Once again, however, Hall delayed taking action. The Childs brothers continued to take part in the “special channel operation” for the remainder of the decade. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin records that during the eight months up to April 1978 Jack Childs conducted nineteen operations: three VALDAY money transfers, two meetings with KGB officers, five dead drops, six brush contacts and three operations to signal contacts.87 By the spring of 1980, however, the FBI had concluded that the Childs were in imminent danger of being compromised. On May 28, as a pretext for withdrawing from the “special channel,” Morris Childs told Hall that unidentified men had been calling on his neighbors making enquiries about him and he feared he might have to go into hiding to avoid arrest. He handed Hall 225,437 dollars in cash, which, he claimed, was all the money from Moscow in his possession. Jack Childs, who had been in failing health for some time, died in a New York hospital on August 12. Morris and Eva Childs retired to a luxurious condominium north of Miami with spectacular views over the Atlantic. In 1987, at a special ceremony at FBI headquarters, Morris was presented by President Reagan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He and his brother Jack, who was awarded the same medal posthumously, thus became the only spies ever to be decorated by both the Soviet Union and the United States.88
Throughout the decades when the Childs brothers operated the secret channel to Moscow, the CPUSA had been wholly marginal to American politics. In four presidential elections between 1972 and 1984 Gus Hall never received more than 59,000 votes; after falling to 35,000 in 1984, he decided to support the Democrats in 1988. After dropping well below 10,000 members in the mid-1970s, the Party staged a modest revival but in the later 1980s was only about 15,000 strong.89 Hall, however, continued to inhabit a fantasy world in which the CPUSA had a major influence on American politics. He wrote to Boris Ponomarev, the head of the International Department, in the autumn of 1981:
More than at any moment in recent history, I am convinced that our Party can be an important factor in slowing down, stopping and reversing the present reactionary policies of the Reagan administration. Tens of millions have become disillusioned. They are moving towards mass actions, and millions are in ideological flux. Our Party can be an important and even a decisive factor in influencing and moving these masses.
As on this occasion, Hall’s fantasy assessments of the CPUSA’s growing influence were accompanied by appeals for Soviet subsidies, which for most of the 1980s ran at 2 million dollars a year. In 1987 Hall asked for a large increase:
I can only argue that because our party works in the decaying heart of imperialism whatever we do in influencing events in the United States has an impact on world developments. And, because of the crisis of the Reagan presidency, which is deep and chronic now, our Party’s work has had and continues to have a growing impact on the politics of our country.
Therefore, in the context of the struggle against US imperialism and the policies of the Reagan administration, our party must be seen as an important, and even indispensable, factor.
The CPUSA’s subsidy for the following year was put up to three million dollars.90
Morris Childs believed that the remarkable generosity of Soviet donations to the CPUSA (200 dollars a member in 1987) was due partly to the fact that the Kremlin took Gus Hall’s claims at least semi-seriously and “ludicrously overestimated the influence of the American party.”91 The generosity was also due, however, to the ideological servility of Hall and the CPUSA leadership. According to Dorothy Ray Healey, a prominent party militant for forty-five years:
Under Gus’s leadership the American CP had picked up the dubious distinction of being the chief ideological sheepdog in the international Communist movement, barking on command when any of the other lambs threatened to stray from the fold. The Soviet leaders would contact Gus and tell him what they wanted him to say, he would say it, and then Pravda could run a story saying that embattled American Communists speaking from the heartland of world imperialism had thus-and-such to say about whatever issue was of particular concern to the Soviets at the moment.92
EIGHTEEN
EUROCOMMUNISM
A conference of eighty-five Communist parties held in Moscow in 1960 unanimously reaffirmed loyalty to the Soviet Union as an unshakeable article of faith for Communists in both East and West:
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been, and remains, the universally recognized vanguard of the world Communist movement, being the most experienced and steeled contingent of the international Communist movement.
By the end of the decade, however, the CPSU leadership was outraged to find its infallibility being called into question by the emergence of what was later termed “Eurocommunism.” The Eurocommunist heresy made its first public appearance after the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, when a number of Western parties ventured some, mostly timid, criticisms of the Soviet invasion. The leadership of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), later the dominant force in Eurocommunism, reaffirmed “the profound, fraternal and genuine ties that unite the Italian Communist Party to the Soviet Union and the CPSU,” but denied the right of the Soviet Union to intervene militarily “in the internal life of another Communist Party or another country.”1
“The profound, fraternal and genuine ties” which bound the PCI to the Soviet Union even after Soviet tanks had entered Prague had a secret dimension of which very few Italian Communists outside the Direzione were aware. After the Colonels’ coup in Athens in April 1967, the PCI general secretary, Luigi Longo, and other party leaders had become alarmed by the possibility of an Italian military putsch on the Greek model. In the summer of 1967, Giorgio Amendola, on behalf of the PCI Direzione, formally requested Soviet assistance in preparing the Party for survival after a coup as an illegal underground movement. Politburo decision no. P50/P of August 15 authorized the FCD to draw up a program which was intended to give the PCI its own intelligence unit with fully trained staff and a clandestine radio communications system. Details of the program were agreed in talks in Moscow between ANDREA, the head of the PCI’s illegal apparatus, and senior Central Committee officials and KGB officers. Between October 1967 and May 1968 three Italian radio operators completed a four-month KGB training course. Other Party members took courses in producing bogus identity documents, following a syllabus which devoted ninety-six hours to the production of rubber stamps and document seals, six to the art of embossing with synthetic resins, six to changing photographs on identity documents, six to making handwritten entries on documents and twelve to “theoretical discussions.” These and other secret training programs continued at least until the end of the 1970s. The PCI leadership also asked the KGB to check its headquarters for listening devices.2
After the immediate PCI protest at the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, open criticism quickly subsided. Before the PCI Twelfth Congress in February 1969, both Boris Ponomarev, head of the Central Committee’s International Department, and senior KGB officers put heavy pressure on Luigi Longo and other Party leaders to tone down their comments on Cezchoslovakia in speeches to the conference. In reports to the CPSU Central Committee, Ponomarev and the KGB claimed the credit for the fact that, despite the retention of some “ambiguous phrases,” all references to “intervention” and “occupation” by the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact were removed. Nor was there any call by the PCI for the withdrawal of Warsaw Pact forces from Czechoslovakia.3 In a private discussion in 1970 with Nikita Ryzhov, the Soviet ambassador, Longo “particularly emphasized that for the Italian Communists friendship with the CPSU and the Soviet Union was not a formality but a real necessity for their existence.”4
Longo also depended heavily on Soviet subsidies. He was at his most importunate when a general election was called one year ahead of schedule in May 1972. The original CPSU Politburo allocation for the election year was 5,200,000 dollars—2 million more than in 1971. After a further appeal from Longo, it provided another 500,000 dollars. Longo then w
rote another begging letter, to which Brezhnev sent a personal reply, delivered by the Rome resident, Gennadi Fyodorovich Borzov (alias “Bystrov”), on April 4:
Dear Comrade Longo,
We have received your letter requesting additional assistance to meet expenses relating to the Italian Communist Party’s participation in the electoral campaign.
We well understand the difficult nature of the situation in which this campaign is taking place, and the need for the intense activity which your Party must exert in this connection in order to win the elections and resist the forces of reaction.
As you, Comrade Longo, know, we have already allocated an additional US $500,000 for the Italian Communist Party to take part in the electoral campaign, thus bringing the total [contribution] this year to US $5,700,000.
In the light of your request, we once again carefully studied all the possibilities open to us, and decided to give the Italian Communist Party further assistance to the amount of US $500,000. Unfortunately, at the present time, there is no more that we can do.
With Communist greetings,
[Signed] L. Brezhnev
General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee5
After handing the letter to Longo, Borzov reported to the Centre:
The Ambassador [Nikita Ryzhov] declared that as we had gone behind his back he intended to telegraph Comrade Brezhnev about this. Bearing in mind Ryzhov’s difficult character, and his extremely sensitive reaction to things of this kind, this particular incident has greatly exacerbated the Ambassador’s attitude towards us.
The Centre ordered Borzov to do his best to pacify the Ambassador:
Tell Ryzhov that you assumed he would be made aware in Moscow of the decision taken by the Instantsiya [CPSU leadership]. On your own behalf, ask Comrade Ryzhov to treat all this with proper understanding and not to attach exaggerated importance to what has happened; tell him that our relations with him will continue to be businesslike and that the Ambassador will be fully informed about all our contacts with our friends [the PCI].6
In October 1972, Borzov reported that the “friends” had handed back three 100-dollar notes which had, embarrassingly, turned out to be forgeries.7
Until 1976 the transfer of funds to the Communist Party was a far more straightforward business in Rome than in the United States or many other parts of the world. Since leading Italian Communists regularly called at the Soviet embassy, it was thought unnecessary to resort to the clandestine rigmarole of brush contacts and dead-drops. The most dependable Soviet loyalist on the PCI Direzione, who was in regular contact with the KGB, simply selected a series of emissaries who drove to the embassy and collected the money, having first checked that their cars were not being followed. The KGB residency’s KOMETA radio-listening post simultaneously monitored the wavelengths used by Italian police and security forces in order to detect any signs of surveillance. As an additional precaution, the emissary was followed to and from the embassy by a PCI car.8 Moscow provided further financial assistance through lucrative contracts with PCI-controlled companies in business ventures ranging from Soviet oil imports to hotel construction in the Soviet Union.9
The PCI’s fears of a right-wing military coup were revived by the overthrow of President Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government in Chile by the armed forces in September 1973. In December the PCI took secret delivery from the KGB of three SELENGA radio stations in order to enable Party headquarters to maintain contact with local branches if the PCI was forced underground. Party radio technicians were trained in Russia to operate the new system. In the aftermath of a coup the SELENGA radios would transmit messages to Moscow which would then be retransmitted to local PCI underground groups by powerful Soviet transmitters.10
The renewed fear of an Italian putsch, however, also drove the PCI in directions which caused concern in Moscow that the West’s largest Communist Party was succumbing to ideological heresy. In a series of articles entitled “Reflections on Italy after the Events in Chile,” Enrico Berlinguer (who had succeeded Longo as general secretary in 1972) proposed, in a phrase which became famous, a compromesso storico (“historic compromise”) with the Socialists and the ruling Christian Democrats.11 Berlinguer was unlike any previous major Communist leader with whom the Kremlin had had to deal. His wife Letizia was a devout Catholic and he had agreed to their children being brought up in the Catholic faith. Longo had done his best to persuade Moscow that, despite his Catholic family, Berlinguer was the best available candidate and that his three main rivals, Giorgio Amendola, Gian Carlo Pajetta and Pietro Ingrao, were unsuitable for the post of general secretary. Amendola, according to Longo, “had a great deal of the bourgeois democrat about him and had too often committed revisionist errors;” Pajetta, “whose authority was dwindling, was too short-tempered and would not promote [Party] unity;” Ingrao was “superficial and given to unrealistic theoretical speculation.” Berlinguer, however, represented the new generation of Party leaders who had emerged since the Second World War.12 Moscow was far from reassured.
Berlinguer’s original proposal for a “historic compromise” was conceived chiefly as a defense against the prospect of a right-wing coup, justified by Lenin’s dictum that revolutionaries must know when to retreat. Gradually, however, the proposal evolved into a more ambitious—and, in Moscow’s view, heretical—strategy, in which Catholic traditions of solidarity would combine with Communist collective action to produce a new political and social order. During 1975 Berlinguer emerged as the chief spokesman of what became known as Eurocommunism. The PCI joined with the Spanish PCE and French PCF in issuing what was, in effect, a Eurocommunist manifesto, distancing themselves from the Soviet model of socialism and committing themselves to free elections, a free press and a parliamentary road to socialism within a multi-party system.13
At a secret meeting with Ryzhov on December 12, 1975, a KGB informant on the Direzione accused Berlinguer and the Party leadership of “a cowardly rejection of Leninism” and growing hostility to the Soviet Union. He appealed to the CPSU to issue a public criticism of the PCI line: “This will almost split the party, but it is the only way to save the situation.” The informant also claimed that the PCI leadership was planning to disrupt the conference of European Communist Parties, due to be held in East Berlin in the summer of 1976, by using it as a platform for its revisionist views.14
During the preparations for the East Berlin conference the Kremlin issued a series of thinly veiled public warnings to the Eurocommunists not to misbehave. Berlinguer, however, was not to be intimidated. During the Italian election campaign in June, he made what Moscow considered his most outrageous statement yet. Italian membership of NATO, Berlinguer declared, was on balance an advantage: “This guarantees us the kind of socialism that we want—to be precise, socialism in liberty, socialism of a pluralist kind.” The Kremlin responded with a scathing, though secret, letter of protest. Of far more significance so far as most of the PCI Direzione was concerned, however, was the fact that the Party received a record 34.5 percent of the vote (up 7.3 percent since 1972). At the East Berlin conference on June 29-30 the clash between the CPSU and the Eurocommunists was thinly papered over by a bland communiqué calling for “internationalist solidarity.” The speeches of Berlinguer and other leading heretics, which drew attention to flaws in “existing socialism” (in other words, the Soviet model), were published in Pravda only in a censored version.15
In December 1976 the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, always a faithful mouthpiece for the Kremlin, denounced Eurocommunism as one of the bourgeois propagandists’ “main lines of ideological subversion against proletarian internationalism.”16 The Kremlin’s scope for a direct, frontal assault on Berlinguer, however, was limited by his immense popularity. Instead, Andropov instructed Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, to prepare active measures to discredit him and other tribunes of Eurocommunism. 17 A report prepared by the FCD for the Central Committee claimed that Berlinguer owned a plot of land in Sardinia, and
had been involved in dubious building contracts worth tens of billions of lira.18
Remarkably, while hoping to destabilize Berlinguer by leaking evidence of his alleged corruption, Moscow continued to subsidize the PCI. The total subsidy for 1976 was 6.5 million dollars.19 According to KGB files, however, the “operational situation” for the transfer of money in Rome had become more difficult. The newly appointed resident, Boris Solomatin (previously stationed in New York), concluded in 1976 that handing over money at the embassy was insufficiently clandestine. He agreed with Guido Cappelloni (codenamed ALBERTO), head of the PCI Central Committee administration department, that it would be safest for the money transfers to take place early on Sunday mornings at pre-arranged locations in the Rome suburbs which had been carefully checked beforehand by both the residency and the PCI. The route of the car used by the “friend” who received the money was kept under careful surveillance by PCI members; he then transferred the money to another car which delivered it to a secret Party office.20
Despite its hostility to Berlinguer and Eurocommunism, the Soviet Politburo also continued to authorize KGB training in underground operations of specially selected Italian Communists. In 1979, for example, the PCI sent three Party members to Moscow for instruction by the FCD “Illegals” Directorate S. One was trained to act as radio and cipher instructor, another as a disguise specialist and the third in the fabrication of false documents.21
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