The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  ORLOV: I do not believe that this has been established. I rely on my own inner conviction, on my experience and on my thoughts.

  QUESTION: Do you believe that the imperialist States and their agencies, to which you addressed the majority of the documents which incriminate you, are not interested in weakening and undermining the Soviet regime but in strengthening it? Is that how we must interpret you?

  ORLOV: I protest against such a manner of putting questions, when you first make an assertion of your own, and then ask whether this is a fact. This is the typical way of putting a leading question. The very problem set out in your positive assertion derives from the interpretation of general aspects of détente, or, on the contrary, of the Cold War, the mutual interest of the peoples in making common progress and, in particular, progress in the field of human rights or, on the other hand, their mutual interest in internal troubles arising because of the lack of such progress. The problem also derives from the interpretation of what international organizations one may turn to, and to which ones one may not (or, perhaps, one must not approach any international organizations?). It derives from the interpretation of whether international obligations on human rights may be verified at an international level; whether they can be criticized by the international public; when such criticism is permissible, and when it becomes interference in internal affairs; does in general criticism of breaches of human rights in a particular society undermine its structure or improve it; which human rights are organically linked with the regime, and which are not; and the same applies to breaches of the rights. Besides, as is well known, my documents have been used in the West by those progressive forces whose criticism has clearly improved certain aspects of human rights in the USSR. I have in mind statements by Communists in France, Italy and probably others, and also criticism from various left-wingers, their meetings and so forth, and also statements by representatives of Workers’ Parties, Socialists and Social Democrats. One must bear in mind that criticism from hostile forces can be useful for the regime; for example, criticism of capitalism by the USSR has undoubtedly strengthened that system and prolonged its existence. However, I did not appeal to hostile forces, but either to the international pubic as a whole, or to left-wingers, including Communists, or to members of governments irrespective of regime, if it was a question of formal international obligations. All criticism, both internal and external, has led to the following shifts in the field of human rights in the USSR: as the result of the 1977 reforms, the number of people imprisoned in the camps is actually falling; a clause has been introduced in the constitution concerning the unacceptability of persecution for criticism, the very persecution which was one of the reasons why Soviet citizens appealed to Western public opinion; the number of psychiatric repressions has been reduced; there has been a clear reduction, and possibly a total stop, to instances of children being virtually taken away from members of certain religious communities following decisions by the judicial authorities, and so forth. For these reasons, I can consider that your question has no direct relevance to the case.

  QUESTION: How do you explain your reluctance to give objective testimony on the substance of the charge?

  ORLOV: I ask you to explain the term “objective testimony.” In my view, I have spoken about the very substance of the case.

  QUESTION: Do you have anything to add?

  ORLOV: I wish to write additional comments in my own hand.

  [Written comments by Orlov]

  In the first place, I want to add that I did not sign the charge sheet, although I read it, in part because I requested that the investigator who has just put the charge to me be taken off the case, and I do not accept the Procuracy’s rejection of my request.

  Secondly, I want to explain further why I do not understand the substance of the charge. The accusation is based on an interpretation of Article 70 of the RSFSR criminal code which is not clear to me: it has never been explained to me precisely and unambiguously what is meant by the words “undermining,” “weakening” and even “Soviet regime,” how the presence or absence of “purpose” is to be interpreted, what is considered as “defamatory” and what is not, and so on.

  I have read through the record; my answers have been written verbatim, and I do not have any corrections or observations.

  [Signed] Yu. Orlov.47

  TWENTY-ONE

  SIGINT IN THE COLD WAR

  One of the largest gaps in histories of Cold War intelligence operations and international relations in both East and West concerns the role of signals intelligence (SIGINT). The role of the ULTRA intelligence generated by British and American codebreakers in hastening victory over Germany and Japan during the Second World War is now well known. Research on post-war SIGINT, by contrast, has barely begun. With the exception of the VENONA decrypts of mostly wartime Soviet communications, British and American SIGINT records for the Cold War remain completely closed. Other declassified files, however, show that SIGINT sometimes had an important influence on British and American policy. An in-house CIA history concludes that during the Korean War SIGINT became “a critically important source of information.” During the 1956 Suez Crisis, the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, wrote to congratulate the director-general of the British SIGINT agency, GCHQ, on the “volume” and “excellence” of the Middle Eastern decrypts it had produced and to say “how valuable” the decrypts had proved to be.1 In 1992, after the end of the Cold War, President George Bush described SIGINT as “a prime factor” in his foreign policy.2

  In both Britain and the United States Cold War SIGINT operations were controlled by a single agency. Soviet SIGINT was more fragmented. The GRU had responsibility for intercepting and decrypting military communications, the KGB for diplomatic and other civilian traffic. An attempt early in the Cold War to combine the SIGINT operations of the two agencies was short-lived. Until the late 1960s KGB SIGINT, ciphers and communications were the primary responsibility of the Eighth Chief Directorate.3 The volume of SIGINT supplied to the Soviet leadership was very large. The KGB annual report sent to Khrushchev early in 1961 reveals that during 1960 the Eighth Chief Directorate decrypted 209,000 diplomatic cables sent by representatives of fifty-one states. No fewer than 133,200 of these intercepts were forwarded to the Central Committee (chiefly, no doubt, to its international department). 4 By 1967 the KGB was able to decrypt 152 cipher systems employed by a total of 72 states.5 Though the text of all these decrypts remains inaccessible in the archives of the Eighth and Sixteenth directorates, FCD files and other sources contain important information on KGB SIGINT operations and some of the results achieved by them. Both FCD residencies abroad and the Second Chief Directorate (SCD) within the Soviet Union made impressive contributions to these operations.

  David Kahn, the leading Western historian of SIGINT, plausibly concludes that, on present evidence, bugs and agent penetration contributed more than cryptanalysis to Soviet SIGINT successes during the Cold War.6 The SCD had a long tradition of bugging Moscow embassies. For over thirty years after the establishment of Soviet—American diplomatic relations in 1933, the United States embassy was one of its most successful targets. A navy electrician who conducted the first electronic sweep of the embassy in 1944 discovered 120 hidden microphones. For a time, according to a member of the embassy staff, more “kept turning up, in the legs of any new tables and chairs that were delivered, in the plaster of the walls, any and everywhere.” 7 The embassy seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security by its failure to find more bugs during the early years of the Cold War. In reality, it remained highly vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated Soviet electronic eavesdropping until at least the mid-1960s.

  In 1952 the new American ambassador, George Kennan, ordered a thorough search of both the embassy and his own residence. The security experts sent from Washington asked him to dictate the text of an old diplomatic despatch in his study in order to help them discover any voice-activated listening device. As he continued his dict
ating, one of the experts suddenly began hacking away at the wall behind a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. Finding nothing in the wall, he then attacked the seal itself with a mason’s hammer and triumphantly extracted from it a pencil-shaped bug which had been relaying Kennan’s every word (and no doubt those of previous ambassadors) to Soviet eavesdroppers. Next morning Kennan noted a “new grimness” among the Soviet guards and embassy staff: “So dense was the atmosphere of anger and hostility that one could have cut it with a knife.”8

  In 1953 work began on a new US embassy in Tchaikovsky Street. During its construction American security personnel stood guard each day to prevent the installation of listening devices, particularly on the two top floors which were to contain the CIA station, the ambassador’s office and the cipher rooms. The day-long security vigil, however, served little purpose since the guards were withdrawn at night, thus allowing KGB personnel ample opportunity to bug the embassy. Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who had succeeded Kennan as ambassador, later blamed the extraordinary decision to leave the new embassy unguarded overnight on “carelessness” (presumably his own) and the desire “to save money.”9 “Carelessness” in matters of security was by now an embassy tradition.

  During a heated discussion with US ambassador Foy Kohler in 1962, Khrushchev made clear—to the dismay of the KGB—that he knew the ambassador had personally opposed the supply of steel tubing manufactured in the West for the construction of natural gas pipelines in the Soviet Union.10 Though Kohler probably deduced that Khrushchev knew the contents of some of his cables to Washington, he seems not to have realized that the information came from the bugging of his own embassy. In 1964, however, acting on intelligence from the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, the embassy discovered over forty bugs concealed in bamboo tubes built into the walls behind the radiators in order to shield them from metal detectors.11 Remarkably, most studies of US—Soviet relations take no account whatever of the almost continuous hemorrhage of diplomatic secrets from the United States Moscow embassy for more than thirty years.

  FROM THE 1960S onwards the KGB also had a series of successes in bugging American and British embassies in the Third World, as well as the intelligence stations for which they provided diplomatic cover. The planting of listening devices on targets outside the Soviet Union was the responsibility of the FCD OT (Operational Technical Support) Directorate (also known as the Fourteenth Department), whose officers in residencies had a wide range of duties which included providing the equipment for clandestine photography of classified documents, short-range radio communication and the construction of apparently innocent objects (such as hairbrushes and cans of shaving cream) which could be used to conceal film and other espionage paraphernalia. Each of the OT eavesdropping devices, often remote-controlled, was individually constructed in order to assist concealment in the target area, which was always carefully reconnoitered beforehand. The devices were fixed in place either by FCD operations officers or by local agents employed as cleaners, electricians, plumbers, furniture makers and telephone company technicians.12

  One of the FCD’s most successful eavesdropping operations against a British target was directed at the chief SIS station in the Middle East, which was located in the British embassy building in Beirut (codenamed OVRAG, “Ravine”).13 During the early 1960s a Lebanese maid in the embassy, Elizabeth Aghasapet Ghazarian, was talent-spotted by a bishop in the Armenian Orthodox church, codenamed OLAF, who had been recruited as a Soviet agent in 1947.14 In 1964 Ghazarian was herself recruited as agent ZOLUSHKA (“Cinderella”).15 By January 1966 she had successfully planted a radio microphone (STEREO-1) in the office of the ambassador, Sir Derek Riches. On February 4 ZOLUSHKA succeeded in concealing another radio microphone (STEREO-2), about the size of a matchbox, behind the desk of the Old Etonian SIS head of station, Peter Lunn (codenamed PHOENIX), who worked under diplomatic cover as the embassy first secretary.16

  The Centre was briefed on Lunn’s background and career by his former colleague Kim Philby, who had worked in Beirut as a journalist and SIS agent from 1956 until his defection to Moscow in 1963, soon after SIS obtained proof of his treachery.17 Lunn was one of Britain’s leading skiers; he had been captain of the British team at the 1936 Winter Olympics and was the author of a series of well-known skiing manuals. 18 He and Philby joined SIS at almost the same moment in 1941.19 After his defection Philby informed the KGB that Lunn had been awarded the CMG (the highest decoration then given to any SIS officer save the Chief) for his success in the planning and operation of a 500-meter tunnel under East Berlin which in 1955-6 tapped Soviet and East German telephone lines. The Centre rather admired Lunn’s professionalism and calm, self-assured manner. According to a report on operation RUBIN in 1967:

  Peter Lunn has many agents, who collect information on intelligence services of socialist countries and their representatives in the Middle East, on the activities of the intelligence service of the United Arab Republic [the short-lived union of Egypt and Syria], on oil policy (via a fluctuating agent network), on relations between Arab countries and the USSR and carry out the cultivation of Egyptian intelligence officers. In his agent work Lunn shows caution, experience, puts a high priority on security with agent contacts. With those agents who do not know that Lunn works under embassy cover he used the assumed name Joseph and met either at a clandestine rendezvous or at the flat of his secretary… For meetings with agents who are personally known to Lunn, he used his flat or business premises in the city. Lunn is demanding, strives to give his agents set tasks and to ensure they are carried out clearly. He is very economical when paying rewards to his agents, he adheres strictly to the rule that, firstly, it is only necessary to pay for information when it is unobtainable without paying and, secondly, that payment is only for that information which can be used actively.

  Lunn’s only major weakness, in the Centre’s view, was his relaxed attitude to station security. The KGB eavesdroppers overheard one of his staff suggest extra security measures. They must have been relieved to hear Lunn reply that no further measures were necessary. The bugging of the office of the Beirut head of station, codenamed operation RUBIN, continued for three and a half years after Lunn was recalled to a post at SIS headquarters in November 1967.20

  The deputy head of the FCD, Mikhail Stepanovich Tsymbal, reported to Andropov in 1967 that RUBIN had identified over fifty British agents in the Middle East and Europe: “Of the greatest interest is the identification of an SIS agent group consisting of a courier and two agents in the highest government circles of Iraq.” SIS was also alleged to have “an important agent” in Egypt “with access to President Nasser,” and “sub-sources” who included the foreign minister of one Middle Eastern country and the army chief-of-staff of another.21

  Operation RUBIN also revealed that SIS had penetrated the Lebanese Communist Party. Its most important penetration agent was a lawyer who was a member of the Party’s Politburo and a personal friend of its general secretary, Nicolas Chaoui. On September 27, 1967 the Centre informed the Soviet Politburo that, in addition to keeping SIS well informed on the affairs of the Lebanese Communist Party, the lawyer had provided intelligence on contacts between the Party leadership and the retiring Soviet ambassador, and on Soviet involvement in the affairs of the Lebanese and Syrian peace movements and of the Cairo Peace Conference. The Centre, however, was reluctant to warn Chaoui that one of his closest associates was an SIS agent, probably for fear that he would confront the agent, who in turn would alert SIS to the penetration of its operations.

  In 1971, a year after SIS had discovered the bugging of its Beirut station, the Soviet Politburo gave permission for Chaoui to be briefed during a visit to Moscow. At a meeting in the international department of the CPSU on December 25, Pavel Yefimovich Nedosekin, a senior FCD officer, informed Chaoui that the lawyer was regarded by SIS as “one of its very valuable agents” and had given it secret information about the Lebanese Communist Party and two of the most important Soviet fro
nt organizations, the World Peace Council and the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee. Though doubtless somewhat shocked, Chaoui admitted that, as early as 1949, he had received a report of a confidential meeting between the lawyer and a British consul; he added that since 1968 the lawyer had twice been to London, ostensibly for treatment to a cataract. Chaoui acknowledged that he had no intelligence department capable of protecting Party security, and promised to take immediate action to set one up.22

  Among other unwelcome revelations of operation RUBIN was the discovery that SIS had succeeded in planting six agents in the KGB, the GRU and the Czechoslovak StB. The most important appears to have been SHAUN, the owner of an advertising bureau in Damascus, who was discovered to be a double agent run by Lunn’s deputy, BARITONE. A Centre damage assessment concluded that SHAUN had compromised a series of KGB operations in which he had taken part, among them the recruitment of the Spanish cipher clerk GOMEZ (arrested after his return to Spain); the attempted recruitment of an unidentified member of the West German embassy in Damascus; and contacts between the Soviet military attaché and the chief of the Syrian general staff. SHAUN had also reported to SIS on an affair between the KGB resident in Damascus and the wife of a Soviet doctor. Andropov was tersely informed that “measures have been taken to neutralize the consequences of SHAUN’s treachery.”23

  In January 1967 ZOLUSHKA also succeeded in placing a bug in BARITONE’s office in the SIS Beirut station. In addition to running SHAUN, he was discovered to have sixteen agents inside the Lebanese Communist Party and other left-wing organizations. A detailed study of the SIS officers in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere identified through the bugging of the Beirut station led the Centre to draw a number of general conclusions which, surprisingly, it does not seem to have fully grasped before. The report on operation RUBIN concluded, correctly, that the cover posts occupied by SIS officers in British embassies were rarely as high as counselor and never higher; most were first, second or third secretaries, and seldom headed any of the main embassy departments such as trade and information. SIS personnel did not keep to the daily diplomatic routine, spent more time outside the embassy, lived in worse accommodation, drove older cars and gave fewer large receptions at their homes than British diplomats, but had higher expense allowances and arranged more meetings in restaurants and other public places. Philby had doubtless made such points before, but KGB debriefers still tended to seek only detailed classified information from agents and defectors and failed to use them to add to their general understanding of the West. By the late 1960s Philby was, unsurprisingly, deeply depressed and drinking heavily, convinced that the KGB had “no idea” of how to profit from his vast experience.24