60 years ago, the advent of the "red telephone" between Washington and Moscow

August 30, 2023

Sixty years ago, a direct line of crisis communication was established for the first time between the United States and the Soviet Union: the famous “red telephone”.

Sent from Washington to Moscow, the message dated August 30, 1963 was more intended to test all the letters of the Latin alphabet than to avert an impending conflict.

“THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG’S BACK 1234567890”, or in French “the quick brown fox jumped over the back of the lazy dog”, was the content of the message sent by the White House.

Since then, the famous line of communication has sent warning messages between Washington and Moscow, whose relations are at their lowest with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

The ‘hotline’ was set up in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, with US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreeing that the world had come too close. a nuclear war.

Contrary to what was shown in Hollywood films, the communication line was never a red telephone.

Originally, it worked thanks to an imposing telegraph and cables under the Atlantic that each country tested every hour.

The Pentagon, which handled communications on the U.S. side, usually sent trivial facts, like baseball game results, while the Kremlin preferred to send snippets of Russian literature, Howard Patrick, a linguist who helped to operate the first machine.

In an interview with The Pioneer Press, he recounts the shock experienced when the line was used for the first time, in November 1963. The message, coming from the United States, announced to the Soviets that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

And the first time the line was used to prevent a potential conflict between the two powers was in 1967, during the Six Day War between Israel and Arab countries.

According to US officials, 19 messages will be exchanged during the conflict between US President Lyndon B. Johnson and Soviet leader Alexei Kosygin.

Lyndon B. Johnson would become a devotee of the “red telephone”, known in Washington as “Molink”, and would frequently send news of the Apollo space missions to Moscow.

The hotline would be used again in 1973 during another Arab-Israeli conflict, the Yom Kippur War.

The story goes that the American president at the time, Richard Nixon, was absolutely in no condition to respond to the requests of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

According to later declassified documents, Richard Nixon was intoxicated, dealing with the decay of his presidency around the Watergate scandal.

It was Richard Nixon’s advisers, led by the head of diplomacy Henry Kissinger, who then decided to raise the alert level of the American armed forces.

The red phone will not be used only to avoid tensions between the two superpowers. Sometimes warnings will be issued through this.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter sent Leonid Brezhnev what the American would later describe as “the strongest message” of his tenure, in which he denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The following year, the American president warned the Soviet Union of “serious consequences” if it were to invade Poland in order to crush the Solidarnosc trade union movement. The Kremlin will not intervene.

In 2008, the red telephone was replaced by a secure email connection. In 2016, Barack Obama used it to protest to Russian President Vladimir Putin about alleged interference in the American presidential election by Moscow.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Washington has sharply restricted its diplomatic ties with Moscow.

But last year, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, however assured that the United States “has the ability to speak directly at high levels” to Russia, and this, “unequivocally” .