Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

THOUGH NEVER FULLY satisfied by the extent of its stranglehold over the Orthodox Church, the KGB was far more concerned by the “subversive” activities of those Christians over whom it had no direct control. The largest of the underground churches was the Greek Catholic (or Uniate) Church of Ukraine (nowadays the Ukrainian Catholic Church), whose liturgy and structure followed the “Eastern Rite” but which accepted the authority of Rome. Fearful at the end of the Second World War that the Uniate Church would provide a focus for Ukrainian nationalism, Stalin set out to terrorize it into submission to Moscow. In 1946 a mock synod in Lviv cathedral, staged by the MGB with the assistance of a small number of Uniate stooges and the blessing of the Orthodox hierarchy, announced the “reunion” of the Greek Catholics with the Russian Orthodox Church. Greek Catholic Archbishop (later Cardinal) Josyf Slipyj wrote later:

Our priests were given the choice of either joining the “church of the Regime” and thereby renouncing Catholic unity, or enduring for at least ten years the harsh fate of deportation and all the penalties associated with it. The overwhelming majority of priests chose the way of the Soviet Union’s prisons and concentration camps.

Almost overnight, the four million Uniate Christians became the world’s largest illegal church. All but two of its ten bishops, along with many thousands of priests and believers, died for their faith in the Siberian gulag. 71

In 1963 Slipyj was expelled to Rome, leaving Bishop (later Archbishop) Vasyl Velychkovsky as effective leader of the underground church. The KGB immediately deployed five agents—TIKHOV, SIDORENKO, ROMANENKO, SOVA and PODOLENIN (none identified in Mitrokhin’s notes)—in a series of attempts to discredit Velychkovsky among the persecuted Uniate faithful. TIKHOV, evidently a member of the underground church, periodically sent to Slipyj in the Vatican letters containing disinformation about Velychkovsky fabricated by the Centre. According to KGB files, Slipyj sent his own emissaries to the Ukraine to check the truth of the allegations against his successor, but agents who were planted on them confirmed TIKHOV’s fabrications. 72KGB reports, however, probably overstated the success of their active measures. There is no convincing evidence of a breach between Slipyj and Velychkovsky.

In July 1967 a conference of senior officials of Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies met in Budapest to discuss “work against the Vatican; measures to discredit the Vatican and its backers; and measures to exacerbate differences within the Vatican and between the Vatican and capitalist countries.” 73Two senior KGB officers, Agayants and Khamazyuk, addressed the conference on “The Hostile Activity of the Vatican and of the Catholic and Uniate Clergy on the Territory of the USSR and the Experience of the [KGB] Agencies in Countering this Activity.” A third, Kulikov, spoke on “Some aspects of agent operational work against Vatican institutions.” On the proposal of the KGB delegation, all but the Romanian representatives agreed on the need to intensify “work against the Vatican in close relation with the work against the Main Adversary.” Andropov, who regarded the Uniates as the spearhead of the Vatican’s ideological sabotage offensive in the Soviet Union, wrote to the Central Committee, emphasizing the importance of the conference’s conclusions. 74

Andropov’s obsession with ideological subversion by the Holy See was doubtless reinforced by the claim in a 1968 intelligence report that the Vatican’s Secretariat of State had devised a masterplan to shatter the unity of the Soviet Union and had given the Deputy Secretary of State, Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, the task of implementing it. 75A Centre assessment of 1969 repeated the claim that the Vatican was out “to shatter the Soviet Union from within with the help of ideological sabotage”:

Church people were disseminating Church propaganda literature, praising the Western way of life, whipping up nationalist feelings among the population of Soviet Republics and sowing distrust among Soviet people towards Soviet and Party agencies. 76

A professional antireligioznik from the Ukraine, speaking at an official conference in 1969, paid unwitting tribute to the continued vitality of the persecuted Uniates:

Nurturing hopes for the restoration of the Uniate Church, its apologists are working on the clergy who reunited with Orthodoxy, trying to persuade them to repudiate the “Muscovites” and to adopt openly or secretly a Uniate, pro-Vatican line. In some regions of the Ukraine, illegal schools were organized to train new Uniate priests. In a series of localities, the Uniates have willfully opened previously closed churches and have been conducting [unauthorized] religious services… 77

On April 4, 1969 Andropov approved further “measures to intensify the struggle against subversive activity by the Vatican and the Uniates on the territory of the USSR in 1969-70,” to be implemented jointly by the FCD, the Fifth (Dissidents and Ideological Subversion) Directorate and local KGBs. The FCD was instructed, somewhat ambitiously, to attempt the agent penetration of all major sections of the Vatican bureaucracy, the Jesuit order, the Russicum and other pontifical colleges training priests for Eastern churches, as well as to make operational contact with three Roman clerics—codenamed APOSTOL, RASS and SLUGA—who had been born in the Soviet Union. 78Among the few successes in this ambitious program by the end of 1969 which Mitrokhin found in Centre files was the penetration of pontifical colleges by KGB agents from the legally established Catholic Church in the Soviet Union, particularly the Baltic republics. PETROV and ROGULIN, both agents of the Fifth Directorate, had arrived in Rome in January 1968 to begin three years’ study at the Russicum; in 1969 they went on an intelligence-gathering mission to “Catholic centers” in France and Belgium. 79During 1969, two KGB agents from Lithuania, ANTANAS and VIDMANTAS, were studying at the Gregorian University. 80Two other Lithuanian agents, DAKTARAS (a bishop) and ZHIBUTE, took part in the working commission for the reform of the Canon Law Codex, held at the Vatican from May 21 to June 11, 1969. DAKTARAS told his case officer that, at a papal audience on June 7, Paul VI had told him, “I remember you in my prayers and hope that God will help the clergy and believers [in Lithuania].” 81

With the assistance of the Hungarian AVH, the KGB also succeeded in cultivating a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Eastern Church, Uniate Bishop Dudás, who was resident in Hungary. A Fifth Directorate female agent, POTOCHINA, who had probably infiltrated the underground church in Ukraine, traveled regularly to Hungary on the pretext of visiting a relative and—according to her file—succeeded in winning Dudás’s confidence. 82Dudás doubtless never suspected that she was a KGB agent, sent to obtain intelligence on the Vatican’s secret contacts with the Ukrainian Uniates.

The operations against the Vatican approved by Andropov in April 1969 also included a series of active measures. The KGB was instructed to find ways of creating distrust between émigré clerics in Rome and Uniates and other Catholics in the Soviet Union. The leading KGB agents in the Russian Orthodox Church who were in contact with the Vatican—DROZDOV (Metropolitan Aleksi), ADAMANT (Metropolitan Nikodim), SVYATOSLAV and NESTEROV (both unidentified)—were instructed “to cause dissension between Vatican organizations such as the Congregation for the Eastern Church, the Secretariat for Christian Unity and the Commission for Justice and Peace.” In order to put pressure on the Vatican “to cease its subversive activity,” ADAMANT was also instructed to tell his contacts in the Roman Curia that the Soviet government was contemplating establishing autonomous Catholic churches in the Baltic republics and elsewhere in the Soviet Union which would be independent of Rome. The Lithuanian bishop DAKTARAS passed on the same message when he attended a bishop’s conference in Rome in October 1969. 83There is no evidence that any of the active measures had a discernible effect on Vatican policy.