No group of Soviet dissidents during the Cold War could long avoid being penetrated by one or more of the KGB’s several million agents and co-optees. Their capacity to make a public protest was limited to the ability to circulate secretly samizdat pamphlets or unfurl banners briefly in Red Square before they were torn down by plain clothes KGB men. Until the final years of the Soviet system, the dissidents were a tiny minority within the Soviet population with very little public support or sympathy. Therein lay much of their heroism, as they battled courageously against what must have seemed impossible odds.
The KGB helped to make the notion of serious political change appear an impossible dream. It simply did not occur to the vast majority of the Russian people that there was any alternative to the Soviet system. Despite grumbles about the standard of living, their almost unquestioning acceptance of the status quo had a profound effect on attitudes in the West, and thus on Western foreign policy. During the Cold War, most Western observers reluctantly assumed that the Soviet system would continue indefinitely. Hence the general sense of shock as well as of surprise when the Communist order in eastern Europe crumbled so swiftly in the final months of 1989, followed two years later by the almost equally rapid disintegration of the Soviet one-party state. Henry Kissinger claimed in 1992, “I knew no one… who had predicted the evolution in the Soviet Union.”23
AS WELL AS underestimating the centrality of the KGB’s system of social control to the functioning of the Soviet system, Western observers have often underestimated the power and influence of its security and intelligence chiefs.24 Beria, who became head of the NKVD at the end of the Terror, emerged as the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union—“my Himmler,” as Stalin once described him. In 1945 he was put in charge of the construction of the first Soviet atomic bomb. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Beria became the first Soviet security chief to make a bid for supreme power. Fear of his ambitions, however, united the rest of the Soviet leadership against him and led to his execution at the end of the year.
It was frequently assumed thereafter that no KGB chief would ever again be given the opportunity by the rest of the Soviet leadership to make a successful bid for power. That assumption proved correct in the case of Aleksandr Shelepin, the dynamic and relatively youthful chairman of the KGB from 1958 to 1961, who made little secret of his desire to become general secretary, but was effectively sidelined after Khrushchev’s overthrow by Brezhnev and the other leading plotters.
Yuri Andropov played a much subtler game than Beria or Shelepin in planning his own rise to power during the 1970s. As Brezhnev became progressively feebler, Andropov gradually established himself as heir apparent, succeeding him as general secretary in 1982. There is, however, not a single reference to Andropov either in the 2,000 pages of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs of the period 1969-77, or in Cyrus Vance’s memoirs on his term as secretary of state, in succession to Kissinger, from 1977 to 1980.25 Vladimir Kryuchkov was similarly underrated as KGB chairman a decade later. Most Western observers were taken by surprise when he emerged as the ringleader of the abortive coup of August 1991 which sought to topple Gorbachev and install a hardline regime. Like Beria, however, Kryuchkov overreached himself. Though the KGB had hitherto been an indispensable bulwark of the Communist one-party state, Kryuchkov’s mistimed attempt to shore it up merely hastened its collapse.26
Yevgeni Primakov, first head of the FCD’s successor, the SVR, also attracted surprisingly little attention from most Western commentators. A much-praised American study of Yeltsin’s Russia, published on the eve of Primakov’s appointment as prime minister in September 1998, contained not a single reference to him.27 By the spring of 1999, though disclaiming any ambition to succeed Yeltsin, Primakov topped opinion polls of potential candidates in the following year’s presidential elections. Having apparently concluded that Primakov had become too powerful, Yeltsin sacked him in May 1999.
THE CHEKA AND its successors were central to the conduct of Soviet foreign policy as well as to the running of the one-party state. Kim Philby proudly told a KGB lecture audience in 1980, “Our service operating abroad is the Soviet Union’s first line of defense.”28 The failure by many Western historians to identify the KGB as a major arm of Soviet foreign policy is due partly to the fact that many Soviet policy aims did not fit Western concepts of international relations. Surveys of Stalin’s foreign policy invariably mention the negotiations on collective security against Nazi Germany, which were conducted by Litvinov and Soviet diplomats, but usually ignore entirely the less conventional operations against the White Guards in Paris, the plan to assassinate General Franco early in the Spanish Civil War, the liquidation of the leading Trotskyists in western Europe in the late 1930s and the plot to kill Tito in 1953—all of which were entrusted to the foreign intelligence service.29 Even after Stalin’s death, much of Soviet foreign policy was not cast in a Western mold.
INO, the interwar foreign intelligence agency, made its initial reputation by defeating a series of counter-revolutionary conspiracies involving anti-Bolshevik émigrés and imperialist intelligence agencies. Though the evidence now available indicates that none of these (in reality, rather trivial) conspiracies had the slightest prospect of success, they bulked large in the imagination of the Soviet leadership. Similarly, INO’s liquidation of leading White Guards and Trotskyists outside the Soviet Union was, from Stalin’s perspective, a major victory. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Stalin was more concerned by Trotsky than by Hitler.
During the 1930s Soviet foreign intelligence collection, thanks chiefly to the Great Illegals, led the world. The recruitment of the Magnificent Five and other high-flying ideological agents opened up the prospect of penetrating the very heard of imperialist power in Western capitals. The large number of British and other diplomatic documents obtained by INO had an important—though still little researched—influence on the making of Soviet foreign policy. Throughout the Stalin era, the Soviet intelligence contest with both Britain, the chief pre-war target, and the United States, the Main Adversary of the Cold War, was remarkably one-sided. SIS had no Moscow station between the wars; the United States possessed no espionage agency at all until 1941. INO’s main pre-war defeats were selfinflicted: chief among them the massacre of many of its best officers who fell victim to the paranoia of the Great Terror.
Soviet intelligence penetration of the West reached its apogee during the Second World War. Never before had any state learned so many of its allies’ secrets. At Tehran and Yalta Stalin was probably better informed on the cards in the hands of the other negotiators than any statesman at any previous conference. Stalin knew the contents of many highly classified British and American documents which Churchill and Roosevelt kept even from most of their cabinets. ULTRA, though revealed to only six British ministers, was known to Stalin. So was the MANHATTAN project, which was carefully concealed from Vice-President Harry Truman until he succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945. (Truman was then also informed of ULTRA for the first time.)30 There is a peculiar irony about Truman’s decision at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 to reveal to Stalin that “we had a new weapon of unusual destructive power.”31 Stalin seemed unimpressed by the news—as well he might, since he had known about plans to build the American atomic bomb for fifteen times as long as Truman.
Stalin was also much better informed than most American and British policymakers about the first major American-British intelligence success against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the VENONA decrypts, which revealed the codenames and clues to the identities of several hundred Soviet agents. Remarkably, Truman seems never to have been informed of VENONA at all. Nor, almost certainly, were more than a small minority of the Attlee cabinet in Britain. Because of internal rivalries within the US intelligence community, even the CIA was not told until late in 1952. The Centre, however, had learned of VENONA by early in 1947 from William Weisband, an agent in the US SIGINT agency, ASA. Thus, amazingly, Stalin discovered the greatest American intelligence secr
et of the early Cold War over five years before either the president or the CIA.32
The Centre’s extraordinary successes in penetrating its allies during the Second World War, and the fact that some of its agents remained in place after victory, raised exaggerated expectations of what Soviet intelligence could achieve during the Cold War against the Main Adversary and its NATO allies. KGB post-war strategy was based on an attempt to recreate the pre-war era of Great Illegals, establish a large network of illegal residencies and recruit a new generation of high-flying ideological agents. Alongside the legal residencies in Washington, New York and San Francisco, the Centre planned as late as the early 1980s to set up six illegal residencies, each running agents at the heart of the Reagan administration. Its plans proved hopelessly optimistic.33
Despite some striking tactical successes, the KGB’s post-war grand strategy for penetrating the corridors of power in its Main Adversary failed. At least until the early 1960s, its chief source of intelligence on American foreign policy was probably the penetration of the US embassy in Moscow. By the beginning of the Cold War the previously seductive myth-image of Stalin’s Russia as the world’s first truly socialist worker-peasant state, which had inspired the Magnificent Five and their American counterparts, was fading fast. Most of the idealistic student revolutionaries of the late 1960s, unlike their pre-war predecessors, turned for inspiration not to the old Communist parties but to a new left which seemed deeply suspect to the increasingly geriatric leadership of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union.
The marginalization of the post-war Communist Parties in the United States and Great Britain deprived Soviet intelligence of what had previously been a major source of recruits and talent-spotters. Its most fertile Western recruiting grounds in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War were France and Italy, the two west European countries with the most powerful Communist Parties, both of which took part in post-war coalition governments. The longest-serving and probably most productive French and Italian agents identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin, JOUR and DARIO, both entered their respective foreign ministries during these years.34
By the 1950s the KGB was probably obtaining more high-grade diplomatic and political intelligence from the main NATO members in continental Europe than from the United States and Britain. As well as generating large numbers of diplomatic documents, the penetration of the French, Italian and other Western foreign ministries and Moscow embassies provided crucial assistance to KGB codebreakers. For most, if not all, of the Cold War the total number of diplomatic decrypts which the Centre considered sufficiently significant to forward to the Central Committee probably never dropped below 100,000 a year.35 During the Cold War as a whole, as a result of the partition of Germany and the flow of refugees from East to West, the FRG was the major NATO member most vulnerable to agent penetration—though the KGB’s successes were exceeded by those of its East German ally. The success of the HVA agent, Gånter Guillaume, in becoming aide to the Chancellor of West Germany at a crucial moment in East-West relations, just as Willy Brandt was beginning his Ostpolitik, was one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War.
Though the Centre acquired a considerable volume of high-grade intelligence from NATO countries, it was never satisfied by what it achieved. In Europe, as in north America, it refused to abandon its early Cold War ambition to create a new generation of Great Illegals. During the 1970s it sought and obtained promises of assistance from Communist leaders around the world in finding further Richard Sorges. The files seen by Mitrokhin suggest, however, that few, if any Sorges were discovered. By the mid-1970s the brightest of the young Party members in the few west European countries where Communism remained a powerful force tended to be Eurocommunist heretics rather than blindly obedient pro-Soviet loyalists ready to sacrifice their lives in the service of the Fatherland of the Toilers. Even some Soviet illegals had difficulty in preserving their ideological commitment when confronted with the reality of life in the West. As the Cold War progressed, the KGB’s best agents increasingly became mercenary (like Aldrich Ames) rather than ideological (like Kim Philby).
Residencies, however, remained under pressure from the Centre leadership, which had almost no first-hand experience of life in the West, to cultivate major political figures. Hence the hopelessly unrealistic KGB schemes, all doubtless approved by the political leadership, to recruit Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt, Oskar Lafontaine, Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzezinski and other senior Western statesmen. Kryuchkov responded to these and other failures not with a more realistic recruitment policy but with greater bureaucracy, demanding ever longer reports and more form-filling. Residents must have groaned inwardly in April 1985 when they received from the Centre a newly devised questionnaire which Kryuchkov instructed them to use as the basis for reports on politicians and other “prominent figures in the West” being considered as possible “targets for cultivation.” It contained fifty-six questions, many of them highly complex and minutely detailed. Question 14 in section 4 of the questionnaire, for example, demanded information on:
Life style: hobbies, enjoyments, tastes; books—what writers does he prefer; theater, music, painting, and what he particularly likes; collecting; attitude to sport (riding, hunting, fishing, swimming, chess, football, games, motoring, sailing, etc.), prizes won; hiking; with what kind of environment and what kind of people does he prefer to associate; what kind of cuisine does he prefer, and so on.
The fifty-five other questions contained similarly detailed demands for reports on topics as diverse as “compromising information on subject” and “subject’s attitude towards American foreign policy.”36 A full answer to the questionnaire on any “prominent figure in the West” would have required months of investigations by residency operations officers.
THE CENTRE’S MAIN weakness in the field of political intelligence was not, as it supposed, in intelligence collection but rather in its ability to interpret what it collected. Under both Stalin and Khrushchev, the Centre forwarded each day to the Kremlin a selection of foreign intelligence reports received from residencies and other sources, but usually shrank from offering more than perfunctory interpretation of the reports for fear of contradicting the views of the political leadership.37 Both Stalin and Khrushchev acted as their own, ill-qualified chief intelligence analysts. Brezhnev, by contrast, spent little time interpreting intelligence or any other information, thus giving Andropov greater scope than any of his predecessors to submit intelligence assessments.
Intelligence assessment was worst in the Stalin era. Stalin himself bears a large measure of personal responsibility for the failure to heed repeated intelligence warnings of the 1941 German invasion. The institutionalized paranoia of the Stalinist system led to a series of other failures of assessment—among them the deluded belief in the middle of the war that the Magnificent Five, some of the Centre’s most gifted and productive agents, were part of an elaborate British deception. Though intelligence analysis after Stalin’s death never again descended to quite such paranoid depths, at moments of crisis in the Cold War the KGB tended to substitute conspiracy theory for balanced assessment. Within a year of becoming KGB chairman, Andropov was submitting distorted intelligence assessments to the Politburo designed to strengthen its resolve to crush the Prague Spring by armed force. His obsession with Western attempts to promote ideological sabotage in the Soviet Bloc made him unwilling to consider any evidence which suggested otherwise. In 1968 the Centre destroyed classified US documents obtained by the Washington residency which showed that neither the CIA nor any other American agency was manipulating the reformers of the Prague Spring.38
In both the early 1960s and the early 1980s the Centre believed that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Though some FCD officers in Western residencies, far better acquainted with the West than Soviet leaders and KGB chairmen, privately dismissed such fears as absurd alarmism, they did not dare dispute the Centre’s judgment openly. The East Germ
an foreign intelligence chief, Markus Wolf, who resented the waste of time caused by KGB demands for HVA assistance in discovering non-existent plans for an American first strike, also knew better than to complain to Moscow. “These orders,” he claims, “were no more open to discussion than other orders from above.”39
The distortion of Soviet intelligence analysis derived, at root, from the nature of the one-party state and its inherent distrust of all opposing views. The Soviet Union thus found it more difficult than its Western rivals to understand, and therefore to use, the political intelligence it collected. Though the Soviet leadership never really understood the West until the closing years of the Cold War, it would have been outraged to have its misunderstandings challenged by intelligence reports. Heterodox opinions within the Soviet system always ran the risk of being condemned as subversive. Those intelligence officers who dared to express them openly during the late 1930s were likely to have their life expectancy dramatically reduced. Even during the post-Stalin era, when their survival was no longer threatened, their careers, like that of Mitrokhin, were almost certain to suffer. Closed or semi-closed societies have an inbuilt advantage over open societies in intelligence collection from human sources, because Western capitals invariably have much lower levels of security and surveillance than their counterparts in Communist and other authoritarian regimes. Equally, however, one-party states have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to intelligence analysis, since analysts usually fear to tell the Party hierarch what it does not want to hear.
Though careful to avoid offending the sensibilities of the political leadership, INO report-writers during the 1930s knew that they were on safe ground if they produced evidence of British anti-Soviet conspiracies. During the Cold War, their FCD successors similarly knew that they were taking no risks if they used the United States as a scapegoat. One Line PR officer, interviewed a few weeks after the abortive 1991 coup, told Izvestia that he and his colleagues had spent much of their careers acting on the principle “Blame everything on the Americans, and everything will be OK.”40 The intelligence reports received by the Soviet leadership thus tended to reinforce, rather than to correct, their misconceptions of the outside world.
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