The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  With the growing aggressiveness of international imperialism, the data received indicate that subversive activity by foreign Zionist centres against the socialist countries has substantially increased. At the present time, there are more than 600 Zionist centres and organizations in the capitalist states, possessing significant propaganda resources. Since Israel’s aggression against the Arab countries in June 1967, it has begun a campaign of widespread and open provocation against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

  Zionist circles, in trying to deflect the attention of world public opinion away from the aggressive actions of the US in Indochina and of Israel in the Middle East, and toward the non-existent ‘problem’ of the Jews in the USSR, have unleashed on our country a broad campaign of slander, and to this end are organizing abroad anti-Soviet meetings, assemblies, conferences, marches and other hostile acts.

  . . . Along with the cultivation of anti-Soviet world opinion, the Zionists are striving to exert ideological influence on the Jewish population of the Soviet Union, in order to provoke negative manifestations and create a nationalist underground in our country.

  . . . The KGB organs have been focusing on operations for curtailing hostile and specially organized activity of Jewish nationalists, in particular methods of dismantling, separating and dividing groups, compromising their spiritual leaders and isolating deluded individuals from them.39

  Soviet policy oscillated between the desire to deter Jewish emigration to Israel and intermittent anxiety at the impact on foreign opinion of the persecution of the refuseniks. Brezhnev was in a particularly nervous mood for several months before his visit to Washington in June 1973. He told the Politburo in March, ‘In the last few months, hysteria has been whipped up around the so-called education tax on individuals emigrating abroad. I have thought a lot about what to do.’ Unusually he criticized Andropov by name for failing to implement his instructions to end collection of the tax. ‘It was my fault that we delayed implementing your instructions for six days,’ Andropov confessed. ‘It was simply the unwieldiness of our apparatus.’ As Brezhnev carried on complaining, his tone became increasingly self-pitying. ‘On Saturday and Sunday I didn’t even go outside’, he told the Politburo, ‘and now I will have to devote even more time to these questions.’ He concluded the discussion with a bizarre, rambling monologue which epitomized the broader confusion of Soviet policy:

  Why not give [the Jews] some little theatre with 500 seats for a Jewish variety show that will work under our censorship with a repertoire under our supervision? Let Auntie Sonya sing Jewish wedding songs there. I’m not proposing this, I’m just talking . . . I’m speaking freely because I still have not raised my hand for anything I’m saying. For now, I’m simply keeping my hands at my sides and thinking things over, this is the point . . . Zionism is making us stupid, and we [even] take money from an old lady who has received an education.40

  The outbreak of the Yom Kippur War enabled Andropov to recoup some of his personal prestige within the Politburo. The simultaneous attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces on 6 October 1973 caught Israel and the United States, but not the KGB, off guard. Still conscious of having been caught out by the beginning of the Six-Day War six years earlier, the KGB was able to provide advance warning to the Politburo before Yom Kippur - probably as a result of intelligence from its penetrations of the Egyptian armed forces and intelligence community.41

  The KGB appears to have achieved no similar penetration of the Israeli Defence Force and intelligence agencies, despite the inclusion of large numbers of agents among those allowed to emigrate to Israel. According to Oleg Kalugin, head of FCD Counter Intelligence:

  Many promised to work for us abroad, but almost invariably forgot their pledges as soon as they crossed the Soviet border. A few did help us, keeping the KGB informed about the plans and activities of Jewish émigré and refusenik groups. Our ultimate goal was to place these Jewish émigrés, many of whom were scientists, into sensitive positions in Western government, science or the military-industrial complex. But we enjoyed little success, and by the time I stepped down as head of Foreign Counter-Intelligence in 1980 I didn’t know of a single valuable [Jewish émigré] mole in the West for the KGB .42

  Other Soviet-bloc intelligence services were probably no more successful than the KGB. Markus Wolf later acknowledged that during his thirty-three years as head of the East German HVA, ‘We never managed to penetrate Israeli intelligence.’43

  The KGB found it far easier to infiltrate agents into Israel than to control them once they were there. The small residency in the Russian Orthodox Church mission in Jerusalem, which was kept under close surveillance by Shin Bet, could not cope with the demands made of it by the Centre. In October 1970 the Centre approved a plan to expand intelligence operations in Israel by sending a series of illegals on short-term missions as well as preparing the establishment of a permanent illegal residency.44 Among the illegals despatched to Israel in 1971-72 both to contact existing agents and to cultivate potential new recruits were KARSKY, PATRIYA, RUN and YORIS, posing as - respectively - Canadian, Spanish, Mexican and Finnish nationals.45 In 1972 an illegal residency in Israel also began operating, run by the thirty-four-year-old Yuri Fyodorovich Linov (codenamed KRAVCHENKO), posing as the Austrian Karl-Bernd Motl. Plans were made to give Linov control of a network of five agents:46 LEON, a medical researcher with Israeli intelligence contacts who had been recruited in 1966 while on a visit to the Soviet Union;47 KIM, a bogus Jewish refugee sent to Israel in 1970, where he enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to penetrate organizations such as the Prisoners of Zion Association which campaigned for the release of Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union;48 PETRESKU, another KGB Jewish agent who arrived in Israel in 1970;49 GERDA, an employee of the German embassy;50 and RON, a foreign ambassador in Israel.51

  Linov’s new illegal residency, however, survived for only a year. The first danger signal, the significance of which was apparently not appreciated by the Centre, was KIM’s sudden unauthorized appearance in West Berlin in February 1973, where he complained to the KGB that Shin Bet was showing an interest in him.52 A month later Linov was arrested while in the middle of an intelligence operation. The Centre concluded that he had been betrayed by LEON, who may well have been a double agent controlled by Shin Bet.53 PETRESKU was also suspected of having been turned by Israeli intelligence.54 Though contact with RON (and probably GERDA) continued, the Centre noted that RON was ‘inclined to be extortionate’ in his financial demands.55

  Following Linov’s arrest, the Centre shelved plans for an illegal residency and cancelled all visits by illegals to Israel.56 Plans by the Hungarian AVH to send their illegal YASAI to Israel posing as a French-born Jew were also shelved after he refused to be circumcised. 57 Two FCD officers, V. N. Okhulov and I. F. Khokhlov, took part in protracted secret negotiations with Israeli intelligence officers to secure Linov’s release. Throughout the negotiations he was referred to by his Austrian alias ‘Motl’. The Israelis requested in exchange the release of Heinrich Speter, a Bulgarian Jew sentenced to death on a probably spurious charge of espionage, and of sixteen Soviet Jews imprisoned for an alleged attempt to hijack a Soviet aircraft. The KGB insisted at first on a straight swap of Linov for Speter, claiming that both men had been found guilty on similar charges of espionage. In the end, however, the Centre also agreed to free Silva Zalmonson, one of the alleged hijackers, and to allow two of her companions to emigrate to Israel at the end of their prison sentences. As a condition of the exchange, the Israeli negotiators insisted that no mention be made in public of the release of ‘Motl’ - probably to avoid the impression that Israel was willing to exchange captured Soviet spies for persecuted Jews in the Soviet bloc.

  The arrival in Israel of Speter and Zalmonson in September 1974 was thus interpreted by some Western observers as evidence that the Kremlin had decided on a more conciliatory policy towards Jewish emigration. Time magazine’s Moscow correspondent saw their release a
s a Soviet attempt to influence the US Congress by making a humanitarian gesture. Andropov appeared delighted with the outcome of the negotiations for Linov’s release and presented Okhulov and Khokhlov with formal letters of congratulation.58 The Centre was less pleased with Linov. Officers in the FCD Illegals Directorate believed that he had given away more than he should have done under Israeli interrogation.59

  During the mid-1970s Soviet policy towards Jewish emigration hardened once again. The immediate cause was the passage through Congress in 1974 of the Jackson-Vanik and Stevenson amendments to the 1972 US/Soviet Trade Agreement, making most-favoured-nation status dependent on the relaxation of curbs on emigration. The numbers of exit visas given in the mid-1970s declined from the record numbers of over 30,000 a year in 1972-73 to 20,000 in 1974 and less than 15,000 a year in 1975-76. Andropov continued to take a close, even obsessive, personal interest in the surveillance of would-be Jewish emigrants and all contacts between Soviet Jews and their foreign supporters.60 He regarded even the sending of matsos (unleavened bread) from the West to Soviet Jews for the seder (the Passover meal) as an issue of such grave importance that it needed to be brought to the attention of the Politburo, writing in March 1975:

  From the experience of previous years, it is clear that the delivery of such parcels [of matsos] to the addressees gives rise to negative processes among the Jewish population of the USSR, and reinforces nationalist and pro-emigration feelings.

  In view of this, and in view of the fact that at the present time Jewish communities are fully supplied with locally baked matsos, the Committee of State Security considers it essential for parcels containing matsos sent from abroad to be confiscated . . .61

  The claim that Soviet Jews were already well supplied with Passover matsos was disinformation designed to pre-empt opposition to Andropov’s proposal from those Politburo members who, like Brezhnev, occasionally grasped that the obsession with Zionist conspiracy was ‘making us stupid’. Andropov regarded foreign telephone calls as an even greater danger than imported matsos, in view of the politically incorrect tendency of Soviet Jews to complain to foreigners about the various forms of persecution to which they were subject. In June 1975 he reported personally to the Politburo on the success of KGB measures ‘to prevent the use of international communications channels for the transfer abroad of tendentious and slanderous information’ by Soviet Jews. During the previous two years over a hundred telephone lines used by ‘Jewish nationalists’ to make phone calls abroad had been disconnected, ‘thereby inflicting a noticeable blow on foreign Zionist organizations’. More recently, however, Jews had taken to using telephone booths in telegraph offices, giving the staff non-Jewish names in order not to arouse suspicion, and direct-dial international telephone lines where there was no operator to keep track of them.62

  Zionism was second only to the United States (‘the Main Adversary’) as a target for KGB active measures. For some conspiracy theorists in the Centre and elsewhere in Moscow, the two targets were in any case closely linked. Arkadi Shevchenko, the Soviet Under Secretary-General of the United Nations in the mid-1970s, was struck by the puzzlement in Moscow at how the United States functioned with such technological efficiency despite so little apparent regulation: ‘Many are inclined towards the fantastic notion that there must be a secret control centre somewhere in the United States.’63 The power behind the scenes, they believed, was monopoly capital which, in turn, was largely identified in some Soviet imaginations with the Jewish lobby.

  The Centre devoted enormous energy to anti-Zionist active measures within the United States which, it was hoped, would also discredit the Jewish lobby. Probably the Centre’s most successful tactic was to exploit the activities of the extremist Jewish Defense League (JDL), founded by a Brooklyn rabbi, Meir Kahane, whose inflammatory rhetoric declared the need for Jews to protect themselves by ‘all necessary means’ - including violence. The JDL so perfectly fitted the violent, racist image of Zionism which the KGB wished to project that, had it not existed, Service A might well have sought to invent a similarly extremist US-based underground movement. In September 1969, six Arab missions at the UN received threatening telegrams from the League, claiming that they were ‘legitimate targets’ for revenge attacks for terrorist acts committed by Arabs.64 A year later, on 4 October 1970, KGB officers in New York posted forged letters containing similar threats, purporting to come from the JDL and other Zionist extremists, to the heads of Arab missions. The Centre calculated that these letters would provoke protests by the missions to both U Thant, the UN Secretary-General, and the US government.65

  In the early hours of 25 November 1970 there was a bomb attack on the Manhattan offices of the Soviet airline Aeroflot, followed by an anonymous phone call to Associated Press by a caller who claimed responsibility for the bombing and used the JDL slogan, ‘Never again!’ Another bomb attack on 8 January 1971, this time outside a Soviet cultural centre in Washington, was followed by a similar phone call and the use of the same slogan. A spokesman for the JDL denied the League’s involvement in the bombing but refused to condemn it. Once again, the Centre decided to imitate the example of the League. On 25 July the head of the FCD First (North American) Department, Anatoli Tikhonovich Kireyev, instructed the New York residency to implement operation PANDORA: the planting of a delayed-action explosive device in ‘the Negro section of New York’, preferably ‘one of the Negro colleges’. After the explosion, the residency was ordered to make anonymous phone calls to black organizations, claiming responsibility on behalf of the JDL. PANDORA was merely the most dramatic in a series of active measures designed to stir up racial hostility between the black and Jewish communities. Simultaneously Andropov approved the distribution of bogus JDL leaflets fabricated by Service A, which denounced the crimes perpetrated by ‘black mongrels’. Sixty letters were sent to black student and youth groups giving lurid accounts of fictitious JDL atrocities and demanding vengeance. Other anti-semitic pamphlets, circulated in the name of a non-existent ‘Party of National Rebirth’, called on whites to save America from the Jews.66

  The main data base used by Service A in its active-measures campaigns against Zionist targets from 1973 onwards was obtained during operation SIMON, carried out by an agent of the Viennese residency codenamed CHUB (‘Forelock’) against the Paris headquarters of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). Preliminary reconnaissance by CHUB established that the premises were unguarded at night and had no burglar alarm. Using a duplicate key to the main entrance, he entered the WJC Paris offices on the night of 12- 13 February 1972 and removed the entire card index listing names and addresses of the WJC’s 20,000 French supporters together with details of their financial contributions, address plates giving the 30,000 addresses in fifty-five countries to which the WJC French-language periodical Information Juive was despatched, finance files relating to the activities of the WJC European Executive and details of the financing of a book on anti-semitism in Poland. At 11 a.m. on 14 June CHUB delivered all this material, which filled two suitcases and a shopping bag, to the Soviet consulate in Paris, then returned to Vienna using a false passport. 67

  Service A spent much of the next year planning the production of forgeries based on the format of the stolen documents which were designed to discredit the WJC and Zionism. On 4 January 1973, N. A. Kosov, the head of Service A, submitted a large-scale plan for active measures based on the forgeries which was approved by Andropov on the following day. Many of the fabricated documents were posted to addresses in Europe and North America over the next few years in the name of a fictitious ‘Union of Young Zionists’: among them a letter from one of the leaders of the French branch of the WJC containing compromising information on the World Zionist Organization (WZO), which, through its executive arm, the Jewish Agency, was responsible for Jewish emigration to Israel; financial documents purporting to show that WJC leaders had embezzled large sums of money which had been collected to provide aid for Israel; evidence that a series of newspapers had been
bribed to publish pro-Israeli propaganda; and material designed to show that the WJC had links with Jewish extremists who were secretly trying to provoke outbreaks of anti-semitism in order to encourage emigration to Israel.68 There is no evidence, however, that this elaborate disinformation exercise had any significant impact. No KGB active-measures campaign was capable of countering the adverse publicity generated by the persecution of the refuseniks. The Centre’s obsession with the menace of Zionist subversion also introduced into the campaign an element of sometimes absurd exaggeration. It decided, for example, to exploit the murder in October 1973 of a female relative of the future French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, by distributing in the name of a fictitious French Israeli support group a ludicrous fabrication declaring that she had been killed by Zionists in revenge for Giscard’s part in the prosecution some years earlier of a group of Jewish financiers. So far from grasping the pointlessness of this dismal active measure, the Centre was unaccountably proud of it.69

  Though estimating the impact of KGB anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli active measures in Europe is inevitably difficult, they appear to have achieved no more than marginal successes. Among these marginal successes was the visit to the Soviet Union of the British Chief Rabbi, Immanuel (later Lord) Jakobovits, in December 1975. On his return he was greeted by the headline in the Jerusalem Post: ‘Jakobovits “Duped” by Soviets, Say Those Who Have Lived There’. Though the headline was exaggerated, the Chief Rabbi had shown a degree of naivety when subjected during his visit to a succession of carefully prepared active measures. Even when he wrote an account of his visit in his memoirs nine years later, it seems not to have occurred to him that the Russian Jews with whom he had lengthy discussions during his visit inevitably included a series of well-trained KGB agents.70 Mitrokhin’s notes contain the codenames of eleven of them; their task included ‘conveying slanted information about the situation in the Soviet Union’.71