The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Though Jakobovits met dissidents as well as official representatives during his visit, he returned with an inadequate grasp of the numbers who wished to emigrate, telling a packed audience in the St John’s Wood Synagogue: ‘Even if the doors of the Soviet Union were freely opened to emigration, the most optimistic estimate is that only about half a million Jews would avail themselves of the opportunity, while some believe that the figure would not be much above 100,000.’

  The fact that Jakobovits even mentioned the highly implausible hypothesis that as few as 100,000 Soviet Jews might wish to emigrate strongly suggests that he had been influenced by the ‘slanted information’ passed on to him by KGB agents. In fact, within twenty years of his visit the total number of emigrants had risen to over a million. Convinced that ‘the bulk of Soviet Jewry’ did not wish to emigrate, the Chief Rabbi placed as much emphasis on improving the conditions of Jewish life in the Soviet Union as on supporting the refuseniks.72 But if Jakobovits showed a degree of naivety, so too did the KGB. Agent SHCHERBAKOV was given the impossible task of cultivating the executive director of the Chief Rabbi’s office, Moshe Davis, with a view to his recruitment by the KGB.73

  Probably the greatest success of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign was its role in promoting the passage in the UN General Assembly by sixty-seven to fifty-five votes (with fifteen abstentions) of Resolution 3379, denouncing Zionism as a form of racism, in November 1975. In Jakobovits’s view, ‘UN resolutions hostile to Israel had been commonplace, but none could compare in virulence to this one. Its impact on Jews everywhere was devastating . . . ’74 The anti-Western majority which voted for Resolution 3379, however, was achieved as much by the lobbying of the Arab states as by the Soviet bloc. Though the KGB officers operating under diplomatic cover in New York and elsewhere doubtless played their part in the lobbying, there is no indication in any of the files noted by Mitrokhin that the KGB made a substantial contribution to the success of the vote. Soviet diplomacy appears to have contributed far more than Soviet intelligence to the passage of Resolution 3379.

  In 1977 the Soviet Union began a gradual increase in the number of exit visas granted to would-be Jewish emigrants in an attempt to demonstrate its compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords of 1975.75 Almost 29,000 Jews emigrated in 1978, followed by a record 51,000 in 1979.76 KGB pressure on the refuseniks, however, was unrelenting. In March 1977 the leading refusenik, Anatoli (Natan) Shcharansky, was arrested. For the next year he resisted all the attempts of his KGB interrogators to bully and cajole him into co-operating in his own show trial by admitting working for the CIA. Andropov refused to admit defeat. In June 1978 he falsely informed the Politburo that, ‘Shcharansky admits his guilt; we have caught him in his espionage activities and can present the appropriate materials.’ How long a sentence Shcharansky received, Andropov added, would ‘depend on how he behave[d] himself’ in court. 77 The trial, though almost unpublicized inside the Soviet Union, ended in a moral victory for Shcharansky, who made a movingly defiant final address:

  For two thousand years the Jewish people, my people, have been dispersed all over the world and seemingly deprived of any hope of returning. But still, each year Jews have stubbornly, and apparently without reason, said to each other, ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ And today, when I am further than ever from my dream, from my people and from my [wife] Avital, and when many difficult years of prisons and camps lie ahead of me, I say to my wife and to my people, ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’

  And to the court, which has only to read a sentence that was prepared long ago - to you I have nothing to say.78

  Shcharansky was sentenced to thirteen years in prison and camps on trumped-up charges of espionage and betrayal of the motherland. There is little doubt that Andropov was personally responsible for his persecution. Despite their conspiracy theories about Zionism, some - perhaps most - other members of the Politburo barely knew the name either of Shcharansky or of any other refusenik. In September President Jimmy Carter raised the Shcharansky case at a meeting with Gromyko in the White House. Gromyko replied that he had never heard of Shcharansky. Dobrynin, who was present at the meeting, believed at the time that Gromyko ‘had shown great diplomatic skill in handling such a sensitive subject by feigning ignorance of it’. After the meeting, however, Dobrynin discovered to his surprise that Gromyko’s ignorance was genuine: ‘He had instructed his subordinates in Moscow not to bother him with what he called such “absurd” matters.’79

  With the breakdown in East-West relations which followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, there was a sharp cut-back in the number of exit visas given to Jewish emigrants. Emigrants fell from 51,000 in 1979 to 25,000 in 1980 - many probably on visas issued before the change in Soviet policy. In 1981 there were fewer than 10,000, in 1982 under 5,000, and for each of the next four years fewer than 2,000.80 During the first half of the 1980s the refuseniks, like the rest of the dissident movements within the Soviet Union, seemed at their lowest ebb since their emergence in the late 1960s. Those who remained at liberty were under constant KGB surveillance. Andropov and his successors as KGB Chairman, Fedorchuk and Chebrikov, took pride in reporting to the Politburo and Central Committee on the success of their efforts to disrupt the refuseniks’ ‘anti-Soviet’ activities. On a number of occasions, the KGB exploited popular anti-semitism in order to intimidate the refuseniks. Andropov reported in May 1981, for example, that an attempt by ‘Jewish nationalists’ to hold a meeting in a forest near Moscow to commemorate the Holocaust and protest against the refusal of exit visas had been prevented ‘with the active participation of the Soviet public’.81

  Andropov’s term as Soviet leader from 1982 to 1984 witnessed the tensest period in Soviet-American relations since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. 82 The Centre’s conspiracy theories about Zionist-American collaboration to subvert the Soviet bloc gave added impetus to KGB operations against Zionist targets. In 1982 the KGB held a high-level in-house conference in Leningrad devoted to ‘The main tendencies of the subversive activity of Zionist centres abroad and Jewish nationalists within the country, and topical questions relating to increasing the effectiveness of KGB agencies in combating this [activity] in present-day conditions.’ Meeting soon after the suppression of the Polish Solidarity movement (whose minority of Jewish leaders attracted disproportionate interest in the Centre), the conference agreed that ‘virtually no major negative incidents took place in the socialist countries of Europe without the involvement of Zionists’. A number of speakers claimed that the Zionists’ penetration of the political leadership of much of the West had given them a major influence over Western policy which was exacerbating both East-West tension and ‘treasonable tendencies’ among Soviet Jews.83 In the summer of 1982, probably as a result of this conference, residents were sent a detailed four-year ‘Plan for Work against Zionism in 1982-1986’, warning them that the Soviet bloc was threatened by ‘all kinds of subversive operations’ organized by Zionists in league with Israel and ‘imperialist intelligence services’, especially the CIA. These had to be countered by a major increase in intelligence collection on ‘the plans, forms and methods of Zionist subversion’ as well as by a wide range of active measures designed to weaken and divide the Zionist movement.84

  In a review of foreign operations early in 1984, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, claimed that during the previous two years, ‘The subversive activity of émigré, nationalist and Zionist organizations and associations abroad has shown a marked increase. ’85 The FCD ‘Plan of Work’ for 1984 put first on its list of counter-intelligence targets: ‘Plans for subversive action or secret operations by the adversary’s special services and by centres for ideological diversion and nationalists, especially Zionists and other anti-Soviet organizations, against the USSR and other countries of the socialist community.’86

  At the beginning of the Gorbachev era, there were still many in the Centre who believed that the American ‘military-industrial
complex’ was dominated by the Jewish lobby. Proponents of even more extreme Zionist conspiracy theories included L. P. Zamoysky, deputy head of the FCD Directorate of Intelligence Information. Despite his reputation as one of the Centre’s ablest analysts, Zamoysky maintained that Zionism had behind it not merely Jewish finance capital but also the occult power of Freemasonry whose rites, he maintained, were of Jewish origin. It was, he insisted, a ‘fact’ that Freemasons were an integral part of the Jewish conspiracy.87

  During his early career, Mikhail Gorbachev absorbed at least some of the anti-Zionist prejudices which were part of the mindset of the CPSU. Those prejudices were clearly apparent at a Politburo meeting on 29 August 1985 which discussed the case of the leading dissident, Andrei Sakharov, and his Jewish wife, Elena Bonner, both of whom had been banished to Gorky five years earlier. Chebrikov, the KGB Chairman, declared (inaccurately) that Bonner had ‘one hundred per cent influence’ over her husband and dictated his actions. ‘That’s what Zionism does for you!’ joked Gorbachev. It was Gorbachev, none the less, who over the next four years played the leading role in resolving the problem of the refuseniks. Gorbachev realized that neither democratic reform nor the normalization of East-West relations could continue so long as Sakharov’s exile and the persecution of other dissidents continued. Because of the opposition of the KGB and the old guard within the Politburo, however, he was forced to proceed cautiously. It was not till December 1986, twenty-one months after he became General Secretary, that he judged that the Politburo was ready to accept Sakharov’s and Bonner’s return from internal exile.88 The rearguard action against ending the persecution of the refuseniks was even stronger than in the case of non-Jewish dissidents. The release of Natan Shcharansky from the gulag in 1986 and his departure for Israel, where he arrived to a hero’s welcome, none the less marked a turning point in the struggle for Jewish emigration.

  In August 1987, at the request of the KGB leadership, the Politburo agreed to a propaganda campaign designed to deter would-be Jewish emigrants to Israel, as well as measures such as the foundation of Jewish cultural associations which would provide positive incentives to remain in the Soviet Union.89 By this time, Gorbachev’s own policy was to remove the obstacles to the emigration of the refuseniks while encouraging as many other Soviet Jews as possible to remain. Though he saw the departure of Jewish professionals as ‘a brain drain’ which threatened to slow the progress of perestroika, he abandoned the attempt to hold on to those who were determined to depart. Of the 8,000 Jewish emigrants in 1987, 77 per cent had previously been denied exit visas.90

  The new Jewish cultural associations were subjected to a series of anti-semitic attacks. In 1988, for example, the refusenik Judith Lurye arrived for a meeting of one of the associations to find the door of the meeting hall padlocked and guarded by two KGB officers. A notice nailed to the door declared: ‘Why do we - the great, intelligent, beautiful Slavs - consider it a normal phenomenon to live with Yids among us? How can these dirty stinking Jews call themselves by such a proud and heroic name as “Russians”?’91

  In 1989, with the campaign to deter Jewish emigration in visible disarray, the floodgates were opened at last. That year 71,000 Jews left the Soviet Union, followed over the next two years by another 400,000.92 To the old guard in the KGB, bitterness at the collapse of the Soviet Union was compounded by what they saw as the triumph of Zionist subversion.

  13

  Middle Eastern Terrorism and the Palestinians

  The precedent set by the KGB’s use of Sandinista guerrillas against US targets in Central and North America during the later 1960s1 encouraged the Centre to consider the use of Palestinian terrorists as proxies in the Middle East and Europe. The man chiefly responsible for exporting Palestinian terrorism to Europe was Dr Wadi Haddad, deputy leader and head of foreign operations of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), codenamed KHUTOR,2 headed by Dr George Habash. On the day Israeli forces destroyed his family home in Galilee, Haddad had sworn that he would pursue the Israelis for the rest of his life.

  Convinced of the futility of attacking Israeli military targets after the humiliation of the Six-Day War, Haddad devised a new strategy of aircraft hijacking and terrorist attacks on ‘Zionist’ targets in Europe which made front-page news across the world and attracted the favourable attention of the Centre. ‘To kill a Jew far from the battlefield’, he declared, ‘has more effect than killing hundreds of Jews in battle.’ The first hijack organized by Haddad was in July 1968 on board an El Al Boeing 707 bound for Tel Aviv which two PFLP hijackers renamed ‘Palestinian Liberation 007’ and forced to land in Algiers. Though Israel had publicly declared that it would never negotiate with terrorists, Haddad forced it to do just that. After more than a month’s negotiations, the Israeli passengers on board were exchanged for sixteen Palestinians in Israeli jails.3 It was probably in the aftermath of the hijack that the KGB made its first contact with Haddad.4 The KGB remained in touch with him during the spate of PFLP hijackings and attacks on Jewish targets in European capitals over the next few years.

  In 1970 Haddad was recruited by the KGB as Agent NATSIONALIST. Andropov reported to Brezhnev in May:

  The nature of our relations with W. Haddad enables us to control the external operations of the PFLP to a certain degree, to exert influence in a manner favourable to the Soviet Union, and also to carry out active measures in support of our interests through the organization’s assets while observing the necessary conspiratorial secrecy.5

  Haddad’s career as a KGB agent very nearly ended only a few months after it began. On the evening of 11 July, he had a meeting in his Beirut apartment with one of the PFLP hijackers, the twenty-four-year-old Laila Khalid, whose photogenic appearance had caught the attention of the media and helped to make her the world’s best-known female terrorist. While they were talking, six Soviet-made Katyushka rockets - launched, almost certainly by Mossad, from the flat opposite - hit his apartment. Amazingly, Haddad and Khalid suffered only minor injuries.6

  One of Haddad’s reasons for becoming a KGB agent was probably to obtain Soviet arms for the PFLP. With Brezhnev’s approval, an initial delivery of five RPG-7 hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers in July was followed by the elaborately planned operation VOSTOK (‘East’), during which a large consignment of arms and ammunition were handed over to the PFLP at sea near Aden under cover of darkness. To prevent any of the arms and ammunition being traced back to the KGB if they were captured, the shipment consisted of fifty West German pistols (ten with silencers) with 5,000 rounds of ammunition; fifty captured MG-ZI machine guns with 10,000 rounds of ammunition; five British-made Sterling automatics with silencers and 36,000 rounds of ammunition; fifty American AR-16 automatics with 30,000 rounds of ammunition; fifteen booby-trap mines manufactured from foreign materials; and five radio-activated ‘SNOP’ mines, also assembled from foreign materials. The two varieties of mine were among the most advanced small weapons in the extensive Soviet arsenal, and, like some of the silencers, had never been previously supplied even to other members of the Warsaw Pact.7

  The first use of Haddad as a KGB proxy was in operation VINT: the attempt, personally approved by Brezhnev, to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA station in Lebanon, codenamed VIR, and ‘have him taken to the Soviet Union’. Andropov assured Brezhnev that no suspicion would attach to the KGB:

  Bearing in mind that the Palestinian guerrilla organizations have recently stepped up their activities in Lebanon against American intelligence and its agents, the Lebanese authorities and the Americans would suspect Palestinian guerrillas of carrying out the [VINT] operation. The ultimate purpose of the operation would only be known to NATSIONALIST [Haddad], on the foreign side, and to the KGB officers directly involved in planning the operation and carrying it out, on the Soviet side.

  Despite elaborate preparations, operation VINT failed. VIR varied his daily routine and Haddad’s gunmen found it impossible to abduct him. A later KGB plan for t
he gunmen to assassinate him also failed.8

  A number of other PFLP operations against Mossad and CIA targets succeeded. In 1970 an individual codenamed SOLIST, who was being cultivated by the KGB residency in Beirut, came under suspicion of working for the Israelis after his brother was arrested in Cairo, charged with being a Mossad agent. SOLIST was kidnapped by a PFLP snatch squad, headed by Ahmad Yunis (also known as Abu Ahmad), chief of the PFLP security service in Lebanon, and brought to the Beirut residency for interrogation. Soon afterwards Yunis became a KGB confidential contact (though not, like Haddad, a fully recruited agent) with the codename TARSHIKH.9