Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Despite some striking tactical successes, the KGB’s post-war grand strategy for penetrating the corridors of power in its Main Adversary failed. At least until the early 1960s, its chief source of intelligence on American foreign policy was probably the penetration of the US embassy in Moscow. By the beginning of the Cold War the previously seductive myth-image of Stalin’s Russia as the world’s first truly socialist worker-peasant state, which had inspired the Magnificent Five and their American counterparts, was fading fast. Most of the idealistic student revolutionaries of the late 1960s, unlike their pre-war predecessors, turned for inspiration not to the old Communist parties but to a new left which seemed deeply suspect to the increasingly geriatric leadership of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union.

The marginalization of the post-war Communist Parties in the United States and Great Britain deprived Soviet intelligence of what had previously been a major source of recruits and talent-spotters. Its most fertile Western recruiting grounds in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War were France and Italy, the two west European countries with the most powerful Communist Parties, both of which took part in post-war coalition governments. The longest-serving and probably most productive French and Italian agents identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin, JOUR and DARIO, both entered their respective foreign ministries during these years. 34

By the 1950s the KGB was probably obtaining more high-grade diplomatic and political intelligence from the main NATO members in continental Europe than from the United States and Britain. As well as generating large numbers of diplomatic documents, the penetration of the French, Italian and other Western foreign ministries and Moscow embassies provided crucial assistance to KGB codebreakers. For most, if not all, of the Cold War the total number of diplomatic decrypts which the Centre considered sufficiently significant to forward to the Central Committee probably never dropped below 100,000 a year. 35During the Cold War as a whole, as a result of the partition of Germany and the flow of refugees from East to West, the FRG was the major NATO member most vulnerable to agent penetration—though the KGB’s successes were exceeded by those of its East German ally. The success of the HVA agent, Gånter Guillaume, in becoming aide to the Chancellor of West Germany at a crucial moment in East-West relations, just as Willy Brandt was beginning his Ostpolitik, was one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War.

Though the Centre acquired a considerable volume of high-grade intelligence from NATO countries, it was never satisfied by what it achieved. In Europe, as in north America, it refused to abandon its early Cold War ambition to create a new generation of Great Illegals. During the 1970s it sought and obtained promises of assistance from Communist leaders around the world in finding further Richard Sorges. The files seen by Mitrokhin suggest, however, that few, if any Sorges were discovered. By the mid-1970s the brightest of the young Party members in the few west European countries where Communism remained a powerful force tended to be Eurocommunist heretics rather than blindly obedient pro-Soviet loyalists ready to sacrifice their lives in the service of the Fatherland of the Toilers. Even some Soviet illegals had difficulty in preserving their ideological commitment when confronted with the reality of life in the West. As the Cold War progressed, the KGB’s best agents increasingly became mercenary (like Aldrich Ames) rather than ideological (like Kim Philby).

Residencies, however, remained under pressure from the Centre leadership, which had almost no first-hand experience of life in the West, to cultivate major political figures. Hence the hopelessly unrealistic KGB schemes, all doubtless approved by the political leadership, to recruit Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt, Oskar Lafontaine, Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzezinski and other senior Western statesmen. Kryuchkov responded to these and other failures not with a more realistic recruitment policy but with greater bureaucracy, demanding ever longer reports and more form-filling. Residents must have groaned inwardly in April 1985 when they received from the Centre a newly devised questionnaire which Kryuchkov instructed them to use as the basis for reports on politicians and other “prominent figures in the West” being considered as possible “targets for cultivation.” It contained fifty-six questions, many of them highly complex and minutely detailed. Question 14 in section 4 of the questionnaire, for example, demanded information on:

Life style: hobbies, enjoyments, tastes; books—what writers does he prefer; theater, music, painting, and what he particularly likes; collecting; attitude to sport (riding, hunting, fishing, swimming, chess, football, games, motoring, sailing, etc.), prizes won; hiking; with what kind of environment and what kind of people does he prefer to associate; what kind of cuisine does he prefer, and so on.

The fifty-five other questions contained similarly detailed demands for reports on topics as diverse as “compromising information on subject” and “subject’s attitude towards American foreign policy.” 36A full answer to the questionnaire on any “prominent figure in the West” would have required months of investigations by residency operations officers.

THE CENTRE’S MAIN weakness in the field of political intelligence was not, as it supposed, in intelligence collection but rather in its ability to interpret what it collected. Under both Stalin and Khrushchev, the Centre forwarded each day to the Kremlin a selection of foreign intelligence reports received from residencies and other sources, but usually shrank from offering more than perfunctory interpretation of the reports for fear of contradicting the views of the political leadership. 37Both Stalin and Khrushchev acted as their own, ill-qualified chief intelligence analysts. Brezhnev, by contrast, spent little time interpreting intelligence or any other information, thus giving Andropov greater scope than any of his predecessors to submit intelligence assessments.

Intelligence assessment was worst in the Stalin era. Stalin himself bears a large measure of personal responsibility for the failure to heed repeated intelligence warnings of the 1941 German invasion. The institutionalized paranoia of the Stalinist system led to a series of other failures of assessment—among them the deluded belief in the middle of the war that the Magnificent Five, some of the Centre’s most gifted and productive agents, were part of an elaborate British deception. Though intelligence analysis after Stalin’s death never again descended to quite such paranoid depths, at moments of crisis in the Cold War the KGB tended to substitute conspiracy theory for balanced assessment. Within a year of becoming KGB chairman, Andropov was submitting distorted intelligence assessments to the Politburo designed to strengthen its resolve to crush the Prague Spring by armed force. His obsession with Western attempts to promote ideological sabotage in the Soviet Bloc made him unwilling to consider any evidence which suggested otherwise. In 1968 the Centre destroyed classified US documents obtained by the Washington residency which showed that neither the CIA nor any other American agency was manipulating the reformers of the Prague Spring. 38

In both the early 1960s and the early 1980s the Centre believed that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Though some FCD officers in Western residencies, far better acquainted with the West than Soviet leaders and KGB chairmen, privately dismissed such fears as absurd alarmism, they did not dare dispute the Centre’s judgment openly. The East German foreign intelligence chief, Markus Wolf, who resented the waste of time caused by KGB demands for HVA assistance in discovering non-existent plans for an American first strike, also knew better than to complain to Moscow. “These orders,” he claims, “were no more open to discussion than other orders from above.” 39