Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

AT THE BEGINNING of the 1980s, despite all the setbacks of the previous thirty years, the Centre’s plans for the expansion of illegal networks on the territory of the Main Adversary still remained remarkably ambitious—though not to quite the same degree as a decade earlier. Instead of the ten illegal residencies which it had intended to establish within the United States by 1975, the Centre planned to have six by 1982. Between them, the six residencies were supposed to have three to four sources in each of a series of major penetration targets: the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and what were described as “related institutions”—among them the Hudson Institute, the Rand Corporation, Columbia University’s School of International Relations, Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic Studies and the West German affiliates of Stanford University’s Center for Strategy and Research. The Centre also planned the “active recruitment” of students at Columbia, New York and Georgetown Universities. 56

It is clear that the KGB had some success in deploying illegals against the Main Adversary in the 1980s. For example, Mitrokhin’s notes record that in 1983 the illegal couple GORT and LUIZA were operating in the United States, but give no details of their achievements. 57However, even the KGB’s downgraded plan for six illegal residencies, each with agents at the heart of the Reagan administration, was hopelessly unrealistic. The scale of the Centre’s ambitious projects for illegal operations against the Main Adversary in the later years of the Cold War reflected not the reality of the 1980s but the spell still cast by the triumphs of the Great Illegals half a century before.

Yuri Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967 with extravagant expectations of the potential contribution of political intelligence to Soviet foreign policy, particularly towards the United States. In a report to KGB Party activists soon after his appointment, he declared that the KGB must be in a position to influence the outcome of international crises in a way that it had failed to do during the Cuban missile crisis five years earlier. He ordered the preparation within three to four months of a First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate report to the Central Committee on the current and future policy of the Main Adversary and its allies. The principal weakness of current operations in the United States, Andropov complained, was the lack of American agents of the caliber of the Britons Kim Philby, George Blake and John Vassall, or the West German Heinz Felfe. Only by recruiting such agents, he insisted, could the FCD gain access to really high-grade intelligence. 1

Almost from the moment he became a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo in 1967, Andropov established himself as a powerful voice in Soviet foreign policy. In 1968 he emerged as the chief spokesman of those calling for “extreme measures” to crush the Prague Spring. 2During the 1970s he became co-sponsor, with the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, of the main foreign policy proposals brought before the Politburo (of which both were full, voting members from 1973). Dmitri Ustinov, who became Defense Minister in 1977, sometimes added his signature to the proposals worked out with Gromyko. According to the long-serving Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin:

Andropov had the advantage of familiarity with both foreign policy and military issues from the KGB’s broad sources of information… Gromyko and Ustinov were authorities in their respective domains but laid no special claim to each other’s fields in the way that Andropov felt comfortable in both. 3

Under Andropov, the FCD, which had traditionally been wary of taking the initiative in issuing intelligence assessments, for fear that they might contradict the opinions of higher authority, reformed and expanded its analytical branch. 4On a number of occasions Andropov circulated slanted assessments to the Politburo in an attempt to influence its policy. 5

Andropov became one of Brezhnev’s most trusted advisers. In January 1976, for example, he sent the General Secretary a strictly personal eighteen-page letter, which began sycophantically:

This document, which I wrote myself, is intended for you alone. If you find something in it of value to the cause, I shall be very glad, and if not, then I ask you to consider it as never having happened. 6

Though careful not to criticize Brezhnev even in private discussions with senior KGB officers, 7Andropov was well aware of both his intellectual limitations and declining health, and set out to establish himself as heir-apparent. The General Secretary paid little attention to the details of foreign policy. Dobrynin quickly discovered that what most interested Brezhnev about foreign affairs were the pomp and circumstance of ceremonial occasions:

…the guards of honor, the grand receptions for foreign leaders in the Kremlin, the fulsome publicity, and all the rest. He wanted his photo taken for his albums, which he loved to show. He much preferred a fine ceremony signing final documents rather than working on them.

During one meeting with Dobrynin, Brezhnev disappeared upstairs and reemerged in field marshal’s uniform, his chest clanking with medals. “How do I look?” he asked. “Magnificent!” Dobrynin dutifully replied. 8From 1974 onwards a series of mild strokes caused by arteriosclerosis of the brain left Brezhnev a semi-invalid. At the rear of the cavalcade of black Zil limousines which accompanied Brezhnev wherever he went was a resuscitation vehicle. By the mid-1970s one of his closest companions was a KGB nurse, who fed him a steady stream of pills without consulting his doctors. 9

THOUGH ANDROPOV STRENGTHENED both his own influence and that of the KGB in the making of Soviet foreign policy, his ambitious plans for dramatically improved political intelligence on the Main Adversary were never realized. Line PR (political intelligence) in the American residencies failed to live up to his high expectations. In 1968, a scandal arose over the New York resident, Nikolai Panteleymonovich Kulebyakin, a former head of the FCD First (North American) Department. After the Centre had received a complaint against him, probably from within his residency, an enquiry revealed that he had entered the KGB with a bogus curriculum vitae. Contrary to the claims in his CV, he had never completed his school education and had evaded military service. Fearing that Kulebyakin might defect if he were confronted with his crimes in Washington, he was told he had been promoted to deputy director of the FCD and summoned home to take up his new office. On arriving in Moscow, however, he was summarily dismissed from the KGB and expelled from the Communist Party. 10

Thanks chiefly to two walk-ins, Line PR in Washington performed rather better than New York during the mid- and late 1960s. In September 1965 Robert Lipka, a twenty-year-old army clerk in NSA, caused great excitement in the Washington residency by presenting himself at the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street, a few blocks from the White House, and announcing that he was responsible for shredding highly classified documents. Lipka (code-named DAN) was probably the youngest Soviet agent recruited in the United States with access to high-grade intelligence since the nineteen-year-old Ted Hall had offered his services to the New York residency while working on the MANHATTAN project at Los Alamos in 1944. Lipka’s file notes that he quickly mastered the intelligence tradecraft taught him by Line PR. Over the next two years he made contact with the residency about fifty times via dead letter-boxes, brush contacts and meetings with a case officer. 11