Page 626 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

626 XXXIX Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

Atlantic and the Mediterranean basin, and with support from military bases in the USA
and Canada, was carried out in September 1960 with a code name FALLEX-60. It was
analyzed in a detailed paper by the chief of Main Operational Directorate of Soviet
General Staff, Col-Gen Semen Ivanov, published inside the newly established top secret
3
theoretical journal Voennaya Misl [Military Thought] . Gen. Ivanov asserted that about
200 000 serviceman, 200 staffs, 5000 aircraft, and 580 warships from all NATO armed
forces (with the exception of Portugal and Iceland) took part in FALLEX-60, which
consisted of approximately twenty regional drills. According to the scenario, the BLUE
(NATO troops) won categorical victory over the “aggressive” ORANGE (Warsaw Pact
troops), which would suffer significant losses – 30 to 60 percent in personnel and 80-
85 percent in aviation, particularly after the massive use of about 1660 nuclear strikes
against Soviet and East European territory during the second phase. Gen. Ivanov made
several critical remarks in his analysis with stress on some “weak” points of the scenar-
4
io, concluding at the end: “The optimism of the NATO Command is ill-founded” . The
broader data about the goals and scenario of the next FALLEX-62 exercise was received
by open sources – an article in Der Spiegel of 10 October 1962, and a parliamentary
discussion at the House of Commons in London of 27 March 1963.
The first ever multilateral meeting of the Warsaw Pact MI chiefs was organized by
Bulgarian initiative in October 1964 in Sofia. One of the paragraphs of the signed agree-
ment underlined the prospective task of organizing joint coordination for SIGINT recon-
5
naissance of the larger NATO exercises, like FALLEX . The second Warsaw Pact MI
annual meeting, held in October 1965 in Budapest, decreed that in the second half of
1966 a special joint session of Information and Radio Technical Departments have to
be organized for assessment of the next FALLEX-66 exercise. In accordance with that
multilateral task the chief of Bulgarian General Staff, Gen. Atanas Semerdzhiev issued a
special order No. 068 of 19 August 1966 for organization of radio-electronic reconnais-
sance in all Radio-Technical Intelligence units during the NATO fall exercises .
6
The proposed session was held for the first time in Prague in September 1966, but
a more thorough discussion on the subject was carried out during the third MI chiefs’
meeting in November 1966 in East Berlin. According to a previous decision, the prin-
cipal reports on the matter were made by the Czechoslovak (for Central European War
Theater) and Bulgarian (for Southern European War Theater) MI chiefs with a supple-

3 The journal was addressed only for highest level officers from Army Commander up; however, in 1961-1962
it was distributed to Washington by CIA agent and a GRU colonel Oleg Penkovsky – CIA FOIA Release
1/16/2006.
4 S. P. Ivanov, “The Fallex-60 Maneuvers of NATO Armed Forces”, Voennaya Misl, Moscow, No. 4, October
1961. Gen. Semen Ivanov and the chief of GRU, Gen. Ivan Serov were removed in December 1962 as result
of disclosure of Col. Penkovsky as a CIA agent.
5 The acquired new information on FALLEX-64 was shared during the first multilateral meeting in Sofia. The
Bulgarian MI service published a special review “NATO FALLEX-64 exercise in September 1964 at the
Southern European War Theater” - Archive of the Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing
Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security (DS) and the Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian
National Armed Forces (Further – COMDOS), Sofia, VR, Inventory No. 23.
6 COMDOS, VR, Microfilm (MF) No. 01288, File (A.E.) 982, p. 2.