Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The Romanian Communist Party leadership does not openly reveal its territorial claims; but it does everything to demonstrate that historically, ethnically and in other ways Moldavia and the Chernovitsy Oblast belong to Romania. The statement made by Mao in conversation with Japanese socialists about the USSR’s illegal acquisition of Bessarabia [Moldavia] has been developed in Romania.

The French newspaper Le Monde has twice published articles casting doubt on the legality of Bessarabia’s inclusion in the [Soviet] Union. It is not impossible that the initiative for publishing the articles came from Romania. 55

The illegals sent to Romania under Western disguise in 1971 were ordered to collect intelligence on Romanian relations with the United States and China; Romanian claims on Soviet territory in Bessarabia and north Bukovina; the political and economic basis of opposition to the Soviet Union; the position of German and Hungarian minorities; the Ceauşescu cult; and the state of the Romanian Communist Party. 56The illegals’ main sources included staff of the Party newspaper Scintea and the German language Volk und Kultur. 57

PROGRESS OPERATIONS IN Yugoslavia during 1971 were prompted chiefly by the most serious internal crisis since Tito’s break with Moscow in 1948. The dramatic resurgence of nationalist tensions during the Croat Spring of 1971 culminated at the end of the year with Tito’s arrest of the Croat Communist leaders and 400 Croat nationalists and in his resumption of direct control over the Croat secret police. The claim that Yugoslav socialism was resolving ethnic rivalries was exposed as an illusion. 58The illegals were given a long list of institutions in which they were instructed to “strike up acquaintances:” the Academy of Sciences, the Public Opinion Institute in Belgrade, the editorial offices of Kommunist, Politika and Borba, the Tanjug Agency, the Institute for International Politics and Economics at Belgrade University, Zagreb University, Yugoslav businesses and the Union of Journalists (in particular, the writer Dobrica Ćosić, who was believed to be close to Tito). Some of the reports sent back to the Centre by illegal courier, radio and the post were judged sufficiently important to be forwarded to Brezhnev. 59

BY FAR THE largest KGB presence in eastern Europe was in East Germany. Ever since the Second World War there had been a large KGB enclave within the headquarters of the Soviet military administration in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. During the period which preceded the establishment of the GDR it had closely monitored political parties, churches, trade unions and public opinion within the Soviet zone of Germany. Though the KGB claimed after the foundation of the GDR that the role of its Karlshorst base was to mount operations against the FRG and other Western countries, as well as to provide liaison with the Stasi, it also continued to monitor developments within East Germany. 60In 1971 the intelligence personnel stationed at Karlshorst, not including liaison officers, totaled 404, of whom fortyeight were operations officers working under cover. Another forty-seven KGB operations officers were stationed elsewhere in the GDR. 61

The advent of Willy Brandt’s socialist-liberal coalition in West Germany in 1969 offered opportunities for détente which Moscow was more anxious to pursue than Walter Ulbricht, the aging and inflexible neo-Stalinist leader of East Germany. KGB reports from Karlshorst complained that, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ulbricht was posing as the wisest and most far-sighted statesman of the Soviet Bloc, implying (probably correctly) that he had been quicker than Brezhnev to identify the subversive nature of the Dubček regime. 62Ulbricht’s refusal to abandon his commitment to a united “socialist” Germany made him unwilling to consider an agreement with Brandt involving, for the first time, mutual recognition by the FRG and the GDR. 63

By 1969, if not before, both Willi Stoph, the East German prime minister, and Erich Honecker, who had overseen the building of the Berlin Wall, were fueling Moscow’s growing irritation with Ulbricht at meetings with the KGB and the Soviet ambassador, Pyotr Andreyevich Abrasimov. Ulbricht, they reported, had described Soviet cut-price imports of East German uranium as “the plundering of the GDR’s natural resources.” When Abrasimov suggested that allowance needed to be made for Ulbricht’s age (he was seventy-six in 1969), Stoph and Honecker retorted that he should have resigned when he was seventy. 64In 1971 Ulbricht was kicked upstairs to the newly created post of Party chairman, and succeeded as Party leader by Honecker. In the following year the GDR and FRG formally recognized each other’s existence as separate states.

Though bickering continued within the Party leadership, the KGB’s main concern was “the impact of the adversary’s ideology on citizens of the GDR” through Western broadcasts and visits by West Germans. The Centre calculated in the mid-1970s that “500,000 citizens are hostile to the existing system and the [Western] adversary will for a long time retain a base of support in the GDR.” 65A long-running KGB operation, codenamed LUCH, monitored opinion within the East German population and Party, contacts between East and West Germans and alleged “attempts by the USA and the FRG to harm the building of socialism” in the GDR. In 1974 the section of the Karlshorst KGB responsible for LUCH was raised in status to a directorate. 66

The majority of the Centre’s intelligence on East Germany, however, came from the Stasi, whose network of internal informers was vastly greater than the KGB’s. The GDR had seven times as many informers per head of population as Nazi Germany. 67In 1975 65 percent of all reports from Soviet Bloc security services received by the Centre came from the Stasi. 68Some of the reports were, in effect, classified East German opinion polls. In an opinion survey of factory workers in 1974, for example, 20.6 percent of those questioned “considered that friendship with the USSR restricted the GDR’s autonomy and brought more benefit to the Soviet Union than to the GDR.” A majority, when asked to explain the phrase “achieving working-class power,” claimed not to know what it meant. Some of the comments on the phrase, however, were described in the report forwarded to the Centre as “bitter, wounding and vicious.” Among them were “Working-class power is all right [in theory], but what is it like in practice?”; “This is just a slogan!”; and “Justice for every worker, not just for a newly created privileged group!” Given the inevitable caution of those questioned in expressing politically incorrect views, the real level of dissatisfaction was probably considerably higher. Both the size of the KGB’s Karlshorst base and the volume of intelligence from the Stasi made the Centre less dependent on PROGRESS operations by illegals for intelligence from East Germany than from the rest of eastern Europe. 69

THE KGB’S MAIN concern in Hungary was the extent of Jewish influence within the Party and the AVH (the Hungarian KGB). Always prone to Zionist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the Centre was deeply disturbed by Hungarian reluctance to agree in 1969 to its suggestion for holding “an anti-Zionist conference in Budapest of progressive Jews opposed to the policy of Israel” or for assisting the KGB in making an anti-Zionist film alleging cooperation between Hitler and Hungarian Zionists. “The Hungarian security agencies,” the Centre concluded, “were forced to look over their shoulder when working on the [anti-]Zionist line, as Jewish nationalists within the leadership of the highest Party organs were morbidly cautious with regard to this sector of work.” The KGB also looked askance at the number of Jews within the Hungarian interior ministry, among them—it reported—two deputy ministers, the heads of the AVH First and Third Directorates (responsible, respectively, for foreign intelligence and the surveillance of domestic political opposition), the head of the police directorate and the head of military counter-intelligence. The situation was worst of all in foreign intelligence, where, according to KGB calculations, thirteen of the seventeen department chiefs were Jewish. 70