————
THOUGH LINE X operations in Italy were on about half the scale of those in France, they included some striking successes. In 1970 the co-owners of a small high-tech company, METIL (“Methyl”) and BUTIL (“Butyl”), jointly supplied the KGB with full technical documentation on the production of butyl rubber, which was used in the construction of the Soviet Sumgait rubber factory and led to the redesign of production lines at the Nizhnekama Combine and the Kuybyshev Synthetic Rubber Works. Directorate T calculated that their ST had produced a saving of 16 million roubles. METIL and BUTIL were paid 50,000 dollars. In the mid-1970s BUTIL provided other highly rated intelligence, some from American sources, on chemical and petrochemical processes.148
In 1970 the Rome residency had nine Line X officers who ran about ten agents,149 composed chiefly of businessmen but including an important minority of academics.150 There was some expansion of ST operations during the later 1970s both in Rome151 and in Milan, where a senior Line X officer, Anatoli Vasilyevich Kuznetsov (codenamed KOLIN), was posted in 1978 under consular cover.152 Probably the most important Line X agent at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s was UCHITEL (“Teacher”), who taught at a major university and was controlled by Kuznetsov.153 Using his wide range of academic and business contacts, UCHITEL provided ST from a total of eight major companies and research institutes in Italy, West Germany, France and Belgium, and carried out other KGB assignments in the USA and FRG. UCHITEL’s most valuable intelligence seems to have concerned military aircraft, helicopters, aero-engine construction and airborne guidance systems. Among the intelligence he supplied was information on NATO’s newest combat aircraft, the Tornado, jointly developed by Britain, the FRG and Italy.154 Doubtless unknown to UCHITEL, at least one of his university colleagues, a nuclear physicist codenamed MARIO, was also a KGB agent.155 Another academic, KARS, who operated as a Line X agent in both Italy and the United States, also appears to have been based at the same university.156
Though Soviet scientists working as KGB agents or co-optees used a variety of methods to lure their Western colleagues into secret collaboration, they commonly promised both money and privileged access to Soviet research in their fields. A probably typical example was the agreement, dated September 12, 1976, concluded by Professor Georgi Nikolayevich Aleksandrov (agent AYUN) of the Lenin Polytechnic Institute Imeni Kalinin (LPI) with KULON, a senior member of an Italian research institute:
In view of the importance of the exchange of scientific and technical information and the timeliness of obtaining information on research in other countries, LPI on the one hand, in the person of its pro-rector for scientific contacts with foreign countries, V. A. Serebryannikov, and [the Italian research institute] on the other hand, in the person of the scientific adviser to its director, Professor [KULON], have agreed as follows:
(1) Professor [KULON] agrees to use his own and LPI’s facilities to assist LPI in obtaining scientific and technical information on basic problems of electronics of an applied nature. This scientific and technical information should be in the form of reports and articles which have not been published in journals, or of materials put out by firms on the results of studies by firms and scientific institute laboratories in the United States, the FRG, France, the UK and Japan [Directorate T’s five main targets]. If the information is of a confidential nature, it will be transmitted to LPI’s pro-rector or his representative at personal meetings, which may be held in one of three countries as agreed. The pro-rector’s request will be made in the form of a separate list. LPI will pay in any currency for acquisitions…
(2) For its part LPI undertakes to assist Professor [KULON] to publish in closed specialized Soviet journals and to arrange for invitations for him to the USSR in order to learn about other institutions in the USSR and to carry out joint studies, and for familiarization with major hydroelectric stations and power transmission lines.
Most meetings between KULON and his KGB contacts took place in Switzerland. 157 Though KULON seems to have remained a confidential contact, similar approaches to other Western scientists sometimes led to their recruitment as agents.
ST operations in Italy suffered a serious setback on August 5, 1981 with the unpublicized expulsion of probably the most senior Line X officer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, which caused inevitable KGB anxiety as to whether UCHITEL and his other agents had been detected by Italian counterintelligence. An investigation at the Centre arrived at three possible explanations for the expulsion: that some of Kuznetsov’s Line X operations dating from his period at the Paris residency from 1970 to 1975 had come to light; or that his work as security officer for the Soviet colony in northern Italy, which he combined with his Line X work, had blown his cover as consul in Milan; or that his frequent trips from Milan to Turin had aroused suspicion.158 It does not seem to have occurred to the Centre until its investigation of the FAREWELL case in 1982 that the leak which led to Kuznetsov’s downfall might have come from within Directorate T.
BY THE 1970s a majority of the most highly rated Line PR agents run by both the Rome and Paris residencies were journalists. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin contains a list of the thirteen most highly paid political intelligence agents run by the Rome residency at the beginning of 1977.159 Of the six best-paid, each of whom received 240 hard currency roubles a month, at least three were journalists: FRANK, recruited in 1966, who held a senior position on a major newspaper;160 POD-VIZHNY (“Agile”), also a well-known journalist;161 and STAZHER (“Trainee”), who had been recruited in 1969 and worked in the Rome bureau of a news agency.162 The other three agents paid 240 roubles a month by the Rome residency were DARIO, the veteran agent-recruiter in the Foreign Ministry; NEMETS (“German”), a well-known left-wing politician; and ORLANDO, who cannot be clearly identified from Mitrokhin’s notes.163
The next best-paid agents of the Rome residency at the beginning of 1977 were six who received 170 roubles a month. No information is available on the occupation of one of the six, ACERO; Mitrokhin’s notes reveal his identity and indicate that he was probably recruited not later than 1969, but give no further details.164 Of the five whose occupations are identified, three—FIDELIO, RENATO and MAVR—were journalists. RENATO, recruited in 1974, was editor of a periodical.165 FIDELIO, who became an agent in 1975, was director of a press agency.166 MAVR, a left-wing journalist on a leading Rome daily recruited some years earlier than RENATO or FIDELIO, also acted as agent-recruiter. Among his recruits was ARALDO, a civil servant who, according to MAVR, regarded the whole Italian political establishment as a “den of thieves” and was happy to earn a share of the spoils by selling classified documents.167
The other two agents paid 170 roubles a month by the Rome residency were LORETO, a (probably disillusioned) Maoist militant who provided information on China’s contacts with its supporters in the European left,168 and METSENAT (“Patronage”), a corrupt civil servant whose motives were assessed as purely mercenary. 169 The final codename on the January 1977 list of the Rome residency’s most valuable agents is that of TURIST, a newspaper publisher who was paid 150 roubles a month.170 In all, at least seven of the residency’s thirteen best-paid recruits, who each received between 150 and 240 roubles a month, were journalists. As in Paris, where a majority of the KGB’s most highly rated Line PR agents were also journalists, the Centre’s probably exaggerated confidence in their potential as agents of influence led it to undertake an ambitious series of active measures throughout the 1970s.
A Centre report on the Rome residency in August 1977 concluded that it had “an effective and reliable agent network” with sources in the foreign ministry, cabinet office, defense ministry and the main political parties. Each month the residency obtained between 40 and 50 intelligence reports from its agents. It was, however, criticized for its comparative lack of success against American, NATO and European Community targets. The Centre’s greatest praise was reserved for the residency’s influence operations: “[Its] agents coped successfully
with active measures, including those on a large scale.” During 1977 operation CRESCENDO, which used forged documents to discredit the human rights policy of the Carter administration, and operation BONZA, targeted against the Chinese, were singled out for particular praise.171
The Rome residency’s annual statistics for its active measures in 1977 were as follows:
articles published in the bourgeois press: 43
materials distributed: 1
letters drafted: 2
oral information disseminated: 1
conversations of influence: 13
interviews secured: 1
television appearances: 2
exhibitions mounted: 1
parliamentary questions inspired: 2
appeals inspired: 2172
Such statistics, of course, mean relatively little unless it can be demonstrated that the active measures to which they refer had a significant influence on Italian opinion. Nowhere in the files examined by Mitrokhin, however, is there any sign of a serious, critical assessment of what active measures in Italy (or in most other countries) had actually achieved. Instead, any sign that Western opinion was hostile to any aspect of American policy or sympathetic to the Soviet Union was liable to be seized on uncritically as evidence of a successful KGB operation. Just as it suited the residencies to exaggerate the success of their active measures, so it also suited the Centre to report these successes to the Politburo.
AT LEAST HALF the Rome residency’s best-paid Line PR Italian agents in January 1977 were either taken off the KGB payroll or retired over the next five years.173 The first to go was TURIST. Apparently disillusioned by the evidence of Soviet abuses of human rights, TURIST made various pretexts for declining to co-operate during 1977 and by the end of the year had broken contact. According to his case officer, he “did not correctly understand and interpret the situation of believers and of the Church itself in the USSR, or that of dissidents.” In other words, TURIST had been alienated by the persecution of Soviet religious and political dissidents. An examination of TURIST’s file led Mitrokhin to doubt whether he had ever been a fully committed KGB agent.174
In 1978 FIDELIO was also removed from the agent network after it was discovered that he was in regular touch with—and doubtless receiving money from—Hungarian intelligence, and had also made contact with the Czechoslovak and Polish services.175 In 1979 DARIO retired, followed by METSENAT in the following year.176 Simultaneously, RENATO and FRANK—like TURIST—were becoming disillusioned. RENATO was put on ice in 1980, initially for a four-year period;177 there is no evidence as to whether contact with him was subsequently resumed. FRANK’s case officer complained that he was too easily “influenced by anti-Soviet propaganda” following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland two years later. FRANK was also reported to be associated with one of those arrested for involvement with the Red Brigades. He was removed from the agent network in 1982.178
The disillusion of FRANK, who a few years earlier had been one of the KGB’s most highly paid Italian agents, epitomized the problems faced by Service A as it tried to devise new influence operations in the early 1980s. Though no KGB report dared say so, active measures could not possibly repair the damage done to the image of the Soviet Union by the invasion of Afghanistan and the suppression of Solidarity.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE of the KGB’s active measures during the early and mid-1980s in Italy and France, as in western Europe as a whole, were those which exploited popular currents of anti-Americanism and the fear of nuclear war. Though the first step in the renewed nuclear arms race had been the Soviet decision in 1978 to begin the deployment of SS20s (a new generation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles), Western peace movements were far more critical of the subsequent decision by NATO to station Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe from 1983. As Mitterrand once drily observed, “The missiles are in the East, but the peace protests are in the West.” It is reasonable to assume, but difficult to prove, that the constant stream of Soviet peace propaganda, reinforced by KGB active measures, encouraged—even if it did not cause—the overconcentration by most Western peace activists on the nuclear menace posed by Reagan and his NATO allies rather than on that from the Soviet Union. In February 1984, Kryuchkov reported to a conference of senior FCD officers, when reviewing active measures over the previous two years:
Considerable work has been done to provide support for unofficial organizations [such as peace movements] in a number of countries abroad in their struggle against implementation of the American administration’s militarist plans.179
The Centre’s confidence that it now possessed a nerve-hold on Western public opinion was reflected in the first three priorities which it laid down for active measures in 1984, the year before Gorbachev became Soviet leader:
• counteracting attempts by the USA and NATO to destroy the existing military strategic equilibrium and to acquire military superiority over the USSR; compromising the aggressive efforts of imperialist groups and their plans for preparing a nuclear missile war…
• deepening disagreements inside NATO…
• exposing before the international community the plans made by the USA to launch a war, its refusal to negotiate in good faith with the USSR on limiting armaments; stimulating further development of the anti-war and antimissile movements in the West, involving in them influential political and public figures and broad strata of the population, and encouraging these movements to take more decisive and coordinated action.180
KGB active measures in western Europe were much less successful during the Gorbachev era as a result both of East-West détente and of glasnost within the Soviet Union. By 1987 Gorbachev and his advisers were visibly concerned that Western exposure of KGB disinformation might take the gloss off the new Soviet image in the West. The claim that the AIDS virus had been “manufactured” by American biological warfare specialists—one of the most successful active measures of the mid-1980s—was officially disowned by Moscow, though it continued to circulate for several years in the Third World and the more gullible sections of the Western media. During the later 1980s Soviet front organizations were increasingly exposed as frauds. The most important of them, the World Peace Council, lost most of its remaining credibility in 1989 when it admitted that 90 percent of its income came from the Soviet Union.181
In September 1990 Kryuchkov acknowledged in an “Order of the Chairman of the KGB” that there had been a serious decline in the effectiveness of active measures—and in the FCD’s faith in them:
There are very limited opportunities for residencies’ access to the mass media in the countries of the West, the progress of acquiring new operational sites is progressing slowly, and there is an absence of the necessary cooperation with the other sections of the Soviet KGB and other Soviet ministries and agencies.
Like other members of the KGB old guard, Kryuchkov refused to accept that the end of the Cold War implied any decline in the importance of active measures either in western Europe or elsewhere.182 That view still appears to be well-represented in the senior ranks of the SVR today.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE PENETRATION AND PERSECUTION OF THE SOVIET CHURCHES
Though paying lip-service to freedom of religion, the Soviet state was the first to attempt to eradicate the concept of God. Marx had famously denounced religion as “the opium of the people,” but also spoke with some compassion of its role as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world.” Lenin’s denunciation of religion, however, was uncompromisingly venomous:
Every religious idea, every idea of God, every flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness,… vileness of the most dangerous kind, “contagion” of the most abominable kind. Millions of filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of a God decked out in the smartest “ideological” costumes.1
During the 1930s most priests were
condemned to a gulag from which few returned. Most churches, with their religious symbols removed or defaced but their onion domes usually left more or less intact, were turned into barns, cinemas and garages, or given over to other secular purposes. After two decades of brutal persecution which had left only a few hundred churches open for worship, the Russian Orthodox Church was unexpectedly revived as a public institution by Stalin’s need for its support during the Great Patriotic War. In 1943, after a gap of seventeen years, the Moscow Patriarchate, the Church’s administrative center, was formally reestablished. 2 During the remainder of the decade, Orthodox Christians reclaimed and lovingly restored several thousand of their churches.3
The Church, however, paid a heavy price for its restoration. The Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (later the Council for Religious Affairs) worked in close cooperation with the NKVD and its successors to ensure the subservience of Church to State.4 Both Patriarch Aleksi I and Metropolitan Nikolai of Krutitsky and Kolomna, second in the Orthodox hierarchy, joined the World Peace Council, the Soviet front organization founded in 1949, and were highly valued by the KGB as agents of influence.5 Aleksi declared in 1955:
The Russian Orthodox Church supports the totally peaceful foreign policy of our government, not because the Church allegedly lacks freedom, but because Soviet policy is just and corresponds to the Christian ideals which the Church preaches.6
The Orthodox Church also took a prominent part in the founding of another front organization, the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), established in 1958 with its headquarters in Prague, in a further attempt to mobilize worldwide Christian support for the “peace policies” of the Soviet Union. At the second conference of the CPC in 1960 delegates from the rest of the world, mostly innocent of its orchestration by Moscow, outnumbered those from the Soviet Bloc.7
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