Operation Dragon

by R. James Woolsey

  KGB officer Panteleymon Bondarenko, aka “Pantyusha,” the first chief of Communist Romania’s political police, the Securitate, starting in 1948, told Pacepa (in vulgar terms) that illegals had changed the face of Europe. Herbert Wehner, the West German SPD party chairman in the Bundestag and minister for “all-German affairs” (meaning relations with East Germany), pretended to have spent World War II as a political refugee in Sweden. In fact, as Pacepa learned from Pantyusha, Wehner had sheltered in Moscow, along with Walter Ulbricht, Matyas Rakosi, Georgi Dimitroff, Klement Gottwald, and Boleslaw Bierut. All became illegal Soviet officers charged to take over the governments of Eastern and Central Europe as soon as those countries were “liberated” by the Red Army. All carried the undercover rank of colonel except for Dimitroff, who became an “illegal” general. “All secretly worked for us,” Pantyusha explained, as Stalin did not give a “fucking kopek” for any foreign communist in Moscow “who tried to weasel out of working with us.”

  It is very hard to identify an illegal officer living in the West under a Western biography. General Pacepa approved many of them. All carried original Western birth certificates, school diplomas, pictures of alleged relatives, and even fake graves of relatives in the West. In some important cases, the KGB community also created ersatz living relatives in the West—ideologically motivated people who received life-long secret annuities from the Soviet bloc intelligence community.

  One of these illegals was so carefully documented that he rose to ambassador of an enemy nation. His Russian name was Iosif Grigulevich. At the end of World War II, Stalin was at the peak of his glory, but he hated Pope Pius XII, who in 1949 had excommunicated Stalin and his Communist Party. In retaliation, Stalin ordered an illegal to be tasked to kill Pope Pius XII. Grigulevich, documented as Teodoro B. Castro, the supposed illegitimate son of a recently deceased wealthy Costa Rican, was selected because on February 22, 1947, the nephew of Pius XII, Prince Giulio Pacelli (birth name, Eugenio Pacelli) had become the Costa Rican minister plenipotentiary to the Holy See.

  In 1949, Grigulevich and his Mexican KGB-recruited wife settled in Rome. He was now known as Teodoro Castro, a rich Costa Rican coffee merchant. Castro bought his way into the Costa Rican diplomatic service and by 1952 had risen to the post of Costa Rican minister plenipotentiary to Italy. KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected to the British in 1993 (and whose information has been described by the FBI as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source”), reported seeing Grigulevich’s personnel file in KGB archives with a note saying that as Castro he had “successfully cultivated the Costa Rican nuncio [sic] to the Vatican, Prince Giulio Pacelli, a nephew of Pope Pius XII” and “had a total of fifteen audiences with the Pope.”

  On March 5, 1953, Stalin unexpectedly died, and the illegal operation to assassinate Pope Pius XII was cancelled. In 1954, Grigulevich honorably retired from the KGB. Settling down in Moscow under the name Lavretsky, he died in 1988.

  A contemporary version of Grigulevich in the United States may be Bob Avakian. An American citizen, Avakian was said to be living in self-exile in Paris where he was rarely sighted. Avakian owned “revolution bookstores” in sixteen American cities, including Cambridge, Berkeley, New York, and Seattle, and he published a Soviet-style anti-American magazine called Revolution. Some years ago, Avakian formed a Soviet-style Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which was instrumental in sparking the 1992 Los Angeles riots and more recently in creating two Soviet-style radical organizations, Not in our Name and World Can’t Wait.

  We do not yet have a contemporary source like Pacepa to tell us if Avakian is another Grigulevich. But Avakian is now at work on replacing the U.S. Constitution with a Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, an American version of Lenin’s The State and the Revolution, which turned Russia into the Gulag Archipelago.

  The draft of Avakian’s constitution is a disturbing read. Behind its supposedly American façade, the document is breathtaking in its Soviet-style brutality: “In order to bring this new Socialist Republic into being, it would be necessary to thoroughly defeat, dismantle and abolish the capitalist-imperialist state of the USA; and this in turn would only become possible with the development of a profound and acute crisis in society.” The RCP Constitution legalizes “special Tribunals” for dealing with the “war crimes and other crimes against humanity” committed by “former members and functionaries of the ruling class of the imperialist USA and its state and government apparatus.” These enemies of the state will “be imprisoned or otherwise deprived of rights and liberties.”4

  It is an echo of Khrushchev: “Stealing from capitalism is moral, Comrades,” Khrushchev used to preach. “Don’t raise your eyebrows, Comrades. I intentionally used the word steal. Stealing from our enemy is moral, Comrades.” During the years Pacepa was his national security adviser, Ceausescu of Romania would also sermonize that stealing from capitalists was a Marxist duty. “Capitalists are the mortal enemies of Marxism,” Pacepa heard Fidel Castro inveigh in 1972, when he spent a vacation in Cuba as a guest of Fidel’s brother, Raul. “Killing them is moral, comrades!”

  Was Avakian’s constitution written for the 2020 elections? Hard to say.

  It will not be easy to break Russia’s five-century-old tradition of samoderzhavie, or tsarism run by political police. This was Russia’s historical form of government, and it appears to continue to be. Nevertheless, man would never have learned to walk on the moon had he not first studied where the moon lay in the universe and what it was made of. That is what this book seeks to do.

  CHAPTER 2

  UNDERCOVER FEUDALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Russia was the first hell on earth that legitimized theft and the elimination of despised groups of wealthy people as tools of national policy under the doctrine of socialism. The “kulak” or bourgeois class was eliminated and its property redistributed to the victors of the November 1917 socialist revolution. The imperial family’s wealth and rich Russians’ land were seized by the new Communist Party, and the Russian economy was nationalized. Property rights were eliminated, and most of Russia’s major property owners were killed.

  In 1931, socialism became the only religion allowed in Russia. Stalin’s political police dynamited the Cathedral of Christ the Savior—the site of the premiere in 1882 of Tchaikovsky’s famous 1812 Overture, a symphony written to give thanks to God and the heroes of the war against Napoleon. Some fifty thousand other Russian churches were also demolished. Some six hundred bishops, forty thousand priests, and one hundred and twenty thousand monks and nuns were killed.1

  In the mid-1930s, the Communist Party itself was coopted by Stalin, who stole all the country’s top-level positions and pinned them onto his chest. By the middle of the twentieth century, Russia had reverted to a dismal autocratic feudalism, nicknamed socialism.

  In August 1939, Soviet killing and stealing moved abroad. By signing the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, along with its secret protocol, Stalin made off with Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and portions of Poland and Finland. During World War II, Stalin shifted focus to stealing Western technologies. Lacking private ownership and the vitality of competition, Soviet technological progress stalled. So Stalin sought to steal whatever the Soviets could not invent on their own. After World War II, Stalin also netted all of Eastern Europe and helped engineer Mao’s victory in China. A few years later, the Kremlin managed to dispossess more than a third of the world’s population of their properties.

  It was nothing new for Russia. The astute French observer Astolphe Louis-Léonor, aka Marquis de Custine, concluded in 1839 that “everything is deception” in Russia. Like the Romans, Custine noted, the Russians “have taken their sciences and their arts from foreign lands. They have intelligence, but theirs is an imitative mind and, consequently, more ironic than fertile—it copies everything and creates nothing.”2 The Soviet Union’s satellites were forced to Russianize an
d rewrite history accordingly. In communist Romania, the national radio headquarters was located on Alexander Popov Street because Soviet history held that the Russian Popov, not Guglielmo Marconi, had invented the radio. In reality, Popov was an insignificant Russian physicist, who on May 7, 1895, had presented a paper on a wireless lightning detector based on the work of Marconi. The Soviet Union and its satellite countries were all required to celebrate that day as Radio Day.

  Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, was an educated lawyer who spent most of his mature life (1900–1917) in Western Europe, where political parties played a dominant role. He therefore quite naturally conceived of everything in terms of political parties. In his fundamental theoretical work, What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin developed his theory that the proletarian communist revolution should be led by a political party that would act as the “vanguard of the proletariat.” In his vision, that “party of a new type,” to which he devoted twenty years to construct, was to be the revolution’s mentor, leader, and guide. The other main Western-educated Soviet theorist, Leon Trotsky, went a step further: “The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition of an honorable, popular, really democratic foreign policy.”3 After the October Revolution, Trotsky became the commissar of foreign affairs and later of war.

  In October 1917, when Lenin returned to Russia to head his communist revolution, he found a country very different from the Europe in which he had matured politically. Unlike Marx’s England and Germany, whose economic problems had been caused by the industrial revolution, Russia was an agricultural backwater. Though nominally freed by Alexander II in 1861, Russia’s peasants had never really owned property or been allowed to make decisions for themselves. Feudal Russia had no relevant history of political parties, unlike England and Germany. Furthermore, the Russia at the center of Lenin’s revolution had a long history as a political police state, back to the sixteenth century’s Ivan the Terrible, a feudal lord who ruled through a personal political police or praetorian guard. Every Russian tsar built his own political police force, which, more than any other instrument of government, was used to keep the country quiet and under his or her control.

  When Peter the Great ascended to the throne at the end of the seventeenth century, he set up a secret police loyal solely to himself, the Preobrazhensky Prikaz. So secret was this organization that the exact date of its creation is still a mystery. Following Ivan the Terrible’s principle that “anyone who is not with me is a traitor,” Peter unleashed his new instrument of power against whoever spoke out against him, from his own wife and the nobles who dared to defy him to drunks who made jokes at his expense. Peter even entrusted the Preobrazhensky Prikaz with luring his own son and heir, the tsarevich Aleksey, back to Russia from abroad and torturing him to death.

  Months after Tsar Nicholas I took the throne, he established the Third Section of his Imperial Chancellery as his secret police. His 1845 Criminal Code laid down draconian penalties for anyone guilty of writing or spreading written or printed works or representations intended to arouse disrespect for sovereign authority or for the personal qualities of the sovereign. The law in Russia was therefore, quite expressly, that there was no freedom of speech in Russia and, moreover, that harboring any intention of speaking in any manner that the tsar did not like was criminal. It amounted to the institutionalization of political crime in Russia.

  The more moderate Aleksandr II abolished his predecessor’s Third Section but created his own Department of State Police. This body failed to save his life, however, for in 1881 he was assassinated with a primitive hand grenade. Yet Ivan the Terrible’s political police persisted, in one form or another, throughout the history of Russia. At the time of the October Revolution, it was called the Okhrana, founded in 1881 by Alexander II. Responsible only to the tsar, it had the power to search, imprison, and exile on its own sole authority entirely independently of Russian law.

  It was natural for Lenin to integrate his plans into this centuries-old tradition. On December 20, 1917, only two months after his final return to Russia, Lenin created his own political police, the famous Cheka (Vserossiyskaya Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya po Borbe s Kontrrevolyutsiyey i Sabotazhem, or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), which became the parent organization for subsequent generations of political police organizations.

  The Cheka’s coat of arms consisted of a shield, for protecting the revolution against traitors, and a sword, for putting its edge to those traitors’ necks. Thus, the roots of this emblem led back to the days of Ivan the Terrible rather than to the political ideology of Karl Marx. In 1917, Lenin described the Cheka as a temporary organization needed to subdue his domestic enemies and consolidate the rule of his party. It is nevertheless clear that he envisioned a key role for this organization from the beginning. The Russian word “cheka” means linchpin, and the Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya was surely so named to have its initials, pronounced Che Ka, convey that sense.

  The Cheka was the most rapidly expanding Soviet organization. It had started out with twenty-three men, but within a couple of years it numbered over two hundred thousand. A 1993 book written by British writer John Costello and Russian intelligence officer Oleg Tsarev, based on original KGB documents, reports that in 1920 “the Cheka’s total strength was approaching a quarter of a million, and that it outnumbered the peak strength of the Tsar’s Okhrana by more than two to one.” In 1921, Soviet Russia counted more Cheka officers than party members.4

  Twenty-one million people were killed by Lenin’s new political police during the first fifteen years of socialism in Russia, such that it is no wonder that the socialist Cheka’s magazine was named Krasnye Terror (Red Terror). Even more than the Spanish Inquisition, the socialist political police, under each of its numerous names, has been synonymous with killing. The Spanish Inquisition used to kill individuals they deemed to be heretics. The Soviet political police indiscriminately killed its faithful, its unfaithful, and its priests as well. But all in all, socialism—and only in Russia—killed three times more people than Nazism. The murder rate extended to China and other countries where the socialist experiment has been tried expands many times beyond that.

  In an August 11, 1918, handwritten order demanding that at least one hundred kulaks (prosperous peasants) be hanged in the town of Penza to set an example, Lenin wrote with his own hand: “Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers … Do it in such a way that people for hundreds of [kilometers] around will see, tremble, know and scream out: they are choking and strangling to death these bloodsucking kulaks.”5

  A 1918 article published in Red Terror magazine under the signature of Martyn Ivanovich Latsis, a deputy of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, explained: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.” Latsis’s instructions to the Cheka were equally conclusive. “During investigation,” he wrote, “do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education and profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance of the Red Terror.”6

  At Lenin’s direction, the Soviet Union’s first commissar of Public Health in 1918, Nikolai Semashko, organized the Soviet Union’s “free” socialist health care system. Later it would play a major role in bankrupting the nation, as after the political police, it was the largest Soviet bureaucracy. The government takeover of health care killed even more people throughout the Soviet bloc than the Cheka did, and the effects are long-lasting. In today’s Russia it is still normal to have two patients share the same hospital bed.

  Lacking the vitality of private enterprise, medical progress stagnated. The Nobel Prize for Medicine tells the story in a nutshell. During the last century, the United States’s free-market me
dical care system was awarded seventy-two Nobel prizes. The Soviet Union’s socialized medical system got none. (Tsarist Russia did get one Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1904 for Ivan Pavlov’s conditional reflex theory.)

  Bribery was the second major nightmare the Semashko “free” health care system generated. Everyone in the Soviet system knew one had to “stimulate” the bureaucracy to get any medical care. If you needed surgery, you knew that the first thing you had to do was find out what size of bribe would be acceptable to the bureaucrats who could approve that particular surgery. In 2008, The Lancet medical journal reported that in Russia, each doctor and nurse still had “his or her little tax” and that “they all prefer cash in envelopes, of course.” Nurses took 50 rubles ($2) to empty a bedpan and 200 rubles ($8) to give an enema. Surgical operations started at 300 rubles, but “the sky’s the limit.”

  People in the United States are not used to baksheesh, but in the future, if our health care system is being run by bureaucrats, we will soon get the hang of it. It may not start out as blatant bribes, but soon bribery is sure to become the rule in one way or another. In France, for instance, the government bureaucracy recently introduced a €1 franchise on every medical consultation, described as a “contribution au remboursement de la dette sociale” (contribution to the repayment of the social debt). That was followed by an €18 franchise on “costly” medical procedures. Now French patients are learning that if they discreetly slip an envelope with cash into the pocket of the doctor’s white lab coat hanging in his office, they will get more “attention.” And a little extra attention may indeed be vital in a centralized system in which doctors are obliged by law to see sixty to seventy patients a day.