Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Until the closing years of the Cold War, there was an extraordinary contrast between the Kremlin’s privileged access to the secrets of state-of-the-art Western technology and its failure to grasp the nature and extent of its own economic mismanagement. Gorbachev was the first post-war Soviet leader who gained access to moderately accurate statistics on the performance of the Soviet economy. Abel Aganbegyan, his most influential economic adviser in the early years of perestroika, calculated that between 1981 and 1985 there had been “a zero growth rate.” The revelation of the extent of Soviet economic stagnation and long-term decline relative to the West had a much more profound effect on Gorbachev’s policy than the successes of ST collection against Western targets which had previously so impressed him. By the end of the decade, he had moved from trying to rejuvenate the command economy to accepting the market as the main economic regulator. 48

The conclusion of the Cold War, so far from ending Russian ST operations in the West, created new Line X opportunities through the expansion of East-West scientific exchanges and business joint ventures, which the SVR was eager to exploit. The reactivation in the early 1990s of the leading British Line X agent Michael Smith was one sign among many of the continued priority given to ST collection in the Yeltsin era. 49For the SVR, as for the FCD, the main Line X target remained the United States. The relaxation of US security checks, in an attempt to build bridges to Moscow and Beijing, led in 1994 to a dramatic increase in the number of Russian and Chinese scientists allowed to visit the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear laboratories, as well as other institutes conducting classified research. Line X, however, has found less enthusiasm for its product than during the Cold War. The collapse of the Russian command economy left the military-industrial complex—previously the chief customer for S—in disarray. During (and perhaps even before) the Yeltsin presidency, Russian S operations seem to have been upstaged by those of the Chinese. A congressional enquiry concluded in 1999 that, over the two previous decades, China had obtained detailed intelligence on every warhead in the US nuclear arsenal. 50There is little doubt that the phenomenal achievements of Chinese ST collection were inspired, at least in part, by the Soviet Union’s earlier success in copying the first American atomic bomb and in basing the majority of its Cold War weapons systems on Western technology.

IT IS IMPORTANT not to judge the success of KGB foreign operations by purely Western standards. The Centre had, ultimately, an even higher priority than intelligence collection in the West. The Cheka had been founded six weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of power “for a revolutionary settlement of accounts with counter-revolutionaries.” In that primary role—to defend the Bolshevik one-party state against dissent in all its forms—the Cheka and its successors were strikingly successful.

From the 1920s onwards the war against “counter-revolution” was waged abroad as well as at home. The FCD’s role in combating ideological subversion has given rise, in Yeltsin’s Russia, to a curious official amnesia. Like Kryuchkov and some other former senior FCD officers, the SVR maintains that the FCD was not involved in the persecution of dissidents and the abuse of human rights. In reality, it was centrally involved. Within the Soviet Bloc the war against ideological subversion was increasingly coordinated between the internal KGB and its foreign intelligence arm.

In the immediate aftermath of the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising by Soviet tanks in 1956, and again after the destruction of the Prague Spring in 1968, many Western observers doubted whether the genie of freedom could be quickly returned to its bottle. In fact, thanks largely to the KGB and its Hungarian and Czechoslovak allies, one-party states were restored in both Budapest and Prague with remarkable speed and success. From 1968 onwards the state of public opinion in the Soviet Bloc was carefully monitored by experienced illegals posing as Western tourists and business people, who sought out, and pretended to sympathize with, critics of the Communist regimes. In reporting on the results of these “PROGRESS operations,” the FCD was franker than it would have dared to be in analyzing, for example, satirical comments by Soviet citizens on Brezhnev’s increasing physical decrepitude.

Throughout the Cold War the KGB’s war against ideological subversion was energetically waged in foreign capitals as well as on Soviet soil. Residencies in the West had standing instructions to collect as much material as possible to assist the persecution of dissidents, both at home and abroad:

In order to take active measures against the dissidents, it is important to know of disagreements among them, differences of views and conflicts within the dissident milieu, reasons why they have arisen, and possible ways of exacerbating them; and particulars discrediting the dissidents personally (alcoholism, immoral behavior, professional decline and so forth, as well as indications of links with the CIA, Western special [intelligence] services and ideological centers). 51

Residencies were also required to target many of the dissidents’ main supporters in the West. Among the KGB’s targets in Britain was the London neurologist Harold Merskey, who had campaigned on behalf of the victims of Soviet psychiatric abuse. On September 20, 1976 the London residency posted a letter to Merskey, purporting to come from an anonymous wellwisher, warning him of an imminent attempt by unidentified assailants to cause him grievous bodily harm. Merskey, it was hoped, would become preoccupied with his own personal safety and spend less time supporting the incarcerated dissidents. 52

So, far from being a mere adjunct to more conventional foreign intelligence operations, the FCD’s war against the dissidents was one of its chief priorities. Among its most important operations in 1978, for example, was the attempt to ensure that the dissident Yuri Orlov did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize—as Sakharov had done three years earlier. The fact that the prize went instead to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin was claimed by the Centre as a major triumph—though, in reality, it probably owed little to KGB active measures. Suslov, the Politburo’s leading guardian of ideological orthodoxy, was woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from the Oslo resident to be told the good news. 53There are few better indications of the importance attached to a piece of information in any political system than the decision to wake a minister.

Residencies also followed with anxious attention the emergence in some leading Western Communist parties of the Eurocommunist heresy which challenged the traditional infallibility of the Moscow line, and thus qualified as a novel form of ideological subversion. Among the more unusual active measures devised in the later 1970s were those designed to discredit Eurocommunist party leaders. 54

One of the FCD’s chief priorities until the closing years of the Cold War was to seek to prevent all Soviet dissidents and defectors achieving foreign recognition—even in fields entirely divorced from politics (at least as understood in the West). Enormous time and effort was devoted by the Centre to devising ways to damage the careers of Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and other defectors from Soviet ballet. 55By the time the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (codenamed VOYAZHER, “Traveller”) left for the West in 1974, the KGB had ceased to plan operations to cause physical injury to émigrés in the performing arts, but seems to have redoubled active measure campaigns intended to give them bad reviews in the Western media. In 1976, after Rostropovich and his wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, were deprived of Soviet citizenship, the Centre appealed to all Soviet Bloc intelligence services for help in finding agents to penetrate their entourage. It was outraged by Rostropovich’s appointment in 1977 as director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington—a post he was to retain until his return to Russia seventeen years later—but encouraged by an untypically critical review of his work with the orchestra in the Washington Post in May 1978. The Centre circulated the review to Western residencies as an example of the kind of criticism they were to encourage, and demanded that they inspire articles attacking Rostropovich’s alleged vanity, failure to live up to Western expectations, and—especially ironic in view of KGB active measures against him—his supposed attempts to manipulate the Western media. 56