The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  The main problem encountered by Line PR during the 1960s was the loss of what had hitherto been its main intelligence asset, the assistance of the JCP, Asia’s largest non-ruling Communist party. As the Sino-Soviet split developed, the Japanese Communist leadership sided more with Beijing than with Moscow. In 1964 Moscow, already engaged with Beijing in the most vitriolic polemics in the history of international Communism, accused the JCP of kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party and declaring war on the CPSU. The JCP retaliated by denouncing the CPSU’s ‘brazen and unpardonable’ attempts to dictate to its Japanese comrades: ‘The chief cause for the disunity in the international Communist movement and the socialist camp today is precisely your self-conceit and the flagrant interference with, and attacks on, the fraternal parties unleashed brazenly by you as a result of this self-conceit.’

  The JCP also complained of ‘the destructive activities against our Party of Soviet Embassy staff members and special correspondents’ - doubtless with the activities of the Tokyo residency particularly in mind. It correctly accused Moscow of using spies and informants to maintain contact with, and promote the interests of, those Japanese Communists pursuing ‘anti-party [pro-Moscow] activities’.20 The Chairman of the JCP Central Committee, Hakamadi Satomi, boasted of burning CPSU literature to heat his ofuro (Japanese bath).21 In the space of a few years the JCP had changed from an important KGB intelligence asset into a hostile target.22

  The Centre’s Japanese operations suffered another major blow in 1963 with the loss of what seems to have been the main illegal KGB residency in Tokyo run by a veteran pro-Soviet Chinese Communist, JIMMY, who, with assistance from Communist Chinese intelligence, had succeeded in setting up an export-import company based in Hong Kong and Tokyo and in procuring bogus Hong Kong identity papers for other KGB illegals. When JIMMY failed to return from a visit to China to see his relatives after the Sino-Soviet split, the Centre decided to wind up his residency, probably fearing that it had been compromised.23 The Tokyo residency’s lack of major Japanese intelligence sources during the mid-1960s was reflected in the fact that its most productive agent from 1962 to 1967 was a journalist on the Tokyo Shimbun, codenamed KOCHI, who appears to have had access to high-level gossip from the cabinet and Foreign Ministry but probably not to classified documents.24

  Line PR’s main strategy after the breach with the JCP was to recruit leading members from the left wing of the main opposition party, the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), which it codenamed KOOPERATIVA,25 and to use them as agents of influence. On 26 February 1970 the Politburo approved the payment by the KGB of a total of 100,000 convertible rubles (35,714,000 yen) to a number of leading figures in the JSP and to subsidize the party newspaper.26 Similar subsidies seem to have been paid each year.27 Probably by the time the Politburo approved secret subsidies to the JSP, five influential party members had already been recruited as KGB agents: Seiichi Katsumata (codenamed GAVR), runner-up in the 1966 election for the post of JSP General Secretary, who in 1974 was given 4 million yen to strengthen his position in the party;28 Tamotsu Sato (transparently codenamed ATOS), leader of a Marxist faction in the JSP, who was used to place active-measures material in four party periodicals;29 ALFONS, who was paid 2.5 million yen in 1972, and used to place articles in the JSP daily Shakai Shimpo;30 DUG, a JSP official close to the Party Chairman, who was given 390,000 yen in 1972 for his election campaign;31 and DIK, paid 200,000 yen in 1972 to publish election leaflets and posters.32 Other recruits in the 1970s included JACK, a JSP deputy and prominent trade unionist;33 Shigero Ito (codenamed GRACE), also a deputy and a member of the party’s Central Committee,34 and DENIS, who had been a close aide of the former JSP Chairman Saburo Eda.35 KGB confidential contacts included a former Communist codenamed KING, who had become one of the leading figures in the JSP,36 and KERK, a member of Katsumata’s JSP faction in the Diet.37 Mitrokhin’s notes on the files of DENIS and GRACE record that their motivation was both ideological and financial.38 The same was probably true of most of the KGB’s other agents in the JSP. The KGB’s influence operations in the Diet were also assisted by the academic YAMAMOTO, who was described in his file as being ‘ideologically close’ to Moscow. After being recruited as an agent in 1977, he successfully prompted at least two parliamentary questions in each session of the Diet, which, according to the residency’s possibly optimistic assessment, had a significant impact.39

  Of the politicians recruited by the KGB outside the JSP, the most important was Hirohide Ishida (codenamed HOOVER), a prominent parliamentary deputy of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), formerly Minister of Labour. In February 1973 Ishida became Chairman of the newly founded Parliamentary Japanese- Soviet Friendship Association (codenamed LOBBY),40 and led a delegation to the Soviet Union from 27 August to 6 September, shortly before the visit of Kakuei Tanaka, the first by a Japanese Prime Minister for seventeen years. On this and subsequent visits to Moscow, Ishida was publicly fêted at the request of the Centre by Brezhnev, President Nikolai Podgorny, Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin and other notables.41 The KGB also went to great pains to flatter Ishida and assure him of the high regard in which he was held by the Soviet leadership. The leading Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, on which the KGB had at least one well-placed agent, reported after Ishida’s visit to Moscow in the summer of 1973: ‘The Soviet Union today said it would immediately release all forty-nine Japanese fishermen detained on charges of violating Soviet territorial waters. The announcement was made by the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet during his meeting with Hirohide Ishida, head of a visiting Japanese parliamentary delegation.’

  According to Stanislav Levchenko, then working on the FCD Japanese desk, the Japanese fishermen released in honour of Ishida were among those ‘routinely shanghaied and held for use as bargaining chips’. Ishida was also co-opted into the network of global flattery which the KGB used to service Brezhnev’s voracious appetite for world-wide recognition. He was persuaded by Vladimir Pronnikov, head of Line PR at the Tokyo residency, to show his appreciation for the liberation of the fishermen by presenting Brezhnev with a maroon Nissan limousine to add to his considerable collection of luxury foreign cars. Levchenko, who suspected - probably correctly - that the Nissan had been purchased with KGB funds, was put in personal charge of the car, which was delivered in a crate to FCD headquarters, in order to prevent parts being stolen before its formal presentation to Brezhnev.42 In 1974, already a KGB confidential contact, Ishida was recruited as an agent by Pronnikov, who was rewarded with the Order of the Red Banner.43 Ishida became one of the Tokyo residency’s leading agents of influence.

  The priority attached by the Centre to operations in Japan in the early 1970s was reflected in the fact that the budget for them in 1973 was almost as large as for India and almost three times as large as for any of the eleven other Asian states which were then the responsibility of the FCD Seventh Department.44 KGB active measures before and during Tanaka’s visit to Moscow in 1973 were intended to promote a peace treaty and agreement on Japanese- Soviet relations on the lines agreed by the Politburo on 16 August. If progress was made during the negotiations, Tanaka was to be offered the return of the Habomais and Shikotan as well as concessions on fishing rights in return for the abrogation of the US-Japanese Security Treaty and the closure of US military bases.45 Though Tanaka was not expected to accept these terms, it was hoped to increase Japanese public support for an agreement on these lines.46 The visit, however, achieved little. Tanaka insisted that return of all the Northern Territories was the pre-requisite for economic cooperation and other forms of improved relations with the Soviet Union.47

  During the remainder of the 1970s, Ishida continued to be used as an agent of influence within both the LDP and the Parliamentary Japanese-Soviet Friendship Association. In 1977, at the request of the KGB, he complained personally to the LDP Prime Minister, Takeo Fukuda, that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and his wife had made themselves unwelcome by their contacts with dissidents
and to hint that it was time for him to be recalled.48 During the 1970s there were at least two further recruitments within the LDP: FEN, a confidant of Kakuei Tanaka,49 and KANI, a deputy whose career the Tokyo residency claimed to be actively promoting. 50 The key to the KGB’s penetration of conservative politics was the corruption endemic in some factions of the LDP and other parts of Japanese society. Tanaka owed much of his phenomenal success in rising through the ranks to become a cabinet minister at the age of only thirty-nine, despite never having finished secondary school, to the consummate mastery of the politics of the pork barrel which helped to raise his remote prefecture of Niigata ‘from rural obscurity to contemporary affluence’. All those who won contracts for the numerous public works in Niigata were expected to contribute handsomely to Tanaka’s political war chest. In December 1974 he was forced to resign, allegedly on health grounds, after some details of his corruption appeared in the press. In 1976 much more damning evidence emerged that the US aircraft company Lockheed had paid Tanaka and other prominent LDP politicians large bribes to win a contract to supply its Tri-star planes to All Nippon Airways. Lockheed followed in an already long tradition of bribery by foreign firms.51 The KGB, though able to exploit that tradition, was never able to compete financially with the kick-backs on offer from such major players as Lockheed and, partly for that reason, never truly penetrated the commanding heights of Japanese conservative politics.

  Most KGB agents in the media probably also had mainly mercenary motives. Files noted by Mitrokhin identify at least five senior Japanese journalists (other than those on JSP publications) who were KGB agents during the 1970s: BLYUM on the Asahi Shimbun,52 SEMYON on the Yomiuri Shimbun,53 KARL (or KARLOV) on the Sankei Shimbun,54 FUDZIE on the Tokyo Shimbun55 and ODEKI, identified only as a senior political correspondent on a major Japanese newspaper.56 The journalist ROY, who, according to his file, regarded his work for the KGB simply as ‘a commercial transaction’, was valuable chiefly for his intelligence contacts and was instrumental in the recruitment of KHUN, a senior Japanese counter-intelligence officer who provided intelligence on China. 57 Not all the paid agents in the Japanese media, however, were willing recruits. Mitrokhin’s summary of SEMYON’s file notes that, during a visit to Moscow in the early 1970s, ‘He was recruited on the basis of compromising material’: changing currency on the black market (probably in an ambush prepared for him by the SCD) and ‘immoral’ behaviour (doubtless one of the many variants of the KGB ‘honey trap’). During his six years as a Soviet agent, SEMYON tried frequently to persuade the KGB to release him. The Centre eventually broke contact with him after he had been caught passing disinformation. 58

  Stanislav Levchenko later identified several other journalists used for KGB active measures,59 of whom the most important seems to have been Takuji Yamane (codenamed KANT), assistant managing editor and personal adviser to the publisher of the conservative daily Sankei Shimbun. According to Levchenko, one of his controllers, Yamane skilfully concealed his pro-Soviet sympathies beneath a veneer of anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese nationalism and became one of the Tokyo residency’s leading agents of influence. Among the Service A forgeries which he publicized was a bogus ‘Last Will and Testament’ of Zhou Enlai concocted soon after his death in 1976, which contained numerous references to the in-fighting and untrustworthiness of the rest of the Chinese leadership and was intended to disrupt negotiations for a Sino-Japanese peace treaty. The Centre doubtless calculated that the forgery would make more impact if published in a conservative rather than a JSP paper. It believed that even Beijing, which tried frantically to discover the origin of the document, was not at first sure whether or not the document was genuine.60 After a detailed investigation, however, the Japanese intelligence community correctly identified Zhou’s will as a forgery. 61 This and other active measures failed to prevent the signing on 12 August 1978 of a Sino-Japanese peace treaty which, to the fury of Moscow, contained a clause committing both signatories to opposing attempts by any power to achieve hegemony (a phrase intended by Beijing as a coded reference to Soviet policy).62

  By the autumn of 1979 Line PR at the Tokyo residency had a total of thirty-one agents and twenty-four confidential contacts.63 These statistics and examples of KGB disinformation planted in the media were doubtless used by the Centre to impress the Soviet political leadership - especially since the Japanese were the world’s most avid newspaper readers.64 The evidence of opinion polls demonstrates, however, that the KGB active-measures offensives in Japan against both the United States and China, though achieving a series of tactical successes, ended in strategic defeat. During the 1960s around 4 per cent of Japanese identified the Soviet Union as the foreign country they liked most. Despite the combined efforts of Service A, Line PR in Tokyo and a substantial network of agents of influence in both the JSP and the media, Soviet popularity actually declined during the 1970s, dipping below 1 per cent after the invasion of Afghanistan and never rising significantly above 2 per cent even during the Gorbachev era. By contrast, the percentage naming the United States as their favourite nation was usually over 40 per cent, save for a dip in the early 1970s due to the Vietnam War. After the normalization of Tokyo’s relations with Beijing in 1972, China too, though never rivalling the appeal of the United States, was far more popular than the Soviet Union.65

  Intelligence collection in Japan had much greater success than active measures. The Tokyo residency’s most successful penetration was probably of the Foreign Ministry. From the late 1960s at least until (and perhaps after) Levchenko’s defection in 1979, two Japanese diplomats, codenamed RENGO and EMMA, provided large amounts of classified material in both Tokyo and their foreign postings. Their files describe both as ‘valuable agents’. Early in her career EMMA’s controller gave her a handbag fitted with a concealed Minox camera which she regularly took to work to photograph diplomatic documents. RENGO also acted as a talent spotter.66 The diplomat OVOD, who was the victim of two honey traps during postings in Moscow six years apart, was a far more reluctant recruit. On the second occasion, after he had been seduced by Agent MARIANA, who was employed as his language teacher, and - following usual KGB practice - had probably been confronted with photographs of their sexual encounter, OVOD gloomily told his case officer, ‘Now I shall never be rid of the KGB for the rest of my diplomatic career.’67

  The KGB’s most successful diplomatic honey trap involving a Japanese target recruitment was almost certainly the seduction of the cipher clerk MISHA by the KGB ‘swallow’ LANDYSH while he was stationed in Moscow during the early 1970s.68 MISHA is probably identical with the cipher clerk who in the late 1970s was working at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo under the new KGB codename NAZAR.69 NAZAR’s intelligence was considered so important that his case officers in Tokyo, first Valeri Ivanovich Umansky, then Valentin Nikolayevich Belov, were taken off all other duties. For security reasons NAZAR rarely met either case officer, leaving his material in a dead letter-box or passing it on by brush contact. Whenever he was due to make a delivery, operations officers ringed the DLB or brush-contact location to ensure that it was not under surveillance and, if necessary, act as decoys if any suspicious intruder approached the area. The diplomatic telegrams supplied by NAZAR, which included traffic between Tokyo and its Washington embassy, were sometimes so voluminous that the residency found it difficult to translate them all before forwarding to the Centre. The assistance given to the Centre’s codebreakers by NAZAR’s cipher material was probably rated even more highly than his copies of Japanese diplomatic traffic.70 There must have been moments when, thanks to NAZAR and Soviet codebreakers, the Japanese Foreign Ministry was, without knowing it, practising something akin to open diplomacy in its dealings with the Soviet Union.71

  The other most striking success of the Tokyo residency during the 1970s was the increased collection of scientific and technological intelligence (S&T) by Line X which reported in the Centre to FCD Directorate T. During the 1960s Japan’s annual growth rate had averaged ove
r 10 per cent. The value of exports increased from $4.1 billion in 1960 to $19.3 billion a decade later. By 1970 Japan had the largest ship-building, radio and television industries in the world. Its consumer industries far outstripped those of the Soviet Union. In less than a decade Japan had passed from the era of the ‘Three Sacred Treasures’ (washing machine, refrigerator, black and white TV) to that of the ‘Three C’s’ (car, cooler, colour TV).72 In 1971 the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) set out a new high-tech agenda for the Japanese economy, based on a shift to ‘knowledge-intensive’ industries such as semi-conductors and integrated circuits.73

  In June 1971 Agent TONDA, the head of a high-tech company in the Tokyo region, supplied the residency with two volumes of secret documents on a new micro-electronic computer system intended for US air and missile forces.74 Among the most highly rated of the agents who provided intelligence on, and samples of, Japanese and US semi-conductors was TANI, the owner of a company which specialized in semi-conductor design. TANI told his case officer that he regarded himself not as working for the KGB but as simply engaging in industrial espionage which, he seemed to imply, was a fact of modern business life.75 Some, if not most, Line X agents probably took a similarly cynical view. Among the other agents who provided intelligence on state-of-the-art semi-conductor production was LEDAL, director of semi-conductor research in a Japanese university.76 Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files identify a total of sixteen agents with senior positions in Japanese high-tech industry and research institutes during the 1970s.77 This list, which does not include confidential contacts, is doubtless far from comprehensive. Even the equipment used by the KGB residency to monitor the communications exchanged between Tokyo police surveillance teams and their headquarters was based on technology stolen from Japan.78