The Committee believes that he is a man of remarkable commitment and courage, who risked imprisonment or death in his determination that the truth should be told about the real nature of the KGB and their activities, which he believed were betraying the interests of his own country and people. He succeeded in this, and we wish to record formally our admiration for his achievement. 12
While in Britain, scarcely a week passed without Mitrokhin re-reading his papers, responding to questions on them and checking translations. On the eve of his death on 23 January 2004 he was still making plans for the publication of parts of his archive.
With his wife Nina, a distinguished medical specialist,13 Mitrokhin was also able to resume the foreign travels which he had been forced to discontinue a generation earlier when he was transferred from FCD operations to archives. Mitrokhin’s first visit to Paris made a particular impression on him. He had read the KGB file on the defection in Paris of the Kirov Ballet’s greatest dancer, Rudolf Nureyev, and had followed with personal outrage the planning of operations (happily never successfully implemented) to break one or both of Nureyev’s legs with the aim - absurdly expressed in euphemistic KGB jargon - of ‘lessening his professional skills’.14 In October 1992, while Mitrokhin was meeting SIS in Britain to make final plans for the exfiltration of his family and archive in the following month, Nureyev, by then seriously ill with Aids, was directing his last ballet, Bayaderka, at the Paris Opera. When, after the performance, Nureyev appeared on stage in a wheelchair, wrapped in a tartan rug, he received a standing ovation. Many in the audience wept, as did many of the mourners three months later during his burial at the Russian cemetery of Sainte Geneviève des Bois in Paris. On his visit to Paris, Mitrokhin visited Nureyev’s tomb as well as the graves of other Russian exiles, among them both White Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution and dissidents of the Soviet era. Though also deeply interested in other Western sites associated with Russian émigrés, from Ivy House in London, home of the great ballerina Anna Pavlova, to the New York Russian community at Brighton Beach, his travels ranged far more widely. After the death of Nina in 1999, he flew around the world on his British passport. Only a year before his own death in 2004, he went for a walking holiday in New Zealand.
Save for his love of travel, Mitrokhin mostly remained, as he had always been, a man of simple tastes, preferring his own home-cooked Russian cabbage soup, shchi, to the elaborate cuisine of expensive restaurants. His favourite London restaurants were ‘The Stockpot’ chain, which specialize in good-value ‘home-cooked’ menus. Though Mitrokhin himself drank little, he would usually produce wine when entertaining friends and liked to splash out for family birthdays and major celebrations. On a visit to the Ritz the family splashed out more than it intended, having failed to appreciate the cost of a round of vintage cognacs. Mitrokhin was no more motivated by fame than by money. It was only after long persuasion that he agreed to include any of his career in volume 1, and only a few months before publication that he consented to the use of his real name rather than a pseudonym. Strenuous efforts by the media to track Mitrokhin down after publication were, happily, unsuccessful. He was too private a person and had arrived in Britain too late in life with too little experience of the West to have coped with the glare of publicity. Mitrokhin had, however, perfected the art of being inconspicuous and travelled unnoticed the length and breadth of the United Kingdom on his senior citizen’s rail-card. Until his late seventies he also remained remarkably fit. Intelligence officers from a number of countries were mildly disconcerted by his unselfconscious habit, when meetings dragged on, of dropping to the floor and doing a set of press-ups.
Mitrokhin was both an inspiring and, at times, a difficult man to work with while I wrote the two volumes of the Mitrokhin Archive.15 In his view, the material he had risked his life to smuggle out of KGB archives revealed ‘the truth’. Though he accepted the need to put it in context, he had little interest in the work of scholars however distinguished, which failed, in his view, to recognize the central role of the KGB in Soviet society. Mitrokhin tolerated, rather than welcomed, my use of such works and a wide range of other sources to complement, corroborate and fill gaps in his own unique archive.16 My admiration for some of the books which neglected the intelligence dimension of twentieth-century international relations was beyond his comprehension. Though Mitrokhin did not, alas, live to see the publication of this volume, it was virtually complete by the time of his death and I am not aware of any interpretation by me of material in his archive with which he disagreed. The opportunity he gave me to work on his archive has been an extraordinary privilege.
Since the original material in the Mitrokhin archive remains classified, the content of this second volume, like that of the first, was examined in great detail by an ‘interdepartmental working group’ in Whitehall before clearance for publication received ministerial approval.17 Though the complex issues involved caused extensive delays in publication, I am grateful to the working group for the time and care they have taken, and for clearing all but about two pages of the original text.
As in volume 1, codenames (also known as ‘worknames’ in the case of KGB officers) appear in the text in capitals. It is important to note that the KGB gave codenames not merely to those who worked for it but also to those whom it targeted and to some others (such as foreign officials and ministers) who had no connection with it. Codenames are, in themselves, no evidence that the individuals to whom they refer were conscious or witting KGB agents or sources - or even that they were aware of being targeted for recruitment or to influence operations. At the risk of stating the obvious, it should also be emphasized that the vast majority of those outside the Soviet Union who expressed pro-Soviet opinions had, of course, no connection with the KGB.
Christopher Andrew
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to those colleagues who commented on parts of this book during the brief interval between the clearance of the text by the Whitehall interdepartmental working group and its delivery to the publishers: Mr Geoffrey Archer, Sir Nicholas Barrington, Professor Chris Bayly, Dr Susan Bayly, Mr Kristian Gustafson, Professor Jonathan Haslam, Mr Alan Judd, Professor John Lonsdale, Dr Gabriella Ramos, Dr David Sneath and Sir Roger Tomkys. I also owe a considerable debt to the intellectual stimulation provided by the remarkable group of young scholars from around the world in the Cambridge University Intelligence Seminar who are transforming the academic study of intelligence history. While writing this book, I have been especially fortunate to have the opportunity to supervise and learn from the doctoral research of the outstanding Australian historian and Gates Scholar Ms Julie Elkner, who is conducting path-breaking work on the image of the secret policeman in Soviet and post-Soviet culture. I have also benefited from her extensive knowledge of published sources.
Christopher Andrew
1
Introduction: ‘The World Was Going Our Way’ The Soviet Union, the Cold War and the Third World
Communism, claimed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, would change not simply the history of Europe and the West but the history of the world. Their Communist Manifesto of 1848, though chiefly directed to industrialized Europe, ended with a clarion call to global revolution: ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!’ (Working women, it was assumed, would follow in the train of male revolutionaries.) After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin hailed not only the triumph of the Russian Revolution but the beginning of ‘world revolution’: ‘Our cause is an international cause, and so long as a revolution does not take place in all countries . . . our victory is only half a victory, or perhaps less.’ Though world revolution had become a distant dream for most Bolsheviks by the time Lenin died seven years later, he never lost his conviction that the inevitable collapse of the colonial empires would one day bring global revolution in its wake:
Millions and hundreds of m
illions - actually the overwhelming majority of the world’s population - are now coming out as an independent and active revolutionary factor. And it should be perfectly clear that, in the coming decisive battles of the world revolution, this movement of the majority of the world’s population, originally aimed at national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and will, perhaps, play a much more revolutionary role than we have been led to expect.1
The Third Communist International (Comintern), founded in Moscow in March 1919, set itself ‘the goal of fighting, by every means, even by force of arms, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic’. For the next year or more, Comintern’s Chairman, Grigori Yevseyevich Zinoviev, lived in a revolutionary dream-world in which Bolshevism was about to conquer Europe and sweep across the planet. On the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he declared his hope that, within a year, ‘the Communist International will triumph in the entire world’. At the Congress of the Peoples of the East, convened at Baku in 1920 to promote colonial revolution, delegates excitedly waved swords, daggers and revolvers in the air when Zinoviev called on them to wage a jihad against imperialism and capitalism. Except in Mongolia, however, where the Bolsheviks installed a puppet regime, all attempts to spread their revolution beyond Soviet borders foundered either because of lack of popular support or because of successful resistance by counter-revolutionary governments.2
By the mid-1920s Moscow’s main hopes were pinned on China, where the Soviet Politburo had pushed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into alliance with the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT leader, Chiang Kai-shek, declared in public: ‘If Russia aids the Chinese revolution, does that mean that she wants China to apply Communism? No, she wants us to carry out the national revolution.’ Privately, he believed the opposite, convinced that ‘What the Russians call “Internationalism” and “World Revolution” are nothing but old-fashioned imperialism.’ The Soviet leadership, however, believed that it could get the better of Chiang. He should, said Stalin, ‘be squeezed like a lemon and then thrown away’. In the event, it was the CCP which became the lemon. Having gained control of Shanghai in April 1927 thanks to a Communist-led rising, Chiang began a systematic massacre of the Communists who had captured it for him. The CCP, on Stalin’s instructions, replied with a series of armed risings. All were disastrous failures. Moscow’s humiliation was compounded by a police raid on the Soviet consulate in Beijing which uncovered a mass of documents on Soviet espionage.3
In an attempt to generate new support for Lenin’s vision of a liberated post-colonial world, the League Against Imperialism was founded early in 1927, shortly before the Chinese débâcles, by the great virtuoso of Soviet front organizations, Willi Münzenberg, affectionately described by his ‘life partner’, Babette Gross, as ‘the patron saint of fellow travellers’ with a remarkable gift for uniting broad sections of the left under inconspicuous Communist leadership. Those present at the inaugural congress in Brussels included Jawaharlal Nehru, later the first Prime Minister of independent India, and Josiah Gumede, President of the African National Congress and head of the League’s South African section. One of the British delegates, Fenner Brockway of the British Independent Labour Party, wrote afterwards: ‘From the platform the conference hall was a remarkable sight. Every race seemed to be there. As one looked on the sea of black, brown, yellow and white faces, one felt that here at last was something approaching a Parliament of Mankind.’
The League, Brockway believed, ‘may easily prove to be one of the most significant movements for equality and freedom in world history’.4 But it was not to be. Within a few years the League had faded into oblivion, and Comintern, though it survived until 1943 as an obedient, though drastically purged, auxiliary of Soviet foreign policy and Soviet intelligence,5 achieved nothing of importance in the Third World. The colonial empires remained intact until the Second World War, and neither the foreign policy nor the intelligence agencies of Joseph Stalin made any serious attempt to hasten their demise. Under his brutal dictatorship, the dream of world revolution quickly gave way to the reality of ‘Socialism in one country’, a Soviet Union surrounded by hostile ‘imperialist’ states and deeply conscious of its own vulnerability.
During the xenophobic paranoia of Stalin’s Terror, Comintern representatives in Moscow from around the world lived in constant fear of denunciation and execution. Many were at even greater risk than their Soviet colleagues. By early 1937, following investigations by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), Stalin had convinced himself that Comintern was a hotbed of subversion and foreign espionage. He told Georgi Dmitrov, who had become its General Secretary three years earlier, ‘All of you there in the Comintern are working in the hands of the enemy.’ Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD whose sadism and diminutive stature combined to give him the nickname ‘Poison Dwarf’, echoed his master’s voice. ‘The biggest spies’, he told Dmitrov, ‘were working in the Communist International.’ Each night, unable to sleep, the foreign Communists and Comintern officials who had been given rooms at the Hotel Lux in the centre of Moscow waited for the sound of a car drawing up at the hotel entrance in the early hours, then heard the heavy footsteps of NKVD men echo along the corridors, praying that they would stop at someone else’s door. Those who escaped arrest listened with a mixture of relief and horror as the night’s victims were taken from their rooms and driven away, never to return. Some, for whom the nightly suspense became too much, shot themselves or jumped to their deaths in the inner courtyard. Only a minority of the hotel’s foreign guests escaped the knock on the door. Many of their death warrants were signed personally by Stalin.6 Mao’s ferocious security chief, Kang Sheng, who had been sent to Moscow to learn his trade, enthusiastically co-operated with the NKVD in the hunt for mostly imaginary traitors among Chinese émigrés.7
The most enduring impact of Soviet intelligence on the Third World before the Second World War was thus the liquidation of potential leaders of post-war independence movements.8 Ho Chi-Minh, Deng Xiaoping, Jomo Kenyatta and other future Third World leaders who studied in Moscow at the Comintern-run Communist University of the Toilers of the East between the wars9 were fortunate to leave before the Terror began. Kenyatta, in particular, would have been an obvious target. His lecturers complained that ‘his attitude to the Soviet Union verges on cynicism’.10 When his fellow student, the South African Communist Edwin Mofutsanyana, accused him of being ‘a petty bourgeois’, Kenyatta replied, ‘I don’t like this “petty” thing. Why don’t you say I’m a big bourgeois?’11 During the Terror such outrageously politically incorrect humour would have been promptly reported (if only because those who failed to report it would themselves be suspect), and the career of the future first Prime Minister and President of an independent Kenya would probably have ended prematurely in an NKVD execution cellar.
After victory in the Second World War, the Soviet Union, newly strengthened by the acquisition of an obedient Soviet bloc in eastern and central Europe, initially showed less interest in the Third World than after the Bolshevik Revolution. During the early years of the Cold War Soviet intelligence priorities were overwhelmingly concentrated on the struggle against what the KGB called ‘the Main Adversary’, the United States, and its principal allies. Stalin saw the world as divided into two irreconcilable camps - capitalist and Communist - with no room for compromise between the two. Non-Communist national liberation movements in the Third World were, like capitalists, class enemies. The decolonization of the great European overseas empires, which had begun in 1947 with the end of British rule in India, persuaded Stalin’s ebullient successor, Nikita Khrushchev, to revive the Leninist dream. At the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, as well as secretly denouncing Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, he publicly abandoned the two-camp theory, setting out to win support from former Western colonies which had won their independence:
The new period in world history which Lenin predicted has
arrived, and the peoples of the East are playing an active part in deciding the destinies of the whole world, are becoming a new mighty factor in international relations.
Though one of the few major world leaders of peasant origins, Khrushchev had no doubt that the Soviet Union’s break-neck industrialization in the 1930s provided a model for the newly independent former colonies to modernize their economies. ‘Today’, he declared, ‘they need not go begging for up-to-date equipment to their former oppressors. They can get it in the socialist countries, without assuming any political or military commitments.’ Many of the first generation of post-colonial leaders in the 1950s and 1960s, who blamed all their economic ills on their former colonial rulers, were happy to accept Khrushchev’s offer.12
‘In retrospect’, writes the economic historian David Fieldhouse, ‘it is one of the most astonishing features of post-1950 African history that there should have been so general an expectation that independence would lead to very rapid economic growth and affluence. ’13 Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the first black African colony to gain its independence, claimed that Africa’s hitherto slow industrial development was entirely the fault of colonial powers which had deliberately held back ‘local economic initiative’ in order to ‘enrich alien investors’: ‘We have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialized continent . . . Africa, far from having inadequate resources, is probably better equipped for industrialization than almost any other region in the world.’14
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