Andropov considered this improbable top secret conspiracy theory so important that on January 24, 1977 he forwarded it under his signature to the other members of the Politburo and Central Committee.69
THE CENTRE HARBORED far fewer illusions about the incoming Reagan administration in January 1981 than it had done about Carter four years earlier. Any hope that Reagan’s anti-Soviet speeches during the election had been mere campaign rhetoric quickly faded after his inauguration. In April 1981, after a trip to the United States at the Centre’s request, Arbatov sent a report on the new administration to Andropov and Kryuchkov. At a dinner in the White House he had been able to observe Reagan for one and a half hours from a distance of only fifteen meters. Though Reagan seemed to be acting the role of president, he played the part with genuine emotion. Tears came to his eyes when the flags of the four armed services were brought into the room and when he stood up and placed his hand on his heart as the national anthem was played. Nancy Reagan’s eyes never left her husband. Her adoring expression reminded Arbatov of a teenage girl suddenly placed next to her favorite pop star. Though Reagan’s speech to the assembled journalists was “exceptionally shallow,” the President played to perfection the role of “father of the nation,” a great leader who had kept his humanity, a sense of humor and the common touch.70
Both the Centre and the Kremlin took a less benign view of Reagan. In a secret speech to a major KGB conference in May 1981 a visibly ailing Brezhnev denounced Reagan’s policies as a serious threat to world peace. He was followed by Andropov, who was to succeed him as general secretary eighteen months later. To the astonishment of most of the audience, the KGB chairman announced that, by decision of the Politburo, the KGB and GRU were for the first time to collaborate in a global intelligence operation, codenamed RYAN—a newly devised acronym for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (“Nuclear Missile Attack”). RYAN’s purpose was to collect intelligence on the presumed, but non-existent, plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union—a delusion which reflected both the KGB’s continuing failure to penetrate the policy-making of the Main Adversary and its recurrent tendency towards conspiracy theory.71 “Not since the end of the Second World War,” Andropov informed foreign residencies, “has the international situation been as explosive as it is now.”72 As Brezhnev’s successor in November 1982, Andropov retained full control over the KGB; his most frequent visitors were senior KGB officers.73 Throughout his term as general secretary, RYAN remained the FCD’s first priority.
For several years Moscow succumbed to what its ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin, fairly described as a “paranoid interpretation” of Reagan’s policy.74 Most residencies in Western capitals were less alarmist than Andropov and the KGB leadership. When Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky joined the London residency in June 1982 he found all his colleagues in Line PR skeptical about operation RYAN. None, however, were willing to risk their careers by challenging the Centre’s assessment. RYAN thus created a vicious circle of intelligence collection and assessment. Residencies were, in effect, ordered to search out alarming information. The Centre was duly alarmed by what they supplied and demanded more.75 The Washington resident, Stanislav Andreyevich Androsov, a protégé of Kryuchkov, was at pains to provide it.76
The Centre interpreted the announcement of the SDI (“Star Wars”) program in March 1983 as part of the psychological preparation of the American people for nuclear war. On September 28, 1983 the terminally ill Andropov issued from his sickbed a denunciation of American policy couched in apocalyptic language unparalleled since the depths of the Cold War. “Outrageous military psychosis” had taken over the United States. “The Reagan administration, in its imperial ambitions, goes so far that one begins to doubt whether Washington has any brakes at all preventing it from crossing the point at which any sober-minded person must stop.” Alarm within the Centre reached a climax during the NATO exercise “Able Archer 83,” held in November 1983 to practice nuclear release procedures. For a time the KGB leadership was haunted by the fear that the exercise might be intended as cover for a nuclear first strike. Some FCD officers stationed in the West were by now more concerned by the alarmism in the Centre than by the threat of a Western surprise attack.77
Operation RYAN wound down (though it did not end) during 1984, helped by the death of its two main proponents, Andropov and defense minister Ustinov, and by reassuring signals from London and Washington, both worried by intelligence on Soviet paranoia.78 The alarmist RYAN reports obediently provided by KGB residencies were merely an extreme example of Line PR’s habitual tendency to tell Moscow what it wanted to hear. One political intelligence officer later admitted:
In order to please our superiors, we sent in falsified and biased information, acting on the principle “Blame everything on the Americans, and everything will be OK.” That’s not intelligence, it’s self-deception!79
During the first Reagan administration, as at other periods, the Centre would have gained a far more accurate insight into American policy by reading the New York Times or Washington Post than by relying on the reports of its own residencies. One of the most striking signs of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” on foreign policy after he became general secretary in 1985 was his early dissatisfaction with the FCD’s political reporting. In December 1985 Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov, KGB chairman since 1982, summoned a meeting of the KGB leadership to discuss a stern memorandum from Gorbachev “on the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs in messages and informational reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other ruling bodies.” The meeting sycophantically agreed on the need to avoid sycophantic reporting and declared the duty of all Chekists both at home and abroad to fulfill “the Leninist requirement that we need only the whole truth.”80
Gorbachev was far more impressed initially by the performance of FCD’s Directorate T. Throughout the Cold War the KGB had greater success in collecting scientific and technological intelligence (ST) than in its political intelligence operations against the Main Adversary. Infiltrating US defense contractors and research institutes proved far easier than penetrating the heart of the federal government. ST also rarely suffered from the political correctness which distorted the reporting of Line PR in residencies and political intelligence assessments at the Centre. What remained at least partially taboo, however, was the difficulty experienced by Soviet state-run industry in making full use of the extraordinary ST which it received. In 1971, for example, the defense and electronics industry ministries began a joint project to duplicate Westinghouse cathode-ray tubes. Two years later, because of production problems at the State Optical Institute, little progress had been made.81 It was ideologically impossible to learn the lessons of failures such as this, for to do so would have involved a recognition of the inferiority of the Soviet command economy to the market economies of the West. FCD reports thus concentrated on the structural contradictions of Western capitalism while glossing over the far more serious economic problems of the Soviet Bloc.82
In 1970 the New York and Washington residencies each ran nine Line X agents and five “trusted contacts.”83 In 1973 the new position of head ST resident for the United States was established in New York, with responsibility for coordinating Line X operations by the three American residencies, as well as attempts to evade the embargo on the export of advanced technology to the Soviet Union. By 1975 Directorate T had seventy-seven agents and forty-two trusted contacts working against American targets inside and outside the United States.84
Mitrokhin’s notes identify thirty-two of the ST agents and trusted contacts active in the United States during the 1970s, mostly recruited in the same decade. A further eight whose espionage is not dated in the notes were also probably active in the 1970s.85 The companies for which they worked included some of the leading American defense contractors: among them IBM, McDonnell Douglas and TRW.86 The ST agent network also contained scientists with access to important defen
serelated projects at some of the United States’ best-known research institutes: among them MIKE at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,87 and TROP in the Argonne National Laboratory at the University of Chicago.88 In addition to the civilian ST agent network, there were also KGB agents in the armed forces who provided intelligence on the latest military technology: among them JOE, an army electronics engineer who provided “valuable information” on military communications systems,89 and NERPA, who in 1977 was engaged in weapons research at the US army’s Material Development and Readiness Command (DARCOM).90
Though Mitrokhin’s information on the extent and targets of the ST network on the territory of the Main Adversary is far more extensive than any previously available account, it is not comprehensive.91 There is, for example, no mention in Mitrokhin’s notes of the Californian drug dealer Andrew Daulton Lee, who in 1975-6 provided the KGB residency in Mexico City with the operating manual for the Rhyolite surveillance satellite and technical data on other satellite systems. Lee’s source was his friend Christopher Boyce, an employee of Rhyolite’s manufacturer, TRW Corporations in Redondo Beach. Among the TRW secrets passed on to the KGB was detailed information on how American spy satellites monitored Soviet missile tests. In 1977 Lee and Boyce were arrested, tried and sentenced to, respectively, life and forty years’ imprisonment. Both achieved celebrity status as the subjects of the bestselling book and film The Falcon and the Snowman.92 One of the KGB files noted by Mitrokhin reveals that only a year after the arrest of Lee and Boyce the KGB recruited another, possibly even more important, spy in TRW with the codename ZENIT. While Boyce had been only a clerk (though with access to classified documents), ZENIT was a scientist.93
Directorate T was proud of its achievements, particularly against the Main Adversary, and anxious to bring them to the attention of the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev was informed in 1972 that ST had produced a saving during the past year of over a hundred million convertible roubles.94 Among the successes singled out for Brezhnev’s attention was intelligence on the construction of the American space shuttle and preparations for unmanned flights to Mars. This, he was told, would solve a number of current problems in the development of Soviet space technology. ST intelligence on the pelletization of seeds, he was further assured (doubtless unrealistically), would increase the Soviet grain harvest by 20 to 30 per cent and shorten growing time.95 In 1973 Directorate T reported that it had acquired over 26,000 documents and 3,700 “samples.” Though only a minority of this material was classified, it included top secret information on the Saturn rocket, the Apollo space missions, the Poseidon, Honest John, Redeye, Roland, Hydra and Viper missiles, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet and computer technology subsequently plagiarized in the construction of the Minsk-32 computer.96
The triumphs of ST collection figured prominently in the Chekist Hall of Fame opened by the FCD at Yasenevo in 1977 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Directorate T’s exhibit claimed that during the previous fiveyear period it had obtained over 140,000 ST documents and more than 20,000 “samples.” These were alleged to have produced an economic benefit of over one billion roubles for the Soviet economy and to have advanced research work in a number of branches of science and technology by periods of from two to six years.97
Leonid Sergeyevich Zaitsev, the dynamic and ambitious head of Directorate T appointed in 1975, argued that it should be allowed to leave the FCD and become an independent directorate within the KGB. It would, he claimed, need a budget of only 1 percent per annum of the value of the ST which it supplied to Soviet industry and agriculture.98 The head of the FCD, Kryuchkov, however, was determined not to allow such a prestigious part of his intelligence empire to escape from his control. Despite failing to win its freedom, Directorate T increasingly operated independently from the rest of the FCD. Its new recruits mostly came from scientific or engineering backgrounds, had their own curriculum in the Andropov Institute (the FCD academy) and trained separately from those in other departments. In foreign residencies Line X officers mixed relatively little with their colleagues in other lines.99
The Military—Industrial Commission (VPK), which was mainly responsible for overseeing Directorate T, showed greater interest in non-American targets than during the early Cold War.100 The United States none the less remained a more important ST target than the rest of the world combined. In 1980 61.5 percent of the VPK’s information came from American sources (some outside the USA), 10.5 percent from West Germany, 8 percent from France, 7.5 percent from Britain and 3 percent from Japan.101 In 1980 the VPK gave instructions for 3,617 “acquisition tasks,” of which 1,085 were completed within a year, benefiting 3,396 Soviet research and development projects.102 Directorate T was its chief collection agency.
Directorate T owed much of its success in meeting so many of the VPK’s requirements to its numerous collaborators in the Soviet scientific community, who numbered approximately 90 agent-recruiters, 900 agents and 350 trusted contacts during the mid-1970s.103 Among these collaborators—probably the largest network of talent-spotters in the history of ST—were some of the Soviet Union’s leading scientists. All Western scientists—particularly in the United States—in fields related to Directorate T’s “acquisition tasks” were potential targets for the KGB. The first approach to a targeted scientist usually came from a Soviet colleague in a similar field, who would try to establish cooperation at a personal or institutional level. Directorate T would then seek to recruit the more naive or corrupt of the Western scientists approached in this way as agents or trusted contacts.104 Among the Directorate’s agent-recruiters was the director of the Physics and Energy Institute of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (codenamed VITOS), who in 1973 recruited MIKE, a senior physicist at MIT.105 SATURN, a department head at McDonnell Douglas, was recruited in 1978 with similar assistance from the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.106
The KGB also took an active part in the selection of Soviet students for academic exchange programs with the United States and trained many of them as talent-spotters. Students were told to seek places at universities and research institutes within easy reach of the residencies at New York (Brooklyn Polytechnic, MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic and the universities of Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, New York and Princeton), Washington (American, Catholic, Georgetown, George Washington and Maryland Universities) and San Francisco (the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco, California Institute of Technology, University of Southern California and Stanford).107
Directorate T’s success in penetrating American targets was greatly assisted by poor security in some of its target companies and research institutes. Appearing in 1985 before a Senate committee investigating security among defense contractors, Christopher Boyce testified that he and colleagues at TRW “regularly partied and boozed it up during working hours with the ‘black vault’” housing the Rhyolite satellite project. Bacardi rum, he claimed, was kept behind the cipher machines and a cipher-destruction device used as a blender to mix banana daiquiris and Mai-Tais.108 Security failures in most other companies probably took less exotic and alcoholic forms.
Since most major American companies operated abroad, they were vulnerable to penetration outside as well as inside the United States. In the mid-1970s seventeen major US companies and research institutes were targeted by KGB residencies in western Europe: among them IBM by the London, Paris, Geneva, Vienna and Bonn residencies; Texas Instruments by Paris; Monsanto by London and Brussels; Westinghouse Electric by Brussels; Honeywell by Rome; ITT by Stockholm; and the National Institutes of Health by Copenhagen.109 European residencies were assisted by a number of walk-ins. In 1974, for example, a Canadian resident of Los Angeles (later given the codename SPRINTER) entered the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, announced that he worked for an electro-optical company which was developing laser anti-missile systems and infra-red sights for firearms, tanks, ships and aircraft, and offered to sell its secrets.110 Like SPRINTER, most of the KGB’s ST network in the United Sta
tes appear to have been mercenary spies.
SIGINT added substantially to the ST provided by agents. The SIGINT stations within the Washington, New York and San Francisco residencies (whose operations are discussed in chapter 21) succeeded in intercepting the telephone and fax communications of the Brookhaven National Laboratory and a series of major companies. Mitrokhin’s notes, however, do not make it possible to assess the proportion of ST provided by SIGINT rather than HUMINT.
Since before the Second World War ST had been regarded as an essential means of preventing Soviet military technology and weapons systems from falling behind the West’s. According to one report noted by Mitrokhin, over half the projects of the Soviet defense industry in 1979 were based on ST from the West.111 Andropov claimed in 1981 that all the tasks in military ST set for the KGB had been successfully completed.112 According to an official US report, based largely on documents supplied during the early 1980s by Vladimir Vetrov (codenamed FAREWELL), a French agent in FCD Directorate T:
The Soviets estimate that by using documentation on the US F-18 fighter their aviation and radar industries saved some five years of development time and 35 million roubles (the 1980 dollar cost of equivalent research activity would be $55 million) in project manpower and other developmental costs. The manpower portion of these savings probably represents over a thousand man-years of scientific research effort and one of the most successful individual exploitations ever of Western technology.
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