The National Security Archive (NSA) has released a new tranche of declassified material that it says restores key historical records the U.S. State Department quietly deleted from an official history of the 1983 Able Archer war scare—an archival excision the Archive calls unprecedented and deeply troubling. In a detailed statement, the NSA said the purged records illuminate the seriousness of Soviet military fears during the NATO nuclear-release exercise and expose the extent to which U.S. intelligence analysts, military officials, and even President Ronald Reagan grappled with the possibility that Moscow believed a Western first strike was imminent.
According to the Archive, the deletions—first reported by The Washington Post—removed a 15-page appendix from the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volume on U.S.–Soviet relations covering 1983 to 1985. The appendix had been available to the public since February 2021 before disappearing from the government’s republished 2025 edition of the volume. “This is the first known instance in which the State Department has removed previously declassified and published documents from one of its Foreign Relations of the United States volumes,” the NSA said, citing the exceptional nature of the act. The Archive noted that although a federal appeals court upheld CIA efforts to withhold one specific record requested under FOIA, “nothing in the ruling recommended or required the removal of already published material.”
The NSA said the State Department offered little explanation for the deletion beyond a statement that the Archive’s FOIA litigation “was litigated in District Court and the Court of Appeals and both courts upheld withholding the information.” When pressed about why entire sections of the FRUS history had vanished, a State Department official told The Post that the agency “was not required to provide public notice.” The Archive responded that such reasoning does not account for why multiple documents that were never part of the FOIA case were also deleted.
The newly republished records include a centerpiece document: the “End of Tour Report Addendum” written in January 1989 by U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, who at the time of Able Archer served as the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence at U.S. Air Forces in Europe before becoming Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Perroots wrote that U.S. signals intelligence detected that the Soviet 4th Air Army “issued an alert which included preparations for immediate use of nuclear weapons,” warning in his final report that what occurred during Able Archer formed “an ominous picture.” He asked: “What might have happened that day in November 1983 if we had begun a precautionary generation of forces” in response to what—unknown to the United States at the time—appeared to be a genuine Soviet fear of a NATO nuclear attack?
The Archive said Perroots’s argument directly challenged long-standing U.S. intelligence assumptions that Soviet alerts would be unmistakable. As the document put it, the Western intelligence view that analysts “would have detected” a real Soviet mobilization “may have been whistling through the graveyard.” The NSA emphasized that this judgment reflected a profound U.S. blind spot: analysts did not adequately consider that Soviet leaders “feared a Western nuclear first strike,” a fear exacerbated by new NATO procedures, the introduction of rapid-strike Pershing II missiles, and growing paranoia in the Kremlin.
The appendix also included a CIA response acknowledging that Soviet forces took “an abnormally high alert posture in early November 1983 in response to a routine NATO command post and communications exercise.” Two senior CIA officers wrote that “Perroots’s concerns about this episode are legitimate,” warning of a “long-standing warning problem” within U.S. intelligence and noting that poor communication could provoke commanders to take steps “that could have serious escalatory consequences.”
Another document—also deleted—recounted National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane’s recollections of the influence of KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky’s reporting on the Reagan administration. McFarlane wrote that Reagan viewed Soviet alarm as either “paranoid in strange ways we could not let bother us” or an attempt to “fabricat[e] the appearance of fear.” The Archive pointed out that this private assessment contradicted Reagan’s own diary entry on November 18, 1983, where the president wrote that he believed the Soviets were “so paranoid about being attacked” that the U.S. needed to communicate reassurance.
NSA director Tom Blanton said the State Department’s decision to delete the records evokes the Soviet censorship practices the Able Archer documents themselves describe. Citing journalist David Remnick’s history of Soviet-era purges of published material, Blanton said: “Today, in America, the censors just have to press delete.”
Among the surviving records still present in the FRUS volume is a British intelligence summary explaining that Able Archer 83 differed markedly from previous NATO exercises. The British report noted that NATO had, for the first time, changed nuclear-release procedures and included realistic pre-exercise communications moving forces through graduated alert levels—operations that “made it of considerable interest to the Soviet authorities.” According to the Archive, such realistic elements likely intensified Soviet beliefs that NATO might use the drill as cover for a real first strike.
The NSA also highlighted documents it had previously declassified, including a 94-page 1990 report by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which concluded: “There is little doubt… that the Soviets were genuinely worried by Able Archer.” The report warned that U.S. actions “may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger” and criticized the intelligence community for assuming Soviet leaders would dismiss the possibility of a U.S. attack simply because Washington knew one was not planned.
The Archive’s new disclosures also include a Soviet General Staff analysis published in Voennaya Mysl’ in early 1984, which declared that NATO exercises had become so realistic that they were “difficult to distinguish… from the real deployments of armed forces for aggression.” The article cited Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov’s warning that NATO drills increasingly resembled preparations “for large-scale aggression” and rehearsed nuclear strike scenarios that convinced Soviet military planners they might face a real Western attack.
The most recently declassified document released today is a 1986 CIA report titled “Warsaw Pact Military Perceptions of Nuclear Initiation,” which the Archive calls one of the most revealing assessments yet. According to the NSA, the report confirms that Soviet nuclear doctrine prioritized gaining the advantage through massive first use, stating: “The key tenet of Soviet doctrine for nuclear war holds that delivery of the first massed strike provides a decisive, potentially war-winning advantage.” The report emphasized the Soviet “bias for preemption,” especially heightened by the deployment of U.S. Pershing II missiles in Europe, which gave NATO the capability for a fast, decapitating strike and “provided an additional incentive to launch a preemptive massed nuclear strike when NATO nuclear use is assessed as imminent.”
The Archive said the disappearance—and now restoration—of these records raises serious questions about transparency, historical accuracy, and the stewardship of official U.S. history. The NSA insisted that the public deserves access to the full record of Able Archer 83, not only because the documents illuminate a moment when misperception could have triggered nuclear catastrophe, but because they show how easy it can be to erase documented history.
