The World Was Going Our Way (7 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
The KGB’s active-measures doctrine improbably insisted that its influence operations were ‘radically different in essence from the disinformation to which Western agencies resort in order to deceive public opinion’:
KGB disinformation operations are progressive; they are designed to mislead not the working people but their enemies - the ruling circles of capitalism - in order to induce them to act in a certain way, or abstain from actions contrary to the interests of the USSR; they promote peace and social progress; they serve international détente; they are humane, creating the conditions for the noble struggle for humanity’s bright future.
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KGB active-measures campaigns were extensively supported by its allies in the Soviet bloc. According to Ladislav Bittman of the Czechoslovak StB:
Anti-American propaganda campaigns are the easiest to carry out. A single press article containing sensational facts of a ‘new American conspiracy’ may be sufficient. Other papers become interested, the public is shocked, and government authorities in developing countries have a fresh opportunity to clamour against the imperialists while demonstrators hasten to break American embassy windows.
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KGB active measures were also intended to serve a domestic political agenda by encouraging the support of the Soviet leadership for a forward policy in the Third World. The Centre supplied the Kremlin with regular reports designed to demonstrate its success in influencing Third World politicians and public opinion. The ‘successes’ listed in these reports seem to have changed little from Brezhnev to Gorbachev. Among documents liberated from the Central Committee archives in the aftermath of the abortive 1991 Moscow coup was a 1969 report from Andropov, boasting of the KGB’s ability to organize large protest demonstrations outside the US embassy in Delhi for $5,000 a time, and a quite similar letter to Gorbachev twenty years later from the then KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov (formerly head of the FCD), reporting with much the same satisfaction the recruitment of an increased number of agents in the Sri Lankan parliament and the ‘sincere gratitude to Moscow’ allegedly expressed by the leader of the Freedom Party for Soviet ‘financial support’.
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Given the tight control over the Soviet media and the virtual impossibility of mounting dissident demonstrations in Moscow, the Politburo was unsurprisingly impressed by the KGB’s apparent ability to influence Third World opinion. Some KGB active measures were designed less to influence the rest of the world than to flatter the Soviet leadership and the Party apparatus. Unable to report to Moscow that the only aspect of CPSU congresses which made much impression on the world outside the Soviet bloc was the mind-numbing tedium of their banal proceedings, foreign residencies felt forced to concoct evidence to support the official doctrine that, ‘The congresses of the CPSU are always events of major international importance: they are like beacons lighting up the path already traversed and the path lying ahead.’
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Mitrokhin noted in 1977 that throughout the year residencies around the world were busy prompting local dignitaries to send congratulations to the Soviet leadership on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘Great October Revolution’ and the introduction of the supposedly epoch-making (but in fact insignificant) ‘Brezhnev’ Soviet constitution.
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These carefully stage-managed congratulations, as well as featuring prominently in the Soviet media, were doubtless included in the daily intelligence digests prepared by FCD Service 1 (intelligence assessment), signed by Andropov, which were delivered to members of the Politburo and Central Committee Secretariat by junior KGB officers, armed with the latest Makarov pistols, travelling in black Volga limousines.
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Mitrokhin noted in 1977 that throughout the year residencies around the world were busy prompting local dignitaries to send congratulations to the Soviet leadership on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘Great October Revolution’ and the introduction of the supposedly epoch-making (but in fact insignificant) ‘Brezhnev’ Soviet constitution.
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These carefully stage-managed congratulations, as well as featuring prominently in the Soviet media, were doubtless included in the daily intelligence digests prepared by FCD Service 1 (intelligence assessment), signed by Andropov, which were delivered to members of the Politburo and Central Committee Secretariat by junior KGB officers, armed with the latest Makarov pistols, travelling in black Volga limousines.
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In the Third World as elsewhere, KGB officers had to waste time pandering to the whims and pretensions of the political leadership. Khrushchev, for example, had been outraged by photographs in the American press showing him drinking Coca-Cola, which he regarded as a symbol of US imperialism, and demanded that further ‘provocations’ be prevented. Residencies thus kept a close watch for Coca-Cola bottles during the numerous foreign visits of Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, respectively the first man and the first woman into space. All went well until a banquet in Mexico in 1963, when an alert KGB officer noticed a news photographer about to take a picture of Tereshkova with a waiter holding a bottle of Coca-Cola in the background. A member of the Mexico City residency wrote later: ‘The “provocation” prepared with regard to the cosmonauts did not slip past our vigilant eyes. The first female cosmonaut, a Soviet woman, featuring in an advertisement for bourgeois Coca-Cola! No, we could not permit this. We immediately turned to our Mexican colleagues for help.’ The ‘Mexican colleagues’ (presumably local security officials) successfully prevented the photograph from being taken.
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Brezhnev’s increasingly preposterous vanity, which was undiminished by his physical decline, had to be fed not merely by more medals than were awarded to all previous Soviet leaders combined
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but also by a regular diet of praise from around the world, some of it manufactured by the KGB. In 1973, for example, a paid Moroccan agent codenamed AKMET, who regularly wrote articles based on material provided by Service A, published a book extolling Soviet assistance to African countries. At the prompting of the local residency, he sent a signed copy to Brezhnev as a token of his deep personal gratitude and respect. Trivial though this episode was, it was invested with such significance by the Centre that the book and dedication were forwarded to Brezhnev with a personal covering letter from Andropov - who doubtless did not mention that they had originated as a KGB active measure .
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Brezhnev was, of course, carefully protected from any sense of how absurd his personality cult appeared to much of the outside world - as, for example, to Joan Baez, who in 1979 composed and sang a satirical birthday tribute to him:
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but also by a regular diet of praise from around the world, some of it manufactured by the KGB. In 1973, for example, a paid Moroccan agent codenamed AKMET, who regularly wrote articles based on material provided by Service A, published a book extolling Soviet assistance to African countries. At the prompting of the local residency, he sent a signed copy to Brezhnev as a token of his deep personal gratitude and respect. Trivial though this episode was, it was invested with such significance by the Centre that the book and dedication were forwarded to Brezhnev with a personal covering letter from Andropov - who doubtless did not mention that they had originated as a KGB active measure .
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Brezhnev was, of course, carefully protected from any sense of how absurd his personality cult appeared to much of the outside world - as, for example, to Joan Baez, who in 1979 composed and sang a satirical birthday tribute to him:
Happy birthday, Leonid Brezhnev!
What a lovely seventy-fifth
We watched the party on TV
You seemed to be taking things casually
What a mighty heart must beat in your breast
To hold forty-nine medals on your chest !
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What a lovely seventy-fifth
We watched the party on TV
You seemed to be taking things casually
What a mighty heart must beat in your breast
To hold forty-nine medals on your chest !
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As well as manufacturing evidence of the global popularity of the Soviet leadership, the KGB fed it a carefully sanitized, politically correct view of the outside world. Throughout the Soviet era there was a striking contrast between the frequent success of intelligence collection and the poor quality of intelligence analysis. Because analysis in all one-party states is distorted by the insistent demands of political correctness, foreign intelligence reports do more to reinforce than to correct the regime’s misconceptions. Though the politicization of intelligence sometimes degrades assessment even within democratic systems, it is actually built into the structure of all authoritarian regimes. Soviet intelligence reports throughout the Stalin era, and for some years after, usually consisted only of selective compilations of relevant information on particular topics with little attempt at interpretation or analysis for fear that it might contradict the views of the political leadership. Though intelligence analysis improved under Andropov, it remained seriously undeveloped by Western standards. Leonov, who was dismayed to be appointed in 1971 as deputy head of the FCD assessment section, Service 1, estimates that it had only 10 per cent of the importance occupied by the Directorate of Intelligence (Analysis) in the CIA. Its prestige was correspondingly low. A general air of depression hung over Service 1, which was usually regarded as ‘a punishment posting’. To be transferred there from an operational section, as happened to Leonov, was ‘equivalent to moving from a guards regiment in the capital to the garrison in a provincial backwater’.
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In 1973 Leonov was promoted to head Service 1 and was soon able to resist the traditional pressure to accept rejects from operational departments. Freedom of debate, he claims, came to his department much earlier than to foreign intelligence as a whole, let alone to the rest of the KGB.
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That debate, however, was coloured by Leonov’s conspiracy theories about the United States which were still in evidence during the final years of the Soviet Union.
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There was also little change in the standards of political correctness required in intelligence reports to the Soviet leadership:
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That debate, however, was coloured by Leonov’s conspiracy theories about the United States which were still in evidence during the final years of the Soviet Union.
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There was also little change in the standards of political correctness required in intelligence reports to the Soviet leadership:
All the filtration stages . . . were concerned with making sure that alarming, critical information did not come to the attention of the bosses. [Such information] was provided in a sweetened, smoothed form, with all the thorns removed in advance.
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Vadim Kirpichenko, who later rose to become first deputy head of foreign intelligence, recalls that during the Brezhnev era, pessimistic intelligence was kept from him on the grounds that it would ‘upset Leonid Il yich’ .
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When Soviet policy in the Third World suffered setbacks which could not be concealed, analysts knew they were on safe ground if they blamed imperialist machinations, particularly those of the United States, rather than failures of the Soviet system. As one FCD officer admitted at the end of the Cold War, ‘In order to please our superiors, we sent in falsified and biased information, acting on the principle “Blame everything on the Americans, and everything will be OK”.’
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Within the Centre it was possible during the Andropov era to express much franker opinions about Third World problems - for example, about Soviet prospects in Egypt after the death of Nasser or economic collapse in Allende’s Chile
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- than were communicated to the political leadership. From the moment that the KGB leadership had taken up a position, however, FCD dissidents kept their heads down. When, for example, Andropov concluded that the first Reagan administration had plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, none of the probably numerous sceptics in KGB residencies around the world dared to breathe a word of open dissent.
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Within the Centre it was possible during the Andropov era to express much franker opinions about Third World problems - for example, about Soviet prospects in Egypt after the death of Nasser or economic collapse in Allende’s Chile
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- than were communicated to the political leadership. From the moment that the KGB leadership had taken up a position, however, FCD dissidents kept their heads down. When, for example, Andropov concluded that the first Reagan administration had plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, none of the probably numerous sceptics in KGB residencies around the world dared to breathe a word of open dissent.
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Despite the sanitized nature of the Centre’s reports to the political leadership, however, its optimism about the Third World was genuine. By the mid-1970s, the KGB was confident that it was winning the Cold War in the Third World against a demoralized and increasingly discredited ‘Main Adversary’. As Henry Kissinger later acknowledged:
It is doubtful that Castro would have intervened in Angola, or the Soviet Union in Ethiopia, had America not been perceived to have collapsed in Indochina, to have become demoralized by Watergate, and to have afterward retreated into a cocoon.
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But while Washington was stricken by self-doubt, Moscow was in economic denial. The severe structural problems of the Soviet economy and the military might which depended on it were far more serious than the transitory loss of American self-confidence which followed Vietnam. In June 1977 the Soviet government was forced to purchase 11.5 million tonnes of grain from the West. In August it concluded that another 10 million tonnes would be needed to meet the shortfall in Soviet production. Yet at the celebration three months later of the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Brezhnev declared to thunderous applause, ‘This epoch is the epoch of the transition to Socialism and Communism . . . and by this path, the whole of mankind is destined to go.’ Though the naive economic optimism of the Khrushchev era had largely evaporated, the ideological blinkers which constricted the vision of Brezhnev, Andropov and other Soviet true believers made it impossible for them to grasp the impossibility of the increasingly sclerotic Soviet command economy competing successfully with the market economies of the West.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Andropov passionately believed that, ‘Everything that has been achieved here [in the Soviet Union] has long put socialism far ahead of the most democratic bourgeois states.’
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While the Soviet system would solve its problems, those of the capitalist West were insoluble. The onward march of socialism in the Third World pointed to the inevitability of its ultimate global triumph. In the confident words of Karen N. Brutents, first deputy head of the International Department: ‘The world was going our way.’
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The CIA feared that Brutents might be right. It reported to the White House in June 1979 that, ‘Part of the Soviet mood is a sense of momentum in the USSR’s favour in the Third World.’ Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership, it concluded, ‘can view their position in the world with considerable satisfaction’.
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While the Soviet system would solve its problems, those of the capitalist West were insoluble. The onward march of socialism in the Third World pointed to the inevitability of its ultimate global triumph. In the confident words of Karen N. Brutents, first deputy head of the International Department: ‘The world was going our way.’
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The CIA feared that Brutents might be right. It reported to the White House in June 1979 that, ‘Part of the Soviet mood is a sense of momentum in the USSR’s favour in the Third World.’ Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership, it concluded, ‘can view their position in the world with considerable satisfaction’.
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How the KGB set out to win the Cold War in the Third World, and with what consequences, is the subject of this book.
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