Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Thanks to the sanctuary offered by East Germany to its main surviving activists from 1977 onwards, the RAF was able to regroup. With training, weapons, funds and false identity documents provided by the Stasi, the Red Army Faction launched a new offensive during the early 1980s. In August 1981 a car bomb attack on the European headquarters of the US airforce at Ramstein in West Germany injured seventeen people; a month later RAF terrorists made an unsuccessful rocket attack in Heidelberg on the car of General Frederick Kroesen. During another terrorist offensive in 1984-5, the RAF attempted to blow up the NATO school at Oberammergau, bombed the US airbase at Frankfurt/Main, and attacked American soldiers at Wiesbaden. The Stasi also connived in the bombing of the La Belle discothèque in West Berlin, helping to transport the explosives which killed an American sergeant and a Turkish woman and wounded 230 people, including fifty US servicemen. Other Stasi contacts included the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA and Carlos the Jackal. 96

In 1983, at the height of operation RYAN (the combined KGB/GRU attempt to find (nonexistent) evidence of US and NATO plans for a surprise nuclear attack), Andropov ordered preparations by Department 8 for terrorist attacks on British, American and NATO targets in Europe. Plans were made for a campaign of letter bombs to be sent to Mrs. Thatcher’s office at 10 Downing Street and to a series of prominent US and NATO representatives. 97At about the same time the KGB organized a series of dead drops in bars and restaurants near American bases in West Germany, intended to conceal explosives which could be detonated in a manner that would give the impression of terrorist attacks. The dead drop sites included behind a vending machine, in a ventilation cavity under a sink, on a wooden beam over a lavatory and underneath a paper-towel dispenser. By the time the sites were discovered by the CIA in 1985, however, operation RYAN was winding down and plans for a KGB terrorist campaign against NATO targets had been shelved. 98

In August 1983, while RYAN was still in full swing, the Centre instructed the main residencies in European NATO countries to step up their search for NATO preparations for

the secret infiltration of sabotage teams with nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons into the countries of the Warsaw Pact; [and] the expansion of the network of sabotage-training intelligence schools and increase in the recruitment of émigrés from the socialist countries and persons who know the language of these countries, and the creation of émigré military formations and sabotage and intelligence teams. 99

Though, as with most of the requirements for operation RYAN, there was no such intelligence to collect, the Centre’s instructions give an important insight into Moscow’s contingency plans for the role of Department 8 and its DRGs in an attack on NATO.

THE DECLINE AND fall of the Cold War brought a further decline in KGB special actions. The last major special action of the Soviet era was directed not against the traditional Main Adversary and its NATO allies, but against the reformers within the Soviet Union. On December 8, 1990 Kryuchkov, who had become KGB chairman two years earlier, summoned to his office in the Lubyanka his former chief-of-staff, Vyacheslav Zhizhin, now deputy chief of the FCD, and Alexei Yegorov of Counter-intelligence. There he instructed them to prepare a report on the measures needed to “stabilize” the country following the declaration of a state of emergency—in other words, the “special” and other actions required to preserve one-party rule and a centralized Soviet state.

Over the next eight months Kryuchkov repeatedly tried and failed to persuade Gorbachev to agree to the declaration of a state of emergency and the “stabilization” of the Soviet Union. The point of no return for himself and his co-conspirators was the agreement on July 23, 1991 of the text of a new Union Treaty which would have transferred many of the powers of central government to the republics. On August 4 Gorbachev, whom Kryuchkov had placed under close surveillance some months earlier as SUBJECT 110, left for his summer holidays in a luxurious dacha at Foros on the Crimean coast, intending to return to Moscow for the signing of the Union Treaty on August 20. The day after Gorbachev’s departure, Kryuchkov and his fellow plotters—chief among them the defence and interior ministers, Dmitri Yazov and Boris Pugo (former head of the Latvian KGB)—met at OBJECT ABC, a KGB sanatorium equipped with swimming pool, saunas, masseuses and cinema. There they secretly constituted themselves as the State Committee for the State of Emergency, and met over the next fortnight to make preparations for a coup which would forestall the signing of the Union Treaty. The committee ordered the printing of 300,000 arrest forms and the supply by a factory in Pskov of 250,000 pairs of handcuffs. Kryuchkov called all KGB personnel back from holiday, placed them on alert and doubled their pay. Two floors of cells in the Lefortovo prison were emptied to received important prisoners and a secret bunker prepared for the committee in the Lubyanka in case the going got rough.

On August 18 the plotters made a final attempt to intimidate Gorbachev into declaring a state of emergency. Having failed, they kept him incommunicado under house arrest in Foros and announced next day that the president was prevented by “ill health” from performing his duties, and that Vice-President Gennadi Yanayev had become acting president (in fact a mere figurehead) at the head of an eight-man State Committee for the State of Emergency. The plotters quickly discovered, however, that the old autocratic machinery of the one-party state was in too serious a state of disrepair for them to be able to turn back the clock. The Alpha group spetsnaz was supposed to storm the Moscow White House, the seat of government of the Russian Federation, and arrest its president, Boris Yeltsin, but failed to do either. Not one of the 7,000 reformers on the plotters’ detention list was arrested. The coup crumbled farcically and ignominiously in only four days. Pugo committed suicide. “Forgive me,” he wrote in a note to his children and grandchildren. “It was all a mistake. I lived honestly, all my life.” As Yazov was being led to a prison van, he said to those who arrested him, “Everything is clear now. I am such an old idiot. I’ve really fucked up.” Kryuchkov lacked sufficient self-knowledge to reach a similar conclusion. 100

The result of the final special action organized by the KGB was thus the precise opposite of what Kryuchkov and his fellow plotters had intended, accelerating both the collapse of the Communist one-party state and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The coup also ended in unprecedented humiliation for the KGB. On the evening of August 21 a heavy crane arrived in front of the Lubyanka and, before a cheering crowd, hoisted the giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky by a noose around his neck, toppled him from his pedestal and dragged him away to a field near the Tretyakov gallery, which became a graveyard for statues of the Soviet regime.

Our operational letter No. 24/[Line]F of April 14, 1969 sets out a draft plan for carrying out a Lily [sabotage operation] against the target codenamed VAZA [“Vase”].

The operation is codenamed YAYTSO [“Egg”].

The aim and purpose of the operation is to cause moral and political damage to the south-east wing of NATO.

Constant disagreements between Greece and Turkey cause great concern to the leadership of the USA and NATO and are a weak link in American policy in the area of southeast Europe.