were, but kind of further than that.

There was a cranking up of the paranoia, and we talked about this in the last episode, in large part because of something that the Soviets were doing called Operation Ryan or Operation Rion.

As we discussed before, that was basically the Soviet intelligence apparatus trying to read tea leaves to decide, are the Americans going to launch a first strike on us? But there are historical reasons why the Soviet Union, especially the leadership at the time, would have been really sensitive to the idea that they were going to get sneak attacked.

This is why we brought in Lee.

This is a multi-nation alliance.

I guess one of the things, I'm sure Nathan will get to it, but what does the Able Archer simulation look like to Soviet spies in Europe?

Yeah, because remember, the Soviet spies under Operation Ryan have been asking questions like, hey, are there lines at the blood bank? Whereas now what they're seeing in these three days in real life in this simulation is NATO forces have been put on full alert.

They remain there for the entire simulation.