Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Without creativity and free enterprise, a society is not viable, and it becomes the victim of bureaucracy. 125

The files noted by Mitrokhin do not record the Centre’s doubtless outraged response. There is little doubt, however, that there were other illegals who agreed privately with what ORLOV dared to say openly.

AS EARLY AS 1980 the Soviet Politburo had been forced into the reluctant recognition that the only effective defense against a Polish counter-revolution was the fear of Soviet military intervention. That fear, however, was a dwindling asset based on memories of Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Kabul in 1979. Once the Politburo secretly turned against the idea of invading Warsaw in 1980, its policy was based on a bluff which could not be sustained indefinitely.

Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985 hastened the moment when the bluff would be called. In some of his first meetings as general secretary with east European leaders, he warned that they could no longer expect the Red Army to come to their rescue if they fell out with their fellow citizens. Gorbachev conveyed the same message more formally at a meeting of Comecon leaders in Moscow in November 1986. 126Though the east European regimes were, predictably, unwilling to share the secret with their subjects, it was only a matter of time before they discovered it. It did not occur to Gorbachev, however, that he might be opening the way to the end of the Communist era in eastern Europe. He expected the hardliners, when they could hold out no longer, to be succeeded by a generation of little Gorbachevs anxious to emulate the reforms being introduced in Moscow. Few peacetime miscalculations have had such momentous consequences. Once a new crisis arose within the Soviet Bloc and it became clear that the Red Army would stay in its barracks, the “Socialist Commonwealth” was doomed.

The end game began in Poland. By the beginning of 1989, with the economy in dire straits and the return of labor unrest, the Polish Politburo was discussing new austerity measures which threatened to produce an explosion of discontent reminiscent of that in 1980. Jaruzelski refused to consider a return to martial law, convinced that it would lead to much greater loss of life than in 1981. The only option, he believed, was to hold discussions with the still-illegal Solidarity in return for its help in preserving the peace. Though Jaruzelski had the support of Czesław Kiszczak, interior minister in charge of the SB and one of the leading hardliners of 1981, he was able to push his proposal through the Politburo only by threatening to resign. Two months of tortuous negotiations led to Solidarity’s relegalization and to general elections in June under rules which, though calculated to produce a large Communist majority, would give Solidarity a place in parliament. To the stupefaction of both itself and its opponents, however, Solidarity won a sweeping victory. A few months earlier the government spokesman, Jerzy Urban, had dismissed Solidarity as a “non-existent organization” and Wałęsa as a “private citizen” of no political significance. After the Communist defeat he told the outgoing government, “This is not just a lost election, gentlemen. It’s the end of an age.” 127

The end came more quickly than anyone thought possible. Any remaining doubts about Moscow’s willingness to tolerate the removal of the Communist old guard disappeared during Gorbachev’s visit to East Berlin in September to attend the fortieth birthday celebrations of the now-doomed “German Democratic Republic.” He told Honecker in a phrase quickly made public by the Soviet delegation, “In politics life punishes severely those who fall behind.” Honecker himself fell from power six weeks later. Even when it became clear that the whole Communist order, and not merely the old guard, was at risk in eastern Europe, Gorbachev did not draw back. He sent his close adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev to the capitals of the disintegrating Socialist Commonwealth “to make the point over and over again: We are not going to interfere.” Yakovlev said later:

Please, we told them, make your own calculations, but make sure you understand that our troops will not be used, even though they are there. They will remain in their barracks and will not go anywhere, under any circumstances. 128

After delirious East German crowds surged through the Berlin Wall on November 9 it took only the last seven weeks of the year for the remaining one-party states to topple like a house of cards.

The Centre accepted the collapse of the Soviet Bloc with far less equanimity than Gorbachev. Though the KGB devised active measures in a desperate attempt to stave off the downfall of the Communist regimes, it was refused permission to implement them. According to the head of the FCD, Leonid Shebarshin, the leaders of eastern Europe were told to fend for themselves. “But,” he complains, “they were educated only to be friends of the Soviet Union; they were never prepared to stand on their own feet. They were just thrown to the wolves.” 129

Most academic historians have been slow to recognize the role of intelligence communities in the international relations and political history of the twentieth century. One striking example concerns the history of signals intelligence (SIGINT). From 1945 onwards, almost all histories of the Second World War mentioned the American success in breaking the main Japanese diplomatic cipher over a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. British success in breaking German ciphers during the First World War was also common knowledge; indeed one well-publicized German decrypt produced by British codebreakers—the Zimmermann telegram—had hastened the US declaration of war on Germany in 1917. But, until the revelation of the ULTRA secret in 1973, it occurred to almost no historian (save for former intelligence officers who were forbidden to mention it) that there might have been major SIGINT successes against Germany as well as Japan. Even after the disclosure of ULTRA’s important role in British and American wartime operations in the west, it took another fifteen years before any historian raised the rather obvious question of whether there was a Russian ULTRA on the eastern front. 1

At the end of the twentieth century, many of the historians who now acknowledge the significance of SIGINT in the Second World War still ignore it completely in their studies of the Cold War. This sudden disappearance of SIGINT from the historical landscape immediately after VJ Day has produced a series of eccentric anomalies even in some of the leading studies of policymakers and international relations. Thus, for example, Sir Martin Gilbert’s massive and mostly authoritative multi-volume official biography of Churchill acknowledges his passion for SIGINT as war leader but includes not a single reference to his continuing interest in it as peacetime prime minister from 1951 to 1955.

There is even less about SIGINT in biographies of Stalin. While there are some excellent histories of the Soviet Union, it is difficult to think of any which devotes as much as a sentence to the enormous volume of SIGINT generated by the KGB and GRU. In many studies of Soviet foreign policy, the KGB is barely mentioned. The bibliography of the most recent academic history of Russian foreign relations from 1917 to 1991 (published in 1998), praised by a British authority on the subject as “easily the best general history of Soviet foreign policy,” contains—apart from a biography of Beria—not a single work on Soviet intelligence among more than 120 titles. 2

Though such aberrations by leading historians are due partly to the over-classification of intelligence archives (worst in the case of SIGINT), they derive at root from what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”—the difficulty all of us have in grasping new concepts which disturb our existing view of the world. 3For many twentieth-century historians, political scientists and international relations specialists, secret intelligence has been just such a concept. It is, of course, naive to assume, as some “spy writers” have done, that the most secret sources necessarily provide the most important information. But it is also naive to suppose that research on twentieth-century international relations and authoritarian regimes (to take only two examples) can afford to neglect the role of intelligence agencies. As a new century dawns the traditional academic disregard for intelligence is in serious, if not yet terminal, decline. A new generation of scholars has begun to emerge, less disoriented than most of their predecessors by the role of intelligence and its use (or abuse) by policymakers. 4A vast research agenda awaits them.