The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  • To arrange, via available agent resources, for leading figures in the legal profession to make public statements discrediting the policy of the Johnson administration on the Negro question.

  • To forge and distribute through illegal channels a document showing that the John Birch Society, in conjunction with the Minuteman organization, is developing a plan for the physical elimination of leading figures in the Negro movement in the US.84

  Service A sought to exploit the violent images of the long, hot summers which began in August 1965 with race riots in Watts, the black Los Angeles ghetto, which resulted in thirty-six deaths, left 1,032 injured and caused damage estimated at over 40 million dollars. The Centre seems to have hoped that as violence intensified King would be swept aside by black radicals such as Stokeley Carmichael, who told a meeting of Third World revolutionaries in Cuba in the summer of 1967, “We have a common enemy. Our struggle is to overthrow this system… We are moving into open guerrilla warfare in the United States.” Traveling on to North Vietnam, Carmichael declared in Hanoi, “We are not reformists… We are revolutionaries. We want to change the American system.”85

  King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 was quickly followed by the violence and rioting which the KGB had earlier blamed King for trying to prevent. Within a week riots had erupted in over a hundred cities, forty-six people had been killed, 3,500 injured and 20,000 arrested. To “Deke” DeLoach, it seemed that, “The nation was teetering on the brink of anarchy.”86 Henceforth, instead of dismissing King as an Uncle Tom, Service A portrayed him as a martyr of the black liberation movement and spread conspiracy theories alleging that his murder had been planned by white racists with the connivance of the authorities.87

  Simultaneously the Centre implemented a series of active measures designed to weaken the internal cohesion of the United States and undermine its international reputation by inciting race hatred. In 1971 Andropov personally approved the fabrication of pamphlets full of racist insults purporting to come from the extremist Jewish Defense League, headed by Meir Kahane, calling for a campaign against the “black mongrels” who, it was claimed, were attacking Jews and looting Jewish shops. Thirty pamphlets were mailed to a series of militant black groups in the hope of producing “mass disorders in New York.” At the same time forged letters were sent to sixty black organizations giving fictitious details of atrocities committed by the League against blacks and calling for vengeance against Kahane and his chief lieutenants. Probably to the Centre’s disappointment, Kahane was assassinated some years later, not by a black militant but by an Arab.

  On at least one occasion, the Centre ordered the use of explosives to exacerbate racial tensions in New York. On July 25, 1971 the head of the FCD First (North American) Department, Anatoli Tikhonovich Kireyev, instructed the New York residency to proceed with operation PANDORA: the planting of a delayed-action explosive package in “the Negro section of New York.” Kireyev’s preferred target was “one of the Negro colleges.” After the explosion the residency was ordered to make anonymous telephone calls to two or three black organizations, claiming that the explosion was the work of the Jewish Defense League.88

  The attempt to stir up racial tensions in the United States remained part of Service A’s stock-in-trade for the remainder of the Cold War. Before the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, for example, Line PR officers in the Washington residency mailed bogus communications from the Ku Klux Klan to the Olympic committees of African and Asian countries.89 Among the racial taunts devised by Service A for inclusion in the mailings was the following:

  THE OLYMPICS—FOR THE WHITES ONLY!

  African monkeys!

  A grand reception awaits you in Los Angeles!

  We are preparing for the Olympic games by shooting at black moving targets.

  In Los Angeles our own Olympic flames are ready to incinerate you. The highest award for a true American patriot would be the lynching of an African monkey.

  Blacks, Welcome to the Olympic games in Los Angeles!

  We’ll give you a reception you’ll never forget!

  This and other active measures on the same theme made front-page news in many countries. When Attorney-General William French Smith denounced the letters as KGB forgeries, Moscow predictably feigned righteous indignation at Washington’s anti-Soviet slanders.90

  THE CENTRE’S ASSESSMENT of “anti-Sovietism” in the United States changed radically at the beginning of the 1970s. In 1968 the Kremlin had been so anxious to prevent the election of the veteran anti-Communist Richard Nixon that it had secretly offered to subsidize the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey.91 Once in office, however, Nixon rapidly emerged as the architect of détente. More Soviet-American agreements were signed in 1972-3 than in the entire forty years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Washington. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, under threat of impeachment for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, caused both dismay and deep suspicion in Moscow. Seen from the Kremlin, Nixon’s attempts to conceal the use of dirty tricks against his opponents were, as Dobrynin later acknowledged, “a fairly natural thing to do. Who cared if it was a breach of the Constitution?” The conspiracy theorists in the Centre convinced themselves that Nixon’s dramatic fall from power was due far less to public indignation over Watergate than to conspiracy by the enemies of détente—in particular the “Jewish lobby,” who were campaigning for unrestricted emigration by Soviet Jews to Israel, and the military-industrial complex, which was anxious to prevent lower arms expenditure.92

  The key figure in holding together the anti-Soviet coalition, in the Centre’s view, was the liberal Democrat, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Kissinger too regarded Jackson as “the indispensable link between the liberals, preoccupied with human rights [in the Soviet Union], and the conservatives, who became anxious about any negotiations with the Soviets.” “Jackson,” one commentator has written, “was not the type of leader who needed an impassioned aide to tell him what to think, but he had one anyway: Richard Perle, an intense, razor-sharp scourge of the Soviets who, despite his cherubic smile, earned the sobriquet Prince of Darkness from the legions he had engaged in bureaucratic battle.” Perle was the leader of what the KGB saw as a particularly dangerous part of the Jewish lobby: an informal group on Capitol Hill which included both paid Israeli lobbyists and congressional staffers.93

  Jackson was propelled into battle in August 1972 by the Soviet announcement of an exit tax on emigrants, theoretically designed to repay the costs of their statefunded education but whose main practical effect would have been to reduce Jewish emigration to a trickle. In October Jackson introduced an amendment to the Nixon Trade Reform Bill barring the Soviet Union from receiving most-favored nation status and trade credits until it had lifted restrictions on emigration. Though Moscow quickly dropped the exit tax, Jackson maintained his amendment. For the next two years Kissinger conducted a shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Jackson, trying vainly to obtain enough Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration to persuade Jackson to back down. “For a long time,” said Kissinger later, “I did not realize that Jackson could not be placated.”94

  Dobrynin reported to Moscow that Jackson “kept escalating his demands” in order to win the backing of the Jewish lobby for his attempt to win the Democratic nomination at the 1976 election.95 The New York resident, Boris Solomatin, informed the Centre that Jackson appeared to be in a strong position for the presidential primaries:

  Jackson’s strong point is the fact that, during his nearly thirty-five years in Congress, he has never been involved in any sort of political or personal scandal. In the post-Watergate period the personal integrity of a presidential candidate has had exceptionally great significance. It is necessary to find some stains on the Senator’s biography and use them to carry out an active measure which will compromise him. We must discuss with the American friends [the CPUSA] the most effective ways and means of opposing Jackson’s plans to become president
of the USA.

  Others in the Centre cynically concluded that Jackson’s reticence about his private life “probably points to the existence of compromising information which could be used to discredit him and his family.” The KGB’s search for “compromising information” was extraordinarily wide-ranging. Despite the fact that Jackson’s parents had left Norway as long ago as 1885, the Oslo residency was ordered in 1974 to make a detailed investigation of his Norwegian relatives. As the American residencies examined Jackson’s long political career with a fine toothcomb, the most promising area which seemed to emerge was his sexuality. Jackson’s file in the Centre records that his marriage at the age of forty-nine “amazed many of his colleagues, who had considered him a confirmed bachelor.” Intensive KGB research, however, found no more incriminating evidence of homosexuality than the fact that for many years Jackson had shared an apartment in Washington with a male childhood friend.96

  Lacking any proof that Jackson had ever been a practicing homosexual, the Centre decided to fabricate it in an active measure codenamed operation POROK. In 1976 Service A forged an FBI memorandum, dated June 20, 1940, in which Hoover reported to the Assistant Secretary of Justice that Jackson was a homosexual. Photocopies of the forgery were sent to the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Topeka Capital and Jimmy Carter’s campaign headquarters. Service A also sought to exploit a number of incidents during the 1976 primary campaign. After an argument with a gay rights activist at a press conference in March, Jackson told him that he did not want his vote. During a television appearance in April, Jackson declared that “homosexuality leads to the destruction of the family.” The KGB sent these statements, together with bogus documents purporting to show that Jackson and Perle were members of a gay sex club, to, among others: Senator Edward Kennedy, who was thought “personally hostile to Jackson;” the columnist Jack Anderson; and the magazines Playboy and Penthouse.

  Because of Jackson’s continuing influence on the ratification of Soviet-American arms limitation agreements, operation POROK continued long after he had failed to gain the Democratic nomination. One of the aims of the operation during 1977 was to incite the gay press into attacking Jackson as a closet gay who hypocritically attacked homosexuality in public for his own political advantage. Early in May a Service A officer in New York posted a forged FBI document to the California-based magazine Gay Times reporting that Jackson had been an active homosexual while working as a state prosecutor in the early 1940s. Handwritten on the forgery was the heading “Our Gay in the US Senate.” Like the rest of operation POROK, the forgery had no discernible effect on Jackson’s career.

  THE CENTRE’S MAIN target within the Carter administration, which took office in 1977, was the Polish-born National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously an ill-chosen KGB target for cultivation.97 As Brzezinski later acknowledged, he and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance engaged in a “prolonged and intense” debate over policy to the Soviet Union. The result, according to Vance, was an unstable balance between the “visceral anti-Sovietism” of Brzezinski and his own “attempt to regulate dangerous competition” between the superpowers.98 “When Carter spoke on foreign affairs,” complained Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, “we tended to hear echoes of the anti-Sovietism of Brzezinski.”99 The aim of Service A was to diminish Brzezinski’s influence relative to Vance’s and, if possible, to engineer his dismissal.

  The Centre ordered its American residencies to begin a trawl for potentially damaging information on Brzezinski as wide-ranging as that which preceded operation POROK. Was Brzezinski concealing Jewish origins? Was he having an affair with the actress Candice Bergen? Was there any compromising material on his relations with, among others, his deputy David Aaron, his special assistant Karl Inderfurth, Ambassador Richard Gardner and the Polish émigré community?100

  Though muckraking in the United States appears to have proved unproductive, the Centre was supplied with what it believed was sensational evidence of Brzezinski’s secret career in the CIA by the Bulgarian intelligence service. Probably under pressure from his interrogators, Henrich Natan Shpeter, a Bulgarian economist who had confessed to working for both American and Israeli intelligence, produced a bizarre account of a visit to Bulgaria in 1963 by Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University, as a guest of the Academy of Sciences. Shpeter allegedly claimed that Brzezinski was a CIA officer who contacted him by using a password, received intelligence from him and gave him further instructions for intelligence operations. In addition, even in 1963, according to Shpeter, Brzezinski had a major role in framing US policy towards the Soviet Bloc.

  Shpeter’s story, in short, was strikingly similar to those expected of defendants in Stalinist show trials. The Centre, however, was easily seduced by attractive conspiracy theories and used Shpeter’s bizarre tale as the basis of an active measure code-named operation MUREN. Service A drafted a bogus report on Brzezinski by an Israeli Zionist organization which included allegedly authentic details of his involvement in Shpeter’s espionage. The report went on to denounce Brzezinski as “a secret anti-Semite” and declared that the Zionists had compromising information on his private life which would seriously discredit him.

  The Centre decided to deliver this bizarre document to the US embassy in Israel, convinced that its contents were so sensational that they would be brought to carter’s as well as Vance’s attention. On August 20, 1978 the report was inserted through the half-open window of a car parked by an American diplomat on a street in East Jerusalem.101 In all probability, the US embassy dismissed the document as the work of a mildly deranged conspiracy theorist. Service A, however, persuaded itself that it had succeeded in putting Brzezinski’s career in jeopardy. It seized on press articles during and after the negotiation of the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel in September 1978—which appeared to show that Vance had established himself as Carter’s main foreign policy adviser—as proof that Brzezinski had been demoted. In November 1978 the deputy head of Service A, L. F. Sotskov, proudly reported to Andropov that operation MUREN had been successfully completed. Though the MUREN file fails to mention it, that judgment was doubtless revised the following year. The hardening of Carter’s policy to the Soviet Union was evident even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979.103

  PROBABLY NO AMERICAN policymaker at any time during the Cold War inspired quite as much fear and loathing in Moscow as Ronald Reagan during his first term as president. Active measures against Reagan had begun during his unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in 1976. The Centre had no doubt that Reagan was far more anti-Soviet than either the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, or the Democratic contender, Jimmy Carter. As in the cases of Jackson and Brzezinski, Service A was ordered to embark on a remarkably wide-ranging quest for compromising material. The Centre ordered, inter alia, an investigation of reports that Reagan’s health had been affected by his father’s alcoholism.104 During his childhood Christmases, Reagan later recalled, “there was always a threat hanging over our family. We knew holidays were the most likely time for Jack [Reagan senior] to jump off the wagon.”105 But such painful childhood memories were not the stuff of which successful active measures were made. Apart from confirming Reagan’s reputation as a Cold War warrior, Service A seems to have discovered nothing more damaging than alleged evidence of his “weak intellectual capabilities.” Service A successfully planted anti-Reagan articles in Denmark, France and India,106 where they found more fertile soil than in the United States, but it is barely conceivable that KGB active measures had any influence on Reagan’s failure to win the Republican nomination in 1976.

  The Centre was less involved in trying to influence the 1980 presidential election than it had been four years earlier. Moscow saw little to choose between what it now saw as a Carter administration dominated by Brzezinski’s hard line policies and Reagan’s long-standing anti-Sovietism. “Fed up with Carter and uneasy about Reagan,” wrote Dobrynin, “it decided to stay
on the fence.” After Reagan’s election, Moscow quickly regretted its fence-sitting, convinced that the new administration represented “the most conservative, chauvinist, and bellicose part of American politics… pressing for the restoration of American world leadership after the defeat in Vietnam.” To Dobrynin’s dismay, the Kremlin succumbed to a “paranoid interpretation” of Reagan’s policy, fearful—particularly during 1983—that he was planning a nuclear first strike. Dobrynin discovered from the Washington resident, Stanislav Andreyevich Androsov, the instructions for the vast KGB-GRU operation RYAN designed to detect Reagan’s non-existent preparations for the surprise attack. But RYAN remained so secret that most Soviet ambassadors were kept in ignorance of it.107

  It was probably the extreme priority attached by the Centre to discrediting the policies of the Reagan administration which led Andropov to decree formally on April 12, 1982, as one of the last acts of his fifteen-year term as chairman of the KGB, that it was the duty of all foreign intelligence officers, whatever their “line” or department, to participate in active measures.108 Ensuring that Reagan did not serve a second term thus became Service A’s most important objective. On February 25, 1983 the Centre instructed its three American residencies to begin planning active measures to ensure Reagan’s defeat in the presidential election of November 1984. They were ordered to acquire contacts on the staffs of all possible presidential candidates and in both party headquarters. Residencies outside the United States were told to report on the possibility of sending agents to take part in this operation. The Centre made clear that any candidate, of either party, would be preferable to Reagan. Residencies around the world were ordered to popularize the slogan “Reagan Means War!” The Centre announced five active measures “theses” to be used to discredit Reagan’s foreign policy: his militarist adventurism; his personal responsibility for accelerating the arms race; his support for repressive regimes around the world; his administration’s attempts to crush national liberation movements; and his responsibility for tension with his NATO allies. Active measures “theses” in domestic policy included Reagan’s alleged discrimination against ethnic minorities; corruption in his administration; and Reagan’s subservience to the military-industrial complex.109