The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  Mitrokhin thus found himself spending more time dealing with the files of Directorate S, the most secret in the FCD, than with those of any other section of Soviet foreign intelligence. The illegals retained a curious mystique within the KGB. Before being posted abroad, every illegal officer was required to swear a solemn, if somewhat melodramatic, oath:

  Deeply valuing the trust placed upon me by the Party and the fatherland, and imbued with a sense of intense gratitude for the decision to send me to the sharp edge of the struggle for the interest of my people… as a worthy son of the homeland, I would rather perish than betray the secrets entrusted to me or put into the hand of the adversary materials which could cause political harm to the interests of the State. With every heartbeat, with every day that passes, I swear to serve the Party, the homeland, and the Soviet people.17

  The files showed that before the Second World War the greatest foreign successes had been achieved by a legendary group of intelligence officers, often referred to as the “Great Illegals.” After the Second World War, the KGB had tried to recreate its pre-war triumphs by establishing an elaborate network of “illegal residencies” alongside the “legal residencies” which operated under diplomatic or other official cover in foreign capitals.

  The records of Directorate S revealed some remarkable individual achievements. KGB illegals successfully established bogus identities as foreign nationals in a great variety of professions ranging from Costa Rican ambassador to piano tuner to the Governor of New York. Even in the Gorbachev era, KGB propaganda continued to depict the Soviet illegal as the supreme embodiment of the chivalric ideal in the service of secret intelligence. The retired British KGB agent George Blake wrote in 1990:

  Only a man who believes very strongly in an ideal and serves a great cause will agree to embark on such a career, though the word “calling” is perhaps appropriate here. Only an intelligence service which works for a great cause can ask for such a sacrifice from its officers. That is why, as far as I know, at any rate in peacetime, only the Soviet intelligence service has “illegal residents.”18

  The SVR continues the KGB tradition of illegal hagiography. In July 1995, a month after the death of the best-known American-born illegal, Morris Cohen, President Yeltsin conferred on him the posthumous title of Hero of the Russian Federation.

  The files of Directorate S noted by Mitrokhin reveal a quite different kind of illegal. Alongside the committed FCD officers who maintained their cover and professional discipline throughout their postings, there were others who could not cope when confronted by the contrast between the Soviet propaganda image of capitalist exploitation and the reality of life in the West. An even darker secret of the Directorate S records was that one of the principal uses of the illegals during the last quarter of a century of the Soviet Union was to search out and compromise dissidents in the other countries of the Warsaw Pact. The squalid struggle against “ideological subversion” was as much a responsibility of Directorate S as of the rest of the FCD.

  MITROKHIN WAS UNDERSTANDABLY cautious as he set out in 1972 to compile his forbidden FCD archive. For a few weeks he tried to commit names, codenames and key facts from the files to memory and transcribe them each evening when he returned home. Abandoning that process as too slow and cumbersome, he began to take notes in minuscule handwriting on scraps of paper which he crumpled up and threw into his wastepaper basket. Each evening, he retrieved his notes from the wastepaper and smuggled them out of Yasenevo concealed in his shoes. Gradually Mitrokhin became more confident as he satisfied himself that the Yasenevo security guards confined themselves to occasional inspections of bags and briefcases without attempting body searches. After a few months he started taking notes on ordinary sheets of office paper which he took out of his office in his jacket and trouser pockets.

  Not once in the twelve years which Mitrokhin spent noting the FCD archives was he stopped and searched. There were, however, some desperately anxious moments. From time to time he realized that, like other FCD officers, he was being tailed—probably by teams from the Seventh (Surveillance) or Second Chief (Counter-intelligence) Directorates. On one occasion while he was being followed, he visited the Dynamo Football Club sports shop and, to his horror, found himself standing next to two English visitors whom his watchers might suspect were spies with whom he had arranged a rendezvous. If he was searched, his notes on top secret files would be instantly discovered. Mitrokhin quickly moved on to other sports shops, hoping to convince his watchers that he was on a genuine shopping expedition. As he approached his apartment block, however, he noticed two men standing near the door to his ninth-floor flat. By the time he arrived, they had disappeared. FCD officers had standing instructions to report suspicious incidents such as this, but Mitrokhin did not do so for fear of prompting an investigation which would draw attention to the fact that he had been seen standing next to English visitors.

  Each night when he returned to his Moscow flat, Mitrokhin hid his notes beneath his mattress. On weekends he took them to a family dacha thirty-six kilometers from Moscow and typed up as many as possible, though the notes became so numerous that Mitrokhin was forced to leave some of them in handwritten form. He hid the first batches of typescripts and notes in a milk-churn which he buried below the floor.19 The dacha was built on raised foundations, leaving just enough room for Mitrokhin to crawl beneath the floorboards and dig a hole with a short-handled spade. He frequently found himself crawling through dog and cat feces and sometimes disturbed rats while he was digging, but he consoled himself with the thought that burglars were unlikely to follow him. When the milk-churn was full, he began concealing his notes and typescripts in a tin clothes-boiler. Eventually his archive also filled two tin trunks and two aluminum cases, all of them buried beneath the dacha.20

  Mitrokhin’s most anxious moment came when he arrived at his weekend dacha to find a stranger hiding in the attic. He was instantly reminded of the incident a few years earlier, in August 1971, when a friend of the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had called unexpectedly at his dacha while Solzhenitsyn was away and surprised two KGB officers in the attic who were probably searching for subversive manuscripts. Other KGB men had quickly arrived on the scene and Solzhenitsyn’s friend had been badly beaten. Andropov cynically ordered Solzhenitsyn to be “informed that the participation of the KGB in this incident is a figment of his imagination.”21 The incident was still fresh in Mitrokhin’s mind when he arrived at the dacha because he had recently noted files which recorded minutely detailed plans for the persecution of Solzhenitsyn and the “active measures” by which the KGB hoped to discredit him in the Western press. To his immense relief, however, the intruder in the attic turned out to be a homeless squatter.

  During summer holidays Mitrokhin worked on batches of his notes at a second family dacha near Penza, carrying them in an old haversack and dressing in peasant clothes in order not to attract attention. In the summer of 1918 Penza, 630 kilometers southeast of Moscow, had been the site of one of the first peasant risings against Bolshevik rule. Lenin blamed the revolt on the kulaks (better-off peasants) and furiously instructed the local Party leaders to hang in public at least one hundred of them so that “for hundreds of kilometers around the people may see and tremble…”22 By the 1970s, however, Penza’s counter-revolutionary past was long forgotten, and Lenin’s bloodthirsty orders for mass executions were kept from public view in the secret section of the Lenin archive.

  One of the most striking characteristics of the best literature produced under the Soviet regime is how much of it was written in secret. “To plunge underground,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “to make it your concern not to win the world’s recognition—Heaven forbid!—but on the contrary to shun it: this variant of the writer’s lot is peculiarly our own, purely Russian, Russian and Soviet!”23 Between the wars Mikhail Bulgakov had spent twelve years writing The Master and Margarita, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, knowing that it could not be published in his lifetime and f
earing that it might never appear at all. His widow later recalled how, just before his death in 1940, Bulgakov “made me get out of bed and then, leaning on my arm, he walked through all the rooms, barefoot and in his dressing gown, to make sure that the manuscript of The Master was still there” in its hiding place.24 Though Bulgakov’s great work survived, it was not published until a quarter of a century after his death. As late as 1978, it was denounced in a KGB memorandum to Andropov as “a dangerous weapon in the hands of [Western] ideological centers engaged in ideological sabotage against the Soviet Union.”25

  When Solzhenitsyn began writing in the 1950s, he told himself he had “entered into the inheritance of every modern writer intent on the truth”:

  I must write simply to ensure that it was not forgotten, that posterity might some day come to know of it. Publication in my own lifetime I must shut out of my mind, out of my dreams.

  Just as Mitrokhin’s first notes were hidden in a milk-churn beneath his dacha, so Solzhenitsyn’s earliest writings, in minuscule handwriting, were squeezed into an empty champagne bottle and buried in his garden.26 After the brief thaw in the early years of “de-Stalinization” which made possible the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s story of life in the gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he waged a timeconsuming struggle to try to prevent the KGB from seizing his other manuscripts until he was finally forced into exile in 1974.27 It did not occur to Mitrokhin to compare himself with such literary giants as Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn. But, like them, he began assembling his archive “to ensure that the truth was not forgotten, that posterity might some day come to know of it.”

  THE KGB FILES which had the greatest emotional impact on Mitrokhin were those on the war in Afghanistan. On December 28, 1979 Babrak Karmal, the new Afghan leader chosen by Moscow to request “fraternal assistance” by the Red Army which had already invaded his country, announced over Kabul Radio that his predecessor, Hafizullah Amin, an “agent of American imperialism,” had been tried by a “revolutionary tribunal” and sentenced to death. Mitrokhin quickly discovered from the files on the war which flooded into the archives that Amin had in reality been assassinated, together with his family and entourage, in an assault on the Kabul presidential palace by KGB special forces disguised in Afghan uniforms.28

  The female clerks who filed KGB reports on the war in the archives after they had been circulated to the Politburo and other sections of the Soviet hierarchy had so much material to deal with that they sometimes submitted to Mitrokhin thirty files at a time for his approval. The horrors recorded in the files were carefully concealed from the Soviet people. The Soviet media preserved a conspiracy of silence about the systematic destruction of thousands of Afghan villages, reduced to forlorn groups of uninhabited, roofless mud-brick houses; the flight of four million refugees; and the death of a million Afghans in a war which Gorbachev later described as a “mistake.” The coffins of the 15,000 Red Army troops killed in the conflict were unloaded silently at Soviet airfields, with none of the military pomp and solemn music which traditionally awaited fallen heroes returning to the Motherland. Funerals were held in secret, and families told simply that their loved ones had died “fulfilling their internationalist duty.” Some were buried in plots near the graves of Mitrokhin’s parents in the cemetery at Kuzminsky Monastery. No reference to Afghanistan was allowed on their tombstones. During the Afghan War Mitrokhin heard the first open criticism of Soviet policy by his more outspoken colleagues at Yasenevo. “Doesn’t the war make you ashamed to be Russian?” an FCD colonel asked him one day. “Ashamed to be Soviet, you mean!” Mitrokhin blurted out.

  When Mitrokhin retired in 1984, he was still preoccupied with the Afghan War. He spent the first year and a half of his retirement sorting through his notes, extracting the material on Afghanistan, and assembling it in a large volume with a linking narrative. Despite Gorbachev’s call for glasnost after he became Party leader in 1985, Mitrokhin did not believe the Soviet system would ever allow the truth about the war to be told. Increasingly, however, he began to think of ways of transporting his archive to the West and publishing it there.

  One novel method suggested itself on May 28, 1987, when a single-engine Cessna piloted by a nineteen-year-old West German, Matthias Rust, crossed the Finnish border into Soviet airspace and flew undetected for 450 miles before landing in Red Square. After an hour of confusion, during which Kremlin security guards wondered whether Rust was an actor in a film, he was taken away to the KGB’s Lefortovo Prison. Mitrokhin briefly considered but quickly abandoned the idea of using a microlite from a KGB sports club to fly with his archive in the opposite direction to Finland.

  The most practical of the various schemes considered by Mitrokhin before the collapse of the Soviet Union was to get a position on the local Party committee which issued permits for foreign travel, obtain permits for himself and his family, then book reservations on a cruise from Leningrad to Odessa in the Black Sea. At one of the cruise’s West European ports of call, Mitrokhin would make contact with the authorities and arrange to leave his archive in a dead letter-box near Moscow for collection by a Western intelligence agency. He eventually abandoned the idea because of the difficulty of separating himself from the Soviet tour group and the ever-watchful group leaders for long enough to tell his story and arrange the hand-over.

  As the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 and the Soviet Bloc began to disintegrate, Mitrokhin told himself to be patient and wait for his opportunity. In the meantime he carried on typing up his handwritten notes in his Moscow flat and at the two family dachas, assembling some of them in volumes covering the FCD’s chief target countries—first and foremost the United States, known in KGB jargon as the “Main Adversary.” He shared the relief of most Muscovites at the failure of the hardline coup in August 1991 to depose Gorbachev and reestablish the one-party Soviet state. It came as no surprise to Mitrokhin that the chief ringleader in the failed coup was Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, head of the FCD from 1974 to 1988 and chairman of the KGB from 1988 until the coup.

  Though Kryuchkov proved better at public relations than most previous KGB chairmen, he had long represented much of what Mitrokhin most detested in the FCD. As a young diplomat at the Soviet embassy in Budapest, Kryuchkov had caught the eye of the ambassador, Yuri Andropov, by his uncompromising opposition to the “counter-revolutionary” Hungarian Uprising of 1956. When Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, Kryuchkov became head of his personal secretariat and a loyal supporter of his obsessive campaign against “ideological subversion” in all its forms. The files seen by Mitrokhin showed that, as head of the FCD, Kryuchkov collaborated closely with the KGB Fifth (Ideological Subversion) Directorate in the war against dissidents at home and abroad.29 He had made a senior member of the Fifth Directorate, I. A. Markelov, one of the deputy heads of the FCD with responsibility for coordinating the struggle against ideological subversion.30 The failed coup of August 1991 marked an appropriately discreditable end to Kryuchkov’s KGB career. Instead of shoring up the Soviet Union and the one-party state, it served only to hasten their collapse.

  On October 11, 1991, the State Council of the disintegrating Soviet Union abolished the KGB in its existing form. The former FCD was reconstituted as the SVR, the foreign intelligence service of the Russian Federation, independent of the internal security service. Instead of repudiating its Soviet past, however, the SVR saw itself as the heir of the old FCD. Mitrokhin had seen the FCD file on the SVR’s newly appointed head, Academician Yevgeni Maksimovich Primakov, previously Director of the Institute of World Economics and International Relations and one of Gorbachev’s leading foreign policy advisers. The file identified Primakov as a KGB co-optee, codenamed MAKSIM, who had been sent on frequent intelligence missions to the United States and the Middle East.31 Primakov went on to become Boris Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister in 1996 and Prime Minister in 1998.

  IN THE FINAL months of 1991, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the relative weakness of fro
ntier controls at the new borders of the Russian Federation at last opened the way to the West for Mitrokhin and his archive. In March 1992 he boarded an overnight train in Moscow bound for the capital of one of the newly independent Baltic republics.32 With him he took a case on wheels, containing bread, sausages and drink for his journey on top, clothes underneath, and—at the bottom—samples of his notes. The next day he arrived unannounced at the British embassy in the Baltic capital and asked to speak to “someone in authority.” Hitherto Mitrokhin had had an image of the British as rather formal and “a bit of a mystery.” But the young female diplomat who received him at the embassy struck him as “young, attractive and sympathetic,” as well as fluent in Russian. Mitrokhin told her he had brought with him important material from KGB files. While he rummaged at the bottom of his bag to extract his notes from beneath the sausages and clothes, the diplomat ordered tea. As Mitrokhin drank his first cup of English tea, she read some of his notes, then questioned him about them. Mitrokhin told her they were only part of a large personal archive which included material on KGB operations in Britain. He agreed to return to the embassy a month later to meet representatives from the Secret Intelligence Service.

  Emboldened by the ease with which he had crossed the Russian frontier in March, Mitrokhin brought with him on his next trip to the Baltic capital 2,000 typed pages which he had removed from the hiding place beneath his dacha near Moscow. Arriving at the British embassy on the morning of April 9, he identified himself to the SIS officers by producing his passport, Communist Party card and KGB pension certificate, handed over his bulky typescript and spent a day answering questions about himself, his archive and how he had compiled it. Mitrokhin accepted an invitation to return to the embassy about two months later to discuss arrangements for a visit to Britain. Early in May the SIS Moscow station reported to London that Mitrokhin planned to leave Moscow on an overnight train on June 10. On June 11 he arrived in the Baltic capital carrying a rucksack containing more material from his archive. Most of his meeting with SIS officers was spent discussing plans for him to be debriefed in Britain during the following autumn.