Our friends hand over to us all their cipher traffic with the residencies, whether it is of an information nature or operational; they also hand over telegrams from ambassadors. Our friends keep practically no secrets from us.43
The crushing of the Prague Spring and the “normalization” which followed marked a turning point in the KGB’s policy towards eastern Europe. The PROGRESS operations by illegals pioneered in Czechoslovakia were extended to the rest of eastern Europe to monitor the state of public opinion, penetrate subversive groups and watch for signs of “ideological sabotage” by Western intelligence agencies. From 1969 onwards the KGB was also allowed to recruit agents and confidential contacts throughout the Soviet Bloc. In addition to the KGB liaison offices in the countries of the Warsaw Pact, the Centre now established, as in Czechoslovakia, secret residencies operating under diplomatic cover in Soviet embassies.44
In March 1968, partly as a result of the Prague Spring, there had been several weeks of confrontation between Warsaw students and the police, during which the aging Polish leader Władisław Gomułka had seemed in danger of losing control. Gomułka survived in the short term only because of his steadfast backing for intervention in Czechoslovakia and the Kremlin’s desire to avoid simultaneous upheavals in another part of the Soviet Bloc. His position, however, was already under threat from his eventual successor, Eduard Gierek. According to reports from the KGB liaison office in Warsaw, the hardline, anti-Semitic minister of the interior, Mieczysław Moczar, who was responsible for the SB (the Polish KGB), feared that his own position would also be threatened under Gierek and began plotting to prevent his succession. Compromising material on Gierek was passed, on Moczar’s instructions, to Radio Free Europe via an SB agent. Moczar also ordered the bugging of a series of leading figures in the PUWP, the Polish Communist Party.45
Late in 1970 Gomulka’s position was fatally undermined by a new round of public protest. On December 14 workers at the Baltic shipyards of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Szczecin struck in protest at a sudden rise in food prices. Clashes next day with security forces left 300 strikers and demonstrators dead.46 According to KGB reports from Warsaw, the order to open fire on the shipyard workers was given by Zenon Kliszko, Gomułka’s closest supporter on the Politburo, and General Grzegorz Korczyński, deputy defense minister and a supporter of Gierek.47 The KGB also forwarded to Moscow the minutes of the Polish Politburo meeting held to discuss the crisis on December 19. With Gomułka in a Party clinic suffering from nervous exhaustion, the meeting was chaired by the prime minister, Józef Cyrankiewicz, who asked the Minister of Defense, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, to report on the situation.
Jaruzelski’s assessment sealed Gomułka’s fate. He reported that 350 tanks and 600 troop carriers had been deployed in Gdańsk and Gdynia alone. If unrest on a similar scale occurred in Warsaw, he could not guarantee the security of the capital, though special measures would be taken to protect Party and government buildings. Army morale was seriously affected. On the Baltic coast it was being met with shouts of “Gestapo!” and “Murderers!” Jaruzelski was followed by Moczar, who summarized SB and other reports reaching the interior ministry. The Party, he said, has never found itself so helpless in the face of a crisis. Hitherto, even when times were hardest, Party members had felt they were fighting for “a righteous cause”—but no longer. In Party meetings, when the Politburo letter justifying the price increases was read out, some Communists were reduced to tears and left the room. The rise in family allowances from 15 to 25 zlotys caused derision among rank and file members, stunned by the leadership’s incomprehension of ordinary living conditions. After an agitated debate it was agreed that Gomułka should be replaced as first secretary by Gierek. There was then an acrimonious discussion about who should tell Gomułka to submit his resignation, before it was finally decided to send Cyrankiewicz and the hitherto faithful Kliszko.48
Gomułka’s downfall marked the first occasion anywhere in Europe since the Second World War when spontaneous working-class protest had brought about a change of political leadership.49 The Centre was predictably alarmed at the extent and success of the popular revolt and immediately embarked on a PROGRESS operation to assess how far it had been contained. A group of illegals, posing once again as Western visitors, were instructed to investigate the role of the Catholic Church in organizing protest, its attitude towards the Gierek regime and the general mood of the population. 50 Among the illegals was the experienced Gennadi Blyablin (BOGUN), disguised as a West German press photographer, who was given a list of five individuals to cultivate and told to persuade two or three of them to “co-operate under false flag,” in the belief that they were supplying information not to the KGB but to West German wellwishers. Probably the most important name on the list was that of Father Andrzej Bardecki, personal assistant to Cardinal Archbishop Karol Wojtyła of Kraków, whom the Centre considered the leading ideological influence on the Polish Church. The KGB doubtless did not foresee that less than eight years later Wojtyła would become the first Polish pope, but it showed some foresight in identifying him as a potential threat to the Communist regime.51
DURING 1971, IN addition to the illegals sent on PROGRESS operations to Czechoslovakia and Poland, thirteen were deployed in Romania, nine in Yugoslavia, seven in East Germany, four in Hungary and three in Bulgaria.52 Though all had broadly similar objectives, there were also specific causes of KGB concern in each country.53 The priority given to Romania in 1971 reflected growing Soviet displeasure at the foreign policy of its leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, who combined a nepotistic version of neo-Stalinism at home with increasing independence from the Warsaw Pact abroad. After condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ceauşescu was rewarded in the following year by a state visit from Richard Nixon, the first by an American president to Communist eastern Europe. In 1970 Ceauşescu paid the first of three visits to the United States. Moscow showed its displeasure at his visit to Beijing in 1971 by staging Warsaw Pact maneuvers on the Romanian borders.54
KGB reports on Romania were written in a tone which combined indignation with deep suspicion:
Exploiting the anti-Soviet line of the Chinese Communist Party and of the Chinese government, the Romanian leadership has set out on the path of so-called autonomy and independence from the Soviet Union… Nationalism is flourishing in Romania. Its authors and advocates are the very same Party and government leaders.
The Romanian Communist Party leadership does not openly reveal its territorial claims; but it does everything to demonstrate that historically, ethnically and in other ways Moldavia and the Chernovitsy Oblast belong to Romania. The statement made by Mao in conversation with Japanese socialists about the USSR’s illegal acquisition of Bessarabia [Moldavia] has been developed in Romania.
The French newspaper Le Monde has twice published articles casting doubt on the legality of Bessarabia’s inclusion in the [Soviet] Union. It is not impossible that the initiative for publishing the articles came from Romania.55
The illegals sent to Romania under Western disguise in 1971 were ordered to collect intelligence on Romanian relations with the United States and China; Romanian claims on Soviet territory in Bessarabia and north Bukovina; the political and economic basis of opposition to the Soviet Union; the position of German and Hungarian minorities; the Ceauşescu cult; and the state of the Romanian Communist Party.56 The illegals’ main sources included staff of the Party newspaper Scintea and the German language Volk und Kultur.57
PROGRESS OPERATIONS IN Yugoslavia during 1971 were prompted chiefly by the most serious internal crisis since Tito’s break with Moscow in 1948. The dramatic resurgence of nationalist tensions during the Croat Spring of 1971 culminated at the end of the year with Tito’s arrest of the Croat Communist leaders and 400 Croat nationalists and in his resumption of direct control over the Croat secret police. The claim that Yugoslav socialism was resolving ethnic rivalries was exposed as an illusion. 58 The illegals were given a long list of institutions in which they were in
structed to “strike up acquaintances:” the Academy of Sciences, the Public Opinion Institute in Belgrade, the editorial offices of Kommunist, Politika and Borba, the Tanjug Agency, the Institute for International Politics and Economics at Belgrade University, Zagreb University, Yugoslav businesses and the Union of Journalists (in particular, the writer Dobrica Ćosić, who was believed to be close to Tito). Some of the reports sent back to the Centre by illegal courier, radio and the post were judged sufficiently important to be forwarded to Brezhnev.59
BY FAR THE largest KGB presence in eastern Europe was in East Germany. Ever since the Second World War there had been a large KGB enclave within the headquarters of the Soviet military administration in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. During the period which preceded the establishment of the GDR it had closely monitored political parties, churches, trade unions and public opinion within the Soviet zone of Germany. Though the KGB claimed after the foundation of the GDR that the role of its Karlshorst base was to mount operations against the FRG and other Western countries, as well as to provide liaison with the Stasi, it also continued to monitor developments within East Germany.60 In 1971 the intelligence personnel stationed at Karlshorst, not including liaison officers, totaled 404, of whom fortyeight were operations officers working under cover. Another forty-seven KGB operations officers were stationed elsewhere in the GDR.61
The advent of Willy Brandt’s socialist-liberal coalition in West Germany in 1969 offered opportunities for détente which Moscow was more anxious to pursue than Walter Ulbricht, the aging and inflexible neo-Stalinist leader of East Germany. KGB reports from Karlshorst complained that, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ulbricht was posing as the wisest and most far-sighted statesman of the Soviet Bloc, implying (probably correctly) that he had been quicker than Brezhnev to identify the subversive nature of the Dubček regime.62 Ulbricht’s refusal to abandon his commitment to a united “socialist” Germany made him unwilling to consider an agreement with Brandt involving, for the first time, mutual recognition by the FRG and the GDR.63
By 1969, if not before, both Willi Stoph, the East German prime minister, and Erich Honecker, who had overseen the building of the Berlin Wall, were fueling Moscow’s growing irritation with Ulbricht at meetings with the KGB and the Soviet ambassador, Pyotr Andreyevich Abrasimov. Ulbricht, they reported, had described Soviet cut-price imports of East German uranium as “the plundering of the GDR’s natural resources.” When Abrasimov suggested that allowance needed to be made for Ulbricht’s age (he was seventy-six in 1969), Stoph and Honecker retorted that he should have resigned when he was seventy.64 In 1971 Ulbricht was kicked upstairs to the newly created post of Party chairman, and succeeded as Party leader by Honecker. In the following year the GDR and FRG formally recognized each other’s existence as separate states.
Though bickering continued within the Party leadership, the KGB’s main concern was “the impact of the adversary’s ideology on citizens of the GDR” through Western broadcasts and visits by West Germans. The Centre calculated in the mid-1970s that “500,000 citizens are hostile to the existing system and the [Western] adversary will for a long time retain a base of support in the GDR.”65 A long-running KGB operation, codenamed LUCH, monitored opinion within the East German population and Party, contacts between East and West Germans and alleged “attempts by the USA and the FRG to harm the building of socialism” in the GDR. In 1974 the section of the Karlshorst KGB responsible for LUCH was raised in status to a directorate.66
The majority of the Centre’s intelligence on East Germany, however, came from the Stasi, whose network of internal informers was vastly greater than the KGB’s. The GDR had seven times as many informers per head of population as Nazi Germany. 67 In 1975 65 percent of all reports from Soviet Bloc security services received by the Centre came from the Stasi.68 Some of the reports were, in effect, classified East German opinion polls. In an opinion survey of factory workers in 1974, for example, 20.6 percent of those questioned “considered that friendship with the USSR restricted the GDR’s autonomy and brought more benefit to the Soviet Union than to the GDR.” A majority, when asked to explain the phrase “achieving working-class power,” claimed not to know what it meant. Some of the comments on the phrase, however, were described in the report forwarded to the Centre as “bitter, wounding and vicious.” Among them were “Working-class power is all right [in theory], but what is it like in practice?”; “This is just a slogan!”; and “Justice for every worker, not just for a newly created privileged group!” Given the inevitable caution of those questioned in expressing politically incorrect views, the real level of dissatisfaction was probably considerably higher. Both the size of the KGB’s Karlshorst base and the volume of intelligence from the Stasi made the Centre less dependent on PROGRESS operations by illegals for intelligence from East Germany than from the rest of eastern Europe.69
THE KGB’S MAIN concern in Hungary was the extent of Jewish influence within the Party and the AVH (the Hungarian KGB). Always prone to Zionist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the Centre was deeply disturbed by Hungarian reluctance to agree in 1969 to its suggestion for holding “an anti-Zionist conference in Budapest of progressive Jews opposed to the policy of Israel” or for assisting the KGB in making an anti-Zionist film alleging cooperation between Hitler and Hungarian Zionists. “The Hungarian security agencies,” the Centre concluded, “were forced to look over their shoulder when working on the [anti-]Zionist line, as Jewish nationalists within the leadership of the highest Party organs were morbidly cautious with regard to this sector of work.” The KGB also looked askance at the number of Jews within the Hungarian interior ministry, among them—it reported—two deputy ministers, the heads of the AVH First and Third Directorates (responsible, respectively, for foreign intelligence and the surveillance of domestic political opposition), the head of the police directorate and the head of military counter-intelligence. The situation was worst of all in foreign intelligence, where, according to KGB calculations, thirteen of the seventeen department chiefs were Jewish.70
The illegals sent to Hungary on PROGRESS operations in 1971 posing as Western visitors were sent primarily to investigate the extent of Zionist influence. They were instructed to report on attitudes to Israel and its trade and economic relations with Hungary, “the links of Hungarian organizations and individuals with Zionist circles” and the situation in the Writers’ Union and other “creative unions” (where Jewish influence was also believed to be strong). The illegals were also told to “identify anti-Semitic attitudes,” presumably in the hope that they would discover popular opposition to the number of Hungarian Jews in high places. According to an alarmist Centre assessment, “Pro-Zionist domination was entrenched in Party, state and public organizations.”71
DURING 1972 PROGRESS operations were extended to areas of nationalist unrest within the Soviet Union. On October 4, 1972 KGB Directive No. 150/3-10807 instructed the FCD Illegals Directorate to investigate the mood of the population and the activities of Western tourists in the Baltic republics. The Centre’s analysis of the reports received from ARTYOM, FYODOROV, SEVIDOV and VLAS was uniformly depressing. Posing as Western visitors, all four illegals noted inefficient administration; an apathetic workforce “just sitting out the appointed [working] hours, with no pride in their profession;” intolerance between ethnic groups; and widespread drunkenness. The population of the Baltic republics were, however, “well informed about events in the West and in the Soviet Union.” Letters were taken to the West by foreign tourists, frequently written by people anxious to enter into marriages of convenience with Westerners to provide pretexts for emigration: “Many people of either sex marry ethnic Jews, although they themselves are not Jews; their only aim is to leave the USSR.” As frequently occurred with analyses of internal dissidence, the main scapegoats were the Jews. Because they were “conscious of the moral support of Israel and the USA and other Western countries,” they were alleged to be even more idle than the rest of the
population—admitting to the illegals that “We work just enough to avoid being sacked.”72
ALL OVER EASTERN Europe the illegals appear to have given franker, and therefore more depressing, assessments of public attitudes than the KGB liaison offices and residencies, who were under pressure to produce flattering accounts of local reaction to dreary set-piece speeches by Soviet leaders. Even in Bulgaria most of the population had lost their traditional sense of Slav kinship with Soviet Russia. According to one report:
Anti-Sovietism flourishes on Bulgarian television. Though not openly expressed… it finds a fertile breeding ground. The so-called “spots,” featuring Soviet films about the Soviet Union and Soviet life, cause the population to switch off their television sets.73
When the illegal TANOV was sent on a two-month PROGRESS mission to Bulgaria in 1974, posing as a Western journalist preparing travel brochures, he was advised by the Centre to win the confidence of the Bulgarians he talked to by giving them presents. Everywhere he went he found resentment at the low standard of living and the well-founded conviction that Bulgaria was being pressurized by the Soviet Union to squander resources on Cuba and other profligate foreign friends, as well as on a huge police and state security system. From the Centre’s viewpoint, the only silver lining in TANOV’s bleak report was that Bulgarians were too afraid of the DS, their security service, to grumble publicly.74
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