The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume II: The KGB And The World

[Ryan Ruck]

The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume II: The KGB And The World

The scruffy visitor with dynamite secrets

On April 9, 1992, a scruffy 70-year-old Russian arrived in the capital of a newly-independent Baltic state by the overnight train from Moscow for a pre-arranged meeting at the British Embassy with officers of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6). He began by producing a passport that identified him as Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, former senior archivist in the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate of the KGB. SIS then took the unprepossessing secret photograph of him that The Times publishes today for the first time.

Mitrokhin had made his first visit to the embassy a month earlier, when he arrived pulling a battered case on wheels and wearing the same shabby clothes. Used to the male-dominated world of Soviet diplomacy, he was surprised that the Russian-speaking British diplomat who met him was a young woman. He rummaged beneath the sausages, bread, drink and clothes he had packed for his journey, pulled out a large wodge of paper and told her it was top-secret material he had copied from the KGB archives.

And there the story could easily have ended. The diplomat might well have dismissed Mitrokhin as a down-at-heel asylum-seeker trying to sell bogus secrets. Instead, she asked him a question that changed his life (and mine): “Would you like a cup of tea?” While Mitrokhin drank his first cup of English tea, she read some of his notes, quickly grasped their potential importance, and arranged for him to return a month later to meet SIS officers from its London headquarters.

At his meeting with SIS Mitrokhin produced another 2,000 pages from his private archive and told the extraordinary story of how, while supervising the ten-year-long transfer of the foreign intelligence (FCD) archive from its overcrowded offices in central Moscow to new headquarters just beyond the outer ringroad, he had daily smuggled out handwritten notes and extracts from the files and hidden them beneath his family dacha. The material showed that he had access to even the holy of holies in the FCD archives: files that revealed both the real identities and the bogus “legends” of the elite corps of deep-cover KGB “illegals” stationed around the world disguised as foreign nationals.

On November 7, 1992, the SIS spirited Mitrokhin, his family and his entire archive, packed in six large containers, out of Russia to Britain in a remarkable operation whose details still remain secret.

The FBI has called the Mitrokhin archive “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source”. In the view of the CIA it is “the biggest counter-intelligence bonanza of the postwar period”. The all-party British Intelligence and Security Committee has revealed that other Western (and some non-Western) intelligence agencies have also been “extremely grateful” for numerous leads from the Mitrokhin archive.

As well as containing extraordinary detail on KGB operations in the West and the Soviet bloc (the subject of the first volume which I wrote in collaboration with Vasili Mitrokhin, who died last year), his archive contains much new material on KGB operations in the rest of the world.

Though no historian of the Cold War would nowadays dream of ignoring the role of the CIA in the Third World, most still make little, if any, mention of the even more important role of the KGB. The result has been a curiously lopsided history of the secret Cold War in the developing world — the intelligence equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.

As The Mitrokhin Archive II seeks to show, for a quarter of a century the KGB, unlike the CIA, believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War. From the establishment of the alliance with Castro’s Cuba (optimistically codenamed Bridgehead by the KGB) to the disastrous decision to invade Afghanistan 20 years later (which began with the KGB assassination of President Hafizullah Amin), it was usually the KGB rather than the Foreign Ministry that took the lead in the Third World.

Even in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan the most able and longest-serving of all KGB chiefs, Yuri Andropov (soon to succeed Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader), was confident that his strategy was working.

He told his Vietnamese counterpart in 1980: “The Soviet Union is not merely talking about world revolution but actually assisting it.” Over the previous few years, he declared, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan had all been “liberated” — in other words acquired Marxist-Leninist regimes. Though the KGB won a series of short-term Third-World victories, its operations contained a strong element of fantasy. Brezhnev’s preposterous vanity had to be fed not merely by more medals than those of all previous Soviet leaders combined but also by adulation from around the world, some of it manufactured by the KGB.

The successes of intelligence collection were undermined by the poor quality of intelligence analysis. The KGB was expected to tell Soviet leaders what they wanted to hear. It thus fed them carefully sanitised intelligence.

There is no more convincing evidence of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” in foreign policy when he became Soviet leader in 1985 than his denunciation of the traditional bias of intelligence reporting. The fact that KGB HQ had to issue stern instructions to its officers at the end of 1985 “on the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs” is a damning indictment of its previous subservience to the political correctness demanded by the Soviet one-party state.

Lure of the West

Though the KGB tended to exaggerate the success of its active measures, they appear to have been on a larger scale than those of the CIA.

By the early 1980s there were about 1,500 Indo-Soviet Friendship Societies, compared with only two Indo-American Friendship Societies. The Soviet leadership seems to have drawn the wrong conclusions from this apparently spectacular, but in reality somewhat hollow, success.

American popular culture had no need of friendship societies to secure its dominance over that of the Soviet bloc. No subsidised film evening in an Indo-Soviet Friendship Society could hope to compete with the appeal of Hollywood or Bollywood. Similarly, few Indian students, despite their widespread disapproval of US foreign policy, were more anxious to win scholarships to universities in the Soviet bloc than in the US.

[Ryan Ruck]

Castro Requested Soviet Missiles In 1981, Book Says

Nineteen years after the Cuban missile crisis nearly sparked a nuclear war, Fidel Castro asked the Soviet Union to redeploy atomic weapons to his island, says a new book based on reports by Moscow's KGB intelligence agency.

The book, based on documents revealed by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin when he defected in 1992, makes other bombshell allegations as it tracks KGB operations around the Third World in the 1960s and '70s:

• The KGB documents record actual and proposed payments to Chile's Salvador Allende totaling $420,000 both before and after his election as president in 1970.

• Costa Rica's José ''Pepe'' Figueres received $300,000 from the KGB for his 1970 presidential campaign and $10,000 afterward.

• Carlos Fonseca, founder of Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front, was ''a trusted KGB agent'' code-named GIDROLOG.

• Nicaraguan Manuel Andara y Ubeda was a KGB agent who led a group of Sandinistas tasked by Moscow in the late 1960s to scope out the U.S. border with Mexico for possible targets for KGB sabotage teams.

• The KGB ''trained and financed'' the Sandinistas who seized the National Palace in Managua and dozens of hostages in 1978. A senior KGB official was briefed on the plan on the eve of the raid, led by Edén Pastora, also known as Commander Zero.

Pastora could not be reached for comment. The book does not refer to him as a KGB agent. All the agents identified by name in the book are now dead.

Mitrokhin and respected British historian Christopher Andrew first collaborated on a 1999 book about KGB operations against the United States and Europe. That book is now regarded by intelligence experts as the definitive work on the topic.

Their new book, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, covers KGB operations in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa -- the Third World that Moscow believed it could come to dominate after Cuban President Castro embraced communism and became a beacon for leftists worldwide.

Its most startling revelation about Cuba is that Castro, concerned that President Ronald Reagan was planning to attack Cuba in 1981, urged a senior Soviet army general visiting Havana to counter the deployment of U.S. cruise missiles to Europe.

''Castro made the extraordinary proposal that, if the deployment went ahead, Moscow should seriously reconsider reestablishing the nuclear missile bases in Cuba dismantled after the missile crisis 19 years earlier,'' it says. The book does not elaborate or record the Soviet reaction.

'SEIZE THE INITIATIVE'

''Classic Castro,'' said Brian Latell, a retired CIA analyst on Cuba. ``Always seize the initiative. Always go on the offensive to surprise the enemy -- never mind that the Soviets were never ever going to consider that.''

But not surprising, Latell added, because Fidel's brother Raúl has said publicly that in the early 1980s, Moscow told Havana that it would not protect Cuba in case of hostilities with the United States.

Mitrokhin's archives show that the KGB provided virtually no support to Castro before his guerrillas seized power in 1959. But just three months later, it gave Cuba the code name AVANPOST -- bridgehead -- and cemented better relations with Havana than the Soviet diplomats stationed there had.

Even then, the KGB never stopped snooping. Besides its official presence in Havana, it ran a secret branch to spy on Cuba that in 1974 alone sent 269 reports to Moscow, the book adds.

Other KGB reports describe Raúl Castro, on a 1960 arms-buying trip to Czechoslovakia, as `` sleeping with his boots on and demanding the services of blonde prostitutes.''

'IMPORTANT' CONTACT

The book describes Allende as ''by far the most important of the KGB's confidential contacts in South America,'' because he was a democratically elected Marxist and Castro's ally. In KGB lexicon, a confidential contact is more like a friendly source, not an agent.

But Allende's KGB file says the agency maintained ''systematic contact'' with him since 1961, the book adds. One report says, ``He stated his willingness to cooperate on a confidential basis . . . since he considered himself a friend of the Soviet Union.''

So while the Nixon administration and CIA were working diligently to prevent his election in 1970, and to oust him afterward, the KGB also was working hard to put him and keep him in power, the book says.

Mitrokhin and Andrew also wrote that while president, Allende offered a KGB officer to send his trusted aides around the region to investigate and report on issues to the KGB. Allende died in the 1973 coup that toppled him.

Only about 130 of the book's 677 pages are devoted to Latin America -- from more innocent KGB contacts with other Latin American leaders to previously known Soviet weapons shipments to Salvadoran guerrillas.

On Costa Rica's Pepe Figueres, the book says that after his election he met regularly with the KGB chief in San José, rather than the Soviet ambassador, and agreed to a deal involving a small newspaper he ran.

A 1974 KGB report to Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev said this: ``In view of the fact that Figueres has agreed to publish materials advantageous to the KGB, he has been given 10,000 U.S. dollars under the guise of stock purchases in his newspaper.''

DID THEY KNOW?

Although the book does not say explicitly whether Allende and Figueres knew that their money was coming from the KGB, Andrew argued in an e-mail to The Herald that they surely knew.

''Allende knew well before he became president, and Figueres by 1970 at the latest, that they were dealing with a KGB officer rather than someone they assumed to be a Soviet diplomat or journalist,'' Andrew wrote in the e-mail.

``Allende's KGB case officer, Svyatoslav Kuznetsov, reported to Moscow that Allende reacted positively to his suggestions for reorganizing Chilean intelligence and establishing liaison with the KGB. Figueres took elaborate precautions to preserve the secrecy of his regular meetings with the KGB resident.''

[Ryan Ruck]

KGB Tried To Incite A War Between India and Pakistan In 1981

NEW DELHI: As former KGB spy Vasili Mitrokhin’s revelations continue to shock India, new documents have revealed that the Soviet spy agency tried its best to incite a war between India and Pakistan in 1981. The Soviet agency also toyed with the idea of setting up an Azad Kashmir state independent of Pakistan and India and the formation of a free Baluchistan government-in-exile.

The KGB resident in Delhi proposed that another war between India and Pakistan would be advantageous for the Soviet Union and the Babrak Karmal regime in Afghanistan, suggesting that both countries “must be steered in that direction”. These documents were not part of Christopher Andrew’s recently published ‘The Mitrokhin Archive’, but are included in a paper that Mitrokhin presented in 2002 to the Cold War International History Project (CWIH) based in Washington. India’s largest circulated weekly ‘Outlook’ accessed these documents at the CWIH.

According to the paper, the idea behind provoking an India-Pakistan war was to distract international attention from Soviet activities in Afghanistan. The suggestion to work towards precipitating a new war between India and Pakistan was seriously considered, Mitrokhin said. Prokhorov, the KGB resident in Delhi, said to be the working alias of Gennadiy Afanasyevich Vaumin, put the idea forward. Operation ‘Torkham’ was then launched to, among other things, “deepen disagreements between India and Pakistan on existing issues of dispute.”

According to Mitrokhin, another KGB outfit called the Chukhrov Working Group, “also considered the question of creating a new irritant - the setting up an Azad Kashmir independent of Pakistan and India, and the formation of a free Baluchistan government-in-exile from Afghanistan.” But this proposal was postponed “in view of the extreme complexity and uncertainty of many aspects of the situation.”

The 2002 Mitrokhin report points to some specific instances of the use of Indian journalists by the KGB. “Through their agents, the KGB residents in Delhi and Colombo established channels for conveying First Chief Directorate Service A (KGB’s foreign intelligence wing) information directly to highly-placed officials in India,” the report says. “In Delhi, agent Vano, who was a journalist, passed information to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In September 1981, he was sent to Pakistan.”

Mitrokhin claimed that highly confidential papers, which he had access to in the KGB archives, said that “the KGB actively carried out joint measures with the Hungarians, who were in operational contact with a prominent Indian journalist in Vienna. They supplied him with KGB disinformation, which he published in the press under his own name.”

In Colombo, the Mitrokhin report says, “a Sri Lankan journalist had access to the Indian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, T Sri Abraham. Thus, at a regular meeting on January 10, 1981, the agent passed on to Abraham information on a 20-year US plan to establish its hold in the Indian Ocean. Abraham said he would discuss this information with E Gonsalvez, the secretary of the Indian ministry of foreign affairs, who was due to visit Sri Lanka on 12 January.”

[vector7]

Companion Thread: Russian Espionage in the United States

Russian arms caches still hidden across Britain, says historian

Date July 8, 2014

Ben Farmer

London: Booby-trapped caches of weapons are probably still hidden around Britain after being concealed during the Cold War by Soviet agents preparing for conflict, a leading historian has said.

Details of how clandestine stockpiles of small arms and communications gear were hidden across Europe are disclosed in a KGB intelligence archive made public for the first time.

The trove of files copied down by a KGB archivist called Vasili Mitrokhin over a 12-year period before he defected in 1992 is considered one of the most invaluable intelligence sources of the Cold War and provides a detailed insight into Soviet spy operations.

Nineteen of 33 box files containing his notes are being opened to the public at Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. Mitrokhin's notes provide detailed descriptions of weapons caches hidden outside major European cities for use by agents operating abroad should tensions escalate into a conflict.

Professor Christopher Andrew, a historian and friend of Mitrokhin who has written two books on the archive, said caches were hidden around most major cities.

Some of the caches hidden around Europe have since been uncovered and, although the archive provides no details of hidden weapons in Britain, many are almost certainly here, he said.

He added: "Given that Britain was second only to the United States in terms of importance to the Soviets at this time, it would be remarkable if this tactic wasn't deployed here. Of course by now they would not be easy to find and it is unlikely the weapons would be serviceable."

Describing one stash near Berne, Switzerland, Mitrokhin, who died in 2004, provides directions to a chapel near a farm: "After taking 36 steps, you will be at the point between two large leafy trees, the only ones in the sector.

"The distance between the trees is three paces. The area between the trees has been used for the cache."

Another note provides instructions on how to disarm explosive booby-traps on the caches.

Mitrokhin defected in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union, bringing more than 25,000 pages of secret files to the British embassy.

"Once there, he opened his suitcase, revealing the documents along with his dirty underpants and food he had packed for the journey and asked to speak to somebody in authority," Professor Andrew said.

Once the value of his offer became clear, he and his family were brought to Britain.

His duties with the KGB had included overseeing the transfer of the agency's archive to a new location, meaning he had unlimited access to thousands of files from a global network of spies and intelligence gathering operations.

Disenchanted with the Soviet regime, he began making copies and extraordinarily detailed notes. At first he would screw his notes into tiny balls to smuggle them out in his shoe but soon realised that his position meant he could not be searched so he could simply slip them into his pocket.