Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

According to Arkadi Nikolayevich Shevchenko, the Russian under secretary-general at the UN who defected in 1978, Lesiovsky and Krepkogorsky were given largely routine responsibilities by Waldheim, checking the order of speakers at the General Assembly or representing him at innumerable diplomatic receptions, but were frozen out of sensitive UN business by what they claimed was Waldheim’s “Austrian mafia.” The UN Secretariat in New York none the less became a much more successful recruiting ground than the federal government in Washington. Shevchenko frequently saw Lesiovsky in the delegates’ lounge, “buying drinks for an ambassador, telling amusing stories, procuring hard-to-get theater or opera tickets, name dropping, ingratiating himself.” 28The Secretary-General’s KGB personal assistants spent much of their time cultivating and trying to recruit members of foreign missions and the UN Secretariat from around the world. 29

The Centre, however, frequently expressed disappointment with political intelligence operations by the New York residency outside the United Nations. The residency’s work was seriously disrupted in 1973 when it discovered that the FBI had detailed information on the activities of some of its operations officers, as well as of three “developmental” agents (codenamed GREK, BREST and BRIZ). 30A report at the end of 1974 concluded that Line PR’s performance had been unsatisfactory for some time past:

For a number of years the Residency has not been able to create an agent network capable of fulfilling the complex requirements of our intelligence work, especially against the US We have not succeeded in achieving this goal in 1974, either, although there has been some progress in this line. There have been several recruitments (SUAREZ, DIF, HERMES) and confidential contacts have been acquired. But these results still do not move us any closer to fulfilling our basic task. 31

None of the three new agents was of major significance. SUAREZ was a Colombian journalist recruited by Anatoli Mikhailovich Manakov, a KGB officer operating under cover as Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent in New York. A few years later SUAREZ succeeded in gaining US citizenship. 32DIF was a US businessman who provided political and economic assessments. 33HERMES, potentially the most important of the three new recruits, was Ozdemir Ahmet Ozgur, a Cypriot born in 1929. In 1977, the New York residency was able to arrange through Arkadi Shevchenko for Ozgur to gain a post at the UN Secretariat. When Shevchenko defected in 1978, however, the KGB was forced to break off all contact with HERMES. 34

DIF, the US businessman, was also included in the Washington residency’s list of its Line PR agents in 1974. Line PR had nine other agents: GRIG, MAGYAR, MORTON, NIK, RAMZES, REM, ROMELLA, SHEF and STOIC. 35GRIG remains unidentified but is reported as operating in Canada. 36MAGYAR was a leading peace activist. 37MORTON was a prominent lawyer recruited in 1970 but taken off the agent list in 1975 because of his advancing years. On his retirement he put the Washington residency in touch with his son, who was also a partner in a well-known law firm. 38NIK was a Colombian who worked on US—Colombian cultural exchange programs. 39RAMZES was an American professor with contacts in Congress, academe, the press and Latin America. 40REM was an Italian employee of the UN Secretariat. 41ROMELLA was a Latin American diplomat in the UN Secretariat, who made contact with the KGB to seek its help in renewing her contract at the UN before it expired in 1975; she supplied both classified documents and recruitment leads. 42SHEF was a professor at McMaster University, recruited during a visit to Lithuania in 1974. 43STOIC was a Latin American diplomat in the UN Secretariat. 44As in New York, none of the Washington Line PR agents had high-level access to any branch of the federal government.

Though the New York residency had some successes in electronic eavesdropping, in active measures and in scientific and technological intelligence, its Line PR network mostly consisted of agents at the UN and in émigré communities, only a minority of whom had US citizenship. 45The largest concentration of agents was within the Soviet colony itself, most of whom inhabited the residential complex in Riverdale. According to KGB statistics, in 1975 the colony numbered 1,366 Soviet employees and dependents. Of the 533 employees, seventy-six were officially classed as agents and sixteen as “trusted contacts.” 46Most, however, were chiefly concerned with informing on their colleagues to Line SK (Soviet Colony) in the residency. The Centre’s assessment in 1974 stressed the limitations of Line PR’s New York agents:

Not one of these agents has access to secret American information. The basic thrust of operations with this network therefore consists of using it for the collection of information from UN diplomatic sources, and from several American [non-agent] sources. 47

Lacking any high-level agents in the federal government, Line PR officers in New York and Washington, usually operating under cover as diplomats or journalists, devoted much of their time to collecting insider gossip from well-placed non-agent sources in Congress and the press corps. 48As head of Line PR in Washington from 1965 to 1970, Kalugin got to know the columnists Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft and Drew Pearson; Chalmers Roberts and Murray Marder of the Washington Post; Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor; Carl Rowan, former director of the US Information Agency; and Henry Brandon of the London Times. Kalugin’s role when he called at their offices or lunched with them in Washington restaurants was not that of agent controller or recruiter. Instead, he “would act like a good reporter,” carefully noting their assessments of the current political situation: “Rarely did I come up with a scoop for the Politburo, but the reporting of our [PR] section enabled Soviet leaders to have a better sense of American political realities…” During the 1968 presidential election campaign some of Kalugin’s sources provided corroboration for Sedov’s reports, based on conversations with Kissinger, that, if elected, Nixon would prove much less anti-Soviet than Moscow feared. One of Kalugin’s most important contacts was Senator Robert Kennedy who, but for his assassination just after he had won the California presidential primary, might have won the 1968 Democratic nomination. Before his death Kennedy presented Kalugin with a tie-pin showing the PT-109 torpedo boat which his brother had captained during the war. Line PR officers in Washington also had regular meetings with such leading senators as Mike Mansfield, William Fulbright, Mark Hatfield, Charles Percy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Jacob Javits. The Centre liked to boast to the Politburo that its assessments of American policy were based on access to the Congressional élite. 49

Most of the political reporting of the Washington residency was thus based on non-secret sources—to the considerable annoyance of some of the Soviet diplomats whose far smaller foreign currency allowances gave them less freedom to entertain their contacts in Washington restaurants. Despite his insistence on keeping the back channel to himself, Dobrynin took a more benign view of the residency’s work, and seemed genuinely interested in what it discovered from both its contacts and agents. 50“In too many Soviet embassies,” Dobrynin complained, “normal personal relations between the ambassador and the KGB resident were the exception rather than the rule.” Ambassador and resident frequently became locked in bitter rivalry as each sought “to show who really was the boss in the embassy” and to demonstrate to Moscow the superiority of his own sources of information. 51

As resident in Washington from 1965 to 1968 Solomatin had got on well with Dobrynin. When he became resident in New York in 1971, however, he quickly began to feud with Yakov Malik, the Soviet representative at the United Nations. Malik strongly objected to Solomatin’s attempts to develop contacts whom he wished to cultivate himself—among them David Rockefeller, brother of Nelson and chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. 52Malik was fascinated by Rockefeller’s 30,000-name card file of his contacts around the world, cross-indexed by country, city and business. On a visit to the chairman’s sprawling seventeenth-floor office at the sixty-story Chase Manhattan building, Malik asked to see a sample from the file. Rockefeller picked out the card for Khrushchev. 53Malik also vigorously opposed Solomatin’s contacts with the veteran diplomat Averell Harriman, regarded in Moscow as one of the most influential American advocates of better relations with the Soviet Union. 54In co-operation with Dobrynin, Harriman later returned from retirement to act as unofficial channel of communication between Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter during the transition period after Carter’s 1976 election victory. 55Solomatin complained to the Centre that Malik’s objections to his attempts to cultivate Rockefeller and Harriman were “characteristic” of his general obstructionism. 56He failed, however, to tell the Centre that there was not the slightest prospect of recruiting either Rockefeller or Harriman.