Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

QUESTION: How do you explain your reluctance to give objective testimony on the substance of the charge?

ORLOV: I ask you to explain the term “objective testimony.” In my view, I have spoken about the very substance of the case.

QUESTION: Do you have anything to add?

ORLOV: I wish to write additional comments in my own hand.

[Written comments by Orlov]

In the first place, I want to add that I did not sign the charge sheet, although I read it, in part because I requested that the investigator who has just put the charge to me be taken off the case, and I do not accept the Procuracy’s rejection of my request.

Secondly, I want to explain further why I do not understand the substance of the charge. The accusation is based on an interpretation of Article 70 of the RSFSR criminal code which is not clear to me: it has never been explained to me precisely and unambiguously what is meant by the words “undermining,” “weakening” and even “Soviet regime,” how the presence or absence of “purpose” is to be interpreted, what is considered as “defamatory” and what is not, and so on.

I have read through the record; my answers have been written verbatim, and I do not have any corrections or observations.

One of the largest gaps in histories of Cold War intelligence operations and international relations in both East and West concerns the role of signals intelligence (SIGINT). The role of the ULTRA intelligence generated by British and American codebreakers in hastening victory over Germany and Japan during the Second World War is now well known. Research on post-war SIGINT, by contrast, has barely begun. With the exception of the VENONA decrypts of mostly wartime Soviet communications, British and American SIGINT records for the Cold War remain completely closed. Other declassified files, however, show that SIGINT sometimes had an important influence on British and American policy. An in-house CIA history concludes that during the Korean War SIGINT became “a critically important source of information.” During the 1956 Suez Crisis, the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, wrote to congratulate the director-general of the British SIGINT agency, GCHQ, on the “volume” and “excellence” of the Middle Eastern decrypts it had produced and to say “how valuable” the decrypts had proved to be. 1In 1992, after the end of the Cold War, President George Bush described SIGINT as “a prime factor” in his foreign policy. 2

In both Britain and the United States Cold War SIGINT operations were controlled by a single agency. Soviet SIGINT was more fragmented. The GRU had responsibility for intercepting and decrypting military communications, the KGB for diplomatic and other civilian traffic. An attempt early in the Cold War to combine the SIGINT operations of the two agencies was short-lived. Until the late 1960s KGB SIGINT, ciphers and communications were the primary responsibility of the Eighth Chief Directorate. 3The volume of SIGINT supplied to the Soviet leadership was very large. The KGB annual report sent to Khrushchev early in 1961 reveals that during 1960 the Eighth Chief Directorate decrypted 209,000 diplomatic cables sent by representatives of fifty-one states. No fewer than 133,200 of these intercepts were forwarded to the Central Committee (chiefly, no doubt, to its international department). 4By 1967 the KGB was able to decrypt 152 cipher systems employed by a total of 72 states. 5Though the text of all these decrypts remains inaccessible in the archives of the Eighth and Sixteenth directorates, FCD files and other sources contain important information on KGB SIGINT operations and some of the results achieved by them. Both FCD residencies abroad and the Second Chief Directorate (SCD) within the Soviet Union made impressive contributions to these operations.

David Kahn, the leading Western historian of SIGINT, plausibly concludes that, on present evidence, bugs and agent penetration contributed more than cryptanalysis to Soviet SIGINT successes during the Cold War. 6The SCD had a long tradition of bugging Moscow embassies. For over thirty years after the establishment of Soviet—American diplomatic relations in 1933, the United States embassy was one of its most successful targets. A navy electrician who conducted the first electronic sweep of the embassy in 1944 discovered 120 hidden microphones. For a time, according to a member of the embassy staff, more “kept turning up, in the legs of any new tables and chairs that were delivered, in the plaster of the walls, any and everywhere.” 7The embassy seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security by its failure to find more bugs during the early years of the Cold War. In reality, it remained highly vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated Soviet electronic eavesdropping until at least the mid-1960s.

In 1952 the new American ambassador, George Kennan, ordered a thorough search of both the embassy and his own residence. The security experts sent from Washington asked him to dictate the text of an old diplomatic despatch in his study in order to help them discover any voice-activated listening device. As he continued his dictating, one of the experts suddenly began hacking away at the wall behind a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. Finding nothing in the wall, he then attacked the seal itself with a mason’s hammer and triumphantly extracted from it a pencil-shaped bug which had been relaying Kennan’s every word (and no doubt those of previous ambassadors) to Soviet eavesdroppers. Next morning Kennan noted a “new grimness” among the Soviet guards and embassy staff: “So dense was the atmosphere of anger and hostility that one could have cut it with a knife.” 8

In 1953 work began on a new US embassy in Tchaikovsky Street. During its construction American security personnel stood guard each day to prevent the installation of listening devices, particularly on the two top floors which were to contain the CIA station, the ambassador’s office and the cipher rooms. The day-long security vigil, however, served little purpose since the guards were withdrawn at night, thus allowing KGB personnel ample opportunity to bug the embassy. Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who had succeeded Kennan as ambassador, later blamed the extraordinary decision to leave the new embassy unguarded overnight on “carelessness” (presumably his own) and the desire “to save money.” 9“Carelessness” in matters of security was by now an embassy tradition.

During a heated discussion with US ambassador Foy Kohler in 1962, Khrushchev made clear—to the dismay of the KGB—that he knew the ambassador had personally opposed the supply of steel tubing manufactured in the West for the construction of natural gas pipelines in the Soviet Union. 10Though Kohler probably deduced that Khrushchev knew the contents of some of his cables to Washington, he seems not to have realized that the information came from the bugging of his own embassy. In 1964, however, acting on intelligence from the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, the embassy discovered over forty bugs concealed in bamboo tubes built into the walls behind the radiators in order to shield them from metal detectors. 11Remarkably, most studies of US—Soviet relations take no account whatever of the almost continuous hemorrhage of diplomatic secrets from the United States Moscow embassy for more than thirty years.

FROM THE 1960S onwards the KGB also had a series of successes in bugging American and British embassies in the Third World, as well as the intelligence stations for which they provided diplomatic cover. The planting of listening devices on targets outside the Soviet Union was the responsibility of the FCD OT (Operational Technical Support) Directorate (also known as the Fourteenth Department), whose officers in residencies had a wide range of duties which included providing the equipment for clandestine photography of classified documents, short-range radio communication and the construction of apparently innocent objects (such as hairbrushes and cans of shaving cream) which could be used to conceal film and other espionage paraphernalia. Each of the OT eavesdropping devices, often remote-controlled, was individually constructed in order to assist concealment in the target area, which was always carefully reconnoitered beforehand. The devices were fixed in place either by FCD operations officers or by local agents employed as cleaners, electricians, plumbers, furniture makers and telephone company technicians. 12