A Window Of Opportunity

By CI Centre Oleg D. Kalugin

The last point of view has found sympathetic response in this country and appears to have edged into an area of broad discussion on the future of US- Russian relations in the years to come. Perhaps, most eloquent if not very convincing comment on this issue was provided by “The Nation” magazine contributors Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel who assert that Vladimir Putin, “became the Bush administration’s most valuable ally in the war against terrorism,” that “Russia’s contribution to the US counter-terror operation in Afghanistan exceeded that of all of America’s NATO allies together” and that “the promise of a historic US-Russian partnership is being squandered by President Bush’s polices.”[1]

With this and possibly other similar or quite opposite views it’s inevitable that a public controversy should ensue with questions focused on the following issues: will the anti-terrorist coalition transform into a fundamental, long-term union based on mutual trust and common goals? Can it survive the turbulent currents of international politics, overcome the legacy of the Cold War mentality on both sides and evolve into a true partnership?

An overview of the alliances the former USSR had over the past decades may help answer some of these questions. Since this is an extremely broad subject it will be limited by necessity to a relatively small but crucial area, that of cooperation in matters of intelligence and security.

To better appreciate the principal stand of the Soviet leadership on these problems it’s pertinent to recall the words of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who in December of 1952, speaking at the meeting of the commission on reorganization of intelligence and counter-intelligence work created by the CPSU Central Committee, said, “In intelligence work one should never practice a frontal attack. An intelligence service must operate in a roundabout way; otherwise it will suffer failures, heavy failures. To attack head on is a short-sighted tactic…Completely eliminate stereotypes from intelligence work, at all times change tactics, methods. At all times, adjust to the world situation. Take advantage of the world situation…Our main enemy – America. But the principal effort should not be on America proper. Illegal residences should be created first of all in neighboring states…”[2]

The Soviet leader’s words in essence summarized the experience of Soviet intelligence and subversive activities of two previous decades: NKVD assistance to Spain and China in the 1930s, the Grand Alliance with US and Great Britain during World War II, Soviet state security crucial role in the creation of the Soviet bloc (except Yugoslavia and Albania) after the war when the Eastern European security services were set up in the image of the Soviet KGB and overseen by Soviet advisers.

Stalin’s remarks featured in the book as a symbol of his wisdom admired by former KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, suggests indirectly that Mr. Putin also derives his inspiration from “the leader of all times and all peoples.”

But let’s look at the record.

The first contacts of the Soviet security organs with similar foreign entities go back to the 1930s when the NKVD (KGB early predecessor) fearing Japanese incursions into the Soviet Far East, helped create and strengthen the security establishment in Outer Mongolia and Tuva, two Asiatic countries bordering the USSR. Several years later, Tuva was incorporated into the USSR and became one of its autonomous republics, while Mongolia remained a communist outpost in the region, claiming formal independence.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet government, although represented on the “non-intervention committee” in the beginning of the conflict in 1936, sent a considerable amount of aid in tanks, planes, and military specialists to the Republicans. The Soviet intelligence regularly provided the Republican government with information on secret designs and plans of Nazi Germany and Italy against the new regime, it helped in clandestine transfer of hundreds of “volunteers” and tons of arms to Spain from neighboring countries, and after the Republicans’ defeat, in the evacuation of their military and political cadre to the USSR.

Perhaps the most extensive allied relationship in the pre-war period the Soviet intelligence developed with China. Stalin ordered to help the Kuomintang Army to repel the Japanese aggression. The Soviet assistance included arms and ammunition, and military specialist. In 1938, the first formal organ of coordination between the Soviet and Kuomintang intelligence services was instituted under the name “The Joint Bureau.” Under its auspices regular exchanges of intelligence information were carried out for several years. The Soviet NKVD provided the Chinese with assistance in training of their special units, which operated in the Japanese occupied territories as guerrillas and saboteurs.

Simultaneously, the Soviet intelligence took advantage of the situation and set up its “legal” residences in about 20 Chinese cities. In Shanghai and Harbin, Soviet illegal groups were also deployed. The heavy Soviet presence in China at that time facilitated the eventual victory of the communists in the country.[3]

World War II opened new vistas for the KGB and new great opportunities. In August of 1941, the British government, through its Ambassador in Moscow, proposed to establish ties and cooperation between the Soviet and British intelligence services in their common struggle against Nazi Germany. The first talks held subsequently in Moscow lasted nearly two weeks and resulted in the signing of a major agreement, which envisaged the exchange of intelligence information about Germany, the conduct of joint operations involving sabotage on German and occupied territories, infiltration of agents into these areas, providing them with communication lines and equipment. Special intelligence missions were opened in London and Moscow (no sooner were the negotiations successfully over than the Soviet intelligence obtained from its secret assets in England full accounts of what had happened in Moscow). The initial results of the cooperation looked very promising. By March of 1944, the Soviet intelligence had sent to England 36 agents, 28 of them were infiltrated by the Britts into Germany, France, Holland, Belgium and Italy.

However, the head of the Soviet official intelligence mission in England, Ivan Chichaev in his cable to Moscow in 1942 complained about delays and suspicious behavior of his British partners and recommended to wind up the operation.[4]

Ivan Chichaev played another role outside his duties as the liaison officer in the U.K. He was charged with the task of maintaining relations with allied governments in exile of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Norway, Belgium, and France. While performing these duties, Chichaev and his staff recruited a number of spies from émigré circles, who provided the Soviets with valuable intelligence information. For instances the results of an experiment with “heavy water” conducted in Norway as part of research in nuclear science, were obtained by Chichaev. One of his contacts from France would later become a prized KGB asset “Daedalus,” ¾a future minister in the Charles de Gaulle Cabinet, Pierre Cot. [5]

The Soviet-British intelligence cooperation ended at the imitative of the British government in September of 1945. The U.K. representative in Moscow was recalled home because, according to Russian sources, the British side resented Soviet suspiciousness and lack of progress in their relationship.[6]

The United States came late with its offer of cooperation with the Soviet intelligence. At the end of 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dispatched the OSS Director William Donovan to Moscow to negotiate an agreement with the Soviets and open a liaison mission in the USSR.

The American side suggested to exchange intelligence information about the adversaries, to discuss acts of sabotage behind the front lines, to assist in infiltrating agents in the enemies’ rear, to swap radio communication devices and materials related to sabotage activities.

By early spring of 1944 the Soviet liaison mission headed by Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Graur was ready for departure to the USA when it was suddenly cancelled at the suggestion of the US. Within days, the Soviet intelligence, which ran 26 assets in the OSS at that time, learned that it was J. Edgar Hoover, the omnipotent Director of the FBI who opposed the opening of another Soviet spy nest in the USA. Eventually, Hoover’s resistance was overruled by President Roosevelt, and by June of 1944 the exchanges, as defined by the agreement, were in full swing.

The Soviet intelligence, both KGB and the military (GRU) were generally satisfied with the level of cooperation. Some pieces of intelligence, like for instance 1,500 photocopies of key lists to Soviet ciphers captured by the Germans and obtained by the allied forces in Italy, had special value.[7]

The Soviet-American partnership in the area of intelligence lasted only a year and a half with World War II over and the OSS disbanded in October of 1945, a new war, the Cold War, was looming on the horizon.

The Venona documents (the US code breaking project that deciphered Soviet intelligence messages in the 1940s) revealed that the period of Soviet-American amity turned out to be the best time for Soviet espionage against the USA. The Soviet intelligence handled in the 1940s over 200 Americans as spies. Curiously, the number of Soviet KGB intelligence officers stationed in the USA in 1941 was only 18.[8] (For comparison: at the peak of the Cold War in the early 1980s the KGB had over 200 officers in the USA under various covers, while the number of assets was close to 20.)

The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe posed new challenges to the Soviet Security and Intelligence apparatus. To keep control of the internal situation in the “liberated” countries, to weed out anti-socialist and anti-party elements, Zionists, “enemies of the people” was no easy task. The organized forms of the KGB cooperation with their counterparts in Eastern Europe began gradually to take shape in 1948. By then, the Soviets had helped the local Communist Party officials to pick up the right people for their Security Services. Some of them had a long record of collaboration with Soviet intelligence in pre-war times. By 1950, official Soviet advisors’ mission opened in every socialist country. The missions were compact, an average of 12 to 15 KGB officers, each responsible for a line of work. (East Germany was an the exception.) Instead of direct involvement into running the national interior and Security ministries, as practiced before the Soviet advisors began to coordinate their activities, exchange information and work experience, plan joint projects, and specific operations. But the new, more civilized approach to mutual cooperation would be abrupted instantly if a Soviet partner from Eastern Europe had views different from those of the Soviets. When the Yugoslav and Albanian leaders rejected Soviet rude interference in their domestic affairs, they were branded as traitors. The alleged accomplices of the “traitors” in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czecheslovakia were executed. In East Germany, the head of the Stasi Ernest Wollweber and a former NKVD agent in the 1930s who resented Moscow dictate was surveilled by the Soviet KGB and then sacked.

In Hungary, in 1956, during the popular uprising against the Communist rule and Soviet domination, Prime Minister Imre Nagy, another NKVD agent since the 1930s was arrested and subsequently executed by the Soviets for his refusal to obey Soviet orders.

The Hungarian lesson and the public unrest in East Germany and Poland were not to be lost upon the new Soviet leadership. Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the KGB’s brutality led to significant changes in the Soviet treatment of its allies. It became more civilized, subtle, orderly, and relatively benign. The equality in partnership under the auspices of the Warsaw Pact Treaty was proclaimed to be the crux of the new Soviet policies in Eastern Europe.

The events in Czechoslovakia in 1986 jolted Leonid Brezhnev out of complacency and unleashed the KGB wrath against a new breed of revisionists in the Socialist camp. It’s now known that it was Yuri Andropov, the KGB Chairman, who insisted on military intervention in Czechoslovakia. He secured the support of other hardliners in the politbureau who overwhelmed Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin and wavering Brezhnev and dispatched Soviet tanks to suppress the “Prague Spring.” The KGB’s trusted people arrested the Czech Party leader Alexander Dulcek and installed the new pro-Moscow government. But prior to the invasion, the KGB sent its illegals to Czechoslovakia, who fabricated evidence of counter-revolutionary conspiracies by Czech liberals. Secret caches of arms allegedly stashed by NATO spies and “discovered” by the Czech Security Service, anti-communist leaflets, other hostile acts were part of the KGB’s psychological warfare to prepare the public opinion for the Soviet military “assistance” to the “healthy” socialist forces in the country.

The Czech events had far reaching consequences for KGB operations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Frustrated by the lack of objective and reliable reports from the KGB liaison offices, KGB Chairman Andropov ordered the use of covert ways to obtain desired information (“Operations Progress”).

From 1968, onwards the moods and views of Eastern Europe nations were monitored by experienced Soviet illegals, who operated under disguise of western businessmen, journalists, and tourists and pretended to sympathize with critics of the Communist regimes. The number of illegals differed from country to country. In Romania, for instance, 13 officers, Czechoslavakia –20, Yugoslavia –9, GDR –7, Hungary –4, Bulgaria –3.[9]

In 1969, the KGB started opening “legal” residences in Eastern European and other friendly capitals in addition to its liaison missions. Operating under diplomatic, journalistic, and other official covers, the KGB officers were now allowed to recruit agents among local citizens, with an emphasis on government officials, party functionaries, and security service personnel. The ratio of KGB liaison and undercover employees was roughly 1 to 3. In Cuba for instance, 14 KGB officers at the official mission were supplemented by 35 undercover officers, but in East Germany undercover officers constituted only 10 percent of the total KGB 450 employees.

With Czech discontent ruthlessly suppressed and other satellite nationals scared, the KGB tightened its screws on the allies. Only Romania did not comply with new Soviet toughness and bolted out of the alliance. In 1971, the Romanian State Security at the behest of its leader Nicolai Ceusescu terminated their ties with the Soviet KGB.

Other Eastern Europe secret services would now become even more subservient to the Soviet KGB.

From assistance in preparing assassinations of political dissidents by Bulgaria to approving East German Stasi flirtations with foreign terrorist groups, from joint operations in double agentry to stealing Western technologies, the pattern was always the same: the Soviet KGB stood behind and directed its allies.

Former chief of the KGB official mission in Prague, General Elisei Sinitsin in his annual report to Moscow in 1977, summarized the spirit and gist of the KGB relationship with its East European colleagues: “our friends hand over to us all their cipher traffic with their residences both information and operational. They also hand over telegrams from ambassadors. Our friends keep practically no secrets from us.”[10]

But the KGB could not stop the growing discontent and disillusionment of the peoples of Eastern Europe nor, for that matter, of its own people.

The Polish crisis of the 1980s proved to be insoluble for the Soviet leaders. The old, tested ways would not work. The KGB reports from Warsaw left no doubt that the Czech version would be vigorously opposed not only by the Polish people, but the Polish Communists as well. The elevation of the Polish Cardinal to the Vatican throne made it practically impossible to resort to force. The world reaction would be dangerously unpredictable.

The Soviet retreat in the face of potentially unacceptable consequences compounded by the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reluctance to be drawn into adventures led eventually to the demise of the Warsaw Pact Organization.

The KGB accepted the collapse of the Soviet empire with great chagrin and aversion. Prior to the finale, it devised a special program of active measures in a desperate attempt to stave off the downfall of the communist regime, but it was denied permission to implement them. Said Leonid Shebarshin, the last head of the KGB intelligence service, “the leaders of Eastern Europe were told to fend for themselves. But they were educated only to be friends of the Soviet Union; they were never prepared to stand on their own feet. They were just thrown to the wolves.”[11]

With the Soviet domination in Eastern Europe coming to an end, the Soviet KGB was facing yet another defeat ¾this time in the third world, where the KGB had also been running liaison missions and prepared grounds for transforming a number of nations into Soviet satellites. General Nikolai Leonov, former KGB chief analyst, summoned up the views of his colleagues on this issue in the following words, “In the Cold War confrontation, we accepted as a matter of principle that geo-political victory will be won by those with whom the third world will go…Some countries linked to us by political and military ties received our ideological encouragement and arms, but their real economic ties were with the West. For instance, Syria was very close, very friendly to our country, was our ally. Our Navy operated from their bases, but 98 percent of their economy was tied to the West.”[12]

The inability of the Soviet Union to effectively help the developing nations in building up their economies could not be compensated by the KGB manipulations. From Angola to Mozambique to Ethiopia and Somalia, to Syria and South Yemen, the Soviet KGB missions were failing. The last Soviet stronghold, Afghanistan where the KGB installed its stooges ever since the local communists had taken over power in 1978, fell down under pressure from the Afghan resistance movement in 1989.

Before this happened, between 1980 and 1989, the KGB trained in its special schools on the territory of the USSR nearly 30,000 Afghan officers, a half of the Afghan Security Service.[13] It did not help.

After Mikhail Gorbachev’s advent to power in 1985, the KGB was encouraged to widen its contacts with foreign intelligence and security agencies outside the Soviet block. In 1988, Vladimir Kryuchkov travelled to India for confidential talks with Indian Prime Minister Radjiv Ghandi. During that visit, Kryuchkov raised the question of cooperation with Indian Special Services and exchange of intelligence information on Pakistan and China. Kryuchkov’s initiative was essentially a political gesture because over the years the Soviet KGB had thoroughly infiltrated the Indian Security and Intelligence establishment.

In 1990, the KGB unofficially contacted German law enforcement agencies trying to alleviate the fate of Erich Mielke, former chief of East German “Stasi” and his colleagues who were persecuted by German authorities.

In the Spring of 1991, Kryuchkov made an official trip to Berlin where he discussed with his German counterparts the plight of former “stasi” officers asking for mercy. He also offered to begin regular exchanges of opinions on problems of security with new Germany.[14]

The first KGB informal contact on a high level with the US CIA occurred in 1987, when Kryuchkov accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev during his official visit to Washington. He met then with the Deputy Director Robert Gates, but according to published reports, the meeting produced no practical results. In 1989, Kryuchkov made an unprecedented gesture by receiving the US Ambassador to the USSR in his office.

Ever since, the KGB chairman, later the mastermind of anti-Gorbachev’s plot, touted his desire to strengthen ties with his counterparts in the West. “The KGB, declared Kryuchkov, should have an image not only in our country but world wide, which is consistent with the noble goals, I believe we are pursuing in our work.”[15]

In 1990, Gates came to Moscow and offered, according to the KGB, a CIA analysis of national problems of the USSR up to the year 2000. The promised document, however, was never delivered to the Soviets. Later, former CIA Director William Colby and Stansfield Turner, traveled to Moscow, but only in a private capacity.

Before the demise of the USSR, as part of the KGB’s “new image” campaign, Moscow established informal ties with special services of Italy, France, Spain, Austria, and South Korea. The overall effect of these contacts was practically zero.

With new Russia emerging on the ruins of the Soviet empire, the KGB’s successors renewed their efforts to develop working relations with Western special services.

The areas of common interest were defined and included an exchange of information and occasional joint efforts in combating organized crime, money laundering, drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, nuclear proliferation, ecological and computer security and, finally, international terrorism. The intelligence support provided by Moscow to the United States after 9-11 has become, perhaps, one of the momentous events in the post-Cold War history. Mr. Putin’s desire to internationalize the Chechen War and legitimize the indiscriminate use of Russian force against the civilian population of the break-away republic as well as expectations of some rewards (forgiveness of Russia’s foreign debts, for instance) played undoubtedly a significant role in his decision to join the anti-terrorist coalition

At the “International Forum of Secret Services” held last March in St. Petersburg (Russ), the FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, addressing some one hundred heads of intelligence services from 39 nations, called for the “unification” of espionage agencies, “new level or cooperation” with the West. Undoubtedly, Mr. Patrushev toed the party line drawn up by his boss – President Putin. Ironically, at about the same time British counterintelligence arrested an employee of one of the country’s largest defense contractors for stealing confidential materials and sending it to Moscow, and in Japan a Russian trade representative was charged with attempting to obtain US military secrets from a former Japanese Air Force officer.

Said Andrei Piontrovsky, director of the Center for Strategic Research and one of Russia’s top political analysts, “It’s highly unlikely that, in the places he did his studies, Putin was taught to love the West, especially “the main adversary.” But those places probably did teach him to base his actions on real circumstances and the real distribution of forces on the world political stage, rather than let himself be guided by emotions, complexes, and fantasies.”[16]

In other words: “At all times adjust to the world situation, take advantage of the world situation.” At no time the window of opportunity was wider open than now.

Oleg D. Kalugin

Major General (Ret.)

Former People’s Deputy of the USSR

Professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies

Washington DC

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