Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The KGB has been informing the leadership of the country about this in time and detail. We would not want a repetition of the tragic situation before the Great Patriotic War against Germany, when Soviet intelligence warned about the imminent attack of Nazi Germany but Stalin rejected this information as wrong and even provocative. You know what this mistake cost us.

Further dramatic evidence of the resurgence of the KGB leadership’s traditional conspiracy theories about the Main Adversary came in a speech by Kryuchkov to a closed session of the Supreme Soviet on June 17. Kryuchkov read out a hitherto top secret FCD report to the Politburo of January 1977, “On CIA Plans to Recruit Agents Among Soviet Citizens,” which denounced an imaginary CIA masterplan to sabotage the Soviet administration, economy and scientific research. This plan, Kryuchkov claimed, remained actively in force. 138The CIA’s most important agent, he solemnly informed Gorbachev, was his own closest adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, allegedly recruited while an exchange student at Columbia University over thirty years earlier. 139

As Kryuchkov later complained, Gorbachev did not take such nonsense seriously. Nor, no doubt, did many FCD officers with the first-hand experience of the West which the KGB Chairman lacked. Kryuchkov was now Gorbachev’s most dangerous opponent, convinced that, having tamely accepted the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, Gorbachev was now presiding over the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In August 1991 he became the chief organizer of the coup which attempted to topple Gorbachev and preserve the Union.

“The philosophers,” wrote Marx, “have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” 1In addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessments of it, the KGB also sought to influence the course of world events by a variety of “active measures” ( aktivinyye meropriatia ) ranging from media manipulation to “special actions” involving various degrees of violence. Inspired by exaggerated accounts of its heroic defeat of counter-revolutionary conspiracies between the wars and a desire to impress the political leadership, it frequently overestimated its own effectiveness.

Throughout the Cold War the United States was the main target for KGB active measures as well as for intelligence collection. Most were at the non-violent end of the active measures spectrum—“influence operations” designed to discredit the Main Adversary. A conference of senior FCD officers in January 1984 reaffirmed a priority which had remained unchanged since the end of the Second World War: “Our chief task is to help to frustrate the aggressive intentions of American imperialism… We must work unweariedly at exposing the adversary’s weak and vulnerable points.” 2Much of what was euphemistically described as “exposure” was in reality disinformation fabricated by Service A, the active measures branch of the FCD, and spread by Line PR officers in foreign residencies. Line PR officers were supposed to spend about 25 percent of their time on active measures, though in practice some failed to do so.

The wide variation in the sophistication of the disinformation generated by Service A reflected the uneven quality of its personnel. About 50 per cent of its officers were specialists in active measures. Some of the remaining 50 per cent were rejects from other departments. Few of the ablest and most ambitious FCD recruits wanted jobs in Service A; it rarely offered the opportunity of overseas postings and was widely regarded as a career dead end. 3There were, of course, exceptions. Yuri Modin, the last controller of the Magnificent Five, became an active measures specialist, was appointed deputy head of Service A and subsequently had a successful Line PR posting spreading disinformation in India before becoming head of political intelligence at the Andropov Institute. 4Many Service A officers, however, had little, if any, experience of living in the West and relied on crude conspiracy theories about the capitalist and Zionist plotters who supposedly operated a secret “command center” in the United States. 5Successive chairmen of the KGB and heads of the FCD, none of whom until the late 1980s had worked in foreign residencies, were influenced by the same theories.

IT WOULD HAVE been wholly out of character had the Centre failed to interpret President Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on November 22, 1963 as anything less than conspiracy. The deputy chairman of the KGB reported to the Central Committee in December:

A reliable source of the Polish friends [the Polish intelligence service], an American entrepreneur and owner of a number of firms closely connected to the petroleum circles of the South, reported in late November that the real instigators of this criminal deed were three leading oil magnates from the South of the USA—Richardson, Murchison and Hunt, all owners of major petroleum reserves in the southern states who have long been connected to pro-fascist and racist organizations in the South. 6

It was not difficult to find circumstantial “evidence” for this simplistic conspiracy theory, particularly as regards the oil magnate and anti-Communist buffoon H. L. Hunt. “The Communists need not invade the United States,” Hunt once preposterously declared. “Pro-Bolshevik sentiment in the US is already greater than when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government and took over Russia.” 7

Hunt’s son, Bunker, was one of a group of right-wing mavericks who had paid for a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News on the day of Kennedy’s visit, accusing the President of being a Communist stooge—a charge which prompted Kennedy to say he was “heading into nut country.” 8The Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby, who shot and fatally wounded Oswald on November 24, had visited the Hunt offices shortly before Kennedy’s assassination. 9

The KGB reported that a journalist from the Baltimore Sun “said in a private conversation in early December that on assignment from a group of Texas financiers and industrialists headed by millionaire Hunt, Jack Ruby, who is now under arrest, proposed a large sum of money to Oswald for the murder of Kennedy.” Oswald had subsequently been shot by Ruby to prevent him revealing the plot. 10Khrushchev seems to have been convinced by the KGB view that the aim of the right-wing conspirators behind Kennedy’s assassination was to intensify the Cold War and “strengthen the reactionary and aggressive elements of American foreign policy.” 11

The choice of Oswald as Kennedy’s assassin, the KGB believed, was intended to divert public attention from the racist oil magnates and make the assassination appear to be a Communist plot. 12The Centre had strong reasons of its own to wish to deflect responsibility for the assassination from Oswald. It was deeply embarrassed by the fact that in 1959 Oswald had defected to Russia, professing disgust with the American way of life and admiration for the Soviet system. Initially the KGB had suspected that he might have been sent on a secret mission by the CIA, but eventually concluded that he was an unstable nuisance and were glad to see the back of him when he returned to Texas with his Russian wife in 1962. After Oswald’s return the FBI at first similarly suspected that he might be a Soviet agent but then seems to have made the same jaundiced assessment of him as the Centre. 13KGB suspicions of Oswald revived, however, when he wrote to the CPUSA in August 1963 asking whether it might be better for him to continue the fight against “anti-progressive forces” as a member of the “underground” rather than as an open supporter of “Communist ideals.” Jack Childs (codenamed MARAT), an undeclared member of the CPUSA who acted as one of its main points of contact with the KGB, warned Moscow that Oswald’s letter “was viewed as an FBI provocation.” The fact that, unknown to the KGB, Childs was himself an FBI agent renders his warning unusually ironic. 14