Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The Centre considered its penetration of the Italian interior ministry to be so important that in 1955 it handed over control of it to a newly established illegal residency in Rome, headed by YEFRAT (“Euphrates”). YEFRAT was Ashot Abgarovich Akopyan, a 40-year-old Armenian from Baku who had assumed the identity of a live double, Oganes Saradzhyan, a Lebanese Armenian living in the Soviet Union. Like many illegals, he was a gifted linguist, fluent—according to his file—in Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, French, Italian, Romanian and Turkish. His wife, Kira Viktorovna Chertenko, an ethnic Russian from Baku, was also an illegal, codenamed TANYA. YEFRAT and TANYA began their careers as illegals in Romania in 1948, obtained Italian visas by bribery and moved to Rome where they acquired passports in the name of Saradzhyan from the Lebanese embassy. YEFRAT’s original mission was to prepare the establishment of a new illegal residency in Iran, but in 1952 he and his wife were directed to Egypt instead. In 1954 they were recalled to Rome where YEFRAT was given 19,500 dollars to purchase a business to provide cover for an illegal residency. He was not, however, a successful businessman; an Italian firm with which he was involved went bankrupt. 137

YEFRAT’s residency was given control of DEMID, QUESTOR and a third agent in the interior ministry, CENSOR, who had probably been recruited by DEMID. CENSOR’s greatest coup was to abstract top secret documents from the safe of the director general of the security service in the ministry. 138YEFRAT also succeeded in renewing contact with a former agent, OMAR, who had been sacked from the interior ministry cipher department in 1948 and had obtained a job in what Mitrokhin’s notes describe as “a service attached to the American embassy.” For unexplained reasons, however, the quantity of high-grade intelligence produced by the agents in the interior ministry declined during the later 1950s. When exhortations by the Centre and a personal meeting between YEFRAT and Lazarev, the head of the Illegals Directorate S, failed to produce results, YEFRAT was recalled and his illegal residency closed. Control of his agents was handed back to the legal Rome residency. 139

THE ITALIAN EMBASSY in Moscow, like that of France, was a major KGB target. Whereas Second Chief Directorate operations against French diplomats culminated in an embarrassing public scandal, those against the Italian embassy achieved spectacular, unpublicized success. The weapons used against Italian diplomats were the normal stock-in-trade of the SCD: a combination of sexual compromise and blackmail. The SCD’s first victim was IKAR (“Icarus”), one of the service attachés in the Italian embassy who was seduced in the late 1950s by a KGB swallow, who then claimed to be pregnant and pretended to have an abortion. IKAR was confronted by an SCD officer, posing as the swallow’s enraged husband and signed a document agreeing to become a KGB agent in return for the supposed scandal being hushed up. In addition to providing classified information, IKAR also gave his SCD controller the combination number of his safe and a copy of the cipher he used to communicate with Rome.

IKAR, however, became increasingly anxious at the KGB’s hold over him—finally handing his controller a rather pathetic letter, promising to continue work as a Soviet agent but appealing for the undertaking he had signed to be destroyed:

Beneath your cloak, you are holding a dagger at the ready. The day that you trapped me by using methods which I regard as unworthy of your highly respected nation, I tried to convey to you that my attitude to you was friendly. Ignoring these feelings of mine, you have subjected me to various tests. Despite that, you still doubt my loyalty and my good intentions. You continue to hold a gun to my head, while uttering words of friendship and appreciation towards me. If these feelings of yours correspond with reality and are not a mere fiction, then give me some proof—that is to say, the question of destroying the document concerning the circumstances in which I was caught must be resolved between us. If you do not do this, I shall no longer be able to regard you as worthy of my friendship and of my friendly esteem.

I beg you to understand that I need your respect. Therefore, if you think that I am acting under the threat of the materials relating to the circumstances in which I was caught, you judge me wrongly. Find some means of testing my loyalty without threats. I believe that I shall not be found wanting. If you continue to doubt my sincerity, I shall not be able to work while I remain anxious, or continue to respect you.

IKAR was given a copy of his signed undertaking, carefully fabricated to look like the original, and destroyed it with evident relief in the presence of his controller. The original, however, remained in IKAR’s file, together with a Russian translation which was later transcribed by Mitrokhin. 140

Another member of the Italian embassy staff, codenamed PLATON, was also successfully blackmailed into becoming a KGB agent after falling victim to the same SCD honeytrap. The swallow (codenamed R) planted on him by the SCD moved into his Moscow flat, then pretended that she was pregnant. PLATON paid for her to have a (fictitious) abortion (a criminal act under Italian law), was threatened with exposure and agreed to become a KGB agent. By the time Mitrokhin saw PLATON’s file in 1976, he had left Moscow and a plan had been drawn up for Georgi Pavlovich Antonov, an Italian-speaking FCD officer formerly stationed in Rome, to renew contact with him in Belgium. 141Whether PLATON continued as a KGB agent after 1976 remains unknown.

One senior married Italian diplomat in Moscow was the victim of two honeytraps. When first targeted, ENERO (also codenamed INSPECTOR) was having an affair with a secretary at the French embassy. The SCD concluded that he had an insatiable “appetite for women,” selected a swallow, agent SUKHOVA, as his maid and secretly photographed them making love. During a visit to Tashkent, ENERO was seduced by another KGB swallow, Diana Georgiyevna Kazachenko, and further photographs were taken of their lovemaking. A Russian friend of ENERO (who, unknown to ENERO, was a KGB officer) then told him that the KGB had come into possession of photographs of him in bed with SUKHOVA, taken by a criminal gang who were about to stand trial, charged with taking compromising photographs which they intended to use for blackmail and extortion. Almost simultaneously, ENERO was informed that Kazachenko’s relatives had lodged an official complaint, accusing him of rape and claiming that he had made Kazachenko pregnant. Kazachenko, it was claimed, was now an invalid as a result of medical complications arising from the abortion.

An SCD operations officer, I.I. Kuznetsov, told ENERO that the Soviet authorities were prepared to hush both matters up if he agreed to “help” them. Though ENERO protested that Kuznetsov’s proposal was straightforward blackmail, he quickly gave way to it. According to his file, the intelligence he provided included information that the embassy was illegally smuggling into Moscow by diplomatic bag roubles purchased abroad at a fraction of the official exchange rate. Before leaving Moscow in the early 1970s, ENERO agreed to continue work as a KGB agent on his return to Italy and was given an initial payment of 500 US dollars. Soon afterwards Kusnetsov visited him in Rome to introduce his new case officer from the local residency. A year later, however, the residency reported that ENERO was avoiding meetings with his controller and had changed his private address. In 1979 a residency officer resumed contact but, since ENERO was now retired and in poor health, he was removed from the agent network. 142

The SCD’s greatest triumph in its operations against the Italian embassy in Moscow was the recruitment of a senior diplomat, successively codenamed ARTUR and ARLEKINO (“Harlequin”). ARTUR was first recruited by the Czechoslovak StB in the 1960s, which threatened to expose both his affair with a prostitute and his currency speculation unless he agreed to cooperate. When he was posted to Moscow some years later, control of him was transferred by the Czechs to the SCD. ARTUR’s file records that he was rewarded with “valuable presents” and all-expenses-paid hunting expeditions in the Moscow area. After his return to Italy, ARTUR continued to work for the KGB until 1983, several years after his retirement, when his muchreduced access to classified information led to his removal from the agent network. 143