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Kremlin precious minutes to ready retaliation. The instructions said, “For instance, noting the launching of strategic missiles from the continental part of the USA and taking into account the time required for determining the direction of their flight in fact leaves roughly 20 minutes reaction time. This period will be considerably curtailed after deployment of the ‘Pershing 2’ missile in the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany], for which the flying time to reach long-range targets in the Soviet Union is calculated at 4–6 minutes.” The instructions added, “It is thusfully evident that the problem of uncovering the threat of RYAN must be dealt with without delay.” 5
    Gordievsky said the KGB agents in London were constantly being urged by Moscow to spread propaganda against the Pershing II missiles. “We discussed it quite a lot in the meetings in the morning with the military attaché,” he recalled. “He said, ‘They fly from Britain to Moscow in eight minutes! And they penetrate underground bunkers.’ Apart from that, there were a number of telegrams.
Develop a campaign! Develop a campaign! Use all your contacts in order to develop a propaganda campaign against the Pershings and the cruise missiles as well!
They were very worried.” The Kremlin leaders “knew they would be the first to die, and didn’t want to die.” 6
    The Soviet quest for intelligence about a possible attack also extended to East Germany. The KGB assigned a major role in the operation to East German intelligence under Markus Wolf. By the early 1980s, Wolf said in his memoirs, “with the U.S. rearmament program and the advent of the aggressive Reagan administration, our Soviet partners had become obsessed with the danger of a nuclear missile attack…” His intelligence service “was ordered to uncover any Western plans for such a surprise attack, and we formed a special staff and situation center, as well as emergency command centers, to do this. The personnel had to undergo military training and participate in alarm drills. Like most intelligence people, I found these war games a burdensome waste of time, but these orders were no more open to discussion than other orders from above.” In 1983, the East Germans completed five years of construction on project 17/5001, an underground bunker near the village of Prenden, outside of Berlin, to house the leadership in the event of nuclear war. The bunker was a sealed mini-town that would have protected four hundred people for two weeks after a nuclear attack. 7
    Of Andropov’s fifteen months in power, half his time was spent in the hospital. During a working holiday in February 1983, Andropov’s health suffered a sharp decline. “He had had kidney trouble all his life, and now it seemed his kidneys had given up altogether,” wrote Volkogonov. 8 The Kremlin doctor, Yevgeny Chazov, recalled that Andropov’s kidneys failed completely. Andropov’s doctors decided to put him on an artificial kidney. A special ward was set up for treatment twice a week at a Moscow hospital. 9 Andropov started to have trouble walking. That summer,Andropov’s colleagues had an elevator installed in the Lenin Mausoleum so he would not have to endure the stress of walking eleven and a half feet up the steps.
    At the May 31 Politburo meeting, Andropov called for tougher propaganda against Reagan and the West. “We need to show more vividly and broadly the militaristic activities of the Reagan administration and countries of Western Europe supporting it,” he said. Andropov also suggested that such propaganda would “mobilize the Soviet people” on the economic front. But at the same time, there was a downside.
    “Certainly,” he said, “we shouldn’t frighten our people of war.”
    Ever since the previous autumn, as Andropov’s paranoia deepened about a possible nuclear missile attack from Western Europe, there had also been ominous new threats on the Pacific horizon. The United States carried out