Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The thirteen compromise operations were remarkably diverse. As usual, they involved a number of forgeries: among them a bogus State Department evaluation which dismissed Sakharov as a worn-out political dilettante and a fabricated letter from Radio Liberty’s Russian staff denouncing his links with the Zionists. Somewhat more bizarrely, attempts were made to link Sakharov with the gay liberation movement. Letters bearing the forged signatures of Sakharov and a Belorussian “group of homosexuals” were sent to gay rights organizations in Britain and Scandinavia, with the aim of prompting them to send letters in reply.

The Western “bourgeois press” and its Moscow correspondents were fed stories—apparently without much success—claiming that Sakharov’s family suffered from hereditary mental illness, which affected both his children and his brother, and that he himself had degenerated into “a tired, weak-willed man,” “unable to take independent decisions” because of his domineering wife. Instructions were given for suitably gullible foreign correspondents to be invited to meet the Deputy Procurator-General, S. I. Gusev, who would provide “objective information about the nature of the official warning given to ASKET about his provocative actions.” 11

The most vicious of the active measures were directed against Elena Bonner both because Sakharov’s worldwide reputation for integrity made him a less vulnerable target than his less well-known wife, and because attacks on Bonner wounded Sakharov more deeply than those on himself. During Sakharov’s fifteen years of persecution, his only resort to physical violence was to slap the face of Nikolai Yakovlev, one of the writers used by the KGB to libel Bonner. 12The character assassination of Bonner began in earnest with an article entitled “Madame Bonner—Sakharov’s Evil Genius?” planted in the New York Russian-language newspaper Russkiy Golos ( Russian Voice ) by an agent codenamed YAK, in July 1976. 13Simultaneously, Bonner began to receive letters prepared by Service A but purporting to come from one “Semyon Zlotnik,” who claimed to know the secrets of her “dark past” and demanded money with menaces. 14

The “dark past” fabricated by the KGB over the next few years was an explosive mixture of sex and violence. “In her dissolute youth,” it was claimed, “[Bonner] had developed an almost professional knack for seducing and subsequently sponging off older men of considerable stature.” During the war she had allegedly seduced the poet Vsevelod Bagritsky, then hounded his wife to her grave by bombarding her with obscene telephone calls. Her next victim, according to the KGB libel, was a well-known engineer, “Moisei Zlotnik” (“uncle” of the fictitious Semyon Zlotnik), who was jailed for murdering his wife on instructions from Bonner. To escape justice, Bonner was said to have become a nurse on a wartime hospital train—only to be sacked when her seduction of the elderly doctor in charge was discovered by the doctor’s daughter. Among Bonner’s fictitious post-war conquests was her equally elderly, married French uncle, Leon Kleiman; the affair was said to have continued even after she “ensnared” Sakharov. 15The KGB went to enormous pains to fabricate this account of Bonner’s supposedly homicidal sexual appetites, even sending an illegal to France in 1977 to recover some of the papers of Leon Kleiman (who had died five years earlier) to assist in the production of Service A’s forgeries. 16

Unsurprisingly, the KGB found considerable difficulty for several years in placing this libellous fiction in the Western “bourgeois press.” It eventually appeared as a “world exclusive” in the Sicilian newspaper Sette Giorni, whose staff—according to the Rome residency—included a “confidential contact” codenamed KIRILL. 17On April 12, 1980 Sette Giorni printed a sensational story headlined “WHO IS ELENA BONNER? The Wife of Academician Sakharov Perpetrator of Several Murders.” An unnamed member of the editorial staff was reported to have met the elusive “Semyon Zlotnik” while on holiday in Paris, and to have learned the story from him. Sette Giorni cited at some length a series of Service A forgeries, among them a letter from “Moisei Zlotnik” to Bonner reproaching her for persuading him to murder his wife: “You acted precisely, cold-bloodedly and rationally… And your demand ‘to bump her off’ seemed as natural as remembering that I should give you your favorite chocolates on your birthday.” The article also cited an equally fraudulent diary supposedly written by Leon Kleiman describing his seduction by Bonner and denouncing her obsession with “subjugating others” to her will. 18The Rome residency proudly sent fifty copies of the Sette Giorni article to the Centre, together with subsequent readers’ letters denouncing Bonner, most of which had been written or prompted by the residency itself. 19When reporting on the operation to the Central Committee, the KGB is unlikely to have mentioned that Sette Giorni was a little-known provincial newspaper with a print run of only 20,000. 20

To increase the pressure on Bonner, and through her on Sakharov, attempts were made to deprive her of the support of family and friends. The first of the active measures devised by the KGB early in 1977 “to cut off ASKET and LISA from their close contacts engaged in anti-social activity and to cause dissension in their circle” listed seven different methods of harassing her daughter from her first marriage, Tanya, and son-in-law, Efrem Yankelevich, in order to force them to emigrate. The harassment succeeded. On September 5, 1977 Bonner said goodbye to Tanya and Efrem at Sheremetyevo airport.

The Centre showed equal ingenuity in attempting to alienate the Sakharovs’ friends. Agents in the dissident movement were instructed to “cause dissension between ASKET and LISA on the one hand and their contacts involved in anti-social activity” by circulating disparaging comments about other dissidents supposedly made by Sakharov and Bonner. 21

The two sets of KGB active measures designed to “hinder the hostile activity of ASKET and LISA” also had the unstated aim of making daily life impossible for both of them. The “hindrance” operations were designed to “create abnormal [living] conditions” in as many ways as possible. Though the KGB did not yet dare to withdraw Sakharov’s driving license, no other member of his or Bonner’s families was allowed to obtain—or retain—a license. An agent codenamed MORVIKOV was instructed to stir up trouble between the couple and Andrei Sakharov’s children. The “distraction” operations included flooding the Sakharovs with bogus requests for help from people who had fallen foul of the Soviet legal system or who simply sought their advice on non-existent problems. 22The cumulative effect of the KGB’s active measures took an inevitable toll—particularly on the health of Bonner, who was suffering from a heart condition. There were times, she wrote later, “when it was difficult for me to walk even a hundred yards, when even sitting at the typewriter made me break out in a cold sweat.” Simply thinking about the allegations about her private life made her feel sick—or even that she was about to have a heart attack. 23

THE EXTENT OF the Sakharovs’ covert persecution was due partly to the fact that the KGB did not yet dare imprison them. The president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences solemnly assured his American opposite number that “not one hair of Dr. Sakharov’s head” would be harmed—though, as Bonner wryly remarked, the promise meant little since Sakharov was almost bald. 24During 1977, however, there was a wave of arrests of other well-known dissidents, among them the two most prominent members of the “Helsinki Watch Groups”: the veteran civil rights campaigner Aleksandr Ginzburg, victim of the botched 1968 show trial, and the physicist Yuri Orlov, founder of the Moscow group. Andropov’s characteristically slanted intelligence reports to the Politburo sought to implicate both in the ideological subversion campaigns allegedly run by Western intelligence agencies: