A frequent cause for unrest among scientists, artists and writers behind the Iron Curtain is quite naturally the lack of freedom of inquiry in their fields, the imposition of political theses on their work which even goes so far as to reject ideas that tend to conflict with Marxist views of the world. In some fields an honest Soviet scientist stands in about the same relation to the state as Galileo did to the Inquisition 350 years ago (recant or be punished). The Lysenko controversy was one of the most publicized affairs in which laboratory science and Marxist ideology clashed head on, and Marxism, of course, won. The theories of biologists who opposed Lysenko and genetic findings which emphasized the importance of heredity were rejected by a state which rules that man can be transformed by his environment. The outstanding Soviet chemist, Dr. Mikhail Klochko, a Stalin Prize winner, who defected in Canada in 1961, wrote:
The Soviet Encyclopedia had appeared with an article on physical chemistry written by scientists senior to me, which was both biased and ludicrous. At a meeting I pointed this out. Many persons told me later that although they agreed with me, they thought I should not get into trouble with these powerful men. But this event merely reinforced the conviction I now had that I must leave the Soviet Union if ever I was to achieve my full potentialities as a scientist.1
1 This Week Magazine, December 31, 1961.
I believe that, given a free opportunity to leave, the number of people who today would move out from behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains would be, without exaggeration, astronomical. The total from the end of World War II until the end of 1961, the year the Berlin Wall went up, was over 11 million, and most of them had not been given the opportunity to leave; they took it. The available figures, which include war-displaced persons who did not wish to return to their homelands behind the Curtain after the war was over, as well as refugees and defectors, are by area of origin, estimated as follows:
East Germany
3,600,000
Baltic states
200,000
European satellites
1,783,000
Communist China
3,000,000
Asian satellites
2,000,000
Soviet Russia
1,000,000
Total
11,583,000
The Communists will go to great lengths to prevent the defection of any person whom they regard as “valuable” to them or of possible use to us. Western scientists at international conferences attended by Soviet and satellite delegations have frequently tried to start friendly conversations with one or another of the members of such delegations decked out as chemists or meteorologists, only to stumble upon the one man who does not know the first word about the subject in which the delegation was supposed to be expert. He is the KGB security man who has been sent along solely for the sake of keeping an eye on the bona fide scientists in the delegation, to see that they don’t talk out of turn and, above all, that they don’t make a break for freedom.
The Chinese Communists carefully limit the amount of fuel in the tanks of their military planes before the latter go on training missions or maneuvers so that a pilot who might take it into his head while aloft to steer for Formosa and freedom cannot reach his goal. Even so, a few years ago one of their pilots happened to make it. The first night after he landed he was put up at a farm out in the country. The next morning he was asked how he had slept during his first night of freedom. He hadn’t slept well, he said, because of the noise. “Noise?” he was asked. “Out here in the country? What noise?” It turned out that the clucking of the chickens had kept him awake. He wasn’t used to it. Barnyard noises apparently are on the wane on the mainland.
On the other hand, the fate of some who have gone from our side over to the Soviets would not serve as a particularly good advertisement for further defections in that direction. Some of them recently have talked to Western visitors and have admitted, without prompting, that their lot is an unhappy one and that they have no future. The scientific defectors, like the atomic physicist Pontecorvo, who continue to be useful to the Soviets in their technological efforts, seem to fare better than the others, and sometimes even receive high honors, as Pontecorvo did when he was awarded the Lenin Prize. The Burgesses and MacLeans, the Martins and Mitchells, had their day of publicity and then eked out a dull living, some as “propaganda advisers.”
Often “defectors” from the Communist side are not exactly what they seem. Some, for example, have been working as agents “in place” behind the Curtain for long periods of time before defecting and only come out because they or we feel that the dangers of remaining inside have become too great.
People who volunteer “in place” have many ways of doing so, even though the isolation, the physical barriers and the internal controls of the Soviet bloc are all supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It is possible, also, for them to communicate safely with the West in a number of ways—surprisingly enough, even by mail, as long as the address of the recipient looks harmless and the identity of the sender within the bloc remains concealed. Soviet bloc censorship cannot possibly inspect every piece of mail passing to and fro over their borders—the volume is too great. Even if a letter is censored or intercepted, it need give no clue whatever about the identity of the sender if proper security precautions are followed. Various radio stations in Western Europe that broadcast to the Soviet bloc solicit comments and fan mail from listeners and usually supply a postbox to which such mail can be sent. They receive many letters from behind the Iron Curtain. If a volunteer who has mailed out information succeeds later in reaching the West, he then, of course, finds a ready welcome there.
Some very helpful and important defectors have been diplomats or intelligence officers under diplomatic cover. It is, of course, a relatively simple matter for them while posted abroad in a free country to walk out of their jobs one fine day and go to the Foreign Office of the country to which they are accredited or a Western embassy and request protection. In the West, whenever this happens and when the motives of the defecting diplomat appear to be bona fide, the requested protection and material assistance needed until the diplomat can find a new livelihood in his new home are usually granted.
If there is any hesitancy in extending these privileges, it is because the Soviets have from time to time mounted phony defections, which is rather an unsatisfactory way of planting an agent but may have incidental benefits. The phony “defector,” when interviewed by persons in the country to which he has “defected,” may pick up and be able to send back a certain amount of information, especially concerning what is known or not known about his own country. A further and final step in such phony defections is that the defector may eventually “redefect.” One day he will announce that he is disillusioned with the West, that it is not as represented, he repents of his sins and wants to go home even if he is to be punished for his original defection. This provides some propaganda repercussion, is embarrassing to the country of haven, and is a convenient way for the defector, who was really an agent, to return home and report on the information he has been assembling. But this is the exception, and the Soviets have not tried it much lately, chiefly, I think, because it has not worked well. It has usually been possible to discover quite early in the day whether the man was bona fide or not. In some cases, phony defectors have confessed that they were planted.
Soviet and satellite intelligence officers, like the diplomats, also have the advantage of posts and of trips abroad, and some use such occasions to make the break they may long have been contemplating. Their defections are regarded as most serious losses by the Soviets. They may go to great le
ngths to prevent such defections from happening, even to using violence to force the return of a potential defector, not to mention reprisals of various kinds should the defection succeed or the defector’s family remain under Soviet control.
The reader may recall the sensational news photos in 1954 which showed a Soviet goon squad strong-arming the wife of defector Vladimir Petrov, KGB Chief in Australia, in an attempt to get her on a plane and take her back to Russia against her will. Only the quick intervention of the Australian police saved Mrs. Petrov from being abducted.
For these reasons the defection of intelligence officers is often carried out with much less fanfare than those of more public personages like diplomats or scientists. The Soviet or satellite intelligence officer also usually has the advantage of knowing in some degree how to get in touch with his “opposite numbers” in the West. After all, part of his job was to probe for such information. When he picks up and leaves, it is likely that he will head for a Western intelligence installation rather than for a diplomatic establishment or the nearest police station because he can be fairly certain of his welcome there and that his defection will be handled most securely.
The defection of a staff intelligence officer of the opposition is naturally a break for Western counterintelligence. It is often the equivalent, in the information it provides, of a direct penetration of hostile headquarters for a period of time. One such intelligence “volunteer” can literally paralyze the service he left behind for months to come. He can describe the internal and external organization of his service and the work and character of many of his colleagues at headquarters. He can identify intelligence personnel stationed abroad under cover. Best of all, he can deliver information about operations. Yet he may not know the true identity of a large number of agents for the reason that all intelligence services compartmentalize such information. No one knows true identities except the few officers intimately concerned with a case.
The West has been singularly fortunate in having many such defectors come over to its side in the course of recent history. In 1937 two of Stalin’s top intelligence officers stationed abroad defected rather than return to Russia to be swallowed up in the purge of the NKVD, which followed the purges of the party and of the Army. One was Walter Krivitsky, who had been chief of Soviet intelligence in Holland. He was found dead in a Washington hotel in 1941, shot presumably by agents of the Soviets who were never apprehended. The story that he committed suicide seems most unlikely. The second was Alexander Orlov, who had been one of the NKVD chiefs in Spain at the time of the Civil War. Unlike Krivitsky, he has managed to elude Soviet vengeance and has published a number of books, one on Stalin’s crimes and another on Soviet intelligence.
An early postwar Soviet defector was Igor Gouzenko, whom I mentioned earlier. Gouzenko was a military intelligence officer in charge of codes and ciphers in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. Thanks in some measure to clues he brought with him, part of the international atomic spy ring which the Soviets had been running during and after the last years of the war was uncovered.
Following the liquidation of Beria shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953, it was clear to officers of the Soviet Security Service that anyone who had served under him was in jeopardy. The new regime would not feel sure of the loyalty of old-timers who knew too much. The new regime could also make itself more popular by going through the motions of wiping out the hated secret police of a previous regime and quietly putting its own loyal adherents in their places.
Among the major defectors to the West at that time were Vladimir Petrov, whom I have just mentioned; Juri Rastvorov, an intelligence officer stationed at the Soviet mission in Japan; and Peter Deriabin, who defected from his post in Vienna. All these men had at some time been stationed at intelligence headquarters in Moscow and possessed valuable information that went far beyond their assignments at the time they defected. Deriabin later told his story in a book called The Secret World.
In recent years, two defections of a special kind have involved Soviet intelligence personnel employed on assassination missions. Nikolay Khokhlov was sent from Moscow to West Germany in early 1954 to arrange for the murder of a prominent anti-Soviet émigré leader, Georgi Okolovich. Khokhlov told Okolovich of his mission and then defected. At Munich in 1957, Soviet agents tried without success to poison Khokhlov. In the fall of 1961, Bogdan Stashinski defected in West Germany and confessed that on Soviet orders he had murdered the two Ukrainian exile leaders Rebet and Bandera some years earlier in Munich.
In 1959, Soviet diplomat Aleksandr Kaznacheev defected in Burma, where he had been stationed in the embassy. While Kaznacheev was not a staff member of Soviet intelligence, he was a “coopted worker” and was used in intelligence work whenever his position as a diplomat enabled him to perform certain tasks with less risk of discovery than his colleagues in the intelligence branch. His candid book describing what went on in the Soviet embassy in Rangoon2 has done a great deal to debunk the picture of Soviet skill and American incompetence previously impressed on the American public in the book The Ugly American.
2 Inside a Soviet Embassy, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1962.
The latest and one of the most advertised defections of a Soviet intelligence officer took place in early February of 1964, when an “expert” attached to the Soviet delegation to the Geneva Disarmament Conference, Yuri I. Nossenko, disappeared from view and was reported some days later by our own State Department to have requested asylum in the United States. Nossenko was a high-ranking staff officer of the KGB, presumably well-versed in security as well as in scientific matters. It was somewhat amusing in this case that the Soviets went to the Swiss police, before the official U.S. announcement was made, to ask for help in locating their missing man. They would hardly have done that in Stalin’s day. It was tantamount to their saying: please help us keep our personnel under control, since we can’t do it ourselves.
All the important intelligence “volunteers” have not been Soviets. Numerous high-ranking staff officers have defected from the satellite countries and were able to contribute information not only about their own services but about Soviet intelligence as well. Whatever impression of independence European satellite governments may try to give, they are, in matters of espionage, satrapies of the U.S.S.R. When agents of the satellite services come over to the West, they are a window on the policies and plans of the Kremlin.
Joseph Swiatlo, who defected in Berlin in 1954, had been chief of the department of the Polish intelligence service which kept tabs on members of the Polish Government and the Polish Communist party. Needless to say, he knew all the scandal about the latter, and the Soviets had frequently consulted with him.
Pawel Monat had been Polish military attaché in Washington from 1955 to 1958, after which he had returned to Warsaw and was put in charge of world-wide collection of information by Polish military attachés. He served in this job for two years before defecting in 1959. We will hear more of him later on.
Frantisek Tisler defected in Washington after having served as Czech military attaché there from 1955 to 1959. The Hungarian secret police officer, Bela Lapusnyik, made a daring escape to freedom over the Austro-Hungarian border in May, 1962, and reached Vienna in safety, only to die of poisoning apparently at the hands of Soviet or Hungarian agents, before he could tell his full story to Western authorities.
The Chinese defector, Chao Fu, who had been serving as the “security officer” in the Red Chinese embassy in Stockholm until he “disappeared” in 1962, was one of the first openly publicized cases of a defection from the Chinese Communist State Security Service. There are others.
What has brought these men and others over to our side is naturally a matter of great interest, not only to Western intelligence, but to any serious student of the Soviet system and of Soviet life. Gouzenko, for example, has told how he was gradually overcome by shame and repugnance as he began to realize that the U.S.S.R.,
while a wartime ally of Britain, Canada and the United States, was mounting a massive espionage effort to steal scientific secrets. This moral revulsion eventually led to his defection.
The postwar defectors were not in a similar situation because the Soviets after 1946 were no longer even pretending to be our friends. Every Soviet official was well indoctrinated on this point and could not easily survive in his job if he had any soft feelings about the “imperialists.” Nevertheless, feelings akin to those which stirred Gouzenko seem to have moved others. Most defectors have suffered some kind of disillusionment or disappointment with their own system.
When one studies the role the intelligence services play in the Soviet world and their closeness to the centers of power, it is not surprising that the Soviet intelligence officer gets an inside look, available to few, of the sinister methods of operation behind the façade of “socialist legality.” To the intelligent and dedicated Communist, such knowledge comes as a shock. One defector has told us, for example, that he could trace the disillusionment which later led to his own defection back to the day when he found out that Stalin and the NKVD, and not the Germans, had been responsible for the Katyn massacre (the murder of about ten thousand Polish officers during World War II). The Soviet public still does not know the truth about this or most of the other crimes of Stalin. But once a man is aware of realities, “loss of faith” in the system within which he is working, coupled often with personal disappointments, seems to be the powerful driving factor in defections.
The names mentioned here by no means exhaust the list of all those who have left the Soviet intelligence service and other Soviet posts. Some of the most important and also some of the most recent defectors have so far chosen not to be “surfaced,” and for their own protection must remain unknown to the public. They are making a continual contribution to the inside knowledge of the work of the Soviet intelligence and security apparatus and to exposing the way in which the subversive war is being carried on against us by Communism.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 18