Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

A number of other Italian embassies around the world also contained KGB agents: among them DENIS, a cipher clerk stationed in the Middle East and recruited in 1961; 144VITTORIO, a former member of the PCI recruited in Latin America in 1970; 145and PLEMYANNIK (“Nephew”), a cipher clerk in the Middle East recruited with the help of Bulgarian intelligence in 1977. 146As well as providing large numbers of documents, the KGB’s agents inside the Italian foreign ministry and embassies abroad must also have made a major contribution to the success of the Sixteenth Directorate in decrypting Italian diplomatic telegrams, which continued at least until the mid-1980s. 147Mitrokhin’s notes provide very few details on the content of the remarkable number of diplomatic documents which reached the Centre and nothing on the content of the decrypts. The implications of the KGB files on Italy and France to which he had access are, none the less, very great. So great was the Centre’s access to classified French and Italian diplomatic traffic that, at numerous points during the Cold War, both France and Italy were conducting, so far as the Soviet Union was concerned, something akin to open diplomacy.

THOUGH LINE X operations in Italy were on about half the scale of those in France, they included some striking successes. In 1970 the co-owners of a small high-tech company, METIL (“Methyl”) and BUTIL (“Butyl”), jointly supplied the KGB with full technical documentation on the production of butyl rubber, which was used in the construction of the Soviet Sumgait rubber factory and led to the redesign of production lines at the Nizhnekama Combine and the Kuybyshev Synthetic Rubber Works. Directorate T calculated that their ST had produced a saving of 16 million roubles. METIL and BUTIL were paid 50,000 dollars. In the mid-1970s BUTIL provided other highly rated intelligence, some from American sources, on chemical and petrochemical processes. 148

In 1970 the Rome residency had nine Line X officers who ran about ten agents, 149composed chiefly of businessmen but including an important minority of academics. 150There was some expansion of ST operations during the later 1970s both in Rome 151and in Milan, where a senior Line X officer, Anatoli Vasilyevich Kuznetsov (codenamed KOLIN), was posted in 1978 under consular cover. 152Probably the most important Line X agent at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s was UCHITEL (“Teacher”), who taught at a major university and was controlled by Kuznetsov. 153Using his wide range of academic and business contacts, UCHITEL provided ST from a total of eight major companies and research institutes in Italy, West Germany, France and Belgium, and carried out other KGB assignments in the USA and FRG. UCHITEL’s most valuable intelligence seems to have concerned military aircraft, helicopters, aero-engine construction and airborne guidance systems. Among the intelligence he supplied was information on NATO’s newest combat aircraft, the Tornado, jointly developed by Britain, the FRG and Italy. 154Doubtless unknown to UCHITEL, at least one of his university colleagues, a nuclear physicist codenamed MARIO, was also a KGB agent. 155Another academic, KARS, who operated as a Line X agent in both Italy and the United States, also appears to have been based at the same university. 156

Though Soviet scientists working as KGB agents or co-optees used a variety of methods to lure their Western colleagues into secret collaboration, they commonly promised both money and privileged access to Soviet research in their fields. A probably typical example was the agreement, dated September 12, 1976, concluded by Professor Georgi Nikolayevich Aleksandrov (agent AYUN) of the Lenin Polytechnic Institute Imeni Kalinin (LPI) with KULON, a senior member of an Italian research institute:

In view of the importance of the exchange of scientific and technical information and the timeliness of obtaining information on research in other countries, LPI on the one hand, in the person of its pro-rector for scientific contacts with foreign countries, V. A. Serebryannikov, and [the Italian research institute] on the other hand, in the person of the scientific adviser to its director, Professor [KULON], have agreed as follows:

(1) Professor [KULON] agrees to use his own and LPI’s facilities to assist LPI in obtaining scientific and technical information on basic problems of electronics of an applied nature. This scientific and technical information should be in the form of reports and articles which have not been published in journals, or of materials put out by firms on the results of studies by firms and scientific institute laboratories in the United States, the FRG, France, the UK and Japan [Directorate T’s five main targets]. If the information is of a confidential nature, it will be transmitted to LPI’s pro-rector or his representative at personal meetings, which may be held in one of three countries as agreed. The pro-rector’s request will be made in the form of a separate list. LPI will pay in any currency for acquisitions…

(2) For its part LPI undertakes to assist Professor [KULON] to publish in closed specialized Soviet journals and to arrange for invitations for him to the USSR in order to learn about other institutions in the USSR and to carry out joint studies, and for familiarization with major hydroelectric stations and power transmission lines.

Most meetings between KULON and his KGB contacts took place in Switzerland. 157Though KULON seems to have remained a confidential contact, similar approaches to other Western scientists sometimes led to their recruitment as agents.

ST operations in Italy suffered a serious setback on August 5, 1981 with the unpublicized expulsion of probably the most senior Line X officer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, which caused inevitable KGB anxiety as to whether UCHITEL and his other agents had been detected by Italian counterintelligence. An investigation at the Centre arrived at three possible explanations for the expulsion: that some of Kuznetsov’s Line X operations dating from his period at the Paris residency from 1970 to 1975 had come to light; or that his work as security officer for the Soviet colony in northern Italy, which he combined with his Line X work, had blown his cover as consul in Milan; or that his frequent trips from Milan to Turin had aroused suspicion. 158It does not seem to have occurred to the Centre until its investigation of the FAREWELL case in 1982 that the leak which led to Kuznetsov’s downfall might have come from within Directorate T.

BY THE 1970s a majority of the most highly rated Line PR agents run by both the Rome and Paris residencies were journalists. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin contains a list of the thirteen most highly paid political intelligence agents run by the Rome residency at the beginning of 1977. 159Of the six best-paid, each of whom received 240 hard currency roubles a month, at least three were journalists: FRANK, recruited in 1966, who held a senior position on a major newspaper; 160POD-VIZHNY (“Agile”), also a well-known journalist; 161and STAZHER (“Trainee”), who had been recruited in 1969 and worked in the Rome bureau of a news agency. 162The other three agents paid 240 roubles a month by the Rome residency were DARIO, the veteran agent-recruiter in the Foreign Ministry; NEMETS (“German”), a well-known left-wing politician; and ORLANDO, who cannot be clearly identified from Mitrokhin’s notes. 163

The next best-paid agents of the Rome residency at the beginning of 1977 were six who received 170 roubles a month. No information is available on the occupation of one of the six, ACERO; Mitrokhin’s notes reveal his identity and indicate that he was probably recruited not later than 1969, but give no further details. 164Of the five whose occupations are identified, three—FIDELIO, RENATO and MAVR—were journalists. RENATO, recruited in 1974, was editor of a periodical. 165FIDELIO, who became an agent in 1975, was director of a press agency. 166MAVR, a left-wing journalist on a leading Rome daily recruited some years earlier than RENATO or FIDELIO, also acted as agent-recruiter. Among his recruits was ARALDO, a civil servant who, according to MAVR, regarded the whole Italian political establishment as a “den of thieves” and was happy to earn a share of the spoils by selling classified documents. 167