Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

During the Cold War, unlike the Second World War, the dwindling band of American Communists and fellow travelers rarely had access to the ST sought by the KGB. Most ST agents recruited in the United States seem to have spied for money. Two such mercenary spies were caught by the FBI during the mid-1960s: John Butenko, who worked for an ITT subsidiary which did classified work for Strategic Air Command, and Colonel William Whalen, who provided intelligence on missiles and atomic weapons. 66In 1963 the New York residency supplied 114 classified ST documents, totaling 7,967 pages, and 30,131 unclassified documents, totaling 181,454 pages, as well as 71 “samples” of state-of-the-art technology and other items. Washington sent the Centre 37 classified documents (3,944 pages) and 1,408 unclassified documents (34,506 pages). 67

Some of the best American ST, however, came from residencies outside the United States. Possibly the most important was in the field of computer technology, where the Soviet Union had fallen far behind the West. The experimental Soviet BESM-1, produced in 1953, was judged by a Western expert to be “a respectable computer” for its time, with a capability superior to that of the UNIVAC-1 introduced in 1951. The BESM-2, however, which went into production in 1959, was only a third as fast as the IBM-7094, introduced in 1955, and one-sixteenth as fast as the IBM-7090 of 1959. Because of the embargo on the export of advanced technology to the Soviet Union maintained by COCOM (the embargo coordinating committee of NATO members and Japan), the computers legally imported from the West were barely more powerful than their Soviet counterparts. 68During the 1960s the attempt to catch up with Western computer technology was based largely on espionage.

The KGB’s main source of computer ST was, almost certainly, IBM, which manufactured over half the computers in use around the world in the mid-1960s. Within IBM, the most important KGB agent identified in Mitrokhin’s notes was ALVAR, a naturalized French citizen born in Tsarist Russia, whose motives—unlike most Americans in the ST network—may well have been ideological. Probably the KGB’s longest-serving Line X agent, ALVAR had been recruited by the NKVD in 1935. By the 1950s he held a senior post at IBM’s European headquarters in Paris, and in 1958 was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his work as a Soviet agent. ALVAR carried on working for the KGB until his retirement in the late 1970s, when he was awarded a Soviet pension of 300 dollars a month in addition to his company pension—a certain sign of the Centre’s appreciation of him. 69

In the early 1960s the Paris residency supplied intelligence on American transistor manufacture which, according to KGB files, both improved the quality of Soviet transistors and brought forward the start of mass production by one and a half years. It also provided ST on computer networking systems which were later imitated by the Soviet defense ministry. 70The most likely source of the intelligence on both transistor production and computer networks was ALVAR. From 1964, however, the Paris residency also had an agent, codenamed KLOD, in Texas Instruments. 71

Among other agents who provided technology and ST from IBM was a Nordic national, codenamed KHONG. From 1960 to 1966 KHONG worked for a European affiliate of IBM, and purchased embargoed materials and samples worth 124,000 dollars, which he passed on to the KGB. In both 1961 and 1962 he was questioned by the local US embassy on the reasons for his purchases, but appears to have satisfied the embassy on both occasions. KHONG’s motives, unlike ALVAR’s, seem to have been mainly financial. He was initially paid 10 percent commission, subsequently raised to 15 percent, on his purchases from IBM. KHONG later worked for the United Nations in a number of countries. The fact that he had a total of twelve controllers during his career as a Soviet agent is evidence that the Centre considered him an important source. By the time contact with him ceased in 1982, a year after his retirement, the KGB had held about 150 meetings with him. 72

The Soviet Union often found it more difficult to use than to collect the remarkable ST which it collected from American businesses, most of them defense contractors. In 1965 the Politburo criticized the fact that there was a time lag of two to three years before Soviet industry began exploiting ST. 73Even the computer technology stolen by the KGB did no more than, at best, stabilize the striking gap between East and West. 74The gap was not to be explained by any lack of expertise among Soviet scientists and mathematicians. As one Canadian expert wrote in 1968, “Westerners who know Soviet computer scientists can testify to their competence and their thorough knowledge of the field.” 75The continued backwardness of the Soviet computer industry, despite the expertise of Soviet scientists and the remarkable ST obtained by the KGB, reflected the cumbersome inefficiency of the Soviet command economy, in which technological innovation had to run the gauntlet of a complex and unresponsive state bureaucracy.

Rather than accept any share of responsibility for the failure to make efficient use of much of the ST acquired from the West, the VPK chairman, L. V. Smirnov, blamed the KGB for not obtaining enough of it. In a letter to the KGB chairman, Semichastny, in April 1965, Smirnov complained that over 50 percent of the top priority ST tasks assigned to the KGB between two and four years earlier had still not been fulfilled. Semichastny replied that steps had been taken to improve the KGB’s ability to meet its assignments, but criticized the VPK for underestimating the current difficulty of collecting ST from American targets. Since some of the same scientific and technological developments were taking place in Britain, France, Japan and West Germany, the VPK should pay greater attention to targets in these countries. 76In the following year groups of Line X officers operating against American targets were stationed in residencies in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, India, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Republic and a number of other Third World countries. 77

Despite Smirnov’s criticisms, the KGB’s performance in ST collection was, on balance, a success story. As Smirnov himself acknowledged, the FCD fulfilled almost half of the VPK’s demanding tasks against the Main Adversary with a few years at most. Measured against the spectacular successes of twenty years earlier, however, when the Centre had received the plans of the atomic bomb—the world’s greatest scientific secret—from two different agents and important nuclear intelligence from several more, even the successes of the early 1960s were bound to seem somewhat disappointing. The decline was irreversible. Most of the Soviet spies who penetrated every major branch of the Roosevelt administration had been ideological agents, seduced by the myth-image of Stalin’s Russia as the world’s first worker-peasant state, pointing the way to a new Socialist society. During the early Cold War, even among American radicals, the vision faded. Most of the successors to the wartime ideological moles were mercenary walk-ins and corrupt employees of defense contractors willing to sell their companies’ secrets.

Though the KGB could not bring itself to accept it, the golden age of the high-flying American ideological agent had gone, never to return.

Baltimore:by the Clayton men’s clothing store on North Avenue.

Boston:the music hall; by the State Hilton Hotel.

Chicago:the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts buildings; by the movie theater on State Street; by the Lake State movie theater; and by the men’s tie store on Randolph Street.