The World Was Going Our Way (84 page)
Read The World Was Going Our Way Online
Authors: Christopher Andrew
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Accounts, #Espionage, #History, #Europe, #Ireland, #Military, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Russia, #World
Shebarshin and Leonov, like other former senior FCD officers, still cannot bring themselves to recognize that the KGB, so far from being the victim of a failed system, was at the heart of its most monstrous abuses. Under Stalin the NKVD made possible the surveillance and repression of dissent - both real and imaginary - on a scale unparalleled in the peacetime history of Europe. In the less brutal post-Stalin era, the KGB was central to a system of social control so pervasive that even the possibility of dissent occurred only to a heroic but tiny minority of dissidents. Because of their inability to come to terms with the real record of Soviet intelligence, many of its veterans find it impossible to recognize the motives of secret dissidents within their own ranks, such as Vasili Mitrokhin and Oleg Gordievsky, who recognized the KGB for what it was and set out to undermine its authority. Western historians of intelligence find no difficulty in grasping the fact that there were ideological ‘moles’ in both East and West during the Cold War. Not so the apologists for the FCD. While idealizing the motives of Soviet ideological agents in the West, they usually refuse to admit that there were any Western ideological agents in the Soviet Union. Yevgeni Primakov, one of the leading intellectuals in Russian foreign intelligence who had close, long-standing links with the FCD before becoming the first head of its post-Soviet successor, the SVR, still clings to an improbably romanticized image of the Cambridge ‘mole’, Donald Maclean, whom he knew personally, as ‘a Scottish lord’ (despite the fact that, though the son of a knight, he had no title) who gave up a fortune large enough to meet the entire running costs of Soviet foreign intelligence (a preposterous exaggeration) in order to work as a penetration agent ‘for purely ideological reasons’. By contrast, Primakov denies that Gordievsky, despite the fact that he put his life repeatedly at risk for a cause in which he profoundly believed, was motivated by ideological rejection of the Soviet system.
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Like Primakov, Vadim Kirpichenko, now chief consultant to the head of the SVR, continues to insist that no Western agents in the Soviet Union ever worked for ideological motives: ‘There have never been any purely ideological warriors for the wonderful capitalist system.’ Hence Kirpichenko’s insistence that Mitrokhin, Gordievsky and others who risked their lives to expose the vices of the KGB were no more than ‘traitors’ motivated by ‘various types of vices’ - ‘psychological instability’, ‘family discord’, hypochondria, the desire ‘to get their boss into trouble’ or financial greed.
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Like Primakov, Vadim Kirpichenko, now chief consultant to the head of the SVR, continues to insist that no Western agents in the Soviet Union ever worked for ideological motives: ‘There have never been any purely ideological warriors for the wonderful capitalist system.’ Hence Kirpichenko’s insistence that Mitrokhin, Gordievsky and others who risked their lives to expose the vices of the KGB were no more than ‘traitors’ motivated by ‘various types of vices’ - ‘psychological instability’, ‘family discord’, hypochondria, the desire ‘to get their boss into trouble’ or financial greed.
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Such attitudes are a legacy of the mindset of the Soviet one-party state, which always refused to accept that any dissident acted from principle. As well as being monstrous, the KGB’s Cold War obsession with what it called ‘ideological subversion’ reached levels of absurdity comparable with Brezhnev’s medal-mania. Even taking an interest in abstract paintings or listening to the wrong kinds of music was regarded as potentially subversive. The KGB Moscow Directorate and Fifth Directorate (which dealt with ideological subversion) proudly reported in 1979 that their agents in the artistic community had succeeded in ‘preventing seven attempts by avant-garde artists to make provocative attempts to show their pictures’. Provincial KGBs went to enormous pains to monitor the role of Western popular music in encouraging ideological subversion among the young. The KGB in Dnepropetrovsk oblast, where Brezhnev had begun his career as a Party apparatchik, warned that, ‘Even listening to musical programmes gave young people a distorted idea of Soviet reality and led to incidents of a treasonable nature.’ Such reports are a reminder of how the hunt for ideological subversion destroyed all sense of the absurd among those committed to the holy war against it. The Centre’s in-house journal
KGB Sbornik
regularly celebrated counter-subversive triumphs which were, by any objective standards, of the most trivial importance. One such ‘triumph’ was the hunt for a subversive codenamed KHUDOZHNIK (‘Artist’), who in 1971 began sending anonymous, handwritten letters attacking Marxism-Leninism and various Party functionaries to CPSU and Komsomol committees. Despite the fact that none of his letters became public and he represented no conceivable threat to the regime, the resources deployed to track him down comfortably exceeded those devoted in the West to most major murder enquiries. Because some of KHUDOZHNIK’s letters were sent to military Komsomols, there was an immense trawl through the records of people dismissed from military training establishments and the files of reserve officers. In Moscow, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Gavrilov-Yam, where his letters were posted, the Postal Censorship Service searched for many months for handwriting similar to KHUDOZHNIK’S. Numerous KGB agents and co-optees were also shown samples of his writing and given his supposed psychological profile. A further enormous research exercise was undertaken to identify and scrutinize official forms which KHUDOZHNIK might have filled in. In 1974, after a hunt lasting almost three years, his writing was finally found on an application to the Rostov City Housing Commission and he was unmasked as a Rostov street committee chairman named Korobov, tried and imprisoned. This surreal investigation was entirely in accord with Centre policy. Andropov told a conference of the Fifth Directorate in 1979 that the KGB could not afford to ignore the activities of a single dissident, however obscure.
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Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in Soviet foreign intelligence, who, after disagreements with Kryuchkov, was moved from the FCD to become deputy head of the Leningrad KGB in 1980, quickly realized that most of its work was ‘an elaborately choreographed farce’, in which it tried desperately to discover enough ideological subversion to justify its bloated size and resources.
42
KGB Sbornik
regularly celebrated counter-subversive triumphs which were, by any objective standards, of the most trivial importance. One such ‘triumph’ was the hunt for a subversive codenamed KHUDOZHNIK (‘Artist’), who in 1971 began sending anonymous, handwritten letters attacking Marxism-Leninism and various Party functionaries to CPSU and Komsomol committees. Despite the fact that none of his letters became public and he represented no conceivable threat to the regime, the resources deployed to track him down comfortably exceeded those devoted in the West to most major murder enquiries. Because some of KHUDOZHNIK’s letters were sent to military Komsomols, there was an immense trawl through the records of people dismissed from military training establishments and the files of reserve officers. In Moscow, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Gavrilov-Yam, where his letters were posted, the Postal Censorship Service searched for many months for handwriting similar to KHUDOZHNIK’S. Numerous KGB agents and co-optees were also shown samples of his writing and given his supposed psychological profile. A further enormous research exercise was undertaken to identify and scrutinize official forms which KHUDOZHNIK might have filled in. In 1974, after a hunt lasting almost three years, his writing was finally found on an application to the Rostov City Housing Commission and he was unmasked as a Rostov street committee chairman named Korobov, tried and imprisoned. This surreal investigation was entirely in accord with Centre policy. Andropov told a conference of the Fifth Directorate in 1979 that the KGB could not afford to ignore the activities of a single dissident, however obscure.
41
Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in Soviet foreign intelligence, who, after disagreements with Kryuchkov, was moved from the FCD to become deputy head of the Leningrad KGB in 1980, quickly realized that most of its work was ‘an elaborately choreographed farce’, in which it tried desperately to discover enough ideological subversion to justify its bloated size and resources.
42
Apologists for Soviet foreign intelligence frequently seek to distance its operations from the abuse of human rights by the domestic KGB. In reality, as volume 1 of
The Mitrokhin Archive
showed, the struggle against ideological subversion at home and abroad was carefully co-ordinated. Just as hunting down Trotsky and other ‘enemies of the people’ abroad became the main priority of foreign intelligence operations during the ‘Great Terror’ before the Second World War,
43
so ‘agent operational measures’ against some leading dissidents during the 1970s were jointly agreed by Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, and internal security chiefs. Early in 1977 a total of thirty-two jointly devised active-measures operations intended to discredit and destabilize Andrei Sakharov (‘Public Enemy Number One’, as Andropov described him) were either already underway or about to begin both at home and abroad.
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There was similar co-operation between the foreign and domestic arms of the KGB in their obsessive campaign against ‘Zionist subversion’ and Jewish refuseniks.
45
Until the closing years of the Cold War the FCD set out to prevent all Soviet dissidents and defectors achieving foreign recognition - even in fields entirely divorced from politics (at least as understood in the West). Enormous time and effort were devoted by the Centre to devising ways to damage the careers of Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and other defectors from Soviet ballet. After the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, went into exile in the West, the Centre appealed to all Soviet-bloc intelligence services for help in penetrating their entourage and ruining their reputations. Preventing dissident chess players winning matches against the ideologically orthodox was another priority of KGB foreign operations. A team of eighteen FCD operations officers was sent to the 1978 world chess championship in the Philippines to try to ensure the defeat of the defector Viktor Korchnoi by the Soviet world champion Anatoli Karpov.
46
The Mitrokhin Archive
showed, the struggle against ideological subversion at home and abroad was carefully co-ordinated. Just as hunting down Trotsky and other ‘enemies of the people’ abroad became the main priority of foreign intelligence operations during the ‘Great Terror’ before the Second World War,
43
so ‘agent operational measures’ against some leading dissidents during the 1970s were jointly agreed by Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, and internal security chiefs. Early in 1977 a total of thirty-two jointly devised active-measures operations intended to discredit and destabilize Andrei Sakharov (‘Public Enemy Number One’, as Andropov described him) were either already underway or about to begin both at home and abroad.
44
There was similar co-operation between the foreign and domestic arms of the KGB in their obsessive campaign against ‘Zionist subversion’ and Jewish refuseniks.
45
Until the closing years of the Cold War the FCD set out to prevent all Soviet dissidents and defectors achieving foreign recognition - even in fields entirely divorced from politics (at least as understood in the West). Enormous time and effort were devoted by the Centre to devising ways to damage the careers of Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and other defectors from Soviet ballet. After the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, went into exile in the West, the Centre appealed to all Soviet-bloc intelligence services for help in penetrating their entourage and ruining their reputations. Preventing dissident chess players winning matches against the ideologically orthodox was another priority of KGB foreign operations. A team of eighteen FCD operations officers was sent to the 1978 world chess championship in the Philippines to try to ensure the defeat of the defector Viktor Korchnoi by the Soviet world champion Anatoli Karpov.
46
Abroad as well as at home, the KGB played a central role in the worst Cold War Soviet violations of human rights: among them the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956,
47
the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968,
48
the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979
49
and the pressure on the Polish Communist regime to strangle the democratic Solidarity movement in 1981.
50
Export of Soviet systems of oppression had begun between the wars. Mao’s security chief, Kang Sheng, learned in Stalin’s Russia during the Great Terror some of the brutal methods of liquidating ideological subversion which he later introduced in China.
51
After the Second World War, Communist rule within the newly established Soviet bloc in eastern and central Europe depended on systems of surveillance and repression implemented by local security services created in the image of the KGB.
52
During the Cold War elements of these systems were exported to many of the Soviet Union’s friends and allies in other continents. One of the most malign aspects of the foreign operations of the KGB and other Soviet-bloc intelligence services was the assistance which they provided to leaders of one-party states in the Third World from Afghanistan to Ethiopia in crushing opposition to their rule.
47
the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968,
48
the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979
49
and the pressure on the Polish Communist regime to strangle the democratic Solidarity movement in 1981.
50
Export of Soviet systems of oppression had begun between the wars. Mao’s security chief, Kang Sheng, learned in Stalin’s Russia during the Great Terror some of the brutal methods of liquidating ideological subversion which he later introduced in China.
51
After the Second World War, Communist rule within the newly established Soviet bloc in eastern and central Europe depended on systems of surveillance and repression implemented by local security services created in the image of the KGB.
52
During the Cold War elements of these systems were exported to many of the Soviet Union’s friends and allies in other continents. One of the most malign aspects of the foreign operations of the KGB and other Soviet-bloc intelligence services was the assistance which they provided to leaders of one-party states in the Third World from Afghanistan to Ethiopia in crushing opposition to their rule.
Since the governments of one-party states regard dissent as illegitimate, all require systems of secret surveillance and social control to monitor its progress and keep it in check, though the permissible limits vary from state to state. Only when the vast apparatus of Soviet social control began to be dismantled under Gorbachev did the full extent of the KGB’s importance to the survival of the USSR become clear. The manifesto of the hard-line leaders of the August 1991 coup, of which Kryuchkov was the chief organizer, implicitly acknowledged that the relaxation of the campaign against ideological subversion had shaken the foundations of the one-party state: ‘Authority at all levels has lost the confidence of the population . . . Malicious mockery of all the institutions of state is being implanted. The country has in effect become ungovernable.’ What the plotters failed to grasp was that it was too late to turn back the clock. ‘If the
coup d’etat
had happened a year and a half or two years earlier’, wrote Gorbachev afterwards, ‘it might, presumably, have succeeded. But now society was completely changed.’ Crucial to the change of mood was declining respect for the intimidatory power of the KGB, which had hitherto been able to strangle any Moscow demonstration at birth. The most striking symbol of the collapse of the August coup was the toppling of the giant statue of the founder of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, from its plinth in the middle of the square outside KGB headquarters. A large crowd, which a few years earlier would never have dared to assemble, encircled the Lubyanka and cheered enthusiastically as ‘Iron Feliks’ was borne away, dangling in a noose suspended from a huge crane supplied by the Moscow City Government.
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coup d’etat
had happened a year and a half or two years earlier’, wrote Gorbachev afterwards, ‘it might, presumably, have succeeded. But now society was completely changed.’ Crucial to the change of mood was declining respect for the intimidatory power of the KGB, which had hitherto been able to strangle any Moscow demonstration at birth. The most striking symbol of the collapse of the August coup was the toppling of the giant statue of the founder of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, from its plinth in the middle of the square outside KGB headquarters. A large crowd, which a few years earlier would never have dared to assemble, encircled the Lubyanka and cheered enthusiastically as ‘Iron Feliks’ was borne away, dangling in a noose suspended from a huge crane supplied by the Moscow City Government.
53
As well as suppressing civil liberties at home, the KGB degraded Soviet policy-making abroad. Despite the FCD’s numerous successes in intelligence collection, its politically correct assessments of the Main Adversary and its allies served to reinforce rather than to correct the misunderstandings of the Soviet leadership. Even on the eve of the Gorbachev era, the Politburo would have learned more from reading leading Western newspapers than from top-secret Soviet intelligence reports. Kryuchkov’s assessment of the international situation in the FCD Work Plan for 1984, for example, declared that ‘The imperialist states are pursuing their intrigues over Poland and Afghanistan’, but made no reference to the mass opposition to Communist rule and Soviet domination which was at the root of the crisis in both countries. Similarly, Kryuchkov’s biennial report early in 1984 on KGB operations and international affairs over the previous two years arrived at the alarmist conclusion that ‘the deepening social and economic crisis in the capitalist world’ had reached such desperate straits that the imperialists were seriously considering thermonuclear war ‘as an escape from the difficulties they have created’. But there was, of course, no mention of the far more intractable economic problems of the Soviet bloc.
54
KGB influence on Soviet foreign policy has been frequently underrated. Even horrendously mistaken intelligence reports - such as those in the early 1960s and early 1980s claiming that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike - were capable of having an important influence on policy if, as happened in both cases, policy-makers took them seriously.
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KGB influence on Soviet foreign policy has been frequently underrated. Even horrendously mistaken intelligence reports - such as those in the early 1960s and early 1980s claiming that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike - were capable of having an important influence on policy if, as happened in both cases, policy-makers took them seriously.
55
As volume 1 of
The Mitrokhin Archive
sought to demonstrate, scientific and technological intelligence (S&T) from the West, which suffered far less from the demands of political correctness, was put to far more effective use than political intelligence. The plans for the first US atomic bomb obtained for Moscow by British and American agents were the most important military secret ever obtained by any intelligence service. As in the case of nuclear weapons, the early development of Soviet radar, rocketry and jet propulsion was heavily dependent on the covert acquisition of Western technology. The enormous flow of Western (especially American) S&T throughout the Cold War helps to explain one of the central paradoxes of a Soviet state which was once famously described as ‘Upper Volta with missiles’: its ability to remain a military superpower while its infant mortality and other indices of social deprivation were at Third World levels. The fact that the gap between Soviet weapons systems and those of the West was far smaller than in any other area of economic production was due not merely to their priority within the Soviet system but also to the remarkable success of S&T collection in the West. For most of the Cold War, American business proved much easier to penetrate than the federal government. Long before the KGB finally acquired a major spy in the CIA with the walk-in of Aldrich Ames in 1985, it was running a series of other mercenary agents in American defence contractors, as well as intercepting many of their fax communications. The Pentagon estimated in the early 1980s that probably 70 per cent of all current Warsaw Pact weapons systems were based on Western technology. Both sides in the Cold War - the Warsaw Pact as well as NATO - thus depended on American know-how. Outside the defence industry, however, the inefficient Soviet command economy was unable to put to good use most of the huge amount of S&T obtained from the West.
56
The Mitrokhin Archive
sought to demonstrate, scientific and technological intelligence (S&T) from the West, which suffered far less from the demands of political correctness, was put to far more effective use than political intelligence. The plans for the first US atomic bomb obtained for Moscow by British and American agents were the most important military secret ever obtained by any intelligence service. As in the case of nuclear weapons, the early development of Soviet radar, rocketry and jet propulsion was heavily dependent on the covert acquisition of Western technology. The enormous flow of Western (especially American) S&T throughout the Cold War helps to explain one of the central paradoxes of a Soviet state which was once famously described as ‘Upper Volta with missiles’: its ability to remain a military superpower while its infant mortality and other indices of social deprivation were at Third World levels. The fact that the gap between Soviet weapons systems and those of the West was far smaller than in any other area of economic production was due not merely to their priority within the Soviet system but also to the remarkable success of S&T collection in the West. For most of the Cold War, American business proved much easier to penetrate than the federal government. Long before the KGB finally acquired a major spy in the CIA with the walk-in of Aldrich Ames in 1985, it was running a series of other mercenary agents in American defence contractors, as well as intercepting many of their fax communications. The Pentagon estimated in the early 1980s that probably 70 per cent of all current Warsaw Pact weapons systems were based on Western technology. Both sides in the Cold War - the Warsaw Pact as well as NATO - thus depended on American know-how. Outside the defence industry, however, the inefficient Soviet command economy was unable to put to good use most of the huge amount of S&T obtained from the West.
56
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