Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The other two agents paid 170 roubles a month by the Rome residency were LORETO, a (probably disillusioned) Maoist militant who provided information on China’s contacts with its supporters in the European left, 168and METSENAT (“Patronage”), a corrupt civil servant whose motives were assessed as purely mercenary. 169The final codename on the January 1977 list of the Rome residency’s most valuable agents is that of TURIST, a newspaper publisher who was paid 150 roubles a month. 170In all, at least seven of the residency’s thirteen best-paid recruits, who each received between 150 and 240 roubles a month, were journalists. As in Paris, where a majority of the KGB’s most highly rated Line PR agents were also journalists, the Centre’s probably exaggerated confidence in their potential as agents of influence led it to undertake an ambitious series of active measures throughout the 1970s.

A Centre report on the Rome residency in August 1977 concluded that it had “an effective and reliable agent network” with sources in the foreign ministry, cabinet office, defense ministry and the main political parties. Each month the residency obtained between 40 and 50 intelligence reports from its agents. It was, however, criticized for its comparative lack of success against American, NATO and European Community targets. The Centre’s greatest praise was reserved for the residency’s influence operations: “[Its] agents coped successfully with active measures, including those on a large scale.” During 1977 operation CRESCENDO, which used forged documents to discredit the human rights policy of the Carter administration, and operation BONZA, targeted against the Chinese, were singled out for particular praise. 171

The Rome residency’s annual statistics for its active measures in 1977 were as follows:

articles published in the bourgeois press: 43

materials distributed: 1

letters drafted: 2

oral information disseminated: 1

conversations of influence: 13

interviews secured: 1

television appearances: 2

exhibitions mounted: 1

parliamentary questions inspired: 2

appeals inspired: 2 172

Such statistics, of course, mean relatively little unless it can be demonstrated that the active measures to which they refer had a significant influence on Italian opinion. Nowhere in the files examined by Mitrokhin, however, is there any sign of a serious, critical assessment of what active measures in Italy (or in most other countries) had actually achieved. Instead, any sign that Western opinion was hostile to any aspect of American policy or sympathetic to the Soviet Union was liable to be seized on uncritically as evidence of a successful KGB operation. Just as it suited the residencies to exaggerate the success of their active measures, so it also suited the Centre to report these successes to the Politburo.

AT LEAST HALF the Rome residency’s best-paid Line PR Italian agents in January 1977 were either taken off the KGB payroll or retired over the next five years. 173The first to go was TURIST. Apparently disillusioned by the evidence of Soviet abuses of human rights, TURIST made various pretexts for declining to co-operate during 1977 and by the end of the year had broken contact. According to his case officer, he “did not correctly understand and interpret the situation of believers and of the Church itself in the USSR, or that of dissidents.” In other words, TURIST had been alienated by the persecution of Soviet religious and political dissidents. An examination of TURIST’s file led Mitrokhin to doubt whether he had ever been a fully committed KGB agent. 174

In 1978 FIDELIO was also removed from the agent network after it was discovered that he was in regular touch with—and doubtless receiving money from—Hungarian intelligence, and had also made contact with the Czechoslovak and Polish services. 175In 1979 DARIO retired, followed by METSENAT in the following year. 176Simultaneously, RENATO and FRANK—like TURIST—were becoming disillusioned. RENATO was put on ice in 1980, initially for a four-year period; 177there is no evidence as to whether contact with him was subsequently resumed. FRANK’s case officer complained that he was too easily “influenced by anti-Soviet propaganda” following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland two years later. FRANK was also reported to be associated with one of those arrested for involvement with the Red Brigades. He was removed from the agent network in 1982. 178

The disillusion of FRANK, who a few years earlier had been one of the KGB’s most highly paid Italian agents, epitomized the problems faced by Service A as it tried to devise new influence operations in the early 1980s. Though no KGB report dared say so, active measures could not possibly repair the damage done to the image of the Soviet Union by the invasion of Afghanistan and the suppression of Solidarity.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE of the KGB’s active measures during the early and mid-1980s in Italy and France, as in western Europe as a whole, were those which exploited popular currents of anti-Americanism and the fear of nuclear war. Though the first step in the renewed nuclear arms race had been the Soviet decision in 1978 to begin the deployment of SS20s (a new generation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles), Western peace movements were far more critical of the subsequent decision by NATO to station Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe from 1983. As Mitterrand once drily observed, “The missiles are in the East, but the peace protests are in the West.” It is reasonable to assume, but difficult to prove, that the constant stream of Soviet peace propaganda, reinforced by KGB active measures, encouraged—even if it did not cause—the overconcentration by most Western peace activists on the nuclear menace posed by Reagan and his NATO allies rather than on that from the Soviet Union. In February 1984, Kryuchkov reported to a conference of senior FCD officers, when reviewing active measures over the previous two years:

Considerable work has been done to provide support for unofficial organizations [such as peace movements] in a number of countries abroad in their struggle against implementation of the American administration’s militarist plans. 179

The Centre’s confidence that it now possessed a nerve-hold on Western public opinion was reflected in the first three priorities which it laid down for active measures in 1984, the year before Gorbachev became Soviet leader:

• counteracting attempts by the USA and NATO to destroy the existing military strategic equilibrium and to acquire military superiority over the USSR; compromising the aggressive efforts of imperialist groups and their plans for preparing a nuclear missile war…

• deepening disagreements inside NATO…

• exposing before the international community the plans made by the USA to launch a war, its refusal to negotiate in good faith with the USSR on limiting armaments; stimulating further development of the anti-war and antimissile movements in the West, involving in them influential political and public figures and broad strata of the population, and encouraging these movements to take more decisive and coordinated action. 180

KGB active measures in western Europe were much less successful during the Gorbachev era as a result both of East-West détente and of glasnost within the Soviet Union. By 1987 Gorbachev and his advisers were visibly concerned that Western exposure of KGB disinformation might take the gloss off the new Soviet image in the West. The claim that the AIDS virus had been “manufactured” by American biological warfare specialists—one of the most successful active measures of the mid-1980s—was officially disowned by Moscow, though it continued to circulate for several years in the Third World and the more gullible sections of the Western media. During the later 1980s Soviet front organizations were increasingly exposed as frauds. The most important of them, the World Peace Council, lost most of its remaining credibility in 1989 when it admitted that 90 percent of its income came from the Soviet Union. 181