When Kissinger took over as Secretary of State in 1973, Dobrynin became the only ambassador in Washington who was allowed to enter the State Department unobserved via the underground garage.23 The Washington residency complained to the Centre that Kissinger had forbidden his officials to meet members of the Soviet embassy outside office hours, thus making it impossible for residency officers to develop contacts of their own within the State Department and “check Kissinger’s true intentions when negotiating with Ambassador Dobrynin.”24 During his twenty-three years in Washington from 1963 to 1986, Dobrynin’s access to a series of major policy-makers from Dean Rusk under Kennedy to George Shultz under Reagan was never equaled by the Washington residency.25
Line PR at the New York residency had no success in recruiting “valuable agents” within the US administration either. The United Nations, however, was a much softer target. Of the more than 300 Soviet nationals employed in the UN Secretariat, many were KGB and GRU officers, agents and co-optees. KGB officers operating under diplomatic cover became the trusted personal assistants to successive UN secretaries-general: Viktor Mechislavovich Lesiovsky to U Thant, Lesiovsky and Valeri Viktorovich Krepkogorsky to Kurt Waldheim and Gennadi Mikhaylovich Yevstafeyev to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.26 The KGB made strenuous attempts to cultivate Waldheim in particular, arranging for the publication of flattering articles about him in the Soviet press and selecting a painting of Samarkand by a Soviet artist which was personally presented to him by Lesiovsky and Krepkogorsky when he visited the USSR.27
According to Arkadi Nikolayevich Shevchenko, the Russian under secretary-general at the UN who defected in 1978, Lesiovsky and Krepkogorsky were given largely routine responsibilities by Waldheim, checking the order of speakers at the General Assembly or representing him at innumerable diplomatic receptions, but were frozen out of sensitive UN business by what they claimed was Waldheim’s “Austrian mafia.” The UN Secretariat in New York none the less became a much more successful recruiting ground than the federal government in Washington. Shevchenko frequently saw Lesiovsky in the delegates’ lounge, “buying drinks for an ambassador, telling amusing stories, procuring hard-to-get theater or opera tickets, name dropping, ingratiating himself.”28 The Secretary-General’s KGB personal assistants spent much of their time cultivating and trying to recruit members of foreign missions and the UN Secretariat from around the world.29
The Centre, however, frequently expressed disappointment with political intelligence operations by the New York residency outside the United Nations. The residency’s work was seriously disrupted in 1973 when it discovered that the FBI had detailed information on the activities of some of its operations officers, as well as of three “developmental” agents (codenamed GREK, BREST and BRIZ).30 A report at the end of 1974 concluded that Line PR’s performance had been unsatisfactory for some time past:
For a number of years the Residency has not been able to create an agent network capable of fulfilling the complex requirements of our intelligence work, especially against the US We have not succeeded in achieving this goal in 1974, either, although there has been some progress in this line. There have been several recruitments (SUAREZ, DIF, HERMES) and confidential contacts have been acquired. But these results still do not move us any closer to fulfilling our basic task.31
None of the three new agents was of major significance. SUAREZ was a Colombian journalist recruited by Anatoli Mikhailovich Manakov, a KGB officer operating under cover as Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent in New York. A few years later SUAREZ succeeded in gaining US citizenship.32 DIF was a US businessman who provided political and economic assessments.33 HERMES, potentially the most important of the three new recruits, was Ozdemir Ahmet Ozgur, a Cypriot born in 1929. In 1977, the New York residency was able to arrange through Arkadi Shevchenko for Ozgur to gain a post at the UN Secretariat. When Shevchenko defected in 1978, however, the KGB was forced to break off all contact with HERMES. 34
DIF, the US businessman, was also included in the Washington residency’s list of its Line PR agents in 1974. Line PR had nine other agents: GRIG, MAGYAR, MORTON, NIK, RAMZES, REM, ROMELLA, SHEF and STOIC.35 GRIG remains unidentified but is reported as operating in Canada.36 MAGYAR was a leading peace activist.37 MORTON was a prominent lawyer recruited in 1970 but taken off the agent list in 1975 because of his advancing years. On his retirement he put the Washington residency in touch with his son, who was also a partner in a well-known law firm.38 NIK was a Colombian who worked on US—Colombian cultural exchange programs.39 RAMZES was an American professor with contacts in Congress, academe, the press and Latin America.40 REM was an Italian employee of the UN Secretariat.41 ROMELLA was a Latin American diplomat in the UN Secretariat, who made contact with the KGB to seek its help in renewing her contract at the UN before it expired in 1975; she supplied both classified documents and recruitment leads.42 SHEF was a professor at McMaster University, recruited during a visit to Lithuania in 1974.43 STOIC was a Latin American diplomat in the UN Secretariat. 44 As in New York, none of the Washington Line PR agents had high-level access to any branch of the federal government.
Though the New York residency had some successes in electronic eavesdropping, in active measures and in scientific and technological intelligence, its Line PR network mostly consisted of agents at the UN and in émigré communities, only a minority of whom had US citizenship.45 The largest concentration of agents was within the Soviet colony itself, most of whom inhabited the residential complex in Riverdale. According to KGB statistics, in 1975 the colony numbered 1,366 Soviet employees and dependents. Of the 533 employees, seventy-six were officially classed as agents and sixteen as “trusted contacts.”46 Most, however, were chiefly concerned with informing on their colleagues to Line SK (Soviet Colony) in the residency. The Centre’s assessment in 1974 stressed the limitations of Line PR’s New York agents:
Not one of these agents has access to secret American information. The basic thrust of operations with this network therefore consists of using it for the collection of information from UN diplomatic sources, and from several American [non-agent] sources.47
Lacking any high-level agents in the federal government, Line PR officers in New York and Washington, usually operating under cover as diplomats or journalists, devoted much of their time to collecting insider gossip from well-placed non-agent sources in Congress and the press corps.48 As head of Line PR in Washington from 1965 to 1970, Kalugin got to know the columnists Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft and Drew Pearson; Chalmers Roberts and Murray Marder of the Washington Post; Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor; Carl Rowan, former director of the US Information Agency; and Henry Brandon of the London Times. Kalugin’s role when he called at their offices or lunched with them in Washington restaurants was not that of agent controller or recruiter. Instead, he “would act like a good reporter,” carefully noting their assessments of the current political situation: “Rarely did I come up with a scoop for the Politburo, but the reporting of our [PR] section enabled Soviet leaders to have a better sense of American political realities…” During the 1968 presidential election campaign some of Kalugin’s sources provided corroboration for Sedov’s reports, based on conversations with Kissinger, that, if elected, Nixon would prove much less anti-Soviet than Moscow feared. One of Kalugin’s most important contacts was Senator Robert Kennedy who, but for his assassination just after he had won the California presidential primary, might have won the 1968 Democratic nomination. Before his death Kennedy presented Kalugin with a tie-pin showing the PT-109 torpedo boat which his brother had captained during the war. Line PR officers in Washington also had regular meetings with such leading senators as Mike Mansfield, William Fulbright, Mark Hatfield, Charles Percy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Jacob Javits. The Centre liked to boast to the Politburo that its assessments of American policy were based on access to the Congressional élite.49
Most of the political reporting of the Washington residency was thus based on non-secret sources
—to the considerable annoyance of some of the Soviet diplomats whose far smaller foreign currency allowances gave them less freedom to entertain their contacts in Washington restaurants. Despite his insistence on keeping the back channel to himself, Dobrynin took a more benign view of the residency’s work, and seemed genuinely interested in what it discovered from both its contacts and agents.50 “In too many Soviet embassies,” Dobrynin complained, “normal personal relations between the ambassador and the KGB resident were the exception rather than the rule.” Ambassador and resident frequently became locked in bitter rivalry as each sought “to show who really was the boss in the embassy” and to demonstrate to Moscow the superiority of his own sources of information.51
As resident in Washington from 1965 to 1968 Solomatin had got on well with Dobrynin. When he became resident in New York in 1971, however, he quickly began to feud with Yakov Malik, the Soviet representative at the United Nations. Malik strongly objected to Solomatin’s attempts to develop contacts whom he wished to cultivate himself—among them David Rockefeller, brother of Nelson and chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.52 Malik was fascinated by Rockefeller’s 30,000-name card file of his contacts around the world, cross-indexed by country, city and business. On a visit to the chairman’s sprawling seventeenth-floor office at the sixty-story Chase Manhattan building, Malik asked to see a sample from the file. Rockefeller picked out the card for Khrushchev.53 Malik also vigorously opposed Solomatin’s contacts with the veteran diplomat Averell Harriman, regarded in Moscow as one of the most influential American advocates of better relations with the Soviet Union.54 In co-operation with Dobrynin, Harriman later returned from retirement to act as unofficial channel of communication between Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter during the transition period after Carter’s 1976 election victory.55 Solomatin complained to the Centre that Malik’s objections to his attempts to cultivate Rockefeller and Harriman were “characteristic” of his general obstructionism. 56 He failed, however, to tell the Centre that there was not the slightest prospect of recruiting either Rockefeller or Harriman.
In an attempt to improve the quality of agent recruitment in the United States, the director of the Institute of Psychology in the Academy of Sciences, Boris Fyodorovich Lomov, a “trusted contact” of the KGB, was sent in 1975 to advise the New York residency on techniques of cultivation.57 In 1976 the Centre devised an elaborate incentive scheme to reward successful recruiters, with inducements ranging from medals and letters of appreciation to accelerated promotion, new apartments and cash bonuses in hard currency (which would make possible the purchase of Western consumer goods that could be shipped back to Moscow at the end of the officer’s tour of duty).58
As chairman of the KGB, Andropov seemed unable to grasp the difficulties of penetrating the US administration. During the mid-1970s he initiated a series of hopelessly impracticable recruitment schemes. Following Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 after the Watergate scandal, Andropov instructed the Washington residency to establish contact with five members of the former administration: Pat Buchanan and William Safire, former advisers and speechwriters to Nixon; Richard Allen, Deputy National Security Adviser during the first year of Nixon’s administration; C. Fred Bergsten, an economist on the National Security Council (NSC); and S. Everett Gleason, an NSC veteran who died three months after Nixon’s resignation. 59 All were wildly improbable recruits. In 1975 Andropov personally approved a series of equally improbable operations designed to penetrate the “inner circles” of a series of well-known public figures: among them George Ball, Ramsey Clark, Kenneth Galbraith, Averell Harriman, Teddy Kennedy and Theodore Sorensen.60 Somewhat humiliatingly for the FCD, the KGB’s most productive agent during the 1976 election campaign was a Democratic activist with access to the Carter camp who had been recruited during a visit to Russia by the Second Chief Directorate.61
The KGB’s most successful strategy for cultivating American policy-makers was to use the prestigious academic cover of the Moscow Institute of the United States and Canada. The secret 1968 statute of the institute kept at the Centre authorized the KGB to task it to research aspects of the Main Adversary which were of interest to it, to provide KGB officers with cover positions, to invite prominent American policy-makers and academics to Moscow and to undertake intelligence-related missions to the United States. Among the KGB’s cover positions at the institute was that of deputy director, occupied by Colonel Radimir Bogdanov (codenamed VLADIMIROV), sometimes described behind his back as “the scholar in epaulets.”62 The KGB’s most important agent at the institute was its director, Georgi Arbatov, codenamed VASILI, who built up a large circle of high-level contacts in the United States and was regularly required to cultivate them.63 According to Kissinger:
[Arbatov] was especially subtle in playing to the inexhaustible masochism of American intellectuals who took it as an article of faith that every difficulty in US—Soviet relations had to be caused by American stupidity or intransigence. He was endlessly ingenious in demonstrating how American rebuffs were frustrating the peaceful, sensitive leaders in the Kremlin, who were being driven reluctantly by our inflexibility into conflicts that offended their inherently gentle natures.64
Though Arbatov’s access to US policy-makers raised KGB hopes of a major penetration of the federal government, Mitrokhin found no evidence in the files of any significant recruitment which resulted from it. In the Centre’s view, Arbatov’s most important contact during the 1970s was former Under-Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, codenamed VIZIR (“Vizier”). During a visit to Moscow in the spring of 1973, Vance unsurprisingly agreed with Arbatov on the need to “increase the level of mutual trust” in US—Soviet relations. Arbatov reported that he had told Vance—doubtless to no effect—that the majority of the American press corps in Moscow were propagating “a negative propagandistic” image of the USSR at the behest of the Zionist lobby in the United States. In 1976 Arbatov was sent on another mission to the United States. While there he claimed an addition 200 dollars for “operational expenses” from the New York residency for entertaining Vance and others. From such inconsequential meetings the Centre briefly formed absurdly optimistic hopes of penetrating the new American administration after Jimmy Carter’s victory in the presidential election of November 1976 and his appointment of Vance as Secretary of State. On December 19 Andropov personally approved operations against Vance which were probably intended to make him at least a “trusted contact” of the KGB. The operations were, of course, doomed to failure. Vance’s file records that, once he entered the Carter administration, any possibility of unofficial access to both him and his family dried up.65 Doubtless to the frustration of the Centre, Ambassador Dobrynin continued to have a private entrée to the State Department via its underground garage, just as he had done during Kissinger’s term as Secretary of State, and prided himself on maintaining through Vance the “confidential channel” between White House and Kremlin which the Centre had briefly deluded itself into believing it could take over.66
The Centre’s early expectations of the Carter administration were so unrealistic that it even devised schemes to cultivate his hardline National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The FCD drew up a plan to send Arbatov’s deputy, Bogdanov, whom Brzezinski had met previously, to Washington “to strengthen their relationship and to convey to him some advantageous information.” On January 3, 1977 Andropov also approved an operation to collect “compromising information” on Brzezinski as a means of putting pressure on him. Unsurprisingly, as in the case of Vance, the Centre’s early hopes of cultivating Brzezinski quickly evaporated, and the Centre concentrated instead on devising “active measures” to discredit him.67
KGB Decree No. 0017 of May 26, 1977 declared that there was an urgent need for better intelligence on the Carter administration. The Centre’s evaluations of the work of the Washington and New York residencies in both 1977 and 1978 make clear that this requirement was not met. Line PR’s agent network in the United States was once again decla
red incapable of meeting the objectives assigned to it. Not a single agent had direct access to major penetration targets.68
Lacking reliable, high-level sources within the administration, the Centre, as frequently happened, fell back on conspiracy theories. Early in 1977 Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, head of the FCD and a protégé of Andropov, submitted to him a report entitled “On CIA Plans to Recruit Agents Among Soviet Citizens,” revealing a non-existent CIA masterplan to sabotage Soviet administration, economic development and scientific research:
…Today American intelligence is planning to recruit agents among Soviet citizens, train them and then advance them into administrative positions within Soviet politics, the economy and science. The CIA has drafted a program to subject agents to individual instruction in espionage techniques and also intensive political and ideological brainwashing… The CIA intends that individual agents working in isolation to carry out policies of sabotage and distortion of superiors’ instructions will be coordinated from a single center within the US intelligence system. The CIA believes that such deliberate action by agents will create internal political difficulties for the Soviet Union, retard development of its economy and channel its scientific research into dead ends.
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