Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Mitrokhin’s notes identify thirty-two of the ST agents and trusted contacts active in the United States during the 1970s, mostly recruited in the same decade. A further eight whose espionage is not dated in the notes were also probably active in the 1970s. 85The companies for which they worked included some of the leading American defense contractors: among them IBM, McDonnell Douglas and TRW. 86The ST agent network also contained scientists with access to important defenserelated projects at some of the United States’ best-known research institutes: among them MIKE at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 87and TROP in the Argonne National Laboratory at the University of Chicago. 88In addition to the civilian ST agent network, there were also KGB agents in the armed forces who provided intelligence on the latest military technology: among them JOE, an army electronics engineer who provided “valuable information” on military communications systems, 89and NERPA, who in 1977 was engaged in weapons research at the US army’s Material Development and Readiness Command (DARCOM). 90

Though Mitrokhin’s information on the extent and targets of the ST network on the territory of the Main Adversary is far more extensive than any previously available account, it is not comprehensive. 91There is, for example, no mention in Mitrokhin’s notes of the Californian drug dealer Andrew Daulton Lee, who in 1975-6 provided the KGB residency in Mexico City with the operating manual for the Rhyolite surveillance satellite and technical data on other satellite systems. Lee’s source was his friend Christopher Boyce, an employee of Rhyolite’s manufacturer, TRW Corporations in Redondo Beach. Among the TRW secrets passed on to the KGB was detailed information on how American spy satellites monitored Soviet missile tests. In 1977 Lee and Boyce were arrested, tried and sentenced to, respectively, life and forty years’ imprisonment. Both achieved celebrity status as the subjects of the bestselling book and film The Falcon and the Snowman. 92One of the KGB files noted by Mitrokhin reveals that only a year after the arrest of Lee and Boyce the KGB recruited another, possibly even more important, spy in TRW with the codename ZENIT. While Boyce had been only a clerk (though with access to classified documents), ZENIT was a scientist. 93

Directorate T was proud of its achievements, particularly against the Main Adversary, and anxious to bring them to the attention of the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev was informed in 1972 that ST had produced a saving during the past year of over a hundred million convertible roubles. 94Among the successes singled out for Brezhnev’s attention was intelligence on the construction of the American space shuttle and preparations for unmanned flights to Mars. This, he was told, would solve a number of current problems in the development of Soviet space technology. ST intelligence on the pelletization of seeds, he was further assured (doubtless unrealistically), would increase the Soviet grain harvest by 20 to 30 per cent and shorten growing time. 95In 1973 Directorate T reported that it had acquired over 26,000 documents and 3,700 “samples.” Though only a minority of this material was classified, it included top secret information on the Saturn rocket, the Apollo space missions, the Poseidon, Honest John, Redeye, Roland, Hydra and Viper missiles, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet and computer technology subsequently plagiarized in the construction of the Minsk-32 computer. 96

The triumphs of ST collection figured prominently in the Chekist Hall of Fame opened by the FCD at Yasenevo in 1977 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Directorate T’s exhibit claimed that during the previous fiveyear period it had obtained over 140,000 ST documents and more than 20,000 “samples.” These were alleged to have produced an economic benefit of over one billion roubles for the Soviet economy and to have advanced research work in a number of branches of science and technology by periods of from two to six years. 97

Leonid Sergeyevich Zaitsev, the dynamic and ambitious head of Directorate T appointed in 1975, argued that it should be allowed to leave the FCD and become an independent directorate within the KGB. It would, he claimed, need a budget of only 1 percent per annum of the value of the ST which it supplied to Soviet industry and agriculture. 98The head of the FCD, Kryuchkov, however, was determined not to allow such a prestigious part of his intelligence empire to escape from his control. Despite failing to win its freedom, Directorate T increasingly operated independently from the rest of the FCD. Its new recruits mostly came from scientific or engineering backgrounds, had their own curriculum in the Andropov Institute (the FCD academy) and trained separately from those in other departments. In foreign residencies Line X officers mixed relatively little with their colleagues in other lines. 99

The Military—Industrial Commission (VPK), which was mainly responsible for overseeing Directorate T, showed greater interest in non-American targets than during the early Cold War. 100The United States none the less remained a more important ST target than the rest of the world combined. In 1980 61.5 percent of the VPK’s information came from American sources (some outside the USA), 10.5 percent from West Germany, 8 percent from France, 7.5 percent from Britain and 3 percent from Japan. 101In 1980 the VPK gave instructions for 3,617 “acquisition tasks,” of which 1,085 were completed within a year, benefiting 3,396 Soviet research and development projects. 102Directorate T was its chief collection agency.

Directorate T owed much of its success in meeting so many of the VPK’s requirements to its numerous collaborators in the Soviet scientific community, who numbered approximately 90 agent-recruiters, 900 agents and 350 trusted contacts during the mid-1970s. 103Among these collaborators—probably the largest network of talent-spotters in the history of ST—were some of the Soviet Union’s leading scientists. All Western scientists—particularly in the United States—in fields related to Directorate T’s “acquisition tasks” were potential targets for the KGB. The first approach to a targeted scientist usually came from a Soviet colleague in a similar field, who would try to establish cooperation at a personal or institutional level. Directorate T would then seek to recruit the more naive or corrupt of the Western scientists approached in this way as agents or trusted contacts. 104Among the Directorate’s agent-recruiters was the director of the Physics and Energy Institute of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (codenamed VITOS), who in 1973 recruited MIKE, a senior physicist at MIT. 105SATURN, a department head at McDonnell Douglas, was recruited in 1978 with similar assistance from the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. 106

The KGB also took an active part in the selection of Soviet students for academic exchange programs with the United States and trained many of them as talent-spotters. Students were told to seek places at universities and research institutes within easy reach of the residencies at New York (Brooklyn Polytechnic, MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic and the universities of Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, New York and Princeton), Washington (American, Catholic, Georgetown, George Washington and Maryland Universities) and San Francisco (the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco, California Institute of Technology, University of Southern California and Stanford). 107

Directorate T’s success in penetrating American targets was greatly assisted by poor security in some of its target companies and research institutes. Appearing in 1985 before a Senate committee investigating security among defense contractors, Christopher Boyce testified that he and colleagues at TRW “regularly partied and boozed it up during working hours with the ‘black vault’” housing the Rhyolite satellite project. Bacardi rum, he claimed, was kept behind the cipher machines and a cipher-destruction device used as a blender to mix banana daiquiris and Mai-Tais. 108Security failures in most other companies probably took less exotic and alcoholic forms.