Service A also attempted to drive a wedge between China and North Korea. In 1978, during the visit of General Zia ul-Haq to Beijing, the North Korean embassy in Islamabad was sent a forged Pakistani document produced by Service A reporting that he had been told that the Chinese leadership had informed the US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, that they accepted the need for American troops to remain in South Korea.79 As the Centre had hoped, Chinese-North Korean relations deteriorated sharply at the end of the decade. The reasons, however, had far less to do with KGB active measures than with North Korean distrust of the Sino-American rapprochement. On 1 January 1979 the United States and the PRC commenced full diplomatic relations. In February Chinese forces invaded the Soviet Union’s ally, Vietnam, and for the next month waged the world’s first war between ‘socialist’ states. Soviet arms supplies to North Korea, which had been suspended in 1973, resumed during 1979. On Red Army Day in February 1980, Pyongyang celebrated anew the ‘militant friendship’ between Soviet and North Korean forces.
The agent of influence who carried most authority in the KGB active-measures campaign in the West against the PRC during the later 1970s was probably Jean Pasqualini, also known as Bao Ruowang. The son of a Corsican father and a Chinese mother, Pasqualini was arrested in 1957, charged with imaginary ‘counter-revolutionary activities’ as ‘an agent of the imperialists and a loyal running dog of the Americans’, and spent the next seven years in the laogai. He first came to the attention of the Paris residency in the early 1970s while writing, in collaboration with an American journalist, a memoir of his harrowing experiences in labour camp, Prisoner of Mao. ‘Over the years’, wrote Pasqualini, ‘Mao’s police have perfected their interrogation methods to such a fine point that I would defy any man, Chinese or not, to hold out against them.’ Though he later recovered from his brainwashing, at the time he was sentenced he felt that he ‘truly loved Mao, his police and the People’s Courts’. The KGB was doubtless impressed by the fact that, despite being ‘employed as slave labour’, Pasqualini did not emerge from the laogai as an anti-Communist. Though hostile to Mao’s regime, he admired ‘the honesty and dedication of most of the Communist cadres’ and insisted that his book was not intended to give aid and comfort to the CIA.80 First published in the United States in 1973, Prisoner of Mao was published in Britain two years later and translated into Chinese, French, German, Spanish and other languages. It remains a classic and is still listed prominently on the booklists of campaigners against the laogai. Pasqualini was first contacted by the Paris residency in 1972 and became a KGB agent in 1975 with the codename CHAN, paid 1,500 francs a month. As well as teaching at the Paris École des Langues Orientales, he was invited to give a series of lectures at Oxford University in 1978 on the abuse of human rights in the PRC. As in his Oxford lectures, Pasqualini proved willing to add to his authentic experience of the laogai information passed to him by the KGB, which included - according to his file - a number of Service A fabrications. Between June 1977 and December 1978 he had forty-eight meetings with his case officer, who was convinced of his ‘sincerity’. In 1979, however, the KGB discovered that Pasqualini was under surveillance by the DST, the French security service.81 The breach of security which led to the surveillance was probably the fault of the Paris residency. In June 1979 the residency’s most important agent of influence, Pierre-Charles Pathé, was arrested while meeting his case officer, who had been tailed by the DST.82 Mitrokhin’s notes on Pasqualini’s file end in 1979, and it is unclear whether his contact with the KGB was later resumed.83
For the Chinese people the most dramatic indications of the new era which followed Deng’s victory in the succession struggle after Mao’s death were the posthumous rehabilitation of the most celebrated victim of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi, in February 1980, followed in November by the beginning of the two-month trial of the Gang of Four. Liu was declared the victim of the ‘biggest frame-up in the history of our Party’ and given a belated state funeral. At their trial, to preserve the memory of Mao as unsullied as possible, the Gang of Four were made responsible for this and all other atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. It is probably a sign of the lack of high-grade Soviet intelligence on these political convulsions that a French Foreign Ministry report on President Giscard d’Estaing’s visit to the PRC in October 1980, provided by Agent SEN in Paris, was forwarded to the Politburo as a document of special importance.84
In a report early in 1984 on KGB operations during the previous two years, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, claimed that: ‘Beijing is blocking normalization of Sino-Soviet relations . . . Beijing is counting on deriving political advantages for itself by manoeuvring between the West and the socialist countries, and trying to blackmail the West with the prospect of an improvement of relations with the Soviet Union.’
In general, Kryuchkov was dissatisfied with the performance of Line K:
The [FCD] has achieved some useful results over the past two years in its work against China, but the successes have been in general in the nature of isolated episodes. Many residencies are still slow in dealing with the specific tasks posed by [agent] recruitment. Insufficient attention is being given to promising categories of Chinese nationals abroad such as specialists, students and trainees. Little effort is being made to select agents for prolonged periods in the PRC or in Hong Kong or Taiwan.
Residencies must step up their endeavour to achieve solid results in recruiting Chinese nationals. The most highly trained officers and experienced agents must be directed into this work. We must not let slip the opportunities created by the changeover in personnel in the Chinese state administration, the process of discrediting Maoist ideology and the purge carried out in the Party.
Nowhere more than in working against China do we require circumspection, patience, endurance and accurate appreciation of the particular characteristics of the Chinese.85
The FCD Plan for 1984 ordered active-measures operations to ‘counter the military and political rapprochement between the PRC and the USA and other imperialist countries on an anti-Soviet basis’.86 Among them were active measures intended to disrupt Anglo-Chinese relations over the future of Hong Kong. In the ‘Joint Declaration’ signed in December 1984, Britain and the PRC agreed that Hong Kong would return to full Chinese sovereignty after the expiry of the British lease on the bulk of the colony in 1997 but that for the next half-century the capitalist system would continue in Hong Kong under the formula, ‘One Country, Two Systems’. The KGB sought, without striking success, to disseminate through the media the ‘thesis’ that weak-kneed Britain had suffered a major humiliation at the hands of the Chinese. 87
At the beginning of the Gorbachev era the KGB continued to find the PRC the most difficult of its major targets to penetrate. In April 1985 a review of operations against China by Directorate T (Scientific and Technological Espionage), one of the FCD’s most successful sections, disclosed serious and persistent ‘shortcomings’. Of the S&T collected by residencies only 1 per cent related to China and its quality was considered ‘low’. Residents were informed of these findings during May in a circular which berated them for ‘a number of negligences’ - chief among them their lack of Chinese contacts, which was described as ‘a source of extreme anxiety’.88 This anxiety extended to all aspects of intelligence collection against Chinese targets. As Nikolai Leonov acknowledged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘We had an unbridgeable gap in our information sources on China.’89
One conundrum, however, remains. Mitrokhin had no access to the SIGINT archives of the KGB Eighth and Sixteenth Directorates, which house diplomatic decrypts.90 The files noted by him contain few clues about the KGB’s ability to intercept and decrypt PRC communications. As in other major capitals, the Beijing residency contained a SIGINT station, codenamed KRAB. Its budget for 1979, a fraction of that for the US residencies and significantly lower than that for the main European capitals, does not suggest, by KGB standards, a high level of activity.91 Probably
in the early to mid-1970s operation ALPHA succeeded in ‘the technical penetration of the People’s Republic of China embassy and other Chinese establishments in Ulan Bator’, but Mitrokhin’s notes give no indication of the intelligence which this generated.92 Viktor Makarov, a former KGB officer who worked in the Sixteenth Directorate from 1980 to 1986, believes that the significance of Chinese SIGINT declined in the early 1980s. From 1981 he was permitted to enter the office used by Chinese cryptanalysts, which had hitherto been out of bounds. Makarov deduced, probably correctly, that its current success rate no longer merited the unusually high level of security previously accorded to the office within the directorate.93 Though Chinese communications were also intercepted by other sections of the vast KGB and GRU SIGINT network, on present evidence it seems unlikely that cryptanalysis was able to compensate adequately for the relative failure of agent recruitment.
16
Japan
With the exception of Kim Philby, the most celebrated of all Soviet spies was the German GRU illegal Richard Sorge, who was stationed in Tokyo in 1933, posing so successfully as a Nazi newspaper correspondent for the next eight years that a Japanese journalist described him as ‘a typical, swashbuckling arrogant Nazi . . . quick-tempered, hard-drinking’. He was also, according to the female Soviet agent Hede Massing, ‘startlingly good-looking’. As well as penetrating the German embassy in Tokyo and seducing the ambassador’s wife, Sorge also ran a Japanese spy ring headed by an idealistic young Marxist from a wealthy family, Hotsumi Osaki, a member of the brains trust of the leading statesman, Prince Konoye. Sorge correctly forecast both the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, sending crucial reassurance on both occasions that the Japanese did not intend to invade Siberia. Until the Wehrmacht began its attack on 22 June 1941, Stalin refused to believe all intelligence warnings of the German invasion, dismissing Sorge as a lying ‘shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan’. Shortly before his arrest in October 1941, however, Sorge received a belated message of thanks from Moscow. In 1964, twenty years after his execution by the Japanese, he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, honoured by a series of officially approved hagiographies and - most unusually for a foreign agent - a special issue of postage stamps. Though Sorge had worked for the rival GRU, the Centre regarded him as the ideal role model to inspire a new generation of KGB illegals. At the Twenty-fourth CPSU Congress in Moscow in 1971, senior KGB officers approached a series of Western Communist Party leaders to seek help in recruiting illegals from their countries. In each case, as an indication of the kind of recruit they were looking for, they gave the example of Richard Sorge.1 At that very moment, however, a series of agents in the Tokyo Foreign Ministry were providing a greater volume of classified documents on Japanese foreign policy (albeit at a less critical time in Soviet-Japanese relations) than Sorge’s spy ring had obtained a generation earlier. Their names, unlike that of Sorge, have never been made public.2
Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in August 1945 was followed by an American military occupation which imposed on it a new democratic constitution. In September 1951 a peace treaty signed in the improbable setting of the San Francisco Opera House provided for the occupation to end in the following April. A US-Japanese Security Treaty signed on the same day, however, approved the maintenance of American military bases not merely to defend Japan from foreign attack and assist in maintaining the peace and security of the Far East but also, if requested by the Japanese government, to help ‘put down large-scale internal riots and disturbances in Japan, caused through instigation or intervention of an outside Power or Powers’.3 The Soviet Union refused to sign the San Francisco peace treaty and condemned the security treaty. Its refusal to give up the four islands in the southern chain of the Kuriles north of Hokkaido (known in Japan as the ‘Northern Territories’), which it had occupied at the end of the war, made it impossible for the remainder of the century to conclude a peace treaty with Japan. A Soviet offer in 1956 to return the two southernmost islands (Shikotan and the Habomais4) in return for a peace treaty on its own terms failed to break the deadlock and was later withdrawn.
Throughout the Cold War one of the main priorities of the Tokyo residency’s active measures was to drive a wedge between Japan and the United States. Its first major opportunity came with the negotiation of a revised security treaty in January 1960.5 A campaign against ratification of the treaty begun by the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), the Trades Union General Council (Sohyo) and the Student Federation (Zengakuren) turned into the biggest mass movement in Japanese political history. At the height of the protest in May and June 1960, several million people in Tokyo and the main cities took part in street demonstrations and work stoppages, attended meetings and signed petitions. There were brawls in the Diet and riots in the streets, during which a female Tokyo University student was trampled to death.6 As usually happened with protest movements of which it approved, the KGB claimed excessive credit for it.7 The Tokyo residency, however, at least partly inspired a number of anti-American incidents - among them an airport demonstration by Communist students in the Zengakuren against the arrival of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty. In June the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government of Nobusuke Kishi suffered the humiliation of having to cancel a forthcoming visit by Eisenhower himself on the grounds that his personal safety could not be guaranteed. ‘Viewed from any angle’, wrote Eisenhower later, ‘this was a Communist victory.’8 The Centre, predictably, claimed the ‘victory’ for itself.9 The Tokyo residency also succeeded in publicizing bogus secret annexes to the security treaty concocted by Service A, which purported to continue the 1951 agreement on the use of US troops to quell civil unrest and to extend US-Japanese military co-operation throughout the Far East from the Soviet Pacific to the Chinese coast.10
The KGB’s tactical successes, however, had little strategic significance. A few days after the cancellation of Eisenhower’s visit, the US-Japanese Security Treaty was ratified by the Japanese Diet. The resignation of the Kishi government shortly afterwards took the steam out of the protest movement. The left failed to make the treaty a major issue in the November elections at which the ruling LDP, which dominated Japanese politics from 1955 until 1993, gained another comfortable majority. The JCP received less than 3 per cent of the vote and won only three seats.11
The degree to which Japan was seen by the Centre as effectively a NATO member is indicated by the extensive activity during the 1960s by Line F (‘special actions’) at the Tokyo residency. In the event of war with NATO, Moscow planned a massive campaign of sabotage and disruption behind enemy lines. Each year residencies in NATO and some neutral European countries were expected to draw up detailed plans for the sabotage of four to six major targets.12 The same applied in Japan, where both Japanese and US installations were targeted. In 1962, for example, Line F made preparations for the sabotage of four major oil refineries in different areas of Japan13 as well as of US bases on Okinawa.14 As in NATO countries, Line F in Tokyo was also instructed to reconnoitre possible wartime bases in remote parts of Japan for Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups (DRGs). In 1970, for example, Line F identified four possible DRG landing sites on the north-west coast of the island of Hokkaido.15 As well as containing precise map references and detailed descriptions of the terrain, each file on a possible DRG base used a standardized coded jargon. Each DRG landing area was known as a DOROZHKA (‘runway’); each site for a DRG base was termed a ULEY (‘beehive’).
The Tokyo residency also made plans for peacetime acts of sabotage intended to damage US-Japanese relations. In Line F jargon each act of sabotage was termed a ‘lily’ (lilya), the explosive device a ‘bouquet’ (buket), the detonator a ‘little flower’ (tsvetok), the explosion of the device a ‘splash’ (zaplyv), and the saboteur the ‘gardener’ (sadovnik).16 Among the sabotage plans devised by Line F was operation VULKAN,
an attack on the library of the American Cultural Center in Tokyo which was planned to coincide with demonstrations against the Vietnam War in October 1965. The illegal agent NOMOTO was to place a book bomb in a bookcase in the library shortly before it closed one evening, together with a detonator concealed in a pack of American cigarettes which was timed to go off in the early hours of the morning. In order to conceal the KGB’s hand in the operation, Service A was to prepare leaflets purporting to come from Japanese nationalist extremists calling for attacks on US property.17 The most dramatic scheme devised by Line F to cause a major crisis in US-Japanese relations was a 1969 plan to scatter radioactive material in Tokyo Bay in the expectation that it would be blamed on US nuclear submarines using the Yokosuka naval base and cause a national outcry. Though supported by the Tokyo resident, the plan was turned down by the Centre because of the difficulty of obtaining suitable radioactive material from the United States and the danger that the source of Soviet material might be detected.18 Two years later KGB plans for ‘special actions’ were drastically scaled down after some of them were compromised by the defection in London of the Line F officer, Oleg Lyalin.19
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