The U.S. state department ordered an information blackout when the decision was taken earlier this year. Since January the blueprint has been refined.
Nine Nato divisions -- U.S., British, German, and Polish -- have been identified for combat operations in the event of armed aggression against Poland or the three Baltic states. North Polish and German ports have been listed for the receipt of naval assault forces and British and U.S. warships. The first NATO exercises under the plan are to take place in the Baltic next year, according to informed sources.
Following years of transatlantic dispute over the new policy, Nato leaders are understood to have quietly endorsed the strategy at a summit in Lisbon last month.
Despite President Barack Obama’s policy of “resetting” relations with Russia, which was boosted at the NATO summit attended by Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, the state department fears that the major policy shift could trigger “unnecessary tensions” with Moscow.
The decision to draft contingency plans for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was taken secretly earlier this year at the urging of the US and Germany at Nato headquarters in Belgium, ending years of division at the heart of the western alliance over how to view Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The decision, according to a secret cable signed by Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, marks the start of a major revamp of NATO defence planning in Europe.
The strategy has not been made public, in line with NATO’s customary refusal to divulge details of its “contingency planning” -- blueprints for the defence of a NATO member state by the alliance as a whole.
These are believed to be held in safes at NATO’s planning headquarters in Mons, Belgium.
According to a secret cable from the U.S. mission to NATO in Brussels, U.S. admiral James Stavridis, the alliance’s top commander in Europe, proposed drawing up defence plans for the former Soviet Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
The policy was put to top military officials from NATO’s 28 states. “On January 22 Nato’s military committee agreed ... under a silence procedure”, the cable notes, referring to a decision carried by consensus unless someone speaks up to object.
The policy shift was decided by senior military officials rather than NATO’s top decision-taking body, the North Atlantic Council, in order to avoid repeating the splits and disputes on the issue over the past five years. The plan entails grouping the Baltic states with Poland in a new regional defence scheme that has been worked on in recent months and is codenamed Eagle Guardian.
In parallel negotiations with Warsaw the U.S. has also offered to beef up Polish security against Russia by deploying special naval forces to the Baltic ports of Gdansk and Gdynia, putting squadrons of F-16 fighter aircraft in Poland and rotating C-130 Hercules transport planes into Poland from U.S. bases in Germany, according to the diplomatic cables, almost always classified secret.
Earlier this year the U.S. started rotating U.S. army Patriot missiles into Poland in a move that Warsaw celebrates publicly as boosting Polish air defences and demonstrating American commitment to Poland’s security.
But the secret cables expose the Patriots’ value as purely symbolic. The Patriot battery, deployed on a rotating basis at Morag in north-eastern Poland, 60kms from the border with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, is purely for training purposes, and is neither operational nor armed with missiles.
At one point Poland’s then deputy defence minister privately complained bitterly that the Americans may as well supply “potted plants’.
Since joining NATO in 2004, the three Baltic states have complained they are treated as second-class members because their pleas for detailed defence planning under NATO’s “all for one and one for all” article 5 have been being ignored. Article 5 is the heart of NATO’s founding treaty, stipulating that the alliance will come to the rescue of any member state attacked. The only time it has been invoked was following 9/11 when the European allies and Canada rallied to support America.
The Poles and the Baltic states have long argued that rhetorical declarations of commitment to article 5 are meaningless without concrete defence planning to back them up.
The Baltic demands for hard security guarantees became much more desperate in the past three years.
A cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007 was believed to have originated in Russia, and the Kremlin invaded Georgia a year later.
Nerves were further set on edge last year when the Russians staged exercises simulating an invasion of the Baltic states and a nuclear attack on Poland.
The eastern European calls for hard security guarantees, however, were stymied by western Europe, led by Germany, which did not want to antagonise Russia.
During intense -- if discreet -- diplomacy last year, the resistance was overcome by the Americans, and the new policy was tabled as a joint U.S.-German move.
In a meeting last December in Brussels with the Nato ambassadors from Poland, the three Baltic states and the Nato secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, together with the U.S. and German ambassadors, Ivo Daalder and Ulrich Brandenburg, secured agreement on the new policy.
“Ambassador Daalder acknowledged in these meetings that Germany had initiated the proposal,” says another secret cable.
