Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

A walk-in to the Washington embassy two months later came as the answer to Kryuchkov’s prayers. By the time Aldrich Ames offered his services to the KGB in April 1985 he had been working for the CIA for eighteen years. Within two months he had betrayed twenty Western (mostly American) agents: among them Dmitri Polyakov, a GRU general who had worked for the FBI and CIA for over twenty years; Oleg Gordievsky, a British agent in the KGB who had just been appointed resident in London; Adolf Tolkachev, an electronics expert who had provided high-grade intelligence on the Soviet avionics system; and at least eleven other KGB and GRU officers stationed in various parts of the world. A majority were shot, though Gordievsky made an epic escape from Russia, with SIS assistance, while under KGB surveillance. Collectively, they had represented probably the most successful Western agent penetration of the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution. Ames’s main motive for betraying them was probably greed. By the time of his arrest nine years later, the KGB and its successor agency had paid him almost three million dollars (probably more than any other agent in Russian history) and had promised him another two. 125As Gorbachev embarked on a new course in policy towards the United States, he was doubtless impressed by the fact that the KGB had, for the first time, recruited a major agent within the CIA. The FCD also appears to have responded to Gorbachev’s demand for less crudely biased reporting on the Main Adversary and its allies. According to Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin, then one of Kryuchkov’s deputies, “the FCD no longer had to present its reports in a falsely positive light,” 126though many of its officers must surely have found it difficult to throw off the habits of a lifetime.

In December 1987 Gorbachev took Kryuchkov with him on his historic visit to Washington to sign with President Reagan the first arms control treaty to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers. Never before had a head of the FCD accompanied a Soviet leader on a visit to the West. Gorbachev’s confidence in Kryuchkov—which he would later bitterly regret—doubtless reflected his high opinion of the FCD’s success both in gathering an unprecedented volume of ST and in penetrating the CIA. During the visit to Washington Kryuchkov had dinner at the Maison Blanche restaurant, unnoticed by other diners, with the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Robert Gates (later DCI). Gates wrote later:

Looking back, it is embarrassing to realize that, at this first high-level CIA—KGB meeting, Kryuchkov smugly knew that he had a spy—Aldrich Ames—at the heart of CIA, that he knew quite well what we were telling the President and others about the Soviet Union, and that he was aware of many of our human and technical collection efforts in the USSR. 127

In October 1988 Kryuchkov achieved his ambition of becoming the first foreign intelligence chief to become chairman of the KGB. His valedictory address on leaving the FCD was a remarkable mixture of the old and new thinking. “Democratization and glasnost are the motive force of perestroika, ” he declared, “and we shall not win through without them:”

Unless we have an objective view of the world, seeing it unadorned and free of clichés and stereotyped ideas, all claims about the effectiveness of our foreign policy operations will be nothing but empty words.

The old suspicions and conspiracy theories about the United States, however, still lurked not far below the surface of Kryuchkov’s address. Without mentioning operation RYAN by name, he sought to justify the principles on which it was based:

Many of [the FCD’s] former responsibilities have not been removed from the agenda. The principal one of these is not to overlook the immediate danger of nuclear conflict being unleashed.

And he added a warning about what he alleged was the continuing brutality of “provocation operations” by Western intelligence services; he claimed that there had been over 900 such operations during the first half of 1988 alone. 128Kryuchkov began 1989 with a dramatic demonstration of the new climate of East—West relations, becoming the first chairman in KGB history to receive the United States ambassador in his office. Thereafter he embarked on an unprecedented public relations campaign designed to win over Western as well as Soviet opinion. “The KGB,” he declared, “should have an image not only in our country but worldwide which is consistent with the noble goals I believe we are pursuing in our work.” 129

After a brief power struggle, Kryuchkov was succeeded as head of the FCD by the 53-year-old Leonid Shebarshin, the first man with experience of working in countries outside the Soviet Bloc to run foreign intelligence since the Second World War. 130One of Shebarshin’s main jobs at the beginning of the Gorbachev era had been to prepare intelligence reports for the Party leadership. The fact that he leapfrogged several more senior candidates for his new post is a certain indication that his briefing had impressed Gorbachev. 131Foreign intelligence officers interviewed by zvestia after Shebarshin’s resignation in September 1991 described him as “the first really competent head of the FCD in decades.” 132According to Shebarshin, his main initial brief from Gorbachev was “to ensure the West did not cheat on arms control.” 133

The tactical victories of the FCD against the Main Adversary which impressed Gorbachev failed to avert strategic defeat. Directorate T’s very success in stealing Western secrets merely underlined the structural problems of the Soviet economy. Despite ST worth a billion roubles a year and the Soviet Union’s large numbers of scientists and engineers, Soviet technology fell steadily further and further behind the West. Gorbachev’s reforms served only to weaken further the command economy, without establishing a market economy in its stead. There was a bread shortage even after the good harvest of 1990. 134No amount of either economic or political intelligence could stave off the disintegration of the failing Soviet system.

As the Soviet Union’s economic problems multiplied during 1990 and separatist movements strengthened, the Centre’s traditional suspicions of the Main Adversary revived. Kryuchkov did not place all the blame for Russia’s ills on imperialist plots. “The main sources of our trouble, in the KGB’s view,” he declared, “are to be found inside the country.” But he accused the CIA and other Western intelligence services of promoting “anti-socialist” and separatist forces as part of a “secret war against the Soviet state.” 135According to Shebarshin, Gorbachev failed to heed the FCD’s warnings. “He and his friends lived in a world of self-delusion… We were hitching our wagon to the Western train.” 136With Gorbachev, in the Centre’s view, unwilling to offend the Americans, Kryuchkov began to publicize some of the KGB’s neglected conspiracy theories. In December 1990 he denounced a (non-existent) Western plot, “akin to economic sabotage,” to “deliver impure and sometimes infected grain, as well as products with an above-average level of radioactivity or containing harmful substances.” 137In February 1991 first Kryuchkov’s deputy, Viktor Fyodorovich Grushko, and then the new prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, denounced an equally imaginary plot by Western banks to undermine the rouble. The fullest public version of the Centre’s theory of a vast American-led conspiracy to subvert the Soviet Union was set out in April 1991 in a speech by the head of KGB assessments, Nikolai Sergeyevich Leonov, formerly deputy head of the FCD, responsible for operations in North and South America. The goal of US policy, he declared, was “to eliminate the Soviet Union as a united state.” Gorbachev, he implied, was refusing to listen: