Edward Lucas - Deception

Well before the end of the Soviet empire in 1991, the battle lines had softened. As early as 1986, the CIA and KGB had set up a spooks’ back-channel at a meeting in Vienna: the aim was to have a practical, depoliticised way of avoiding crises and misunderstandings, and to explore cooperation on subjects of common interest such as terrorism. 1It later developed to include agreement about the treatment of defectors and haggling over spy swaps. After the Berlin Wall fell in October 1989, British, American and French spies found themselves hobnobbing with their Soviet counterparts, comparing notes on the troubling prospect of German unity. Milt Bearden, a top CIA man dealing with Eastern Europe, listened sympathetically as his KGB counterpart bemoaned the fact that he would soon need a visa to visit a city that his forebears had liberated from fascism at such enormous cost. In some cases, old foes went into business: setting up security companies or, in the case of two station chiefs from Berlin, KGB and CIA respectively, co-authorship. 2

As the Kremlin lost its grip, the fringes of the former Soviet Union became a perfect springboard for spying on its core. The borderlands from Tallinn to Tbilisi, formerly a hostile operating environment, were now friendly and rewarding. Moreover, as the stick and the carrot of the Soviet system disappeared, the costs and risks of spying had never been lower. Treachery had once led not just to dismissal and imprisonment, but quite likely to death. The change came quickly. The last Western agent to be executed in the Soviet Union was the idealistic Dmitri Polyakov, a retired GRU major-general, in 1988. 3But by 1989 the regime had largely lost its power to terrify. It could still blackmail, but the murderous fire in the belly of the system lit by Lenin in 1917 was all but extinguished. The intricate system of privileges used as rewards – access to a better shop, spacious housing, higher education for a child, maybe even a trip to a foreign country – was no longer attractive. With a bit of hard currency, the humblest individual could buy a better lifestyle than the system could offer its most favoured servants.

The ideological climate had changed too. For those with vestigial loyalties to the old regime, it was hard to stay motivated as its day of judgement loomed. Treating the West as a predatory enemy had been a bulwark of the Soviet mentality. Now the ‘capitalist camp’ was a valued partner, lending money and sending food aid. In the former satellite states, people were positively eager to help anyone wanting to bury the vestiges of the ‘evil empire’. Even inside the most senior and sensitive parts of the state, the collapse of morale corroded loyalty.

The Cold War had been an existential struggle, in which ruthlessness generally triumphed over sentiment. The new era provided more complex choices. Was the big prize German reunification on the West’s terms? In that case the priority should be to prop up the faltering regime in Moscow while it did the necessary deals. That would mean going easy on aggressive intelligence collection, which might seem like a further humiliation for the Soviet leadership. Others argued that it was futile to believe that the West could bolster the reformists, who might be out of power at any moment. It was better to press home what might be a temporary advantage. Counter-intelligence services in particular argued hard for the latter. The CIA and SIS both suspected that they had been badly penetrated during the Cold War, but had failed to nail the traitors. The Czechoslovak, East German, Hungarian and Polish spy agencies had all been fearsome adversaries. Now they were in friendly hands, offering a trove of clues about their past activities. With even the KGB in trouble, it had never been easier to track down moles, illegals, double agents and other sources. Indeed KGB officers were queuing – in some cases even literally – to offer their services to Western spycatchers, to the point that the CIA office dealing with defector resettlement complained it could not handle any more. In at least one instance, a would-be KGB defector was told to apply for an American visa through the normal channels.

But the spycatchers’ needs were only one pile of paper on the desks of the harried spymasters. Their political masters were desperate for more information too. Would the reforms in the Soviet Union continue? What was the likelihood of a coup? Would the USSR break-up? An industry grew up in stealing (or obtaining, depending on your viewpoint) military technology. Electronics, and insights into it, were in particular demand: radar beacons, friend-or-foe identification, encryption technology, nuclear command and control systems, submarine radio systems and the like. 4Amid the haggling of the arms bazaar were more subtle questions. Who was in charge of the nuclear arsenal, particularly the highly portable tactical weapons, some of them no bigger than a suitcase? Were they properly guarded? What capabilities did the Soviet submarine fleet maintain? And what was the state of Soviet signals intelligence? Could it really listen to phone calls in Stockholm? Or Berlin? Or Washington? The pull-out of the Soviet forces from Eastern Germany and the Baltic was a top political priority until 1994. But so was spying on them. Discipline was ragged and corruption colossal. Everything was on sale, from gadgets such as night-vision goggles to humdrum commodities such as petrol – and also military secrets.

Answering all these questions meant recruiting human assets on a previously inconceivable scale. During the Cold War getting alongside anybody in the Soviet power structures had been a challenge; now even the GRU and KGB were direct targets. Politicians, officials, military officers and spooks were all open to persuasion. Many who had signed up to defend the motherland felt their life’s purpose was lost, or could easily be persuaded to think so. Wages were miserable and paid late; accommodation was abominable. For most, the offer of money was enough. Senior officers worried about their retirement. For those with families, the ability to provide for them trumped loyalty to the motherland. Some found it demeaning to take money, but asked simply for pharmaceuticals: many readers of this book might betray their country for a reliable supply of otherwise unobtainable insulin for a diabetic loved one.

The contrast with the Soviet years was complete. In the years after the collapse of Operation Jungle and its counterparts, Western intelligence had fared poorly in difficult conditions. For a start, its reputation was in tatters. Kremlin propagandists were cock-a-hoop at the KGB’s triumph (and indeed were still publishing material embarrassing to SIS when the Soviet empire was in its death throes). SIS and the CIA were depicted, not wholly inaccurately, as cynical, incompetent and infested with fascist collaborators. 5The dented credibility made it harder to recruit people, and the KGB’s strength made it far harder to run them. Ferrying agents in and out had been easy when Major Lukaševičs was acting in effect as the travel agent. Thereafter it was dangerous and difficult. Soviet air defences improved, making parachute drops far harder too.

With official paranoia fuelled by the subversion efforts that the West had tried to mount from the mid 1950s onwards, the KGB’s counter-intelligence department commanded colossal clout and resources. The dangers of penetration and dangles were acute. If you recruited an agent, how could you run him safely, or know if he had gone bad? And how could you be sure that the information he passed on to you was sound? According to the best book on the subject, Nigel West’s The Friends , 6SIS gave up trying to run or recruit agents in Moscow because of the ‘impossibly hostile environment’. KGB surveillance meant that even casual social contacts with the locals prompted an unwelcome response. Even routine fieldcraft, such as looking for dead-letter drops and clandestine meeting-places, was ‘a complete waste of time’ thanks to ubiquitous KGB informers. Foreigners were conspicuous, and ‘no sooner was one watcher team shaken off, than another appeared in its place’. Nigel West notes that the CIA station in Moscow ‘had also concluded that running agents in the Soviet capital was an unprofitable business’. This came after one of its star sources, Piotr Popov, was caught in October 1959 in the act of passing a message to his case officer. The American was released. Popov is thought to be the agent mentioned in the earlier chapter on spycraft: fed into a furnace, with his grisly murder filmed for the benefit of new recruits to the GRU. Viktor Sheymov, the most senior KGB officer to defect to America while living in the Soviet Union, spent months in Moscow simply trying to work out how to meet a British or American intelligence officer in order make his offer of help. He eventually found a means of doing so involving a loose window in a cinema toilet in Warsaw. 7