The World Was Going Our Way (54 page)
Read The World Was Going Our Way Online
Authors: Christopher Andrew
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Accounts, #Espionage, #History, #Europe, #Ireland, #Military, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Russia, #World
Most KGB agents in the media probably also had mainly mercenary motives. Files noted by Mitrokhin identify at least five senior Japanese journalists (other than those on JSP publications) who were KGB agents during the 1970s: BLYUM on the
Asahi Shimbun
,
52
SEMYON on the
Yomiuri Shimbun
,
53
KARL (or KARLOV) on the
Sankei Shimbun
,
54
FUDZIE on the
Tokyo Shimbun
55
and ODEKI, identified only as a senior political correspondent on a major Japanese newspaper.
56
The journalist ROY, who, according to his file, regarded his work for the KGB simply as ‘a commercial transaction’, was valuable chiefly for his intelligence contacts and was instrumental in the recruitment of KHUN, a senior Japanese counter-intelligence officer who provided intelligence on China.
57
Not all the paid agents in the Japanese media, however, were willing recruits. Mitrokhin’s summary of SEMYON’s file notes that, during a visit to Moscow in the early 1970s, ‘He was recruited on the basis of compromising material’: changing currency on the black market (probably in an ambush prepared for him by the SCD) and ‘immoral’ behaviour (doubtless one of the many variants of the KGB ‘honey trap’). During his six years as a Soviet agent, SEMYON tried frequently to persuade the KGB to release him. The Centre eventually broke contact with him after he had been caught passing disinformation.
58
Asahi Shimbun
,
52
SEMYON on the
Yomiuri Shimbun
,
53
KARL (or KARLOV) on the
Sankei Shimbun
,
54
FUDZIE on the
Tokyo Shimbun
55
and ODEKI, identified only as a senior political correspondent on a major Japanese newspaper.
56
The journalist ROY, who, according to his file, regarded his work for the KGB simply as ‘a commercial transaction’, was valuable chiefly for his intelligence contacts and was instrumental in the recruitment of KHUN, a senior Japanese counter-intelligence officer who provided intelligence on China.
57
Not all the paid agents in the Japanese media, however, were willing recruits. Mitrokhin’s summary of SEMYON’s file notes that, during a visit to Moscow in the early 1970s, ‘He was recruited on the basis of compromising material’: changing currency on the black market (probably in an ambush prepared for him by the SCD) and ‘immoral’ behaviour (doubtless one of the many variants of the KGB ‘honey trap’). During his six years as a Soviet agent, SEMYON tried frequently to persuade the KGB to release him. The Centre eventually broke contact with him after he had been caught passing disinformation.
58
Stanislav Levchenko later identified several other journalists used for KGB active measures,
59
of whom the most important seems to have been Takuji Yamane (codenamed KANT), assistant managing editor and personal adviser to the publisher of the conservative daily
Sankei Shimbun
. According to Levchenko, one of his controllers, Yamane skilfully concealed his pro-Soviet sympathies beneath a veneer of anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese nationalism and became one of the Tokyo residency’s leading agents of influence. Among the Service A forgeries which he publicized was a bogus ‘Last Will and Testament’ of Zhou Enlai concocted soon after his death in 1976, which contained numerous references to the in-fighting and untrustworthiness of the rest of the Chinese leadership and was intended to disrupt negotiations for a Sino-Japanese peace treaty. The Centre doubtless calculated that the forgery would make more impact if published in a conservative rather than a JSP paper. It believed that even Beijing, which tried frantically to discover the origin of the document, was not at first sure whether or not the document was genuine.
60
After a detailed investigation, however, the Japanese intelligence community correctly identified Zhou’s will as a forgery.
61
This and other active measures failed to prevent the signing on 12 August 1978 of a Sino-Japanese peace treaty which, to the fury of Moscow, contained a clause committing both signatories to opposing attempts by any power to achieve hegemony (a phrase intended by Beijing as a coded reference to Soviet policy).
62
59
of whom the most important seems to have been Takuji Yamane (codenamed KANT), assistant managing editor and personal adviser to the publisher of the conservative daily
Sankei Shimbun
. According to Levchenko, one of his controllers, Yamane skilfully concealed his pro-Soviet sympathies beneath a veneer of anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese nationalism and became one of the Tokyo residency’s leading agents of influence. Among the Service A forgeries which he publicized was a bogus ‘Last Will and Testament’ of Zhou Enlai concocted soon after his death in 1976, which contained numerous references to the in-fighting and untrustworthiness of the rest of the Chinese leadership and was intended to disrupt negotiations for a Sino-Japanese peace treaty. The Centre doubtless calculated that the forgery would make more impact if published in a conservative rather than a JSP paper. It believed that even Beijing, which tried frantically to discover the origin of the document, was not at first sure whether or not the document was genuine.
60
After a detailed investigation, however, the Japanese intelligence community correctly identified Zhou’s will as a forgery.
61
This and other active measures failed to prevent the signing on 12 August 1978 of a Sino-Japanese peace treaty which, to the fury of Moscow, contained a clause committing both signatories to opposing attempts by any power to achieve hegemony (a phrase intended by Beijing as a coded reference to Soviet policy).
62
By the autumn of 1979 Line PR at the Tokyo residency had a total of thirty-one agents and twenty-four confidential contacts.
63
These statistics and examples of KGB disinformation planted in the media were doubtless used by the Centre to impress the Soviet political leadership - especially since the Japanese were the world’s most avid newspaper readers.
64
The evidence of opinion polls demonstrates, however, that the KGB active-measures offensives in Japan against both the United States and China, though achieving a series of tactical successes, ended in strategic defeat. During the 1960s around 4 per cent of Japanese identified the Soviet Union as the foreign country they liked most. Despite the combined efforts of Service A, Line PR in Tokyo and a substantial network of agents of influence in both the JSP and the media, Soviet popularity actually declined during the 1970s, dipping below 1 per cent after the invasion of Afghanistan and never rising significantly above 2 per cent even during the Gorbachev era. By contrast, the percentage naming the United States as their favourite nation was usually over 40 per cent, save for a dip in the early 1970s due to the Vietnam War. After the normalization of Tokyo’s relations with Beijing in 1972, China too, though never rivalling the appeal of the United States, was far more popular than the Soviet Union.
65
63
These statistics and examples of KGB disinformation planted in the media were doubtless used by the Centre to impress the Soviet political leadership - especially since the Japanese were the world’s most avid newspaper readers.
64
The evidence of opinion polls demonstrates, however, that the KGB active-measures offensives in Japan against both the United States and China, though achieving a series of tactical successes, ended in strategic defeat. During the 1960s around 4 per cent of Japanese identified the Soviet Union as the foreign country they liked most. Despite the combined efforts of Service A, Line PR in Tokyo and a substantial network of agents of influence in both the JSP and the media, Soviet popularity actually declined during the 1970s, dipping below 1 per cent after the invasion of Afghanistan and never rising significantly above 2 per cent even during the Gorbachev era. By contrast, the percentage naming the United States as their favourite nation was usually over 40 per cent, save for a dip in the early 1970s due to the Vietnam War. After the normalization of Tokyo’s relations with Beijing in 1972, China too, though never rivalling the appeal of the United States, was far more popular than the Soviet Union.
65
Intelligence collection in Japan had much greater success than active measures. The Tokyo residency’s most successful penetration was probably of the Foreign Ministry. From the late 1960s at least until (and perhaps after) Levchenko’s defection in 1979, two Japanese diplomats, codenamed RENGO and EMMA, provided large amounts of classified material in both Tokyo and their foreign postings. Their files describe both as ‘valuable agents’. Early in her career EMMA’s controller gave her a handbag fitted with a concealed Minox camera which she regularly took to work to photograph diplomatic documents. RENGO also acted as a talent spotter.
66
The diplomat OVOD, who was the victim of two honey traps during postings in Moscow six years apart, was a far more reluctant recruit. On the second occasion, after he had been seduced by Agent MARIANA, who was employed as his language teacher, and - following usual KGB practice - had probably been confronted with photographs of their sexual encounter, OVOD gloomily told his case officer, ‘Now I shall never be rid of the KGB for the rest of my diplomatic career.’
67
66
The diplomat OVOD, who was the victim of two honey traps during postings in Moscow six years apart, was a far more reluctant recruit. On the second occasion, after he had been seduced by Agent MARIANA, who was employed as his language teacher, and - following usual KGB practice - had probably been confronted with photographs of their sexual encounter, OVOD gloomily told his case officer, ‘Now I shall never be rid of the KGB for the rest of my diplomatic career.’
67
The KGB’s most successful diplomatic honey trap involving a Japanese target recruitment was almost certainly the seduction of the cipher clerk MISHA by the KGB ‘swallow’ LANDYSH while he was stationed in Moscow during the early 1970s.
68
MISHA is probably identical with the cipher clerk who in the late 1970s was working at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo under the new KGB codename NAZAR.
69
NAZAR’s intelligence was considered so important that his case officers in Tokyo, first Valeri Ivanovich Umansky, then Valentin Nikolayevich Belov, were taken off all other duties. For security reasons NAZAR rarely met either case officer, leaving his material in a dead letter-box or passing it on by brush contact. Whenever he was due to make a delivery, operations officers ringed the DLB or brush-contact location to ensure that it was not under surveillance and, if necessary, act as decoys if any suspicious intruder approached the area. The diplomatic telegrams supplied by NAZAR, which included traffic between Tokyo and its Washington embassy, were sometimes so voluminous that the residency found it difficult to translate them all before forwarding to the Centre. The assistance given to the Centre’s codebreakers by NAZAR’s cipher material was probably rated even more highly than his copies of Japanese diplomatic traffic.
70
There must have been moments when, thanks to NAZAR and Soviet codebreakers, the Japanese Foreign Ministry was, without knowing it, practising something akin to open diplomacy in its dealings with the Soviet Union.
71
68
MISHA is probably identical with the cipher clerk who in the late 1970s was working at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo under the new KGB codename NAZAR.
69
NAZAR’s intelligence was considered so important that his case officers in Tokyo, first Valeri Ivanovich Umansky, then Valentin Nikolayevich Belov, were taken off all other duties. For security reasons NAZAR rarely met either case officer, leaving his material in a dead letter-box or passing it on by brush contact. Whenever he was due to make a delivery, operations officers ringed the DLB or brush-contact location to ensure that it was not under surveillance and, if necessary, act as decoys if any suspicious intruder approached the area. The diplomatic telegrams supplied by NAZAR, which included traffic between Tokyo and its Washington embassy, were sometimes so voluminous that the residency found it difficult to translate them all before forwarding to the Centre. The assistance given to the Centre’s codebreakers by NAZAR’s cipher material was probably rated even more highly than his copies of Japanese diplomatic traffic.
70
There must have been moments when, thanks to NAZAR and Soviet codebreakers, the Japanese Foreign Ministry was, without knowing it, practising something akin to open diplomacy in its dealings with the Soviet Union.
71
The other most striking success of the Tokyo residency during the 1970s was the increased collection of scientific and technological intelligence (S&T) by Line X which reported in the Centre to FCD Directorate T. During the 1960s Japan’s annual growth rate had averaged over 10 per cent. The value of exports increased from $4.1 billion in 1960 to $19.3 billion a decade later. By 1970 Japan had the largest ship-building, radio and television industries in the world. Its consumer industries far outstripped those of the Soviet Union. In less than a decade Japan had passed from the era of the ‘Three Sacred Treasures’ (washing machine, refrigerator, black and white TV) to that of the ‘Three C’s’ (car, cooler, colour TV).
72
In 1971 the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) set out a new high-tech agenda for the Japanese economy, based on a shift to ‘knowledge-intensive’ industries such as semi-conductors and integrated circuits.
73
72
In 1971 the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) set out a new high-tech agenda for the Japanese economy, based on a shift to ‘knowledge-intensive’ industries such as semi-conductors and integrated circuits.
73
In June 1971 Agent TONDA, the head of a high-tech company in the Tokyo region, supplied the residency with two volumes of secret documents on a new micro-electronic computer system intended for US air and missile forces.
74
Among the most highly rated of the agents who provided intelligence on, and samples of, Japanese and US semi-conductors was TANI, the owner of a company which specialized in semi-conductor design. TANI told his case officer that he regarded himself not as working for the KGB but as simply engaging in industrial espionage which, he seemed to imply, was a fact of modern business life.
75
Some, if not most, Line X agents probably took a similarly cynical view. Among the other agents who provided intelligence on state-of-the-art semi-conductor production was LEDAL, director of semi-conductor research in a Japanese university.
76
Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files identify a total of sixteen agents with senior positions in Japanese high-tech industry and research institutes during the 1970s.
77
This list, which does not include confidential contacts, is doubtless far from comprehensive. Even the equipment used by the KGB residency to monitor the communications exchanged between Tokyo police surveillance teams and their headquarters was based on technology stolen from Japan.
78
74
Among the most highly rated of the agents who provided intelligence on, and samples of, Japanese and US semi-conductors was TANI, the owner of a company which specialized in semi-conductor design. TANI told his case officer that he regarded himself not as working for the KGB but as simply engaging in industrial espionage which, he seemed to imply, was a fact of modern business life.
75
Some, if not most, Line X agents probably took a similarly cynical view. Among the other agents who provided intelligence on state-of-the-art semi-conductor production was LEDAL, director of semi-conductor research in a Japanese university.
76
Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files identify a total of sixteen agents with senior positions in Japanese high-tech industry and research institutes during the 1970s.
77
This list, which does not include confidential contacts, is doubtless far from comprehensive. Even the equipment used by the KGB residency to monitor the communications exchanged between Tokyo police surveillance teams and their headquarters was based on technology stolen from Japan.
78
According to Levchenko, it was not unusual for the fortnightly consignments sent by Line X to Moscow via diplomatic couriers ‘to weigh as much as a ton’. They were transported to Aeroflot flights leaving Tokyo airport in an embassy minibus.
79
The statistics for S&T collection in 1980, provided by a French agent in Directorate T, tell a less dramatic story. Though Japan was the fifth most important source of S&T, it came far behind the United States.
80
In 1980 61.5 per cent of S&T came from American sources (not all in the US), 10.5 per cent from West Germany, 8 per cent from France, 7.5 per cent from Britain and 3 per cent from Japan. Though producing advanced technology used for military purposes, Japan did not possess the large defence industries which were the chief target of Directorate T. Even 3 per cent of the vast global volume of Soviet S&T, however, indicates that Japanese material benefited approximately 100 Soviet R&D projects during 1980.
81
That statistic understates the significance of S&T operations in Japan. Japan was a major source for US as well as Japanese S&T. The Directorate T ‘work plan’ for 1978-80 instructed Line X officers:
79
The statistics for S&T collection in 1980, provided by a French agent in Directorate T, tell a less dramatic story. Though Japan was the fifth most important source of S&T, it came far behind the United States.
80
In 1980 61.5 per cent of S&T came from American sources (not all in the US), 10.5 per cent from West Germany, 8 per cent from France, 7.5 per cent from Britain and 3 per cent from Japan. Though producing advanced technology used for military purposes, Japan did not possess the large defence industries which were the chief target of Directorate T. Even 3 per cent of the vast global volume of Soviet S&T, however, indicates that Japanese material benefited approximately 100 Soviet R&D projects during 1980.
81
That statistic understates the significance of S&T operations in Japan. Japan was a major source for US as well as Japanese S&T. The Directorate T ‘work plan’ for 1978-80 instructed Line X officers:
• to cultivate and recruit American citizens in Japan;
• to cultivate and recruit Japanese working in American establishments in Japan, and in American organizations involved in Japanese/American co-operation in the scientific, technical and economic fields;
• to cultivate Japanese and individuals of other nationalities engaged in industrial espionage in the USA on behalf of Japanese monopolies;
• to train agent-recruiters and agent talent-spotters capable of working on American citizens in Japan and in the USA;
• to penetrate the Japanese colony in the USA;
• to obtain information of American origin;
• systematically to seek out, cultivate and recruit Japanese with the object of deploying them to the USA, and also to act as support agents.
82
82
Line X also devised ways of evading the Co-ordinating Committee for East-West Trade (COCOM) embargo maintained by NATO and Japan on the export to the Soviet Union of technology with military applications. Directorate T regarded as a major coup the successful negotiation in 1977 of a major contract with a Japanese shipbuilder, Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries, for a floating dock with a capacity of over 80,000 tonnes, supposedly for the exclusive use of the Soviet fishing fleet. Levchenko found it difficult to ‘believe the Japanese were so naive as to accept those assurances as the literal truth’. It is possible that MITI, which approved the contract, simply turned a blind eye to the military significance of the floating dock in order not to lose a large export order. The Japanese Defence Ministry, which would doubtless have taken a different view, did not learn of the contract until after it was signed. Within a few months of its delivery in November 1978 to Vladivostok, the main base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, the dry dock was being used to carry out repairs to nuclear submarines and the aircraft carrier
Minsk
.
83
Minsk
.
83
The Tokyo resident, Oleg Aleksandrovich Guryanov, told his staff in the late 1970s: ‘The proceeds from the operations these [Line X] officers carry out each year would cover the expenses of our entire Tokyo residency with money still left over. In fact, worldwide, technical intelligence all by itself covers
all
the expenses of the whole KGB foreign intelligence service.’
84
all
the expenses of the whole KGB foreign intelligence service.’
84
The dynamic and ambitious head of Directorate T, Leonid Sergeyevich Zaitsev, made similar claims and campaigned unsuccessfully for his directorate to become independent of the FCD.
85
Though S&T was of crucial importance in preventing Soviet military technology falling seriously behind the West, however, it made a much smaller contribution to the Soviet economy as a whole. The real economic benefit of Western and Japanese scientific and technological secrets, though put by Directorate T at billions of dollars, was severely restricted by the incurable structural failings of the command economy. Hence the great economic paradox of the 1970s and 1980s that, despite possessing large numbers of well-qualified scientists and engineers and a huge volume of S&T, Soviet technology fell steadily further behind that of the West and Japan.
86
85
Though S&T was of crucial importance in preventing Soviet military technology falling seriously behind the West, however, it made a much smaller contribution to the Soviet economy as a whole. The real economic benefit of Western and Japanese scientific and technological secrets, though put by Directorate T at billions of dollars, was severely restricted by the incurable structural failings of the command economy. Hence the great economic paradox of the 1970s and 1980s that, despite possessing large numbers of well-qualified scientists and engineers and a huge volume of S&T, Soviet technology fell steadily further behind that of the West and Japan.
86
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