© 2021 by R. James Woolsey and Ion Mihai Pacepa
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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Woolsey, R. James, 1941– author. | Pacepa, Ion Mihai, 1928– author.
Title: Operation dragon : inside the Kremlin’s secret war on America / by Ambassador R. James Woolsey and Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa.
Description: New York : Encounter Books, [2021] Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020020632 (print) | LCCN 2020020633 (ebook) ISBN 9781641771450 (cloth) | ISBN 9781641771467 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Espionage, Russian--United States--History. Intelligence service—Soviet Union—History. | Spies—Soviet Union.
Classification: LCC JN6529.I6 W66 2021 (print) | LCC JN6529.I6 (ebook) DDC 327.1247073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020632
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020633
Design of Developing the Secret Ink (photographic insert) by ADLI, LLC / Dana Bart
Interior page design and typesetting by Bruce Leckie
In Memory of Nancye Miller and Maurice Anthony Miller, with love and admiration
To Mary Lou Pacepa, who helped me to look at my past with American eyes
If you know the enemy and know yourself,
you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,
you will succumb in every battle.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Socialist Russia: An “Illegal” Intelligence Tyranny
CHAPTER 2 Undercover Feudalism in the Twentieth Century
CHAPTER 3 Socialist Anti-Semitism
CHAPTER 4 Stealing America’s Nuclear Bomb
CHAPTER 5 Disinformation: The Original Fake News Developing the Secret Ink
CHAPTER 6 The Killing of President Kennedy
CHAPTER 7 Gheorghiu-Dej, Ceausescu, and “Radu”
CHAPTER 8 The Glasnost Swindle
CHAPTER 9 As Russian as the Balalaika
CHAPTER 10 The “Dragon” Operation
CHAPTER 11 The Designated Hit Man
CHAPTER 12 From Presidential Assassination to International Terrorism
CHAPTER 13 The King is Dead! Long Live the King!
Epilogue
Biographical Notes
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
Until its wars against communist expansion in Korea and Vietnam, America was accustomed to victory. From 1776 to 1782 and in 1812, America gained and maintained its liberty from the British Empire, the most powerful in the world. In 1846, Mexico attacked and was soundly defeated. In 1898, the United States went to war to keep Cuba independent of Spain, decimating the Spanish fleet and forcing Spain to sue for peace. In World War I, in which over 40 million Europeans were killed, the United States quickly put together an army of 4 million and became instrumental in defeating the German aggressor. In World War II, almost half a million Americans died to defeat Nazism. At its end, a united America rebuilt her vanquished enemies. It took seven years and trillions of dollars to turn Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hirohito’s Japan into prosperous democracies, but the effort made the United States the uncontested leader of the world, a fact that has kept the peace for over seventy years.
America has always stood against tyranny from any ideological source. Russia during its socialist period killed over 90 million people throughout its empire. It stole American nuclear technology. It murdered one of our presidents. It generated today’s international terrorism. Now, our intelligence professionals say, it openly interferes in America’s internal affairs. This book is about why confronting such behavior must be at the center of America’s foreign policy.
This is the first and it will be surely the last book in history to be co-written by a former director of the U.S. foreign intelligence community and an ex-Soviet–bloc spy chief. As communism collapsed economically in the early 1990s, Pacepa effectively sent a socialist tyrant, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, to the gallows by writing a book entitled Red Horizons. Knowledge is power. This book adds to our knowledge base about Russia as it was in the Soviet period and as it continues to be. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto has turned 172 years old, leaving behind the wreckage of nations like trailer parks after a hurricane. Communism’s late socialist leaders are today reviled universally as tyrants, from the Soviet Union’s Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin to Cuba’s Fidel Castro; from Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito to Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov; from Albania’s Enver Hoxha to Hungary’s Mátyás Rakosi; from Guinea’s Sékou Touré to Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. For years the USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev and Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu were even found unworthy of a marked grave.
The United States fought the Cold War for forty-four long years. It may have won, but unlike other wars, this war didn’t end with the defeated enemy throwing down its weapons. The Soviet Union has changed its name, but at 6,612,100 square miles, Russia is still the largest country on earth geographically. It also still has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear and bacteriological weapons and the world’s second largest fleet of ballistic nuclear missile submarines, a fact our politicians and press tend to ignore. Russia remains largely a mystery to America, but it is a puzzle that we assume away as subdued, or as having “collapsed,” at our peril.
On March 16, 2014, Moscow state television announced with fanfare that Russia could now turn its archenemy, the U.S., into “radioactive ash.” A single Russian electromagnetic pulse (EMP) nuclear bomb launched above the U.S. mainland from a fishing boat off either our East or West Coast could collapse the entire United States electric grid and all that depends on it—communications, transportation, banking, finance, and food and water. This is all that is currently necessary to sustain modern civilization and the lives of roughly 330 million Americans. NATO’s deputy supreme commander in Europe, General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, warned that “the threat from Russia and the risk it brings of miscalculation resulting in a strategic conflict represents an existential threat to our whole being.”
We agree.
The two of us have spent decades managing the foreign intelligence communities of our native countries. Behind Russia’s new smiling face lurk almost a hundred nuclear and bacteriological cities built and managed by the KGB. This intelligence service has been rechristened the FSB only to make it seem to be a new organization. Its sole task is to steal U.S. military technologies and weapons and to secretly reproduce them as if they were Russian inventions. Chelyabinsk city in the Urals is on a map of the Soviet Union. But Chelyabinsk-40, a city of 40,000 people also located in the Urals, is not. Nor do any maps show Chelyabinsk-65, Chelyabinsk-70, Chelyabinsk-95, or Chelyabinsk-115, all in the Urals. Krasnoyars
k city is in eastern Siberia, but there is no mention anywhere of Krasnoyarsk-25, Krasnoyarsk-26, or Krasnoyarsk-45. All these secret cities maintained by the KGB/FSB survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.1
Candidates for public office routinely ignore the threat to national security from historical enemies of the United States. Some appear to believe that Russia is now Westernized—some who lean left even seem to believe that Russia’s cast-off socialism still ought to serve as a model for the United States. In the tradition of pie-in-the-sky promises, candidates for public office promise American voters Russian-style jobs, free education, and free health care for all. Few seem to grasp that the Soviet Union’s economic disintegration in 1989 was final proof of socialism’s bankruptcy as a system. Its failure also came without warning. Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1991 that “I never heard a suggestion from the CIA or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State” about “growing, systemic economic problems in the Soviet Union.”2 Rather, the trendy political science theory of the 1970s was “convergence.” That the Soviet Union and the U.S. were more alike than different and were gradually coming together in a “convergence” of free market and socialist systems.
Our contemporary politicians do not seem to understand, or to remember, that each long war brings significant social and political changes to the belligerents. The Great War brought Marxism to Russia to create the Soviet Union. At the end of World War II, the USSR created a Marxist empire by swallowing up Eastern Europe. Right in the middle of the twentieth century, when much of the world was finally beginning to enjoy economic prosperity, Eastern Europe was shoved back into dismal feudalism.
In 1945, young British voters, tired of five years of war, kicked the legendary Winston Churchill—instrumental in winning World War II—out of office and brought in Clement Attlee, an undercover Marxist leader of the Labour Party. Attlee started his reign with a populist move: he nationalized the health care system and the finance system. Attlee went on, l’appétit vient en mangeant,3 to nationalize the auto and coal industries, communication facilities, civil aviation, electricity, and the steel industry. The British economy collapsed, and the powerful British Empire passed into history. This history should have been a stern warning to all. But it was largely ignored. Marxists continued to flourish and to nurture their favorite idea. Now, after eighteen years of war in Afghanistan, the specter of Marx haunts even the United States. Young Americans too love the promise of a “free lunch.”
The cover of Newsweek magazine just after our 2008 financial crisis proclaimed, “We Are All Socialists Now.”4 An article in, of all places, Russia’s Pravda, declared, “It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Socialism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.”5 A couple of years later, Newsweek was sold for a dollar, 14 million Americans had lost their jobs, and 41.8 million people had gone on government food stamps.
Therefore, we two decided to write a brief analysis about the secret role played by Russian intelligence in the free world. Russia has now become the first intelligence dictatorship in history—and few people know what that really means.
This is not just another spy story. It is a book about some of Russia’s most successful anti-American espionage and disinformation operations. Through these operations, the KGB, now rebaptized as the FSB to look like a new organization, moved into the Kremlin. As a result, the KGB/FSB now owns Russia. Most of these operations were born during Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s Cold War years and were left in place, largely unaffected by the collapse of the Soviet economy and the Soviet political superstructure.
The Cold War years of Khrushchev and Andropov were the period in which KGB general Aleksandr Sakharovsky, at that time known to General Pacepa under an alias (as was the rule in those days), served as Romania’s chief KGB adviser. Sakharovsky was a Soviet version of the heads of Mossad and MI6 at the peak of the Cold War. At that time, not even the members of the Israeli and British governments knew the identities of the heads of their secret intelligence agencies. Now very few people know that the urbane fan of classical music, Sakharovsky, who was also secrecy incarnate, was a killer. It is even less understood that under Khrushchev, Sakharovsky spread the KGB’s domestic mass killings out into the West. During his fourteen years as the Soviet Union’s top spy chief, the bloodthirsty Sakharovsky worked with the equally bloodthirsty Khrushchev to export Soviet-style communism to Cuba (1958–1962), where again, tens of thousands were killed to establish communist rule. Khrushchev’s and Sakharovsky’s Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. In 1969 Sakharovsky transformed airplane hijacking into a primary tool of international terrorism. That terrorist weapon of choice would resurface once again in New York City on September 11, 2001.
In this book we also focus on Russia’s secret theft of America’s super-secret nuclear technologies just before the era of Sakharovsky and Khrushchev. This theft of data helped Russia create today’s nuclear risks by proliferating nuclear technology to communist China, North Korea, Pakistan, and probably beyond.
For the past eighteen years, Russia has been managed by undercover KGB officers. As a result, even its official policies, like most intelligence operations, have been effectively written in secret ink. Without the secret developing solution, such operations cannot be read. Combining our collective experience as a former head of foreign intelligence in the United States and a former acting chief of foreign intelligence of a Soviet bloc country, Romania, we have been in a position to decode a number of top-secret Soviet intelligence operations conducted against the United States that reveal the unseen face of today’s Russia openly managed by its rechristened KGB, the FSB.
CHAPTER 1
SOCIALIST RUSSIA: AN “ILLEGAL” INTELLIGENCE TYRANNY
On September 20, 2004, a senior Democratic Party figure running for the White House said during a PBS radio interview with Jim Lehrer: “Well, let me just say quickly that I’ve had an extraordinary experience of watching up close and personal that transition in Russia, because I was there right after the transformation. And I was probably one of the first senators … to go down into the KGB underneath Treblinka Square and see reams of files with names on them. It sort of brought home the transition to democracy that Russia was trying to make.”
We understand that confusing Treblinka, a Nazi death camp in Poland, with the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka, in Moscow, could have been a slip of the tongue. But the fact that a main runner for the White House thought that he could claim to understand Russia because he had, on a junket, viewed a few KGB archive files written in a language he could not read, is scary. To romanticize the Russian danger leaves us unprepared to face its reality.
In 2010, the FBI arrested ten Russian illegal intelligence officers, otherwise known as spies, in the U.S. But President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry deported them to Russia before they were thoroughly interrogated by the FBI about their activities.1
The American media tends to treat the idea of illegal officers akin to a joke—comic book characters, spy novel fodder, or inconsequential sleepers. For the intelligence community, however, illegals are a particularly insidious and dangerous component of espionage. To preserve the secrecy of these agents, the Kremlin goes to dramatic lengths. One example was the dramatic prison break in England on October 22, 1966, of George Blake, a former ranking officer of the British foreign intelligence service (SIS). He had been considered by his superiors as a possible “C” (chief of the entire British foreign intelligence). Sprung from Wormwood Scrubs prison, he was never seen again in the West. Blake was serving an unprecedented forty-two-year sentence for having compromised the West’s highly secret “Operation Gold” to the KGB—a tunnel in East Berlin used to tap Soviet military telephone lines during the Cold War—and the identities of some four hundred SIS and CIA officers and agents
involved in that secret operation. After a tip from a Soviet bloc defector, Blake was arrested and sentenced for espionage. As far as we know, the British SIS did not then suspect that Blake was a Soviet illegal officer.
Forty-four years later, a former head of the KGB, Vladimir Putin, installed himself as Russia’s president. Two years after that, a select cluster of former senior KGB officers gathered at Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, to launch George Blake’s book Transparent Walls. Sergey Lebedev, the new head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), wrote in the book’s foreword that, despite the book being devoted to the past, it was about the present. Blake’s book was, indeed, a message to all Russian illegal officers around the world: it is again your time.
The term “illegal” has a specialized meaning. Intelligence officers working under the cover of official representatives, such as diplomats, in foreign countries are “legal,” overt “spies.” Officers documented as natives of a foreign target country and embedded in that country for the rest of their operational lives are “illegals.”
Illegal officers might just be your next-door neighbors. They are documented as born in your country, and they speak your language with native fluency. Some might be even ranking members of your country’s administration, like George Blake. All, however, are ready to become operationally active on special occasions, such as for killing political opponents, influencing elections, or replacing the legal agents in times of war when the enemy’s embassies are shut down. Some are even prepared to create skeletons of pro-Russian governments in that country after the end of major wars.
In May 1974, the chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, wrote to the West German president: “I accept political responsibility for negligence in connection with the Guillaume espionage affair and declare my resignation from the office of federal chancellor.”2 Günter Guillaume was an illegal officer of Communist East Germany’s Stasi intelligence service3 who had risen to become a staunch member of the West German SPD party and a trusted adviser to Brandt himself. Sentenced to thirteen years in prison, in 1988 he was returned to East Germany in exchange for Western spies caught in the Eastern bloc. In East Germany, Guillaume was celebrated as a hero. There he published his bestselling autobiography, Die Aussage (The Statement).
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