The Craft of Intelligence (11 page)

7

The Main Opponent —The Communist Intelligence Services

Most totalitarian countries have, in the course of time, developed not just one but two intelligence services with quite distinct functions, even though the work of these services may occasionally overlap. One of these organizations is a military intelligence service run by the general staff of the armed forces and responsible for collecting military and technical information abroad. In the U.S.S.R. this military organization is called the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate). GRU officers working out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa operated the atomic spy networks in Canada during World War II. The other service, which more typically represents an exclusive development of a totalitarian state, is the “security” service. Generally such a service has its origin in a secret police force devoted to internal affairs such as the repression of dissidents and the protection of the regime. Gradually this organization expands outward, thrusting into neighboring areas for “protective” reasons, and finally spreads out over the globe as a full-fledged foreign intelligence service and much more.

Since this security service is primarily the creation of the clique or party in power, it will always be more trusted by political leaders than is the military intelligence service, and it will usually seek to dominate and control the military service, if not to absorb it. In Nazi Germany the “Reich Security Office,” under Himmler, during 1944 completely took over its military counterpart, the
Abwehr
. In 1947, the security and military services in Soviet Russia were combined, with the former dominant, but the merger lasted only a year. In 1958, however, Khrushchev placed one of his most trusted security chiefs, General Ivan Serov, in charge of the GRU, apparently in order to keep an eye on it. It was Serov, one of the most brutal men in Soviet intelligence history, whom Khrushchev called upon to direct the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the Soviet “reconquest” of Hungary in November of 1956. There are, incidentally, indications that things have not gone too well for Serov, that he was caught up in one of the dramatic housecleanings that so often sweep through the Soviet security services.

Whether or not the security service of a totalitarian state succeeds in gaining control of the military service, it inevitably becomes the more powerful organization. Furthermore, its mandate, both internal and external, far exceeds that of the intelligence services of free societies. Today the Soviet State Security Service (KGB) is the eyes and ears of the Soviet state abroad as well as at home. It is a multipurpose, clandestine arm of power that can in the last analysis carry out almost any act that the Soviet leadership assigns to it. It is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counterintelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries. It is an aggressive arm of Soviet ambitions in the Cold War. If the Soviets send astronauts to the moon, I expect that a KGB officer will accompany them.

No sooner had the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia than they established their own secret police. The Cheka was set up under Feliks Dzerzhinski in December, 1917, as a security force with executive powers. The name stood for “Extraordinary Commission against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.” The Cheka was a militant, terroristic police force that ruthlessly liquidated civilians on the basis of denunciations and suspicion of bourgeois origins. It followed the Red armies in their conflicts with the White Russian forces, and operated as a kind of counterespionage organization in areas where sovietization had not yet been accomplished. In 1921 it established a foreign arm, because by that time White Russian soldiers and civilian opponents of the Bolsheviks who could manage to do so had fled to Western Europe and the Middle and Far East and were seeking to strike back against the Bolsheviks from abroad.

Almost at once this foreign arm of Soviet security had a much bigger job than ever confronted the Czar’s Okhrana. It had not only to penetrate and neutralize the Russian exile organizations that were conspiring against the Soviets, but also to watch, and wherever possible to influence, the Western powers hostile to the Bolsheviks. It thus became a political intelligence service with a militant mission. In order to achieve its aims, it engaged in violence and brutality, in kidnaping and murder, both at home and abroad. This activity was directed not only against the “enemies of the state,” but against fellow Bolsheviks who were considered untrustworthy or burdensome. In Paris, in 1926, General Petlura, the exiled leader of the Ukrainian nationalists, was murdered; some say it was by the security service, others claim it was personal vengeance. In 1930, again in Paris, the service kidnaped General Kutepov, the leader of the White Russian war veterans; in 1937 the same fate befell his successor, General Miller. For over a decade Leon Trotski, who had gone into exile in 1929, was the prime assassination target of Stalin. On August 21, 1940, the old revolutionist died in Mexico City after being slashed with an Alpine climber’s ice ax by an agent of Soviet security. The list of its own officers and agents abroad whom it murdered during this same period, many of whom had tried to break away or were simply not trusted by Stalin, is far longer.

Lest anyone think that violent acts against exiles who opposed or broke with the Bolsheviks in the early days were merely manifestations of the rough-and-tumble era of early Soviet history or of Stalin’s personal vengefulness, it should be pointed out that in the subsequent era of so-called “socialist legality,” which was proclaimed by Khrushchev in 1956, a later generation of exiled leaders was decimated. The only difference between the earlier and later crops of political murders lay in the subtlety and efficacy of the murder weapons. The mysterious deaths in Munich, in 1957 and 1959, of Lev Rebet and Stephen Bandera, leaders of the Ukrainian émigrés, were managed with a cyanide spray that killed almost instantaneously. This method was so effective that in Rebet’s case it was long thought that he had died of a heart attack. The truth became known only when the KGB agent Bogdan Stashinski gave himself up to the German police in 1961 and acknowledged that he had perpetrated both killings.

For the first murder, Stashinski reports he was given a fine banquet by his superiors in the KGB; for the second he received from them the Order of the Red Banner.

Since the earliest days of the Soviets, secret assassination has been an official state function assigned to the apparatus of the security service. A special “Executive Action” section within the latter has the responsibility for planning such assassinations, choosing and training the assassin, and seeing to it that the job is carried out in such a way that the Soviet government cannot be traced as the perpetrator. That this section is still today a most important component of Soviet intelligence is borne out by the fact that General Korovin
1
has been serving as its chief. While counselor of the Soviet Embassy in London from 1953 until early 1961, he was in charge of two key Soviet spies in Britain, George Blake and William John Vassall. After the apprehension of the latter, the ground got too hot for the General and he was recalled and reassigned to the “Executive Action” branch of the KGB.

In 1922 the Cheka became the GPU (State Political Administration), which in 1934 became part of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). This consolidation finally brought together under one ministry all civilian security and intelligence bodies—secret, overt, domestic and foreign. As the foreign arm of Soviet security was expanding into a world-wide espionage and political action organization, the domestic arm grew into a monster. It is said that under Stalin one out of every five Soviet citizens was reporting to it. In addition, it exercised control over the entire border militia, had an internal militia of its own, ran all the prisons and labor and concentration camps, and had become the watchdog over the government and over the Communist party itself. Its most frightening power as an internal secret police lay in its authority to arrest, condemn and liquidate at the behest of the dictator, his henchmen or even on its own cognizance, without any recourse to legal judgment or control by any other organ of government.

During the war years and afterward the colossus of the NKVD was split up, reconsolidated, split up again, reconsolidated again and finally split up once more into two separate organizations. The MGB, now KGB, was made responsible for external espionage and high-level internal security; the other organization retained all policing functions not directly concerned with state security at the higher levels and was called the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs).

Obviously, any clandestine arm that can so permeate and control public life, even in the upper echelons of power, must be kept under the absolute control of the dictator. Thus it must occasionally be purged and weakened to keep it from swallowing up everything, the dictator included. The history of Soviet state security, under its various names, exhibits many cycles of growing strength and subsequent purge, of consolidation and of splintering, of rashes of political murders carried out by it and sometimes against it.

After any period during which a leader had exploited it to keep himself in power, it had to be cut down to size, both because it knew too much and because it might become too strong for his own safety. After the demise of a dictator, the same had to be done for the safety of his successor.

Stalin used the GPU to enforce collectivization and liquidate the kulaks during the early thirties, and the NKVD during the mid-thirties to wipe out all the people he did not trust or like in the party, the army and the government. Then in 1937 he purged the instrument of liquidation itself. Its chiefs and leading officers knew too much about his crimes, and their power was second only to his. In 1953, after the death of Stalin, the security service was again strong enough to become a dominant force in the struggle for power, and the so-called “collective leadership” felt they would not be safe until they had liquidated its leader, Lavrenti Beria, and cleaned out his henchmen.

In Khrushchev’s now famous address to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party in 1956, in which he exposed the crimes of Stalin, the main emphasis was on those crimes Stalin had committed through the NKVD. This speech not only served to open Khrushchev’s attack on Stalinism and the Stalinists still in the regime, but was also intended to justify new purges of existing state security organs, which he had to bring under his control in order to strengthen his own position as dictator. Anxious to give both the Soviet public and the outside world the impression that the new era of “socialist legality” was dawning, Khrushchev subsequently took various steps to wipe out the image of the security service as a repressive executive body. One of these was the announcement on September 3, 1962, that the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) was now to be called the Ministry of Public Law and Order. Just what this new ministry would do he did not clarify, although he did promise that no more trials would be held in which Soviet citizens were condemned in secret.

Yet internal control systems still exist, even though in new forms. For example, under the terms of a decree published on November 28, 1962, an elaborate control system has been established which, to quote the
New York Times
(November 29, 1962), “would make every worker in every job a watchman over the implementation of party and government directives.” In commenting on the decree
Pravda
made reference to earlier poor controls over “faking, pilfering, bribing and bureaucracy,” and asserted that the new system would be a “sharp weapon” against them, as well as against “red tape and misuse of authority” and “squanderers of the national wealth.” The new watchdog agency is called the Committee of Party and State Control.

With so many informers operating against such broad categories of crimes and misdemeanors, it should be possible to put almost anyone in jail at any time. And indeed the press has been full of reports recently that courts in the Soviet Union have been handing down death or long prison sentences for many offenses that in the United States would be only minor crimes or misdemeanors.

On February 5, 1963, we learned for example that the director and manager of the Sverdlovsk railway station restaurant had been condemned to death by the court in Sverdlovsk for inventing and using a machine for frying meat and pies which required two or three grams less fat than regulations called for. The two men pocketed the difference and swindled the government out of four hundred rubles monthly. There is something alarmingly out of joint in a country that today will levy the death penalty for such crimes and calls for the collaboration of the ordinary citizen with the secret police in order to discover them. Aleksandr N. Shelepin, who was designated by the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union to be the head of this new control agency, once served as head of the KGB, having succeeded General Ivan Serov in 1958.

But all these shake-ups, purges and organizational changes seem to have had remarkably little effect on the aims, methods and capabilities of that part of the Soviet security service which interests us most—its foreign arm. Throughout its forty-five years this world-wide clandestine apparatus has accumulated an enormous fund of knowledge and experience; its techniques have been amply tested for their suitability in furthering Soviet aims in various parts of the world, and its exhaustive files of intelligence information have been kept intact through all the political power struggles. It has in its ranks intelligence officers (those who survived the purges) of twenty to thirty years’ experience. It has on its rosters disciplined, experienced agents and informants spread throughout the world, many of whom have been active since the 1930s. And it has a tradition that goes all the way back to czarist days.