JUST AS STASHINSKY’S defection in 1961 had made the Centre much more cautious in ordering assassinations, so Lyalin’s defection a decade later dealt a further blow to its plans for peacetime sabotage. Department V found itself in limbo pending a reorganization which took three and a half years to complete. The files seen by Mitrokhin record no new schemes for KGB “special political actions” during the few years immediately after Lyalin’s “treachery.” (It is, of course, possible that some special actions are recorded in files not seen by Mitrokhin.) One example of the Centre’s declining enthusiasm for such operations which made a particular impression on Mitrokhin was its response to the defection of another star of the Kirov Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov, while on a tour of Canada in June 1974. Baryshnikov’s flawless classical style and apparently effortless grace had made him one of Mitrokhin’s personal favorites. Among the intercepted messages sent to Baryshnikov after his defection which found their way into his KGB file, Mitrokhin noted one from a female balletomane in Leningrad which told him that he “was, is and forever will be my dear little brother… one of the brightest, most beautiful and most notable people I have ever met.” Unsurprisingly, the KGB kept Baryshnikov under close observation after his defection. Its agents included another ballet dancer, codenamed MORIS, who also reported on Nureyev and Makarova. What struck Mitrokhin, however, was the apparent lack of plans to maim Baryshnikov similar to those which had been devised, though not apparently implemented, against Nureyev and Makarova a few years earlier.49
Despite the KGB’s increased reluctance to take the risks involved in implementing directly special actions in the West, it continued to use—or connive at the use of—terrorist groups as proxies in the struggle against the United States and its allies. The Centre’s mood, however, remained distinctly cautious. It was almost three years before the arms requested by the IRA in November 1969 through the intermediary of the Irish Communist leader, Michael O’Riordan, were finally delivered by the KGB. Shortly after the request had been made, the IRA had split into two: the Officials under Cathal Goulding and the Provisionals led by Sean MacStioftin.50 The sympathies of the KGB were wholly with the Marxist Officials rather than the more nationalist Provisionals. Though Goulding’s long-term aim was to create a nonsectarian, non-military, all-Ireland revolutionary movement, the Officials were responsible for some of the bloodiest episodes in the Troubles of the early 1970s. The only answer to the “forces of imperialism and exploitation,” Goulding declared in 1971, lay “in the language that brings these vultures to their senses most effectively, the language of the bomb and the bullet.” The Official IRA’s bloodthirsty attempts to upstage the Provisionals ended by alienating some of its own supporters. In February 1972 a bomb planted at the Aldershot headquarters of the Parachute Regiment killed seven people, including a Catholic priest and five women canteen workers. Nationalist anger at the killing of an off-duty British soldier on home leave in Derry on May 21 led the Officials’ army council to announce a ceasefire eight days later. Since the Officials reserved the right to take what they described as “defensive action,” however, the ceasefire had little immediate effect. Though Goulding gradually succeeded in scaling down “military operations,” local militants continued terrorist attacks during the remainder of 1972 and 1973.51
On July 3, 1972 the Irish Communist leader, Michael O’Riordan, wrote to remind the CPSU Central Committee that the arms he had first requested on behalf of the IRA in November 1969 had still not been received. Since then, on behalf of the Official IRA, he had held numerous discussions on the means of shipment with the KGB’s “technical specialists:” “The fact that there has not been the slightest leak of information for two and a half years proves, in my opinion, a high level of responsibility with regard to keeping the secret, so to speak.” Andropov agreed. On August 21 he presented to the Central Committee a “Plan for the Operation of a Shipment of Weapons to the Irish Friends,” codenamed SPLASH. SPLASH was a variant of operation VOSTOK, which had delivered arms to Haddad and the PFLP two years earlier. Once again, the weapons and munitions—2 machine-guns, 70 automatic rifles, 10 Walther pistols, 41,600 cartridges, all of non-Soviet origin to disguise the involvement of the KGB—were transported by a Soviet intelligence-gathering vessel, on this occasion the Reduktor. On this occasion, the arms, in waterproof wrapping, were submerged to a depth of about 40 meters on the Stanton sandbank, 90 kilometers from the coast of Northern Ireland, and attached to a marker buoy of the kind used to indicate the presence of fishing nets below the surface. KGB laboratories carefully examined the arms shipment before it left to ensure that there was no trace of Soviet involvement. The Walther pistols were lubricated with West German oil, the packaging was purchased abroad by KGB residencies and it was specified that the marker buoy should be Finnish or Japanese. A few hours after the arms had been deposited on the sandbank, they were retrieved by a fishing vessel belonging to the “Irish friends,” whose crew were unaware of their contents.52 Operation SPLASH was supervised on board the Reduktor by an officer from the 8th Department of Directorate S (the successor to Department V). Several further Soviet arms shipments to the Official IRA were delivered by similar methods.53
The KGB can have had few illusions about the likely use of the arms it supplied, since the man in charge of their collection from the sandbank was the Officials’ most hard-line terrorist, Seamus Costello.54 Late in 1974, after a dispute with Goulding, Costello was expelled from the Officials and founded a new Trotskyite movement, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). The Officials set up four assassination squads to liquidate the dissidents, but came off worse in a series of shoot-outs in the spring of 1975. They had, however, rather the better of a feud later in the year with the Provisionals. The Official IRA eventually succeeded in murdering Costello in 1977.55 The probability is that some of the arms smuggled into Ireland by the KGB were used in the internecine warfare between republican paramilitaries.
As well as shipping arms to the Official IRA, the KGB also continued to use some Third World terrorists and guerrillas—notably the PFLP and the Sandinistas—as proxies. In Latin America, the KGB found itself—somewhat to its irritation—being upstaged by its Cuban ally, the DGI. By 1970, in the Centre’s view, the DGI had effectively “expropriated” the Sandinista ISKRA guerrilla group. In 1969 the DGI financed the guerrilla operation to free the FSLN (Sandinista) leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador (GIDROLOG), from a Costa Rican jail, where he had been imprisoned for bank robbery.56 Fonseca was recaptured shortly after his jailbreak, but freed again and flown to Cuba after the Sandinista hijack of a plane carrying American executives of the United Fruit Company, who were released in exchange.57 The DGI also organized guerrilla training for the Sandinistas in Cuba, and gave them 100,000 dollars to purchase weapons. The head of the DGI, Manuel Piñeiro Losado, whose nickname “Redbeard” reflected his fiery temperament, told the deputy head of the FCD, Boris Semenovich Ivanov,
Of all the countries in Latin America, the most active work being carried out by us is in Nicaragua. Aid is being given to partisan groups headed by C[arlos] Fonseca. This movement has influence and could go far.
At a meeting with Fonseca in February 1971, Piñeiro restated the conviction of the Cuban leadership that for most Latin American countries armed conflict was the only path to liberation. Though Cuba remained willing to offer the Sandinistas “any kind of support and assistance,” they would need to make major changes in their organization if they were to avoid the defeats and heavy losses they had suffered during the past decade. The Centre concluded that future attempts to use the Sandinistas for special actions against United States targets would have to be made in collaboration with the DGI.58
The KGB did, however, retain a number of agents within the Sandinistas, among them GRIN (not identified by Mitrokhin’s notes), who was used to identify possible operations in which the KGB could make use of the FSLN. In May 1974 a Sandinista delegation visited the Soviet embassy in Havana and delivered a letter to t
he CPSU Central Committee asking for assistance. The most dramatic Sandinista attack on a United States target was the attempt, assisted by the DGI with the personal blessing of Fidel Castro, to kidnap Turner B. Shelton, the American ambassador in Managua and a close friend of the Somoza family.59 Remarkably, Shelton and President Anastasio Somoza Debayle appeared together on the 1974 twenty cordoba note, the ambassador’s head inclined deferentially towards the president; the note quickly became known as the sapo (“toady”).60 The original plan of attack appears to have been for a guerrilla group to force an entry into the US embassy during a diplomatic reception.61 On December 27, 1974, however, an unexpected opportunity arose during a party in honor of Shelton given by the former minister of agriculture, José Maria (Chema) Castillo. A Sandinista working undercover as a waiter at the reception telephoned the guerrilla group to report that Castillo’s house was poorly guarded, providing an excellent opportunity to kidnap the ambassador.62
Shelton escaped kidnap by the skin of his teeth. He left the reception minutes before a well-drilled assault group of Sandinistas (ten male, three female) stormed Castillo’s mansion at 10:50 p.m. Finding the ambassador gone, they killed his host, held the rest of the guests hostage and demanded that the Archbishop of Managua act as mediator. After several days of tense negotiations, President Somoza released eighteen imprisoned FSLN members, paid a million-dollar ransom for the release of the hostages, agreed to publish a 12,000-word denunciation of himself and US imperialism and provided a plane to fly the Sandinistas to Cuba.63 On the Sandinistas’ arrival at Havana, the Cubans took possession of the million dollars.64
Though the FSLN had won an enormous propaganda victory, the period of brutal martial law which followed in Nicaragua led to the death of many of its guerrillas and internal conflict among the Sandinistas over how to wage a victorious guerrilla war.65 Still in awe of the Russian revolutionary tradition,66 Fonseca turned to Moscow for advice. On February 14, 1975 he asked the Soviet embassy in Havana to arrange a trip to Moscow for himself and other Sandinistas so that they could study and learn from both Bolshevik experience before the October Revolution and methods of partisan warfare during the Great Patriotic War. He also requested further financial assistance.67 Late in 1975, probably soon after his return from Moscow,68 Fonseca traveled secretly to Nicaragua to try to resolve the factional conflict within the FLSN. On November 8, 1976 he was killed in a shoot-out with a National Guard patrol. After the Sandinista victory in 1979, Fonseca was reburied as a Hero of the Revolution.69
IN FEBRUARY 1976 the Politburo approved increase staffing and funding for the FCD Illegals Directorate S. As part of the reorganization of the enlarged Directorate by KGB order no. 0046 of April 12, 1976, the former Department V was formally incorporated into it as Department 8 with, by 1980, 23 operational officers at headquarters out of the total for the directorate of 400.70 The head of Department 8, Vladimir Grigoryevich Krasovsky, mournfully reflected on the decline of KGB special actions in recent years. His self-image as a man of action was symbolized by the cigarette lighter mounted on a fragmentation hand grenade which he kept on his desk. But, he complained, “We move paper from place to place. That’s all we do!.71 Department 8’s most basic task—the liquidation of traitors who had fled abroad—was by now an almost hopeless one. But the Centre could not bring itself either to give up the ritual of passing death sentences on KGB defectors or to abandon the pretence that the sentences would one day be carried out.
According to Oleg Kalugin, head of FCD Directorate K (counterintelligence) from 1973 to 1979, the KGB succeeded in tracking down only two post-war defectors, one in Australia (probably Vladimir Petrov) and the other in the United States (probably Pyotr Deryabin)—both of whom had defected in the 1950s. “The hell with them—they’re old men now!” Andropov told Kalugin. “…Find Oleg Lyalin or Yuri Nosenko, and I will sanction the execution of those two!”72 Probably in 1974, Nikolai Fyodorovich Artamonov (codenamed LARK), a former Soviet naval officer working as an analyst in the US Office of Naval Intelligence under the alias “Nicholas Shadrin,” told his KGB controller that he could discover the whereabouts of Nosenko who, he claimed, was living near Washington.73 In 1975 a KGB agent among the Russian Orthodox clergy in the United States found a gangster willing to take out a contract on Nosenko for 100,000 dollars. But before he could do so, the gangster was arrested for other crimes.74 Almost simultaneously, Artamonov was discovered to be a double agent working for the FBI. In December 1975, after being lured to Austria, ostensibly to meet a new controller, he was bundled into a car by operations officers from the Vienna residency who intended to exfiltrate him to Moscow for questioning. The sedative injected into Artamonov to stop him struggling in the back seat was so powerful that it killed him. Kryuchkov, however, was delighted that at last a traitor had received his just deserts. “Which medal do you want?” he asked Kalugin. “The October Revolution or the Combat Red Banner?” Kalugin chose the Red Banner.75
From 1976 to 1981 the Line KR (counterintelligence) officer E. R. Ponomarev (codenamed KEDROV) was stationed at the Washington residency with the sole task of tracking down defectors and was given the cover post of deputy head of the Consular Department in order to give him a pretext for making enquiries in the Departments of Immigration and Naturalization, as well as in lawyers’ offices. Ponomarev also gained access to the file of purchasers at a Russian-language bookshop and cultivated academics thought likely to come into contact with defectors.76 His five years in Washington appear to have been an expensive waste of time and effort.
Some of the KGB’s Soviet Bloc allies, in particular the Bulgarian Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS), were much less cautious than the Centre in their pursuit of defectors. The zeal with which the DS hunted down traitors who had fled abroad owed much to the personal outrage with which the Bulgarian dictator, Todor Zhivkov, the most colorful and grotesque of the rulers of eastern Europe, responded to émigré criticism and mockery. The best known of the émigré writers, Georgi Markov, broadcast regular commentaries on the corruption and excesses of the Zhivkov regime in the Bulgarian-language services of the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe, ridiculing Zhivkov himself as a man with a “a distastefully mediocre sense of humor,” the bullying manner of “a village policeman,” a penchant for “pompous phrases” and the deluded conviction that he was a great huntsman.
In 1974 Boris Arsov, another of the defectors who had dared to attack the excesses of the Zhivkov regime, suddenly disappeared from his flat in Aarhus, Denmark, where he had been publishing the Bulgarian émigré newspaper Levski. Two months later he resurfaced in Sofia and was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. An official statement during Arsov’s trial virtually admitted that he had been kidnapped by the DS:
Arsov was playing with fire. The timely activity of the State Security stopped his dangerous activity. This only shows that the hand of justice is longer than the legs of the traitor.
In 1975 Arsov was officially declared to have been found dead in his prison cell. At about the same time three Bulgarian exiles who had been helping others to defect—Ivan Kolev, Peter Nezamov and Vesselina Stoyova—were shot in Vienna. The assassin, quickly identified by the Austrian police, was a DS agent who had penetrated the émigré group and escaped to Sofia after the murders.77
The KGB eventually became embroiled in DS special political actions. Early in 1978 General Dimitar Stoyanov, Bulgarian interior minister and head of the DS, appealed to the Centre for help in liquidating Georgi Markov, then living in London and accused of “slandering Comrade Zhivkov” in his many radio broadcasts. The request was considered at a meeting chaired by Andropov and attended by Kryuchkov, Vice Admiral Mikhail Usatov (Kryuchkov’s deputy) and Oleg Kalugin, head of FCD counterintelligence. Though reluctant to take the risks involved in helping the Bulgarians, Andropov eventually accepted Kryuchkov’s argument that to refuse would be an unacceptable slight to Zhivkov. “But,” he insisted, “there is to be no direct participation on our part. Give the
Bulgarians whatever they need, show them how to use it and send someone to Sofia to train their people. But that’s all.”
The Centre made available to the DS the resources of its top secret poisons laboratory, the successor to the Kamera of the Stalinist era, attached to the OTU (Operational Technical) Directorate and under the direct control of the KGB chairman. Sergei Mikhailovich Golubev, head of FCD security and a poisons specialist, was put in charge of liaison with the Bulgarians. The murder weapon eventually chosen was concealed in an American umbrella, one of a number purchased at Golubev’s request by the Washington residency in order to disguise the KGB connection if the weapon was ever discovered. The tip was converted by OTU technicians into a silenced gun capable of firing a tiny pellet containing a lethal dose of ricin, a highly toxic poison made from castor-oil seeds. On September 7, 1978, while Markov was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge, he felt a sudden sting in his right thigh. Turning instinctively, he saw a man behind him who had dropped his umbrella. The stranger apologized, picked up his umbrella and got into a taxi waiting nearby. Though Markov felt no immediate ill effects, he became seriously ill next day and died in hospital on September 11. During the autopsy a tiny pellet was recovered from Markov’s thigh, but the ricin, as Golubev had calculated, had decomposed. Markov’s assassination alerted another Bulgarian émigré, Vladimir Kostov, to the significance of an earlier, unexplained attack he had been subject to in Paris on August 26. Nearly a month later, on September 25, a steel pellet of the kind that had killed Markov was removed, still intact, from Kostov’s back. During a visit to Sofia soon afterwards, Kalugin was presented by General Stoyanov with an expensive Browning hunting rifle in gratitude for KGB assistance in the murder of Markov.78
The Sword and the Shield Page 67