Rear Admiral Petrashkevich and the 1971 Secret Soviet Naval Manual
By Constance Bell ·
A high-level leak from Moscow's military headquarters detailed the Warsaw Pact's plan for submarine warfare, but the intelligence remained buried from Langley for four years.
The man who smuggled this journal out of Moscow risked a firing squad, and the sailors of the Baltic risked their lives on a coordination plan that was a lie. For four years, the United States operated with a blind spot regarding how the Eastern Bloc intended to hunt submarines and storm beaches, while the evidence of their strategy sat in a dead-letter drop or a forgotten safe.
In March 1975, David H. Biee, the Acting Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA, signed a memorandum to the Director of Central Intelligence. He was delivering a translation of a secret Soviet publication titled Information Collection of the Headquarters and the Technical Committee of the Combined Armed Forces. The material was a professional article written by Rear Admiral Kh. Petrashkevich, the Chief of Staff of the Navy for the Polish People's Republic—the socialist state that served as the second most populous member of the Eastern Bloc from 1952 to 1989.
The record establishes that this journal was published by the Warsaw Pact Headquarters, the administrative nerve center of the 1955 collective defense treaty, operating out of Moscow. The specific article, appearing in Issue No. 2 of 1971, detailed the "Forms of Coordination of Allied Navies." It was not a general policy statement; it was a technical blueprint for how the navies of the socialist republics would operate as a single machine.
The Architecture of the Hunt
Petrashkevich wrote from the perspective of a man convinced of his own efficiency. He claimed that the "allied navies are resolving" the complexities of coordination "successfully" and that the level of training allowed for seamless cooperation at all levels of command. The record lists the specific pillars of this coordination: combined planning for coast defense, unified patrol duties, and the joint study of the "capabilities of the probable enemy."
One section of the report focuses on the most lethal aspect of maritime warfare: the submarine. Petrashkevich argues that the most effective way to maintain the offensive is to "organize within national frameworks the coordination of ship hunter-killer groups designated to destroy enemy submarines."
This phrase is the core of the document's value. By organizing "within national frameworks," the Warsaw Pact was attempting to solve the perennial problem of socialist military alliances: how to maintain national pride and command structures while ensuring the Soviet Union maintained absolute control. Petrashkevich suggests that these hunter-killer groups would be managed through a system of "flotilla command posts and naval bases," creating a grid of surveillance across the North Atlantic and the Baltic.
The Helicopter and the Lie
There is a profound irony in Petrashkevich's obsession with "personal contact." He writes that the most successful method of organizing coordination is "personal contact among officers," and notes that this is now possible "thanks to the use of helicopters." He envisions a world where the commanding officer of a landing detachment can simply fly to a coordinating large unit to "personally clear up all problems that may arise."
This reliance on the helicopter for "personal contact" reveals the fragility of the Warsaw Pact's technical infrastructure. While the article praises "technical means of communication," the admission that high-ranking officers must physically fly between ships to solve problems suggests a systemic failure in secure, real-time communications. The Polish Admiral was describing a high-tech alliance that still relied on the 19th-century tradition of the courier, just with a rotor blade instead of a horse.
Furthermore, the record describes the coordination of "combined amphibious landing and antilanding operations." Petrashkevich notes that in the "quickly changing situation" of a beach assault, the need for continuous contact is greatest. He suggests the use of "operations groups"—small teams of specialists—detailed to the command posts of other nations to ensure the machine didn't seize up during the chaos of an invasion.
The Four-Year Silence
The most glaring fact in the record is the date. The article was published in 1971. The memorandum from David H. Biee is dated March 28, 1975. This is a four-year gap during which some of the most sensitive naval doctrines of the Warsaw Pact were available in Moscow, but unknown in Washington.
Biee marks the source of the report as "extremely sensitive" and mandates that it be handled on a "strict need-to-know basis." He further protects the source by assigning the reporting a specific Codeword, though the word itself is withheld from the released text. The level of protection is disproportionate to a mere translation of a journal; it is the kind of protection reserved for a human asset who has penetrated the inner sanctum of a foreign military headquarters.
Connecting the dots between the Warsaw Pact Headquarters in Moscow and the CIA's Special Report reveals a breach of catastrophic proportions for the Soviets. To acquire a secret journal published by the Technical Committee of the Combined Armed Forces, the CIA needed more than a signal intercept. They needed someone with a security clearance high enough to walk into the Moscow headquarters, pick up a copy of Issue No. 2, and get it across the border.
The Desk's Reading
The pattern suggests that this document is not a piece of timely intelligence, but a trophy from a retrospective audit. The four-year lag between 1971 and 1975 indicates that the CIA did not have real-time access to these journals. If they had a live feed into the Warsaw Pact Headquarters, they would not have waited until 1975 to report on 1971 tactics. The desk's reading is that the agency likely acquired a cache of documents from a defecting officer or a compromised archive, and the 1975 memorandum represents the moment the analysts finally finished translating the haul.
Moreover, the shape of this file suggests that the "coordination" Petrashkevich describes was a fiction maintained for the benefit of the satellite states. By allowing a Polish Admiral to author the manual, the Soviet Union created the illusion of a partnership. But the fact that the journal was published by the Soviet-controlled Headquarters in Moscow proves the reality: the Polish Navy was not a partner, but a tool. The "fraternal navies" were merely extensions of the Soviet Navy's will, and Petrashkevich was the man tasked with dressing that hegemony in the language of "collaboration."
If a full release of the files associated with this Codeword were to occur, the desk believes it would reveal a high-level HUMINT asset within the Polish naval command or the Warsaw Pact Technical Committee. The redactions and the "extremely sensitive" label are not protecting a document; they are protecting the ghost of a spy who spent years feeding the CIA the internal manuals of the Eastern Bloc. The cost of that secrecy was a four-year window of ignorance for the West, and for the Polish sailors, a doctrine of war that treated them as disposable components of a Soviet machine.