Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The key figure in holding together the anti-Soviet coalition, in the Centre’s view, was the liberal Democrat, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Kissinger too regarded Jackson as “the indispensable link between the liberals, preoccupied with human rights [in the Soviet Union], and the conservatives, who became anxious about any negotiations with the Soviets.” “Jackson,” one commentator has written, “was not the type of leader who needed an impassioned aide to tell him what to think, but he had one anyway: Richard Perle, an intense, razor-sharp scourge of the Soviets who, despite his cherubic smile, earned the sobriquet Prince of Darkness from the legions he had engaged in bureaucratic battle.” Perle was the leader of what the KGB saw as a particularly dangerous part of the Jewish lobby: an informal group on Capitol Hill which included both paid Israeli lobbyists and congressional staffers. 93

Jackson was propelled into battle in August 1972 by the Soviet announcement of an exit tax on emigrants, theoretically designed to repay the costs of their statefunded education but whose main practical effect would have been to reduce Jewish emigration to a trickle. In October Jackson introduced an amendment to the Nixon Trade Reform Bill barring the Soviet Union from receiving most-favored nation status and trade credits until it had lifted restrictions on emigration. Though Moscow quickly dropped the exit tax, Jackson maintained his amendment. For the next two years Kissinger conducted a shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Jackson, trying vainly to obtain enough Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration to persuade Jackson to back down. “For a long time,” said Kissinger later, “I did not realize that Jackson could not be placated.” 94

Dobrynin reported to Moscow that Jackson “kept escalating his demands” in order to win the backing of the Jewish lobby for his attempt to win the Democratic nomination at the 1976 election. 95The New York resident, Boris Solomatin, informed the Centre that Jackson appeared to be in a strong position for the presidential primaries:

Jackson’s strong point is the fact that, during his nearly thirty-five years in Congress, he has never been involved in any sort of political or personal scandal. In the post-Watergate period the personal integrity of a presidential candidate has had exceptionally great significance. It is necessary to find some stains on the Senator’s biography and use them to carry out an active measure which will compromise him. We must discuss with the American friends [the CPUSA] the most effective ways and means of opposing Jackson’s plans to become president of the USA.

Others in the Centre cynically concluded that Jackson’s reticence about his private life “probably points to the existence of compromising information which could be used to discredit him and his family.” The KGB’s search for “compromising information” was extraordinarily wide-ranging. Despite the fact that Jackson’s parents had left Norway as long ago as 1885, the Oslo residency was ordered in 1974 to make a detailed investigation of his Norwegian relatives. As the American residencies examined Jackson’s long political career with a fine toothcomb, the most promising area which seemed to emerge was his sexuality. Jackson’s file in the Centre records that his marriage at the age of forty-nine “amazed many of his colleagues, who had considered him a confirmed bachelor.” Intensive KGB research, however, found no more incriminating evidence of homosexuality than the fact that for many years Jackson had shared an apartment in Washington with a male childhood friend. 96

Lacking any proof that Jackson had ever been a practicing homosexual, the Centre decided to fabricate it in an active measure codenamed operation POROK. In 1976 Service A forged an FBI memorandum, dated June 20, 1940, in which Hoover reported to the Assistant Secretary of Justice that Jackson was a homosexual. Photocopies of the forgery were sent to the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Topeka Capital and Jimmy Carter’s campaign headquarters. Service A also sought to exploit a number of incidents during the 1976 primary campaign. After an argument with a gay rights activist at a press conference in March, Jackson told him that he did not want his vote. During a television appearance in April, Jackson declared that “homosexuality leads to the destruction of the family.” The KGB sent these statements, together with bogus documents purporting to show that Jackson and Perle were members of a gay sex club, to, among others: Senator Edward Kennedy, who was thought “personally hostile to Jackson;” the columnist Jack Anderson; and the magazines Playboy and Penthouse.

Because of Jackson’s continuing influence on the ratification of Soviet-American arms limitation agreements, operation POROK continued long after he had failed to gain the Democratic nomination. One of the aims of the operation during 1977 was to incite the gay press into attacking Jackson as a closet gay who hypocritically attacked homosexuality in public for his own political advantage. Early in May a Service A officer in New York posted a forged FBI document to the California-based magazine Gay Times reporting that Jackson had been an active homosexual while working as a state prosecutor in the early 1940s. Handwritten on the forgery was the heading “Our Gay in the US Senate.” Like the rest of operation POROK, the forgery had no discernible effect on Jackson’s career.

THE CENTRE’S MAIN target within the Carter administration, which took office in 1977, was the Polish-born National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously an ill-chosen KGB target for cultivation. 97As Brzezinski later acknowledged, he and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance engaged in a “prolonged and intense” debate over policy to the Soviet Union. The result, according to Vance, was an unstable balance between the “visceral anti-Sovietism” of Brzezinski and his own “attempt to regulate dangerous competition” between the superpowers. 98“When Carter spoke on foreign affairs,” complained Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, “we tended to hear echoes of the anti-Sovietism of Brzezinski.” 99The aim of Service A was to diminish Brzezinski’s influence relative to Vance’s and, if possible, to engineer his dismissal.

The Centre ordered its American residencies to begin a trawl for potentially damaging information on Brzezinski as wide-ranging as that which preceded operation POROK. Was Brzezinski concealing Jewish origins? Was he having an affair with the actress Candice Bergen? Was there any compromising material on his relations with, among others, his deputy David Aaron, his special assistant Karl Inderfurth, Ambassador Richard Gardner and the Polish émigré community? 100

Though muckraking in the United States appears to have proved unproductive, the Centre was supplied with what it believed was sensational evidence of Brzezinski’s secret career in the CIA by the Bulgarian intelligence service. Probably under pressure from his interrogators, Henrich Natan Shpeter, a Bulgarian economist who had confessed to working for both American and Israeli intelligence, produced a bizarre account of a visit to Bulgaria in 1963 by Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University, as a guest of the Academy of Sciences. Shpeter allegedly claimed that Brzezinski was a CIA officer who contacted him by using a password, received intelligence from him and gave him further instructions for intelligence operations. In addition, even in 1963, according to Shpeter, Brzezinski had a major role in framing US policy towards the Soviet Bloc.

Shpeter’s story, in short, was strikingly similar to those expected of defendants in Stalinist show trials. The Centre, however, was easily seduced by attractive conspiracy theories and used Shpeter’s bizarre tale as the basis of an active measure code-named operation MUREN. Service A drafted a bogus report on Brzezinski by an Israeli Zionist organization which included allegedly authentic details of his involvement in Shpeter’s espionage. The report went on to denounce Brzezinski as “a secret anti-Semite” and declared that the Zionists had compromising information on his private life which would seriously discredit him.