Readingthis 2005 column about the time in 1983 when the Soviets got a bit antsy that Reagan might be cooking up a surprise nuclear strike, and sent out urgent orders to their spies to find out what might be going on (nothing, as it turned out), I wondered if this event was ever used as a plot point on The Americans, set around the same time.
Yes, I’m up to date on the whole series but don’t recall seeing anything like this, or maybe I did but I forget.
It is a plot point—actually an episode title—in Deutschland 83.
No explicit reference ito Able Archer 83 is made in the show (which would have occurred sometime in the middle to end of Series 4) but Operation RYAN was largely focused on Europe, and specifically for looking at civil defense preparations and communication signals in the NATO nations. The United States didn’t even realize the significance of Soviet response to Able Archer 83 until several years afterward.
The Americans is great drama, but while the Soviet KGB definitely tried to place deep cover ‘sleeper agents’ in Western Europe and the United States the show is exaggertated in both the operations and effectiveness of such efforts. It would have been foolhardy to have agents engage in active operations as ‘The Jennings’ do on a routine basis, and the agents we know about in the United States (divuleged in the Mitrokhin Archives and from known recruitments) often did very little beyond attempting to recruit scientists and technicians involved in strategic weapon programs and reporting back publically available information. The GRU (military intelligence) was always more effctive than the Politburo-controlled KGB, albeit with more specific tactical intelligence.
Stranger