Just over a week after he received news of the award, the first of the “Sakharov Hearings,” held in response to an appeal launched by Sakharov and other dissidents a year earlier, opened in Copenhagen to hear evidence of Soviet human rights abuses—almost all of them in breach of the Helsinki Accords.
On November 22 Andropov approved a document entitled “Complex Operational Measures to Expose the Political Background to the Award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Sakharov.” The sheer range and ambitiousness of the active measures proposed indicated Sakharov’s increasing prominence as a KGB target. In collaboration, where necessary, with other KGB directorates, the FCD was instructed:
• to inspire articles and speeches by public and political personalities in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Britain and the FRG, to develop the theme that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Sakharov was an attempt by certain political circles to slow down the process of détente…
• to organize articles and speeches by representatives of public and political circles through KGB assets in Finland, France, Italy and Britain, to demonstrate the absurdity of attempting to link the award of the Peace Prize to Sakharov to a decision relating to the all-European [Helsinki] Conference…
• to organize the mailing of letters and declarations protesting about the award of the Peace Prize to Sakharov to the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting [parliament] and to influential press organs in various Western countries…
• to pass material compromising Sakharov to the Danish, Swedish and Finnish press, hinting at his links with reactionary organizations financed by the CIA and other Western special services;
• to take steps designed to persuade S. Haffner, the leading political observer of the West German Stern magazine to make negative comments on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Sakharov. Haffner had already made sharp criticisms in the FRG press when Sakharov was put forward for the Peace Prize in 1973;
• to pass information to the “dissident” emigration in western Europe designed to exacerbate relations between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn…
• with the help of agents of influence among prominent Chilean émigrés (in Algeria and Mexico), to disseminate the text of a [bogus] telegram of congratulations supposedly sent by General Pinochet [who had led the coup against President Allende] to Sakharov on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize;
• to inspire pronouncements by leading Chilean émigrés in Italy, the FRG and France, expressing the outrage of all Chilean patriots at the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Sakharov, who in 1973 had welcomed the overthrow of the Allende government and in return for this had been awarded the title of “Honorary Citizen” by Pinochet;
• to inspire public statements by public personalities in the Arab countries, condemning the Nobel Committee’s decision on Sakharov, presenting this as a deal between Sakharov and the Zionists, in return for Sakharov’s pronouncements on the question of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, as the Zionists had a decisive influence on the Nobel Committee when it awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1975. It should be noted that the “Sakharov Hearings” in Copenhagen were also a form of payment to Sakharov by the Zionists in return for his pro-Israel activity;
• to make available through Novosti for publication abroad a series entitled “Who Defends Sakharov?,” dealing with [alleged pro-Sakharov] criminals sentenced in the Soviet Union for bribery (Shtern), theft (Leviyev), instigation of terrorism (Bukovsky, Moroz).4
The main fabrications intended to discredit Sakharov personally—his links with Western intelligence agencies, his support for the Pinochet regime and his plots with the Zionists—were all further developed in active measures over the next few years.5 The files examined by Mitrokhin, however, record few immediate successes for the operations approved by Andropov in November 1975. The best the Oslo residency could do to provoke Norwegian opposition to Sakharov’s award was to claim the credit for an article submitted to Dagbladet ridiculing his wife Elena Bonner, who in December 1975 collected the award in place of Sakharov after he was denied an exit visa. The article [which seems not to have been published] claimed that Bonner, a heavy smoker, was constantly providing “free publicity for the tobacco industry” and should have received a cigarette lighter rather than the Nobel Prize.6
In Oslo to see Bonner collect the award on behalf of Sakharov was the Soviet émigré Vladimir Maximov, editor-in-chief of the journal Kontinent, which published news of dissidents throughout eastern Europe in Russian, English, French, German and Italian editions. The first issue in September 1974 had opened with a ringing declaration by Solzhenitsyn:
The intelligentsia of eastern Europe speaks with the united voice of suffering and knowledge. All honor to Kontinent if it is able to make his voice heard. Woe (which will not be long in coming) to western Europe if its ears fail to hear.7
Kontinent rapidly established Maksimov as second only to Solzhenitsyn in the KGB’s list of émigrées enemies. Among the most ingenious of the many active measures used to discredit him in 1976 was one which followed the discovery that a car used by Eduard Mihailovich Serdinov (codenamed TKACHEV), an operations officer in the New York residency, had been bugged by the FBI. It was decided to stage a conversation in the car between Serdinov and a KGB agent from the Soviet community which, it was hoped, would deceive the FBI:
SERDINOV: By the way, Solzhenitsyn’s chum Maksimov is also becoming more and more insolent. He is turning into an open enemy.
AGENT: Which Maksimov do you mean?
SERDINOV: That Parisian one—from the Kontinent.
AGENT: Oh, don’t pay any attention to him! I have heard here from “certain people”… well, from “them” [i.e. the KGB]… that he is their agent and that he even underwent special training with them before he left the Soviet Union.
Other active measures were devised to reinforce the impression that Maksimov was a KGB agent.8 Whether any of them actually succeeded in deceiving the FBI or any other Western intelligence agency remains in doubt.
Doubtless to the intense irritation of the Centre, Kontinent was able to publicize the formation during 1976 and 1977 of “Helsinki Watch Groups” in Moscow, Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia to monitor Soviet compliance with the terms of the Helsinki Accords.
At a meeting of the KGB Collegium in 1976, Andropov branded Sakharov “Public Enemy Number One,”9 a title he retained for the next nine years. The active measures campaign against him continued to expand for several years, with attacks on his wife Elena (codenamed LISA—“Vixen”—by the KGB) forming an increasingly large part of it. A list of current and impending active measures compiled in February 1977 included thirteen “operations to compromise ASKET[Sakharov]”; seven “measures to cut off ASKET and LISA from their close contacts engaged in anti-social activity and to cause dissension in their circle;” eight “measures to hinder the hostile activity of ASKET and LISA;” and four “measures to distract ASKET and LISA from their hostile activity.” Such was the pedantic precision of active measures terminology that “hindrance” operations were carefully distinguished from those whose purpose was merely to “distract.” The main responsibility for directing and coordinating these thirty-two operations fell upon V. N. Shadrin, head of the Ninth Department of the Fifth Directorate.10 It was a measure of the courage and character of Sakharov and Bonner that their sanity and determination survived the KGB’s best efforts to destroy them.
The thirteen compromise operations were remarkably diverse. As usual, they involved a number of forgeries: among them a bogus State Department evaluation which dismissed Sakharov as a worn-out political dilettante and a fabricated letter from Radio Liberty’s Russian staff denouncing his links with the Zionists. Somewhat more bizarrely, attempts were made to link Sakharov with the gay liberation movement. Letters bearing the forged signatures of Sakharov and a Belorussian “group of homosexuals” were sent to gay rights organizations in Britain and Scandinavia, with the aim of prompting them to send le
tters in reply.
The Western “bourgeois press” and its Moscow correspondents were fed stories—apparently without much success—claiming that Sakharov’s family suffered from hereditary mental illness, which affected both his children and his brother, and that he himself had degenerated into “a tired, weak-willed man,” “unable to take independent decisions” because of his domineering wife. Instructions were given for suitably gullible foreign correspondents to be invited to meet the Deputy Procurator-General, S. I. Gusev, who would provide “objective information about the nature of the official warning given to ASKET about his provocative actions.”11
The most vicious of the active measures were directed against Elena Bonner both because Sakharov’s worldwide reputation for integrity made him a less vulnerable target than his less well-known wife, and because attacks on Bonner wounded Sakharov more deeply than those on himself. During Sakharov’s fifteen years of persecution, his only resort to physical violence was to slap the face of Nikolai Yakovlev, one of the writers used by the KGB to libel Bonner.12 The character assassination of Bonner began in earnest with an article entitled “Madame Bonner—Sakharov’s Evil Genius?” planted in the New York Russian-language newspaper Russkiy Golos (Russian Voice) by an agent codenamed YAK, in July 1976.13 Simultaneously, Bonner began to receive letters prepared by Service A but purporting to come from one “Semyon Zlotnik,” who claimed to know the secrets of her “dark past” and demanded money with menaces.14
The “dark past” fabricated by the KGB over the next few years was an explosive mixture of sex and violence. “In her dissolute youth,” it was claimed, “[Bonner] had developed an almost professional knack for seducing and subsequently sponging off older men of considerable stature.” During the war she had allegedly seduced the poet Vsevelod Bagritsky, then hounded his wife to her grave by bombarding her with obscene telephone calls. Her next victim, according to the KGB libel, was a well-known engineer, “Moisei Zlotnik” (“uncle” of the fictitious Semyon Zlotnik), who was jailed for murdering his wife on instructions from Bonner. To escape justice, Bonner was said to have become a nurse on a wartime hospital train—only to be sacked when her seduction of the elderly doctor in charge was discovered by the doctor’s daughter. Among Bonner’s fictitious post-war conquests was her equally elderly, married French uncle, Leon Kleiman; the affair was said to have continued even after she “ensnared” Sakharov.15 The KGB went to enormous pains to fabricate this account of Bonner’s supposedly homicidal sexual appetites, even sending an illegal to France in 1977 to recover some of the papers of Leon Kleiman (who had died five years earlier) to assist in the production of Service A’s forgeries.16
Unsurprisingly, the KGB found considerable difficulty for several years in placing this libellous fiction in the Western “bourgeois press.” It eventually appeared as a “world exclusive” in the Sicilian newspaper Sette Giorni, whose staff—according to the Rome residency—included a “confidential contact” codenamed KIRILL. 17 On April 12, 1980 Sette Giorni printed a sensational story headlined “WHO IS ELENA BONNER? The Wife of Academician Sakharov Perpetrator of Several Murders.” An unnamed member of the editorial staff was reported to have met the elusive “Semyon Zlotnik” while on holiday in Paris, and to have learned the story from him. Sette Giorni cited at some length a series of Service A forgeries, among them a letter from “Moisei Zlotnik” to Bonner reproaching her for persuading him to murder his wife: “You acted precisely, cold-bloodedly and rationally… And your demand ‘to bump her off’ seemed as natural as remembering that I should give you your favorite chocolates on your birthday.” The article also cited an equally fraudulent diary supposedly written by Leon Kleiman describing his seduction by Bonner and denouncing her obsession with “subjugating others” to her will.18 The Rome residency proudly sent fifty copies of the Sette Giorni article to the Centre, together with subsequent readers’ letters denouncing Bonner, most of which had been written or prompted by the residency itself.19 When reporting on the operation to the Central Committee, the KGB is unlikely to have mentioned that Sette Giorni was a little-known provincial newspaper with a print run of only 20,000.20
To increase the pressure on Bonner, and through her on Sakharov, attempts were made to deprive her of the support of family and friends. The first of the active measures devised by the KGB early in 1977 “to cut off ASKET and LISA from their close contacts engaged in anti-social activity and to cause dissension in their circle” listed seven different methods of harassing her daughter from her first marriage, Tanya, and son-in-law, Efrem Yankelevich, in order to force them to emigrate. The harassment succeeded. On September 5, 1977 Bonner said goodbye to Tanya and Efrem at Sheremetyevo airport.
The Centre showed equal ingenuity in attempting to alienate the Sakharovs’ friends. Agents in the dissident movement were instructed to “cause dissension between ASKET and LISA on the one hand and their contacts involved in anti-social activity” by circulating disparaging comments about other dissidents supposedly made by Sakharov and Bonner.21
The two sets of KGB active measures designed to “hinder the hostile activity of ASKET and LISA” also had the unstated aim of making daily life impossible for both of them. The “hindrance” operations were designed to “create abnormal [living] conditions” in as many ways as possible. Though the KGB did not yet dare to withdraw Sakharov’s driving license, no other member of his or Bonner’s families was allowed to obtain—or retain—a license. An agent codenamed MORVIKOV was instructed to stir up trouble between the couple and Andrei Sakharov’s children. The “distraction” operations included flooding the Sakharovs with bogus requests for help from people who had fallen foul of the Soviet legal system or who simply sought their advice on non-existent problems.22 The cumulative effect of the KGB’s active measures took an inevitable toll—particularly on the health of Bonner, who was suffering from a heart condition. There were times, she wrote later, “when it was difficult for me to walk even a hundred yards, when even sitting at the typewriter made me break out in a cold sweat.” Simply thinking about the allegations about her private life made her feel sick—or even that she was about to have a heart attack.23
THE EXTENT OF the Sakharovs’ covert persecution was due partly to the fact that the KGB did not yet dare imprison them. The president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences solemnly assured his American opposite number that “not one hair of Dr. Sakharov’s head” would be harmed—though, as Bonner wryly remarked, the promise meant little since Sakharov was almost bald.24 During 1977, however, there was a wave of arrests of other well-known dissidents, among them the two most prominent members of the “Helsinki Watch Groups”: the veteran civil rights campaigner Aleksandr Ginzburg, victim of the botched 1968 show trial, and the physicist Yuri Orlov, founder of the Moscow group. Andropov’s characteristically slanted intelligence reports to the Politburo sought to implicate both in the ideological subversion campaigns allegedly run by Western intelligence agencies:
The enemy’s special services and ideological centers are applying serious efforts to invigorate and extend the hostile activity of anti-Soviet elements on the territory of the Soviet Union. Especially notable is the effort of Western special services to organize an association of persons opposing the existing state and social order in our country… The need has thus emerged to terminate the actions of Orlov, Ginzburg and others once and for all, on the basis of existing law…25
Orlov and Ginzburg were arrested in February 1977. A month later it was the turn of the leading Jewish human rights activist and “refusenik” Anatoli Shcharansky. For the next year all three withstood the best efforts of teams of KGB interrogators to cajole and bully them into cooperating in their own show trials. On December 29, 1977 Orlov’s chief investigator, Captain Yakovlev, made what amounted to a formal admission of failure. After Yakovlev showed him the official charge sheet, Orlov took notes of it but “refused to sign it, saying that he wholly rejected the charge.” The record of the interrogation on that day (rep
roduced as an appendix to this chapter) shows Orlov, ten months after his arrest, obviously getting the better of his interrogator. When asked whether he understood the charge against him, Orlov replied that it was not clear to him, and that he had been shown no “evidence that my actions had the intention of undermining or weakening the Soviet regime.” He put in writing a complaint that “[i]t has never been explained to me precisely and unambiguously what is meant by the words ‘undermining,’ ‘weakening,’ and even ‘Soviet regime.’” Interrogator Yakovlev offered no explanation. Orlov went on to complain against the manner of Yakovlev’s interrogation: “You first make an assertion of your own, and then ask whether this is a fact. This is the typical way of putting a leading question.” Orlov claimed that the documents he had circulated on behalf of the Helsinki Watch Group had had a beneficial effect. They had been studied by “progressive forces in the West,” such as the French and Italian Communist parties, “whose criticism has clearly improved certain aspects of human rights in the USSR.” Fewer people were being sent to prison camps or being mistreated in psychiatric hospitals, and fewer children from unregistered Christian sects were being taken away from their parents. Yakovlev, as usual, had no answer. Orlov made a written protest that his previous request for Yakovlev to be taken off his case had been turned down.26
The most striking feature of Orlov’s trial in May 1978, apart from his own courageous defiance, was the pathetic spectacle of fifteen prosecution witnesses insisting that Soviet citizens enjoyed all the freedoms guaranteed by the Helsinki Accords. For campaigning for those very freedoms, Orlov was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, followed by five in exile.
Ginzburg, who was tried two months later, knew that, as a re-offender, he was liable to a ten-year sentence. But, to his surprise:
They played a little game with me. The prosecution told the court that he was only asking for eight years, because I had helped the police in the Shcharansky case. It was a lie, but it was a good piece of character assassination for them to use in their propaganda and to make life hard for me in the camps.27
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