The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  The SIGINT-related files seen by Mitrokhin, which end in 1982, do not explain how the KGB sought to respond to these new challenges. It is clear from other evidence, however, that Soviet SIGINT operations continued to expand, at least in volume, during the Gorbachev era. Those of the GRU, targeted chiefly on the armed forces of the United States, NATO and China, were on an even larger scale than the KGB’s. By the end of the 1980s the Red Army had 40 SIGINT regiments, 170 SIGINT battalions and over 700 SIGINT companies. Since the launch of Kosmos 189 in 1967, the GRU Space Intelligence Directorate had put over 130 SIGINT satellites into orbit. More than 60 Soviet surface ships and over 20 different types of aircraft were used for SIGINT collection. The GRU and KGB had between them over 500 SIGINT ground stations in the Soviet Union and around the world. In all, the GRU and KGB SIGINT network probably employed about 350,000 intercept operators, processors, cryptanalysts and other technical specialists, a majority of them military personnel—about five times as many as the NSA and US Service Cryptological Authorities, which together had an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 personnel.86 According to Vladimir Rubakov, a senior KGB officer interviewed shortly before the reorganization of Soviet intelligence in 1991, SIGINT operations consumed a quarter of the KGB budget.87

  In December 1991 the former Eighth and Sixteenth Directorates of the KGB were reconstituted as an independent service, the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information (FAPSI in its Russian acronym), responsible for communications security, ciphers and SIGINT. Russian SIGINT operations today are on a significantly smaller scale than those of the former Soviet Union. One of the least noticed consequences of the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc was the dismantling of the great majority of the 150 ground stations in former Warsaw Pact countries. 88 Some of the most important stations outside the Russian Federation, however, still survive—among them the large SIGINT complexes near Tallinn in Estonia and at Lourdes in Cuba (though the Lourdes personnel was reduced by over half to a total of about 1,000 in 1993).89 The residencies of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, continue to contain active intercept posts. Though FAPSI operates with somewhat reduced resources, faces harder targets and probably finds it increasingly difficult to match NSA’s state of the art technology, Russian SIGINT still has a global reach.

  TWENTY-TWO

  SPECIAL TASKS

  Part 1: From Marshal Tito to Rudolf Nureyev

  Assassination had been an integral part of Stalin’s foreign policy. During the late 1930s he had been obsessed with NKVD operations to liquidate Trotsky and his leading foreign supporters. The final act of his foreign policy before he died in 1953 was a plan to assassinate Josip Tito, who had succeeded Trotsky as the leading heretic of the Soviet Bloc.

  At the height of the Terror, Tito (born Josip Broz) had, ironically, been one of the few leading Yugoslav Communists (most then living in exile in Moscow) who were trusted by the NKVD. On becoming secretary general of the purged Yugoslav Party in 1937, he had dutifully denounced his persecuted and liquidated comrades, in impeccable Stalinist invective, as Trotskyists, traitors, factionalists, spies and anti-Party elements. He apologized personally to Stalin for his own lack of vigilance in choosing as his first wife a woman who had since been unmasked as an (imaginary) Gestapo agent. When Tito became wartime leader of the Communist partisans, an NKVD agent, Josip Kopinić, codenamed VAZHDUH (“Air”), acted as his radio link with Moscow.1 At the end of the war, the NKGB resident, Saveli Vladimirovich Burtakov (codenamed LIST), presented the head of Tito’s Bureau of People’s Protection, Alexander-Leka Ranković, with a portrait of Stalin. Apparently deeply moved, Ranković (codenamed MARKO by the Centre) replied that it was the most precious gift he could possibly have received.2 There was no sign yet of the violent confrontation between Tito and Stalin which was to erupt only three years later. Despite his own subsequent loathing for Stalinism, the leading Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas later acknowledged:

  The fact is that not a single Party leader was anti-Soviet—not before the war, not during, not after… Stalin and the Soviet Union were our corner-stone and point of spiritual origin…3

  There were already signs by the end of the war, however, that Tito (codenamed OREL (“Eagle”) by the Centre) would be less sycophantic to Moscow than most other leaders of the emerging Soviet Bloc. Unlike other Bloc members, the Yugoslav partisans had defeated the Germans and Italians chiefly through their own efforts rather than the sacrifices of the Red Army. Tito declared ominously soon after VE Day, “We will not be dependent on anyone ever again.” Burtakov reported to the Centre:

  Side by side with his positive qualities—popularity, good looks, an expressive face, spirit and willpower—OREL also has the following negative traits: lust for power, lack of modesty, arrogance and insincerity. He considers himself to be the absolute authority, prefers unquestioning obedience, dislikes an exchange of views and criticism of his orders; he is irritable, hot-tempered and curt; he loves to strike poses.

  Burtakov also believed Tito was less than frank about his dealings with Britain, “although outwardly he makes a show of his supposed hostility towards the Allies, especially the British.”4

  Tito and Ranković, in turn, took a dim view of Burtakov, who became notorious for his habit of looting jewelry, crystal, china and rugs from Yugoslav mansions (a practice he was to repeat when posted to Romania and Czechoslovakia).5 At the end of 1945 Burtakov was replaced as chief adviser to the Bureau of People’s Protection (OZNA) by Arseni Vasilyevich Tishkov, known to the Yugoslavs as Timofeyev.6

  The post-war MGB had residencies in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Skopje, as well as four sub-residencies elsewhere in Yugoslavia,7 whose imperious behavior caused increasing resentment at Soviet intrusion into Yugoslav affairs. An inspection by the Centre reported that MGB advisers “interfered roughshod in the internal affairs of the Bureau of People’s Protection, and applied pressure in order to obtain information.” Information refused by OZNA’s leaders was surreptitiously obtained from its junior officers.8 What caused most resentment in Belgrade, however, was MGB recruitment of Yugoslav agents. Tito was unaware that two of his own ministers—Andriya Hebrang, minister of industry, and Streten Žujović, finance minister—were among them. He was, however, outraged at a Soviet attempt in 1945 to seduce and recruit Dusica Petrović, the female officer in charge of Yugoslav ciphers. When informed of the case by Ranković, Tito exploded: “A spy network is something we will not tolerate! We’ve got to let them know right away.”9 Tishkov, however, continued to demand from Tito and Ranković offices for himself and the Soviet “advisers” inside OZNA headquarters, with the right to be informed of all agent files and operations.10

  Of all Tito’s early signs of independence, the one which caused most alarm in Moscow was probably his plan for a Balkan federation—interpreted by Stalin as a potential challenge to Soviet hegemony. In March 1948 the Soviet Union recalled its advisers and angrily denounced the Yugoslav Party as riddled with both ideological heresy and British spies. On June 28 Cominform (the post-war successor to Comintern) expelled the Yugoslavs and appealed to “healthy elements” in the Party to overthrow the leadership. Tito’s flattering secret codename OREL (“Eagle”) was hurriedly downgraded to STERVYATNIK (“Carrion Crow”).11 Stalin, however, initially overestimated the ease with which “Carrion Crow” could be overthrown. “I shall shake my little finger,” he boasted to Khrushchev, “and there will be no more Tito.” When that failed, “he shook everything else he could shake;” but without success. Tito’s hold over the Party, army and state machinery remained secure.

  In the summer of 1948 the MGB and UDBA (OZNA’s successor) began a vicious intelligence war. Hebrang and Žujović, the two Soviet moles in Tito’s cabinet, were arrested. Other Soviet agents were discovered in Tito’s bodyguard, of whom the most senior was Major-General Momo Jurović (codenamed VAL). According to Djilas, the UDBA discovered an MGB plot to wipe out the Yugoslav Politburo with automatic rifles while they were
relaxing in the billiards room at Tito’s villa. The UDBA’s use of terror against Cominforn “traitors” rivaled in horror, if not in scale, that of the NKVD against Soviet “enemies of the people” a decade before. Djilas mournfully told Ranković, “Now we are treating Stalin’s followers just as he treated his enemies!” 12 The MGB and its allied intelligence services simultaneously engaged in a purge of mostly imaginary Titoist conspirators throughout the Soviet Bloc. Their most celebrated victims were the Hungarian interior minister, László Rajk, and seven alleged accomplices who confessed at a carefully rehearsed show trial in Budapest to taking part in a vast non-existent plot hatched by Tito and the CIA.13

  The final, and most ingenious, of the MGB plans to assassinate Tito involved one of the most remarkable of all Soviet illegals, Iosif Grigulevich (at this time codenamed MAKS or DAKS), who had taken a leading part in the first, narrowly unsuccessful, attempt on Trotsky’s life in Mexico City in May 1940, had run a Latin American sabotage network during the Second World War, and in 1951—posing as Teodoro Castro—had become Costa Rican chargé d’affaires (later Minister Plenipotentiary) in Rome.14 Since Costa Rica had no diplomatic mission in Belgrade, Grigulevich was also able to obtain the post of non-resident envoy to Yugoslavia. The MGB reported to Stalin in February 1953:

  While fulfilling his diplomatic duties in the second half of the year 1952, [MAKS] twice visited Yugoslavia, where he was well received. He had access to the social group close to Tito’s staff and was given the promise of a personal audience with Tito. The post held by MAKS at the present time makes it possible to use his capabilities for active measures against Tito.15

  Grigulevich volunteered for the role of assassin. At a secret meeting with senior MGB officers in Vienna early in February 1953 he suggested four possible ways to eliminate “Carrion Crow:”

  1. To administer a lethal dose of pneumonic plague from a silent spray concealed in his clothing during a personal audience with Tito. (Grigulevich would be inoculated with an antidote beforehand.)

  2. To obtain an invitation to the reception for Tito to be given during his forthcoming visit to London by the Yugoslav ambassador, with whom Grigulevich was on friendly terms. Grigulevich would shoot Tito with a silenced pistol, then spray tear gas at the reception to cause panic and assist his escape.

  3. To use the previous method at a diplomatic reception in Belgrade.

  4. To present Tito with jewelry in a booby-trapped box which would release a lethal poison gas as soon as it was opened.

  Grigulevich was asked to submit more detailed proposals to the Centre, Meanwhile, the MGB assured Stalin that there was no doubt that “MAKS, because of his personal qualities and experience in intelligence work, is capable of accomplishing a mission of this kind.”16

  The use of an accredited Central American diplomat as Tito’s assassin was intended to conceal as effectively as possible the hand of the MGB. Using his Costa Rican alias, Grigulevich composed a farewell letter addressed to his Mexican wife to be made public and used to reinforce his Latin American cover if he were captured or killed during the assassination attempt.17 On March 1, 1953 the MGB reported to Stalin that MAK’s attempt to “rub out” Tito had, unfortunately, not yet taken place. This disappointing report, which Stalin read at about midnight, may well have been the last document he saw before he suffered a fatal stroke in the early hours of March 2.18

  After Stalin’s death three days later, plans for the assassination were suspended. That May Grigulevich was hurriedly withdrawn to Moscow when the pre-war Soviet defector Aleksandr Orlov began publishing reminiscences of Stalin and the NKVD in Life magazine. The Centre feared that Orlov, who knew of Grigulevich’s sabotage missions before and during the Spanish Civil War, might blow his cover—though, in the event, he did not do so.19 So far as the puzzled Costa Rican foreign ministry and Rome diplomatic corps were concerned, Grigulevich and his wife simply disappeared into thin air. A note on his KGB file in 1980 records that Western intelligence services had, apparently, never identified the missing Teodoro Castro as the Soviet illegal Iosif Grigulevich. Back in Moscow, Grigulevich had successfully completed a doctoral dissertation, become a senior scientific researcher at the Ethnographic Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1958, and thereafter made a new life for himself as a leading writer and academic authority on Latin America, ethnography and religion, becoming vice-president of the Soviet—Cuban and Soviet—Venezuelan Friendship Societies.20

  UNDER KHRUSHCHEV, PLOTS to assassinate Tito were replaced by attempted conciliation with Belgrade. The public Soviet—Yugoslav conflict was formally concluded during a state visit by Khrushchev to Belgrade in May 1955. Assassination was far less central to Khrushchev’s foreign policy than it had been to Stalin’s. It remained, however, as it had done throughout the Stalin era, a basic part of Soviet policy for dealing with the leaders of anti-Soviet émigré groups: in particular, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the rival Social-Democratic National Labor Union (NTS). As Party secretary in the Ukraine, Khrushchev had ordered the secret poisoning by the MGB of, among others, the nationalist Oleksander Shumsky and of Archbishop Romzha of the Uniate (Catholic) church.21

  The first major foreign assassination target of the post-Stalin era was Georgi Sergeyevich Okolovich, one of the leaders of the NTS organization in West Germany. The training of Okolovich’s intended assassin, Nikolai Khokhlov, was personally overseen by the MGB head of foreign intelligence, Aleksandr Semyonovich Panyushkin. Khokhlov’s instructors included Mikhail Rubak, a Soviet judo champion, and Lieutenant-Colonel Godlevsky, winner of five national pistol tournaments. The execution weapon was an electrically operated gun, fitted with a silencer and concealed inside a cigarette packet, which fired cyanide bullets developed in the Centre’s secret arms laboratory at Khozyaistvo Zheleznovo. Khokhlov, however, proved to be more squeamish than the assassins of the Stalin era and was at least half-persuaded by some of the NTS publications which he read while plotting Okolovich’s assassination. On February 18, 1954 Khokhlov called at Okolovich’s flat in Frankfurt. His introduction was somewhat disconcerting. “Georgi Sergeyevich,” he told him, “I’ve come to you from Moscow. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has ordered your assassination.” He then informed the startled Okolovich that he had decided not to murder him. Instead, Khokhlov defected to an initially skeptical CIA. On April 20 he gave a sensational press conference at which he revealed the assassination plan and displayed his exotic murder weapon to the world’s media. 22

  In April 1955, following a prolonged post-mortem at the Centre in the wake of Khokhlov’s well-publicized defection, “special actions” were made the responsibility of the reorganized FCD Thirteenth Department, which was represented in residencies by a newly created Line F. Its duties were to prepare and conduct sabotage in collaboration with the GRU; to carry out other “special actions” involving the use of force, ranging from kidnapping to assassination; and to steal Western military technology (a responsibility later handed over to FCD Directorate T on its foundation in 1963).23

  SABOTAGE OPERATIONS REPLACED assassination as the most important “special actions” of the Thirteenth Department during and beyond the Khrushchev era. The main priority of these operations consisted of the identification of targets in the West and preparations for their destruction by Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups (diversionnye razvedyvatelnye gruppy or DRGs) and the local Communist “resistance” in the event of an East—West conflict. One of Line F’s earliest tasks followed the conclusion of the four-power Austrian State Treaty, signed in Vienna in May 1955, which ended the post-war occupation by the wartime allies. Before the withdrawal of the Red Army, the KGB was instructed to select and fill a series of secret arms caches. Among the many sites recorded in the files examined by Mitrokhin were the villages of Mayerling, Mollram, Weinersdorf, Heiligenkreuz and Semmering; the Stift Gîttweig monastery; and two ruined castles, Schloss Starhemberg and Schloss Merkenstein. KGB archi
ves contain detailed plans and written descriptions of these and other locations. The plan of the ruins of Schloss Starhemberg, for example, shows a 7.65 caliber Walter pistol, with a cartridge clip and 21 rounds of ammunition, concealed in a crack in the outer wall at ground level 1.5 meters to the left of an old pine tree; and a 6.35 caliber Walter pistol, with a cartridge clip and 21 live rounds, hidden in the castle courtyard 1.5 meters from an old pear tree. At Schloss Merkenstein a 7.65 caliber Mauser pistol, with cartridge clip and 21 rounds of ammunition, was concealed in a niche underneath a large stone to the left of the gateway arch; a Walter pistol, also with cartridge clip and 25 rounds, was hidden in a crevice in the wall.24

  In May 1964, the KGB residency in Vienna made a sample check of the second Schloss Merkenstein cache, and was disturbed to discover that the cover in which the arms had been wrapped had rotted away. Four of the twenty-one rounds of ammunition had disappeared and were assumed to have fallen deeper into the crevice; the other seventeen rounds had deteriorated and were no longer safe to use. The Walter pistol, once rust had been removed, as found to be still serviceable. The Centre prudently decided to leave the other caches undisturbed.25