1988, he was promoted to the rank of General of the Army and became KGB Chairman. In 1989–1990, he was a member of the Politburo. A political hard-liner, Kryuchkov was among the members of the Soviet intelligence community who misinterpreted the 1983 NATO exercise Able Archer 83 as a prelude to a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Many historians, such as Robert Cowley and John Lewis Gaddis, believe the Able Archer incident was the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. KGB chairmanship After KGB Chairman Viktor Chebrikov sided with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's rival Yegor Ligachyov in opposition to glasnost and perestroika, he was replaced by Kryuchkov in October 1988. Kryuchkov also opposed Gorbachev's reforms, and in his memoirs defended Stalinism and condemned most reforms to the Soviet political system since the rule of Nikita Khrushchev. His appointment by Gorbachev despite this was because he had specialized primarily in foreign intelligence rather than domestic services. Kryuchkov had also been recommended by Gorbachev's predecessor and mentor Andropov and his reformist colleague Alexander Yakovlev. After the 1990 Soviet constitutional reforms, Kryuchkov began working with other hardline officials in the new presidential cabinet such as Boris Pugo, Valentin Pavlov, and Gennady Yanayev to undermine Gorbachev's rule. This group of eight ministers eventually became the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP). Gorbachev attempted to appease Kryuchkov with a presidential decree expanding the powers of the KGB, and ordered him to keep the anti-Communist RSFSR President Boris Yeltsin and the dissident leader Andrei Sakharov under surveillance. Kryuchkov's intelligence may have deceived Gorbachev into underestimating the risk to his rule and distancing himself in favor of his old reformist colleagues in favor of the hardliners. According to Sergei Tretyakov, Kryuchkov secretly sent US$50 billion worth of Communist Party funds to an unknown location in the lead up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. August Coup Kryuchkov's strategy eventually shifted to a coup d'état in which a state of emergency would enable the KGB to restore the Soviet Union's hardline Communist political system. During the August coup of 1991, Kryuchkov was the initiator of creation of the GKChP which arrested President Gorbachev. However, the coup failed because of the indecisiveness of Kryuchkov and the other conspirators. Kryuchkov notably mobilized the Alpha Group to arrest Yeltsin but then refused to give it the order to do so. Kryuchkov