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.
On December 20, 1962, an article appeared in Pravda under the name of the Chief of Soviet State Security (KGB), M. Semichastny, which opened with the words, “Forty-five years ago today, at the initiative of Vladimir Illitch Lenin . . .” and went on to describe the founding of the first Soviet security body, the Cheka, in 1917, and to summarize the ups and downs of forty-five years of Soviet police and intelligence history. While the purpose of the article was no doubt to improve the public image of this justly feared and hated institution, its importance to the foreign observer lay in the tacit admission that despite changes of name and of leadership the Soviets really view this organization as having a definite and unbroken continuity since the day of its founding.
In their attempts to evade detection and capture by the Okhrana, the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed the conspiratorial techniques that later stood the Soviets in such good stead. The complicated and devious tricks of concealing and passing messages, of falsifying documents, of using harmless intermediaries between suspect parties so as not to expose one to the other or allow both to be seen together—these were all survival techniques developed after bitter encounters and many losses at the hands of the czar’s police. When the Soviets later founded their own intelligence service, these were the tricks they taught their agents to evade the police of other countries. Even the very words which the Bolsheviks used in the illegal days before 1917 as a kind of private slang among terrorists—such as dubok (little oak tree) for a dead-letter drop—became in time the terms in official use within the Soviet intelligence service.
It is always a matter of surmise among Western observers whether the internal power struggles which are usually rife within the hierarchy of the Soviet Union will affect the position and powers of the KGB as the most privileged body in the Soviet state. I do not mean solely that its top people may be removed, or even executed, as were the former chiefs, Yezhov, Yagoda and Beria, in their day, but rather that its entire ranks might be purged and its standing vis-à-vis other elements of the state sharply reduced. The chief contender for power is the Army, which time and again in Soviet history has been downgraded by the dictator in favor of the state security organization, since the latter was his personal instrument and he could use it to keep an eye on the army.
THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES OF THE EUROPEAN SATELLITES AND RED CHINA
Soviet State Security founded, organized, trained and today still supervises the intelligence and security services
of the European satellites of Soviet Russia. They are in a sense little “KGBs” and sometimes like to call themselves that within their own ranks. They are entirely the creatures of the Soviets and mirror in their structure and their techniques the results of the long-range experience of their Soviet big brothers. Their main objectives are dictated by the Soviets, although they are allowed certain limited initiatives in matters relating to their own “internal” security. The Poles and Czechs, for example, will run operations whose intent is to locate Western espionage directed against their national areas. If in the course of such operations they turn up an especially good agent who offers, let us say, a prime opportunity for penetration of a Western government, the Soviets will very likely take over the agent and run him themselves, and the satellite intelligence service must grin and bear it.
This was the case with Harry Houghton, who was first recruited by the Polish intelligence service when he was stationed at the British embassy in Warsaw. When he was transferred back to London and put to work in the Admiralty, the Soviets saw opportunities which were far too important for the Poles to handle. They took over the case and the Polish intelligence service never heard about Houghton again until his name appeared in the papers after his arrest.
From the beginning the Soviets maintained an efficient stranglehold over these services by appointing to the top jobs in them people who had been old-line Soviet agents and had been trained in Moscow, many of them in pre-World War II days. The hard core of the present Polish intelligence service, for example, is made up of Polish Communists who had fled to Russia in 1939 and who returned to Poland in 1944 with Polish military units accompanying the Red Army. They had spent most of the war years in Moscow being trained by the Soviets for their future jobs in a projected but as yet nonexistent Polish intelligence service. Younger personnel are carefully screened by the Soviets before being accepted for employment in any of the satellite services.
Even today the Soviets manage and direct the satellite services, not at long range but in person. They do this through a so-called advisory system. A Soviet “adviser” is installed in almost every significant department of the satellite intelligence services, be it in Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest or any other satellite capital. This adviser is supposed to be shown all significant material concerning the work being done, and must give consent to all important operational undertakings. He is to all intents and purposes a supervisor, and his word is final.
As a sidelight on Soviet relations to the satellites, it is interesting to note that the Soviets do not rely wholly on these advisers to control the satellite intelligence services. This is not because the latter are incompetent, but because the satellite services are evidently not trusted by their Soviet master. In order to prevent these services from getting away with anything, the Soviets go to the trouble of secretly recruiting intelligence officers of the satellite services who can supply them with information on plans, personnel, conflicts in the local management, disaffection and the like, which might not have come to the attention of the adviser.
While the Soviets cannot really trust their satellites, they will use them to draw chestnuts out of the fire where it is advantageous to do so. The Soviets were quick to recognize, for example, that the very great numbers of persons of Polish, Czech and Hungarian extraction living in Western Europe and in Canada and the United States theoretically represented a potential pool of agents to which the respective satellite services might find access with much greater ease than the Soviets could, on the basis of common ethnic background, family and other sentimental ties to the old country, etc. Thus, we find that the attempts to recruit people of Central European and Balkan extraction both here and abroad for Communist espionage have largely been carried out by personnel of the satellite intelligence services. That the latter have been rebuffed in most cases is a tribute to the loyalties of the first- or second-generation citizens of the U.S. and the other NATO countries.
Red China, not being a satrapy of the Soviet Union as are the smaller nations of Eastern Europe, has its own independent intelligence and security system which is in no way subservient to the KGB. In intelligence as in technical and scientific fields, the Soviets for a long period had advisers stationed in China, but these were really advisers and not the kind of supervisors I described above. They have long since departed, and it is unlikely today, in view of the Sino-Soviet rift, that there is more than the most nominal collaboration and coordination between the Red Chinese and the Soviet intelligence services. Indeed, we can safely assume that each of these countries is using its intelligence service to keep its eye on the other.
We have not yet begun to consider Red Chinese espionage as a serious menace to our own security in the U.S., though in the years to come it may well become a formidable instrument for spying and subversion in the West, as it already has throughout Asia and the Pacific. The Chinese are, of course, at the same disadvantage in operating against us as we are in attempting to operate against them. Physical and cultural differences make it quite difficult to camouflage the true ethnic status and national origin of intelligence officers or agents on either side.
A Ukrainian was able with sufficient training and with the proper documents to pass himself off in England as a Canadian of Anglo-Saxon origin named Gordon Lonsdale. For a Chinese, this would, of course, be impossible. In areas where there are large numbers of resident Chinese, as in Hawaii, Malaya, etc., the Chinese can take advantage of ethnic ties. The first real inroads into Occidental areas are now being made by the Chinese in South America, where the more fanatical element of the local Communist contingents welcomes them. Should the Chinese succeed in such areas in recruiting Westerners of Hispanic origin as long-term agents, it will begin to be possible for them to infiltrate the U.S. and European countries with such agents, who would be no more recognizable as Chinese agents than Lonsdale was as a Soviet agent.
There is reason to expect an ever greater effort on the part of Red Chinese intelligence against U.S. and other Western targets. China is anxious to develop its nuclear power, but the withdrawal of Soviet technical advisers in 1959 undoubtedly slowed down its program in this field. The course of the Red Chinese will very likely be the same the Soviets chose during and after World War II, when they succeeded in stealing atomic secrets from us through spies like Fuchs and Pontecorvo and penetrated American and other Western scientific installations. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, warned American industrialists in early 1964 that the Red Chinese were seeking to gain information on American technical installations through the use of Chinese-Americans long established in this country and also by exploiting the contacts dating from college days which Chinese scientists trained in the United States formerly had with American scientists. Should the Red Chinese be admitted to the U.N. or establish diplomatic installations on our soil, they would then have firmer bases from which to organize and direct their technical espionage undertakings.
In the Western European countries that have recognized Red China diplomatically, among which France can now be numbered, the Chinese have staffed their embassies with a quantity of personnel far in excess of the normal and necessary contingents and with unusually frequent turnovers of such personnel. This has been the case, for example, in Bern, Switzerland, where the Chinese have well over a hundred employees stationed, obviously many more than are needed for the normal course of their diplomacy with Switzerland. What percentage of these are engaged in intelligence work is not easy to determine. It is clear, however, that many of them are sent abroad solely to learn Western ways and to become acquainted with the workings of Western societies and enterprises, doubtless as part of their training for future intelligence work.
THE SOVIET INTELLIGENCE OFFICER
From my own experience I have the impression that the Soviet intelligence officer represents the species homo Sovieticus in its unalloyed and most successful form. This strikes me as much the most important thing about him, mor
e important than his characteristics as a practitioner of the intelligence craft itself. It is as if the Soviet intelligence officer were a kind of final and extreme product of the Soviet system, an example of the Soviet mentality pitched to the nth degree.
He is blindly and unquestioningly dedicated to the cause, at least at the outset. He has been fully indoctrinated in the political and philosophical beliefs of Communism and in the basic motivation which proceeds from these beliefs, which is that the ends alone count and any means which achieve them are justified. Since the ingrained Soviet approach to the problems of life and politics is conspiratorial, it is no surprise that this approach finds its ultimate fulfillment in intelligence work. When such a man does finally see the light, as has happened, his disillusionment is overwhelming.
The Soviet intelligence officer is throughout his career subject to a rigid discipline; as one intelligence officer put it who had experienced this discipline himself, he “has graduated from an iron school.” On the one hand, he belongs to an elite and has privilege and power of a very special kind. He may be functioning as the embassy chauffeur, but he may have a higher secret rank than the ambassador and more power where the power really counts. On the other hand, neither rank nor seniority nor past achievement will protect him if he makes a mistake. When a Soviet intelligence officer is caught out or his agents are caught through an oversight on his part, he can expect demotion, dismissal, even prison. In Stalin’s day he would have been shot.
I can think of no better illustration of the merciless attitude of the Soviet intelligence officer himself than the story told of one of Stalin’s intelligence chiefs, General V. S. Abakumov. During the war, Abakumov’s sister was picked up somewhere in Russia on a minor black-marketing charge—“speculation,” as the Soviets call it. In view of her close connection to this powerful officer in the secret hierarchy, the police officials sent a message to Abakumov asking how he would like the case handled. They fully expected he would request the charges be dropped. Instead, he is reliably reported to have written on the memorandum sent him: “Why do you ask me? Don’t you know your duty? Speculation during wartime is treason. Shoot her.” An interesting sidelight on Abakumov is that he, like his boss, Beria, ran what one writer has described as “a string of private brothels.”
The Craft of Intelligence Page 12
