Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

In December 1959, Mitchell flew from Washington to Mexico City, in defiance of NSA regulations, entered the Soviet embassy and asked for political asylum in the USSR, giving ideological reasons as the motive for his action. 22The KGB residency made strenuous attempts to persuade him to stay on inside NSA as a defector-in-place, but without success. Mitchell agreed to a secret meeting with another KGB officer in Washington but maintained his insistence on emigrating to the Soviet Union with Martin. Once there, however, he promised to reveal all he knew about NSA.

On June 25, 1960, at the beginning of three weeks’ summer leave, Mitchell and Martin boarded Eastern Airlines flight 307 at Washington National Airport, bound for New Orleans. There, after a brief stopover, they took another flight for Mexico City, stayed the night at the Hotel Virreyes, then caught a Cubana Airlines plane to Havana. 23In July they were exfiltrated from Cuba to the Soviet Union. KGB codebreakers were disappointed in the amount of detailed knowledge of NSA cryptanalysis possessed by Mitchell and Martin. Their most important intelligence, in the Centre’s view, was the reassurance they were able to provide on NSA’s lack of success in breaking current high-grade Soviet ciphers. 24However, the KGB similarly remained unable to decrypt high-grade US cipher systems. 25

Security was so lax at NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters that no attempt was made to track Mitchell and Martin down until eight days after they had been due to return from their three-week vacation. Inside Mitchell’s house NSA security officers found the key to a safe deposit box, which Mitchell had deliberately left for them to find. Inside the box in a nearby bank they found a sealed envelope bearing a request, signed by both Mitchell and Martin, that its contents be made public. The envelope contained a lengthy denunciation of the US government and the evils of capitalism and a bizarre eulogy of life in the Soviet Union, including the claim that its emancipated women were “more desirable as mates.” 26

By decision no. 295 of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, dated August 11, 1960, Mitchell and Martin were given political asylum and monthly allowances of 500 roubles each—about the same as their NSA salaries and well above Soviet salary scales. 27In the autumn Mitchell was given a job in the Institute of Mathematics at Leningrad University; Martin began doctoral research at the same institute. Both defectors quickly put their beliefs about the desirability of Soviet mates to the test. Mitchell married Galina Vladimirovna Yakovleva, a 30-year-old assistant professor in the piano music department of the Leningrad Conservatory. Martin, who changed his name to Sokolovsky, married a Russian woman whom he met on holiday on the Black Sea. 28

Within a few years the Centre found both Mitchell and Martin considerably more trouble than they were worth. Predictably, both defectors rapidly became disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union. Martin, whom the Centre regarded as the more impressionable of the two, was gullible enough to believe a tale concocted by the KGB that they had both been sentenced in absentia to twenty years’ hard labor by a closed session of the US Supreme Court. He was eventually shown a bogus copy of the judgment in order to persuade him to put all thought of returning home out of his mind. Mitchell was more skeptical and by the 1970s appeared determined to leave. As chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov gave personal instructions that under no circumstances was either Mitchell or Martin to be allowed to go, for fear of deterring other potential defectors from the West. In a further attempt to deter Martin he was shown an article by Yuri Semyonov in Izvestia claiming that American agents had been found in possession of poison ampoules, and was led to believe that these were intended for Mitchell and himself. Mitchell correctly suspected that the story had been fabricated by the KGB. Galina Mitchell was also anxious to leave, but the KGB put pressure on her mother to persuade Galina to change her mind. After their applications for visas had been rebuffed by Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as the United States, the Mitchells told the Soviet authorities on March 29, 1980 that they had given up their attempts to emigrate. 29But there were persistent reports afterwards that Mitchell was still trying to leave. 30

FOR MOST OF the Cold War, the Washington and New York legal residencies had little success in providing the intelligence from inside the federal government which had been so plentiful during the Second World War. Their limitations were clearly exposed during the two years before the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

The vacuum left by the lack of KGB high-grade political intelligence from the United States was partly filled by dangerous nonsense from elsewhere, some of which reflected the paranoid strain in Soviet analysis. On June 29, 1960 the KGB chairman, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin, personally delivered to Khrushchev an alarmist assessment of American policy, based on a misinformed report from an unidentified NATO liaison officer with the CIA:

In the CIA it is known that the leadership of the Pentagon is convinced of the need to initiate a war with the Soviet Union “as soon as possible”… Right now the USA has the capability to wipe out Soviet missile bases and other military targets with its bomber forces. But over the next little while the defense forces of the Soviet Union will grow… and the opportunity will disappear… As a result of these assumptions, the chiefs at the Pentagon are hoping to launch a preventive war against the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev took the warning seriously. Less than a fortnight later he issued a public warning to the Pentagon “not to forget that, as shown at the latest tests, we have rockets which can land in a pre-set square target 13,000 kilometers away.” 31

Moscow followed the presidential elections of 1960 with close attention. Khrushchev regarded the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, as a McCarthyite friend of the Pentagon hawks, and was anxious that Kennedy should win. The Washington resident, Aleksandr Semyonovich Feklisov (alias “Fomin”), was ordered to “propose diplomatic or propaganda initiatives, or any other measures, to facilitate Kennedy’s victory.” The residency tried to make contact with Robert Kennedy but was politely rebuffed. 32

Khrushchev’s view of Kennedy changed after the CIA’s abortive and absurdly inept attempt to topple Fidel Castro by landing an American-backed “Cuban brigade” at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban débâcle, Kennedy despairingly asked his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen, “How could I have been so stupid?” 33The young president, Khrushchev concluded, was unable to control the “dark forces” of American capitalism’s military-industrial complex. 34At a summit meeting with Kennedy at Vienna in June, Khrushchev belligerently demanded an end to the three-power status of Berlin and a German peace treaty by the end of the year. The two superpowers seemed set on a collision course. Kennedy said afterwards to the journalist James Reston:

I think [Khrushchev] did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get in that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he just beat the hell out of me. 35

On July 29, 1961 Shelepin sent Khrushchev the outline of a new and aggressive global grand strategy against the Main Adversary designed to “create circumstances in different areas of the world which would assist in diverting the attention and forces of the United States and its allies, and would tie them down during the settlement of the question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin’s proposal.” The first part of the plan was to use national liberation movements around the world to secure an advantage in the East-West struggle and to “activate by the means available to the KGB armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments.” At the top of the list for demolition Shelepin placed “reactionary” regimes in the Main Adversary’s own backyard in Central America, beginning in Nicaragua where he proposed coordinating a “revolutionary front” in collaboration with the Cubans and the Sandinistas. Shelepin also proposed destabilizing NATO bases in western Europe and a disinformation campaign designed to demoralize the West by persuading it of the growing superiority of Soviet forces. On August 1, with only minor amendments, Shelepin’s masterplan was approved as a Central Committee directive. 36Elements of it, especially the use of national liberation movements in the struggle with the Main Adversary, continued to reappear in Soviet strategy for the next quarter of a century.