The Sword and the Shield

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The Sword and the Shield Page 40

by Christopher Andrew


  The documentation of the F-18 fire-control radar served as the technical basis for new lookdown/shootdown engagement radars for the latest generation of Soviet fighters. US methods of component design, fast-Fourier-transform algorithms, terrain mapping functions, and real-time resolution-enhancement techniques were cited as key elements incorporated into the Soviet counterpart.113

  Other successful military projects made possible by ST were the construction of a Soviet clone of the AWACS airborne radar system and the construction of the Blackjack Bomber modeled on the American B1-B.114

  From the late 1970s onwards increasing emphasis was also put on the contribution of ST to the Soviet economy. Directorate T calculated that the main branches of civilian industry were ten years behind their Western counterparts.115 In January 1980 Andropov instructed Directorate T to draw up ST collection plans designed to resolve current problems in Soviet agriculture, metallurgy, power-generation, engineering and advanced technology.116 Of the 5,456 “samples” (machinery, components, microcircuits, etc.) acquired by Directorate T during 1980, 44 percent went to defense industries, 28 percent to civilian industry via the State Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT) and 28 percent to the KGB and other government agencies. In the same, possibly exceptional year, just over half the intelligence obtained by Directorate T came from allied intelligence services, chief among them the East German HVA and the Czechoslovak StB.117

  Among the HVA’s greatest ST successes was its penetration of IBM. According to the head of the HVA, Markus Wolf, the East German microelectronics company Robotron “became so heavily dependent on surreptitiously acquiring IBM’s technological advances that it was, in effect, a sort of illegal subsidiary of that company.”118 Though well behind the West, Robotron was rather better than its Soviet equivalents in exploiting IBM computer technology. The KGB’s name-trace system SOUD (“System for Operational and Institutional Data”) used East German computers.119

  ST collection continued to expand during the 1980s. At a meeting of senior FCD staff early in 1984 Kryuchkov reported that, “In the last two years the quantity of material and samples handed over to civilian branches of industry has increased by half as much again.” This, he claimed, had been used “to real economic effect,” particularly in energy and food production. Kryuchkov characteristically failed to mention that the sclerotic nature of Soviet economic management made it far harder to exploit ST in the civilian economy than in the imitation of Western armaments. His obsession with operation RYAN also left him dissatisfied with Directorate T’s intelligence on the weapons systems at the heart of Reagan’s non-existent plans for a nuclear first strike. “As previously,” Kryuchkov complained, “we are experiencing an acute shortage of secret information about new types of weapon and their means of delivery.” The FCD “work plan” for 1984 laid down as Directorate T’s main intelligence priorities:

  military technology measures taken by the Main Adversary to build up first-strike weapons: the quantitative increase in nuclear munitions and means of delivery (MX missile complexes, Trident, Pershing-2, cruise missiles, strategic bombers); replacement of one generation of nuclear missiles by another (Minuteman, Trident-2), the development of qualitatively new types of weapons (space devices for multiple use for military purposes, laser and pencil beam weapons, non-acoustic anti-submarine defense weapons, electronic warfare weapons, etc.).

  The second priority was “information and specimens of significant interest for civilian branches of the USSR’s economy.”120

  Like other Soviet leaders, Gorbachev doubtless took it for granted that Soviet military technology required ST from the West. He was probably more interested, however, in the use of ST to invigorate the civilian economy. In an address to embassy staff in London on December 15, 1984, three months before he became general secretary, he singled out for praise the achievements of Directorate T and its Line X officers in foreign residencies.121 It was already clear that Gorbachev regarded the covert acquisition of Western technology and scientific research as an important part of economic perestroika.

  The dramatic improvement in East—West relations during the later 1980s offered new opportunities for Directorate T, which produced 25-40,000 ST “information reports” and 12-13,000 “samples” a year. In 1986 it estimated their value at 550 million roubles; in 1988 and 1989 it put the figure at one billion roubles a year.122 In the later 1980s about 150 Soviet weapons systems were believed by Western experts to be based on technology system stolen from the West.123

  AS WELL AS being impressed by the achievements of Directorate T, Gorbachev also seems to have revised his initially critical opinion of the political intelligence provided by the FCD. During the early 1980s Kryuchkov had repeatedly berated his subordinates for their lack of success in recruiting important American agents, and demanded “a radical improvement.” As late as February 1985 he denounced “the low standard” of operations against the Main Adversary and “the lack of appreciable results” by KGB residencies in recruiting US citizens.124

  A walk-in to the Washington embassy two months later came as the answer to Kryuchkov’s prayers. By the time Aldrich Ames offered his services to the KGB in April 1985 he had been working for the CIA for eighteen years. Within two months he had betrayed twenty Western (mostly American) agents: among them Dmitri Polyakov, a GRU general who had worked for the FBI and CIA for over twenty years; Oleg Gordievsky, a British agent in the KGB who had just been appointed resident in London; Adolf Tolkachev, an electronics expert who had provided high-grade intelligence on the Soviet avionics system; and at least eleven other KGB and GRU officers stationed in various parts of the world. A majority were shot, though Gordievsky made an epic escape from Russia, with SIS assistance, while under KGB surveillance. Collectively, they had represented probably the most successful Western agent penetration of the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution. Ames’s main motive for betraying them was probably greed. By the time of his arrest nine years later, the KGB and its successor agency had paid him almost three million dollars (probably more than any other agent in Russian history) and had promised him another two.125 As Gorbachev embarked on a new course in policy towards the United States, he was doubtless impressed by the fact that the KGB had, for the first time, recruited a major agent within the CIA. The FCD also appears to have responded to Gorbachev’s demand for less crudely biased reporting on the Main Adversary and its allies. According to Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin, then one of Kryuchkov’s deputies, “the FCD no longer had to present its reports in a falsely positive light,”126 though many of its officers must surely have found it difficult to throw off the habits of a lifetime.

  In December 1987 Gorbachev took Kryuchkov with him on his historic visit to Washington to sign with President Reagan the first arms control treaty to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers. Never before had a head of the FCD accompanied a Soviet leader on a visit to the West. Gorbachev’s confidence in Kryuchkov—which he would later bitterly regret—doubtless reflected his high opinion of the FCD’s success both in gathering an unprecedented volume of ST and in penetrating the CIA. During the visit to Washington Kryuchkov had dinner at the Maison Blanche restaurant, unnoticed by other diners, with the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Robert Gates (later DCI). Gates wrote later:

  Looking back, it is embarrassing to realize that, at this first high-level CIA—KGB meeting, Kryuchkov smugly knew that he had a spy—Aldrich Ames—at the heart of CIA, that he knew quite well what we were telling the President and others about the Soviet Union, and that he was aware of many of our human and technical collection efforts in the USSR.127

  In October 1988 Kryuchkov achieved his ambition of becoming the first foreign intelligence chief to become chairman of the KGB. His valedictory address on leaving the FCD was a remarkable mixture of the old and new thinking. “Democratization and glasnost are the motive force of perestroika,” he declared, “and we shall not win through without them:”

  Unless w
e have an objective view of the world, seeing it unadorned and free of clichés and stereotyped ideas, all claims about the effectiveness of our foreign policy operations will be nothing but empty words.

  The old suspicions and conspiracy theories about the United States, however, still lurked not far below the surface of Kryuchkov’s address. Without mentioning operation RYAN by name, he sought to justify the principles on which it was based:

  Many of [the FCD’s] former responsibilities have not been removed from the agenda. The principal one of these is not to overlook the immediate danger of nuclear conflict being unleashed.

  And he added a warning about what he alleged was the continuing brutality of “provocation operations” by Western intelligence services; he claimed that there had been over 900 such operations during the first half of 1988 alone.128 Kryuchkov began 1989 with a dramatic demonstration of the new climate of East—West relations, becoming the first chairman in KGB history to receive the United States ambassador in his office. Thereafter he embarked on an unprecedented public relations campaign designed to win over Western as well as Soviet opinion. “The KGB,” he declared, “should have an image not only in our country but worldwide which is consistent with the noble goals I believe we are pursuing in our work.”129

  After a brief power struggle, Kryuchkov was succeeded as head of the FCD by the 53-year-old Leonid Shebarshin, the first man with experience of working in countries outside the Soviet Bloc to run foreign intelligence since the Second World War.130 One of Shebarshin’s main jobs at the beginning of the Gorbachev era had been to prepare intelligence reports for the Party leadership. The fact that he leapfrogged several more senior candidates for his new post is a certain indication that his briefing had impressed Gorbachev.131 Foreign intelligence officers interviewed by zvestia after Shebarshin’s resignation in September 1991 described him as “the first really competent head of the FCD in decades.”132 According to Shebarshin, his main initial brief from Gorbachev was “to ensure the West did not cheat on arms control.”133

  The tactical victories of the FCD against the Main Adversary which impressed Gorbachev failed to avert strategic defeat. Directorate T’s very success in stealing Western secrets merely underlined the structural problems of the Soviet economy. Despite ST worth a billion roubles a year and the Soviet Union’s large numbers of scientists and engineers, Soviet technology fell steadily further and further behind the West. Gorbachev’s reforms served only to weaken further the command economy, without establishing a market economy in its stead. There was a bread shortage even after the good harvest of 1990.134 No amount of either economic or political intelligence could stave off the disintegration of the failing Soviet system.

  As the Soviet Union’s economic problems multiplied during 1990 and separatist movements strengthened, the Centre’s traditional suspicions of the Main Adversary revived. Kryuchkov did not place all the blame for Russia’s ills on imperialist plots. “The main sources of our trouble, in the KGB’s view,” he declared, “are to be found inside the country.” But he accused the CIA and other Western intelligence services of promoting “anti-socialist” and separatist forces as part of a “secret war against the Soviet state.”135 According to Shebarshin, Gorbachev failed to heed the FCD’s warnings. “He and his friends lived in a world of self-delusion… We were hitching our wagon to the Western train.”136 With Gorbachev, in the Centre’s view, unwilling to offend the Americans, Kryuchkov began to publicize some of the KGB’s neglected conspiracy theories. In December 1990 he denounced a (non-existent) Western plot, “akin to economic sabotage,” to “deliver impure and sometimes infected grain, as well as products with an above-average level of radioactivity or containing harmful substances.” 137 In February 1991 first Kryuchkov’s deputy, Viktor Fyodorovich Grushko, and then the new prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, denounced an equally imaginary plot by Western banks to undermine the rouble. The fullest public version of the Centre’s theory of a vast American-led conspiracy to subvert the Soviet Union was set out in April 1991 in a speech by the head of KGB assessments, Nikolai Sergeyevich Leonov, formerly deputy head of the FCD, responsible for operations in North and South America. The goal of US policy, he declared, was “to eliminate the Soviet Union as a united state.” Gorbachev, he implied, was refusing to listen:

  The KGB has been informing the leadership of the country about this in time and detail. We would not want a repetition of the tragic situation before the Great Patriotic War against Germany, when Soviet intelligence warned about the imminent attack of Nazi Germany but Stalin rejected this information as wrong and even provocative. You know what this mistake cost us.

  Further dramatic evidence of the resurgence of the KGB leadership’s traditional conspiracy theories about the Main Adversary came in a speech by Kryuchkov to a closed session of the Supreme Soviet on June 17. Kryuchkov read out a hitherto top secret FCD report to the Politburo of January 1977, “On CIA Plans to Recruit Agents Among Soviet Citizens,” which denounced an imaginary CIA masterplan to sabotage the Soviet administration, economy and scientific research. This plan, Kryuchkov claimed, remained actively in force.138 The CIA’s most important agent, he solemnly informed Gorbachev, was his own closest adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, allegedly recruited while an exchange student at Columbia University over thirty years earlier.139

  As Kryuchkov later complained, Gorbachev did not take such nonsense seriously. Nor, no doubt, did many FCD officers with the first-hand experience of the West which the KGB Chairman lacked. Kryuchkov was now Gorbachev’s most dangerous opponent, convinced that, having tamely accepted the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, Gorbachev was now presiding over the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In August 1991 he became the chief organizer of the coup which attempted to topple Gorbachev and preserve the Union.

  FOURTEEN

  POLITICAL WARFARE

  Active Measures and the Main Adversary

  “The philosophers,” wrote Marx, “have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”1 In addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessments of it, the KGB also sought to influence the course of world events by a variety of “active measures” (aktivinyye meropriatia) ranging from media manipulation to “special actions” involving various degrees of violence. Inspired by exaggerated accounts of its heroic defeat of counter-revolutionary conspiracies between the wars and a desire to impress the political leadership, it frequently overestimated its own effectiveness.

  Throughout the Cold War the United States was the main target for KGB active measures as well as for intelligence collection. Most were at the non-violent end of the active measures spectrum—“influence operations” designed to discredit the Main Adversary. A conference of senior FCD officers in January 1984 reaffirmed a priority which had remained unchanged since the end of the Second World War: “Our chief task is to help to frustrate the aggressive intentions of American imperialism… We must work unweariedly at exposing the adversary’s weak and vulnerable points.”2 Much of what was euphemistically described as “exposure” was in reality disinformation fabricated by Service A, the active measures branch of the FCD, and spread by Line PR officers in foreign residencies. Line PR officers were supposed to spend about 25 percent of their time on active measures, though in practice some failed to do so.

  The wide variation in the sophistication of the disinformation generated by Service A reflected the uneven quality of its personnel. About 50 per cent of its officers were specialists in active measures. Some of the remaining 50 per cent were rejects from other departments. Few of the ablest and most ambitious FCD recruits wanted jobs in Service A; it rarely offered the opportunity of overseas postings and was widely regarded as a career dead end.3 There were, of course, exceptions. Yuri Modin, the last controller of the Magnificent Five, became an active measures specialist, was appointed deputy head of Service A and subsequently had a successful Line PR posting spreading disinformation in India bef
ore becoming head of political intelligence at the Andropov Institute.4 Many Service A officers, however, had little, if any, experience of living in the West and relied on crude conspiracy theories about the capitalist and Zionist plotters who supposedly operated a secret “command center” in the United States.5 Successive chairmen of the KGB and heads of the FCD, none of whom until the late 1980s had worked in foreign residencies, were influenced by the same theories.

  IT WOULD HAVE been wholly out of character had the Centre failed to interpret President Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on November 22, 1963 as anything less than conspiracy. The deputy chairman of the KGB reported to the Central Committee in December:

  A reliable source of the Polish friends [the Polish intelligence service], an American entrepreneur and owner of a number of firms closely connected to the petroleum circles of the South, reported in late November that the real instigators of this criminal deed were three leading oil magnates from the South of the USA—Richardson, Murchison and Hunt, all owners of major petroleum reserves in the southern states who have long been connected to pro-fascist and racist organizations in the South.6

  It was not difficult to find circumstantial “evidence” for this simplistic conspiracy theory, particularly as regards the oil magnate and anti-Communist buffoon H. L. Hunt. “The Communists need not invade the United States,” Hunt once preposterously declared. “Pro-Bolshevik sentiment in the US is already greater than when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government and took over Russia.”7

  Hunt’s son, Bunker, was one of a group of right-wing mavericks who had paid for a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News on the day of Kennedy’s visit, accusing the President of being a Communist stooge—a charge which prompted Kennedy to say he was “heading into nut country.”8 The Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby, who shot and fatally wounded Oswald on November 24, had visited the Hunt offices shortly before Kennedy’s assassination.9

 

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