The Craft of Intelligence (12 page)

On December 20, 1962, an article appeared in
Pravda
under the name of the Chief of Soviet State Security (KGB), M. Semichastny, which opened with the words, “Forty-five years ago today, at the initiative of Vladimir Illitch Lenin . . .” and went on to describe the founding of the first Soviet security body, the Cheka, in 1917, and to summarize the ups and downs of forty-five years of Soviet police and intelligence history. While the purpose of the article was no doubt to improve the public image of this justly feared and hated institution, its importance to the foreign observer lay in the tacit admission that despite changes of name and of leadership the Soviets really view this organization as having a definite and unbroken continuity since the day of its founding.

In their attempts to evade detection and capture by the Okhrana, the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed the conspiratorial techniques that later stood the Soviets in such good stead. The complicated and devious tricks of concealing and passing messages, of falsifying documents, of using harmless intermediaries between suspect parties so as not to expose one to the other or allow both to be seen together—these were all survival techniques developed after bitter encounters and many losses at the hands of the czar’s police. When the Soviets later founded their own intelligence service, these were the tricks they taught their agents to evade the police of other countries. Even the very words which the Bolsheviks used in the illegal days before 1917 as a kind of private slang among terrorists—such as
dubok
(little oak tree) for a dead-letter drop—became in time the terms in official use within the Soviet intelligence service.

It is always a matter of surmise among Western observers whether the internal power struggles which are usually rife within the hierarchy of the Soviet Union will affect the position and powers of the KGB as the most privileged body in the Soviet state. I do not mean solely that its top people may be removed, or even executed, as were the former chiefs, Yezhov, Yagoda and Beria, in their day, but rather that its entire ranks might be purged and its standing vis-à-vis other elements of the state sharply reduced. The chief contender for power is the Army, which time and again in Soviet history has been downgraded by the dictator in favor of the state security organization, since the latter was his personal instrument and he could use it to keep an eye on the army.

THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES OF THE EUROPEAN SATELLITES AND RED CHINA

Soviet State Security founded, organized, trained and today still supervises the intelligence and security services of the European satellites of Soviet Russia. They are in a sense little “KGBs” and sometimes like to call themselves that within their own ranks. They are entirely the creatures of the Soviets and mirror in their structure and their techniques the results of the long-range experience of their Soviet big brothers. Their main objectives are dictated by the Soviets, although they are allowed certain limited initiatives in matters relating to their own “internal” security. The Poles and Czechs, for example, will run operations whose intent is to locate Western espionage directed against their national areas. If in the course of such operations they turn up an especially good agent who offers, let us say, a prime opportunity for penetration of a Western government, the Soviets will very likely take over the agent and run him themselves, and the satellite intelligence service must grin and bear it.

This was the case with Harry Houghton, who was first recruited by the Polish intelligence service when he was stationed at the British embassy in Warsaw. When he was transferred back to London and put to work in the Admiralty, the Soviets saw opportunities which were far too important for the Poles to handle. They took over the case and the Polish intelligence service never heard about Houghton again until his name appeared in the papers after his arrest.

From the beginning the Soviets maintained an efficient stranglehold over these services by appointing to the top jobs in them people who had been old-line Soviet agents and had been trained in Moscow, many of them in pre-World War II days. The hard core of the present Polish intelligence service, for example, is made up of Polish Communists who had fled to Russia in 1939 and who returned to Poland in 1944 with Polish military units accompanying the Red Army. They had spent most of the war years in Moscow being trained by the Soviets for their future jobs in a projected but as yet nonexistent Polish intelligence service. Younger personnel are carefully screened by the Soviets before being accepted for employment in any of the satellite services.

Even today the Soviets manage and direct the satellite services, not at long range but in person. They do this through a so-called advisory system. A Soviet “adviser” is installed in almost every significant department of the satellite intelligence services, be it in Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest or any other satellite capital. This adviser is supposed to be shown all significant material concerning the work being done, and must give consent to all important operational undertakings. He is to all intents and purposes a supervisor, and his word is final.

As a sidelight on Soviet relations to the satellites, it is interesting to note that the Soviets do not rely wholly on these advisers to control the satellite intelligence services. This is not because the latter are incompetent, but because the satellite services are evidently not trusted by their Soviet master. In order to prevent these services from getting away with anything, the Soviets go to the trouble of secretly recruiting intelligence officers of the satellite services who can supply them with information on plans, personnel, conflicts in the local management, disaffection and the like, which might not have come to the attention of the adviser.

While the Soviets cannot really trust their satellites, they will use them to draw chestnuts out of the fire where it is advantageous to do so. The Soviets were quick to recognize, for example, that the very great numbers of persons of Polish, Czech and Hungarian extraction living in Western Europe and in Canada and the United States theoretically represented a potential pool of agents to which the respective satellite services might find access with much greater ease than the Soviets could, on the basis of common ethnic background, family and other sentimental ties to the old country,
etc.
Thus, we find that the attempts to recruit people of Central European and Balkan extraction both here and abroad for Communist espionage have largely been carried out by personnel of the satellite intelligence services. That the latter have been rebuffed in most cases is a tribute to the loyalties of the first-or second-generation citizens of the U.S. and the other NATO countries.

Red China, not being a satrapy of the Soviet Union as are the smaller nations of Eastern Europe, has its own independent intelligence and security system which is in no way subservient to the KGB. In intelligence as in technical and scientific fields, the Soviets for a long period had advisers stationed in China, but these were really advisers and not the kind of supervisors I described above. They have long since departed, and it is unlikely today, in view of the Sino-Soviet rift, that there is more than the most nominal collaboration and coordination between the Red Chinese and the Soviet intelligence services. Indeed, we can safely assume that each of these countries is using its intelligence service to keep its eye on the other.

We have not yet begun to consider Red Chinese espionage as a serious menace to our own security in the U.S., though in the years to come it may well become a formidable instrument for spying and subversion in the West, as it already has throughout Asia and the Pacific. The Chinese are, of course, at the same disadvantage in operating against us as we are in attempting to operate against them. Physical and cultural differences make it quite difficult to camouflage the true ethnic status and national origin of intelligence officers or agents on either side.

A Ukrainian was able with sufficient training and with the proper documents to pass himself off in England as a Canadian of Anglo-Saxon origin named Gordon Lonsdale. For a Chinese, this would, of course, be impossible. In areas where there are large numbers of resident Chinese, as in Hawaii, Malaya, etc., the Chinese can take advantage of ethnic ties. The first real inroads into Occidental areas are now being made by the Chinese in South America, where the more fanatical element of the local Communist contingents welcomes them. Should the Chinese succeed in such areas in recruiting Westerners of Hispanic origin as long-term agents, it will begin to be possible for them to infiltrate the U.S. and European countries with such agents, who would be no more recognizable as Chinese agents than Lonsdale was as a Soviet agent.

There is reason to expect an ever greater effort on the part of Red Chinese intelligence against U.S. and other Western targets. China is anxious to develop its nuclear power, but the withdrawal of Soviet technical advisers in 1959 undoubtedly slowed down its program in this field. The course of the Red Chinese will very likely be the same the Soviets chose during and after World War II, when they succeeded in stealing atomic secrets from us through spies like Fuchs and Pontecorvo and penetrated American and other Western scientific installations. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, warned American industrialists in early 1964 that the Red Chinese were seeking to gain information on American technical installations through the use of Chinese-Americans long established in this country and also by exploiting the contacts dating from college days which Chinese scientists trained in the United States formerly had with American scientists. Should the Red Chinese be admitted to the U.N. or establish diplomatic installations on our soil, they would then have firmer bases from which to organize and direct their technical espionage undertakings.

In the Western European countries that have recognized Red China diplomatically, among which France can now be numbered, the Chinese have staffed their embassies with a quantity of personnel far in excess of the normal and necessary contingents and with unusually frequent turnovers of such personnel. This has been the case, for example, in Bern, Switzerland, where the Chinese have well over a hundred employees stationed, obviously many more than are needed for the normal course of their diplomacy with Switzerland. What percentage of these are engaged in intelligence work is not easy to determine. It is clear, however, that many of them are sent abroad solely to learn Western ways and to become acquainted with the workings of Western societies and enterprises, doubtless as part of their training for future intelligence work.

From my own experience I have the impression that the Soviet intelligence officer represents the species
homo Sovieticus
in its unalloyed and most successful form. This strikes me as much the most important thing about him, more important than his characteristics as a practitioner of the intelligence craft itself. It is as if the Soviet intelligence officer were a kind of final and extreme product of the Soviet system, an example of the Soviet mentality pitched to the nth degree.

He is blindly and unquestioningly dedicated to the cause, at least at the outset. He has been fully indoctrinated in the political and philosophical beliefs of Communism and in the basic motivation which proceeds from these beliefs, which is that the ends alone count and any means which achieve them are justified. Since the ingrained Soviet approach to the problems of life and politics is conspiratorial, it is no surprise that this approach finds its ultimate fulfillment in intelligence work. When such a man does finally see the light, as has happened, his disillusionment is overwhelming.

The Soviet intelligence officer is throughout his career subject to a rigid discipline; as one intelligence officer put it who had experienced this discipline himself, he “has graduated from an iron school.” On the one hand, he belongs to an elite and has privilege and power of a very special kind. He may be functioning as the embassy chauffeur, but he may have a higher secret rank than the ambassador and more power where the power really counts. On the other hand, neither rank nor seniority nor past achievement will protect him if he makes a mistake. When a Soviet intelligence officer is caught out or his agents are caught through an oversight on his part, he can expect demotion, dismissal, even prison. In Stalin’s day he would have been shot.

I can think of no better illustration of the merciless attitude of the Soviet intelligence officer himself than the story told of one of Stalin’s intelligence chiefs, General V. S. Abakumov. During the war, Abakumov’s sister was picked up somewhere in Russia on a minor black-marketing charge—“speculation,” as the Soviets call it. In view of her close connection to this powerful officer in the secret hierarchy, the police officials sent a message to Abakumov asking how he would like the case handled. They fully expected he would request the charges be dropped. Instead, he is reliably reported to have written on the memorandum sent him: “Why do you ask me? Don’t you know your duty? Speculation during wartime is treason. Shoot her.” An interesting sidelight on Abakumov is that he, like his boss, Beria, ran what one writer has described as “a string of private brothels.”

Abakumov met the fate of many Soviet intelligence officers after the death of Stalin and the liquidation of Beria. At that time he was in charge of the internal section of Soviet security, which kept the files on members of the government and of the party. Abakumov was secretly executed and his entire section was decimated under the Malenkov regime. They knew too much. Despite certain relaxations in the public life of present-day Russia, the “terror” still holds sway within Soviet intelligence itself because this arm of Soviet power, second to none in peacetime, cannot relax, cannot be allowed any weakness.

In Soviet Russia, where the foreign intelligence service and the internal secret police at the higher levels are only separate arms of the KGB, most officers rotate between the two different types of duty. They customarily are assigned early in their careers to some provincial secret police office, usually in an area of their country in which they are not native. Here their duties primarily call for the running of informants among the local populace. Besides carrying out a function which the Soviet state deems necessary for its own internal security, men working at such posts also receive a basic on-the-job training in the fundamentals of espionage and counterespionage and at a level where occasional errors are not especially damaging.