RYAN

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RYAN is a Russian acronym for Raketno-YAdernoe Napadenie ("Nuclear Missile Attack"). It was the largest Soviet intelligence operation during the Cold War. The purpose of the operation was to collect intelligence on the presumed, but non-existent, plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union - an inaccurate and somewhat paranoid assessment of US intentions. This was due to the KGB's continuing failure to penetrate the policy-making and political sections of the US Government, as opposed to their successful infiltration of the US military-industrial-intelligence complex. This led the USSR to have a somewhat-accurate, but overstated picture of US capabilities, but little intelligence-based understanding of US intentions--intentions being how the US intends to use their capabilities--aside from what open sources (e.g. politicians, policymakers, and the mass media) disclosed.

Thus, due to a certain amount of heated rhetoric coming from the Reagan Administration, including Reagan's declaration that the USSR was an "Evil Empire", his "the bombing begins in five minutes" joke, and other less-than-diplomatic statements, as well as a disturbing tendency of the USSR towards having conspiratorial and paranoid views of the United States Government^[1], the Soviet Union believed that a United States first strike on the Soviet Motherland was imminent.

Project VRYAN was thus initiated in May 1981 by KGB director Yuri Andropov, then chairman of KGB. VRYAN took on a new significance when Andropov took power in 1982, and particularly after the announcement of the planned deployment of the PERSHING II missile to West Germany. The PERSHING II missile was designed to be launched from a road-mobile transporter-erector-launcher, making the launch sites very hard to find (and thus, destroy); the missile's flight time from West Germany to European Russia was only four to six minutes, giving the Soviets little to no warning of an impending attack; the Pershing II was also extremely accurate, capable of destroying hardened nuclear launch silos, and thus preventing a Soviet counterattack in the event of a NATO first strike.

Fears were further heightened, when, on March 23 1983, Ronald Reagan publicly announced development of the SDI program. Soviet leadership felt that the use of SDI technology was to render America invulnerable to Soviet attack, thereby allowing the US to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR with no fear of retaliation. This surprise attack paranoia prompted sudden expansion of the RYAN program. The paranoia reached its peak during the NATO Exercise Able Archer 83.

Operation RYAN was downscaled in 1984, after death of its main proponents, Yuri Andropov and defense minister Dmitriy Ustinov. ^[1]