In addition to using Line F officers in KGB residencies to run or supervise its operations, the Thirteenth Department and its successor also had a small group of illegals, trained in sabotage techniques and other “special actions,” who moved around the world from one sabotage target or “wet job” to another.55 The most active was Igor Vitalyevich Voytetsky (codenamed PAUL), who began training as an illegal in 1956 at the age of twenty-three. Voytetsky’s father, Gleb Pavlovich Shlyandin, had committed suicide at the height of the Great Terror in 1937. His mother, Sofya Davidovna Rudnitskaya, who worked as a music teacher, had remarried Vitali Panteleymonovich Voytetsky, a film director in the Gorky Film Studio. According to his legend, Voytetesky was “Emil Evraert,” the son of a Belgian father, Ernst Evraert, and a German mother, Hedwig Marta Althammer. Ernst Evraert had lived in Russia since 1933; “Hedwig Althammer” did not exist. However, a KGB agent, codenamed RAG, who worked for the commune of Bellecour in the Belgian province of Hainault, made a bogus entry in the commune records which purported to show that PAUL and his fictitious mother had lived there from October 15, 1943 to December 14, 1944. On the strength of this entry and forged identity documents provided by the FCD Illegals Directorate S, PAUL obtained a Belgian passport in the name of Emil Evraert on November 8, 1962, then crossed the Channel to England.
On January 30, 1963, in Dover Register Office, Voytetsky married another KGB illegal, Yulia Ivanovna Gorankova (codenamed VIRGINIA), who was then able to apply for genuine Belgian identity documents to replace her forged West German passport. Assisted by Gorankova, Voytetsky embarked on a full-time career as an illegal working for the Thirteenth Department.56 His first assignment was in Northern Ireland, where he selected sites for airborne and maritime landings by DRGs. He then reconnoitred landing sites in Scotland, where he also identified suitable bases for wartime “resistance movements” by Scottish Communists, prepared large dead-drops for sabotage equipment, identified vulnerable sections of oil pipelines and other targets and selected agents for carrying out sabotage operations. Over the next decade, before becoming an illegal trainer in 1975, Voytetsky carried out similar assignments in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United States—probably the first ever saboteur’s world tour.57
THOUGH THE FCD greatly expanded its sabotage capability during the 1960s, it became increasingly confused about the traditional speciality of its “special actions” department—the liquidation of “enemies of the people” abroad. The targets of most of the assassination plots during the 1960s and 1970s recorded in the KGB files seen by Mitrokhin concerned the KGB’s own defectors, all of whom were sentenced to death for treason during secret trials held in absentia. Despite the risks of further bad publicity in the West if they were hunted down, the Centre was determined not to allow the belief to spread within KGB ranks that traitors could escape their just deserts:
The KGB must intensify the spirit of hatred towards the enemy and traitors. Significant harm is done by the comforting theory that losses are inevitable in wars between intelligence services. At meetings and in reports, betrayals are sometimes called compromises. Compromises, by which is meant operational failures, are usually provoked by skillful dangles by the enemy. Equating these two concepts usually leads to the moral justification of traitors, and creates an image of them as victims of the intelligence skills of the enemy. Defectors do not go unpunished. Their punishment is described in such proverbs as: “The traitor Judas is hated everywhere.” “A mercenary dog deserves a stake through the heart” and “A traitor is his own murderer.”58
Deep concern in the Centre at the damage done by Anatoli Golitsyn’s defection from the Helsinki residency in December 1961 strengthened its determination to deter future defectors. Unaware of the confusion caused inside the CIA by Golitsyn’s increasingly extravagant conspiracy theories, the KGB regarded his defection as a serious setback.59 His case prompted a major review by the Centre of its procedures for liquidating traitors outside the Soviet Union. In November 1962 Semichastny, who had succeeded Shelepin as KGB chairman, a year earlier, approved a plan for “special actions” against a group of “particularly dangerous traitors,” jointly drawn up by the heads of the First and Second Chief Directorates, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Sakharovsky and Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov:
As these traitors, who have given important state secrets to the opponent and caused great political damage to the USSR, have been sentenced to death in their absence, this sentence will be carried out abroad.
The oldest name on the death list was that of the former GRU cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, who had defected in 1945. The remainder were more recent KGB defectors: Anatoli Golitsyn, Pyotr Deryabin, Yuri Rastvorov, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Reino Hayhanen, Nikolai Khokhlov and Bogdan Stashinsky.60 The plan approved by Semichastny instructed the Thirteenth Department to train assassins to carry out the death sentences on the traitors. The FCD Counter-Intelligence Department (later Directorate K) was to track them down in their foreign refuges, in collaboration with the Second Chief Directorate, which would maintain surveillance of the traitors’ relatives inside the Soviet Union, monitor their correspondence and carry out periodic searches of their homes.61 In Golitsyn’s case it was hoped that he would emerge from hiding to give evidence to a Congressional committee and provide an opportunity for a KGB assassin.62
In 1964 reports appeared in the American press that the former illegal Reino Hayhanen, who had betrayed “Willie” Fisher (alias “Rudolf Abel”), had been killed in a road accident. FCD personnel were informed that the “accident” had been arranged by the Thirteenth Department. Though KGB had, in reality, no hand in Hayhanen’s death, most foreign intelligence officers were taken in by their chief’s disinformation.63 The truth, which the Centre could not bring itself to admit even to its own officers, was that it rarely succeeded in tracking down any of those on the list of “particularly dangerous traitors” and that, even when it did so, it could not devise methods of assassinating them which did not carry unacceptable risks.
During the 1960s, the names of several further defectors were added to the list of “particularly dangerous traitors” to be liquidated abroad. The first was Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who had made secret contact with the CIA in June 1962 while serving on the Soviet disarmament delegation in Geneva and who defected to the United States in January 1964.64 Unlike any of the other defectors on the 1962 list of “particularly dangerous traitors,” Nosenko was imprisoned, though not executed. By a terrible irony, however, his jailers were not the KGB but the CIA. Golitsyn had claimed that the KGB would send a series of bogus defectors in an attempt to discredit him. Nosenko, he insisted, was one of them. Tragically, Nosenko’s debriefers, like Angleton, the chief of the counterintelligence staff, believed Golitsyn. They paid too much attention to some of the apparent gaps and discrepancies in Nosenko’s story—notably the confusion over his rank. They also wrongly concluded that some of his information was too good to be true—particularly his accurate report in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination that Oswald’s file in the Centre showed that the KGB considered him mentally unstable and had declined to use him as an agent, despite his period in the Soviet Union. And they foolishly regarded as suspicious rather than rational Nosenko’s lack of support for Golitsyn’s conspiracy theories. Pete Bagley, chief of the counterintelligence branch of the CIA’s Soviet Division, complained, “[Nosenko] made everything sound less sinister than Golitsyn. To me, Golitsyn’s version was simply superior.” For four years and eight months Nosenko was imprisoned by the CIA in miserable conditions, without reading material or human contact, while his interrogators insisted he admit that he was a KGB plant. Few cases in American intelligence history have been so appallingly mishandled.65
The KGB knew nothing of the CIA’s ill-founded suspicions. Ironically, while Nosenko was languishing in solitary confinement in a prison cell, the Centre was working on a plan for both him and Golitsyn to be assassinated by the illeg
al PAUL, if they visited the 1967 Montreal World Fair (which, for rather different reasons, neither did).66
The Centre’s continuing inability to track down its traitors was well illustrated by the case of the illegal Yevgeni Runge (codenamed MAKS), who defected with his wife Valentina Rush (ZINA) to the CIA in Germany in October 1967. Following the KGB’s traditional practice of using insulting codenames for defectors, MAKS was renamed GNIDA (“Nit”). Like his predecessors, he was secretly condemned to death in absentia. Enormous efforts involving several other Soviet Bloc services were devoted to operation TREZOR, the long and unsuccessful attempt to track down and liquidate Runge. More than fifty of the Runges’ friends and relatives in the Soviet Union, East and West Germany were placed under surveillance; every item of their correspondence which passed through the Soviet Bloc was opened and examined; their homes were bugged and secretly searched. The Stasi mounted a support operation, codenamed COBRA, which set out to cultivate Valentina Rush’s sister, Renata Ludwig, and one of her relatives, Ernst Buchholz, who lived in West Berlin. After fifteen years of failure, operation COBRA was finally abandoned.
The KGB also sought the assistance of other Soviet Bloc intelligence services in finding an assassin capable of liquidating Runge in north America, where it was assumed he had taken refuge. The Centre’s preferred candidate was a Hungarianborn West German criminal, codenamed JAGUAR, who had been recruited by the AVH for “special actions” against anti-Communist Hungarian émigrés. On July 1, 1968 JAGUAR blew up the Danube printing house in Munich, which produced émigré publications. He also set fire to the editorial offices of two Hungarian émigré newspapers, putting one of them out of business. For these operations JAGUAR received 40,000 Hungarian forints and 1,000 West German marks from the AVH. Impressed by his “special actions” in Munich, the KGB decided to employ him for operation TREZOR. JAGUAR was shown photographs of Runge and his wife and agreed to hunt them down. Once he had left for the United States, however, he disappeared without trace—together, presumably, with the operational funds allocated to him by the KGB. Following JAGUAR’s disappearance, the Centre asked the East German Stasi and the Bulgarian DS whether they had contacts among American gangsters or mafiosi who would take out a contract on Runge. Neither was able to suggest a suitable assassin.67
AS WELL AS attempting to liquidate major traitors, the Thirteenth Department and Department V were also responsible for administering lesser punishments to other defectors whose crimes were not considered to merit the death penalty. The November 1962 plan for dealing with defectors also specified “special action” against the world-famous ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who had defected at Le Bourget airport in Paris during a tour by the Kirov Ballet in 1961.68 The KGB had begun a campaign of intimidation immediately after Nureyev’s defection. On the night of his first major performance with a Western company, when he was due to dance the part of the Blue Bird in a Paris production of Sleeping Beauty, he received emotional letters from both his parents and his former ballet teacher, appealing to him not to betray the fatherland. Having steeled himself to go ahead, Nureyev then found his performance interrupted:
I had barely come on to the stage… when shouting and whistling broke out, almost drowning Tchaikovsky’s music. I went on dancing the Blue Bird, but beyond the haze of the footlights… I was perfectly aware that some communists were trying to sabotage the performance. I could hardly hear the music and I saw pieces of what looked like glass thrown on to the stage at me but I kept on dancing.69
The KGB’s early attempts at intimidation failed. On February 21, 1962, amid a blaze of publicity, Nureyev made his Covent Garden debut, dancing with Margot Fonteyn in Giselle. To those who saw that unforgettable performance and the twenty-three curtain calls which followed, it was already clear that one of the greatest partnerships in the history of dance had been born.70 The Centre was outraged not merely by the public adulation of a notorious defector but also by Nureyev’s publication a few months later of memoirs describing his “leap to freedom” in the West. Though the November 1962 plan of campaign against leading defectors did not specify the nature of the “special action” to be employed against him, it was clear from the context that it would henceforth involve a good deal more than sprinkling broken glass on the stage.71 Subsequent FCD directives discussed schemes (which were never successfully implemented) to break one or both of Nureyev’s legs.72
In the summer of 1970 one of Nureyev’s best-known near-contemporaries, Natalia Makarova, defected from the Kirov Ballet during a London season at the Royal Festival Hall. The KGB report on the defection predictably condemned her as a “politically immature individual, with low moral qualities.”73 In reality, the main motive for her defection, like Nureyev’s, had been the quest for greater artistic freedom.74 A joint memorandum by the heads of the First and Second Chief Directorates proposed that, if a way could be found to injure Nureyev without the hand of the KGB being obvious, a similar “special action” should be undertaken against Makarova. As usual, the reference in their memorandum to physical injury was expressed in euphemistic bureaucratic prose:
Depending on the results of special actions taken with respect to Nureyev, aimed at lessening his professional skills, [the KGB] should consider carrying out a similar action with respect to Makarova, in order to localize the negative effect of her forthcoming performances in Britain and the United States. If the British propaganda organs are activated and information provided by her is used to slander Soviet life, additional measures will be devised.75
An approach was made by the Centre to the Bulgarian intelligence service to seek the possible assistance of one of their agents in a company where Makarova was due to dance. On one occasion Makarova was slightly hurt in an accident behind the stage caused by a beam falling from the set. The files seen by Mitrokhin, however, do not make clear whether this was the first nearly successful “special action” by the KGB against a defecting ballerina or merely an act of clumsiness by a stagehand.76
Since the defection of the reluctant assassin, Bogdan Stashinshky, in 1960, KGB operations against traitors living in the West had been totally unsuccessful. Though enormous amounts of time and resources had been devoted to tracking down defectors and preparing to kill and maim them, the only successful liquidation claimed by the Centre, the assassination of Hayhanen, was entirely fraudulent. It is just possible that the KGB was responsible for the minor injury to Natalia Makarova. But the probability is that its pursuit of traitors during the decade up to 1970 ended in complete failure.
APPENDIX 1
INSTRUCTIONS FOR DISARMING THE MOLNIYA (“LIGHTNING”) EXPLOSIVE DEVICE
Instructions for Disarming the MOLNIYA Explosive DeviceFCD Directorate S guidance to residencies on the correct procedure for removing radio transmitters from booby-trapped caches
1. When digging out the container from the earth, take care not to strike the handle by chance. Dig until the upper surface of the container with the handle comes to light; remove the board and the plywood which cover the container.
2. The handle must only be turned and the container tilted and taken out of the hole after the explosive device has been disarmed.
3. In order to disarm the device, one must have a pocket torch battery of not less than 3.5 volts. Attach two wires of 30-50 cm length to the battery, with sharp probes at the end (a nail or a needle).
4. Without taking the container out of the cache, place one of the battery contacts on the body of the container, and the other on the left lock fitting, assuming that the lid of the container faces the operator. The contact points must be applied after scratching the paintwork on the body of the container and on the lock fitting.
5. When contact is made with the battery, a “click” should be heard inside the container; this indicates that the explosive device has been disarmed. If there is no “click,” check the contact points again and repeat the operation to disarm the device.
6. If when the operation is repeated there is still
no “click,” it is forbidden to take the container out of the cache and the cache must be filled in. To open the container and remove the electric detonators from the two-way radio:
• remove the padlocks and lift the lid of the container with the key which is inside the container. Unscrew the four screws and remove the metal casing under which the two-way radio is located in the ALIOT packaging;
• cut each of the wires which connect the container with the ALIOT packaging and remove the package from the container.77
APPENDIX 2
EXAMPLE OF BOOBY-TRAPPED RADIO CACHE PUT IN PLACE BY THE BERNE RESIDENCY
On May 15, 1966, the KGB residency in Berne, Switzerland carried out an operation to deposit a booby-trapped BR-3U agent radio transmitter No. 624471/2329 in a hiding place codenamed CACHE No. 3. In July 1972, the residency was ordered to check the area where the transmitter had been buried and to devise an operation to remove it. Directorate S sent Berne the following description of the route to the cache and of its location:
Cache No. 3
Leaving Friburg by the Avenches road. Six kilometers from Friburg, the road goes through the township of Belfaux. There is a farm standing on its own on the right-hand side of the road as you leave Belfaux. About 100 meters beyond this farm, a track on the right-hand side goes up to a wood on a hillock. The entrance to this track is immediately opposite a railway crossing. Go up this track to the edge of the wood, where there is a large covered chapel with the image of a saint and benches for sitting.
A path passes by the chapel on the edge of the wood. Take 55 steps along the path from the left-hand side of the chapel (as you face it). At that point, on the right-hand side, there is a stone pillar inscribed with the letters FC, and next to it on the left there is a large pine tree (the only one in the sector between the chapel and the little pillar). Start counting steps again from the edge of the path. Proceed at right angles to the path, passing between the pine tree and the little pillar. After taking 36 steps, you will be at the point between two large leafy trees, the only ones in the sector. The distance between the trees is three paces. The area between the trees has been used for the cache.
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