Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Lappi had no idea that ALLA, ARTYOMOVA and FYODOROV were KGB illegals sent on missions to assist in the destruction of the last remnants of “socialism with a human face.” Instead, they successfully persuaded him that they were Western supporters of the Prague Spring, anxious to do what they could to assist in its restoration. Given the almost universal revulsion in the West at the Soviet occupation, Lappi’s misplaced trust in his new Swiss, Austrian and German friends was an understandable mistake, cynically exploited by FYODOROV. Lappi’s confidence in FYODOROV was so complete that he left him in charge of his flat when he went on holiday to Romania. He introduced FYODOROV both to K-231 activists and to leaders of the Christian Democrat, People’s and Socialist Parties, which had tried to re-establish themselves during the Prague Spring. Lappi regularly acted as translator at FYODOROV’s meetings with them. Some of FYODOROV’s reports on his meetings with the counter-revolutionaries were rated so highly by the Centre that they were forwarded to the Politburo. 82

What the KGB files do not, of course, report are the feelings of the illegals as they betrayed the sometimes heroic survivors of the Prague Spring. Unlike the leaders of the Soviet Union and the Soviet public, who had no first-hand experience of the world outside the Soviet Bloc, the illegals knew the West and the reality of life in Czechoslovakia too well to have deluded themselves into believing that they were engaged in a moral crusade to defend socialist values against Western imperialism. There were recurrent complaints in FCD Directorate S that after postings abroad illegals sometimes returned with an “incorrect” attitude towards life in the Soviet Union. 83Occasionally their attitudes were so incorrect that their careers were cut short. In 1966 the KGB liaison office in Budapest virtuously reported to the Centre a series of politically incorrect observations made by the female illegal ERNA while returning from leave in Moscow to her posting in Canada. Among the comments said to have “shocked” her fellow KGB officers were the following:

In Moscow I was afraid to express my views frankly on certain subjects. After all, I could see that they thought that I had become more than a bit bourgeois.

Why did the Party allow a second cult of personality to develop in respect of Khrushchev? I cannot understand how Khrushchev could take decisions on important Party and state matters all on his own. And what were the other members of the Central Committee doing? Were the consequences of the cult of Stalin not still fresh in their minds?

What is the point now of launching so many Sputniks? Would it not be better to attend to more important things on earth? Twenty years have gone by since the end of the war, but people do not have the material goods which they need and deserve, and which the humblest inhabitants of the West have long enjoyed! 84

Very few illegals dared to voice such seditious comments openly. But the fact that some undoubtedly thought such thoughts cannot fail to have bred in them an increasing cynicism, heightened in some cases by their experiences in Czechoslovakia.

Some insight into the attitude of GROMOV, one of the first five illegals assigned to the penetration of “rightist” groups during the Prague Spring, is provided by the recollections of his younger brother, Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, who worked from 1963 to 1972 in the FCD Illegals Directorate and Line N in the Copenhagen residency. GROMOV had been born in 1933 and, in Oleg’s view, “had grown up among boys brutalized by war,” becoming a cynical, materialistic adult who much preferred life in the West to the relative privations of Czechoslovakia. When Oleg was informed during his training that he had to choose between learning Czech and Swedish, his brother told him he would be an idiot not to choose Swedish: “If you take Czech, you’ll spend the rest of your life sitting in the pathetic consular departments in Prague and Bratislava… [But] Sweden’s a nice country… From there you can go anywhere in Europe.” 85There are signs of a less blatant cynicism towards the Czechs in FYODOROV’s reports to the Centre. He wrote of the role of the Red Army in Czechoslovakia : “The Soviet forces play the role of a policeman standing at a crossroads where there is heavy traffic; everyone notices him and this disciplines the traffic.” The Czechoslovak population, in other words, was being cowed into submission. 86

In the case of a minority of illegals, their Czechoslovak experiences probably had more serious consequences than simply an increased level of cynicism. A few years later ALLA attempted to commit suicide. Though her KGB file attributes the episode solely to the fact that her partner had left her, 87it is difficult to believe that the betrayal of the Czechoslovaks ALLA had befriended did not add to her emotional scars. A more common reaction by the illegals to their experiences in Czechoslovakia was probably to turn to alcohol. Unable to stop drinking even after he contracted hepatitis B during a mission in south-east Asia, GROMOV died in 1972 at the age of only thirty-nine. 88Both BOGUN and his wife also became alcoholics. In 1976 he was admitted for “a full course of anti-alcohol therapy” at the Burdenko military hospital, while his wife was treated for alcoholism in the psycho-neurological department of the Central KGB Polyclinic. The previous few years, during which BOGUN had worked extensively on PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in eastern Europe, seem to have taken a much heavier psychological toll than his earlier period as an illegal in the United States. 89

In the case of one member of the Illegals Directorate there is no doubt about the shattering impact of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For GROMOV’s brother, Oleg Gordievsky, then serving in Copenhagen, “It was that dreadful event, that awful day, which determined the course of my own life.” The crushing of the Prague Spring convinced him that the Soviet one-party state was, by its very nature, destructive of human liberties. He spent much of the next few years secretly pondering how to work for its overthrow before taking the decision to become a British penetration agent within the KGB. 90

Dubček later described the eight months after the Soviet invasion as “an organized retreat, in which no inch of territory was given up without calculated resistance.” 1It was a retreat, however, which was doomed to end in defeat. Dubček’s position and that of the other leading reformers was steadily undermined by a combination of Soviet pressure, the old guard within the CPCz and former allies who decided to throw in their lot with the invaders to save their own careers.

The immediate pretext for Dubček’s removal was the World Ice Hockey Championship in Stockholm in March 1969. On March 21, Dubček later recalled, “The whole country watched [on TV] as Czechoslovakia played the Soviets; it was much more than ice hockey, of course. It was a replay of a lost war…” The national rejoicings after the Czechoslovak victory led the KGB to prepare, with assistance from its stooges in the StB, an anti-Soviet riot to follow the next match between Czechoslovakia and the USSR on March 28. Shortly before the match a team of police agents disguised as city workers unloaded a pile of paving stones in front of the offices of the Soviet airline, Aeroflot, in Wenceslas Square. Prague police documents show that the whole operation was directly supervised by a Soviet agent in the Czech ministry of the interior. 2Immediately after the Czechoslovak team had defeated the Soviets for the second time in a week, StB plain clothes personnel mingling with the celebrating crowd began to throw the conveniently placed stones at the Aeroflot office. The office furniture was dragged out on to the pavement and set alight.