Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

As well as giving higher priority to operations against the Vatican, Andropov also stepped up the persecution of the Ukrainian Uniates. In 1969 the head of the underground church, Bishop Velychkovsky, was arrested and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The KGB reported that his arrest “greatly helped to achieve a psychological breakthrough in the mind of SERAFIM,” another leading figure in the Uniate underground, who was recruited as a KGB agent. According to Mitrokhin’s notes on his file:

SERAFIM explained in detail by whom, when and in what circumstances he was tasked to direct monks illegally; he reported incidents of criminal organizational activity by Bishop Velychkovsky and his close contacts; he reported on the situation among underground orders of monks… and he drew up a list of Uniate priests operating illegally. SERAFIM’s answers were recorded covertly on tape.

Though SERAFIM agreed to “cooperate secretly” with the KGB, he refused to sign the written undertaking required of most informers. His controller did not insist, on the grounds that it would represent too great “a psychological trial for a man of religion” and leave him in fear of “divine punishment in the next world.” Another agent, terrified of “being cast into Hell,” had once begged the controller, on bended knee, to return his signed undertaking. 84

In 1971 the KGB also succeeded in recruiting in Lviv one of the leading members of an underground order of Uniate monks, codenamed IRENEY, who served as one of the main points of contact with the Catholic Church in Poland. The Fifth Department regarded IRENEY as a tough nut to crack. If confronted directly with his “illegal activity,” he would probably be strong enough to withstand the usual uncompromising interrogation. If given too many details of his activities, he would be able to identify members of the underground church who had informed on him. The KGB decided to begin by mounting a major surveillance operation on IRENEY’s sister and “conspiratorial” collaborator, MARIYA. After MARIYA’s sudden death, with IRENEY in deep depression, his case officer judged that the time was ripe for “a complex recruitment operation.” IRENEY was brought in for interrogation and given extensive details of his ministry in the underground church, carefully designed to give the misleading impression that MARIYA had been informing on him for many years. Mitrokhin’s notes give the following summary of the interrogator’s self-congratulatory report:

The monk lost the power of speech; he was totally stunned by this astonishing thought. His wild eyes, trembling hands, and the perspiration which covered his face betrayed his strong spiritual turmoil… Judging that denials were useless, [IRENEY] described the membership of the illegal leadership of the monastic order in Ukraine; he named Uniate authorities and monks who had come to Lvov [Lviv] through the tourist channel; and he spoke of his own journey to Poland in 1971 and of the meetings that he had held there. A month later, [IRENEY] was recruited… but refused to give a signed undertaking.

IRENEY remained so convinced that his sister had been a KGB agent that, when passing information to his controller, he frequently added the comment, “No doubt my sister told you this.” According to his KGB file, he never ceased to marvel at the way in which sister had succeeded in keeping her KGB connection a secret from him. 85

In 1972, like Slipyj nine years earlier, Bishop Velychkovsky was deported to the Vatican. A year later the KGB managed to gain access to Slipyj. Cardinal Felici invited to the Vatican a leading Uniate cleric from Czechoslovakia, unaware that he was a KGB agent codenamed PROFESSOR. Originally recruited by the Czechoslovak StB, PROFESSOR had been used by the KGB in 1971 to go on a supposedly “pastoral” visitation of the Redemptorist Order in Ukraine in order to provide intelligence on the activities of the underground church and its links with Rome. In September 1973 he met Slipyj in the Vatican. Plans were made for PROFESSOR to meet the Uniate leadership in Lviv, but Mitrokhin’s notes do not record whether this meeting went ahead. 86

In February 1975 a conference of Soviet Bloc intelligence services considered the coordination of operations against, and agent penetration in, the Vatican. 87The Polish SB, Czechoslovak StB and Hungarian AVH all reported that they had “significant agent positions in the Vatican.” Mitrokhin’s notes record no such claim by the KGB. As at the similar conference in 1967, however, a hugely ambitious and unrealistic program for agent penetration was drawn up, which included plans to cultivate the Uniate leadership and no fewer than seven cardinals (Casaroli, Willebrands, Kînig, Samorä, Benelli, Poggi and Pignedoli), as well as an elaborate series of active measures to influence and discredit the Catholic Church. 88

Among the individual targets for character assassination was Velychkovsky’s successor as head of the underground Uniate Church, Bishop (later Metropolitan Archbishop) Volodymyr Sternyuk. Agent NATASHA spread disinformation about Sternyuk’s alleged sexual immorality and the same stories were passed by other agents to the Vatican. As a result, according to KGB reports, “he lost the support of a significant part of the Uniates.” 89In reality, despite a new and vicious round of religious persecution in the early 1980s, the KGB lost its war against the Uniates. In 1987 Sternyuk emerged from the underground at the age of eighty-one with the status of a national hero, openly acknowledged by Rome as head of the Catholic Church in Ukraine—to the dismay of both the KGB and most of the Orthodox hierarchy. Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev and Galich insisted as late as October 1989, “The Uniates will never be legalized in our country.” They were legalized by the end of the year. 90

AFTER THE UNIATES and other Catholics, the KGB was most concerned during its war against religious “ideological subversion” in the Soviet Union by the activities of the unregistered Protestant churches and sects, which—like the Uniates—were outside direct state control. In the late 1950s the KGB estimated the membership of what it termed “illegal sectarian formations”—chief among them the Reform Baptists, Pentecostalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Reformed Adventists—at about 100,000. 91

The fact that throughout the Brezhnev era the KGB continued, on Andropov’s instructions, to spend so much time and effort on groups who represented no conceivable threat to the Soviet system is further evidence of its obsession with even the most harmless forms of dissent. Andropov made the keynote of his address to an allunion KGB conference in 1975 the claim that anti-Soviet elements were conspiring against the state “under cover of religion.” The first essential in unmasking and defeating the conspiracies was agent penetration:

This is difficult, since false perceptions of the attitude of the state towards religion which still prevail in their milieu have left a definite mark on the psychology of the believers. Among sectarians there is a prejudice that any assistance to the authorities, including the KGB, is a great sin—treason. There is no trust in the humanism of the Cheka.

Andropov’s complaint that believers failed to trust the “humanism” of the KGB provides further evidence of his limited sense of the absurd. To illustrate the difficulties of agent penetration among the ungrateful sectarians, he gave the example of “one candidate for recruitment, who had almost freed himself from errors with regard to the Cheka, and carried out particular assignments from an operational officer:”

…One day, however, he declared that meetings with his operational officer were sinful. He explained that the Lord God had appeared to him in a dream, had handcuffed him and asked: “Whose servant art thou?” Greatly shaken by this dream, the potential recruit interpreted it as a warning from God and stopped meeting the Chekist. 92