Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

As well as benefiting from the HVA’s extensive ST operations in the FRG, the KGB’s own Line X agents spanned almost the whole of West German high technology. In addition to those in Siemens, Mitrokhin’s notes identify twenty-nine other agents of varying importance, some of them working for such major firms as Bayer, Dynamit Nobel, Messerschmitt and Thyssen. 126

The great majority of these espionage cases never came to court. One of the few which did was that of Manfred Rotsch (EMIL), who was betrayed by a French agent in Directorate T. 127As head of the planning department in the FRG’s largest arms manufacturer, Messerschmitt—Bîlkow—Blohm (MBB), Rotsch betrayed many of the secrets of NATO’s new fighter bomber, the Tornado (built by MMB jointly with British and Italian manufacturers), the Milan anti-tank missile and the Hot and Roland surface-to-air missiles. 128Rotsch was a highly professional well-trained spy, communicating with his controllers by microdot messages. 129His cover too was impeccable. While living an apparently conventional family life of almost tedious tranquility in a Munich suburb, he joined the conservative Christian Social Union and stood as a CSU candidate in Bavarian local elections. 130Mitrokhin’s brief note on EMIL indicates that he had already been recruited by the KGB before he left East Germany, ostensibly as a refugee, in 1954. 131Rotsch thus may well have been the longest-serving KGB agent planted in the FRG with East German assistance. Arrested in 1984, he was sentenced in 1986 to eight and a half years’ imprisonment but exchanged a year later for an East Berlin doctor serving a long prison term of solitary confinement. Though housed with his wife in a luxury East German lakeside villa, Rotsch had grown attached to his life in the West. Within a few months, both returned to their house near Munich and a frosty welcome from their scandalized neighbors. 132

STASI AND HVA offices were full of busts of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, commemorative plaques embellished with the sword and shield of the Cheka and other trinkets presented at convivial gatherings of GDR and Soviet intelligence officers at which operational successes against the FRG such as the East German Manfred Rotsch’s thirty years as a KGB agent were celebrated and toasts were drunk to the future. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, however, the near 40-year collaboration between HVA and KGB, the most successful (though characteristically rather one-sided) intelligence alliance in the Soviet Bloc, ended in East German charges of betrayal by Moscow. Most appeals for help to the Centre after the collapse of the GDR by former HVA officers and agents who feared prosecution in the West were met by an embarrassed silence from the KGB. On October 22, 1990 Wolf wrote to Gorbachev:

We were your friends. We wear a lot of your decorations on our breasts. We were said to have made a great contribution to your security. Now, in our hour of need, I assume that you will not deny us your help.

Gorbachev, however, did precisely that. Wolf appealed to him to insist on an amnesty for the Stasi and its foreign intelligence service before agreeing to German reunification. Gorbachev refused. “It was,” says Wolf bitterly, “the Soviets’ ultimate betrayal of their East German friends, whose work for over four decades had strengthened Soviet influence in Europe.” 133

For much, probably most, of the Cold War, the Paris residency ran more agents—usually about fifty plus—than any other KGB station in western Europe. Its most remarkable achievement during the Fourth Republic (1946-58) was the penetration of the French intelligence community, especially SDECE, the foreign intelligence agency. An incomplete list in KGB files of the residency’s particularly “valuable agents” in 1953 included four officials in the SDECE (codenamed NOSENKO, SHIROKOV, KORABLEV and DUBRAVIN) and one each in the domestic security service DST (GORYACHEV), the Renseignements Généraux (GIZ), the foreign ministry (IZVEKOV), the defense ministry (LAVROV), the naval ministry (PIZHO), the New Zealand embassy (LONG) and the press (ZHIGALOV). 1In 1954 30 per cent of all reports to the Centre from the Paris residency were based on information from its agents in the French intelligence community. 2

The basis for Soviet penetration of France during the Cold War had been laid at the end of the Second World War. Thanks both to the leading role played by the Communist Party in the French Resistance and the presence of Communist ministers in government until 1947, the few years after the Liberation had been a golden age for agent recruitment. 3Though the British and American intelligence communities were probably unaware of the identities of most Soviet agents in France, they were acutely conscious of the weakness of post-war French security and—for that reason—cautious about exchanging classified information with the SDECE and the DST. A 1948 assessment by the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), infused by a somewhat absurd sense of ethnic superiority, blamed the success of Soviet penetration on “inherent defects in the French character” as well as “the wide appeal of Communism in France.” Soviet intelligence, the JIC concluded, was able to exploit:

a. A natural garrulous tendency in the French character which makes the temptation to pass on “hot” information, albeit in strictest confidence,” almost irresistible.

b. A lack of “security consciousness” which leads to carelessness and insufficient precautions to guard classified documents.

c. A certain decline in moral standards in France, which, together with extremely low rates of pay, must contribute to the temptation to “sell” information… 4

The JIC’s supreme confidence in the inherent superiority of British over Gallic security was, presumably, at least slightly deflated three years later by the defection of Burgess and Maclean, Philby’s recall from Washington and the suspicion which fell on Blunt and Cairncross.

After the compromise of the British Magnificent Five in 1951, France became for the remainder of the decade the KGB’s most productive source of intelligence on Western policy to the Soviet Bloc. 5The KGB defectors Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov reported in 1954 that the Centre “found intelligence work particularly easy in France… The French operational section was littered with what looked like photostat copies of original French documents.” 6The Paris residency obtained important intelligence on Western negotiating positions before both the Berlin Conference early in 1954, the first between Soviet, American, British and French foreign ministers since 1949, and the Geneva four-power summit in July 1955, the first meeting of heads of government since the meeting of the Big Three at Potsdam ten years before. 7Thanks to the diplomatic ciphers provided by JOUR, a cipher clerk in the Quai d’Orsay recruited in 1945, the Centre also seems to have had access to plentiful French SIGINT. In 1957 JOUR was awarded the Order of the Red Star. 8It was probably largely thanks to JOUR that during the Cuban missile crisis, the KGB was able to supply the Kremlin with verbatim copies of diplomatic traffic between the Quai d’Orsay and its embassies in Moscow and Washington. 9

During the early Cold War, the Paris residency also appears to have been the most successful promoter of active measures designed to influence Western opinion and opinion-formers. Between 1947 and 1955 the residency sponsored a series of bogus memoirs and other propagandist works, among them: J’ai choisi la potence ( I Chose the Gallows ) by General Andrei Vlasov, who had fought with the Germans on the eastern front; the equally fraudulent Ma carriäre Ö l’êtat-major soviétique ( My Career in the Soviet High Command ) by “Ivan Krylov;” and bogus correspondence between Stalin and Tito, published in the weekly magazine Carrefour, in which Tito confessed to being a Trotskyist. The main author of the forgeries was Grigori Besedovsky, a former Soviet diplomat who had settled in Paris. Some of Besedovsky’s fabrications, which also included two books about Stalin by a non-existent nephew, were sophisticated enough to deceive even such a celebrated Soviet scholar as E. H. Carr, who in 1955 contributed a foreword to Notes for a Journal, fraudulently attributed to the former foreign commissar Maksim Litvinov. The resident in Paris from 1946 to 1948, Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, who had launched the Besedovsky frauds, was later appointed head of the FCD’s first specialized disinformation section, Department D (subsequently Service A), founded in 1959. 10