The ‘Cultural Revolution’ (officially ‘A Full-Scale Revolution to Establish a Working-Class Culture’) launched by Mao in 1966 made China a more difficult and dangerous place for the KGB to operate than anywhere else on earth. In an extraordinary attempt to re-fashion Chinese society on a utopian revolutionary model, Mao unleashed a general Terror. Millions of youthful, fanatical Red Guards were urged to root out revisionist and bourgeois tendencies wherever they found them - and they found them almost everywhere. Veteran Communist officials and intellectuals were paraded in dunces’ hats, abused, imprisoned and in some cases driven to suicide. The leadership of the Soviet Union were denounced as ‘the biggest traitors and renegades in history’. As during the Stalinist Great Terror thirty years earlier, most of the enemies of the people unmasked and persecuted by the Red Guards had committed only imagined crimes. And, as in Stalin’s Russia, the bloodletting was accompanied by a repellent form of Emperor-worship. Mao was hailed as the ‘Great Helmsman’, ‘the Reddest Red Sun in Our Hearts’. Each day began with a ‘loyalty dance’: ‘You put your hand to your head and then to your heart, and you danced a jig - to show that your heart and mind were filled with boundless love for Chairman Mao.’ Rival factions outdid themselves in terrorizing the Great Helmsman’s imagined enemies, each claiming to be more Maoist than the others.26
Agent recruitment within China during the Cultural Revolution was, as KGB Chairman Semichastny later acknowledged, ‘an impossible task’. In Beijing, ‘Every one of our men, from diplomats to drivers, was as conspicuous as an albino crow.’27 A September 1967 directive by Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, noted that the Beijing residency was being forced to operate under siege conditions.28 Soviet contact with Chinese officials was minimal and closely supervised. The spy-mania and xenophobia of the Red Guards made it difficult for diplomats even to walk round Beijing. Owners of foreign books were forced to crawl on their knees through the streets in shame; those caught listening to foreign broadcasts were sent to prison. As an official Chinese report later acknowledged, ‘The ability to speak a foreign language or a past visit to a foreign country became “evidence” of being a “secret agent” for that country.’ The road leading to the beleaguered Soviet embassy was renamed ‘Anti-Revisionist Lane’. The families of Soviet diplomats and KGB officers were manhandled as they left Beijing airport for Moscow in 1967.
The best first-hand reporting to reach the Centre from Beijing during the Cultural Revolution came from KGB officers of Mongolian or Central Asian extraction who could pass as Chinese citizens and were smuggled out of the Soviet embassy compound after dark in the boots of diplomatic cars. Let out unobserved when the opportunity arose, they mingled with the vast crowds roaming through a city festooned with slogans, read the day’s wall posters (which were declared off-limits for foreigners), attended political rallies and purchased ‘little newspapers’ with news from across China. Late in 1967 they saw the first wall posters denouncing the Head of State, Liu Shaoqi, as the ‘Number One person in authority taking the capitalist road’. After Liu was jailed in the following year, more than 22,000 people were arrested as his alleged sympathizers. Even a night-soil collector, who had been photographed being congratulated by Liu at a model workers’ conference, was paraded through the streets with an accusing placard around his neck and maltreated until he lost his reason. Acting on the principle that ‘Revolutionaries’ children are heroes, reactionaries’ children are lice’, Red Guards killed one of Liu’s children by laying him in the path of an oncoming train. Brutally ill-treated and suffering from pneumonia and diabetes for which he was denied medical treatment, Liu himself died naked on a prison floor in 1969.
Deng Xiaoping, Party General Secretary and ‘Number Two person in authority taking the capitalist road’, was dismissed and sent to do manual labour but - probably on Mao’s personal instructions - allowed to survive. The Red Guards took revenge on his eldest son, a physics student, by throwing him from a second-floor window at Peking University.29 No fellow student dared to come to his aid, and no doctor was willing to operate on him. He was left paralysed from the waist down. Fed with a relentless series of reports of chaos and atrocity, the Centre interpreted the Cultural Revolution not as a convulsion in the life of a one-party state but as a peculiarly Chinese descent into oriental barbarism. Though perhaps 30 million Chinese were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, however, the numbers killed (about a million) were fewer than the victims of the Stalinist Great Terror. 30
The FCD plan for intelligence operations in the PRC and Hong Kong during 1966-67, approved by Semichastny as KGB Chairman in April 1966, made no reference to the hopeless task of recruiting agents in most of mainland China. Instead it concentrated on proposals for the use of illegals and agent infiltration across China’s northern frontiers with the Soviet Union and the Soviet-dominated Mongolian People’s Republic. Plans were made for the establishment of an illegal residency in Hong Kong and for short-term visits by illegals to the PRC (some of them in collaboration with the Mongolian intelligence agency), but it was recognized that planning for an illegal KGB residency in the PRC could not go beyond a preliminary stage. The most ambitious part of the plan for 1966-67 concerned preparations for cross-border operations in collaboration with KGB units in frontier regions and the Mongolian security service.31
The most vulnerable area for KGB penetration was the remote, sparsely populated Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in north-west China, a vast expanse of mountain and desert on the borders of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz republics and Mongolia, with which it had far closer ethnic, cultural and religious ties than with the rest of the PRC. Though covering one-sixth of China’s territory (an area the size of western Europe), the XUAR still accounts for only 1.4 per cent of the Chinese population (17 million out of 1.2 billion). Even today over half its population is composed of non-Chinese Muslim ethnic groups, by far the largest of which are the Muslim Uighurs. Before the foundation of the PRC the proportion was much larger. In 1944 a Uighur-led movement in northern Xinjiang had established the independent state of East Turkestan. Though its independence ended when it was forcibly incorporated by the PRC in 1950, Beijing remained concerned by the threat of XUAR separatism for the remainder of the century. Han Chinese immigration, promoted by Beijing and deeply resented by the Uighurs, increased their numbers from only 6 per cent of the population in 1949 to 40 per cent thirty years later. The leading Communist Party officials at almost all levels in the XUAR were, and remain, Chinese.32 The horrors of the Cultural Revolution were arguably even worse for the non-Chinese minorities in the XUAR, Inner (Chinese) Mongolia and Tibet, whose whole way of life was threatened, than for the Han Chinese who constituted 94 per cent of the PRC population. The deputy director of religious affairs in Kashgar, one of the most devoutly Muslim cities of the XUAR, later admitted:
During the Cultural Revolution, I saw with my own eyes, before the Great Mosque in Kashgar, piles of Korans and other books being burnt. Some people ordered the Muslims to burn these copies themselves . . . I also saw people trying to pull down the minarets beside the Great Mosque. The masses were very indignant, but they could do nothing.
Mosques in most of the XUAR were closed. Some were used as pork warehouses and Uighur families were forced to rear pigs.33 The suffering of Tibetan Buddhists was even greater than that of Muslims in the XUAR, but Tibet was too remote and difficult of access for significant KGB operations (though the Centre investigated the possibility of penetrating the entourage of the exiled Dalai Lama).34 The XUAR, by contrast, had a 1,000-mile frontier with Kazakhstan and one of 600 miles with Mongolia.
In 1968 the Kazakhstan KGB was instructed to set up an illegal residency in Urumqi, the capital of the XUAR, and agent groups in a number of other areas, including the Lop Nor nuclear test site.35 The Politburo also authorized the KGB to provide arms and training in Kazakhstan for the underground resistance to Chinese rule in the XUAR, which in Russian took the politically correct name of the Vo
enno-Trudovaya Narodnaya Revolyutsionnaya Partiya (Military-Labour People’s Revolutionary Party) or VTNRP, codenamed PATRIOTY. The Kazakhstan KGB was instructed to print anti-Chinese newspapers in Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Dungan and the other XUAR languages to be smuggled across the border.36 Sherki Turkestan Evasi (‘The Voice of Eastern Turkestan’), published in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, called on Uighurs ‘to unite against Chinese chauvinism and to proclaim the establishment of “an independent free state” based on the principles of self-determination and the constitutional law of the United Nations’. Broadcasts by Radio Alma Ata and Radio Tashkent sought to convince XUAR Uighurs that living conditions for Soviet Uighurs were vastly superior to their own.37
In April 1968 the Politburo also approved a further reinforcement of Soviet forces along its 4,000-mile frontier with China, the longest armed border in the world.38 About one third of Soviet military power was eventually deployed against the PRC.39 Mao, Moscow feared, was intent on regaining large tracts of territory ceded to Tsarist Russia under the ‘unequal treaties’ of the nineteenth century. 40 During 1969 there were a series of armed clashes along the border. The first, on a remote stretch of the Ussuri river 250 miles from Vladivostok, does not seem to have been planned by either Beijing or Moscow. The trouble began when soldiers on the Chinese side of the river, offended by the allegedly aggressive behaviour of a Soviet lieutenant on the opposite bank, turned their backs, dropped their trousers and ‘mooned’ at the Soviet border guards. During the next ‘mooning’ episode, the Soviet soldiers held up pictures of Mao, thus leading the Chinese troops inadvertently to show grave disrespect to the sacred image of the Great Helmsman. These and other episodes led on 2 March to the Chinese ambush of a Soviet patrol on the small, disputed island of Damansky in the Ussuri river.41 Twenty-three of the patrol were killed. Both Moscow and Beijing responded with a furious denunciation of the other. This was the first occasion on which either side had reported an armed clash along the border. On 7 March a reported 100,000 Muscovites attacked the Chinese embassy and smashed its windows. Not to be outdone, Beijing Radio claimed that 400 million Chinese, half the country’s population, had taken part in protest demonstrations.42
In mid-April 1969 there was fighting 2,500 miles farther west on the Kazakh-XUAR border, followed by further sporadic clashes in the same area over the next four months. Henry Kissinger, recently appointed as President Nixon’s National Security Advisor, was originally inclined to accept Soviet claims that these clashes were started by the Chinese. When he looked at a detailed map of the frontier region, however, he changed his mind. Since the clashes occurred close to Soviet railheads and several hundred miles from any Chinese railway, Kissinger concluded that ‘Chinese leaders would not have picked such an unpropitious spot to attack’.43 His conclusion that Soviet forces were the aggressors is strengthened by the evidence in KGB files. On 4 June two KGB agents in the VTNRP, codenamed NARIMAN and TALAN, both based in Kazakhstan, crossed secretly into the XUAR to make contact with the underground Party leadership. On their return on 9 July, they reported, probably with considerable exaggeration, that the VTNRP had 70,000 members and a Presidium of forty-one (ten of whom were ‘candidate’, non-voting members). But it had not been a wholly successful mission. Within a few days of their arrival in the XUAR, the agents’ automatic weapons and radio telephones had been stolen by TALAN’s relatives. NARIMAN and TALAN also explained that they had been unable to set up a dead letter-box in an agreed location because of the presence of nomadic herdsmen. They reported that many former members of the VTNRP Presidium were in prison. The Mongolian security service concluded that the VTNRP was not ready for ‘active operations’ but should concentrate instead on strengthening its underground organization. Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not record the Centre’s assessment, it must surely have reached the same conclusion.44
In August and September Moscow began sounding out both Washington and European Communist parties on their reaction to the possibility of a Soviet pre-emptive strike against Chinese nuclear installations before they were able to threaten the Soviet Union. A series of articles in the Western press by a journalist co-opted by the KGB, Victor Louis (born Vitali Yevgenyevich Lui), mentioned the possibility of a Soviet air strike against the Lop Nor nuclear test site in the XUAR. Louis claimed that a clandestine radio station in the PRC had revealed the existence of anti-Mao forces (probably a reference to the XUAR) which might ask other socialist countries for ‘fraternal help’. Even the KGB officers who spread such rumours were uncertain whether they were engaged simply in an active measure designed to intimidate the Chinese or warning the West of proposals under serious consideration by the Soviet general staff. In retrospect, the whole exercise looks more like an active-measures campaign.45 Though the Soviet Defence Minister, Marshal Andrei Grechko, appears to have proposed a plan to ‘get rid of the Chinese threat once and for all’, most of his Politburo colleagues were not prepared to take the risk.46
As a result of the lack of any high-level Soviet intelligence source in Beijing, Moscow seems to have been unaware of the dramatic secret response by Mao to its campaign of intimidation after the border clashes. Mao set up a study group of four marshals whom he instructed to undertake a radical review of Chinese relations with the Soviet Union and the United States. Marshals Chen Yi and Ye Jianying made the unprecedented proposal that the PRC respond to the Soviet threat by playing ‘the United States card’ .47 Fear of a pre-emptive Soviet strike seems to have been a major reason for the Chinese decision to enter the secret talks with the United States which led to Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 and a Sino-American rapprochement which only a few years earlier would have seemed inconceivable.48 During Nixon’s visit, Kissinger gave Marshal Ye Jianying an intelligence briefing on Soviet force deployments at the Chinese border which, he told him, was so highly classified that even many senior US intelligence officials had not had access to it.49
There was prolonged discussion in the Centre in the early 1970s as to whether the PRC now qualified for the title ‘Main Adversary’, hitherto applied exclusively to the United States. In the end it was relegated in official KGB jargon to the status of ‘Major Adversary’, with the United States retaining its unique ‘Main Adversary’ status.50 For China, by contrast, it was clear that the Soviet Union had become the Main Adversary. Mao’s suspicions of Moscow deepened as reports began to reach him of a plot by his heir apparent, Lin Biao. By the summer of 1970, according to his doctor, Li Zhisui, ‘Mao’s paranoia was in full bloom.’ Li was afraid even to tell Mao that he had pneumonia for fear of being accused of being part of Lin Biao’s conspiracy. ‘Lin Biao wants my lungs to rot,’ Mao told him. In August 1971 Mao was told that Lin’s son had set up a ‘secret spy organization in the air force’ to prepare a coup. On the evening of 12 September Mao was informed that Lin Biao had fled by air from Shanhaiguan airport. Li noted that ‘Mao’s face collapsed at the news.’ Lin’s plane had taken off with such haste that it had not been properly fuelled and had no navigator, radio operator or co-pilot on board. It was also clear, since the aircraft had struck a fuel truck during the take-off and lost part of its landing gear, that it would have difficulty landing. As Chinese radar tracked Lin’s plane, it first flew west across Inner Mongolia, then turned abruptly north across the frontier of the Mongolian People’s Republic in the direction of the Soviet Union. Next day Mao received news that the plane had crashed before it reached the Soviet border, killing all on board.51 Had the aircraft reached the Soviet Union, the public quarrel between Beijing and Moscow would doubtless have scaled new heights of hysteria. Even after the crash, there were Chinese charges of Soviet complicity in Lin Biao’s treason.52 Mao never admitted that the Cultural Revolution had been a disastrous mistake. ‘But’, according to Li, ‘Lin Biao’s perfidy convinced him that he needed to change his strategy. He put Zhou Enlai in charge of rehabilitating many of the leaders who had been overthrown.’53
For the remainder of the Soviet era the KGB s
ought, without much apparent success, to compensate for its inability to penetrate the government in Beijing by two other strategies: cross-border agent infiltration, particularly from Kazakhstan to the XUAR, and the penetration of PRC groups outside China. In 1969 the Kazakhstan KGB was given an additional fifty-five operations officers, followed by another eighty-one in 1970.54 To assemble an appropriate wardrobe for KGB agents, clothes were taken from Chinese refugees crossing the Kazakhstan border.55 In 1970 operation ALGA, mounted by the Kazakhstan KGB in collaboration with ‘special actions’ officers from the Centre, set out to create a sabotage base in the XUAR with caches to conceal arms and explosives. After a preliminary cross-border expedition by two agents ran into difficulty, however, the operation was suspended as premature and plans to infiltrate an armed group of seven or eight refugees back into the XUAR were cancelled.56
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