The Washington–Moscow Direct Communications Link

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Established by a memorandum of understanding signed at Geneva in June 1963 and operational from 30 August 1963, and almost always described wrongly. It was not a red telephone and carried no voice: it was a duplex teleprinter circuit, running by landline and undersea cable from Washington through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki to Moscow, with a radio path as backup, and messages were typed, encrypted offline with one-time tapes, and exchanged as text. Text was the point — a written message can be composed carefully, translated exactly and read twice, whereas a voice call between heads of government in a crisis invites improvisation and mistranslation. Its origin is the 1962 crisis, during which the two governments had exchanged messages by public radio broadcast and by diplomatic courier, with delays measured in hours at a moment when decisions were being taken in minutes. The link was tested hourly and upgraded repeatedly, first by satellite in the 1970s.

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