Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Throughout the Soviet Bloc the KGB’s east European clones, urged on by the Centre, were among the moving forces during the decade which followed the Prague Spring in the creation of an intellectually monotone and moribund society. Václav Havel, one of the founders of Charter 77 (and later the first president of the post-Communist Czech Republic), wrote later of this period:

I remember the first half of the 1970s in Czechoslovakia as the time when “history stopped”… History has been replaced by pseudo-history, with its calendar of regularly returning official anniversaries, Party congresses, festivities and mass sport meetings… Totalitarian power has brought “order” in the organic “disorder” of history, thereby numbing it as history. The government, as it were, nationalized time. Hence, time meets with the sad fate of so many other nationalized things: it has begun to wither away. 81

The clock which had stopped in eastern Europe with the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 was to start again ten years later with the election of a Polish pope.

The KGB and Western Communist Parties Throughout the Cold War, Communist parties around the world dismissed claims that they were involved in Soviet espionage as crude McCarthyite slander. KGB files, however, give the lie to most of their denials. From the 1920s onwards Western Communists were regularly asked for help in intelligence operations, which they usually considered their fraternal duty to provide. Most leaders of even the largest Western parties equally considered it the fraternal duty of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to provide, via the KGB, annual subsidies whose existence they indignantly denied. Knowledge of the KGB connection in the fields of both espionage and finance was the preserve of small and secretive inner circles within each Party leadership.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the most active assistance in Soviet agent recruitment came from four Communist Parties which were briefly included in coalition governments: the French Parti Communiste Français (PCF), the Italian Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), the Austrian Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (KPÖ) and the Finnish Suomen Kommunistinen Puolue (SKP).

AS SHOWN IN chapter 9, the PCF assisted after the Liberation in a major penetration of the French intelligence community which continued for at least a quarter of a century. From July 1, 1946 to June 30, 1947 the Paris residency forwarded to the Centre a total of 1,289 French intelligence documents. 1By the early 1950s the KGB’s chief collaborator inside the PCF was Gaston Plissonnier (codenamed LANG), a life-long Soviet loyalist who had established himself by 1970 as second-in-command to the Party leader. 2Though little known to the French public and a poor public speaker with a thick regional accent, Plissonnier was a master in the arcane procedures of “democratic centralism” by which the Party leadership imposed its policies on its members. 3As well as providing inside information on the PCF, he assisted the KGB in identifying potential agents and other intelligence operations. 4During the later 1970s Plissonnier also passed on reports from an agent in the entourage of President Boumedienne of Algeria. 5

IN ITALY, AS in France, Communist ministers sat in post-war coalition governments until the spring of 1947. At the end of 1945 the PCI had 1,760,000 members—twice as many as the PCF. All over Italy, photographs of Stalin, affectionately known as Baffone (“Walrus moustache”), were pasted on factory walls and stuck to machinery. “We were all under the impression,” one of the Communist ministers, Fausto Gallo, later acknowledged, “that the wind was blowing our way.” 6Washington feared that Gallo and his colleagues might be right. The National Security Council concluded in November 1947, “The Italian Government, ideologically inclined towards Western democracy, is weak and is being subjected to continuous attack by a strong Communist Party.” The very first CIA covert action was an operation to aid the Christian Democrats against the Communists in the 1948 general election by laundering over 10 million dollars from captured Axis funds for use in the campaign. 7

As in France, the post-war popularity of the Communist Party and the brief period of Communist participation in government created the best opportunities Soviet intelligence was ever to enjoy in Italy for agent penetration. Like JOUR, probably the most important of the post-war French recruits, DARIO, the longest-serving and probably the most valuable Italian agent, was a foreign ministry employee. Born in 1908, and trained as a lawyer, DARIO worked as a journalist and state official in agriculture during the early years of fascist Italy. In 1932 he was recruited as a Soviet agent on an “ideological basis” but, on instructions from his controller, pretended to be a supporter of Mussolini and in 1937 succeeded in enrolling in the Fascist Party. Before the outbreak of war he obtained a job in the foreign ministry, ironically dealing with Soviet and Comintern affairs and succeeded in recruiting three foreign ministry typists (codenamed DARYA, ANNA and MARTA) who regularly supplied him with what the Centre considered “valuable” classified documents. For almost forty years DARIO was instrumental in obtaining a phenomenal amount of classified foreign ministry material. 8His remarkable career as a Soviet agent, however, was temporarily interrupted during the war. In 1942, following the discovery by the Italian police of an illegal GRU residency with which DARIO was in contact, he was arrested and imprisoned, surviving a period at the end of the war in a German concentration camp from which he was liberated by the Red Army. 9

Once back in Italy, DARIO reestablished contact with DARYA and MARTA, both of whom agreed once again to give him foreign ministry documents. Probably on Soviet instructions, instead of joining the PCI he became a member of the Italian Socialist Party led by Pietro Nenni, but was expelled in 1946 after he was denounced as a former fascist and threatened with prosecution. At the request of the Rome residency, the Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, secretly interceded with Nenni and DARIO was given back his Socialist Party membership. Togliatti’s intervention, however, leaked out and DARIO was publicly identified as having links with the Soviet embassy. He succeeded, none the less, in recruiting two more foreign ministry typists: TOPO (later renamed LEDA), who for fifteen years provided what the Centre considered “valuable documents,” and NIKOL (later INGA), who also supplied “consistently valuable” information. Probably soon after her recruitment under a false flag (not identified in Mitrokhin’s notes), TOPO and DARIO were married. 10In March 1975, forty-three years after DARIO’s recruitment, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Red Star. He finally retired in May 1979 after one of the longest careers as a Soviet agent in the history of the FCD. 11

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the Rome residency also achieved a highly successful penetration of the interior ministry, thanks chiefly to a Communist civil servant, codenamed DEMID, who acted as agent-recruiter. On instructions from the residency, DEMID left the Communist Party immediately after his recruitment in 1944. His first major cultivation inside the ministry was QUESTOR, whom he helped to obtain a job in the cipher department. By 1955 the penetration of the Italian interior ministry, begun by DEMID, was considered so important that control of it was handed over to a newly established illegal residency in Rome, headed by Ashot Abgarovch Akopyan, a 40-year-old Armenian from Baku codenamed YEFRAT. 12