Edward Lucas - Deception

• The Institute for Latvian Culture (AEMINX) was established as a cover facility engaged in the preservation and development of Latvian national culture, collection of information on Latvian national life, and the safeguarding and preserving of physical, spiritual, and moral conditions of Latvians who were separated from their homeland.

• AEPOLE (formerly AECHAMP, formerly BGLAPIN) targeted the Lithuanian SSR. These projects provided intelligence and operational data from Baltic countries through radio broadcasts, mailing operations, liaison with émigré organizations, political and psychological briefings for legal travellers and exploitation of other media such as demonstrations.

• AEGEAN (formerly CAPSTAN) provided FI (foreign intelligence) from the Baltic States and USSR using support bases developed in the Lithuanian SSR as transit points.

• AEGEAN/CAPSTAN work continued under Project AECHAMP. AEMANNER (1955–8) was an operation to collect intelligence on the Lithuanian SSR by spotting, recruiting, and training Lithuanians who planned to return to Lithuania; spotting, recruiting, and training Lithuanian merchant seamen who would be on vessels calling at Lithuanian SSR ports; exploiting existing postal channels between Lithuanian SSR and the West; and interrogating persons coming out of the Lithuanian SSR.

• ZRLYNCH was approved in 1950 for use of the Latvian Resistance Movement, which had been formed in 1944, as a vehicle for clandestine activities within the USSR. ZRLYNCH was renewed in 1952 as a part of AECOB, which then provided both FI and political and psychological activities.

See http://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/second-release-lexicon.pdfand http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/ops/ussr-redsox.htm(both accessed July 2011).

16 ‘How to be a spy’ by Anthony Cavendish, Sydney Morning Herald , 17 December 1988. A broadly similar account appears in a book by the same author, Inside Intelligence , published amidst intense official disapproval by Palu in 1987.

17 My Silent War by Kim Philby (Panther, 1969), p. 146.

18 Freds Launags, in the film Red Web.

19 The CIA’s Secret Operations by Harry Rositzke (Reader’s Digest Press, 1977), p. 20.

20 Ibid, p.17.

21 Recruited in Operation Bloodstone. For details see Blowback by Christopher Simpson (Collier Books/Macmillan, August 1989).

22 Bower, p. 153.

23 Lithuania: The Outposts of Freedom by Constantine Jurgela (The National Guard of Lithuania in Exile and Valkyrie Press, 1976), p. 232. Quoted in Razgaitis, p. 40.

24 Männik, p. 57.

25 ‘A Review of Western Intelligence Reports Regarding The Lithuanian Resistance’, by Jonas Öhman, published as an afterword (p. 393) in a revised and updated edition of Forest Brothers, an Account of an Anti-Soviet Freedom Fighter by Juozas Lukša (Central European University Press, Budapest, 2009). ‘Swedish espionage in the Baltics 1943–1957: A study of a fiasco?’ by Peteris Ininbergs http://kau.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:5494/FULLTEXT1(accessed July 2011). It includes an abstract in English; the rest is in Swedish.

26 Linksmakalnis was the last Russian military installation to be decommissioned in Lithuania. Construction started in 1946, with, according to Lukša’s report, the use of Italian or Hungarian POWs (he noted that they spoke a ‘language that the local visitors did not understand’.) It included deep bunkers and a huge array of antennae, with a colossal satellite dish towering over the village. Access to outsiders was strictly forbidden. Staff there joked to locals, in its dying days, that they could connect a telephone to Fidel Castro’s private line. Pictures of the ruins can be found here http://www.urbanexploration.lt/irasai/KGB-radiozvalgybos-kompleksas-linksmakalnyje/

27 I draw heavily here on Bower, pp. 158ff., who gives an excellent account of this.

28 Bower, p. 164.

29 Readers may wish to seek out a copy of the haunting and neglected Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis (Hutchinson, 1980) for an idea of what Britain would be like after decades of Soviet occupation and ‘denationing’. Pages 49–53 in the Penguin edition are strongly recommended. I am indebted to my friend Peter Hitchens for this suggestion. An excellent fictional treatment of the psychological torment caused by the failure of the resistance can be found in Purge, a novel by the Finnish–Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen (Atlantic Books, 2011).

30 Remeikis, p. 278.

31 The Unknown War: Armed Anti-Soviet Resistance in Lithuania in 1944 –1953 by Dalia Kuodytė and Rokas Tracevskis, (Genocide and Resistance Museum, Lithuania, 2004).

32 He died in 2002. ‘ Pēdējā pasaules kara pēdējais mežabrā lis’ (Last Forest Brother of the Last World War) by Māra Grīnberga, published in Diena (Riga, Latvia) 18 May 1995.

33 I am indebted to Ritvars Jansons of the Occupation Museum in Riga for this information, based on Latvian émigrés’ unpublished correspondence.

34 Tamman, p. 182. I would be delighted to hear from any of Capt. Nelberg’s surviving relatives.

35 Hans Toomla and Kaljo Kukk were parachuted into Estonia on 7 May 1954. They carried, according to a KGB report:

a machine gun with ammunition, four revolvers, two portable transmitters, ciphers and codes… topographical maps, cameras, blank Soviet passports, military identity cards and certificates, counterfeit seals of Soviet institutions, Swedish and Norwegian crowns and 80,00 roubles.

A KGB statement reported in the Soviet media gives details of their capture and can be accessed in English (for a fee) here http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/13847060

36 A Secret Life by Benjamin Weiser (Public Affairs, 2004). See also www.kuklinski.us

37 He was interviewed by Bower in the Red Web documentary. Algirdas Vokietaitis, the Lithuanian émigré who made the first contact with the Western secret services in Stockholm in 1943, moved to America, where he was a notable instructor in photography.

38 Two lengthy KGB archive documents (in Estonian) give a thorough picture of the activities of American, British, French, German and Swedish espionage in the Baltics. Dated 4 January 1956 http://www.esm.ee/public/projektid/5/2.osak55.htmland 20 February 1957 http://www.esm.ee/public/projektid/5/dokumendid/dok454.html

39 ‘Spies caught and exposed’, Izvestia, 7 March 1957 https://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/13972020

40 This link (in Swedish) gives an account of the story and of a filmed version of Hallisk’s life. http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/1.3727/verklighetens-ramona

41 Ininbergs gives an excellent account of this little-known history.

42 The mission was dogged by bad luck. The three men were dropped a hundred miles from their supposed destination. One of their supply containers was found by a peasant who gave it to what he thought were real partisans, but who were in fact a phoney group run by the KGB (what happened to the peasant is not known, but can be imagined). ‘Broken promises reward Lithuania’s forgotten heroes’ by Edward Lucas, Independent, 9 September 1991.

43 Interviewed in the Red Web documentary.

44 Interviewed by Tom Bower, Independent Saturday Magazine, 22 September 1990.

45 A partial account of this remarkable story (in Czech) is in Československobritské Zpravodajské Soupeřen (Czechoslovak–British Intelligence Rivalry) by Dr Prokop Tomek, Úřad dokumentace a vyšetřovánízločinů komunismu (Institute for the Documentation and Research of the Crimes of Communism, 2006. http://aplikace.mvcr.cz/archiv2008/policie/udv/securita/sbornik14/sbornik14.pdf

46 Along with Hallisk, van Jung and others, they featured in an Estonian documentary, Külalised ( The Visitors ) in 2002. I am grateful to the producers for providing me with a copy of their film, which deserved a wider audience. http://www.allfilm.ee/web/index.php?lang=en&page_id=111&file_id=1052&cat_id=116