The Third World War: The Untold Story

The advent of Cooker had long been forecast in the West, but even when it began to enter service in 1982 very little was known about its operational capabilities. Its trials and development flying had been carried out in Central Asia out of range of most Western electronic intelligence (ELINT) agencies. It was well known that Soviet radar engineering was in many respects as good as that in the West and that the Candid airframe could provide ample space for bulky Soviet equipment which had not yet fully benefited from the microprocessor revolution. It was possible, therefore, that Cooker’s radar range was similar to that of NATO’s AWACS. If that were so, and if it had similar powers to identify low-flying aircraft and communicate instantaneously with ground and air defences, the task of NATO aircraft attacking deep behind Warsaw Pact lines would become much more difficult.

By January 1985 twenty-four Cookers had come into service. Ten were based in south-eastern Poland out of range of most NATO aircraft, strategically located to fly standing patrols either up towards the Baltic or south-east across Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. Others patrolled former report lines across the northern USSR. A third detachment operated in the Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian areas, while three were regularly deployed to the Chinese border regions. The Soviet crews were apparently well trained and well disciplined. Within a very short time NATO specialists were convinced that Cookers were not using anything like all their frequency range or transmitting power while on routine patrols over Eastern Europe. These suspicions were heightened by regular deployments of individual aircraft back to central USSR with two or more regiments of Foxbats and Flogger Gs. Satellite information was sketchy but was sufficient to indicate that the SAF was holding regular exercises similar to the NATO Red Flag series in Nevada run by the USAF in which Soviet air opposition was realistically simulated. In these, Cooker appeared to be locating several low-flying aircraft and either vectoring interceptors directly on to them or relaying target information to ground control units. But unless the full extent of Cooker’s frequencies could be identified, and its operating ranges established, comprehensive ECM could not be prepared by NATO. Not for the first time, however, at least one of NATO’s problems was to be dramatically reduced as a result of endemic weaknesses within the Soviet system, which in this case culminated in what became known as the Gdansk incident. The account of it given below appeared in the December 1986 number of the RUSI Journal published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London.

4 On 27 July 1985 an IL-76C Cooker of the AEW 16 Guards Regiment of the SAF climbed away on a routine evening patrol from its main operating base south-east of Krakow. The aircraft captain, Major Anatoly Makhov, was not in the best of moods. Just before the take-off his second pilot had been replaced by the regimental political commissar, Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Gregorian. In 1980 the Political Directorate had ordered their regimental officers to show greater affinity with the operational crews. Gregorian, who had earned his pilot’s wings several years before but was now known to hate flying, took care to ensure that he had at least one signature each month in his log book to lend authenticity to figures which could easily be falsified. The power and influence of a regimental commissar were far more attractive to him than the dull routine of Cooker patrols and he did as few of those as he could.

This particular Cooker patrol began uneventfully. It was observed by the Venlo Sentry to reach its routine patrol track north of Bydgoszcz, cruising at slightly more than 350 knots at 30,000 feet. Then abruptly it was observed to lose height and, heading north towards Gdansk, it disappeared below Sentry’s long-range surveillance reach. It was several days before NATO air intelligence was able to reconstruct the events of the next few hours but, happily, there were good secondary sources.

Major Makhov was determined to be as courteous as possible to the Colonel who, after all, could make life very miserable for him. But as the Cooker levelled off on its patrol circuit, Gregorian was clearly losing interest. He took out from his brand-new flying suit a well-thumbed paperback novel which, Makhov was interested to note, was a lurid example of highly illegal Estonian pornography from Tallin. Relieved, the Major relaxed and concentrated on the undemanding job of flying the Cooker on a predetermined track, height and speed while his navigator busily cross-checked their position with the senior fighter controller in the cabin behind them.