The Sword and the Shield
Page 6
On September 7, escorted by SIS, Mitrokhin arrived in England for the first time. After the near chaos of post-Communist Moscow, London made an extraordinary impression on him—“the model of what a capital city should be.” At the time, even the heavy traffic, dotted with the black cabs and red doubledecker buses he had seen only in photographs, seemed but proof of the capital’s prosperity. While being debriefed at anonymous safe houses in London and the countryside, Mitrokhin took the final decision to leave Russia for Britain, and agreed with SIS on arrangements to exfiltrate himself, his family and his archive. On October 13 he was infiltrated back into Russia to make final arrangements for his departure.
On November 7, 1992, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mitrokhin arrived with his family in the Baltic capital where he had first made contact with SIS. A few days later they arrived in London to begin a new life in Britain. It was a bittersweet moment. Mitrokhin was safe and secure for the first time since he had begun assembling his secret archive eighteen years previously, but at the same time he felt a sense of bereavement at separation from a homeland he knew he would probably never see again. The bereavement has passed, though his attachment to Russia remains. Mitrokhin is now a British citizen. Using his senior citizen’s railcard to travel the length and breadth of the country, he has seen more of Britain than most who were born here. Since 1992 he has spent several days a week working on his archive, typing up the remaining handwritten notes, and responding to questions about his archive from intelligence services from five continents. Late in 1995 he had his first meeting with Christopher Andrew to discuss the preparation of this book. Though The Sword and the Shield could not have been written in Russia, Mitrokhin remains as convinced as he was in 1972 that the secret history of the KGB is a central part of the Soviet past which the Russian people have the right to know. He also believes that the KGB’s worldwide foreign operations form an essential, though often neglected, part of the history of twentieth-century international relations.
NO WORD LEAKED out in the British media about either Mitrokhin or his archive. Because material from the archive was passed to so many other intelligence and security services, however, there were, unsurprisingly, some partial leaks abroad. The first, slightly garbled reference to Mitrokhin’s archive occurred in the United States nine months after his defection. In August 1993 the well-known Washington investigative journalist Ronald Kessler published a bestselling book on the FBI based in part on sources inside the Bureau. Among his revelations was a brief reference to a sensational “probe by the FBI into information from a former KGB employee who had had access to KGB files”:
According to his account, the KGB had had many hundreds of Americans and possibly more than a thousand spying for them in recent years. So specific was the information that the FBI was quickly able to establish the source’s credibility… By the summer of 1993, the FBI had mobilized agents in most major cities to pursue the cases. A top secret meeting was called at Quantico [the FBI National Academy] to plot strategy.33
Kessler did not name any of the “many hundreds of Americans” identified by the defector. An unnamed “US intelligence official” interviewed by the Washington Post “confirmed that the FBI had received specific information that has led to a ‘significant’ ongoing investigation into past KGB activities in the United States,” but declined to be drawn in on “how many people are implicated.”34 Time reported that “sources familiar with the case” of the KGB defector had identified him as a former employee of the First Chief Directorate, but had described Kessler’s figures for the number of “recent” Soviet spies in the United States as “highly exaggerated.”35
Mitrokhin’s notes do indeed contain the names of “many hundreds” of KGB officers, agents and contacts in the United States active at various periods since the 1920s. Kessler, however, wrongly suggested that this number applied to “recent years” rather than to the whole history of Soviet espionage in the United States. Though his figures were publicly disputed, the suggestion that the KGB defector had gone to the United States rather than to Britain went unchallenged.36 When no further information on the unidentified defector was forthcoming, media interest in the story quickly died away.
There was no further leak from Mitrokhin’s archive for over three years. In October 1996, however, reports in the French press alleged that Charles Hernu, Defence Minister from 1981 to 1985, had worked for Soviet Bloc intelligence services from 1953 until at least 1963, and that, when informed by the French security service, the DST, President François Mitterrand had hushed the scandal up.37 Le Monde reported that from 1993 onwards British intelligence had passed on to the DST “a list of about 300 names of diplomats and officials of the Quai d’Orsay alleged to have worked for Soviet Bloc intelligence.”38 In reality, French diplomats and Foreign Ministry officials made up only a minority of the names in Mitrokhin’s notes supplied by the SIS to the DST. Charles Hernu was not among them.39 None of the media reports on either side of the Channel related the SIS lists of Soviet agents in France to Kessler’s earlier story of a defector with extensive access to KGB files.
In December 1996 the German weekly Focus reported that, according to “reliable sources,” SIS had also provided the BfV, the German security service, with the names of several hundred German politicians, businessmen, lawyers and police officers who had been involved with the KGB. On this occasion the SIS source was identified as a Russian defector who had had extensive access to the KGB archives. A later article in Focus reported:
The Federal Prosecutor has been examining numerous detailed new leads to a hitherto undiscovered agent network of the former Soviet secret service, the KGB, in Germany. The researchers in Karlsruhe are primarily concentrating on Moscow sources who were taken on by the successors to the KGB and have probably been reactivated since the end of the Cold War.
The basis for the research is extensive information on agents which a Russian defector smuggled into London from the Moscow secret service. After intensive analysis, the British secret service passed all information on KGB connections in Germany to the BfV in Cologne in early 1996.40
In July 1997 another leak from Mitrokhin’s archive occurred in Austria. Press reports quoted a KGB document giving directions for locating a secret arms dump of mines, explosives and detonators, codenamed GROT, hidden in a dead letter-box near Salzburg in 1963, which had been intended for use in sabotage operations:
Leave the town of Salzburg by the Schallmoser Haupstrasse leading to Highway No. 158. At a distance of 8 km from the town limit, in the direction of Bad Ischl-Graz, there is a large stone bridge across a narrow valley. Before reaching this bridge, leave the federal highway by turning right on to a local road which follows the valley in the direction of Ebenau; then go on 200 meters to the end of the metal parapet, which stands on the left-hand side of the road. On reaching the end of the parapet, turn left at once and follow a village road leading in the opposite direction. The DLB is located about 50 meters (60 paces) from the turn-off point leading from the main road on to the village road…41
Though the Austrian press did not mention it, the document came from Mitrokhin’s archive, which also revealed that in 1964 road repair works had covered the entrance to the DLB, raised the ground level, and changed the layout of the surrounding area. The KGB had decided not to try to recover and relocate the GROT arms dump. Attempts by the Austrian authorities to find the dump in 1997 also failed.42 Mitrokhin’s notes reveal that similar KGB arms and radio caches, some of them booby-trapped, are scattered around much of Europe and North America.43
The press leak which came closest to revealing the existence of Mitrokhin’s archive was a further article in the German weekly Focus, in June 1998. Focus reported that a colonel in the FCD registry with access to “all the files on Moscow’s agents” had smuggled handwritten copies of them out of KGB headquarters to his dacha near Moscow. In 1992 he had defected to Britain and, according to Focus, SIS agents had brought the “e
xplosive” notes hidden in the dacha back to London.44 Four years later, in an operation codenamed WEEKEND, SIS had allegedly briefed the BfV on the German material in the archive. According to Focus, “The defector has presented the BfV with hundreds of leads to Moscow’s spy network in the Federal Republic of Germany.” A “high-ranking BfV official” was said to have commented, “We were quite shocked at how much [the defector] knew. Moscow clearly possesses tons of blackmail material.” The BfV was reported to have received new leads on fifty espionage cases and to have begun twelve new investigations.45
The Focus article, however, inspired widespread skepticism—partly because the story of a top secret KGB archive exfiltrated from a Russian dacha seemed inherently improbable, partly because the only detailed example given by Focus of the intelligence it contained was the sensational allegation that the former Chancellor, Willy Brandt, “the icon of Germany’s Social Democrats,” had been a Soviet spy during the Second World War. The Brandt story was instantly dismissed as “completely absurd” by Yuri Kobaladze, head of the SVR press bureau. When asked why in this instance the SVR was abandoning its usual practice of not commenting on individuals alleged to be Russian spies, Kobaladze replied:
It would naturally be very flattering to have such a high-ranking politician on our list of credits, but in the interests of preserving historical truth we felt it necessary to reject this fiction, which could be misused for political purposes.
Kobaladze also dismissed the story of the secret archive in a KGB colonel’s dacha as a myth. The source of the Brandt story, he insisted, could only be a former KGB major in the Oslo residency, Mikhail Butkov, who had defected to Britain in 1991.46
Though wrong about the secret archive, Kobaladze was right to reject the allegation that Brandt had been a Soviet spy. Mitrokhin’s notes reveal that the KGB archives do indeed contain a file on Brandt (codenamed POLYARNIK), which shows that while in Stockholm during the Second World War he passed on information to the NKVD residency. But, as the file makes clear, Brandt was also in touch with British and American intelligence officers—as well as with the Norwegian former secretary of Leon Trotsky, regarded by the NKVD as the greatest traitor in Soviet history.47 Brandt’s overriding motive was to provide any information to all three members of the wartime Grand Alliance which might hasten the defeat of Adolf Hitler. In the case of the Soviet Union, he calculated—accurately—that his best channel of communication with Moscow was via the Stockholm residency. The real embarrassment in the POLYARNIK file concerns the role not of Brandt but of the KGB. In 1962, almost certainly with Khrushchev’s personal approval, the KGB embarked on an operation to blackmail Brandt by threatening to use the evidence of his wartime dealings with the Stockholm residency to “cause unpleasantness” unless he agreed to cooperate. The attempted blackmail failed.48
LIKE THE BFV and Austrian counter intelligence, a number of other security services and intelligence agencies around the world from Scandinavia to Japan have been pursuing leads from Mitrokhin’s archive for several years—usually unnoticed by the media. Most of the leads have been used for counterintelligence purposes—to help resolve unsolved cases and neutralize SVR operations begun in the KGB era—rather than to mount prosecutions. There have, however, been a number of convictions which derive from Mitrokhin’s evidence.
On one occasion, Mitrokhin himself was almost called to give evidence in court. The case concerned Robert Lipka, an army clerk assigned in the mid-1960s to the National Security Agency (NSA, the US SIGINT service), whom Mitrokhin had identified as a KGB agent.49 In May 1993 FBI agent Dmitri Droujinsky contacted Lipka, posing as “Sergei Nikitin,” a GRU officer based in Washington. Lipka complained that he was still owed money for his espionage over a quarter of a century earlier, and was given a total of $10,000 by “Nikitin” over the next few months. He appeared confident that he could no longer be prosecuted. “The statute of limitations,” he told “Nikitin,” “has run out.” “Nikitin” corrected him: “In American law the statute of limitations for espionage never runs out.” Lipka replied that, whatever the legal position, he “would never admit to anything.” After a lengthy FBI investigation, Lipka was arrested in February 1996 at his home in Millersville, Pennsylvania, and charged with handing classified documents to the Soviet Union.50
Since Lipka denied all charges against him, Mitrokhin expected to give evidence at his trial in the U.S. District Court, Philadelphia, in May 1997. But, in what the Philadelphia Inquirer termed “a surprising turnaround” in the courtroom, Lipka “exploded into tears as he confessed that he had handed over classified information to KGB agents.” Lipka had been persuaded by his lawyer, Ronald F. Kidd, to accept a prosecution offer of a plea bargain which would limit his sentence to eighteen years’ imprisonment with time off for good behavior, rather than continue to plead not guilty and face the prospect of spending the rest of his life in jail. Though Mitrokhin’s name was never mentioned in court, it was the evidence he had obtained from KGB files which seems to have prompted Lipka’s change of heart. “We saw how significant the evidence was,” his lawyer told reporters. “But the government also realized they couldn’t go through a full trial and not have the mystery witness exposed.” The “mystery witness” was Mitrokhin. After Lipka’s confession, U.S. Assistant Attorney Barbara J. Cohan admitted, “We had a very sensitive witness who, if he had had to testify, would have had to testify behind a screen and under an assumed name, and now we don’t have to surface him at all.”51 “I feel like Rip Van Spy,” said Lipka when he was sentenced in September 1997. “I thought I had put this to bed many years ago and I never dreamed it would turn out like this.” As well as being sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment and fined 10,000 dollars, Lipka was ordered to repay the further 10,000 dollars from FBI funds given him by “Nikitin.”52
There are many other “Rip Van Spies” whose memories of Cold War espionage are likely to be reawakened by Mitrokhin’s archive. Some will recognize themselves in the pages which follow. About a dozen important cases which are still being actively pursued—including several in leading NATO countries—cannot be referred to for legal reasons until they come to court. Only a small minority of the Soviet agents whose codenames appear in this volume, however, are likely to be prosecuted. But, as the SVR embarks on the biggest and most complex damage assessment in Russian intelligence history, it has to face the unsettling possibility that some of the spies identified by Mitrokhin have since been turned into double agents.
After each of the revelations from Mitrokhin’s archive mentioned above, the SVR undoubtedly conducted the usual damage assessment exercise in an attempt to determine the source and seriousness of the leak. Its official statement in 1996 (effectively reaffirmed as recently as June 1998), which dismissed as “absolute nonsense” the suggestion that the names of several hundred Soviet agents could possibly have been given by a defector to any Western intelligence agency, demonstrates that the conclusions of these exercises were very wide of the mark. Not until the publication of this book was announced in 1999 did the SVR seem to begin to grasp the massive hemorrhage of intelligence which had occurred.
SOME OF THE files noted by Mitrokhin give a vivid indication of the ferocity with which the Centre (KGB headquarters) has traditionally responded to intelligence leaks about its past foreign operations. The publication in 1974 of John Barron’s KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents,53 based on information from Soviet defectors and Western intelligence agencies, generated no fewer than 370 KGB damage assessments and other reports.The resident in Washington, Mikhail Korneyevich Polonik (codenamed ARDOV), was instructed to obtain all available information on Barron, then a senior editor at Reader’s Digest, and to suggest ways “to compromise him.”54 Most of the “active measures” used by the KGB in its attempts to discredit Barron made much of his Jewish origins, but its fabricated claims that he was part of a Zionist conspiracy (a favorite theme in Soviet disinformation) appear to have had little resonance outside the Middle
East.55
The active measures employed against some of the journalists who wrote articles based on Barron’s book were more imaginative. Doctored versions of blank “information cards” from the Austrian Stapo (security police) registry previously obtained by KGB agents were used to compromise Austrian journalists judged to have used material from KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents to undermine the “peaceloving” policies of the USSR. Fabricated entries on the cards prepared by Service A, the FCD active measures specialists, purported to show that the Stapo believed the journalists concerned to be hand-in-glove with the CIA. Photocopies of the cards were then circulated among the Austrian media. The files noted by Mitrokhin list other KGB countermeasures against Barron’s book in countries as far afield as Turkey, Cyprus, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Uganda, India, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.56
The other study of the KGB which did the most to arouse the ire of the Centre was the history published in 1990 by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, which drew on KGB documents and other information obtained by Gordievsky while working as a British agent inside the KGB from 1974 to 1985.57 The Centre predictably responded with active measures against both the book and its authors.58 (Some indication of its continuing hostility to Gordievsky is provided by the fact that, at the time of this writing, he is still under sentence of death in Moscow.) There was, however, one important new element in the reaction of the KGB, and of its chairman Kryuchkov in particular, to the publication of the history by Andrew and Gordievsky. In a top secret “Chairman’s Order” of September 1990 emphasizing the importance of influence operations and other active measures (“one of the most important functions of the KGB’s foreign intelligence service”), Kryuchkov instructed that “wider use should be made of archive material” to publicize a “positive” image of the KGB and “its more celebrated cases.”59