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Rainer Rupp (born September 21, 1945 in Saarlouis, Germany) is a former top spy who worked under the codenames Mosel and later Topaz for the East German intelligence service HVA (General Reconnaissance Administration) in the NATO headquarters in Brussels from 1977 until 1989, releasing documents of the highest importance ( Cosmic Top Secret ) to the Eastern Bloc.
Rupp grew up in West Germany with strong leftist political leanings. In 1968, as a student in Mainz, employment as a spy for the GDR was suggested to him, and he agreed out of conviction. He continued his studies in Brussels, was trained as a spy in East Berlin and was hired by NATO in 1977. He rose quickly in the ranks and provided photographs of some 10,000 pages to his controllers, including the precise location plans for the deployment of cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, as well as the central MC 161 document which summarized the NATO strategy as well as NATO's analysis of the Warsaw Pact and its intentions. These documents were promptly transferred to the KGB.
He would photograph documents in his office, or take them home and photograph them in his wine cellar. He met contact persons all over Europe and received instructions via number stations, radio programs broadcasting messages encrypted as number sequences. His British wife knew about his activities and tried to persuade him to stop. He later said "At the time I did it, I believed it to be my moral duty."[ citation needed ]
NATO did not have any knowledge of the existence of Topaz until GDR officer Heinz Busch defected in 1990. Busch however did not know the identity of Topaz. Several meetings of the secret services of a number of countries ensued with the aim of identifying Topaz, who took part in some of those meetings. With the help of the Rosenholz files that had fallen into the hands of the CIA after the dissolution of the GDR, Rupp was caught in 1993, while on vacation in Germany. He confessed and received a prison sentence of 12 years in 1994. He was released early in July 2000. Rupp became a member of the PDS and served temporarily as an advisor in regard to issues of security and foreign policy; he quit the party, however, in 2003. [1]
Rupp claims that his activities may have averted a nuclear war in the fall of 1983, a claim that is not entirely unfounded according to American experts. [1] In an interview for the Channel 4 programme "1983: The Brink of Apocalypse", about exercise Able Archer 83, broadcast in the UK on 5 January 2008, he said that he had transmitted the message that NATO was not preparing to launch a surprise nuclear attack against the USSR during the exercise to his HVA controllers. He did this by way of encoding the message on a device disguised as a calculator which then turned the message into a short electronic burst which could be transmitted to a set telephone number. He viewed this as vital to preventing a Soviet pre-emptive strike against NATO forces. In the same program, Rupp said he was proud of the damage he did to NATO over the years of his intelligence activities. [2]
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from October 16 to October 28, 1962. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.
The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, an abbreviation of Staatssicherheit, was the state security-service of East Germany from 1950 to 1990.
World War III or the Third World War are names given to a hypothetical worldwide large-scale military conflict subsequent to World War I and World War II. The term has been in use since at least as early as 1941. Some apply it loosely to limited or more minor conflicts such as the Cold War or the war on terror. In contrast, others assume that such a conflict would surpass prior world wars in both scope and destructive impact.
Topaz is a 1969 American espionage thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Based on the 1967 novel of the same title by Leon Uris, the film is about a French intelligence agent (Stafford) who becomes entangled in Cold War politics before the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and then the breakup of an international Soviet spy ring.
John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.
Alfred Frenzel (1899–1968) was a West German member of parliament, who was secretly conducting espionage for Czechoslovakia while serving on the Bundestag's Defense Committee. Given the code name Anna by the StB, he passed along classified information to the Communist government in Prague for five years, until his arrest in Bonn on October 31, 1960. He was the most important StB spy during the entire Cold War.
Topaz is a mineral or gemstone.
Able Archer 83 was the annual NATO Able Archer exercise conducted in November 1983. The purpose for the command post exercise, like previous years, was to simulate a period of conflict escalation, culminating in the US military attaining a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack. The five-day exercise, which involved NATO commands throughout Western Europe, was coordinated from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) headquarters in Casteau, Belgium.
The Cold War from 1979 to 1985 was a late phase of the Cold War marked by a sharp increase in hostility between the Soviet Union and the West. It arose from a strong denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. With the election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and American President Ronald Reagan in 1980, a corresponding change in Western foreign policy approach toward the Soviet Union was marked by the rejection of détente in favor of the Reagan Doctrine policy of rollback, with the stated goal of dissolving Soviet influence in Soviet Bloc countries. During this time, the threat of nuclear war had reached new heights not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
The NATO Double-Track Decision was the decision by NATO from December 12, 1979, to offer the Warsaw Pact a mutual limitation of medium-range ballistic missiles and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. It was combined with a threat by NATO to deploy more medium-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe after the Euromissile Crisis.
Topaz is a Cold War suspense novel by Leon Uris, published in 1967 by McGraw-Hill. The novel spent one week atop The New York Times Best Seller List, and was Uris's first New York Times number-one bestseller since Exodus in 1959. During its 52-week run on the list, Topaz set two records in two weeks; those for largest positional jump to number-one (9–1) and largest positional fall from number-one (1–5).
The Main Directorate for Reconnaissance was the foreign intelligence service of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi), the main security agency of the German Democratic Republic, from 1955 to 1990.
Operation RYAN was a Cold War military intelligence program run by the Soviet Union during the early 1980s when they believed the United States was planning for an imminent first strike attack. The name is an acronym for Raketno-Yadernoe Napadenie. The purpose of the operation was to collect intelligence on potential contingency plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. The program was initiated in May 1981 by Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB.
On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the Soviet nuclear early warning system Oko reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from the United States. These missile attack warnings were suspected to be false alarms by Stanislav Petrov, an engineer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces on duty at the command center of the early-warning system. He decided to wait for corroborating evidence—of which none arrived—rather than immediately relaying the warning up the chain of command. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States and its NATO allies, which would likely have resulted in a full-scale nuclear war. Investigation of the satellite warning system later determined that the system had indeed malfunctioned.
Spies for Peace was a British group of anti-war activists associated with the Committee of 100 who publicized government preparations for rule after a nuclear war. In 1963 they broke into a secret government bunker, Regional Seat of Government Number 6 (RSG-6) at Warren Row, near Reading, where they photographed and copied documents. The RSGs were to include representatives of all the central government departments, to maintain law and order, communicate with the surviving population and control remaining resources. The public were virtually unaware what the government was planning for the aftermath of a nuclear war until it was revealed by Spies for Peace.
Relations between the NATO military alliance and the Russian Federation were established in 1991 within the framework of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. In 1994, Russia joined the Partnership for Peace program, and on 27 May 1997, the NATO–Russia Founding Act (NRFA) was signed at the 1997 Paris NATO Summit in France, enabling the creation of the NATO–Russia Permanent Joint Council (NRPJC). Through the early part of 2010s NATO and Russia signed several additional agreements on cooperation. The NRPJC was replaced in 2002 by the NATO–Russia Council (NRC), which was established in an effort to partner on security issues and joint projects together. Due to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, relations became very tense after the NATO military alliance imposed sanctions against Russia. Russia placed all member states of NATO on a list of "unfriendly countries" along with Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Micronesia and Ukraine.
The Warsaw Pact Early Warning Indicator Project was a highly classified US and Allied program designed to gather intelligence that would provide indicators of impending Soviet nuclear attacks before they occurred. It was the American analogue to Operation RYAN. The project aimed to observe and find ways to prevent conflicts with the Soviet Union and its allies from the Warsaw Pact. It consisted of intense clandestine reporting, and Indicator and Warning Methodology.
Proud Prophet was a war game played by the United States that began on June 20, 1983, and was designed by Thomas Schelling. The simulation was played in real time during the Cold War. Proud Prophet was essentially played to test out various proposals and strategies, in response to the Soviet Union's military buildup. There were advocates for a number of strategies, which varied from demonstration nuclear attacks, limited nuclear war, and decapitation attacks. It was not possible for the United States to pursue each of these strategies. President Ronald Reagan and his administration were faced with the dilemma of figuring out how the United States should respond to the Soviet Union's large nuclear programs, while finding which strategy would be most effective.
The Martel affair, sometimes known as the Sapphire affair, was a spy scandal that took place in France in early 1962. It involved information provided by former high-ranking member of the KGB, Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected to the United States in December 1961. Golitsyn stated that the Soviets had agents placed throughout French military intelligence and even within French President Charles de Gaulle's cabinet. He claimed that these agents had access to any NATO document on demand.
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