Book Reviews

Dieter Kruger,¨ ed., Schlachtfeld Gap. Fulda, Germany: Parzellers Buchverlag, 2014. 313 pp. €17.95.

Reviewed by Major General David T. Zabecki, U.S. Army (ret.)

A great many books and journal articles about the social, political, economic, and grand strategy aspects of the have been written since the collapse of the . Relatively few studies, however, have been devoted to the military strategy, plans, and tactics around which the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers in both East and West centered for more than four decades. The “operational military history” of the Cold War addresses such questions as: What were the specific military plans of both sides? What were the assumptions on which those plans were based? How did each side intend to cope with any relative manpower or technological advantages of the other side? How did chemical and nuclear weapons factor into the plans of both sides? Would any initial military clash in Central Europe inevitably have escalated into a global nuclear war? And, not least, what would happen to the populations of the two German states on whose territory the initial clash would have been fought? The most likely ground zero of the war that was never fought was a place called the Fulda Gap, a natural invasion route between east and west. It was the gateway to ’s financial capital, , and the strategic confluence of the and Rivers. Frankfurt and Kaiserslautern immediately to the west of Fulda were also the geographic center of gravity of U.S. forces in Europe and the location of two major air bases through which most U.S. reinforcements would have entered Europe. The town of Fulda, in the German land (state) of Hesse, sits only a few miles to the west of what during the Cold War was called the (IGB). The Fulda Gap follows the Kinzig River valley, forming a land corridor between the Mountains to the north and the Rhon¨ and Mountains to the south. A parallel corridor runs north of the Vogelsberg. After ´ Bona- parte’s forces were defeated in the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, he withdrew his armies through the Fulda Gap and then regrouped at nearby to inflict a resounding defeat on the Austro-Bavarian army. For the better part of the Cold War, the Eighth Guards Army of the Group of Soviet Forces Germany was responsible for breaking through defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the gap. The U.S. of NATO’s Central Army Group (CENTAG) had the mission to stop them. Schlachtfeld Fulda Gap (Battlefield Fulda Gap), edited by Dieter Kruger,¨ is a long-overdue military analysis of that decisive piece of ground. Kruger,¨ one of the foremost operational military analysts of the Cold War, is a historian at the Uni- versity of Potsdam and the Zentrums fur¨ Militargeschichte¨ und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (Center for Military History and Social Science of the Bundeswehr; ZMSBw). His previous works include Am Abgrund? Das Zeitalter der Bundnisse:¨ Nor- datlantische Allianz und Warschauer Pakt 1947 bis 1991 (At the Abyss? The Era of

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Alliances: North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the 1947–1991), and a book co-edited with Jan Hoffenaar, Blueprints for Battle: Planning for War in Central Europe, 1948–1968. The team that Kruger¨ assembled for his latest book is one of its major strengths. Chapter authors include military experts from both sides of the , rang- ing from the highest levels of operational command down to tactical-level company command. The result is a work of impressive breadth and depth. In the opening chapter, Helmut Hammerich of ZMSBw reviews the operational realities of battle in the Fulda Gap and the popular myths that grew up around those realities. According to V Corps Operations Plan 33001, also known as the General Defense Plan (GDP), the U.S. 3rd Armored Division was responsible for defending the line to the north of Fulda, and the U.S. 8th Infantry Division the line to the south. The U.S. 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) had the covering force mission to the front of the two divisions. NATO policy called for a nuclear response to any Warsaw Pact use of chemical or biological weapons. The use of Atomic Demolition Munitions (ADMs) would create mobility barriers, and nuclear-capable artillery units would attack the Soviet armored formations. (Disclosure statement: In the late 1960s, I served in a nuclear-capable V Corps artillery unit based just to the west of Fulda.) The chapter by Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute in Moscow analyzes the Eighth Guards Army, which by the early 1980s had more than 1,200 T-80 main battle , 2,000 armored personnel carriers, 550 self-propelled and towed artillery pieces, and 137 attack helicopters. Retired Bundeswehr General Helge Hansen spent more than ten years in NATO’s highest command echelons. From 1985 to 1996 he commanded the 1st Panzer Division and then German III Corps, and later served as Inspekteur des Heeres (chief of staff of the German army) and finally as commander-in-chief, Allied Forces Central Europe. He explains how operational concepts evolved on both sides of the IGB from the end of the 1970s to the end of the Cold War. The evolving concepts were tested every two years in a command post exercise called WINTEX (Winter Exercise) that culminated in notional release authority for tactical nuclear weapons. Siegfried Lautsch, a graduate of the Frunze Military Academy who served as a colonel in ’s Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army; NVA) and after reunification as a Bundeswehr lieutenant-colonel, also examines the changes in Warsaw Pact military thinking over the final two decades of the Cold War. Perhaps the most significant development was the introduction of the Operational Maneuver Group, whose mission was to penetrate rapidly into the depth of NATO’s rear areas and cause chaos and disruption to command and control systems. Gregory Pedlow, the long-time director of the historical office at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in southern Belgium, examines how the military strategy of the alliance evolved from the concept of a “Tripwire Force,” to Flexible Response, and then to Follow-on Forces Attack. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Roger Cirillo was a troop commander in the 11th ACR in 1978–1980. As V Corps’ covering force, the 11th ACR would have been the first unit in combat. Cirillo

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describes in some detail his troop’s mission of defending National Highway 84, one of the primary avenues of approach to Alsfeld, northwest of Fulda. Torsten Diedrich, also a ZMSBw historian, examines the role of the German Democratic Republic in the Warsaw Pact and East Germany’s significance to Moscow. Soviet leaders considered East Germany first and foremost as a buffer zone and a staging area. The NVA had no independent existence outside the Warsaw Pact and was completely subordinated to Moscow. East Germany’s Grenztruppen (Border Troops) were a special branch of the NVA, organized and armed as light infantry, but with an internal policing mission. Detlef Rotha, a former Grenztruppen captain, examines the unit’s unique role. Bryan van Sweringen, former United States European Command historian, sum- marizes the history of U.S. V Corps from its initial landing in Europe on 6 June 1944 until the corps was inactivated in 2012. Along with German III Corps to its north and U.S. VII Corps and West German II Corps to its south, V Corps composed NATO’s Central Army Group. Mathias Rupp, a master’s candidate at the University of Potsdam, analyzes the long East-West standoff in terms of brinksmanship and game theory. The crisis of 1958–1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1961 were two such balancing acts on the brink that might have gone the wrong way. Retired Bundeswehr Lieutenant Colonel Michael Poppe provides comprehensive tables comparing NATO and Warsaw Pact strength in manpower and selective key weapons systems from 1950 to 1990. Poppe makes it abundantly clear that during the Cold War the two Germanys were essentially huge armed camps facing each other across the IGB. In his summary chapter, Kruger¨ addresses the question of whether the Soviet Union ever intended to invade Western Europe. For years the popular assumption was that the Warsaw Pact was just waiting for the opportune time to pounce. Recent scholarship, however, has painted a far more nuanced picture, with both sides having a far more defensive attitude than the other side assumed. There were, however, instances in which errors or false information might have pushed one side or the other over the edge. Once such near miss was the 1983 “Petrov Incident” in which a newly installed Soviet strategic radar system falsely reported one and then four more inbound American missiles. Fortunately, the watch officer, Colonel Stanislaw Petrov, reasoned that any U.S. attempted first strike would involve hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles, not just a handful. Given the Soviet Union’s policy of “launch on warning,” Petrov’s perceptive assessment most probably averted World War III. Throughout the Cold War it was an article of faith among most peace activists that the presence of nuclear weapons and massive military forces along the IGB made war more likely and unnecessarily increased the risk of an accidental flash point. Taking a contrary view, the French philosopher and modern interpreter of Clausewitz, Raymond Aron, noted in his 1961 book Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, “The direct contact of the armies tends to forestall incidents, accidents, and misunderstandings: it was in the void created by the retreat of the American troops [in the late 1940s] that the North Korean aggression occurred. A military void is more

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dangerous than a presence.” The Cold War was only about fifteen years old when Aron wrote those lines. Looking back on the history of the Cold War in Europe’s Central Sector from today’s perspective, we can see that Aron appears to have been right. Schlachtfeld Fulda Gap is one of the most important contributions so far to our understanding of the operational military realities of the Cold War, especially to combat in the Fulda Gap, where the Cold War was most likely to have turned hot—too hot. ✣✣✣

David E. Hoffman, The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal. New York: Doubleday, 2015. 312 pp.

Reviewed by Nicholas Daniloff, Northeastern University (emeritus) and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University

All countries engage in spying and counterespionage, none more so than the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The three major targets for each superpower were the adversary’s military technology, the status of the adversary’s economy, and the nature of the adversary’s political decision-making at the highest levels. The “billion dollar spy” of this new book is Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet engineer who worked secretly for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in aviation technology from 1978 until his sudden arrest in 1985. No, he was not paid a billion dollars. But he saved the United States a billon in research and development costs. He was awarded an escrow account of some $4 million—the highest recompense for a spy in U.S. history—but he managed to use only a fraction of it before his arrest. His contributions helped the United States for many years to understand developments in Soviet avionics and bore fruit during the 1991 Gulf War in defeating the advanced Soviet-made MiG fighters of Saddam Hussein’s air force. The outline of Tolkachev’s career has been known for some time through articles published in academic journals, including a 40-page inside CIA account by Barry G. Royden, released in 2008. But what David E. Hoffman, a former Moscow correspon- dent for The Washington Post, has done so ably is to study all accessible information from 944 declassified CIA documents, memoirs of intelligence officers, interviews with officials who met with Tolkachev more than twenty times, and acquaintances of the Tolkachev family. Based on the results of Hoffman’s impressive research, I disagree with the argument put forth by the former CIA historian Benjamin B. Fischer in his article “Double Troubles: CIA and Double Agents during the Cold War,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2016), pp. 48–74. Fis- cher’s contention that Tolkachev was really a double-agent controlled by Soviet foreign intelligence (or perhaps did not exist at all) is undercut by Hoffman’s book. The vast information Hoffman has assembled enables him to tell the story as if he were writing a John le Carre´ novel. Beyond the page-turning momentum, however, are

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