TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=90TT2782> <link 93HT0623> <link 91TT1974> <link 90TT0600> <title> Oct. 22, 1990: Inside The KGB </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990 Oct. 22, 1990 The New Jazz Age </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> EXCERPT, Page 72 INSIDE THE KGB A Double Agent's Tale By Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky </hdr> <body> [(c) 1990 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky. From KGB: The Inside Story, published by HarperCollins Publishing Inc.] OLEG GORDIEVSKY'S escape to the West in 1985 shook the Kremlin. Gordievsky was not only the KGB's top man in London but had been a British intelligence agent for a decade. He is the most senior Soviet intelligence officer ever to work for the West, and possibly the most influential. At the time of his flight, the KGB was a vast empire with 400,000 officials, 200,000 border troops and countless informers. Founded as the CHEKA on Dec. 20, 1917, it had evolved through an alphabet soup of designations (GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, MVD) to the present Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security). For years its emblem was a shield, to defend the Revolution, and a sword, to smite its foes. In a bit of image enhancement, the sword has been dropped. But it will take more than that to erase the KGB's dark record. On the following pages TIME presents an excerpt from KGB: The Inside Story, a history of the agency written, in cooperation with Gordievsky, by Christopher Andrew, an expert on British intelligence. Drawing on Gordievsky's access to the KGB's secret archives, the study offers a unique perspective on the network of Americans who cast their lot with Moscow. Gordievsky also tells how, in 1983, the world edged closer to apocalypse than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Convinced that the U.S. was preparing a nuclear attack, the KGB mobilized all its resources and, in a search for confirmation, came perilously close to persuading Moscow that war might be imminent. The episode chillingly illuminated the other side of the distorting looking glass through which the superpowers had long regarded each other. Oleg Gordievsky was a KGB brat. His father and brother both worked for the agency. He began his career in 1962 with the elite First Chief Directorate, which handles all foreign espionage. But the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 crystallized his growing conviction that the Soviet one-party state was destructive of human liberties. By 1975 he was working with British intelligence. As a double agent, he continued to thrive within the KGB. In 1980 the FCD's most closely guarded files were opened to him when he worked on a classified history of the unit. Posted to London in 1982, he played a major role in briefing Mikhail Gorbachev on his December 1984 visit. Soon after this, he was named Resident, in charge of all KGB operations in Britain. Nothing appeared to be unusual when Gordievsky was summoned home next May. But after he arrived in Moscow, he was accused of betrayal, drugged and interrogated. Gordievsky denied everything and won a breathing space. Despite his constant shadows, he managed to contact British intelligence. He also jogged so regularly that his KGB tails eventually quit huffing after him. At 4 p.m. on Friday, July 19, he left his apartment dressed for running. He never returned. Taking a complicated route he is still keeping secret, he crossed the frontier. For the first time, a KGB officer identified as a Western mole had escaped from the U.S.S.R. Not without cost: to this day, his second wife Leila and their two daughters Anna and Maria are under guard in the U.S.S.R. and Gordievsky still occasionally dons a wig and false beard to thwart attempts on his life. The U.S. did not become the "Main Adversary" of the KGB until the end of World War II, but for some time it had been the state most vulnerable to Soviet penetration. Throughout the 1930s, intelligence gathering within America was a comparatively low priority for Moscow Center. It was chiefly interested in the U.S. as a base for operations against the more important targets of Japan and Germany. By the middle of the decade, however, several influential underground cells of the American Communist Party were in varying degrees of contact with Soviet intelligence and the Comintern, or Communist International. The main link between the party underground and Soviet intelligence was Whittaker Chambers, a Communist journalist who was instructed in 1932 to break overt contact with the party to conceal his affiliation. The next year he was sent to Moscow for intelligence training. On his return in 1934, Chambers became a courier between his Soviet controller and an underground cell in Washington founded by Harold Ware, an official in the Department of Agriculture and a Communist. Its other leading members, according to Chambers' later testimony, included John Abt, Lee Pressman, Charles Kramer and Alger Hiss, all in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Hiss's brother Donald at the State Department; Henry Collins and Victor Perlo of the National Recovery Administration; and Nathan Witt of the National Labor Relations Board. Chambers made Alger Hiss, the ablest member of that cell, the founder member of a "parallel apparatus" in 1935. Among other new agents who entered Chambers' net then were Harry Dexter White, a highflyer in the Treasury Department; George Silverman, a government statistician who probably recruited White; and Julian Wadleigh, an Oxford-educated economist at the State Department. Wadleigh later summed up the motivation of the moles: "When the Communist International represented the only world force effectively resisting Nazi Germany, I had offered my services to the Soviet underground in Washington as one small contribution to help stem the Fascist tide." In 1936, when his Soviet controller suggested that the members of the underground be offered money to "put them in a productive frame of mind," Chambers objected. But he did accept $1,000--then a considerable sum--to buy Bokhara rugs for his four most valuable agents: Hiss, White, Silverman and Wadleigh. Each was told that the rugs were "gifts from the Russian people to their American comrades." Hiss moved to the State Department in the autumn of 1936 and was soon delivering documents to Chambers at intervals of about a week or 10 days. Hiss covered his tracks so well that even Wadleigh had no idea that he was working for the Russians: "I regarded him as a very moderate New Dealer with strongly conservative instincts." The comparatively low priority given to intelligence collection in the U.S. was reflected in both the personnel and the lax methods employed. Spies were to be found socializing at each others' homes, visiting art galleries and playing table tennis together. One particularly inept agent, having been told either to burn documents or flush them down the toilet, did both: he crammed a mass of flaming papers into the toilet, setting the seat on fire. His puzzled landlord, surveying the damage, muttered to himself, "I don't see how that could possibly have happened." Chambers, increasingly disillusioned with Stalinism, broke all contact with the KGB in April 1938. After spending several months underground, he re-emerged in public as a writer and later senior editor for TIME magazine. Outraged, though not surprised, by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Chambers agreed to tell his story on Sept. 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of war, to Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State and a member of Roosevelt's Brain Trust. Berle assured Chambers that his information would go directly to the President and that he would not be penalized for cooperating; but he stopped short of promising immunity from prosecution. After their meeting, Berle drew up a four-page memorandum, titled "Underground Espionage Agents," that listed Alger Hiss, White and other leading Soviet agents for whom Chambers had acted as courier. Roosevelt was not interested. He seems simply to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his Administration as absurd. Equally remarkably, Berle did not send a report of his interview with Chambers to the FBI until the bureau requested it in 1943. Chambers' defection in 1938 inevitably disrupted KGB operations in Washington. White was the most senior of several agents who abruptly ceased supplying information. His wife, who did not share his communist sympathies, made him promise to give up espionage. The man who did most to resuscitate the Washington network of Soviet informants was Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, a government economist. Emotionally incapable of accepting the brutal reality of Stalinism, Silvermaster retained the untarnished idealism of the revolutionary dream. By Pearl Harbor he had gathered together a group of 10 government officials, including Lauchlin Currie, an administrative assistant to Roosevelt. Harry Dexter White did not join the group but provided intelligence directly to Silvermaster, who had coaxed him back probably soon after the outbreak of war. Silvermaster found him a timid man, reluctant for "his right hand to know what the left is doing," who hid the valuable Bokhara rug given him before the war in his attic. As the right-hand man of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, White had access to most of the Treasury's classified files and also to secret information exchanged with other government departments. The courier for the Silvermaster group from 1941 was Elizabeth Bentley, a 33-year-old Vassar graduate who had become an ardent anti-Fascist after a year in Mussolini's Italy. By 1943 she was carrying back to New York City in her knitting bag about 40 rolls of microfilm, averaging 35 exposures each, to be developed in the laboratory of the KGB residency. She considered the "most fruitful source" of the Silvermaster group's intelligence to be the Pentagon. To her inexperienced eye, it seemed that the group supplied "every conceivable piece of data on aircraft-production figures, charts showing allocation of planes to combat areas and foreign countries, performance data, new and secret developments in numberless fields." The KGB was doubtless particularly pleased by its penetration of the American intelligence community. This led to a staggering disproportion between what the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA, knew about the KGB and what the KGB knew about the OSS. At least seven members of the headquarters staff of the OSS were later identified as working for the KGB. The most important may have been Duncan Chaplin Lee, a descendant of General Robert E. Lee, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and a brilliant young lawyer in the firm of William Donovan. Soon after Donovan became head of the OSS in 1942, he made Lee his assistant. [In February 1945 the Allied powers, on the verge of victory, gathered in the Crimean resort of Yalta to map out the postwar world. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin went into that meeting with some invaluable, if unacknowledged, assistants. Alger Hiss had been actively engaged in preparations for the conference and was a member of the American delegation; two months later, in April 1945, he became temporary Secretary-General of the incipient United Nations. But he was by no means Moscow's only invisible asset.] Although Harry Dexter White was not present at Yalta, he had given Soviet negotiators some powerful assistance in the discussions that centered on reparations. White had already facilitated a concealed American subsidy to the Soviet Union. In 1944 he provided the KGB with samples of the occupation currency printed for use in postwar Germany. When Moscow subsequently asked for the plates, ink and paper samples to print notes of their own, the director of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving reasonably objected that "to permit the Russian government to print a currency identical to that being printed in this country would make accountability impossible." White prevailed by protesting that the Soviets would interpret a refusal as indicating a lack of confidence in their integrity. A week later, Moscow received the plates. The cost to the American taxpayer may have run into millions of dollars. White's position enabled him to take the leading part in formulating American policy for the international financial order of the postwar world. Together with Britain's Lord Keynes, he was the dominant figure at the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944, which drew up the blueprint for both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He became the first U.S. executive director of the IMF in 1945. Helped by the excellent intelligence available to him, Stalin scored several negotiating successes at Yalta--guaranteeing a Soviet-dominated Poland and a role for the Red Army in Japan's final collapse. He ended the conference in great good humor. At the final photo call he sought to entertain the Anglophones by jovially repeating his only four phrases of English: "You said it!" "So what?" "What the hell goes on round here?" and "The toilet is over there." In August 1945 Elizabeth Bentley, the courier for the Silvermaster group, became a double agent working for the FBI. Her defection led the bureau to investigate seriously for the first time Chambers' evidence of prewar Soviet espionage. Though the evidence necessary to secure conviction in a court of law was lacking for the great majority of Soviet agents identified, all ceased to be of significant use to the KGB. Of the four most important, Alger Hiss was placed under immediate surveillance by the FBI, left the State Department early in 1947 to become president of the Carnegie Endowment and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for perjury in 1950; Harry Dexter White had a fatal heart attack soon after giving evidence to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948; and Duncan Lee and Lauchlin Currie left the country. The faith in the Soviet millennium that had inspired thousands of talented young American idealists during the Depression and the Second World War had all but disappeared in the cold war generation. So far as is known, there have been no successors to agents of the caliber of Hiss, White, Lee or Currie. [As Moscow realized that the U.S. was actively engaged in building an atom bomb, Soviet espionage focused on acquiring the new technology. Klaus Fuchs, the first and probably most important of the "atom spies," was not the only Soviet agent working in 1944 on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. David Greenglass, a 22-year-old G.I. and dedicated Communist, had arrived a few days before him to work as a machinist.] The greatest potential threat to Moscow Center's postwar operations in the West came from a breach of cipher security. In 1948 Meredith Gardner, a brilliant U.S. code breaker, succeeded in decrypting fragments of KGB messages to and from the Center during the last year of the war. The discovery, code-named Venona, not only led to the downfall of Fuchs; it also provided the first clues that led to the arrest of Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel. A 1944 KGB message that was decrypted in February 1950 referred to an agent in a low-level job at Los Alamos. Other clues helped identify him as Ethel's brother David Greenglass, who admitted his own role and implicated his brother-in-law. Greenglass revealed in questioning (though it was never mentioned in public) that Julius had boasted to him of running a Soviet espionage network in New York that had provided not merely atomic secrets but also a wide range of other scientific intelligence, including preliminary studies for space satellites. The Rosenbergs eloquently, even movingly, protested their innocence to the end and exemplified the faith that Soviet Russia--or rather their own mythical image of it--represented the hope of mankind. On June 19, 1953, they became the only Soviet spies in the West to be executed. Both Julius and Ethel were dedicated, courageous Soviet agents who believed that they could best serve the future of their cause by denying their own association with it. Ever since their execution, KGB "active measures" [disinformation ploys to influence foreign opinion] have encouraged the belief that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of an anticommunist witch hunt. Skepticism about the Rosenbergs' guilt was encouraged by the U.S. government's refusal on security grounds to make any reference in court to Venona material. The secret was not to become public until the 1980s and even then was not officially acknowledged. No KGB campaign, however, encouraged belief in the innocence of the Rosenbergs as effectively as the leader of the witch hunt himself, Senator Joseph McCarthy. His crusade against the Red Menace helped make liberal opinion around the world skeptical of the reality of the Soviet intelligence offensive against the Main Adversary. The Secrets of the Grave Today the greatest threat to the future of the KGB is its own past. During the Stalinist era it directed the greatest peacetime persecution and the largest concentration camps in European history. In 1989, in the newly elected Congress of People's Deputies, Yuri Vlasov, a former Olympic weightlifting champion whose father had been arrested in 1953 and never returned, expressed the anger and the anguish: "The KGB is not a service but a real underground empire which has not yet yielded its secrets except for opening up the graves." The total number of victims of Stalin's purges may never be known with certainty, but in 1956, in response to a secret request from the Politburo, the KGB estimated that about 19 million had been arrested in the period 1935 to 1940, of whom at least 7 million were shot or died in the Gulag. The real death toll was probably higher still. [After Stalin's death in 1953, changes swept the KGB as well as the rest of the country. But for several years, the KGB continued to carry out assassinations abroad.] The KGB was successful in killing two leading Ukrainian emigres in West Germany in the late 1950s. Both killings had been authorized personally by Nikita Khrushchev and carried out by a young KGB assassin, Bogdan Stashinsky. The murder weapon, devised by the top-secret KGB weapons laboratory, was a spray gun that induced cardiac arrest by firing a jet of poison from a crushed cyanide ampule. Stashinsky tested the gun by taking a dog into a wood near Karlshorst, East Berlin, site of KGB headquarters in East Germany, tying it to a tree and firing at it. The dog had convulsions and died in a few moments. In December 1959 Stashinsky was given the Order of the Red Banner, praised "for carrying out an extremely important government assignment" and told that he was to spend three to five years in the West carrying out further assignments of the same kind. Like others before him, Stashinsky had second thoughts, and in August 1961 he defected to West Germany. After confessing to the earlier killings, he was put on trial at Karlsruhe and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment as an accomplice to murder. The main culprit, the judge declared, was the Soviet government, which had institutionalized political murder. Back in Moscow, an embarrassed Politburo abandoned assassination as a normal instrument of policy outside the Soviet bloc. [Among its allies, though, the Soviet Union felt no such constraint. Not only was violence widely applied to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, but Moscow also freely shared its expertise in terror with "fraternal" governments.] The KGB is no longer master of all of its own secrets. The democratic revolution in Eastern Europe confronts it with the embarrassing possibility that unwelcome revelations may escape from the files of its former Soviet-bloc allies. One secret whose discovery would surely worry the current KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, lies in the Bulgarian file on the 1978 murder of emigre writer Georgi Markov in London. Some months earlier, the Bulgarians had sought assistance in silencing such emigres, and the Center had made available the resources of the highly secret KGB laboratory. Kryuchkov, then head of the First Chief Directorate, personally approved the assignment of KGB General Sergei Golubev to work with the Bulgarians in the use of poisons that the laboratory had developed. At Golubev's request, the KGB in Washington purchased several umbrellas and sent them to the Center, where experts adapted the tips to enable them to inject the victim with a tiny metal pellet containing ricin, a highly toxic poison made from castor-oil seeds. Golubev then took the umbrellas to Sofia to instruct an assassin in their use. The first victim was Markov, who was able to report before he died that he had been bumped into by a stranger who apologized for accidentally prodding him with his umbrella. A tiny wound and the remains of a pellet scarcely larger than a pinhead were found in Markov's right thigh, but by the time of the autopsy the ricin had decomposed. With the 1978 election of Karol Cardinal Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II, Moscow Center grew concerned that the moral authority of a Polish Pope was beginning to eclipse that of the Polish government. Later, opinions in the Center were divided on whether the KGB had been involved in the attempt on the Pope's life in 1981. About half of those to whom Gordievsky spoke were convinced that an affair of that kind would no longer be contemplated, even indirectly through the Bulgarians. The other half, however, suspected that there had been some involvement; some said they only regretted that the attempt had failed. As Solidarity continued to rise in Poland, it was accepted within the Politburo that in the last resort the Soviet army would have to intervene. But Moscow was more reluctant to send in troops than the West realized. Not only would intervention destroy all prospect of detente and arms control for years to come, but the Center also predicted serious problems for Soviet occupying forces. The only solution, they concluded, was for the Polish army, in which the KGB had much greater confidence than it had in the party leadership, to mount a coup. The KGB's candidate to lead the coup was General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Politburo member and longtime Defense Minister. After much Soviet lobbying, Jaruzelski became party leader in October 1981. Final details were settled during secret talks in Warsaw with Kryuchkov and Marshal Viktor Kulikov, commander of the Warsaw Pact forces. Gordievsky was told that Jaruzelski twice asked Moscow for the go-ahead before launching the coup. Andropov and his Politburo colleagues finally managed to persuade the ailing Leonid Brezhnev that action could not be further delayed, and on Dec. 13, martial law was declared in Poland. Operation RYAN The world did not quite reach the edge of the nuclear abyss during a few chilling weeks in November 1983, but it came frighteningly close. The early 1980s saw the most dangerous period of East-West tension since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Moscow had expected the anti-Soviet campaign rhetoric of the victorious Republican candidate Ronald Reagan to mellow once he became President, much as Nixon's had done a decade earlier. Not until Reagan entered the White House in 1981 did the Kremlin fully grasp that his hostility to the Soviet Union derived not from campaign tactics but from deep conviction. Washington was convinced that the American deterrent had been placed in doubt because of the growth of Soviet military might in the 1970s. So the defense budget was increased in real terms by 10%, the MX missile and B-1 bomber were reinstated, and a tough line was set on arms control. But Reagan overlooked one dangerous Soviet vice: a tendency to paranoia in interpreting the West. His "Evil Empire" rhetoric combined with Moscow's paranoia about Western conspiracies to produce a potentially lethal mixture. In May 1981 KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov said in a secret speech during a KGB conference that the new American Administration was actively preparing for nuclear war. Accordingly the Politburo had decided that the overriding priority of foreign intelligence operations must be to collect information on the nuclear threat from the U.S. and NATO. To the astonishment of most of his audience, Andropov then announced that the KGB and the GRU [Soviet military intelligence] were for the first time to cooperate in a worldwide operation code-named RYAN (for raketno yadernoye napadeniye, or nuclear missile attack). Moscow Center's main American experts regarded Andropov's apocalyptic vision of the nuclear threat from the West as seriously alarmist. Still, instructions went out in November to KGB residents in all Western countries. The most detailed messages went to residents in NATO countries who were expected to make Operation RYAN the first priority of their "Work Plans for 1982." [Gordievsky left Moscow in June 1982 to take up his post in London. Within a few months, Brezhnev was dead, and Andropov had become General Secretary. Despite the skepticism Gordievsky detected among his colleagues, Operation RYAN moved into a higher gear.] In February 1982 residents in NATO capitals received directives giving further guidance on the Western nuclear threat. The deployment of Pershing II missiles in West Germany at the end of the year would, the Center claimed inaccurately, put Soviet targets only four to six minutes away--leaving the country's leaders without time even to reach their bunkers. The directive sent to London contained unintentional passages of deep black comedy that revealed terrifying gaps in the Center's understanding of Britain. An "important sign" of preparations for nuclear war would probably be "increased purchases of blood and a rise in the price paid for it" at donor centers. The FCD had failed to grasp that blood donation in Britain is voluntary. The instruction also conjured up a bizarre conspiracy: it urged residents to explore the possibility of obtaining advance warning of a holocaust from religious leaders and major bankers. Operation RYAN imposed a staggering work load on KGB residents in NATO countries. In London the residency was instructed to monitor the number of cars and lighted windows--before, during and after normal working hours--at all government buildings and military installations involved in preparations for nuclear war and to report immediately any deviations from the norm. It had to identify the routes, destinations and methods of evacuation of government officials and their families. All this was too much for the resident; the tiresome detailed observations required were delegated to a junior officer who did not even have the use of a car. At about the same time, Moscow Center instructed its three residencies in the U.S.--in Washington, New York City and San Francisco--to begin planning "active measures" to thwart Reagan's re-election in 1984. All residencies in NATO countries and many in other parts of the world were ordered to popularize the slogan "Reagan means war!" Any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, would be preferable to an incumbent who, they were convinced, considered a nuclear first strike a serious option. That conviction was reinforced in March 1983 when the Strategic Defense Initiative, "Star Wars," was launched. The rhetoric of SDI seemed to demonstrate Reagan's growing belief that the U.S. could win a nuclear war. Gordievsky and a colleague tried to persuade their boss in London that the Center's demands for intelligence on Western preparations for nuclear attack, which produced reporting on possible preparations, which then prompted further instructions from the Center, were dangerously raising tension in Moscow. A checklist of suspicious activities sent out under Kryuchkov's signature was largely a mirror image of Soviet intelligence's own contingency plans for war with the West. Among the signs to look for: "an increase in disinformation operations" directed against the U.S.S.R. and its allies; "secret infiltration of sabotage teams with nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons" into the Warsaw Pact; "expanding the network of subversion-training schools," making particular use of emigres from Eastern Europe; and an increase in "repressive measures by the punitive authorities" against progressive organizations and individuals. On Sept. 1, 1983, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner, KAL 007, that had strayed into their air space. Incompetence as well as disregard for human life brought about the tragedy. Gordievsky was told that eight of the 11 tracking stations in the area overflown by KAL 007 were not functioning properly. Some of those in the confused chain of command handling the intruder believed they were dealing not with a civilian aircraft but with one engaged in intelligence gathering. [The initial Soviet response to the downing of KAL 007 and the loss of 269 lives was denial, followed by an attempt to blame the Americans and South Koreans, an attempt most of Gordievsky's colleagues found laughable. But at the same time, Washington's handling of the crisis was seen by many as provocative and destabilizing. Those anxieties grew a few weeks later when, only hours after the White House labeled rumors of a U.S. invasion of Grenada "preposterous," American troops stormed the island.] Though well aware of the grotesque errors made in their air defense, much of the Soviet leadership convinced itself that KAL 007 had been on an intelligence mission. "The world situation," said Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko later that month, "is now slipping toward a very dangerous precipice." From his sickbed, a dying Andropov issued an apocalyptic denunciation of American policy unprecedented since the depths of the cold war. The U.S. was a "country where outrageous military psychosis is being imposed," he said. "The Reagan Administration, in its imperial ambitions, goes so far that one begins to doubt whether Washington has any brakes at all preventing it from crossing the mark before which any sober-minded person must stop." Operation RYAN now entered its most dangerous phase. On Nov. 2, NATO began an exercise code-named Able Archer 83, designed to practice nuclear-release procedures. Paranoia in the Center reached its peak. Because Soviet contingency plans for a surprise attack against the West envisaged using training exercises as cover for a real offensive, Moscow was haunted by the fear that this might be equally true of Western plans. Two features of Able Archer caused particular alarm: the procedures and message formats employed in the transition from conventional to nuclear warfare were quite different from those used in previous NATO exercises; and the imaginary NATO forces were moved through all the alert phases from normal readiness to general alert. Though there was no real alert involving any NATO troops, alarmist KGB reporting persuaded the Center that there was. On Nov. 8 or 9, 1983 (Gordievsky cannot recall which), flash telegrams were sent to both KGB and GRU residences in Western Europe reporting a nonexistent alert at U.S. bases. Although the Center admitted that concern for the security of U.S. bases might be the result of the Oct. 23 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut, the telegrams implied that there was another possible explanation: the beginning of preparations for a nuclear first strike. Surveillance teams around American bases in Europe reported changed patterns of officer movement and the observation by some bases of one hour's radio silence between 1800 and 1900 hours, Moscow time. In the tense atmosphere generated by the crises and rhetoric of the previous few months, the KGB concluded that American forces had really been placed on alert--and might even have begun the countdown to nuclear war. Another detailed checklist arrived in London. For the first time the Center revealed what it believed to be the time scale of the Western plan for a first strike: "It can be assumed that the period of time from the moment when the preliminary decision is taken, up to the order to deliver the strike, will be of very short duration, possibly seven to 10 days." During that brief interval before Armageddon, "preparations for the surprise attack would necessarily be reflected in the work pattern of those involved." Moscow also expected unusual activity at 10 Downing Street, large numbers of soldiers and armed police in the streets and the evacuation of the families of the American "political, economic and military elite" living in Britain. U.S. embassy and CIA staff were expected to stay behind in embassy bunkers. Although the alarm at Moscow Center eased slightly with the end of the NATO exercise, there was no immediate willingness to lower the priority of Operation RYAN. Moscow betrayed more of its bizarre misapprehensions when it suggested that the activities of banks, post offices and slaughterhouses be monitored. The Center's ideological blinkers persuaded officials that in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, capitalist states would regard the preservation of the banking system as one of their main priorities. Similarly, they believed the food industry had contingency plans for the mass slaughter of cattle whose meat would then be put into cold storage. After Andropov's death in February 1984, those KGB officers who were more concerned by the alarmism of the Center leadership than by any threat from the West were encouraged to note the emergence of a less paranoid interpretation of American and NATO policy. It is reasonable to assume some connection between Gordievsky's warnings to British intelligence of the Center's reaction to Able Archer and various attempts at indirect Western reassurance that followed. Among the members of the Politburo who followed the crisis generated by Soviet paranoia and American rhetoric was Mikhail Gorbachev. He cannot have failed to draw the conclusion that East-West detente was an urgent priority. No Politburo member between the beginning of Stalin's dictatorship and the dawn of the Gorbachev era ever really understood the West. Their ability to make sense of the political intelligence provided by the KGB was impaired by their own ideological blinders and an incurable addiction to conspiracy theory. In their dealings with the West they compensated for their lack of understanding with tactical shrewdness, ruthlessness, relentless striving to gain the upper hand and knowledge of some of the West's weak points provided by their diplomats and intelligence officers. In its efforts to become and remain a global superpower, however, the Soviet Union steadily built up a huge army of diplomats, intelligence officers, journalists and academics who gradually assembled a critical mass of information on the West, which eventually undermined some of the certainties of a system already decaying from within. A PATH OF DISILLUSION Gordievsky once attended a lecture in the Lubyanka [the KGB's notorious Moscow headquarters] by Alger Hiss's wartime controller, Iskhak Akhmerov. Instead of Hiss, the man Akhmerov identified as the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the U.S. was Harry Hopkins, the closest and most trusted adviser of President Roosevelt. So far as is known, Hopkins never discussed with anyone his occasional meetings with Akhmerov. Until revealed by Gordievsky, they remained unknown and unsuspected. Gordievsky later learned that the FCD's American experts thought Hopkins had been an agent of major significance. But he concluded that Hopkins had been only an unconscious agent. Akhmerov's technique had been to make the American believe he had a unique role to play. Hopkins' naivete about the KGB may have led him to believe Akhmerov had been enlisted to deliver personal messages from "Comrade Stalin" because of the Soviet leader's distrust of the diplomatic establishment. As an American patriot, Hopkins was no admirer of the Communist state. But he was convinced that Soviet-American friendship held the key to the postwar world. Contact with Akhmerov had been established before Hopkins' first visit to Moscow, which took place just after the German invasion in June 1941. Stalin realized that Hopkins' unqualified support was of decisive importance in the development of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. The Western envoy was given a reception of unprecedented warmth; his personal bomb shelter came fully equipped with champagne, caviar, chocolate and cigarettes. During their daily meetings, Hopkins came to feel an extraordinary admiration for Stalin. As for Stalin, he once said Hopkins was the first American who had spoken to him po dusham (from the soul). The Soviets had plenty of reason to feel that the relationship with the U.S. was flourishing. At the Big Three meeting in Tehran in November 1943, the Soviet Union was allowed to recover the ill-got gains of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact--eastern Poland, the Baltic states and part of Romania. And after the 1945 Yalta conference, Hopkins proclaimed his admiration for Stalin's genius: "There wasn't any doubt in the minds of the President or any of us that we could live with the Russians peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine." After Roosevelt's death, Akhmerov helped persuade Hopkins that he had once again a crucial role to play, and President Truman sent him to Moscow. Meeting with Stalin on May 26, 1945, Hopkins attributed the Americans' loss of faith in cooperation with the Soviets to problems implementing the Yalta agreement on Poland. The U.S., he said, would accept any Polish government that was both desired by the people and friendly to the Soviet Union. Hopkins apparently failed to grasp the embarrassing truth that no Polish government could be both. The two agreed to a token enlargement of the Communist-dominated provisional government; free elections were put to one side. Truman welcomed the agreement as a way to patch up the wartime alliance, and it survived the final Big Three meeting at Potsdam in the summer of 1945. But as the evidence of Soviet abuse of human rights in Eastern Europe became increasingly difficult to ignore, even Hopkins' faith crumbled. He died in January 1946, a partly disillusioned man. TAKING CARE OF A FRIEND Moscow initially turned a blind eye in September 1979 when Afghan President Noor Muhammad Taraki, the Brezhnev-backed leader who had come to power in a coup the year before, was murdered by his Deputy Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin. But the KGB predicted disaster. Its resident in Kabul was reporting bitter opposition to Amin from Islamic leaders, threats of mutiny from the army and imminent economic collapse. An early attempt to poison Amin failed. As the situation deteriorated, the residency predicted that unless he was removed, the Communist regime would be replaced by an anti-Soviet Islamic one. Both the KGB's First Chief Directorate and the Foreign Ministry feared the international consequences of an invasion, but when the Politburo voted, the decisive argument was the prospect that Islamic fundamentalism, following its victory in Iran the year before, might triumph across the border in Afghanistan. On the evening of Dec. 27, an assault group of KGB commandos, led by a Colonel Boyarinov, left Kabul airport in the direction of the presidential palace. All were dressed in Afghan uniforms and traveled in military vehicles bearing Afghan markings. Boyarinov led the assault on the palace and, after Amin and his mistress had been shot in a bar on the top floor, he decreed that no witnesses be left alive. In the course of the operation, the Colonel, still in Afghan uniform, was mistakenly shot by his own troops. Babrak Karmal, a longtime KGB agent backed by the Center, took over, and what remained of detente was destroyed. THE STRONG GRIP OF THE KGB [The importance Gorbachev attached to the work of the First Chief Directorate became apparent in 1988 when he appointed its head, Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB. It was the first time the top job had gone to a chief of foreign intelligence.] The suppression of the Hungarian revolution made the reputation of a new generation of KGB leaders. In 1954 Vladimir Kryuchkov, then 31, arrived in Budapest and became a protege of Ambassador Yuri Andropov. After five years in Hungary, he followed Andropov to the Central Committee and soon mastered party politics and personal intrigue. When Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, Kryuchkov headed his secretariat and became custodian of the organization's most sensitive secrets. He was appointed head of the FCD in 1974, where he displayed enormous energy, single-mindedness and self-confidence, combined with administrative skill and political flair. He was also a humorless workaholic. In Gordievsky's experience, he never strayed from his prepared texts at meetings, never tried to coin a striking phrase, never showed any sign of a sense of humor. A fitness fanatic as well, Kryuchkov had the unnerving habit when talking to FCD officers of using hand exercisers or squeezing tennis balls to strengthen his grip. He had his own private gymnasium, complete with a massage table, constructed in the new headquarters. Next to the gym was a personal sauna where he sometimes had discussions with other senior KGB officers. Once, while on night duty, Gordievsky was shown around the sauna by a member of the director's secretariat. It was the most luxurious sauna he had seen, with the best that hard currency could buy: expensive wood imported from Finland; elegant, specially designed Scandinavian fittings and lamps; a large array of imported fluffy towels and dressing gowns. Despite these lavish appointments, the adjacent dining area had no drinks cupboard. The teetotal Kryuchkov caused dismay in the traditionally bibulous FCD by banning drinking parties for officers about to take up foreign postings. But the director's main handicap was his complete lack of personal experience of intelligence operations and life in the West. When he and Gordievsky first met in 1972, Kryuchkov derived his views from a series of ideologically based stereotypes and conspiracy theories. Those views began to soften only in the late 1980s. By 1987 Kryuchkov had grasped that the traditional conspiracy theories needed to be toned down and had grown close to Gorbachev. The Soviet leader took the unprecedented step of having his foreign intelligence chief accompany him on his first trip to Washington, though Kryuchkov traveled incognito. </body> </article> </text>