Potential sabotage targets and landing sites for Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups (DRGs) are recorded in KGB files with the same meticulous detail as the location of the secret arms caches.26 By 1959, if not earlier, the most vulnerable points of power-transmission lines, oil pipelines, communications systems and major industrial complexes in most, if not all, NATO countries were being systematically reconnoitered and marked on the Thirteenth Department’s maps. In the summer of 1959 a KGB agent obtained a temporary job at an electricity substation near Worms in order to assist the preparation of plans to sabotage electric power lines crossing the Rhine.27 From October 2 to 30, 1959 a Soviet delegation of energy experts, headed by the deputy minister for the construction of power plants and including a KGB officer, used a visit to the United States to reconnoiter sabotage targets in power stations and electricity lines.
Files on suitable landing sites and bases for the DRGs which would attack these and other targets included detailed information on the terrain, landmarks, climate in different seasons, prevailing winds, populated areas and local customs. Where the DRGs were to land by sea rather than by air, there were further details on the coastline, tides and operating conditions for submarines and motor boats.28 Much of the information was collected by local agents and by Soviet citizens who were allowed to travel to the West for family reunions. An attempt was also made to recruit illegal agents in the main NATO countries and Japan to assist the DRGs. According to a Thirteenth Department file:
People who are suitable as special [illegal] agents for Line F operations are 20 to 45 years old. Persons from aristocratic and bourgeois-conservative circles are of no interest. Preference is given to the following professions: electricians, mechanics, toolmakers, chemists, qualified engineers, technicians and highly skilled workers—primarily citizens of the United States, France, Canada, Britain, West Germany, Italy and Japan. People who adhere strictly to church dogma and rules are not suitable, nor are people with a tendency towards alcoholism, drug addiction and sexual deviations. In order to provide explanations for the characteristics and routines involved in the operations being carried out, it is desirable to select people who travel frequently around their own country as well as to other countries—people who own houses, second homes, country dachas, farmsteads and plots of land.29
The Thirteenth Department’s preparations for wartime sabotage operations inevitably overlapped with those of the GRU. The resulting duplication of effort was made worse by the traditional rivalry and distrust between the two agencies. On April 7, 1960 the CPSU Central Committee issued Decision No. P-274-XIVI, calling for closer co-ordination between the KGB and GRU. This and other exhortations, however, had little practical effect. In September 1963 the Centre complained that the leadership of the GRU was making no serious attempt to co-ordinate its operations with those of the KGB.30
The KGB found it easier to collaborate with the intelligence agencies of other Soviet Bloc countries, who were usually willing to accept a subordinate role, and sought their help in a number of Line F operations. According to Markus Wolf, head of the HVA (Stasi foreign intelligence) from 1952 to 1986, the Centre offered its allies lethal nerve toxins and poisons which were fatal on contact with the skin for use during “special actions.” Wolf claims that he refused all but a small supply of “truth drugs,” which he had analyzed by an HVA doctor:
He came back shaking his head in horror. “Use those without constant medical supervision and there is every chance that the fellow from whom you want the truth will be dead as a dodo in seconds,” he said.
In his memoirs Wolf seeks to distance himself from KGB assassination attempts. He claims, for example, that the KGB assassinated Aleksandr Trushnovich, the NTS leader in West Berlin, “while attempting to kidnap him.”31 KGB files tell a rather different story. In April 1954 Heinz Gleske, a Stasi officer operating undercover in West Germany, lured Trushnovich to his home, where he was kidnapped and handed over to the KGB at Karlshorst. Gleske then issued a statement, claiming that Trushnovich had become disillusioned with the West and had “voluntarily” defected to East Germany. The Centre awarded Gleske the Order of the Red Star.32
Even with some assistance from its allies, the KGB’s “special actions” against NTS and OUN leaders during the Khrushchev era had a mixed record of success—not least because of the doubts of its assassins. In an attempt to disguise its involvement in an attempt to murder the NTS president, Vladimir Poremsky, the Thirteenth Department hired the services of a German contract killer, Wolfgang Wildprett. Like Khokhlov, however, Wildprett had second thoughts, decided not to go ahead with the “special action” and in December 1955 informed the West German police. In September 1957 a Thirteenth Department attempt to poison Khokhlov himself with radioactive thallium (chosen in the belief that it would degrade and leave no trace at autopsy) also failed.
These failures, however, were followed by the successful assassination of two leading Ukrainian émigrés: the main NTS ideologist, Lev Rebet, in October 1957 and the OUN leader, Stephen Bandera, in October 1959.33 The Thirteenth Department assassin in both cases, only twenty-five years of age when he killed Rebet, was Bodgan Stashinsky, who operated out of the KGB compound at Karlshorst. His murder weapon, specially constructed by the KGB weapons laboratory, was a spray gun which fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule and caused death by cardiac arrest. The Centre calculated, correctly, that an unsuspecting pathologist was likely to diagnose the cause of death as heart failure. Stashinsky tested his weapon by taking a dog into a wood near Karlshorst, tying it to a tree and firing at it. The dog had immediate convulsions and died in a few moments. Confident of the deadliness of his spray gun, Stashinsky killed both Rebet and Bandera by lying in wait for them in darkened stairways. In December 1959, he was summoned to Moscow. At a ceremony in the Centre, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin, chairman of the KGB, read aloud a citation praising Stashinsky “for carrying out an extremely important government assignment” and presented him with the Order of the Red Banner. Stashinsky was told he would be sent on a course to perfect his English before being sent on a three- to five-year assignment in the West to carry out further “special actions.”34
Like Khokhlov and Wildprett, however, Stashinsky had second thoughts about his career as an assassin, encouraged by his East German girlfriend, Inge Pohl, whom he married in 1960. In August 1961, the day before the Berlin Wall sealed off the escape route from the East, the couple defected to the West. Stashinsky confessed to the murders of Rebet and Bandera, was tried at Karlsruhe in October 1962 and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. The judge declared that the main culprit was the Soviet government which had institutionalized political murder. Heads were quick to roll within the KGB. According to Anatoli Golitsyn, who defected four months after Stashinsky, at least seventeen KGB officers were sacked or demoted.35 More importantly, the Khokhlov and Stashinsky defections led both the KGB leadership and the Politburo to reassess the risks of “wet affairs” (assassination attempts). Fearful of attracting more of the worldwide publicity generated by Khokhlov’s press conference and Stashinsky’s trial, the Politburo abandoned assassination as a normal treatment of policy outside the Soviet Bloc, resorting to it only on rare occasions such as in the elimination of President Hafizullah Amin of Afghanistan in December 1979.36
Among the chief beneficiaries of the KGB’s declining enthusiasm for assassination plots was probably Nikita Khrushchev. Vladimir Semichastny, then the KGB chairman, claims that he was approached in 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev, the ringleader of the plot to oust Khrushchev, and asked to arrange his “physical elimination.” Semichastny refused.37 He did, however, agree to bug Khruschchev’s private telephone lines. With the KGB’s assistance, the plotters achieved a substantial element of surprise. When Khrushchev left for a holiday on the Black Sea in the autumn of 1964, he was seen off by smiling colleagues. When he returned on October 13, summoned to attend an urgent meeting of the Presidium, he was met at the airport only b
y Semichastny and a senior security officer from the KGB. “They’ve all gathered in the Kremlin and are waiting for you,” Semichastny told him. Khrushchev surrendered to the inevitable without a struggle, agreeing to resign on the grounds of “advanced age and poor health.” Thereafter, he was relegated almost to the status of unperson, not mentioned again in the press until Pravda published a brief note in 1970 recording his death.38
THOUGH ITS ASSASSINATION operations declined, the Centre showed increasing interest during the 1960s and 1970s in collaboration with “anti-imperialist” guerrilla and terrorist groups in the Third World. In January 1961 Khrushchev publicly pledged Soviet assistance for “movements of national liberation.” The abortive, CIABACKED invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs three months later strengthened his determination to do so. On August 3 he told a private meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders in Moscow, “I wish we could give imperialism a bloody nose!”39 The Centre believed it had devised a way to do so which would conceal the role of the KGB.
The aggressive global grand strategy against the Main Adversary, devised in the summer of 1961 by Shelepin and approved by Khrushchev and the Central Committee, envisaged the use of national liberation movements both in operations against the United States and its allies and in promoting “armed uprisings against reactionary pro-Western governments.” At the top of the list of national liberation movements cultivated by the KGB was the newly founded Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua, which was dedicated to following the example of the Cuban revolution and overthrowing the brutal pro-American dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty.40 The FSLN leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador, codenamed GIDROLOG (“Hydrologist”), was described by the Centre as “a trusted agent.”41 Sandinista guerrillas formed the basis for a KGB sabotage and intelligence group established in 1966 on the Mexican US border with support bases in the area of Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Ensenada. Its leader, Manuel Ramón de Jesus Andara y Ubeda (codenamed PRIM), traveled to Moscow for training in Line F operations. Among the chief sabotage targets across the US border were military bases, missile sites, radar installations and the oil pipeline (codenamed START) which ran from El Paso in Texas to Costa Mesa, California. Three sites on the American coast were selected for DRG landings, together with large-capacity dead-drops in which to store mines, explosive, detonators and other sabotage materials. A support group codenamed SATURN was given the task of using the movements of migrant workers (braceros) to conceal the transfer of agents and munitions across the border. SATURN’s headquarters was a hotel belonging to a Russian-born agent, codenamed VLADELETS (“Proprietor”), in Ensenada fifty miles from the US border in the Baja California. VLADELET’s two sons, both born in Mexico but assessed by the KGB as “Russian patriots,” owned a gas station which was selected as a hiding place for DRGs and their equipment as well as a base from which to conduct sabotage in the United States.42
Canada in the north, like Mexico in the south, was intended by the Thirteenth Department (reorganized in 1965 as Department V) as a base for cross-border operations by DRGs against the Main Adversary. In 1967 a number of frontier crossings were reconnoitred: among them areas near the Lake of the Woods and International Falls in Minnesota, and in the region of the Glacier National Park in Montana. The KGB believed that one of its targets in Montana, the Flathead dam, generated “the largest power supply system in the world.” Department V identified a point (codenamed DORIS) on the South Fork river about three kilometers below the dam, where it could bring down a series of pylons on a steep mountain slope which would take a lengthy period to repair. It also planned a probably simultaneous operation in which DRG commandos would descend on the Hungry Horse dam at night, take control of it for a few hours and sabotage its sluices.
The state with the largest number of targets, however, was almost certainly New York, where DRG’s based along the Delaware river, in the Big Spring Park near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and at other locations planned to disrupt the power supply of the entire state before taking refuge in the Appalachian mountains. In examining the target files of the Thirteenth Department and Department V, Mitrokhin was invariably struck by the thoroughness with which each target had been reconnoitred. The file on the port of New York (target GRANIT), for example, included details of ships’ berths, warehouses, communications systems, port personnel and security procedures. As always, the port’s most vulnerable points were carefully marked.43
As well as being a base of KGB “special tasks” against the United States, Canada was also an important target in its own right. Operation KEDR (“Cedar”), begun by the Ottawa residency in 1959, took twelve years to complete an immensely detailed reconnaissance of oil refineries and oil and gas pipelines across Canada from British Columbia to Montreal. Each target was photographed from several angles and its vulnerable points identified. The most suitable approach roads for sabotage operations, together with the best getaway routes, were carefully plotted on small-scale maps.44
Line F operations in north America were part of a much larger strategy. In the event of war with NATO, Moscow planned a massive campaign of sabotage and disruption behind enemy lines. But sabotage on a more modest scale was also envisaged in crises (not precisely defined in files seen by Mitrokhin) which stopped short of war. Within Europe, residencies in NATO countries and some neutral states (notably Austria, Sweden and Switzerland) were all expected to make detailed plans for the sabotage of four to six major targets a year.45 In 1964-6, for example, Line F in West Germany planned “special actions” against the Wilhelmshaven-Wesseling oil pipeline; fuel and lubricant depots in Wilhelmshaven and Unterpfaffenhoven; the main electrical substations in Brauweiler and Rommerskirchen and in the hamlet of Feinau; the NATO military transit base in the harbor of Bremerhaven; the FRG government war bunker; the Howaldswerft shipbuilding docks at Kiel and the Weser A G in Bremen; and the main US army arms depot at Misau. On instructions from the Centre, the Bonn residency purchased uniforms and work clothes, used by Bundeswehr soldiers, railway personnel, forestry workers, gamekeepers and roadworkers, to be worn as disguise by DRG saboteurs, for whom landing sites were selected in the Black Forest and Bavaria. Arms and radio equipment for use in the sabotage missions were hidden in dead-drops near the targets.46 The standard DRG arms package, packed in a container designed for long-term storage, consisted of: equipment for blowing up railway track; one “Cherepakha” (tortoise) mine with 3 additional explosive charges; 4 “Ugolok” devices (purpose not specified in Mitrokhin’s notes); explosives designed to destroy the main supports of high-voltage power transmission pylons; 3 6-meterlong detonator fuses; and 2 Karandash (“pencil”) detonators with a two-hour delay.47 Each arms cache might include more than one container. Radio transmitters and receivers were usually concealed in separate caches, sometimes with local currency for use by the DRGs. In August 1965, for example, 10,000 deutschmarks were placed in the TREZUBETS cache near Bonn; several attempts to locate it a decade later all failed and the money was written off.48
Italy was divided by the Centre into four main zones of operations, each with two landing sites and bases for DRGs: the foothills of the Alps (with sites near Venice and in the Milan-Turin region), the remainder of the north (with sites in the Arno valley and the Livorno-Pisa-Florence area), the center and the south. Each site for parachute landings by DRGs had to be a level area without buildings of approximately 1 by 1.5-2 kilometers. In each zone, a large arms cache was hidden in land or property belonging to an experienced agent; radio equipment and money were hidden in dead-drops. The Rome residency was instructed to buy samples of the uniforms worn by the armed services, police, carabinieri, railway and forestry workers, as well as typical clothing of the local inhabitants near the landing sites. For the use of DRGs in the most northerly region, the residency was asked to acquire badges from Alpine units of the armed services. Line F prepared files on power-transmission lines, oil pipelines, bridges, tunnels and military installations within a 120-kilometer radius of each landing site. A four-
volume file was prepared on former members of the Italian wartime resistance who, it was hoped, would assist in sabotage missions.49
Similar sabotage plans were made for all Department V’s target countries. Each DRG landing site was known as a DOROZHKA (“runway”), each of its bases as a ULEY (“beehive”).50 Among the most sinister remnants of the Cold War, still scattered around north America, most of western and central Europe, Israel, Turkey, Japan and some other parts of the world, are the caches of KGB arms and radio equipment intended for use by the DRGs. Mitrokhin’s notes include precise details of their locations in a number of countries. Some are booby-trapped with MOLNIYA (“lightning”) explosive devices designed to destroy their contents if the caches are opened, and are highly dangerous.51 Indeed, one or more of the caches may already have caused explosions mistakenly attributed to other causes.
LATE IN 1998, the Swiss authorities began removing a radio cache in woods near Berne identified by Mitrokhin,52 which exploded when fired on by a water-cannon. A spokesman for the Federal Prosecutor’s office issued a warning that if any further caches were discovered, they should not be touched: “Anyone who tried to move the [KGB] container would have been killed.”53 In Belgium, radio sets were safely removed from three other KGB caches (codenamed ALPHA-1, ALPHA-2 and ALPHA-5).54 Given the dangerous condition of an unpredictable number of the KGB’s Cold War radio and arms caches, the SVR now has no excuse for failing to reveal their exact locations to the governments of all the countries in which they have been hidden.
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