Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Far from using Wilson as an agent or confidential contact after he became prime minister in 1964, the London residency commissioned articles attacking various of his policies by an agent codenamed DAN, recruited in 1959, who contributed to the left-wing weekly Tribune. DAN’s file records that he published material given him by the KGB and wrote articles on “theses” devised by Service A, the active measures section at the Centre. Though Mitrokhin’s brief notes on the file do not record whether DAN received regular payment, they do mention that in February 1967 he was given a “reward” of 200 pounds. 49

The most prominent British journalist targeted by the Centre during the early years of the Cold War to be identified in the KGB files noted by Mitrokhin was Edward Crankshaw. From the start of the Cold War until some years after his retirement in 1968, Crankshaw was Britain’s most authoritative commentator on Soviet affairs. During the Second World War he had served for two years with the British Military Mission in Russia. In 1947 he was “half-flattered, half-bullied” by the editor of the Observer, David Astor, into returning to Moscow as the paper’s Russian and East European correspondent. For the next generation, he kept up what he called “a continual running commentary on what I thought the Russians were up to” in the Observer, its globally syndicated Foreign News Service, the New York Times Sunday Magazine and “lectures and broadcasts all over the place.” 50Crankshaw’s voluminous “running commentary,” diffused around the world, was a source of continuous annoyance to both the Kremlin and the Centre. “There is only one group of people in the world today,” he wrote in 1951, “which is actively and deliberately… committed to the downfall of our society: the group of Russians who form the government of the Soviet Union.” 51

The KGB tried various methods of bringing pressure on Crankshaw to modify his views—all without success. Some of the methods used were attempts to exploit his sexual liaisons in Moscow. Though “slight and gentlemanly in appearance,” according to his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, “Crankshaw controlled a wild and independent nature.” 52While serving with the wartime military mission, he had lived with the artist T. S. Andreyevskaya and her friend E. S. Rosinevich. In 1948 both were arrested, forced to confess to being British spies and sent to labor camp. 53Crankshaw was not intimidated, but the fate of the two women may well have inspired a moving description by him in 1948 of others who suffered similar fates:

Another thing you become aware of in the north, and which dominated your ideas, is forced labor in its many different forms. As you sit at breakfast in your hotel you hear the dreadful sound of a woman wailing, half hysterically, in the street outside. And looking out you see thirty or forty women and girls being marched along the frozen street by guards with fixed bayonets, each woman with a small bundle. You do not know where they are going; but you know that they are being marched away against their will, that the call came suddenly and roughly, and that behind them they are leaving homes which are, as it were, still warm, while they trudge through the snow with nothing but their bundles. 54

In 1959 photographs were taken of Crankshaw while engaged in what Mitrokhin’s notes describe as “sexual frolics.” 55If the photographs were shown to Crankshaw, as was usual in such cases, he was, once again, not intimidated—although the episode may have helped to inspire his reminder in the Observer that past atrocities committed by the KGB remained “part of the present:”

Still no voice in the Soviet Union can be heard to say that the collectivization, the mass arrests, the deportations and killings were appalling crimes, past now, but never to be forgotten, and this means in effect that for all the remarkable changes since Stalin, the Khrushchev Government is still condoning those crimes. 56

Soon after Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, he gave his approval for an operation designed either to blackmail Crankshaw by using the photographs taken in 1959, and perhaps on other occasions, or to discredit him by sending them to the Observer. The operation, however, was abandoned at the urging of the London residency, which no doubt calculated correctly that Crankshaw would not give way to blackmail and that his editor would stand by him. 57

Though the photographs of Crankshaw’s “sexual frolics” were never published, similar pictures were used in an active measure codenamed operation PROBA designed to discredit the Conservative MP Commander Anthony Courtney, who had aroused the ire of the Centre by campaigning against the growing size of the London residency. 58In 1965 the KGB produced a leaflet containing photographs of Courtney having sex with an unidentified woman, and circulated copies to his wife, other MPs and newspaper editors. Though intended to give the impression that Courtney was having an adulterous affair, the photographs had in fact been taken by the SCD four years earlier during a trip by Courtney, then a widower, to a Moscow trade fair. While in Moscow Courtney had been seduced by an Intourist guide who visited him in a hotel room fitted with a concealed KGB camera. The ensuing scandal, which began with a story in Private Eye, was largely responsible for Courtney’s failure to hold his seat at the 1965 general election. 59The KGB file on operation PROBA also claimed the credit for the breakdown of Courtney’s marriage and the failure of his business career. 60

The KGB’s main targets for sexual compromise operations throughout the Cold War were foreign embassies in Moscow. The files noted by Mitrokhin suggest that few, if any, embassies escaped some degree of penetration by KGB swallows. The most successful seduction within the British embassy during the Brezhnev era, though it achieved far less than the entrapment of John Vassall, was probably that of a 30-year-old married male diplomat codenamed KAREV, who was seduced by his family’s Russian maid, codenamed CH. On KGB instructions, using a stratagem successfully deployed against a number of foreign diplomats, CH pretended to be pregnant and sought KAREV’s help in arranging an abortion, for which she claimed to have received help from an embassy protection officer. KAREV was persuaded to show his gratitude by giving some biographical information on embassy personnel, including the identities of SIS officers working under diplomatic cover. To compromise KAREV further, CH then pretended that she was pregnant again and needed help in arranging another abortion. Soon afterward CH was arrested on KGB instructions for being found in possession of Western currency given her by KAREV. On this occasion KAREV sought the help of a Soviet official, whom he probably realized was a KGB officer, both to arrange the second fictitious abortion and to have charges against CH dropped. Since KAREV’s tour of duty in Moscow was about to end, he was persuaded to agree to a meeting with a KGB officer during his next posting. Once out of Moscow, however, KAREV succeeded in holding the KGB at arm’s length. On being shown his file, Philby advised against attempting to compromise KAREV publicly, as in the case of Commander Courtney, probably because the hand of the KGB would have been too obvious. 61

IN BRITAIN, AS in the United States, 62the Centre’s strategy during much of the Cold War was based on the attempt to establish a network of illegal residencies which would prove more difficult for MI5 to monitor than the legal residency at the Soviet embassy, and which could continue to operate if the Cold War turned into hot war. Its first post-war choice of illegal resident was Konon Trofimovich Molody (codenamed BEN), the son of two Soviet scientists, who seems to have been selected in childhood as a potential foreign intelligence officer. In 1932, at only ten years of age, he was sent, with official approval, to live with an aunt in California and attend secondary school in San Francisco, where he became fluent in English before returning to Moscow in 1938. During the Great Patriotic War he joined the NKVD and, according to a stilted official hagiography, “made frequent sorties into the enemy’s rear… brilliantly displaying such qualities as boldness and valor.” After the war Molody took a degree in Chinese and worked as a Chinese language instructor before beginning training as an illegal in 1951. 63