Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

THE CENTRE HARBORED far fewer illusions about the incoming Reagan administration in January 1981 than it had done about Carter four years earlier. Any hope that Reagan’s anti-Soviet speeches during the election had been mere campaign rhetoric quickly faded after his inauguration. In April 1981, after a trip to the United States at the Centre’s request, Arbatov sent a report on the new administration to Andropov and Kryuchkov. At a dinner in the White House he had been able to observe Reagan for one and a half hours from a distance of only fifteen meters. Though Reagan seemed to be acting the role of president, he played the part with genuine emotion. Tears came to his eyes when the flags of the four armed services were brought into the room and when he stood up and placed his hand on his heart as the national anthem was played. Nancy Reagan’s eyes never left her husband. Her adoring expression reminded Arbatov of a teenage girl suddenly placed next to her favorite pop star. Though Reagan’s speech to the assembled journalists was “exceptionally shallow,” the President played to perfection the role of “father of the nation,” a great leader who had kept his humanity, a sense of humor and the common touch. 70

Both the Centre and the Kremlin took a less benign view of Reagan. In a secret speech to a major KGB conference in May 1981 a visibly ailing Brezhnev denounced Reagan’s policies as a serious threat to world peace. He was followed by Andropov, who was to succeed him as general secretary eighteen months later. To the astonishment of most of the audience, the KGB chairman announced that, by decision of the Politburo, the KGB and GRU were for the first time to collaborate in a global intelligence operation, codenamed RYAN—a newly devised acronym for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (“Nuclear Missile Attack”). RYAN’s purpose was to collect intelligence on the presumed, but non-existent, plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union—a delusion which reflected both the KGB’s continuing failure to penetrate the policy-making of the Main Adversary and its recurrent tendency towards conspiracy theory. 71“Not since the end of the Second World War,” Andropov informed foreign residencies, “has the international situation been as explosive as it is now.” 72As Brezhnev’s successor in November 1982, Andropov retained full control over the KGB; his most frequent visitors were senior KGB officers. 73Throughout his term as general secretary, RYAN remained the FCD’s first priority.

For several years Moscow succumbed to what its ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin, fairly described as a “paranoid interpretation” of Reagan’s policy. 74Most residencies in Western capitals were less alarmist than Andropov and the KGB leadership. When Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky joined the London residency in June 1982 he found all his colleagues in Line PR skeptical about operation RYAN. None, however, were willing to risk their careers by challenging the Centre’s assessment. RYAN thus created a vicious circle of intelligence collection and assessment. Residencies were, in effect, ordered to search out alarming information. The Centre was duly alarmed by what they supplied and demanded more. 75The Washington resident, Stanislav Andreyevich Androsov, a protégé of Kryuchkov, was at pains to provide it. 76

The Centre interpreted the announcement of the SDI (“Star Wars”) program in March 1983 as part of the psychological preparation of the American people for nuclear war. On September 28, 1983 the terminally ill Andropov issued from his sickbed a denunciation of American policy couched in apocalyptic language unparalleled since the depths of the Cold War. “Outrageous military psychosis” had taken over the United States. “The Reagan administration, in its imperial ambitions, goes so far that one begins to doubt whether Washington has any brakes at all preventing it from crossing the point at which any sober-minded person must stop.” Alarm within the Centre reached a climax during the NATO exercise “Able Archer 83,” held in November 1983 to practice nuclear release procedures. For a time the KGB leadership was haunted by the fear that the exercise might be intended as cover for a nuclear first strike. Some FCD officers stationed in the West were by now more concerned by the alarmism in the Centre than by the threat of a Western surprise attack. 77

Operation RYAN wound down (though it did not end) during 1984, helped by the death of its two main proponents, Andropov and defense minister Ustinov, and by reassuring signals from London and Washington, both worried by intelligence on Soviet paranoia. 78The alarmist RYAN reports obediently provided by KGB residencies were merely an extreme example of Line PR’s habitual tendency to tell Moscow what it wanted to hear. One political intelligence officer later admitted:

In order to please our superiors, we sent in falsified and biased information, acting on the principle “Blame everything on the Americans, and everything will be OK.” That’s not intelligence, it’s self-deception! 79

During the first Reagan administration, as at other periods, the Centre would have gained a far more accurate insight into American policy by reading the New York Times or Washington Post than by relying on the reports of its own residencies. One of the most striking signs of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” on foreign policy after he became general secretary in 1985 was his early dissatisfaction with the FCD’s political reporting. In December 1985 Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov, KGB chairman since 1982, summoned a meeting of the KGB leadership to discuss a stern memorandum from Gorbachev “on the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs in messages and informational reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other ruling bodies.” The meeting sycophantically agreed on the need to avoid sycophantic reporting and declared the duty of all Chekists both at home and abroad to fulfill “the Leninist requirement that we need only the whole truth.” 80

Gorbachev was far more impressed initially by the performance of FCD’s Directorate T. Throughout the Cold War the KGB had greater success in collecting scientific and technological intelligence (ST) than in its political intelligence operations against the Main Adversary. Infiltrating US defense contractors and research institutes proved far easier than penetrating the heart of the federal government. ST also rarely suffered from the political correctness which distorted the reporting of Line PR in residencies and political intelligence assessments at the Centre. What remained at least partially taboo, however, was the difficulty experienced by Soviet state-run industry in making full use of the extraordinary ST which it received. In 1971, for example, the defense and electronics industry ministries began a joint project to duplicate Westinghouse cathode-ray tubes. Two years later, because of production problems at the State Optical Institute, little progress had been made. 81It was ideologically impossible to learn the lessons of failures such as this, for to do so would have involved a recognition of the inferiority of the Soviet command economy to the market economies of the West. FCD reports thus concentrated on the structural contradictions of Western capitalism while glossing over the far more serious economic problems of the Soviet Bloc. 82

In 1970 the New York and Washington residencies each ran nine Line X agents and five “trusted contacts.” 83In 1973 the new position of head ST resident for the United States was established in New York, with responsibility for coordinating Line X operations by the three American residencies, as well as attempts to evade the embargo on the export of advanced technology to the Soviet Union. By 1975 Directorate T had seventy-seven agents and forty-two trusted contacts working against American targets inside and outside the United States. 84