As the construction of nuclear missile bases in Cuba began, Bolshakov continued to provide reassurance, probably as part of a deliberate deception strategy, that Khrushchev would never countenance such an aggressive policy. When U-2 spy planes revealed the existence of the bases in mid-October, while they were still in the course of construction, thus beginning the Cuban missile crisis, Robert Kennedy turned on Bolshakov. “I bet you know for certain that you have your missiles in Cuba,” he remonstrated. Bolshakov denied it. According to Sorensen, “President Kennedy had come to rely on the Bolshakov channel for direct private information from Khrushchev, and he felt personally deceived. He was personally deceived.”41
At the moment in the Cold War when the Kremlin most urgently needed good intelligence from Washington, the KGB residency was unable to provide it. During the Second World War Soviet agents had penetrated every major branch of the Roosevelt administration. The Centre had been better informed on some important aspects of American policy (notably the MANHATTAN project) than Roosevelt’s vice-presidents or most members of his cabinets.42 During the Cuban missile crisis, by contrast, the Washington residency’s sources were limited to agents and contacts in the press corps and foreign embassies (especially those of Argentina and Nicaragua). Some of the intelligence which Feklisov, the resident, sent to Moscow was simply gossip. He had no source capable of penetrating the secret deliberations of EXCOMM, Kennedy’s closest advisers who assembled in the cabinet room on October 16 and met in daily session for the next thirteen days until the crisis was resolved. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, wrote dismissively on several of Feklisov’s telegrams at the height of the missile crisis, “This report does not contain any secret information.”43
The relative lack of influence of the KGB on Khrushchev’s policy during the crisis also reflected the limitations of its chairman. In December 1961 the influential Aleksandr Shelepin had been succeeded as chairman by his less able protégé, Vladimir Semichastny, who knew so little about intelligence and was so unattracted by the post offered to him that he accepted it only under pressure from Khrushchev. Khrushchev made clear that his main reason for appointing Semichastny was to ensure the political loyalty of the KGB rather than to benefit from his advice on foreign policy. There is no sign in any of the files noted by Mitrokhin that Semichastny ever followed Shelepin’s example of submitting to Khrushchev ambitious grand strategies for combating the Main Adversary. During the missile crisis Semichastny had not a single meeting with Khrushchev and was never invited to attend meetings of the Presidium (an enlarged Politburo which for the previous decade had been the main policy-making body).
Nor did Khrushchev ever ask for, or receive from, the KGB any assessment of the likely American response to the placing of nuclear missile bases in Cuba.44 As foreign intelligence chief, Sakharovsky seems to have had little insight into American policy-making. Though apparently a competent bureaucrat in the Soviet mold, his first-hand experience of the outside world was limited to Romania and other parts of eastern Europe. His melancholy expression was probably, as one of his subordinates has written, “due to the enormous pressures of the job.”45 Among the pressures was the need to conform to the highest standards of political correctness. The FCD rarely submitted assessments save at the specific request of the Foreign Ministry, the International Department of the Central Committee or the Presidium. Most of what it termed its “analyses” were, in reality, little more than digests of information on particular topics which generally avoided arriving at conclusions for fear that these might conflict with the opinions of higher authority. The supreme authority during the missile crisis was Khrushchev himself rather than the Presidium. To a remarkable degree he both determined Soviet policy and, like Stalin before him, acted as his own chief intelligence analyst.46
Intelligence did, however, have some influence on Khrushchev’s policy during the final stages of the crisis. On October 25 he indicated to the Presidium that, in order to resolve the crisis, it might ultimately be necessary to dismantle the missile bases in return for a US guarantee not to invade Cuba. Khrushchev, however, was not yet ready to make such a proposal. He changed his mind during the night of October 25-6 after a GRU report that US Strategic Air Command had been placed on nuclear alert. Hitherto he had hoped to save face by obtaining the removal of US missile bases in Turkey in return for stopping the construction of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. On the morning of October 26, however, wrongly fearing that an American invasion of Cuba might be imminent, he dictated a rambling and emotional plea for peace to Kennedy which asked for a US guarantee of Cuban territorial integrity but made no mention of the Turkish missile bases. Within twenty-four hours, Khrushchev had changed his mind. On October 27, having concluded that an American invasion was not imminent after all, he sent another letter insisting that the Turkish bases must be part of the deal.47
Shortly after Khrushchev had sent his second letter, Soviet air defense in Cuba, apparently as a result of a failure in the chain of command, shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Cuba, killing the pilot. Khrushchev panicked. Reports that Kennedy was to make a speech on national television at noon on October 28 wrongly persuaded him that the President might be about to announce an invasion of Cuba. Khrushchev gave in and accepted Kennedy’s terms: a unilateral withdrawal of “all Soviet offensive arms” from Cuba. To make sure his message reached Kennedy in time, he ordered it to be broadcast over Radio Moscow.48
THE HUMILIATION OF the Soviet climbdown at the end of the missile crisis, which led two years later to Khrushchev’s overthrow in a Kremlin palace coup, was strengthened in the Centre by the discovery of a series of penetrations by, and defections to, the CIA. In December 1961 a KGB officer, Major Anatoli Mikhailovich Golitsyn, walked into the American embassy in Helsinki and was exfiltrated to the United States. In September 1962 the KGB arrested GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who for the past eighteen months had been providing high-grade intelligence to the British and Americans.49
The damage report on Golitsyn produced the usual stereotyped denunciation of his motives. Since it was impossible to criticize either the KGB or the Soviet system, it followed that the basic cause of all defections was the moral failings of the defectors themselves—in particular, “the virus of careerism” unscrupulously exploited by Western intelligence services:
The treason of Golitsyn, an ambitious and vain man, provides a typical example of a person representing the tribe of careerists. In the mid-1950s he reacted painfully to a demotion in his position: he could not tolerate having his mistakes and blunders pointed out and commented on. Emphasizing his exceptional qualities, he said that only bad luck had prevented him from becoming a highly successful senior officer during the Stalin period. [Late in 1961] Golitsyn made persistent attempts to learn the contents of the evaluation written on him for Moscow, which was negative. The [Helsinki] Residency believes that he succeeded in learning its essence and, knowing from the experience of others that he could expect a serious talk in the personnel department and a demotion in rank, he defected to the United States.50
Like all defectors, Golitsyn was given an insulting codename—in his case, GOR-BATY (“Hunchback”).51 Measures taken to discredit him included the arrest of a Soviet smuggler (codenamed MUSTAFA), who was persuaded to implicate Golitsyn in contraband operations across the Finnish border. An article in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya on September 27, 1962 condemned Golitsyn’s (fictitious) involvement with smugglers.52
Despite the Centre’s attempt to belittle Golitsyn, the damage assessment after his defection concluded that he had been able to betray a wide range of intelligence to the CIA on the operations of most of the “Lines” (departments) at the Helsinki and other residencies, as well as KGB methods of recruiting and running agents.53 Between January 4 and February 16, 1962 the Centre sent instructions to fifty-four residents on the action required to limit the damage to current operations. For the time being, all meetings with important agents were to be suspended an
d contact limited to “impersonal means” such as dead letter-boxes.54
As well as providing important intelligence on KGB methods and leads to a number of Soviet agents, however, Golitsyn also confused the CIA with a series of increasingly extravagant conspiracy theories. He persuaded the head of the CIA counter-intelligence staff, James Angleton, that the KGB was engaged in a gigantic global deception, and that even the Sino-Soviet split was a charade to deceive the West. Golitsyn was later to maintain that the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia was also a KGB description.55 It did not occur to the Centre that Golitsyn’s defection, by infecting a small but troublesome minority of CIA officers with his own paranoid tendencies, would ultimately do the Agency more harm than good.
In November 1963 Aleksandr Nikolayevich Cherepanov of the KGB Second Chief Directorate (internal security and counter-intelligence), sent the American embassy in Moscow a packet of highly classified papers dealing with the surveillance and entrapment of diplomats and other foreigners in Russia, together with a note offering his services to the CIA. In the ambassador’s absence, the deputy head of mission feared that the documents were part of a KGB provocation. Though the head of the CIA station was allowed to photograph the documents, the originals, despite his protests, were returned to the Russians. Cherepanov fled from Moscow but was arrested by KGB border guards on the frontier with Turkestan on December 17, 1963. He admitted during interrogation that the operational secrets he had revealed to the Americans included the use of “spy dust” (metka), special chemicals applied to suspects’ shoes to facilitate tracking. Cherepanov was sentenced to death at a secret trial in April 1964. The Centre’s damage assessment of the case concluded:
It is not possible to determine why the Americans betrayed Cherepanov. Either they suspected that his action was a KGB provocation or they wanted to burden the KGB with a lengthy search for the person who had sent the package to the embassy.56
Though the CIA was not responsible for Cherepanov’s betrayal, it was shortly to make another, even more serious error. In February 1964 Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a KGB officer serving on the Soviet disarmament delegation in Geneva, who had begun working for the Agency in June 1962, defected to the United States. Nosenko’s CIA debriefers, however, wrongly concluded that he was a KGB plant.57
Unaware of the CIA’s horrendous misjudgement, the Centre regarded Nosenko’s defection as a serious setback. Its damage assessment began with the usual character assassination, claiming that Nosenko (henceforth codenamed IDOL), had been infected—like Golitsyn—with the “virus of careerism:”
Nosenko, who lusted for power, did not hide his ambitions and obtained a high position. The leadership of Department 1 at Headquarters will not forget Nosenko’s hysterical reaction when he was informed of their plans to promote him from deputy chief to chief of section [otdeleniye]. “The chief of the directorate has promised that I will replace the head of the department [otdel],” he shouted shamelessly. The characteristics of careerism were evident in many curious facets of his life. When he became the deputy chief of another department, Nosenko was ashamed of his rank [KGB captain], which was below that normally associated with his position. He would return unsigned any documents with “Captain” on them, and would only sign documents on which his perceptive subordinates had not indicated his rank.58
Throughout the Cold War, the KGB had much greater success in collecting scientific and technological intelligence (ST) on the Main Adversary than penetrating the federal government. In 1963 the ST department of the FCD was given enhanced status as Directorate T.59 Most of its tasking came from the Military—Industrial Commission (VPK), which was responsible for overseeing weapons production, 60 and was obsessed with American armaments and advanced technology—almost to the exclusion of the rest of the world. In the early 1960s over 90 percent of
VPK requirements concerned the Main Adversary.61 Among the American ST obtained by the KGB during these years was intelligence on aircraft and rocket technology, turbojet engines (from a source in General Electric), the Phantom jet fighter, nuclear research, computers, transistors, radio electronics, chemical engineering and metallurgy.62 ST agents in the United States identified in Mitrokin’s notes (though with few details of their accomplishments) include: STARIK and BOR (or BORG), who worked as research scientists for the US air force; URBAN, identified by Mitrokhin as a department head at Kellogg (probably the M. W. Kellogg Technology Company in Houston), who had served as an agent since 1940;63 BERG, a senior engineer probably employed by Sperry-Rand (UNIVAC);64 VIL, who worked for the chemical manufacturers Union Carbide; FELKE, an agent in Du Pont de Nemours, the chemical, biomedical and petroleum conglomerate; USACH, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York, which carried out government research on nuclear energy, high-energy physics and electronics; and NORTON of RCA, which manufactured electronic, telecommunications and defense equipment.65
During the Cold War, unlike the Second World War, the dwindling band of American Communists and fellow travelers rarely had access to the ST sought by the KGB. Most ST agents recruited in the United States seem to have spied for money. Two such mercenary spies were caught by the FBI during the mid-1960s: John Butenko, who worked for an ITT subsidiary which did classified work for Strategic Air Command, and Colonel William Whalen, who provided intelligence on missiles and atomic weapons.66 In 1963 the New York residency supplied 114 classified ST documents, totaling 7,967 pages, and 30,131 unclassified documents, totaling 181,454 pages, as well as 71 “samples” of state-of-the-art technology and other items. Washington sent the Centre 37 classified documents (3,944 pages) and 1,408 unclassified documents (34,506 pages).67
Some of the best American ST, however, came from residencies outside the United States. Possibly the most important was in the field of computer technology, where the Soviet Union had fallen far behind the West. The experimental Soviet BESM-1, produced in 1953, was judged by a Western expert to be “a respectable computer” for its time, with a capability superior to that of the UNIVAC-1 introduced in 1951. The BESM-2, however, which went into production in 1959, was only a third as fast as the IBM-7094, introduced in 1955, and one-sixteenth as fast as the IBM-7090 of 1959. Because of the embargo on the export of advanced technology to the Soviet Union maintained by COCOM (the embargo coordinating committee of NATO members and Japan), the computers legally imported from the West were barely more powerful than their Soviet counterparts.68 During the 1960s the attempt to catch up with Western computer technology was based largely on espionage.
The KGB’s main source of computer ST was, almost certainly, IBM, which manufactured over half the computers in use around the world in the mid-1960s. Within IBM, the most important KGB agent identified in Mitrokhin’s notes was ALVAR, a naturalized French citizen born in Tsarist Russia, whose motives—unlike most Americans in the ST network—may well have been ideological. Probably the KGB’s longest-serving Line X agent, ALVAR had been recruited by the NKVD in 1935. By the 1950s he held a senior post at IBM’s European headquarters in Paris, and in 1958 was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his work as a Soviet agent. ALVAR carried on working for the KGB until his retirement in the late 1970s, when he was awarded a Soviet pension of 300 dollars a month in addition to his company pension—a certain sign of the Centre’s appreciation of him.69
In the early 1960s the Paris residency supplied intelligence on American transistor manufacture which, according to KGB files, both improved the quality of Soviet transistors and brought forward the start of mass production by one and a half years. It also provided ST on computer networking systems which were later imitated by the Soviet defense ministry.70 The most likely source of the intelligence on both transistor production and computer networks was ALVAR. From 1964, however, the Paris residency also had an agent, codenamed KLOD, in Texas Instruments.71
Among other agents who provided technology and ST from IBM was a Nordic national, codenamed KHONG. From 1960 to 1966 KHONG worked for a European affiliate of IBM, and
purchased embargoed materials and samples worth 124,000 dollars, which he passed on to the KGB. In both 1961 and 1962 he was questioned by the local US embassy on the reasons for his purchases, but appears to have satisfied the embassy on both occasions. KHONG’s motives, unlike ALVAR’s, seem to have been mainly financial. He was initially paid 10 percent commission, subsequently raised to 15 percent, on his purchases from IBM. KHONG later worked for the United Nations in a number of countries. The fact that he had a total of twelve controllers during his career as a Soviet agent is evidence that the Centre considered him an important source. By the time contact with him ceased in 1982, a year after his retirement, the KGB had held about 150 meetings with him.72
The Soviet Union often found it more difficult to use than to collect the remarkable ST which it collected from American businesses, most of them defense contractors. In 1965 the Politburo criticized the fact that there was a time lag of two to three years before Soviet industry began exploiting ST.73 Even the computer technology stolen by the KGB did no more than, at best, stabilize the striking gap between East and West.74 The gap was not to be explained by any lack of expertise among Soviet scientists and mathematicians. As one Canadian expert wrote in 1968, “Westerners who know Soviet computer scientists can testify to their competence and their thorough knowledge of the field.”75 The continued backwardness of the Soviet computer industry, despite the expertise of Soviet scientists and the remarkable ST obtained by the KGB, reflected the cumbersome inefficiency of the Soviet command economy, in which technological innovation had to run the gauntlet of a complex and unresponsive state bureaucracy.
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