The Soviet Politburo met to consider its next step in the crisis on the same day that Pravda produced its first report on the fictitious counter-revolutionary arms caches. Brezhnev began the meeting by proposing a final meeting with the Czechoslovak leadership to try to reach a negotiated settlement. Only if that failed should they take “extreme measures.” Andropov emerged as the chief spokesman of those who wanted extreme measures immediately. Bilateral talks, he argued, would achieve little, while any delay would increase the threat from “the rightists:” “They are fighting for survival now, and they’re fighting frenziedly… Both we and they are making preparations, and theirs are very thorough. They are preparing the working class, the workers’ militia [for a conflict].” It was a bad-tempered meeting. Andropov became involved in a furious argument with Kosygin, whom he accused of “attacking” him, presumably because of his call for immediate military intervention. “I am not attacking you,” retorted Kosygin. “On the contrary, it is you who are attacking me!” The only full member of the Politburo who supported Andropov’s opposition to a final meeting with the CPCz leadership was K. T. Mazurov. However, the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, like Andropov a non-voting member of the Politburo and later his close ally, probably summed up the majority view when he declared that meeting Dubček and his colleagues was no more than a necessary preliminary to invasion: “Clearly they will not accept our proposals. But then we can move to a decision about taking extreme measures…”60
As Gromyko had predicted, the meeting between the CPCz Presidium and the Soviet Politburo at the border town of Čierní nad Tisou from July 29 to August 1 ended without agreement. After an StB investigation, Pavel reported to the CPCz Presidium that the alleged counter-revolutionary arms caches were a “provocation.” Though the weapons themselves were American, of Second World War vintage, some of them were in Soviet-made packaging. Other intelligence linking K-231 and KAN with Western secret services was also discovered to be fabricated.61 The KGB illegals behind operation KHODOKI, however, went undetected. Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files lend some, though not conclusive, support to the claim by an StB defector that the KGB planned to murder the Soviet wives of a number of Czechoslovak citizens in August and blame their deaths on counter-revolutionaries. The plan was apparently discovered by the StB and aborted.62
At a meeting of the CPCz Party committee of the StB early in August, the head of StB foreign intelligence, Shuoj Frouz (codenamed FARKAC), argued that the KGB advisers in the StB were violating the principles of Czechoslovak-Soviet intelligence liaison and should be recalled to Moscow. A report of the meeting, at which other StB officers supported Frouz, was quickly relayed to the KGB.63 After the Soviet invasion, those who had demanded the recall of the KGB advisers were arrested—with the significant exception of Frouz, who may well have made the demand on KGB instructions in order to identify the main anti-Soviet elements in the StB in advance of the invasion.64
As well as producing fabricated evidence of a Western plot for public consumption, Andropov supplied the Politburo throughout the crisis with slanted intelligence designed to strengthen its resolve to intervene. Probably the most important accurate intelligence on American policy to reach the Centre during the Prague Spring came from the Washington residency, where the dynamic 34-year-old head of Line PR, Oleg Kalugin, gained access to what he reported were “absolutely reliable documents” proving that neither the CIA nor any other agency was manipulating the Czechoslovak reform movement. These documents, however, failed to conform to Andropov’s conspiracy theory of an imperialist plot and were thus kept from the Politburo. On returning to Moscow, Kalugin was amazed to discover that the Centre had ordered that “my messages should not be shown to anyone, and destroyed.” Instead, on Andropov’s orders, “The KGB whipped up the fear that Czechoslovakia could fall victim to NATO aggression or to a coup.”65
At a meeting in Moscow on August 18, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the other four “reliable” members of the Warsaw Pact—Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary and Poland—formally agreed on the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the biggest armed action in Europe since the end of the Second World War.66 At 4 p.m. on August 20 a meeting of “reliable” members of the StB was briefed by Pavel’s pro-Soviet deputy, Viliam Šalgovič, on plans for the invasion which was to begin that night and assigned tasks to assist the Warsaw Pact forces. Josef Houska, dismissed by Pavel two months earlier, returned to take charge of the StB.
At about 9 a.m. on the morning of August 21, with Soviet forces already in key positions in Prague, the StB veteran Lieutenant Colonel Bohumil Molnír, who had been given a specially engraved automatic pistol by the former KGB chairman, Ivan Serov, for his assistance in crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, briefed the group of StB officers selected by the KGB to arrest Dubček and the reformist majority on the CPCz Presidium.67 Escorted by KGB officers, the arrest group proceeded to Dubček’s office in the Central Committee building, where one of them announced in what seemed to Dubček the “mechanical voice” of a second-rate amateur actor: “I am placing you in custody in the name of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government led by Comrade Indra.” He added, after a pause in which he seemed to be remembering his lines, that Dubček and his colleagues would shortly be brought before a revolutionary tribunal, also headed by Alois Indra.68
Indra and the other leading members of the quisling government-in-waiting selected by Moscow were already in the Soviet embassy ready to take power.69 But at this point the invasion plan had to be modified. Indra and his co-conspirators had mistakenly assured Moscow that the invasion would be supported by a majority of the CPCz leadership.70 The fact that Dubček retained a majority on the Presidium as well as overwhelming popular support forced Moscow to abandon its plan for a puppet regime and bring Dubček and his colleagues to the Kremlin, under KGB escort, to be browbeaten into a degree of submission. Brezhnev stuck to the fabricated KGB story that “anti-socialist” forces had been preparing a coup:
Underground command posts and arms caches have now come to light. We don’t want to make charges against you personally, that you’re guilty. You might not even have been aware of it…
As the discussion proceeded over the next few days, however, the Soviet Politburo passed from attempts to justify the invasion and the pretense of comradely solidarity to intimidation and coercion. Dubček felt he had no option but to concede the main Soviet demands: “It could not have been otherwise. We were managing the affairs of an occupied country where the barrel of a Soviet gun was trained on our every move.” On August 26 the Czechoslovak delegation signed a secret protocol accepting a “temporary” occupation by forces of the Warsaw Pact. The decisions of the Extraordinary Fourteenth Congress of the CPCz hurriedly convened on August 22, which had condemned the invasion, were annulled. Some of the leading reformists in the Party, government, radio and television who had most outraged Moscow were dismissed.71
The Kremlin intended the Moscow protocol only as the beginning of a process of “normalization” which would rapidly turn the Prague Spring into winter. As a later official history of the CPCz complained:
The Right… still held the decisive positions in the Party, the state apparatus and the mass media… The Marxist-Leninist forces in the Party and society led a difficult and complicated struggle from August 1968 to April 1969, characterized by the gradual suppression of the Right.72
Of particular concern to Andropov was the continued strength of the “Right” in the StB, despite Houska’s arrest of some leading reformists. According to KGB reports from Prague, the situation was most serious in foreign intelligence:
In the [StB] First [foreign intelligence] Directorate nationalist passions were inflamed and there were acts of an anti-Soviet nature: removal of the Soviet flag, [hostile] slogans, attacks on Soviet military units sent to protect the old premises of the First Directorate, intelligence officers going underground, handing in their official passes, and stopping work in protest at the arrival of Soviet tr
oops.
The Centre was outraged by a series of resolutions passed by the plenary committee of the StB First Directorate Communist Party:
1. Communists of the First Directorate Communist Party Organization welcome the return of the Czechoslovak delegation from Moscow and express their joy that comrades Dubček, Smrkovský, Černík, Kriegel, Svoboda and others will have the possibility of resuming their constitutional and Party duties. [In fact, on Soviet insistence, Kriegel was sacked.]
In expressing their confidence in them, the Communists of the First Directorate Party Organization will continue to give these comrades their full support in implementing the [reformist] action program of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
2. The First Directorate Communist Party Organization expresses concern about the contents of the final communiqué on the talks in Moscow, which reflects the fact that the talks were held in conditions of inequality, under pressure and with occupation forces present in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
3. The Communists again express their full support for the lawfully elected leadership of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service and welcome its return to carry out its duties. The Communists demand an urgent investigation into all incidents in which the orders of this leadership, and also the orders of the Minister of Internal Affairs Pavel [sacked at Moscow’s insistence], were contravened. In this connection, it is also essential to determine what role was played by officers of the USSR KGB.
The Party Organization recognizes the decisions of the Fourteenth Congress [annulled by the Moscow protocol] as lawful and places responsibility for the crisis on the Soviet troops.73
The KGB discovered that the StB resident in New York, codenamed PATERA, was trying vainly to persuade the Czechoslovak foreign minister, Jiří Hájek, to address the United Nations Security Council on the Soviet invasion, in defiance of the Moscow protocol. “If we did not raise the Czechoslovak question in the Security Council,” PATERA insisted, “the nation would declare us to be traitors.”74 The StB resident in Washington, his eyes brimming with tears, told Oleg Kalugin, “My children will hate you for what you’ve done to my country. They will never forgive you for what happened.”75 It took several years for “healthy forces,” as the KGB referred to the Soviet loyalists in the StB, to eradicate all trace of revisionism.
After the Soviet invasion KGB illegals remained central to Andropov’s strategy for penetrating and destabilizing “rightist” forces.76 PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia were augmented by other Soviet Bloc intelligence services. On August 25 Mielke, who had deployed East German illegals in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, informed the Centre that he was sending a further contingent to Prague, together with Stasi officers to direct their operations and liaise with the KGB residency.77 In September Andropov and Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, traveled to Warsaw and agreed a plan for the SB (the Polish KGB) to use both agents and illegals to penetrate the Czechoslovak “counter-revolutionary underground,” émigré groups and hostile intelligence services.78
The most valuable unwitting KGB source among the ranks of Czechoslovak “counter-revolutionaries” identified in the files seen by Mitrokhin was Leo Lappi (codenamed FREDDI), a former political prisoner and founder member of K-231. The fact that, though a Czechoslovak citizen, Lappi was an ethnic German made him far easier to cultivate than the majority of Czechoslovak citizens who were not fluent in Western languages. The first contact with Lappi was made by ALLA, posing as a German-speaking Swiss, in October 1968.79 After about two months his cultivation was handed over to another female illegal, ARTYOMOVA, who had assumed the identity of an Austrian businesswoman.80 From February 1969 onwards, Lappi’s case officer was FYODOROV, who, using a West German passport in the name of Walter Brade, for the next decade became the leading illegal specializing in Czechoslovak operations. Since ALLA and ARTYOMOVA had reported that Lappi let rooms to foreigners, FYODOROV made initial contact with him on the pretext that he was a businessman looking for accommodation in Prague.81
Lappi had no idea that ALLA, ARTYOMOVA and FYODOROV were KGB illegals sent on missions to assist in the destruction of the last remnants of “socialism with a human face.” Instead, they successfully persuaded him that they were Western supporters of the Prague Spring, anxious to do what they could to assist in its restoration. Given the almost universal revulsion in the West at the Soviet occupation, Lappi’s misplaced trust in his new Swiss, Austrian and German friends was an understandable mistake, cynically exploited by FYODOROV. Lappi’s confidence in FYODOROV was so complete that he left him in charge of his flat when he went on holiday to Romania. He introduced FYODOROV both to K-231 activists and to leaders of the Christian Democrat, People’s and Socialist Parties, which had tried to re-establish themselves during the Prague Spring. Lappi regularly acted as translator at FYODOROV’s meetings with them. Some of FYODOROV’s reports on his meetings with the counter-revolutionaries were rated so highly by the Centre that they were forwarded to the Politburo.82
What the KGB files do not, of course, report are the feelings of the illegals as they betrayed the sometimes heroic survivors of the Prague Spring. Unlike the leaders of the Soviet Union and the Soviet public, who had no first-hand experience of the world outside the Soviet Bloc, the illegals knew the West and the reality of life in Czechoslovakia too well to have deluded themselves into believing that they were engaged in a moral crusade to defend socialist values against Western imperialism. There were recurrent complaints in FCD Directorate S that after postings abroad illegals sometimes returned with an “incorrect” attitude towards life in the Soviet Union.83 Occasionally their attitudes were so incorrect that their careers were cut short. In 1966 the KGB liaison office in Budapest virtuously reported to the Centre a series of politically incorrect observations made by the female illegal ERNA while returning from leave in Moscow to her posting in Canada. Among the comments said to have “shocked” her fellow KGB officers were the following:
In Moscow I was afraid to express my views frankly on certain subjects. After all, I could see that they thought that I had become more than a bit bourgeois.
Why did the Party allow a second cult of personality to develop in respect of Khrushchev? I cannot understand how Khrushchev could take decisions on important Party and state matters all on his own. And what were the other members of the Central Committee doing? Were the consequences of the cult of Stalin not still fresh in their minds?
What is the point now of launching so many Sputniks? Would it not be better to attend to more important things on earth? Twenty years have gone by since the end of the war, but people do not have the material goods which they need and deserve, and which the humblest inhabitants of the West have long enjoyed!84
Very few illegals dared to voice such seditious comments openly. But the fact that some undoubtedly thought such thoughts cannot fail to have bred in them an increasing cynicism, heightened in some cases by their experiences in Czechoslovakia.
Some insight into the attitude of GROMOV, one of the first five illegals assigned to the penetration of “rightist” groups during the Prague Spring, is provided by the recollections of his younger brother, Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, who worked from 1963 to 1972 in the FCD Illegals Directorate and Line N in the Copenhagen residency. GROMOV had been born in 1933 and, in Oleg’s view, “had grown up among boys brutalized by war,” becoming a cynical, materialistic adult who much preferred life in the West to the relative privations of Czechoslovakia. When Oleg was informed during his training that he had to choose between learning Czech and Swedish, his brother told him he would be an idiot not to choose Swedish: “If you take Czech, you’ll spend the rest of your life sitting in the pathetic consular departments in Prague and Bratislava… [But] Sweden’s a nice country… From there you can go anywhere in Europe.”85 There are signs of a less blatant cynicism towards the Czechs in FYODOROV’s reports to the Centre. He wrote of the role of the Red Army in Czechoslovakia : “The Soviet forces play the role of a poli
ceman standing at a crossroads where there is heavy traffic; everyone notices him and this disciplines the traffic.” The Czechoslovak population, in other words, was being cowed into submission.86
In the case of a minority of illegals, their Czechoslovak experiences probably had more serious consequences than simply an increased level of cynicism. A few years later ALLA attempted to commit suicide. Though her KGB file attributes the episode solely to the fact that her partner had left her,87 it is difficult to believe that the betrayal of the Czechoslovaks ALLA had befriended did not add to her emotional scars. A more common reaction by the illegals to their experiences in Czechoslovakia was probably to turn to alcohol. Unable to stop drinking even after he contracted hepatitis B during a mission in south-east Asia, GROMOV died in 1972 at the age of only thirty-nine.88 Both BOGUN and his wife also became alcoholics. In 1976 he was admitted for “a full course of anti-alcohol therapy” at the Burdenko military hospital, while his wife was treated for alcoholism in the psycho-neurological department of the Central KGB Polyclinic. The previous few years, during which BOGUN had worked extensively on PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in eastern Europe, seem to have taken a much heavier psychological toll than his earlier period as an illegal in the United States.89
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