In 1975, Lieutenant Commander Valeriy Sablin led his crew in a mutiny on
the Soviet warship Storozhevoy. The ship was then located in Riga,
Soviet Latvia. Sablin's avowed intention was to foment a new communist
revolution by taking the warship to Leningrad, where he expected to
receive the support of the navy and the masses. However, the Soviet
leadership thought that Sablin intended to defect to Sweden, bringing
with him a warship of modern design with all its armaments, electronics,
communication devices, and code books. As a result, Soviet supreme
leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered the destruction of the warship. After
several dramatic, but ultimately failed, attacks on the Storozhevoy,
Colonel General Sergey Gulyayev, commander of the Naval Aviation of the
Baltic Fleet, personally ordered a missile launch against the
Storozhevoy, employing the special protocol for the launch of nuclear
missiles. The purpose of the launch was to destroy the warship. However,
by then the crew had already detained Sablin and announced their
intention to surrender. The air crews did not know this; however, their
commanding officer, Colonel Arkhip Savinkov, never launched the missile,
instead faking a radar malfunction. The mutiny was over.
Due to the very serious implications of the suppressed mutiny, and the
difficulties in finding and attacking the Storozhevoy, which showed that
the combat readiness of the Soviet armed forces was less than desired,
the participating air crews were ordered to destroy any documentation of
the incident and keep quiet about what had happened. As a result, not
even the KGB could later piece together all events of the incident, nor
is there information in Soviet archives on all the actions taken. For
much of the mutiny, the Soviet Navy did not even know the correct
location of the Storozhevoy. However, the Swedish SIGINT service
monitored the entire incident in real time. The Swedish SIGINT reporting
enables a detailed, blow-by-blow description of the events. Being
real-time intercepts, the reporting is a far more trustworthy source
than the later, often embellished accounts previously published. For
this reason, the book offers a detailed and authoritative account of the
mutiny based on the SIGINT reporting, with supporting evidence from
other surviving sources, together with an account of how Western
intelligence interpreted and handled the reporting.
