Apologists for Soviet foreign intelligence frequently seek to distance its operations from the abuse of human rights by the domestic KGB. In reality, as volume 1 of The Mitrokhin Archive showed, the struggle against ideological subversion at home and abroad was carefully co-ordinated. Just as hunting down Trotsky and other ‘enemies of the people’ abroad became the main priority of foreign intelligence operations during the ‘Great Terror’ before the Second World War,43 so ‘agent operational measures’ against some leading dissidents during the 1970s were jointly agreed by Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, and internal security chiefs. Early in 1977 a total of thirty-two jointly devised active-measures operations intended to discredit and destabilize Andrei Sakharov (‘Public Enemy Number One’, as Andropov described him) were either already underway or about to begin both at home and abroad.44 There was similar co-operation between the foreign and domestic arms of the KGB in their obsessive campaign against ‘Zionist subversion’ and Jewish refuseniks.45 Until the closing years of the Cold War the FCD set out to prevent all Soviet dissidents and defectors achieving foreign recognition - even in fields entirely divorced from politics (at least as understood in the West). Enormous time and effort were devoted by the Centre to devising ways to damage the careers of Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and other defectors from Soviet ballet. After the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, went into exile in the West, the Centre appealed to all Soviet-bloc intelligence services for help in penetrating their entourage and ruining their reputations. Preventing dissident chess players winning matches against the ideologically orthodox was another priority of KGB foreign operations. A team of eighteen FCD operations officers was sent to the 1978 world chess championship in the Philippines to try to ensure the defeat of the defector Viktor Korchnoi by the Soviet world champion Anatoli Karpov.46
Abroad as well as at home, the KGB played a central role in the worst Cold War Soviet violations of human rights: among them the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956,47 the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968,48 the invasion of Afghanistan in 197949 and the pressure on the Polish Communist regime to strangle the democratic Solidarity movement in 1981.50 Export of Soviet systems of oppression had begun between the wars. Mao’s security chief, Kang Sheng, learned in Stalin’s Russia during the Great Terror some of the brutal methods of liquidating ideological subversion which he later introduced in China.51 After the Second World War, Communist rule within the newly established Soviet bloc in eastern and central Europe depended on systems of surveillance and repression implemented by local security services created in the image of the KGB.52 During the Cold War elements of these systems were exported to many of the Soviet Union’s friends and allies in other continents. One of the most malign aspects of the foreign operations of the KGB and other Soviet-bloc intelligence services was the assistance which they provided to leaders of one-party states in the Third World from Afghanistan to Ethiopia in crushing opposition to their rule.
Since the governments of one-party states regard dissent as illegitimate, all require systems of secret surveillance and social control to monitor its progress and keep it in check, though the permissible limits vary from state to state. Only when the vast apparatus of Soviet social control began to be dismantled under Gorbachev did the full extent of the KGB’s importance to the survival of the USSR become clear. The manifesto of the hard-line leaders of the August 1991 coup, of which Kryuchkov was the chief organizer, implicitly acknowledged that the relaxation of the campaign against ideological subversion had shaken the foundations of the one-party state: ‘Authority at all levels has lost the confidence of the population . . . Malicious mockery of all the institutions of state is being implanted. The country has in effect become ungovernable.’ What the plotters failed to grasp was that it was too late to turn back the clock. ‘If the coup d’etat had happened a year and a half or two years earlier’, wrote Gorbachev afterwards, ‘it might, presumably, have succeeded. But now society was completely changed.’ Crucial to the change of mood was declining respect for the intimidatory power of the KGB, which had hitherto been able to strangle any Moscow demonstration at birth. The most striking symbol of the collapse of the August coup was the toppling of the giant statue of the founder of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, from its plinth in the middle of the square outside KGB headquarters. A large crowd, which a few years earlier would never have dared to assemble, encircled the Lubyanka and cheered enthusiastically as ‘Iron Feliks’ was borne away, dangling in a noose suspended from a huge crane supplied by the Moscow City Government.53
As well as suppressing civil liberties at home, the KGB degraded Soviet policy-making abroad. Despite the FCD’s numerous successes in intelligence collection, its politically correct assessments of the Main Adversary and its allies served to reinforce rather than to correct the misunderstandings of the Soviet leadership. Even on the eve of the Gorbachev era, the Politburo would have learned more from reading leading Western newspapers than from top-secret Soviet intelligence reports. Kryuchkov’s assessment of the international situation in the FCD Work Plan for 1984, for example, declared that ‘The imperialist states are pursuing their intrigues over Poland and Afghanistan’, but made no reference to the mass opposition to Communist rule and Soviet domination which was at the root of the crisis in both countries. Similarly, Kryuchkov’s biennial report early in 1984 on KGB operations and international affairs over the previous two years arrived at the alarmist conclusion that ‘the deepening social and economic crisis in the capitalist world’ had reached such desperate straits that the imperialists were seriously considering thermonuclear war ‘as an escape from the difficulties they have created’. But there was, of course, no mention of the far more intractable economic problems of the Soviet bloc.54 KGB influence on Soviet foreign policy has been frequently underrated. Even horrendously mistaken intelligence reports - such as those in the early 1960s and early 1980s claiming that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike - were capable of having an important influence on policy if, as happened in both cases, policy-makers took them seriously.55
As volume 1 of The Mitrokhin Archive sought to demonstrate, scientific and technological intelligence (S&T) from the West, which suffered far less from the demands of political correctness, was put to far more effective use than political intelligence. The plans for the first US atomic bomb obtained for Moscow by British and American agents were the most important military secret ever obtained by any intelligence service. As in the case of nuclear weapons, the early development of Soviet radar, rocketry and jet propulsion was heavily dependent on the covert acquisition of Western technology. The enormous flow of Western (especially American) S&T throughout the Cold War helps to explain one of the central paradoxes of a Soviet state which was once famously described as ‘Upper Volta with missiles’: its ability to remain a military superpower while its infant mortality and other indices of social deprivation were at Third World levels. The fact that the gap between Soviet weapons systems and those of the West was far smaller than in any other area of economic production was due not merely to their priority within the Soviet system but also to the remarkable success of S&T collection in the West. For most of the Cold War, American business proved much easier to penetrate than the federal government. Long before the KGB finally acquired a major spy in the CIA with the walk-in of Aldrich Ames in 1985, it was running a series of other mercenary agents in American defence contractors, as well as intercepting many of their fax communications. The Pentagon estimated in the early 1980s that probably 70 per cent of all current Warsaw Pact weapons systems were based on Western technology. Both sides in the Cold War - the Warsaw Pact as well as NATO - thus depended on American know-how. Outside the defence industry, however, the inefficient Soviet command economy was unable to put to good use most of the huge amount of S&T obtained from the West.56
Ridiculed and reviled at the end of the Soviet era, the Russian intelligence community has sinc
e been remarkably successful at re-inventing itself and recovering its political influence. The last three prime ministers of the Russian Federation during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency - Yevgeni Primakov, Sergei Stepashin and Vladimir Putin - were all former intelligence chiefs. Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin as President in 2000, is the only FCD officer ever to become Russian leader.57 According to the head of the SVR, Sergei Nikolayevich Lebedev, ‘The president’s understanding of intelligence activity and the opportunity to speak the same language to him makes our work considerably easier.’58 No previous head of state in Russia, or perhaps anywhere else in the world, has ever surrounded himself with so many former intelligence officers.59 Putin also has more direct control of intelligence than any Russian leader since Stalin. According to Kirpichenko, ‘We are under the control of the President and his administration, because intelligence is directly subordinated to the President and only the President.’ But whereas Stalin’s intelligence chiefs usually told him simply what he wanted to hear, Kirpichenko claims that, ‘Now, we tell it like it is.’60
The mission statement of today’s FSB and SVR is markedly different from that of the KGB. At the beginning of the 1980s Andropov proudly declared that the KGB was playing its part in the onward march of world revolution.61 By contrast, the current ‘National Security Concept’ of the Russian Federation, adopted at the beginning of the new millennium, puts the emphasis instead on the defence of traditional Russian values:
Guaranteeing the Russian Federation’s national security also includes defence of the cultural and spiritual-moral inheritance, historical traditions and norms of social life, preservation of the cultural property of all the peoples of Russia, formation of state policy in the sphere of the spiritual and moral education of the population . . .
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Soviet intelligence system from Cheka to KGB was its militant atheism. In March 2002, however, the FSB at last found God. A restored Russian Orthodox church in central Moscow was consecrated by Patriarch Aleksi II as the FSB’s parish church in order to minister to the previously neglected spiritual needs of its staff. The FSB Director, Nikolai Patrushev, and the Patriarch celebrated the mystical marriage of the Orthodox Church and the state security apparatus by a solemn exchange of gifts. Patrushev presented a symbolic golden key of the church and an icon of St Aleksei, Moscow Metropolitan, to the Patriarch, who responded by giving the FSB Director the Mother of God ‘Umilenie’ icon and an icon representing Patrushev’s own patron saint, St Nikolai - the possession of which would formerly have been a sufficiently grave offence to cost any KGB officer his job. Though the FSB has not, of course, become the world’s first intelligence agency staffed only or mainly by Christian true believers, there have been a number of conversions to the Orthodox Church by Russian intelligence officers past and present - among them Nikolai Leonov, who half a century ago was the first to alert the Centre to the revolutionary potential of Fidel Castro. ‘Spirituality’ has become a common theme in FSB public relations materials. While head of FSB public relations in 1999-2001, Vasili Stavitsky published several volumes of poetry with a strong ‘spiritual’ content, among them Secrets of the Soul (1999); a book of ‘spiritual-patriotic’ poems for children entitled Light a Candle, Mamma (1999); and Constellation of Love: Selected Verse (2000). Many of Stavitsky’s poems have been set to music and recorded on CDs, which are reported to be popular at FSB functions.62
Despite their unprecedented emphasis on ‘spiritual security’, however, the FSB and SVR are politicized intelligence agencies which keep track of President Putin’s critics and opponents among the growing Russian diaspora abroad,63 as well as in Russia itself. During his first term in office, while affirming his commitment to democracy and human rights, Putin gradually succeeded in marginalizing most opposition and winning control over television channels and the main news media. The vigorous public debate of policy issues during the Yeltsin years has largely disappeared. What has gradually emerged is a new system of social control in which those who step too far out of line face intimidation by the FSB and the courts. The 2003 State Department annual report on human rights warned that a series of alleged espionage cases involving scientists, journalists and environmentalists ‘caused continuing concerns regarding the lack of due process and the influence of the FSB in court cases’. According to Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the current head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, which has been campaigning for human rights in Russia since 1976, ‘The only thing these scientists, journalists and environmentalists are guilty of is talking to foreigners, which in the Soviet Union was an unpardonable offence.’64 Though all this remains a far cry from the KGB’s obsession with even the most trivial forms of ideological subversion, the FSB has once again defined a role for itself as an instrument of social control.
Russian espionage in the West appears to be back to Cold War levels.65 In the post-Soviet era, however, the disappearance beyond the horizon of the threat of thermonuclear conflict between Russia and the West, the central preoccupation of intelligence agencies on both sides during the Cold War, means that Russian espionage no longer carries the threat which it once did. Early twenty-first-century intelligence has been transformed by the emergence of counter-terrorism as, for the first time, a greater priority than counterespionage. In the 1970s the KGB saw terrorism as a weapon which could, on occasion, be used against the West.66 The FSB and SVR no longer do. While Russia and the West still spy on each other, they co-operate in counter-terrorism. Given the transnational nature of terrorist operations, they have no other rational option. The head of the SVR, S. N. Lebedev, declared a year after 9/11, ‘No country in the world, not even the United States with all its power, is now able to counter these threats on its own. Co-operation is essential.’67 Today’s FSB and SVR have formal, if little-advertised, liaisons with Western intelligence agencies. In 2004 at the holiday resort of Sochi on the Black Sea the FSB hosted a meeting of intelligence chiefs from seventy foreign services (including senior representatives of most leading Western agencies) to discuss international collaboration in counter-terrorism. In the course of the conference, delegates watched an exercise (codenamed NABAT) by Russian special forces to free hostages from a hijacked plane at Sochi airport.68
Despite their public emphasis on ‘spiritual security’, both the FSB and SVR look back far less to a distant pre-revolutionary past than to their Soviet roots, holding an annual celebration on 20 December, the date of the founding of the Cheka six weeks after the Revolution as the ‘sword and shield’ of the Bolshevik regime. The FSB continues to campaign for the replacement of the statue of the Cheka’s founder, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, on the pedestal outside its headquarters from which it was removed after the failed coup of August 1991. The SVR dates its own foundation from 20 December 1920, when the Cheka’s foreign department was established. It celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1995 by publishing an uncritical eulogy of the ‘large number of glorious deeds’ performed by Soviet intelligence officers ‘who have made an outstanding contribution to guaranteeing the security of our Homeland’.69 A multi-volume history, begun by Primakov as head of the SVR and still in progress, is similarly designed to show that, from the Cheka to the KGB, Soviet foreign intelligence ‘honourably and unselfishly did its patriotic duty to Motherland and people’.70 Much as Russian intelligence has evolved since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has yet to come to terms with its own past.
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