The Sword and the Shield
Page 50
In 1949 Gene Dennis, the general secretary, and ten other Party leaders were put on trial for advocating the forcible overthrow of the federal government. Dennis and nine of the defendants were sentenced to five years in jail, the eleventh was jailed for three years and all the defense attorneys were found in contempt of court. After the Supreme Court upheld the sentences in 1951, more than a hundred other leading Communists were convicted on similar charges. For most of the 1950s the Party was forced into a largely underground existence. It was deeply ironic that when McCarthyism was at its height the CPUSA was among those Western parties which were least able to give assistance to Soviet espionage. Not till the Supreme Court backed away from its earlier decision in 1957 was the CPUSA able to regroup. By the time the Party had drawn up a new membership list in 1958, there were only 3,000 open members and a much smaller number of undeclared members left.28
What the CPUSA might have achieved during the 1950s had it been less persecuted was well illustrated by the neighboring Canadian Party, which in 1951-3 assisted the Ottawa residency in the recruitment of Hugh Hambleton, probably the most important Canadian agent of the Cold War, and ten other agents.29 Like most other Western parties, the Canadian Communist Party also provided help in documenting illegals—among them Konon Trofimovich Molody (codenamed BEN), the most celebrated of the Cold War illegal residents in Britain.30 In 1957, with the help of the Canadian Communist Party, the Ottawa residency succeeded in obtaining a new passport for the illegal resident in the United States, “Willie” Fisher (better known as “Rudolf Abel”) in the name of Robert Callan, born on March 10, 1903 in Fort William, Ontario. “Abel,” however, was arrested before he could adopt his new identity. The Ottawa residency was subsequently fearful that the clerk who issued the passport might recognize the photograph of “Abel” published in the press after his arrest in June 1957 as that of “Robert Callan.” Unsurprisingly, the clerk, who doubtless saw—and paid little attention to—many photographs a day, seems not to have noticed.31
One of the rare cases in which the assistance given by Western Communists in fabricating the legend of a Soviet illegal became public was that of Reino Hayhanen (codenamed VIK), who was helped to adopt the identity of the Finn Eugene Maki by the Finnish Communist Olavi Åhman (codenamed VIRTANEN). When Hayhanen defected to the FBI in 1957, Åhman and his wife were secretly taken into hiding in the Soviet Union. For almost twenty years Åhman pleaded to go back to Finland, but the Finnish Communist Party insisted that he stay in Russia for fear that his return would expose it to “anti-Communist propaganda.” In 1975 the Party leader, Ville Pessi (codenamed BARANOV), finally relented. Åhman was allowed back home and awarded a KGB pension of 200 roubles a month.32
A number of Western Communist parties were also asked to provide various kinds of assistance to KGB illegals. In 1957 a group of undeclared members of the French Communist Party, recommended by the PCF leadership, began training as radio operators for illegal residencies. Initially the new recruits found difficulty in transcribing the coded number groups broadcast in test transmissions from the Centre. By the end of the year, however, some had successfully completed their training course.33
The files seen by Mitrokhin give no sense that the Centre’s demands on the fraternal assistance of Western Communist parties declined in the course of the Cold War. On the contrary, the KGB’s solicitations of its “friends” appear to have been greater during the 1970s than in the previous decade. The increased deployment of experienced illegals in eastern Europe after the Prague Spring and the difficulty experienced by the FCD in finding enough suitably qualified and well-motivated Soviet replacements led it to seek renewed inspiration from the era of the Great Illegals, some of the greatest of whom—the Austrian Arnold Deutsch and the German Richard Sorge chief among them—had been Communists from other European countries. Deutsch’s career, however, still remained top secret, not least because two of his most important recruits, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, were still at liberty in the West. Sorge, by contrast, was the best-publicized member of the Soviet intelligence pantheon. he had been posthumously declared Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964 and further honored by the first postage stamps ever issued to commemorate a spy. Sorge’s reputation as a romantic heart-throb added to his popular appeal. His was the example chosen by the Centre to inspire a new generation of non-Soviet KGB illegals.34
The recruitment campaign began on the eve of the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) in April 1971. The FCD took advantage of the presence in Moscow of a large number of leaders of fraternal parties in the West to ask some of them to search out a new generation of Sorges. The files noted by Mitrokhin record meetings between senior FCD officers and six different Western Communist leaders to discuss the recruitment of illegals. There may well have been many more such approaches.
Shortly before the Party congress opened, the former resident in Copenhagen, Leonid Sergeyevich Zaitsev, met Knud Jespersen, the chairman of the Danish Communist Party, at the Sovetskaya Hotel, and asked him to find “two or three” totally reliable, dedicated Communists, loyal to the Soviet Union, who could be trained to become “Danish Richard Sorges.” They should be male, between twenty and forty years of age, and preferably undeclared rather than open Party members. If married, their wives would have to meet the same conditions. Potential Danish Sorges would also need to be well educated and in a suitable occupation—such as journalist, businessman or foreign language student. According to Zaitsev, Jespersen responded enthusiastically, saying that he fully understood both the importance and the secrecy of the request, and already had one candidate in mind, whose details he would send to the current resident in Copenhagen, Anatoli Aleksandrovich Danilov.35
Meanwhile at the Ukraina Hotel, I. P. Kisliak, a former operations officer at the Athens residency, was asking Kostas Koliannis, first secretary of the Greek Communist Party, to find “one or two” Greek Richard Sorges. Like Zaitsev, Kisliak emphasized that candidates must be “totally reliable ideologically,” but added that they also needed “charm.”36 At a subsequent meeting with Ezekias Papaioannou, general secretary of AKEL (the Cyprus Communist Party), Kisliak was slightly less demanding. Though Cypriot candidates would require high moral, political and professional qualities, they need not necessarily be “the equals of Richard Sorge.”37
While Zaitsev and Kisliak were approaching the heads of the Danish, Greek and Cypriot Parties, Anatoli Ivanovich Lazarev, head of the FCD Illegals Directorate, was engaged in talks with Gaston Plissonnier, the second-in-command of the French Communist Party. Plissonier agreed to select two or three undeclared members of the PCF with the potential to become French Sorges and later suggested two possible candidates. He was also asked to supply the KGB with the names of poorly paid (and, by implication, corruptible) staff in the French foreign ministry whose work included photocopying classified documents.38
One of the FCD’s approaches to a leading member of a fraternal delegation to the Twenty-fourth Party Congress took place in hospital. Geinrich Fritz of the Austrian Communist Party (KPô) Central Committee suffered an acute attack of sciatica shortly before the congress opened and was taken for treatment to the CPSU Central Committee Polyclinic at Kuntsevo. While undergoing treatment in Ward 103, he was visited by Ivan Alekseyevich Yerofeyev, deputy head of the Fourth (German and Austrian) Department, who raised the question of finding “one or two” Austrian Sorges. Fritz said that the KPô chairman, Franz Muhri, refused to become involved in intelligence matters because of his precarious position within the Party. However, Fritz agreed to find suitable candidates himself and to keep N. V. Kirilenko, head of Line PR at the Vienna residency, informed of his progress.39
The most cautious of the Party leaders whose responses to the 1971 illegal recruiting drive were noted by Mitrokhin was the general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), William Kashtan. Though a rigidly orthodox pro-Soviet loyalist, Kashtan “made much of the practical difficulties.” The CPC had to
be particularly careful to avoid any suspicion of involvement with the KGB, he explained, because of memories of the Gouzenko affair in 1945, when the Party’s only MP, Fred Rose, and its national organizer, Sam Carr, had both been exposed as Soviet agents. Kashtan was assured that he was expected only to select reliable candidates, provide character references and suggest ways of making contact with them. The KGB would do the rest and ensure that, even in the event of “complications,” he would not become involved. Kashtan is said to have replied that this arrangement “suited him completely.” 40
During the Twenty-fourth Party Congress senior FCD officers also held discussions with at least eight leaders of Latin American Communist parties. The aim was not as yet to solicit a new generation of Latin American Sorges, but rather to identify potential agents in registry offices who could supply the documents required to support illegals’ legends.41 Within a year or so, however, the Centre was actively seeking Latin illegals to operate in North America.42 In 1975 Kryuchkov personally approached the general secretary of the Argentinian Communist Party, Alvarez Arnedo, to “seek help from our Argentinian friends in building up the illegal agent apparatus of Soviet intelligence.” According to the KGB record of the conversation, Arnedo was “wholly sympathetic.”43 During 1975 Andropov also gave personal instructions for approaches to Communist Party leaders in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as part of a quest for Arab illegals.44
OVER A QUARTER of a century after the collapse of the post-war coalitions which had given Communists a brief experience of office in France, Italy, Austria and Scandinavia, Communist ministers once again entered a Western government. They did so as a result of the Portuguese Revolution of April 1974, when the so-called Armed Forces Movement of young, radical officers ended over forty years of civilian dictatorship and promised both to restore democracy and to end Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa. Within days the Communist and Socialist leaders, Álvaro Cunhal and Mário Soares, had returned from exile, standing together in front of their delirious supporters jointly clutching the same red carnation. Soares paid tribute to Cunhal, his former teacher, as “a remarkable man, with a luminous, penetrating glance that bespoke great inner strength.”45 But Cunhal was also a hardline Soviet loyalist who in 1968 had been the first Western Communist leader to support the crushing of the Prague Spring. Though the differences between himself and Soares gradually widened, they were to serve together in a series of coalition governments until the summer of 1975.
In June 1974 Portugal and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations for the first time since the October Revolution. Six months later Cunhal had his first meeting with the KGB resident in Lisbon, Svyatoslav Fyodorovich Kuznetsov (code-named LEONID), who operated under diplomatic cover in the recently established Soviet embassy. Though the meeting took place in a Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) safe house, both men were so fearful their conversation might be bugged that they conducted an entirely silent dialogue with pencil and paper. It was agreed that the KGB would train two reliable Party members to detect eavesdropping equipment so that their future discussions could be by word of mouth. Cunhal also undertook to hand over material on the Portuguese security service, NATO (of which Portugal had been a founder member) and other “matters of interest to the KGB.”46
Shortly after the revolution of April 1974, a commission of enquiry was given access to the files of the brutal security service of the deposed regime (known successively as the PIDE and DGS), whose vast network of informers had almost rivaled those of the Soviet Bloc. Since the PCP, whose 22-member Central Committee had between them spent 308 years in jail, had been the chief target of the PIDE/DGS, it was, unsurprisingly, well represented on the commission.47 As well as passing on large numbers of PIDE/DGS documents (some of which concerned collaboration with Western intelligence services), the PCP also provided the Lisbon residency with files from Portuguese military intelligence and the new security service established after the revolution. According to one of the files noted by Mitrokhin, the total weight of the classified material provided by the PCP to the Lisbon residency in the mid-1970s came to 474 kilograms. In January 1976 a special section was created within the FCD Fifth Department to work on the Portuguese documents which in their microfilm version filled 68,138 frames. Mitrokhin’s summary of the Centre’s report on the material concludes:
Extremely important information was obtained about the structure, methods of work and agent networks of the Special [intelligence] Services of the USA, France, the FRG and Spain on the territory of Portugal; on their cooperation with and the agent networks of PIDE/DGS in Portugal and its former colonies; on the armed forces of Portugal and of a number of other countries; on the methods of work of the Portuguese Special Services against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries; on the agent operational situation in the country and at target establishments of interest to the KGB; [and] on individuals of operational interest to the KGB.48
Service A made use of the documents, in both authentic and doctored form, as the basis of active measures designed to discredit the CIA, French and West German intelligence services.49
In April 1975, at Portugal’s first free post-war elections, the Communists gained only 12.5 percent of the vote—one third of the support won by the socialists under Soares. Cunhal, however, shrugged off the setback, confident that real power would remain with the Armed Forces Movement, which had made the revolution a year before. “The elections,” he told an interviewer, “have nothing or very little to do with the dynamics of revolution… I promise you there will be no parliament in Portugal.” Cunhal’s prediction proved hopelessly mistaken. His support within the Armed Forces Movement crumbled after the failure of a left-wing coup in November, and new elections in April 1976 gave the Communists only 14.5 percent of the vote, as compared with the socialists’ 35 percent. Soares became prime minister and Cunhal led the PCP into opposition.50
The PCP leadership continued in opposition to talent-spot for the KGB.51 During talks in Moscow in July 1977 the FCD asked PATRICK, a member of the PCP Politburo, to identify PCP members suitable for training as illegal agents to operate against NATO. PATRICK saw no difficulty in using experienced Party members for particular intelligence assignments, but was less happy with using them as long-term illegals since this would require them to give up their work for the PCP. Once back in Lisbon, however, PATRICK suggested the names of five possible candidates “without heavy Party responsibilities” and provided blank Portuguese passports and other identity documents to assist in the fabrication of their legends.52
While the FCD was holding discussions with PATRICK in July 1977, an almost identical approach was being made to the veteran chairman of the Finnish Communist Party (SKP), Ville Pessi (codenamed BARANOV), then on holiday in the Soviet Union. Pessi agreed to suggest the names of four or five undeclared members of the SKP or trusted fellow travellers to train as illegal agents who could be used against American and NATO targets in the United States, Norway, Denmark or the Low Countries. He was also asked to find another one or two potential agents in registry offices or other locations able to provide the documentation required for the fabrication of illegals’ legends.53 At about the same time that PATRICK and BARANOV were engaged in discussions in Moscow, Andropov authorized an approach in Dublin by the resident, Mikhail Konstantinovich Shadrin (codenamed KAVERIN), to a leading Irish Communist (codenamed GRUM), who cannot be identified for legal reasons. GRUM agreed that two undeclared members of the Party should be selected for training as the first Irish illegals.54
The approaches to Communist Parties outside the Soviet Bloc coincided with a series of exhortations from Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, to residencies to improve their Line N (Illegal support) performance. Increasingly close surveillance of legal residencies by Western counterintelligence agencies made the expansion of the illegal network of increasing importance. Kryuchkov was not satisfied, however, with the efforts made by residencies to follow up recruiting leads for illegal agents provided by
Western Communist Parties and other sources. He complained in a circular of April 1978:
In a number of residencies Line N work has been only half-heartedly pursued on the part of residents; the deep study of those who could be utilized for illegal espionage, especially as special [illegal] agents, has not been conducted sufficiently purposefully…55
By the mid-1970s most Western, Latin American and some Middle Eastern, North African and Asian Communist Parties had been drawn into the quest for a new generation of illegals.56 There is, however, no evidence that the almost global recruiting program conducted by the KGB and fraternal parties turned up another Arnold Deutsch or Richard Sorge.57 So far as the recruiting leads produced by Western Communist leaders are concerned, Mitrokhin’s notes reveal no major successes and a number of failures.
The failures included Maria, a Portuguese Communist language teacher recommended as a potential illegal agent by PATRICK of the PCP Central Committee. The Centre planned to recruit Maria as the assistant and wife of an illegal KGB officer, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Kunosenko (codenamed YEFREMOV), who was being trained for work in Brazil. A meeting arranged between YEFREMOV and his proposed bride in East Germany, however, ended in disaster. Maria found Kunosenko physically unattractive and refused to sleep with him; her recruitment was discontinued. Without Maria’s assistance, Kunosenko failed to become sufficiently fluent in Portuguese. In 1981 plans for his posting to Brazil were cancelled and he was redeployed in Directorate S headquarters.58