Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

During the Kennedy administration, however, the role of the KGB in Washington was less important than that of the GRU. In May 1961 GRU Colonel Georgi Bolshakov, operating under cover as head of the Washington bureau of the Tass news agency, began fortnightly meetings with the Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy. Bolshakov succeeded in persuading Robert Kennedy that, between them, they could short-circuit the ponderous protocol of official diplomacy, “speak straightly and frankly without resorting to the politickers’ stock-in-trade propaganda stunts” and set up a direct channel of communication between President Kennedy and First Secretary Khrushchev. Forgetting that he was dealing with an experienced intelligence professional who had been instructed to cultivate him, the President’s brother became convinced that “an authentic friendship grew” between him and Bolshakov:

Any time that he had some message to give to the President (or Khrushchev had) or when the President had some message to give to Khrushchev, we went through Georgi Bolshakov… I met with him about all kinds of things. 37

Despite Bolshakov’s success, GRU intelligence assessment of American policy was abysmal. In March 1962 it produced two dangerously misinformed reports which served to reinforce the KGB’s earlier warning that the Pentagon was planning a nuclear first strike. The GRU claimed that in the previous June the United States had made the decision to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in September 1961, but had been deterred at the last moment by Soviet nuclear tests which showed that the USSR’s nuclear arsenal was more powerful than the Pentagon had realized. The woefully inaccurate Soviet intelligence reports of Washington’s plans for thermonuclear warfare coincided with a series of real but farcically inept American attempts to topple or assassinate Moscow’s Cuban ally, Fidel Castro—actions ideally calculated to exacerbate the paranoid strain in Soviet foreign policy.

In March 1962 Castro urged the KGB to set up an operations base in Havana to export revolution across Latin America. 38Then, in May, Khrushchev decided to construct nuclear missile bases in Cuba—the most dangerous gamble of the Cold War. He was partly motivated by his desire to impress Washington with Soviet nuclear might and so deter it from further (non-existent) plans for a first strike. At the same time he intended to make a dramatic gesture of support for the Cuban revolution. 39

The Soviet gamble was taken in the belief that Washington would not detect the presence of the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. That belief was mistaken for two reasons. First, high-altitude U-2 spy planes were able to photograph the construction of the missile bases. Secondly, American intelligence analysts were able to make sense of the confusing U-2 photographs because they possessed plans of missile site construction and other important intelligence secretly supplied by Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a spy in the GRU run jointly by the British SIS and the CIA. All the main American intelligence reports on the Cuban bases during the missile crisis were later stamped IRONBARK, a codeword indicating that they had made use of Penkovsky’s documents. 40

As the construction of nuclear missile bases in Cuba began, Bolshakov continued to provide reassurance, probably as part of a deliberate deception strategy, that Khrushchev would never countenance such an aggressive policy. When U-2 spy planes revealed the existence of the bases in mid-October, while they were still in the course of construction, thus beginning the Cuban missile crisis, Robert Kennedy turned on Bolshakov. “I bet you know for certain that you have your missiles in Cuba,” he remonstrated. Bolshakov denied it. According to Sorensen, “President Kennedy had come to rely on the Bolshakov channel for direct private information from Khrushchev, and he felt personally deceived. He was personally deceived.” 41

At the moment in the Cold War when the Kremlin most urgently needed good intelligence from Washington, the KGB residency was unable to provide it. During the Second World War Soviet agents had penetrated every major branch of the Roosevelt administration. The Centre had been better informed on some important aspects of American policy (notably the MANHATTAN project) than Roosevelt’s vice-presidents or most members of his cabinets. 42During the Cuban missile crisis, by contrast, the Washington residency’s sources were limited to agents and contacts in the press corps and foreign embassies (especially those of Argentina and Nicaragua). Some of the intelligence which Feklisov, the resident, sent to Moscow was simply gossip. He had no source capable of penetrating the secret deliberations of EXCOMM, Kennedy’s closest advisers who assembled in the cabinet room on October 16 and met in daily session for the next thirteen days until the crisis was resolved. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, wrote dismissively on several of Feklisov’s telegrams at the height of the missile crisis, “This report does not contain any secret information.” 43

The relative lack of influence of the KGB on Khrushchev’s policy during the crisis also reflected the limitations of its chairman. In December 1961 the influential Aleksandr Shelepin had been succeeded as chairman by his less able protégé, Vladimir Semichastny, who knew so little about intelligence and was so unattracted by the post offered to him that he accepted it only under pressure from Khrushchev. Khrushchev made clear that his main reason for appointing Semichastny was to ensure the political loyalty of the KGB rather than to benefit from his advice on foreign policy. There is no sign in any of the files noted by Mitrokhin that Semichastny ever followed Shelepin’s example of submitting to Khrushchev ambitious grand strategies for combating the Main Adversary. During the missile crisis Semichastny had not a single meeting with Khrushchev and was never invited to attend meetings of the Presidium (an enlarged Politburo which for the previous decade had been the main policy-making body).

Nor did Khrushchev ever ask for, or receive from, the KGB any assessment of the likely American response to the placing of nuclear missile bases in Cuba. 44As foreign intelligence chief, Sakharovsky seems to have had little insight into American policy-making. Though apparently a competent bureaucrat in the Soviet mold, his first-hand experience of the outside world was limited to Romania and other parts of eastern Europe. His melancholy expression was probably, as one of his subordinates has written, “due to the enormous pressures of the job.” 45Among the pressures was the need to conform to the highest standards of political correctness. The FCD rarely submitted assessments save at the specific request of the Foreign Ministry, the International Department of the Central Committee or the Presidium. Most of what it termed its “analyses” were, in reality, little more than digests of information on particular topics which generally avoided arriving at conclusions for fear that these might conflict with the opinions of higher authority. The supreme authority during the missile crisis was Khrushchev himself rather than the Presidium. To a remarkable degree he both determined Soviet policy and, like Stalin before him, acted as his own chief intelligence analyst. 46

Intelligence did, however, have some influence on Khrushchev’s policy during the final stages of the crisis. On October 25 he indicated to the Presidium that, in order to resolve the crisis, it might ultimately be necessary to dismantle the missile bases in return for a US guarantee not to invade Cuba. Khrushchev, however, was not yet ready to make such a proposal. He changed his mind during the night of October 25-6 after a GRU report that US Strategic Air Command had been placed on nuclear alert. Hitherto he had hoped to save face by obtaining the removal of US missile bases in Turkey in return for stopping the construction of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. On the morning of October 26, however, wrongly fearing that an American invasion of Cuba might be imminent, he dictated a rambling and emotional plea for peace to Kennedy which asked for a US guarantee of Cuban territorial integrity but made no mention of the Turkish missile bases. Within twenty-four hours, Khrushchev had changed his mind. On October 27, having concluded that an American invasion was not imminent after all, he sent another letter insisting that the Turkish bases must be part of the deal. 47