Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes… You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age, have turned out to be a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile… You are finished. You will find on the record for all time… your hideous abnormalities… What incredible evilness. It is all there on the record. 80

King was probably the only prominent American to be the target of active measures by both the FBI and the KGB. By the mid-1960s the claims by the CPUSA leadership that secret Party members within King’s entourage would be able to “guide” his policies had proved to be hollow. 81To the Centre’s dismay, King repeatedly linked the aims of the civil rights movement not to the alleged worldwide struggle against American imperialism but to the fulfillment of the American dream and “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” He wrote in his inspirational “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in 1963:

I have no despair about the future… We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham [Alabama] and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom… We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. 82

Having given up hope of influencing King, the Centre aimed instead at replacing him with a more radical and malleable leader. In August 1967 the Centre approved an operational plan by the deputy head of Service A, Yuri Modin, former controller of the Magnificent Five, to discredit King and his chief lieutenants by placing articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an “Uncle Tom” who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration. While leading freedom marches under the admiring glare of worldwide television, King was allegedly in close touch with the President. 83

The same operational plan also contained a series of active measures designed to discredit US policy “on the Negro issue.” The Centre authorized Modin:

• To organize, through the use of KGB residency resources in the US, the publication and distribution of brochures, pamphlets, leaflets and appeals denouncing the policy of the Johnson administration on the Negro question and exposing the brutal terrorist methods being used by the government to suppress the Negro rights movement.

• To arrange, via available agent resources, for leading figures in the legal profession to make public statements discrediting the policy of the Johnson administration on the Negro question.

• To forge and distribute through illegal channels a document showing that the John Birch Society, in conjunction with the Minuteman organization, is developing a plan for the physical elimination of leading figures in the Negro movement in the US. 84

Service A sought to exploit the violent images of the long, hot summers which began in August 1965 with race riots in Watts, the black Los Angeles ghetto, which resulted in thirty-six deaths, left 1,032 injured and caused damage estimated at over 40 million dollars. The Centre seems to have hoped that as violence intensified King would be swept aside by black radicals such as Stokeley Carmichael, who told a meeting of Third World revolutionaries in Cuba in the summer of 1967, “We have a common enemy. Our struggle is to overthrow this system… We are moving into open guerrilla warfare in the United States.” Traveling on to North Vietnam, Carmichael declared in Hanoi, “We are not reformists… We are revolutionaries. We want to change the American system.” 85

King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 was quickly followed by the violence and rioting which the KGB had earlier blamed King for trying to prevent. Within a week riots had erupted in over a hundred cities, forty-six people had been killed, 3,500 injured and 20,000 arrested. To “Deke” DeLoach, it seemed that, “The nation was teetering on the brink of anarchy.” 86Henceforth, instead of dismissing King as an Uncle Tom, Service A portrayed him as a martyr of the black liberation movement and spread conspiracy theories alleging that his murder had been planned by white racists with the connivance of the authorities. 87

Simultaneously the Centre implemented a series of active measures designed to weaken the internal cohesion of the United States and undermine its international reputation by inciting race hatred. In 1971 Andropov personally approved the fabrication of pamphlets full of racist insults purporting to come from the extremist Jewish Defense League, headed by Meir Kahane, calling for a campaign against the “black mongrels” who, it was claimed, were attacking Jews and looting Jewish shops. Thirty pamphlets were mailed to a series of militant black groups in the hope of producing “mass disorders in New York.” At the same time forged letters were sent to sixty black organizations giving fictitious details of atrocities committed by the League against blacks and calling for vengeance against Kahane and his chief lieutenants. Probably to the Centre’s disappointment, Kahane was assassinated some years later, not by a black militant but by an Arab.

On at least one occasion, the Centre ordered the use of explosives to exacerbate racial tensions in New York. On July 25, 1971 the head of the FCD First (North American) Department, Anatoli Tikhonovich Kireyev, instructed the New York residency to proceed with operation PANDORA: the planting of a delayed-action explosive package in “the Negro section of New York.” Kireyev’s preferred target was “one of the Negro colleges.” After the explosion the residency was ordered to make anonymous telephone calls to two or three black organizations, claiming that the explosion was the work of the Jewish Defense League. 88

The attempt to stir up racial tensions in the United States remained part of Service A’s stock-in-trade for the remainder of the Cold War. Before the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, for example, Line PR officers in the Washington residency mailed bogus communications from the Ku Klux Klan to the Olympic committees of African and Asian countries. 89Among the racial taunts devised by Service A for inclusion in the mailings was the following:

African monkeys!

A grand reception awaits you in Los Angeles!

We are preparing for the Olympic games by shooting at black moving targets.

In Los Angeles our own Olympic flames are ready to incinerate you. The highest award for a true American patriot would be the lynching of an African monkey.

Blacks, Welcome to the Olympic games in Los Angeles!

We’ll give you a reception you’ll never forget!

This and other active measures on the same theme made front-page news in many countries. When Attorney-General William French Smith denounced the letters as KGB forgeries, Moscow predictably feigned righteous indignation at Washington’s anti-Soviet slanders. 90

THE CENTRE’S ASSESSMENT of “anti-Sovietism” in the United States changed radically at the beginning of the 1970s. In 1968 the Kremlin had been so anxious to prevent the election of the veteran anti-Communist Richard Nixon that it had secretly offered to subsidize the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey. 91Once in office, however, Nixon rapidly emerged as the architect of détente. More Soviet-American agreements were signed in 1972-3 than in the entire forty years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Washington. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, under threat of impeachment for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, caused both dismay and deep suspicion in Moscow. Seen from the Kremlin, Nixon’s attempts to conceal the use of dirty tricks against his opponents were, as Dobrynin later acknowledged, “a fairly natural thing to do. Who cared if it was a breach of the Constitution?” The conspiracy theorists in the Centre convinced themselves that Nixon’s dramatic fall from power was due far less to public indignation over Watergate than to conspiracy by the enemies of détente—in particular the “Jewish lobby,” who were campaigning for unrestricted emigration by Soviet Jews to Israel, and the military-industrial complex, which was anxious to prevent lower arms expenditure. 92