Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: New York, Год выпуска: 2001, ISBN: 2001, Издательство: Basic Books, Жанр: История, Политика, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Sword and the Shield: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Sword and the Shield»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

The Sword and the Shield Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident who worked in the KGB archive, smuggled out copies of its most highly classified files every day for twelve years. In 1992, a U.S. ally succeeded in exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow. The archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the world. But the KGB’s main target, of course, was the United States.
Though there is top-secret material on almost every country in the world, the United States is at the top of the list. As well as containing many fascinating revelations, this is a major contribution to the secret history of the twentieth century.
Among the topics and revelations explored are:
• The KGB’s covert operations in the United States and throughout the West, some of which remain dangerous today.
• KGB files on Oswald and the JFK assassination that Boris Yeltsin almost certainly has no intention of showing President Clinton.
• The KGB’s attempts to discredit civil rights leader in the 1960s, including its infiltration of the inner circle of a key leader.
• The KGB’s use of radio intercept posts in New York and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s to intercept high-level U.S. government communications.
• The KGB’s attempts to steal technological secrets from major U.S. aerospace and technology corporations.
• KGB covert operations against former President Ronald Reagan, which began five years before he became president.
• KGB spies who successfully posed as U.S. citizens under a series of ingenious disguises, including several who attained access to the upper echelons of New York society.

The Sword and the Shield — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Sword and the Shield», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

AS WELL AS underestimating the centrality of the KGB’s system of social control to the functioning of the Soviet system, Western observers have often underestimated the power and influence of its security and intelligence chiefs. 24Beria, who became head of the NKVD at the end of the Terror, emerged as the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union—“my Himmler,” as Stalin once described him. In 1945 he was put in charge of the construction of the first Soviet atomic bomb. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Beria became the first Soviet security chief to make a bid for supreme power. Fear of his ambitions, however, united the rest of the Soviet leadership against him and led to his execution at the end of the year.

It was frequently assumed thereafter that no KGB chief would ever again be given the opportunity by the rest of the Soviet leadership to make a successful bid for power. That assumption proved correct in the case of Aleksandr Shelepin, the dynamic and relatively youthful chairman of the KGB from 1958 to 1961, who made little secret of his desire to become general secretary, but was effectively sidelined after Khrushchev’s overthrow by Brezhnev and the other leading plotters.

Yuri Andropov played a much subtler game than Beria or Shelepin in planning his own rise to power during the 1970s. As Brezhnev became progressively feebler, Andropov gradually established himself as heir apparent, succeeding him as general secretary in 1982. There is, however, not a single reference to Andropov either in the 2,000 pages of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs of the period 1969-77, or in Cyrus Vance’s memoirs on his term as secretary of state, in succession to Kissinger, from 1977 to 1980. 25Vladimir Kryuchkov was similarly underrated as KGB chairman a decade later. Most Western observers were taken by surprise when he emerged as the ringleader of the abortive coup of August 1991 which sought to topple Gorbachev and install a hardline regime. Like Beria, however, Kryuchkov overreached himself. Though the KGB had hitherto been an indispensable bulwark of the Communist one-party state, Kryuchkov’s mistimed attempt to shore it up merely hastened its collapse. 26

Yevgeni Primakov, first head of the FCD’s successor, the SVR, also attracted surprisingly little attention from most Western commentators. A much-praised American study of Yeltsin’s Russia, published on the eve of Primakov’s appointment as prime minister in September 1998, contained not a single reference to him. 27By the spring of 1999, though disclaiming any ambition to succeed Yeltsin, Primakov topped opinion polls of potential candidates in the following year’s presidential elections. Having apparently concluded that Primakov had become too powerful, Yeltsin sacked him in May 1999.

THE CHEKA AND its successors were central to the conduct of Soviet foreign policy as well as to the running of the one-party state. Kim Philby proudly told a KGB lecture audience in 1980, “Our service operating abroad is the Soviet Union’s first line of defense.” 28The failure by many Western historians to identify the KGB as a major arm of Soviet foreign policy is due partly to the fact that many Soviet policy aims did not fit Western concepts of international relations. Surveys of Stalin’s foreign policy invariably mention the negotiations on collective security against Nazi Germany, which were conducted by Litvinov and Soviet diplomats, but usually ignore entirely the less conventional operations against the White Guards in Paris, the plan to assassinate General Franco early in the Spanish Civil War, the liquidation of the leading Trotskyists in western Europe in the late 1930s and the plot to kill Tito in 1953—all of which were entrusted to the foreign intelligence service. 29Even after Stalin’s death, much of Soviet foreign policy was not cast in a Western mold.

INO, the interwar foreign intelligence agency, made its initial reputation by defeating a series of counter-revolutionary conspiracies involving anti-Bolshevik émigrés and imperialist intelligence agencies. Though the evidence now available indicates that none of these (in reality, rather trivial) conspiracies had the slightest prospect of success, they bulked large in the imagination of the Soviet leadership. Similarly, INO’s liquidation of leading White Guards and Trotskyists outside the Soviet Union was, from Stalin’s perspective, a major victory. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Stalin was more concerned by Trotsky than by Hitler.

During the 1930s Soviet foreign intelligence collection, thanks chiefly to the Great Illegals, led the world. The recruitment of the Magnificent Five and other high-flying ideological agents opened up the prospect of penetrating the very heard of imperialist power in Western capitals. The large number of British and other diplomatic documents obtained by INO had an important—though still little researched—influence on the making of Soviet foreign policy. Throughout the Stalin era, the Soviet intelligence contest with both Britain, the chief pre-war target, and the United States, the Main Adversary of the Cold War, was remarkably one-sided. SIS had no Moscow station between the wars; the United States possessed no espionage agency at all until 1941. INO’s main pre-war defeats were selfinflicted: chief among them the massacre of many of its best officers who fell victim to the paranoia of the Great Terror.

Soviet intelligence penetration of the West reached its apogee during the Second World War. Never before had any state learned so many of its allies’ secrets. At Tehran and Yalta Stalin was probably better informed on the cards in the hands of the other negotiators than any statesman at any previous conference. Stalin knew the contents of many highly classified British and American documents which Churchill and Roosevelt kept even from most of their cabinets. ULTRA, though revealed to only six British ministers, was known to Stalin. So was the MANHATTAN project, which was carefully concealed from Vice-President Harry Truman until he succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945. (Truman was then also informed of ULTRA for the first time.) 30There is a peculiar irony about Truman’s decision at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 to reveal to Stalin that “we had a new weapon of unusual destructive power.” 31Stalin seemed unimpressed by the news—as well he might, since he had known about plans to build the American atomic bomb for fifteen times as long as Truman.

Stalin was also much better informed than most American and British policymakers about the first major American-British intelligence success against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the VENONA decrypts, which revealed the codenames and clues to the identities of several hundred Soviet agents. Remarkably, Truman seems never to have been informed of VENONA at all. Nor, almost certainly, were more than a small minority of the Attlee cabinet in Britain. Because of internal rivalries within the US intelligence community, even the CIA was not told until late in 1952. The Centre, however, had learned of VENONA by early in 1947 from William Weisband, an agent in the US SIGINT agency, ASA. Thus, amazingly, Stalin discovered the greatest American intelligence secret of the early Cold War over five years before either the president or the CIA. 32

The Centre’s extraordinary successes in penetrating its allies during the Second World War, and the fact that some of its agents remained in place after victory, raised exaggerated expectations of what Soviet intelligence could achieve during the Cold War against the Main Adversary and its NATO allies. KGB post-war strategy was based on an attempt to recreate the pre-war era of Great Illegals, establish a large network of illegal residencies and recruit a new generation of high-flying ideological agents. Alongside the legal residencies in Washington, New York and San Francisco, the Centre planned as late as the early 1980s to set up six illegal residencies, each running agents at the heart of the Reagan administration. Its plans proved hopelessly optimistic. 33

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Sword and the Shield»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Sword and the Shield» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «The Sword and the Shield»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Sword and the Shield» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x