The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  Reagan’s landslide victory in the 1984 election was striking evidence of the limitations of Soviet active measures within the United States. Even on university and college campuses Reagan was surprised by the (admittedly less than unanimous) “outpouring of affection and support:” “These students in the eighties seemed so different from those that I’d dealt with as governor a decade earlier.”110 Though Service A was never willing to admit it, there was little it could do to undermine a popular president. Its attacks on Reagan fell on much more fertile ground in Europe and the Third World, however, where his populist appeal to the American way was frequently ridiculed.

  ACTIVE MEASURES AGAINST the Main Adversary were usually more effective outside than inside the United States. One of Service A’s most successful tactics was its use of forgeries of US documents shown in confidence to Third World leaders to alert them to supposedly hostile operations against them by the CIA and other American agencies. Since most of these forgeries were never made public, the United States was not usually able to challenge their authenticity. One characteristic example in the files noted by Mitrokhin was operation KULBIT in the Republic of Guinea in 1975. The operation was based on three French language leaflets attacking the government of President Sekou Touré, allegedly produced by the CIA station in the Guinean capital, Conakry, but in reality fabricated by Service A in Moscow. To heighten the dramatic impact of the forgeries, the Soviet ambassador in Conakry telephoned the Minister of Security, Mussa Diakite, at 6 p.m. on October 16, 1975 to tell him that a special emissary had arrived from Moscow with top secret information for the President of great importance. At 9 p.m. the ambassador and O. A. Seliskov, deputy head of FCD Directorate K, were ushered by Diakite into the presence of Sekou Touré. Seliskov handed the President the three fabricated CIA leaflets, the first of which began with an attack on the high level of Guinean unemployment. According to the KGB file on operation KULBIT, on seeing the reference to unemployment, Sekou Touré turned to Diakite, waved the pamphlet in his face and angrily exclaimed, “The filthy imperialists!” Seliskov then described various alleged plots by the CIA station to overthrow the President, making the plots appear all the more convincing by incorporating into them various pieces of information which he knew were already known to the Guinean security service. Sekou Touré, by now “in an emotional state,” pounded the table and declared, “We will take decisive action against the US intelligence officers you have identified. They will be expelled within twenty-four hours!” When he calmed down, the President observed, as Service A had intended, that some of Seliskov’s information coincided with intelligence already in the possession of his security service.111

  Sekou Touré was profuse in his thanks for the KGB disinformation: “We highly appreciate the concern shown by our Soviet comrades. This is not Chile, and we are not going to allow the same events [the overthrow of the President] to happen in our country.” He asked Seliskov how his top secret information on the machinations of the CIA, supposedly obtained from “important and reliable sources in the United States,” should be handled. “At your own discretion,” replied Seliskov graciously. Sekou Touré asked him to convey his “deepest gratitude” to the appropriate Soviet authorities and asked to be kept informed about future imperialist threats to the security of the Guinean Republic.112

  The fabrication of compromising US documents and imaginary CIA plots continued into the Gorbachev era. In addition to the “silent forgeries” shown privately to Sekou Touré and other gullible political leaders around the world, forgeries were used to promote media campaigns: among them, in 1987, a forged letter from the DCI, William Casey, on plans to overthrow the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi; in 1988, bogus instructions from Reagan to destabilize Panama; and in 1989, a fabricated letter from the South African foreign minister, “Pik” Botha, referring to a sinister but non-existent secret agreement with the United States.113

  Probably the most successful anti-American active measure of the Gorbachev era, promoted by a mixture of overt propaganda and covert action by Service A, was the story that the AIDS virus had been “manufactured” by American biological warfare specialists at Fort Detrick in Maryland. An East German, Russian-born physicist, Professor Jacob Segal, claimed on the basis of “circumstantial evidence” (later wholly discredited) that AIDS had been artificially synthesized at Fort Detrick from two natural viruses, VISNA and HTLV-1. Thus fortified by spurious scientific jargon, the AIDS fabrication not merely swept through the Third World, but took in some of the Western media as well. In October 1986 the conservative British Sunday Express made it its main front-page story. During the first six months of 1987 alone, the story received major news coverage in over forty Third World countries.

  At the very height of its success, however, the AIDS fabrication was compromised by a combination of Western protests and “new thinking” in Soviet foreign policy. “We tell the truth and nothing but the truth,” Gorbachev proudly proclaimed at a Moscow press conference in July 1987. Faced with official American protests and the repudiation of the AIDS story by the international scientific community, the Kremlin for the first time showed signs of embarrassment at a successful active measures campaign. In August 1987 US officials in Moscow were informed that the story was officially disowned and Soviet media coverage of it came to an abrupt halt.

  The AIDS fabrication, however, was swiftly followed by other, equally scurrilous anti-American active measures in the Third World, some of which also seduced sections of the Western media. Among the most successful was the “baby parts” story, alleging that rich Americans were butchering Third World children in order to use their bodies for organ transplants in the United States. In September 1988 a motion in the European Parliament condemning the alleged trafficking in “baby parts,” proposed by a French Communist MEP, passed on a show of hands in a poorly attended session.114

  Even the end of the Cold War did little to diminish the enthusiasm for active measures of both Kryuchkov, who became chairman of the KGB in 1988, and Leonid Shebarshin, who succeeded him as head of the FCD. Shebarshin, who had made his reputation as resident in India from 1975 to 1977 in part by the success of his active measures operations, was wont to speak “nostalgically about the old days, about disinformation—forging documents, creating sensations for the press.”115

  Not all KGB personnel, however, shared their chiefs’ continuing enthusiasm for active measures. Kryuchkov complained in September 1990 that some FCD officers in both Moscow and foreign residencies “underestimate the importance and the role of measures designed to promote influence.” He issued a formal “Order of the Chairman of the KGB” requiring “refinement of the work of the foreign intelligence service in the field of active measures” and insisting that “their importance in intelligence work is continuing to grow:”

  In effect the joint political and operational scenario and the interests of the Soviet state and its society require the KGB foreign intelligence service to introduce active measures with greater ingenuity, inventiveness and secrecy which will enhance the level of their effectiveness… Work on active measures is to be considered one of the most important functions of the KGB’s foreign intelligence service.

  The FCD training school, the Andropov Institute, was instructed to prepare new “specialist courses in active measures.” Among the most important “themes” for active measures was to frighten off support by the West—in particular the United States—for nationalist movements in the Baltic republics and other parts of the Soviet Union:

  In Western government and political circles and in influential émigré groups, it is important… to strengthen the conviction that an adventurist gamble on the disintegration of the Soviet Federation and statehood would lead to a disruption of contemporary international relations with the attendant unpredictable consequences.116

  Amid the active measures promoted by the SVR in the mid-1990s there remained some echoes of its KGB past. Yeltsin’s memoir, The View from the Kremlin, published in th
e West in 1994, ends with an appendix which contains two specially selected examples of KGB documents in the secret archives of the Russian president. One concerns the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The KGB documents on this topic, probably drawn to Yeltsin’s attention by the SVR (then headed by Yevgeni Primakov), support the theory formerly propagated by Service A that Oswald had been selected as the assassin by “a group of Texas financiers and industrialists headed by millionaire Hunt:”

  Oswald was the most suitable figure for executing a terrorist act against Kennedy because his past allowed for the organization of a widespread propaganda campaign accusing the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the US Communist party of involvement in the assassination. But… Ruby and the real instigators of Kennedy’s murder did not take into account the fact that Oswald suffered from psychiatric illness. When Ruby realized that after a prolonged interrogation Oswald was capable of confessing everything, Ruby immediately liquidated Oswald.117

  No conspiracy theory of the Cold War era seems to have greater staying power than that generated by the death of President John F. Kennedy.

  FIFTEEN

  PROGRESS OPERATIONS

  Part 1: Crushing the Prague Spring

  The KGB and its predecessors had played a crucial part in the creation of the Soviet Bloc after the Second World War. Throughout eastern Europe, Communistcontrolled security services, set up in the image of the KGB and overseen—except in Yugoslavia and Albania—by Soviet “advisers,” supervised the transition to so-called “people’s democracies.” Political development in most east European states followed the same basic pattern. Coalition governments with significant numbers of non-Communist ministers, but with the newly founded security services and the other main levers of power in Communist hands, were established immediately after German forces had been driven out. Following intervals ranging from a few months to three years, these governments were replaced by bogus, Communist-run coalitions which paved the way for Stalinist one-party states taking their lead from Moscow.1

  The German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht announced to his inner circle on his return to Berlin from exile in Moscow on April 30, 1945: “It’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything under our control.”2 Because a democratic façade had to be preserved throughout eastern Europe, the open use of force to exclude non-Communist Parties from power had, so far as possible, to be avoided. Instead, the new security services took the lead in intimidation behind the scenes, using what became known in Hungary as “salami tactics”—slicing off one layer of opposition after another. Finally, the one-party people’s democracies, purged of all visible dissent, were legitimized by huge and fraudulent Communist majorities in elections rigged by the security services.3

  During the early years of the Soviet Bloc, Soviet advisers kept the new security services on a tight rein. The witch-hunts and show trials designed to eliminate mostly imaginary supporters of Tito and Zionism from the leadership of the ruling Communist Parties of eastern Europe were orchestrated from Moscow. One of the alleged accomplices of the Hungarian Minister of the Interior, László Rajk, in the non-existent Titoist plot for which Rajk was executed in 1949, noted how, during his interrogation, officers of the Hungarian security service “smiled a flattering, servile smile when the Russians spoke to them” and “reacted to the most witless jokes of the [MGB] officers with obsequious trumpetings of immoderate laughter.”4

  Even after Stalin’s death, any Soviet Bloc intelligence officer of whom the KGB disapproved became a marked man. Among them was Ernst Wollweber, head of the East German Stasi from 1953 to 1957, whose long connection with Soviet intelligence went back to his years as an NKVD agent in the 1930s, specializing in marine sabotage. Wollweber, however, had come to dislike Moscow’s habit of issuing peremptory orders and resented the fact that the KGB kept him ill-informed on its operations in West Germany. The KGB also distrusted Wollweber’s current mistress, Clara Vater, a German Communist who, like many of her comrades, had been unjustly imprisoned during Stalin’s Terror.5 Remarkably, it placed both her and her daughter, whom Wollweber had adopted, under surveillance inside East Germany. Wollweber was succeeded in 1957 by the sycophantically pro-Soviet Erich Mielke, who remained in office with Moscow’s blessing until 1989, becoming one of the world’s longest serving intelligence chiefs.6

  ON EACH OF the three occasions when the Red Army intervened to restore pro-Soviet orthodoxy in a wayward Communist state—Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979—the KGB played a prominent part in what was euphemistically termed the process of “normalization.” When the Hungarian uprising began in October 1956 with mass demonstrations calling for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the KGB chairman, General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov, flew to Budapest to take personal charge of KGB operations. At an emergency meeting of security and police officers in the interior ministry, Serov denounced their reluctance to fire on the demonstrators: “The fascists and imperialists are bringing out their shock troops into the streets of Budapest, and yet there are still comrades in your country’s armed forces who hesitate to use arms!” Sandor Kopácsi, the Budapest chief of police, who was soon to side with the freedom fighters, replied scornfully:

  Evidently the comrade adviser from Moscow has not yet had time to inform himself of the situation in our country. We need to tell him that these are not “fascists” or other “imperialists” who are organizing the demonstration; they come from the universities, the handpicked sons and daughters of peasants and workers, the fine flower of our country’s intelligentsia which is demanding its rights…7

  A quarter of a century later Kopácsi still vividly recalled the long, withering glare in his direction from Serov’s steel-blue eyes. Shortly before Kopácsi escaped to the West, Serov told him, “I’m going to have you hanged from the highest tree in Budapest!” On the evening of November 3, 1956 a Hungarian delegation headed by Pál Maléter, the minister of defense, was invited to Soviet military headquarters at Tokol to discuss final details of the Red Army’s withdrawal from Hungarian soil. At midnight, while toasts were being drunk, Serov, brandishing a Mauser pistol, burst into the room at the head of a group of KGB officers and arrested Maléter and his colleagues. A series of mock executions over the next few hours convinced each member of the Hungarian delegation that all his colleagues had been shot.8 At 4 a.m. on November 4 the Red Army began the suppression of the Hungarian uprising. Serov and his deputy, KGB General K. Grebennik, who became military commandant of Budapest, stayed on to supervise the “normalization.”9

  Though it was not until after the Prague Spring of 1968 that the Red Army intervened again to enforce Soviet ideological orthodoxy, Moscow showed growing anxiety during the 1960s at increasing Western influence within the Soviet Bloc. The KGB reported that the West was engaged in wide-ranging “subversive activity in the political and ideological sphere against the socialist countries… seeking to persuade the population of the superiority of the Western way of life.” The “subversion” took many forms: broadcasting, propagandist publications, information distributed by Western embassies, East-West cultural and scientific exchanges, tourism and letterwriting. In the Centre’s view, Western radio stations such as the BBC World Service and Radio Liberty threatened to cause “immense harm” by broadcasting propaganda designed to weaken the fraternal ties between the Soviet Union and the socialist states of eastern Europe.10 What most worried the KGB was that “the broadcasts were popular with the intelligentsia and young people.” According to statistics probably obtained from its Hungarian ally, the AVH, over 20 per cent of young people in Hungary listened to Western radio stations.11 During 1964 approximately fifty million postal items were exchanged between Hungarian citizens and the West, eight million more than in 1963. The KGB was also exercised by the growth in east European visitors to the West, who were in danger of returning with subversive ideas. In 1964 168,000 Hungarians and 150,000 Czechoslovaks visited Western countries. Worse still, in the Centre’s view
, many were unsupervised during their visits. The KGB complained that its Polish ally, the SB, had no officers in its foreign residencies who were responsible for monitoring the behavior of Polish tourists and Poles studying abroad. In 1964 34,500 Poles traveled to the West as individuals rather than as members of groups.12

  The KGB kept somewhat bizarre statistics of “harmful attitudes” and “hostile acts” in the Soviet Bloc, which it tended to lump together: such disparate phenomena as enthusiasm for Western pop music with cases of ideological deviation. In both 1965 and 1966 Hungarian young people were said to have been guilty of approximately 87,000 “harmful attitudes” and “hostile acts.” According to classified official statistics, the figure fell reassuringly, if somewhat surprisingly, to 68,000 in 1968 and remained at about that level for the next decade. Disturbingly, however, about 30 per cent of the cases recorded concerned members of the Communist youth organization, Komsomol.13

  “The West’s subversive activities,” complained one KGB report, were “harming the cause of Socialist construction” throughout the Soviet Bloc, encouraging nationalist tendencies in the states of eastern Europe and damaging their ties with the Soviet Union. The greatest harm was being done among the intelligentsia and young people. The KGB noted “an unhealthy tendency” among writers towards “ideological co-existence” with the West and a growing belief that literature was no business of the Party. Students showed a worrying tendency to set up independent non-Party organizations for “free discussion on the model of English clubs.” One undated KGB report picked out two subversive texts currently attracting “growing interest:” The New Class by the heretical Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas, and the works of the late nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.14