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October 18, 2006

Soviet-Era Intelligence & Ideology II

Part II: How the Soviets Used Intelligence Tools to Keep the State Viable

 

 

This blog will be departing from the usual this weekend as it publishes a two-part essay on Soviet-era intelligence.

 

This is the second part of a two-part essay on Russian intelligence. The previous part covered the role of ideology in the recruitment of soviet agents juxtaposed against the ideological climate of the evolving Soviet empire and its satellites across the globe. Today’s post will deal with how and to what degree the Soviet Union used intelligence-gathering methods and counterintelligence to maintain viability for the State as well as to project that viability before its adversaries.

 

This is an adapted form of an academic work I previously published this year. The scope is deliberately narrow to focus on a few key aspects of a much broader discussion on the sundry aspects of Soviet intelligence, and culls information largely from Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin’s first joint effort, The Sword and the Shield, following a theme of recent posts on this blog (though information was also gathered elsewhere and directly cited, where possible).

 

 

 

 

There are, as most historians note, many ways in which the Soviet Union excelled in utilizing its espionage and intelligence capabilities in maintaining at least the appearance of viability to the world. While we generally agree now the Soviets were having serious trouble keeping their heads above water in several areas pertaining to maintaining the ship of state, they nonetheless performed this fantastic feat well over half a century. During this time the USSR extended its tentacles to nearly every region of the world, pushing and pulling information to help it project itself a powerful, stable, and growing state, while constantly gauging the nature of power of its opponents (and perceived opponents) and while looking for methods of imitating or stealing from every source it could assets of real advantage. In short, the Soviet Union was both the old, miserable asthmatic man given to insane rantings by day and the fiendish bedeviler who would secret out and commit theft, vandalism, and destroy police cars at night before sneaking back into his squalid flat even as most authorities denied his involvement was even possible if likely (and if likely, then for purely reactionary motives against those who conspired against him).

 

The Soviet Union was not unlike contemporary communist states, though its contemporaries have not completely imitated Soviet methods, perhaps since some of what made Sovietism what it was may have been strictly Russian in the broader sense. The bureaucratic machinery which ran often so inefficiently was nonetheless a success in the grandeur of its scale and its prolonged defiance of the basic laws of political physics. It was this apparatus, particularly in the area of espionage and intelligence which both granted the Soviets stunning successes in world affairs prior to and during the Cold War (though where those successes occurred certainly shifted somewhat) and paved a way for the semi-nascent espionage political class which has risen to run Russia today. And fitting that this be, for it was Lenin’s Chekists which carried the grand Russian tradition of state-snooping over from the era of the Czarist Okhrana and to what finally became the KGB, brutality and paranoia fully intact if not greatly improved upon. As Christopher Andrew noted in The Sword and the Shield, “Throughout [KGB defector] Mitrokhin’s career, KGB historians continued to interpret all plots and attacks against the young Soviet regime as ‘manifestations of a unified conspiracy’ by its class enemies at home and the ‘imperialist powers’ abroad” (Andrew & Mitrokhin, p. 27).

 

But it was just this paranoia – much like the insanity of young lovers – which drove Soviet intelligence to unbelievable and unprecedented lengths and depths (along with the fear among agents of losing their heads).  By the 1930s, the NKVD had established a network of agents in every major European capital – most importantly Britain, Germany, and France, as well as other parts on the map from the Far East to the Americas. This was the era of the Great Illegals, “a diverse group of remarkably talented individuals (brought in to target countries under false papers) who collectively transformed OGPU (and by 1934 NKVD) agent recruitment and intelligence collection” (Andrew & Mitrokhin, p. 42). Out of these would emerge the infamous Magnificent Five, recruited by Austrian communist Arnold Deutsch. The Five went on to penetrate various areas of British government including the helm of the counter-Soviet Section IX of Britain's MI6. Much like an open drain, the illegals sucked secrets out to the British at such a rate that it was noted that Stalin knew of many of Britain’s most secret projects well-before many of the highest in British leadership would become privy. Such secrets included the strategies laid out between Churchill and Roosevelt prior to their meeting with Stalin at Yalta, and of course the Tube Alloys project.

 

After World War II, the illegals began to fade in their effectiveness largely as the result of Stalin’s ideological purges earlier and throughout the 1930s and 40s, where most were literally wiped out. As their numbers continued to fell however, Lubyanka found it hard to replace them. This was in large part due to the US and Britain now working to countermand Soviet espionage particularly in their own countries, while at the same time the veneer of the altruistic Soviet illusion began to fade in the face of a constant procession of reality escaping through the vents of what Churchill coined as the Iron Curtain. The latter of course partly because of better Western intelligence efforts and partly because of word of mouth from escaping dissidents. But the collapse of the illegals program was never complete in the West (it also continued to thrive in the Third World) and its diminished status certainly did not arrive before those illegals – still celebrated by SVR in Lubyanka today – in the US and particularly those exploiting S&T were able to stage their greatest triumph (and by all means the Soviet Union's greatest triumph): the stealing of the atomic bomb from the Manhattan and Tube Alloys projects.

 

Though the Soviets never gave up trying to restart the wildly successful illegals program, they also were not reluctant to accept new types of opportunities – such as those offered by opportunists chasing a quick profit. This lead eventually for CCCP to another one of its most stunning successes against the United States during the Cold War through the use of double-agents – such as CIA turncoat Aldrich Hazen Ames, who betrayed several agents working for the US including the double-agent working for the US Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, who unlike others, managed to escape the Soviets with his life.

 

Another tool of Soviet espionage Außenpolitik was the building of satellite states not just within the Warsaw Pact region, but also in Africa, Asia (in cooperation with China), and most importantly in the Caribbean and the Americas, where agents and agent provocateurs could be easily dispatched to Western States drawing less attention. This was often begun by sending Soviet agents (often illegals) to Third World states and helping directly or indirectly to foment revolution. Therafter, the Soviet Union or one of its satellites would provide advisors to help the new regimes to export revolution to yet the next domino as well as aid in Soviet esionage work agains the West directly. The latter was preferred in controntations which otherwise would have been too direct for the Soviet Union to participate for fear of full-scale East-West war.

 

Along similar prolific lines during this time was the Soviet use of “active measures”, its campaign to infiltrate and influence Western media and information dissemination to the public and their officials, while on the defensive end, using “progress” operations to prevent the spread of ideologically undesirable information and ideas in the Soviet bloc. In the latter, agents often infiltrated private and government organizations or posed as Western agents in hopes of snaring those engaged in various outlawed activities both political and religious. A key part of this counterintelligence state machine was how it maintained order in the face of obvious economic failure (obvious, at least, to those living or who had lived within the bloc) and endless, ethnic, religious, and even political fragmentation within its territories. Again here, both SIGINT and HUMINT were liberally used, without regard for human cost. Officials successfully managed to penetrate even relatively benign communist organizations considered heretical to the Kremlin, most notably the Trotskyites and quasi-dissident communist governments in Tito’s Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, and, in some sense Romania, among others. And if Trotsky were to face the bullet, truly un-communist or anti-communist groups faced even worse. Non communist political groups, religious institutions, and every non-political entity was infiltrated with KGB or local subordinates to spy on and manipulate the directions of those organizations in a more “politically correct” orientation. Again, dissidents were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and executed. Ironically, it may well have been the degree of success to which all of this took place that caused populations and local governments to weary and eventually throw off their suffocating oppressors. It may have simply been too much and have gone too far. 

 

Like all communist states, the USSR was a living contradiction. It spent billions on a military and in many ways successful intelligence apparatus to sustain a political system based on an economic ideology which was a proven failure, whose possession of nuclear arms was in spite of, not as the result of its greatness in much the same way as North Korea today. It thus undercut any intellectual honesty in the entire pursuit – and fought brutally to keep up appearances even among its own ranks. Far from having created any form of ptochocracy, it becomes no longer avoidable that the purpose of the Revolution was simply to replace one set of tyrannical ruling elites with another; ideology merely an “opiate” to control the masses. The state then was reduced as the façade began to crumble. This, combined with the economic realities of macro centralized planning lead to inevitable implosion. And so what one witnesses at the end of the day is what happened with the commonwealth of Soviet states juxtaposed the image of grand strategies of foreign involvement and espionage, space flights, and bright red processions in lock step marching through Red Square. Indeed, the more we know of this strange sight, the more paradoxical it becomes. We watched with wide eyes as young Finnish boys in single engine airplanes glided right in to the heart of Moscow, past the Soviet air forces, The Supreme Soviet, St. Basil’s Cathedral, the contributively effusively ruddy Trinity Tower, and the imposing Ministry of Foreign Affairs, landing where those armies, tanks, and missile launchers paraded before woolen leaders and their captive and hungry audience. This may partly be why Nazi Germany – and today’s communist China have looked and look to moderate economic socialism with some degree of monetary liberty despite remaining otherwise faithful to their genus known for its political militancy and brutally strict totalitarian one-party socialism.

 

It is unclear whether Russia has learned its lesson (or even the correct lesson) fully, however. Russian elites are a stubborn lot, and there is little doubt that still today Russian intelligence is a key component in keeping the State viable and arguably on a non-democratic course as it puts down opponents internally (such as Vladimir Khodorkovsky and journalist Anna Politkovskaya) and externally as it seeks partnerships with opponents of the West. It is partly that stubbornness that both enables life in Siberian winters and devotion to Moscow among spies who in Stalin’s time weren’t so sure they would live to spy another day. It is what enables the old man to still get out of bed and do his mischief in the dark of night while the world still struggles to finger him a culprit, and this likely will be the case for a while given the current political climate in Washington, the arrangement of permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and most importantly, a lack of significant push-back by the Russian people.

 

 

 

 

References

 

Dorril, Stephen. (2000). MI6: Inside The Covert World of Her Majesty’s

Secret Intelligence Service. New York: Touchstone.

Andrew, Christopher & Mitrokhin, Vasili. (1999). The Sword and the

Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.

 New York: Basic Books.

Voronova, Zhanna. (2006, Feb. 14). GAZ marks 30^th anniversary of first

Soviet limo. RIA Novosti. Retrieved Oct. 09, 2006, from      

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20060214/43544533.html

Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia. (2006, Oct. 08). Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Retrieved Oct. 09, 2006, from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengistu_Haile_Mariam

 

 

 

Posted by Martin at October 18, 2006 05:45 PM

Comments

Posted by: Debbie at October 18, 2006 10:55 PM

Posted by: Angel at October 19, 2006 12:02 AM