Abakumov met the fate of many Soviet intelligence officers after the death of Stalin and the liquidation of Beria. At that time he was in charge of the internal section of Soviet security, which kept the files on members of the government and of the party. Abakumov was secretly executed and his entire section was decimated under the Malenkov regime. They knew too much. Despite certain relaxations in the public life of present-day Russia, the “terror” still holds sway within Soviet intelligence itself because this arm of Soviet power, second to none in peacetime, cannot relax, cannot be allowed any weakness.
In Soviet Russia, where the foreign intelligence service and the internal secret police at the higher levels are only separate arms of the KGB, most officers rotate between the two different types of duty. They customarily are assigned early in their careers to some provincial secret police office, usually in an area of their country in which they are not native. Here their duties primarily call for the running of informants among the local populace. Besides carrying out a function which the Soviet state deems necessary for its own internal security, men working at such posts also receive a basic on-the-job training in the fundamentals of espionage and counterespionage and at a level where occasional errors are not especially damaging.
Less gifted officers may remain at such posts for the greater part of their careers. The better men will eventually be assigned to intelligence headquarters. When they have sufficient experience and are thought to have been adequately tested for trustworthiness from the Communist point of view, they may finally be sent to a foreign post.
Peter Deriabin, who came over to us in Vienna in 1954, relates in his book that he began his KGB career with an assignment to the section responsible for guarding the lives of the Soviet bigwigs.2 He spent five years in this section and finally succeeded in getting himself assigned to a branch of the Foreign Intelligence Department responsible for operations in Austria. This, as would be the case in most intelligence services, gradually opened the way for his own transfer to a foreign post, logically enough, in Vienna. But he had served in the KGB over six years before he was entrusted with a foreign assignment.
2 Peter Deriabin and Frank Gibney, The Secret World (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1959).
The Soviets prefer to send men abroad who have had counterintelligence experience within Soviet Russia, and for a noteworthy reason. Having sat for years in posts where their primary responsibility was apprehending opponents of the regime, penetrating dissident circles and tracking an occasional miscreant suspected of cooperating with the “imperialists,” they are well aware of the workings of the secret police mentality. When the tables are turned and they find themselves in foreign countries running their own spy networks, they are likely to anticipate and often to outwit local police organs for whom they now represent the potential victim.
After returning from a tour of duty abroad in which they did not especially distinguish themselves, they may be assigned again to provincial police duties. The Soviets thus have a built-in solution for disposing of superannuated or ineffective intelligence officers. If, on the other hand, they did well abroad, they may begin to go up the administrative ladder in the foreign intelligence department, which is the most preferred and privileged branch of the service.
The Soviet citizen does not usually apply for a job in the intelligence service. He is spotted and chosen. Bright upcoming young men in various positions, be it in foreign affairs, economics or the sciences, are proposed by their superiors in the party for work in intelligence. To pass muster they must either be party members themselves, candidates for party membership or members of the youth organization, Komsomol, which is a kind of junior Communist party. They must come from an impeccable political background according to Communist standards, which means that there can be no “bourgeois taint” or any record of deviation or dissent in their immediate family or forebears.
An ambitious young man who is able to make his career in one of the branches of Soviet intelligence is fortunate by Soviet standards. His selection for this duty opens to him the doors of the “New Class,” the elite, the nobility of the new Soviet state. Soviet intelligence officers are ranked, as are the military, and have the same titles, although they only use these titles within the service at home. Rudolf Abel, who so successfully acted the part of a second-rate photographer in Brooklyn, was a colonel in Soviet intelligence. The heads of large departments usually rank as major- or lieutenant-generals. But service with Khrushchev’s security and intelligence often surpasses the prestige of service with the military. Soviet intelligence officers receive material rewards much above those given the similar ranks of government bureaucracy in other departments. They have opportunities for travel open to few Soviet citizens. Further, a career of this kind may open the road to high political office and important rank in the Communist party.
This is the breed of men who handled such cases as Chambers and Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Burgess and Maclean, George Blake, Houghton and Vassall. They have had some brilliant successes. What are their weaknesses and shortcomings?
The Soviet Security Service suffers from the same fundamental weakness as does Soviet bureaucracy and Communist society generally—indifference to the individual and his feelings, resulting in frequent lack of recognition, improper assignments, frustrated ambition, unfair punishment, all of which breed, in a Soviet Russian as in any man, loss of initiative, passivity, disgruntlement and dissidence. Service in the Soviet bureaucracy does not exactly foster independent thought and the qualities of leadership. The average Soviet official, in the intelligence service as elsewhere, is not inclined to assume responsibility or risk his career. There is an ingrained tendency to perform tasks “by the book,” to conform, to try to pass the bureaucratic buck if things go wrong.
Most important of all, every time the Soviets send an intelligence officer abroad they risk his exposure to the very systems he is dedicated to destroy. If for any reason he has become disillusioned or dissatisfied, his contact with the Western world often works as the catalyst which starts the process of disaffection. A steady and growing number of Soviet intelligence officers have been coming over to our side, proving that Soviet intelligence is by no means as monolithic and invulnerable as it wishes the world to believe.
SOME SOVIET TECHNIQUES—LEGALS AND ILLEGALS
I have already referred to “illegals” in an earlier chapter as a kind of “made-over” man. In Soviet practice not only agents but the staff intelligence officer himself may go abroad as an illegal. In the 1920s, when the Soviets ran their intelligence operations out of their diplomatic establishments abroad, these operations, which at that time were by no means particularly sophisticated, frequently fell afoul of the local police with the result that the espionage center was traced down to the local Soviet embassy, forcing the recall of the intelligence personnel stationed there and often harming Soviet relations with important countries, such as France and England with whom the Soviets for economic and other reasons wished to stay on outwardly good terms. It was at this time, in an attempt to keep espionage and diplomacy ostensibly separate, with advantages for both, that the Soviets hit upon the idea of developing a duplicate espionage apparatus in each country. Within the embassy there would still be intelligence officers but they would restrict themselves, except in emergencies, to “clean” operations, of which I have more to say below. This unit the Soviets call the “legal residentura.” Outside the embassy and buried away under the guise of some harmless occupation, perhaps in a bookstore or a photography shop, was quite another center devoted to the “dirty” operations. This was headquarters of the “illegal residentura,” composed mainly of officers who over a period of years had carefully been turned into personages whom it would be almost impossible to identify as Soviet nationals, much less as intelligence personnel. The illegal, unless apprehended with the agent or betrayed by him, can disappear into the woodwork if something goes wrong.
There will be no trail leading to a Soviet diplomatic installation to embarrass or discredit it. A principle governing this double setup was that neither center would have anything at all to do with the other except in emergencies. Each had its own separate communications with Moscow and only took its orders from there. The legal residentura used diplomatic channels of communication. The illegals had their own radio operators, a most dangerous and difficult arrangement. Most of the great Soviet wartime intelligence nets, as we shall see, came to grief because of their secret radio communications.
A man chosen for illegal work in any of its aspects will be sent to live abroad for as many years as it takes him to perfect his knowledge of the language and way of life of another country. He may even acquire citizenship in the adopted country. But during this whole period he has absolutely no intelligence mission. He does nothing that would arouse suspicion. When he has become sufficiently acclimatized, he returns to the Soviet Union, where he is trained and documented for his intelligence mission, and eventually dispatched to the target country, which may be the same one he has learned to live in or a different one. It matters little, for the main thing is that he is unrecognizable as a Soviet or Eastern European. He is a German or a Scandinavian or a South American. His papers show it, and so do his speech and his manners.
Sometimes, to provide their illegals with documents, the Soviets make use of the papers of a family which has been wiped out. For example, after the liberation of the Baltic states in World War I, many Americans of Lithuanian extraction returned to their native habitat with their children. Two decades later, when the Baltic states were overrun by the Soviets, many of these people were caught in the liquidation of anti-Communists which followed. Their papers, including the birth certificates of their American-born children, fell into the hands of the Soviet police. Later the KGB found these extremely useful for documenting their agents with bona fide American passports.
In most Western countries lax procedures in the issuance of duplicate birth certificates, records of marriage, death, etc., make it relatively easy for hostile intelligence services to procure valid documents for “papering” their agents. This situation has been frequently used by the Soviets, and any measures taken to correct it would be of distinct service to Western security.
Because they have almost perfect camouflage and are consequently immensely difficult to locate, “illegals” constitute the gravest security hazards to countries against which they are working. There is every evidence that the Soviets have been turning out such “illegals” at an accelerated rate since the end of World War II. Generally, they are used in a supervisory capacity, for directing espionage networks, rather than for penetration jobs that increase the danger of discovery.
However, despite the lengths to which the Soviets go to create illegals, a number of them of major stature have been uncovered and apprehended by Western intelligence in recent years. In 1957 Colonel Rudolf Abel, alias Emil R. Goldfus, was caught in the United States. He was tried and sentenced but was exchanged in 1962, after serving five years in prison, for the downed U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers. In early 1961 the British caught Conon Molody, alias Gordon Londsdale, in London and with him four other Soviet agents in what became known as the Naval Secrets Case. Lonsdale spoke perfect English and passed for a small-time businessman dealing in jukeboxes. His Canadian identity had been built up over many years, but the Soviets used him not in Canada, where he would have been exposed to accidental encounters with people from his “home town,” but in England, where, as a Canadian, he would be quite acceptable and would be unlikely to become the subject of much curiosity about the details of his background.
When an intelligence service goes to all the trouble to retool and remake a man so that he can succeed in losing himself in the crowd in another country, it naturally does so in the expectation that the man will stay put and remain active and useful for a long period of time. There is no rotation here of the sort that is common among officials of most diplomatic and intelligence services. Also, for obvious reasons, if the “illegal” has a family, the family does not accompany him. The wives and children cannot also be “made over.” He goes alone, and even his communications to his wife and children must necessarily be limited and must pass through secret channels. The only glimpse of Colonel Abel as a human being, indeed the only glimpse of the man as anything but a tight-lipped automaton, was afforded by some letters found in his possession which were written by his wife and daughter. Abel had been at his post nine years when he was caught. There is no reason to believe that he would not have continued in it for many years if one of his fellow workers, also an illegal, had not turned himself over to the U.S.A.
There are times, of course, when the “cover” of the embassy or trade mission lends advantages to the “legal” center not available to the illegal. Under the guise of “business” or “social” relations an officer in an embassy may be able to make certain connections in circles to which he has access which would be denied to the illegal.
If the Soviets, for example, are anxious to find an agent in a Western country who can report to them on a sensitive industry, the Soviet Trade Mission will advertise that it is interested in purchasing certain nonstrategic items manufactured by that industry or one closely allied to it. Manufacturers or middlemen will be attracted by the ad and will visit the Soviet mission to talk over possible business. They will be requested to fill out forms that call for personal and business data, references, financial statements, etc.
All this material is reviewed by the intelligence officer stationed at the mission. If any candidates seem promising because of their innocence, their political or perhaps apolitical attitudes, their need for money or susceptibility to blackmail, the Soviets can cultivate them further by pretending that the business deal is slowly brewing. The hand of espionage has not yet been shown. Nothing ostensibly has yet been done against the law.
Similarly, if Soviet intelligence officers stationed at an embassy and belonging to the legal residentura meet interesting or influential persons from the local environment in the course of the dinners, parties or other social events (which the Soviets now give in order to create a certain sophisticated and “friendly” impression in contrast to their behavior in earlier decades), they may very likely develop these “friendships” and even risk a recruitment at a later date. However, some of their recent attempts of this sort, particularly through their UN personnel, have been so crude and bare-faced as to make one wonder whether the Soviets are not using the UN for the schooling of their intelligence officers. It is also apparent from some recent cases that the Soviets have not been able to establish “illegals” in certain countries and therefore are forced to fall back upon their “legal” personnel even for risky operations.
THE USE OF THE PARTY
The Communist party outside the Soviet Union has been used only intermittently by the Soviet government for actual espionage. Every time some element of the Communist party is caught in acts of espionage, this discredits the party as an “idealistic” and indigenous political organization and exposes it for what it really is—the instrument of a hostile foreign power, the stooge of Moscow. Whenever such exposures have taken place, as happened frequently in Europe in the 1920s, it has been observed that, for a time, there is a sharp decline in the intelligence work performed by local Communist parties. Furthermore, the value of using personnel not fully trained in intelligence work is questionable, since these amateur collaborators can expose not only themselves but also the operations of the intelligence service proper.
Chiefly in countries where the party is tolerated but where resident agents are difficult to procure, the Soviet intelligence services have had recourse to the party. This was the case in the United States during World War II. One of the reasons for the eventual collapse of Soviet networks that reached deeply into our government at that time was the fact that the personnel were not ideally suited for espion
age. Many of these people had only strong ideological leanings toward Communism to recommend them for such work and in time were repelled by the discipline of espionage. Some, like Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, to whom the work became unpalatable, finally balked and volunteered their stories to the FBI. This problem came to a head for the Soviets just after the end of World War II as a result of the revelations of Igor Gouzenko, the defected code clerk of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. At that time the KGB issued a secret order to its officers abroad not to involve members of Communist parties further in intelligence work.
The Communist party apparatus and Communist front organizations may, however, be useful for “spotting” potential agents for espionage. The evidence given in the Canadian trials by Gouzenko acquainted the public for the first time with the elaborate techniques employed by the Communist party under various guises. “Reading groups” and “study groups” for persons quite innocently interested in Russia were formed within Canadian defense industries, entirely for the purpose of spotting and cultivating people who could eventually be exploited for the information they possessed. The target in this case was the atomic bomb.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 13
