The most important and best-paid French ST agent during the 1970s identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin was ALAN (also codenamed FLINT and TELON), an employee of a defense contractor (codenamed AVANTGARDE). ALAN was a walk-in. In 1972 he went to the Paris embassy, explained that he was earning 7,000 francs a month, needed extra money to buy a house (possibly a second home) in the 150,000-200,000 francs price range and was willing to sell his firm’s secrets. Over the next six years he provided technical documentation and parts of missile guidance systems, laser weapons, detection systems for high-speed low-flying targets and infrared night-vision equipment for tanks, helicopters and other uses. ALAN’s file records that his ST “fully met the requirements of the highest authorities [Politburo].”116 In December 1974 his controller, Boris Federovich Kesarev, a Line X officer at the Paris residency, was recommended for the Order of the Red Star in a citation signed personally by Andropov.117 ALAN was paid over 200,000 francs a year,118 but was dismissed by his firm in 1978 on suspicion of passing its secrets to a Western intelligence service. The KGB appears to have escaped suspicion.119
Apart from ALAN’s intelligence, the French ST most highly rated by the Centre probably concerned France’s Ariane rocket and its fuel, Cryogäne.120 From 1974 to 1979 a French engineer, Pierre Bourdiol, recruited by the KGB in 1970, was employed on the Ariane project by SNIAS, the predecessor of the state-owned aerospace group Aerospatiale.121 Probably in 1979 or 1980, agent KARL, a specialist in electromagnetism, succeeded in obtaining further intelligence on Ariane from an unidentified subsource. KARL was paid a salary of about 150,000 francs a year and received bonuses of over 30,000 francs in 1979 and 1980.122 In 1982 KARL recruited NIKE, another highly rated Line X agent, who worked in one of the laboratories of the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques. NIKE was enlisted under false flag, believing he was in the pay of a foreign firm. His file records that his information “satisfied priority requirements” of Directorate T.123
Just as Line X operations in France reached their apogee in the early 1980s, they were compromised by a French agent inside Directorate T, Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov (codenamed FAREWELL), who had been stationed at the Paris residency from 1965 to 1970. Vetrov was an ardent Francophile, deeply disillusioned with the Soviet system, and resentful at his treatment by Directorate T which had transferred him from operations to analysis. In the spring of 1981 he sent a message, via a French businessman returning from Moscow, to the DST headquarters in Paris, offering his services as a spy. Over the next year Vetrov supplied over 4,000 documents on Soviet ST collection and analysis. The FAREWELL operation came to an abrupt end after a brutally bizarre episode in a Moscow park in February 1982 whose explanation still remains unclear. While drinking—and probably quarreling—with a KGB secretary with whom he was having an affair, Vetrov was approached by a KGB colleague. Startled, and perhaps fearing that his double life had been discovered, he stabbed his colleague to death. When his lover tried to run away, Vetrov stabbed her too, probably to prevent her revealing what had happened, but she survived to give evidence against him. Though Vetrov began a twelve-year sentence for murder at Irkurksk prison in the autumn of 1981, it was several months before the KGB began to suspect that he was also guilty of espionage. Vetrov wrote his own death sentence with a confession which concluded, “My only regret is that I was not able to cause more damage to the Soviet Union and render more service to France.”124
Vetrov’s documents added enormously to Western intelligence services’ knowledge of Soviet ST operations.125 In July 1981, two months after he became president, Franáois Mitterrand personally informed Ronald Reagan of the documents being received from FAREWELL. Soon afterwards, Marcel Chalet, the head of the DST, visited Washington to brief Vice-President George Bush, a former Director of Central Intelligence, in greater detail. The first public disclosure of Vetrov’s material followed the discovery early in 1983 that bugs in the teleprinters of the French embassy in Moscow had been relaying incoming and outgoing telegrams to the KGB for the previous seven years. Mitterrand responded by ordering the expulsion from France on April 5, 1983 of forty-seven Soviet intelligence officers—the largest such exodus since operation FOOT in Britain twelve years earlier. Many of those expelled, in particular the Line X officers, had been identified by Vetrov. When the Soviet ambassador, Yuli Vorontsev, arrived at the Quai d’Orsay to deliver an official protest, Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson reduced him to silence by producing one of the KGB documents on ST operations supplied by Vetrov.126
THOUGH THE KGB residency in Rome ran less than half as many agents as its counterpart in Paris (just over twenty in the mid-1970s as compared to about fifty in France),127 the pattern of agent recruitment in the two countries was broadly similar. Immediately after the Second World War Soviet intelligence succeeded, with the assistance of the Communist Party leadership, in penetrating a number of major ministries in both Italy and France. By the 1970s, however, a majority of the best-paid Line PR agents run by the Rome and Paris residencies were journalists rather than civil servants.
As in France, the post-war popularity of the Communist Party and the brief period of Communist participation in government created the best opportunities Soviet intelligence was ever to enjoy in Italy for agent penetration.128 Like JOUR, probably the most important of the post-war French recruits, DARIO, the longest-serving and probably the most valuable Italian agent, worked in the foreign ministry, where he had recruited his first three female agents before the Second World War. On his return to the ministry after the war, he recruited two more female typists: TOPO (later renamed LEDA), whom he married, and NIKOL (later INGA).129
For most of the next three decades DARIO was instrumental in obtaining a phenomenal amount of classified foreign ministry material.130 During the mid-1950s he succeeded in recruiting three further female agents: VENETSIANKA, who was on the staff of the Italian embassy in Paris; OVOD, on whom Mitrokhin’s notes provide no further information; and SUZA, who worked for the diplomatic adviser to President Giovanni Gronchi and gained access to a wide variety of ambassadors’ reports and other classified foreign ministry documents.131 During the early 1960s DARIO’s wife LEDA met her case officer from the Rome residency once a week in cinemas and other locations in the city. As she shook hands with him, she passed over a microfilm of the classified foreign ministry documents she had photographed during the previous week.132
In 1968 the Centre decided to put DARIO “on ice,” and awarded him a pension for life of 180 hard currency roubles a month. Four years later, however, it reactivated him in order to cultivate a female cipher officer in a foreign embassy and another typist at the Italian foreign ministry, who appears to have been given the codename MARA.133 In March 1975, forty-three years after DARIO’s recruitment, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Red Star. He subsequently collected his pension at regular intervals by traveling abroad either to the Soviet Union or to some other country.134
After the Second World War the Rome residency also successfully penetrated the interior ministry, thanks chiefly to DEMID, a ministry official recruited in 1945 who acted as agent-recruiter.135 DEMID’s first major cultivation inside the ministry was a cipher clerk codenamed QUESTOR, who agreed to supply information on the contents of the classified telegrams which he enciphered and deciphered. QUESTOR, however, believed for several years that his information was being passed by DEMID not to Soviet intelligence but to the PCI, and refused to hand over the ciphers themselves. Late in 1953 the Rome residency decided to force the pace and instructed DEMID to offer QUESTOR 100,000 lire for the loan “for a few hours” of the code and cipher books used by the ministry. QUESTOR accepted. On March 3, 1954 DEMID finally told him that he was working not for the PCI but for the KGB, and obtained a receipt from him for the 100,000 lire. Soon afterwards QUESTOR was handed over to the control of STEPAN, an operations officer at the Rome residency, to whom he supplied a phenomenal range of official ciphers to which he succeeded in gaining access. Amon
g them were those of the prefectures, the finance ministry, central and regional headquarters of the carabinieri, Italian diplomatic missions abroad, the Italian general staff and the military-run foreign intelligence service, SIFAR (Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate). QUESTOR also obtained interior ministry lists of Italian Communists, foreign nationals and others who were under surveillance by the Police security service (Pubblica Sicurezza).136
The Centre considered its penetration of the Italian interior ministry to be so important that in 1955 it handed over control of it to a newly established illegal residency in Rome, headed by YEFRAT (“Euphrates”). YEFRAT was Ashot Abgarovich Akopyan, a 40-year-old Armenian from Baku who had assumed the identity of a live double, Oganes Saradzhyan, a Lebanese Armenian living in the Soviet Union. Like many illegals, he was a gifted linguist, fluent—according to his file—in Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, French, Italian, Romanian and Turkish. His wife, Kira Viktorovna Chertenko, an ethnic Russian from Baku, was also an illegal, codenamed TANYA. YEFRAT and TANYA began their careers as illegals in Romania in 1948, obtained Italian visas by bribery and moved to Rome where they acquired passports in the name of Saradzhyan from the Lebanese embassy. YEFRAT’s original mission was to prepare the establishment of a new illegal residency in Iran, but in 1952 he and his wife were directed to Egypt instead. In 1954 they were recalled to Rome where YEFRAT was given 19,500 dollars to purchase a business to provide cover for an illegal residency. He was not, however, a successful businessman; an Italian firm with which he was involved went bankrupt.137
YEFRAT’s residency was given control of DEMID, QUESTOR and a third agent in the interior ministry, CENSOR, who had probably been recruited by DEMID. CENSOR’s greatest coup was to abstract top secret documents from the safe of the director general of the security service in the ministry.138 YEFRAT also succeeded in renewing contact with a former agent, OMAR, who had been sacked from the interior ministry cipher department in 1948 and had obtained a job in what Mitrokhin’s notes describe as “a service attached to the American embassy.” For unexplained reasons, however, the quantity of high-grade intelligence produced by the agents in the interior ministry declined during the later 1950s. When exhortations by the Centre and a personal meeting between YEFRAT and Lazarev, the head of the Illegals Directorate S, failed to produce results, YEFRAT was recalled and his illegal residency closed. Control of his agents was handed back to the legal Rome residency.139
THE ITALIAN EMBASSY in Moscow, like that of France, was a major KGB target. Whereas Second Chief Directorate operations against French diplomats culminated in an embarrassing public scandal, those against the Italian embassy achieved spectacular, unpublicized success. The weapons used against Italian diplomats were the normal stock-in-trade of the SCD: a combination of sexual compromise and blackmail. The SCD’s first victim was IKAR (“Icarus”), one of the service attachés in the Italian embassy who was seduced in the late 1950s by a KGB swallow, who then claimed to be pregnant and pretended to have an abortion. IKAR was confronted by an SCD officer, posing as the swallow’s enraged husband and signed a document agreeing to become a KGB agent in return for the supposed scandal being hushed up. In addition to providing classified information, IKAR also gave his SCD controller the combination number of his safe and a copy of the cipher he used to communicate with Rome.
IKAR, however, became increasingly anxious at the KGB’s hold over him—finally handing his controller a rather pathetic letter, promising to continue work as a Soviet agent but appealing for the undertaking he had signed to be destroyed:
Beneath your cloak, you are holding a dagger at the ready. The day that you trapped me by using methods which I regard as unworthy of your highly respected nation, I tried to convey to you that my attitude to you was friendly. Ignoring these feelings of mine, you have subjected me to various tests. Despite that, you still doubt my loyalty and my good intentions. You continue to hold a gun to my head, while uttering words of friendship and appreciation towards me. If these feelings of yours correspond with reality and are not a mere fiction, then give me some proof—that is to say, the question of destroying the document concerning the circumstances in which I was caught must be resolved between us. If you do not do this, I shall no longer be able to regard you as worthy of my friendship and of my friendly esteem.
I beg you to understand that I need your respect. Therefore, if you think that I am acting under the threat of the materials relating to the circumstances in which I was caught, you judge me wrongly. Find some means of testing my loyalty without threats. I believe that I shall not be found wanting. If you continue to doubt my sincerity, I shall not be able to work while I remain anxious, or continue to respect you.
IKAR was given a copy of his signed undertaking, carefully fabricated to look like the original, and destroyed it with evident relief in the presence of his controller. The original, however, remained in IKAR’s file, together with a Russian translation which was later transcribed by Mitrokhin.140
Another member of the Italian embassy staff, codenamed PLATON, was also successfully blackmailed into becoming a KGB agent after falling victim to the same SCD honeytrap. The swallow (codenamed R) planted on him by the SCD moved into his Moscow flat, then pretended that she was pregnant. PLATON paid for her to have a (fictitious) abortion (a criminal act under Italian law), was threatened with exposure and agreed to become a KGB agent. By the time Mitrokhin saw PLATON’s file in 1976, he had left Moscow and a plan had been drawn up for Georgi Pavlovich Antonov, an Italian-speaking FCD officer formerly stationed in Rome, to renew contact with him in Belgium.141 Whether PLATON continued as a KGB agent after 1976 remains unknown.
One senior married Italian diplomat in Moscow was the victim of two honeytraps. When first targeted, ENERO (also codenamed INSPECTOR) was having an affair with a secretary at the French embassy. The SCD concluded that he had an insatiable “appetite for women,” selected a swallow, agent SUKHOVA, as his maid and secretly photographed them making love. During a visit to Tashkent, ENERO was seduced by another KGB swallow, Diana Georgiyevna Kazachenko, and further photographs were taken of their lovemaking. A Russian friend of ENERO (who, unknown to ENERO, was a KGB officer) then told him that the KGB had come into possession of photographs of him in bed with SUKHOVA, taken by a criminal gang who were about to stand trial, charged with taking compromising photographs which they intended to use for blackmail and extortion. Almost simultaneously, ENERO was informed that Kazachenko’s relatives had lodged an official complaint, accusing him of rape and claiming that he had made Kazachenko pregnant. Kazachenko, it was claimed, was now an invalid as a result of medical complications arising from the abortion.
An SCD operations officer, I.I. Kuznetsov, told ENERO that the Soviet authorities were prepared to hush both matters up if he agreed to “help” them. Though ENERO protested that Kuznetsov’s proposal was straightforward blackmail, he quickly gave way to it. According to his file, the intelligence he provided included information that the embassy was illegally smuggling into Moscow by diplomatic bag roubles purchased abroad at a fraction of the official exchange rate. Before leaving Moscow in the early 1970s, ENERO agreed to continue work as a KGB agent on his return to Italy and was given an initial payment of 500 US dollars. Soon afterwards Kusnetsov visited him in Rome to introduce his new case officer from the local residency. A year later, however, the residency reported that ENERO was avoiding meetings with his controller and had changed his private address. In 1979 a residency officer resumed contact but, since ENERO was now retired and in poor health, he was removed from the agent network.142
The SCD’s greatest triumph in its operations against the Italian embassy in Moscow was the recruitment of a senior diplomat, successively codenamed ARTUR and ARLEKINO (“Harlequin”). ARTUR was first recruited by the Czechoslovak StB in the 1960s, which threatened to expose both his affair with a prostitute and his currency speculation unless he agreed to cooperate. When he was posted to Moscow some years later, control of him was tr
ansferred by the Czechs to the SCD. ARTUR’s file records that he was rewarded with “valuable presents” and all-expenses-paid hunting expeditions in the Moscow area. After his return to Italy, ARTUR continued to work for the KGB until 1983, several years after his retirement, when his muchreduced access to classified information led to his removal from the agent network.143
A number of other Italian embassies around the world also contained KGB agents: among them DENIS, a cipher clerk stationed in the Middle East and recruited in 1961;144 VITTORIO, a former member of the PCI recruited in Latin America in 1970;145 and PLEMYANNIK (“Nephew”), a cipher clerk in the Middle East recruited with the help of Bulgarian intelligence in 1977.146 As well as providing large numbers of documents, the KGB’s agents inside the Italian foreign ministry and embassies abroad must also have made a major contribution to the success of the Sixteenth Directorate in decrypting Italian diplomatic telegrams, which continued at least until the mid-1980s.147 Mitrokhin’s notes provide very few details on the content of the remarkable number of diplomatic documents which reached the Centre and nothing on the content of the decrypts. The implications of the KGB files on Italy and France to which he had access are, none the less, very great. So great was the Centre’s access to classified French and Italian diplomatic traffic that, at numerous points during the Cold War, both France and Italy were conducting, so far as the Soviet Union was concerned, something akin to open diplomacy.
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