Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The failures included Maria, a Portuguese Communist language teacher recommended as a potential illegal agent by PATRICK of the PCP Central Committee. The Centre planned to recruit Maria as the assistant and wife of an illegal KGB officer, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Kunosenko (codenamed YEFREMOV), who was being trained for work in Brazil. A meeting arranged between YEFREMOV and his proposed bride in East Germany, however, ended in disaster. Maria found Kunosenko physically unattractive and refused to sleep with him; her recruitment was discontinued. Without Maria’s assistance, Kunosenko failed to become sufficiently fluent in Portuguese. In 1981 plans for his posting to Brazil were cancelled and he was redeployed in Directorate S headquarters. 58

Among the more promising illegal agents discovered as a result of leads from Western Communist Parties were a French couple, LIMB and his wife DANA, who were recruited in 1973. LIMB was recommended by the PCF as a man “devoted to Communist ideals” but not to be used against French targets. After two years’ training, however, LIMB’s first recorded success was talent-spotting a French recruit. MARCEL, LIMB’s recruitment lead, worked in the mairie of a Paris suburb and was recruited as a KGB agent in 1975, probably to provide documentation for KGB illegals. In December 1975 LIMB (then aged thirty-six) and DANA were deployed to Belgium, where they set up a small business printing invitation and visiting cards near the headquarters of SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe). But their attempts over the next year to cultivate NATO personnel met with little or no success. By the end of 1976 they had returned to France, settled in the Bordeaux region and abandoned their brief careers as KGB illegal agents. 59

Thirty or forty years before, the recruiting drive for illegal agents would doubtless have met with much greater success. Its apparent failure in the 1970s reflected the inability of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev’s geriatric leadership to recapture the idealism of an earlier generation of ideological agents inspired by the utopian vision of the world’s first worker—peasant state. By the mid-1970s most of the leading Western Communist Parties were tainted by what Moscow considered the “Eurocommunist” heresy, which advocated a parliamentary road to socialism within a multi-party system rather than slavish imitation of the Soviet model. 60Within the new generation of young Western Marxists, unconditional pro-Soviet loyalists were a dwindling breed—if not yet an endangered species.

JUST AS THE Centre expected fraternal assistance from the leaders of Western Communist parties, so the parties themselves depended in varying degrees on subsidies from Moscow secretly delivered by the KGB. The subsidies, like involvement in intelligence operations, were closely guarded secrets within each Party leadership. When stories of “Moscow gold” occasionally leaked out during the Cold War, they were dismissed as McCarthyite disinformation. The Centre, however, was well aware that some details of its secret subsidies were known to Western intelligence agencies. During the late 1970s, for example, the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Yakovlev (later one of Gorbachev’s leading advisers), protested to Andropov, Gromyko and Boris Ponomarev, head of the Central Committee’s International Department, against the practice of Canadian Communist Party representatives—in particular the Party leader, William Kashtan—of calling at the embassy to collect funds (codenamed “US wheat”) from the resident, Vladimir Ivanovich Mechulayev. The residency had already warned Kashtan that he was taking a considerable risk. By 1980 the Centre was convinced that the Canadian authorities were aware that subsidies to the CPC were being funded by the Soviet-owned Ukrainskaya Kniga [Ukrainian Book] Company, based in Toronto. The FCD informed Ponomarev on October 20:

The Canadian Special [intelligence] Services are carrying out a study of the financial situation of the Communist Party of Canada which it is proposed to complete within 15-18 months. A preliminary report prepared by the federal government quotes data based on the results of an analysis of the channels and size of the financial receipts in the CPC treasury in 1970. The Special Services have only fragmentary information about subsequent years, but these give grounds to suppose that the methods of financing the activities of the CPC remain as before. According to the data of the Special Services, the CPC budget in 1970 amounted to 158,850 dollars (according to unconfirmed reports, in 1979 it was more than 200,000 dollars). This sum is made up of Party membership dues from CPC members (13,500 dollars or 8.5 percent), receipts from legacies from “deceased loyal members of the Party” (the amount cannot be estimated), voluntary payments and also direct transfers of cash by Soviet representatives and contributions to CPC funds from the income of the Ukrainskaya Kniga Company. It is noted that the first three sources of income provide approximately 30-35 percent of the Party’s total budget. The remaining part [65-70 percent] comes from the USSR and from Ukrainskaya Kniga. The Special Services report concentrates on an analysis of the mechanism for supplying funds along the last two channels. [Canadian] Counter-intelligence concludes that the USSR finances the CPC by means of “physical transfer of cash” by officials of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, to be put at the disposal of Party functionaries under pretext of covering the expenses of Party activists on the occasion of their journeys to Socialist countries. 61

The seizure by Boris Yeltsin’s government of the archives of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) after the failed coup of August 1991 led to the publication for the first time of documentary evidence showing that during the 1980s alone, at a time when the Soviet Union was chronically short of hard currency, the CPSU had distributed over 200 million dollars to fraternal parties outside the Soviet Bloc. The Central Committee’s International Department had tried to destroy the records of the payments shortly before the confiscation of its archive, but the metal paper clips which held the documents together jammed the shredding machines and saved some of them from destruction. 62

THOUGH THE LARGEST Subsidies for most of the Cold War seem to have gone to the French PCF and Italian PCI, the two leading Western Parties, the biggest per capita donations probably went to the Communist Party of the United States. The disproportionate share of Soviet funds channelled to the CPUSA reflected Moscow’s desire to encourage the revival of Communism on the territory of the Main Adversary after the near disintegration of the Party in the mid-1950s. The CPUSA repaid Soviet generosity with an impeccable ideological orthodoxy which became particularly valued in Moscow when the heresy of Eurocommunism later took hold of the major west European Communist Parties.

In April 1958 a veteran member of the CPUSA leadership, Morris Childs (whose aliases included “Morris Summers,” “Ramsey Kemp Martin” and “D. Douglas Mozart”) was invited to Moscow to discuss financial help for his ailing party. Boris Ponomarev, the head of the Central Committee international department, offered 75,000 dollars for the current year and 200,000 dollars for 1959, initially channelled via the Canadian Communist Party. 63From 1961 to 1980 the conduits for Soviet subsidies were Childs (codenamed KHAB) and his brother Jack (alias “D. Brooks,” codenamed MARAT), an undeclared Communist who had worked for Comintern in the 1930s. Until the late 1970s Morris Childs usually visited Moscow at least once a year to submit the CPUSA budget and request for funds, receive instructions from the International Department and the KGB and take part in discussions on American affairs. Jack acted as the main point of contact for the handover of money in the United States. The normal procedure was for the Centre to send a coded message to a CPUSA radio operator in New York containing details of the next transmission of funds. The message would then be passed to Jack Childs, who would decode it and inform his brother, Gus Hall (leader of the CPUSA from 1959 and codenamed PALM), or Hall’s wife Elizabeth that the next delivery was imminent. 64