Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

There was no prospect of a recantation by Yakunin. Only his wife was allowed to attend his trial. The rest of his family and friends, along with the Western press, were refused admittance, while what one correspondent described as “burly young men in ill-fitting suits,” selected by the KGB, filed into the courtroom. Probably to protect his cover, Fonchenkov was among those who were turned away. 56Those called to give evidence against Yakunin included several KGB agents inside the Orthodox Church, among them Iosif Pustoutov (YESAULENKO), former representative of the Moscow Patriarchate at the Prague headquarters of the Christian Peace Conference, who testified to the harmful international consequences of the Christian Committee’s work. Yakunin accepted his sentence of five years’ imprisonment, followed by five years’ internal exile, with the words, “I thank God for this test He has sent me. I consider it a great honor, and, as a Christian, accept it gladly.” The British Council of Churches sent an appeal to Brezhnev, urging the court to reconsider its opinion. Attempts to gain the support of the World Council of Churches for a similar appeal met with no response. 57

A change in WCC rules before its Vancouver Assembly in 1983 ensured that the KGB suffered no repetition of the embarrassment caused by the discussion of the Yakunin and Regelson letter at the previous assembly seven and a half years earlier. Under the new regulations, probably prompted by the KGB agents on the WCC council:

Appeals from groups or individuals for World Council of Churches intervention cannot be acted on by the assembly without the support of delegates or member churches, but will be followed up by the WCC general secretary.

An open letter from Vladimir Rusak, a Russian Orthodox deacon who had been dismissed for writing an unauthorized history of the Church after the October Revolution, appealed to delegates at Vancouver to “stop treating the propagandistic claims of Soviet delegates as the only source of information” on religion in the Soviet Union. He also urged the assembly to hold a frank debate on religious freedom. The mere discussion of the Yakunin-Regelson letter at Nairobi had “yielded some definite results” by embarrassing the authorities into the “hurried publication” of some copies of the Bible. The assembly also received another letter on behalf of thirty-five imprisoned Soviet Christians and 20,000 persecuted Pentecostalists who wished to emigrate to the West. Unsurprisingly, neither letter received support from Soviet delegates and neither was discussed at the assembly.

The embarrassment of the Afghan War was also successfully contained. Despite the desire of a minority of delegates for “a condemnation of Soviet aggression and the unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops,” the final compromise resolution called for a Soviet withdrawal only “in the context of an overall political settlement between Afghanistan and the USSR” (conveniently ignoring the fact that the Kabul regime had been installed by the Soviet invaders) and “an end to the supply of arms to the opposition groups from outside” (in other words, the denial of arms to those resisting the Soviet invasion). These were precisely the conditions which the Soviet Union itself laid down for the withdrawal of its troops. Unsurprisingly, the Russian Orthodox delegation praised the final resolution as “balanced and realistic.” The Vancouver Assembly had no such inhibitions in condemning the West. Western capitalism was duly denounced as the main source of injustice in the world, responsible for the evils of sexism, racism, “cultural captivity, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.” 58

The success, in Moscow’s view, of the Vancouver Assembly, probably helps to explain why the Centre established as one of the priorities for KGB active measures for 1984:

Exerting influence in our favor on the activity of… clerical organizations on the questions of war and peace, and other key contemporary problems. 59

Looking back on his career in the KGB, Oleg Kalugin concludes that, like “the stranglehold over the Church inside the Soviet Union,” the penetration and exploitation of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad was “one of the most sordid and little known chapters in the history of our organization.” 60Mitrokhin came to the same conclusion, commenting at one point in his notes that the files contained “a whirlpool of filth.” 61The KGB used its agents among Russian Orthodox clergy in the West not merely to spy on émigré communities but also to identify possible agent recruits. 62Though the Russian Orthodox Church in north America was split, the faction which remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate was, according to Kalugin, “riddled with KGB agents.” 63Among the agents identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin was a cleric codenamed PETROV, who was sent to north America in the 1970s. His case officers in north America contacted him by using the passwords “Pyotr Mikhailovich,” the first name and patronymic of his Fifth Directorate controller in Moscow. 64

The file on Arkadi Rodyonovich Tyshchuk (VORONOV), a priest who was posted to the Nikolsky Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York from 1977 to 1982, contains evidence of a hostility to the United States which may also have helped to motivate other Orthodox priests in the KGB’s north American network. The United States, VORONOV told his KGB case officer, suffered from the sin of pride—“and pride comes before a fall:”

When a country declares itself to be the most powerful and the richest, and that its government is the smartest and possesses the best weapons—that is not maturity, it is bragging, and is the reason for the downfall of all the powerful nations of the past.

VORONOV usually met his controller from the New York residency either at the Soviet mission to the United Nations, where he went to collect his correspondence from Russia, or on board the ship Mikhail Lermontov, which regularly came into port at New York. More difficult to explain than his hostility to the United States was his apparent admiration for the KGB which, according to his file, he bizarrely described as a “good shepherd” and a “true Russian spiritual guardian and shepherd.” 65

Russian Orthodox priests in the West were also used by FCD Directorate S to collect material for use in devising the well-documented legends of KGB illegals. In the early 1970s, for example, two KGB agents in the Moscow Patriarchate were sent to carry out detailed research on parish registers in Canada. Ivan Grigoryevich Borcha (codenamed FYODOR), who worked as a priest in prairie parishes of Ukrainian and Romanian communities, studied registers in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Viktor Sergeyevich Petlyuchenko (PATRIOT), who was assigned to Orthodox parishes in Edmonton, carried out further research in Alberta. 66

The Russian Orthodox Church, both at home and abroad, took a prominent part in the Rodina (“Motherland”) Society founded as a front organization by the KGB in December 1975 to promote “cultural relations with compatriots abroad,” and thus provide new opportunities for agent recruitment among émigré communities. Its vice-president, P. I. Vasilyev, was a senior member of the FCD’s Nineteenth (Soviet émigré) Department and headed a secret Rodina intelligence section. 67Metropolitan Aleksi of Tallinn and Estonia (agent DROZDOV), 68the future Patriarch Aleksi II, who was made a Rodina council member, told its opening conference, “We are all united by our love for our Socialist motherland.” Through its exarchates, dioceses and parishes in Europe, America, Asia and Africa, the Orthodox Church “continued to maintain spiritual ties with our compatriots” and was “doing its best to keep these contacts alive and active.” 69Metropolitan Aleksi is unlikely to have been unaware that these contacts were exploited by the KGB. According to a KGB document of 1988, “An order was drafted by the USSR KGB chairman to award an honorary citation to agent DROZDOV” for unspecified services to state security. 70