The reliability of the KGB’s German source was authenticated in the report sent to Brezhnev and the Central Committee both by Andropov and by Lieutenant-General Kevorkov, then head of the Seventh Department of the KGB Second Chief Directorate (SCD).109 Kevorkov’s involvement indicates that the source was recruited and controlled not by the FCD but by the SCD, perhaps after being compromised during a visit or posting to Moscow (a characteristic form of SCD blackmail).110
Despite some lack of enthusiasm for Schmidt, both the Soviet and East German leadership were anxious to prevent a return to power by the Christian Democrats. According to a KGB file, Honecker secretly made known to the Schmidt government in 1978 that East Germany was willing to take action designed to improve the SDP’s apparently declining electoral prospects—for example, by easing travel restrictions between the GDR and FRG.111 There is no evidence of any response from the SDP.
Moscow’s particular bête noire was the charismatic, right-wing Bavarian CSU leader, Franz-Josef Strauss, who was chosen as the candidate of the CDU and its CSU allies for the chancellorship in the 1980 elections. According to the minutes of a meeting in Moscow in July 1979 between Andropov and Mielke, the GDR interior minister and head of the Stasi, “It was acknowledged that Strauss was a serious opponent to Schmidt at the Bundestag elections in 1980. It was therefore essential to compromise Strauss and his supporters.”112 Among the KGB active measures agreed by Andropov and Mielke was operation COBRA-2, which used information gathered by an HVA agent, Inge Goliath, former secretary to the head of the main CDU foreign affairs think tank, to fabricate sinister links between the CDU/CSU leadership and right-wing elements in the intelligence agencies. A total of 1,587 copies of a booklet alleging that BND officers had conspired with the opposition against the Schmidt government were circulated to politicians, trade union leaders and other opinion-formers in the FRG. According to the KGB file on COBRA-2, some of the disinformation in the booklet reappeared in the West German press and caused Schmidt to order a judicial enquiry.113
The KGB, which had a recurrent tendency to exaggerate the success of its active measures in reports to the Politburo, claimed that COBRA-2 had caused great alarm in the CDU/CSU leadership and had “a positive influence” in ensuring an SDP victory at the 1980 Bundestag elections.114 Though, in reality, Strauss’s election defeat probably owed little—if anything—to Soviet and East German active measures, it undoubtedly came as a considerable relief to the Centre. When the SDP finally fell from power in 1983, the new government was headed not by Strauss but by the less flamboyant Helmut Kohl.
The main aim of KGB active measures during the early 1980s was the attempt to exploit the opposition of the large and militant West German peace movement to the deployment of US medium-range missiles in the FRG. Among the most eloquent opponents of the deployment was the Bürgermeister of Saarbrucken, Oskar Lafontaine, later an unsuccessful SDP candidate for the chancellorship (and in 1998 briefly a controversial finance minister in the government of Gerhard Schrîder). It would have been wholly out of character had the Centre, which only a few years earlier had formed absurdly unrealistic plans to recruit Harold Wilson and Cyrus Vance, not also targeted Lafontaine. In 1981 the operations officer, L. S. Bratus, was sent to cultivate him and—predictably—failed in the attempt.115 The KGB seems, none the less, to have tried to take a largely undeserved share of the credit for the decision by an SDP congress eight months after its 1983 election defeat to oppose the stationing of US medium-range missiles on German soil. A CPSU Central Committee document in 1984 claimed complacently, “Many arguments that had previously been presented by us to the representatives of the SDP have now been taken over by them.”116
As in other NATO countries, the chief priority of intelligence collection in the FRG during the early 1980s was operation RYAN—the fruitless attempt to discover non-existent Western preparations for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Markus Wolf and, no doubt, some KGB officers in Karlshorst and West German residencies regarded the whole operation as utterly misconceived. None, however, dared to challenge the paranoid mindset of the Centre. Wolf found his Soviet contacts “obsessed” with RYAN and the threat of a NATO nuclear first strike:
The HVA was ordered to uncover any Western plans for such a surprise attack, and we formed a special staff and situation center, as well as emergency command centers, to do this. The personnel had to undergo military training and participate in alarm drills. Like most intelligence people, I found these war games a burdensome waste of time, but these orders were no more open to discussion than other orders from above.117
Because ST collection was less distorted by misconceptions of the West than political intelligence, its quality was probably higher. Kryuchkov wrote in a directive to residencies in July 1977:
Work against West Germany is assuming an increasingly greater importance at the present time in connection with the growth of the economic potential of the FRG and the increase in its influence in the solution of important international issues.
The Federal Republic of Germany is both economically and militarily the leading West European capitalist country. It is the main strategic bridgehead of NATO, where a significant concentration of the adversary’s military strength can be observed: the total numerical strength of the forces of the Western allies (including the Bundeswehr) reaches almost a million in the country. This situation distinguishes the FRG from the other European capitalist states and makes it the most important component of the military bloc. Within the FRG, military scientific research studies in the fields of atomic energy, aviation, rocket construction, electronics, chemistry and biology are being intensively pursued.118
As Kryuchkov’s directive indicates, West Germany, though ranked far behind the United States, had become the chief European target for Line X (ST) operations. In 1980, 61.5 percent of the ST received by the Military Industrial Commission (VPK) came from American sources (not all in the United States), 10.5 percent from the FRG, 8 percent from France, 7.5 percent from Britain and 3 percent from Japan. Just over half the intelligence acquired by FCD Directorate T in 1980 (possibly an exceptional year) came from allied intelligence services, the HVA and Czechoslovak StB chief among them.119
Among Directorate T’s chief targets in the FRG was Germany’s largest electronics company, Siemens, whose scientists and engineers included the KGB illegal RICHARD,120 recruited in East Germany, and at least two other Soviet agents: HELMUT121 and KARL.122 HELMUT was unaware that he was a KGB agent and believed that he was working for the HVA.123
As in the case of other Western companies, it proved easier to collect ST from Siemens than to exploit it in the Soviet Union, particularly in the civilian economy. The Centre’s paranoid tendencies made it increasingly fearful that the Siemens computers it purloined had been bugged or otherwise tampered with. The FCD’s Fifteenth Department (Registry and Archives) planned to use a Siemens computer to store the information on its card files on three million people. Because of the Centre’s fear that the computer contained some hidden bug which Soviet experts had failed to detect, however, it remained unused in a storeroom for five years.124 Less advanced East German computers were eventually used instead.125
As well as benefiting from the HVA’s extensive ST operations in the FRG, the KGB’s own Line X agents spanned almost the whole of West German high technology. In addition to those in Siemens, Mitrokhin’s notes identify twenty-nine other agents of varying importance, some of them working for such major firms as Bayer, Dynamit Nobel, Messerschmitt and Thyssen.126
The great majority of these espionage cases never came to court. One of the few which did was that of Manfred Rotsch (EMIL), who was betrayed by a French agent in Directorate T.127 As head of the planning department in the FRG’s largest arms manufacturer, Messerschmitt—Bîlkow—Blohm (MBB), Rotsch betrayed many of the secrets of NATO’s new fighter bomber, the Tornado (built by MMB jointly with British and Italian manufacturers), the Milan anti-tank missile and the Hot an
d Roland surface-to-air missiles.128 Rotsch was a highly professional well-trained spy, communicating with his controllers by microdot messages.129 His cover too was impeccable. While living an apparently conventional family life of almost tedious tranquility in a Munich suburb, he joined the conservative Christian Social Union and stood as a CSU candidate in Bavarian local elections.130 Mitrokhin’s brief note on EMIL indicates that he had already been recruited by the KGB before he left East Germany, ostensibly as a refugee, in 1954.131 Rotsch thus may well have been the longest-serving KGB agent planted in the FRG with East German assistance. Arrested in 1984, he was sentenced in 1986 to eight and a half years’ imprisonment but exchanged a year later for an East Berlin doctor serving a long prison term of solitary confinement. Though housed with his wife in a luxury East German lakeside villa, Rotsch had grown attached to his life in the West. Within a few months, both returned to their house near Munich and a frosty welcome from their scandalized neighbors.132
STASI AND HVA offices were full of busts of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, commemorative plaques embellished with the sword and shield of the Cheka and other trinkets presented at convivial gatherings of GDR and Soviet intelligence officers at which operational successes against the FRG such as the East German Manfred Rotsch’s thirty years as a KGB agent were celebrated and toasts were drunk to the future. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, however, the near 40-year collaboration between HVA and KGB, the most successful (though characteristically rather one-sided) intelligence alliance in the Soviet Bloc, ended in East German charges of betrayal by Moscow. Most appeals for help to the Centre after the collapse of the GDR by former HVA officers and agents who feared prosecution in the West were met by an embarrassed silence from the KGB. On October 22, 1990 Wolf wrote to Gorbachev:
We were your friends. We wear a lot of your decorations on our breasts. We were said to have made a great contribution to your security. Now, in our hour of need, I assume that you will not deny us your help.
Gorbachev, however, did precisely that. Wolf appealed to him to insist on an amnesty for the Stasi and its foreign intelligence service before agreeing to German reunification. Gorbachev refused. “It was,” says Wolf bitterly, “the Soviets’ ultimate betrayal of their East German friends, whose work for over four decades had strengthened Soviet influence in Europe.”133
TWENTY-SEVEN
FRANCE AND ITALY DURING THE COLD WAR
Agent Penetration and Active Measures
For much, probably most, of the Cold War, the Paris residency ran more agents—usually about fifty plus—than any other KGB station in western Europe. Its most remarkable achievement during the Fourth Republic (1946-58) was the penetration of the French intelligence community, especially SDECE, the foreign intelligence agency. An incomplete list in KGB files of the residency’s particularly “valuable agents” in 1953 included four officials in the SDECE (codenamed NOSENKO, SHIROKOV, KORABLEV and DUBRAVIN) and one each in the domestic security service DST (GORYACHEV), the Renseignements Généraux (GIZ), the foreign ministry (IZVEKOV), the defense ministry (LAVROV), the naval ministry (PIZHO), the New Zealand embassy (LONG) and the press (ZHIGALOV).1 In 1954 30 per cent of all reports to the Centre from the Paris residency were based on information from its agents in the French intelligence community.2
The basis for Soviet penetration of France during the Cold War had been laid at the end of the Second World War. Thanks both to the leading role played by the Communist Party in the French Resistance and the presence of Communist ministers in government until 1947, the few years after the Liberation had been a golden age for agent recruitment.3 Though the British and American intelligence communities were probably unaware of the identities of most Soviet agents in France, they were acutely conscious of the weakness of post-war French security and—for that reason—cautious about exchanging classified information with the SDECE and the DST. A 1948 assessment by the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), infused by a somewhat absurd sense of ethnic superiority, blamed the success of Soviet penetration on “inherent defects in the French character” as well as “the wide appeal of Communism in France.” Soviet intelligence, the JIC concluded, was able to exploit:
a. A natural garrulous tendency in the French character which makes the temptation to pass on “hot” information, albeit in strictest confidence,” almost irresistible.
b. A lack of “security consciousness” which leads to carelessness and insufficient precautions to guard classified documents.
c. A certain decline in moral standards in France, which, together with extremely low rates of pay, must contribute to the temptation to “sell” information…4
The JIC’s supreme confidence in the inherent superiority of British over Gallic security was, presumably, at least slightly deflated three years later by the defection of Burgess and Maclean, Philby’s recall from Washington and the suspicion which fell on Blunt and Cairncross.
After the compromise of the British Magnificent Five in 1951, France became for the remainder of the decade the KGB’s most productive source of intelligence on Western policy to the Soviet Bloc.5 The KGB defectors Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov reported in 1954 that the Centre “found intelligence work particularly easy in France… The French operational section was littered with what looked like photostat copies of original French documents.”6 The Paris residency obtained important intelligence on Western negotiating positions before both the Berlin Conference early in 1954, the first between Soviet, American, British and French foreign ministers since 1949, and the Geneva four-power summit in July 1955, the first meeting of heads of government since the meeting of the Big Three at Potsdam ten years before.7 Thanks to the diplomatic ciphers provided by JOUR, a cipher clerk in the Quai d’Orsay recruited in 1945, the Centre also seems to have had access to plentiful French SIGINT. In 1957 JOUR was awarded the Order of the Red Star.8 It was probably largely thanks to JOUR that during the Cuban missile crisis, the KGB was able to supply the Kremlin with verbatim copies of diplomatic traffic between the Quai d’Orsay and its embassies in Moscow and Washington.9
During the early Cold War, the Paris residency also appears to have been the most successful promoter of active measures designed to influence Western opinion and opinion-formers. Between 1947 and 1955 the residency sponsored a series of bogus memoirs and other propagandist works, among them: J’ai choisi la potence (I Chose the Gallows) by General Andrei Vlasov, who had fought with the Germans on the eastern front; the equally fraudulent Ma carriäre Ö l’êtat-major soviétique (My Career in the Soviet High Command) by “Ivan Krylov;” and bogus correspondence between Stalin and Tito, published in the weekly magazine Carrefour, in which Tito confessed to being a Trotskyist. The main author of the forgeries was Grigori Besedovsky, a former Soviet diplomat who had settled in Paris. Some of Besedovsky’s fabrications, which also included two books about Stalin by a non-existent nephew, were sophisticated enough to deceive even such a celebrated Soviet scholar as E. H. Carr, who in 1955 contributed a foreword to Notes for a Journal, fraudulently attributed to the former foreign commissar Maksim Litvinov. The resident in Paris from 1946 to 1948, Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, who had launched the Besedovsky frauds, was later appointed head of the FCD’s first specialized disinformation section, Department D (subsequently Service A), founded in 1959.10
The post-war Paris residency also had what was, in effect, its own weekly newspaper, focusing on international relations: La Tribune des Nations (codenamed ÉCOLE). Founded in 1946 by André Ulmann with the help of Soviet subsidies,11 the Tribune’s subscribers included both French government departments and foreign embassies. Publicly, Ulmann disclaimed any connection with the French Communist Party (PCF). According to his friend Pierre Daix:
There was nothing Stalinist about him. He did not even seem like a Communist. He was a progressive intellectual, but without any of the utopian or idealistic nonsense associated with this expression. His feet were firmly on the ground.12
Ulmann’s K
GB file, however, reveals that he was a secret member of the PCF. Recommended by the Party leadership to the Paris residency, he had been recruited as agent DURANT in 1946. From 1948 onwards Ulmann also worked as an agent of the Polish intelligence service, which gave him the codename YULI and provided monthly subsidies of 200,000 francs to help finance the publication of La Tribune des Nations.13 Between 1946 and his death in 1970, Ulmann received a total of 3,552,100 francs from the Paris residency, as well as an (unidentified) Soviet decoration for his work for the KGB.14 To at least some Paris journalists, however, Ulmann’s cover was somewhat transparent. The historian of the PCF, Annie Kriegel, herself a former militante, recalls hearing Ulmann being described by one of her friends as “a secret agent disguised as a secret agent.”15
Despite the Paris residency’s successes during the 1950s, the Centre was dissatisfied with the number of its new recruits. It took Moscow some years to accept that, following the end of Communist participation in government in 1947, the pace of subsequent agent recruitment was bound to be slower. In a despatch to the Paris residency on February 3, 1954, the Centre insisted that it step up its campaign to acquire new agents in the foreign ministry, the cabinet secretariat, the SDECE, the DST, the general staff’s Deuxiäme Bureau, the armed forces and NATO. “The residency,” it complained, “is living on its old capital and is not taking energetic measures to acquire new, valuable sources of information.”16
In 1955 the Paris residency recruited a major new agent inside NATO, codenamed GERMAIN, who was controlled by an (unidentified) illegal despatched from the Centre. GERMAIN, like JOUR, was later awarded the Order of the Red Star. His wife NINA trained as a KGB radio operator and was given the medal “For combat services.”17 In 1956 a residency agent, DROZDOV, reported that one of his wife’s friends, ROZA, who worked at SDECE headquarters, had become pregnant after a one-night stand with “a chance acquaintance.” On instructions from the residency, DROZDOV gave ROZA financial help after the birth of her daughter in the following year in the hope of laying the basis for an eventual recruitment. ROZA’s cultivation, however, proceeded slowly. By 1961 the residency had concluded that she would rebuff any direct attempt to turn her into a KGB agent, and decided instead on a false flag recruitment. DROZDOV successfully persuaded her to provide regular intelligence reports to assist a fictitious “progressive organization” of which he claimed to be a member.18 Other French recruits during the early years of the Fifth Republic, established in January 1959 under the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle, included two cipher clerks (LARIONOV19 and SIDOROV20), two Paris police officers (FRENE21 and DACHNIK22) and two young scientists (ADAM23 and SASHA24). In 1964, like his fellow cipher clerk JOUR seven years earlier, SIDOROV was awarded the Order of the Red Star25—a further indication of the success of KGB SIGINT operations in decrypting French diplomatic traffic.
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