Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

35. THE KGB

By the late forties Sakharov was working with Igor Kurchatov on the design of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, made possible in part because of the KGB’s spying on the Manhattan Project in the United States. By 1950 the young scientist and hero of the people had moved to the development of the hydrogen bomb, which was successfully tested in 1953—several months before he had even earned his doctorate, which was given to him at the same time he was awarded the first of his three Hero of Socialist Labor medals.

Two years later he developed the first hydrogen bomb in the megaton range using his own design, which in 1961 led to the test of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb—the largest man-made explosion ever.

About that same time he developed an old Russian idea for what’s called the tokamak, which is a way to control plasma in a nuclear fusion reactor, still in use around the world today.

He was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, came up with the idea of induced gravity as an alternative to quantum mechanical gravity, and was awarded another Hero of Socialist Labor medal.

All this by the time he was forty years old.

But then Russia’s most famous and brilliant scientist came up against the KGB, and it was no contest.

Around the late fifties, Sakharov began to worry about the moral implications of his work on nuclear weapons designs. After all, he reasoned, big hydrogen bombs were only useful for one thing—destroying major cities such as New York or Washington, Moscow or Leningrad, in one blow. There were no peaceful uses for the hellish devices.

By the early sixties he came out publicly against nuclear proliferation, by 1963 he had become a major player in the Partial Test Ban Treaty signed in Moscow, and by 1965 he pulled completely out of nuclear weapons research and turned his energies to the study of cosmology—how the universe came into being and how it worked.

None of this endeared him to the leaders in the Kremlin. Even as he was being awarded his third Hero of Socialist Labor medal, talks at the highest levels centered on the question of what to do with Sakharov.

Two things happened then to seal his fate. The first came in 1967 when the idea of an antiballistic missile defense system started to become a big issue in Soviet-U.S. relations. In a secret letter to the Kremlin in July, he wrote that the Americans had to be taken at their word that they would never launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, so a fabulously expensive, nation-bankrupting antiballistic missile defense was not necessary.

Otherwise, he argued, an arms race for this new technology would almost certainly increase the possibility of all-out nuclear war.

He asked for permission to publish his views in newspapers, but of course the Kremlin refused. In fact, they ignored him. But the decorated hero of the nation was not about to give up, and neither was the KGB.

In May he wrote an essay, Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, in which he argued that an antiballistic missile defense system would pose a major threat to increase the chances of nuclear war. It was first circulated in the Soviet Union as a samizdat publication, which amounted to mimeographed copies passed hand to hand in the underground. Even worse than that, however, a copy reached the outside world and was published for everyone to read.

The KGB had enough, and it struck back, immediately canceling his security clearances and banning him from all military-related research.

Unbowed, Sakharov founded the Moscow Human Rights Committee, and the KGB began tailing his friends, opening his mail, and monitoring his phone calls.

He married Yelena Bonner, who was another human rights activist, and the KGB began spreading vicious rumors about him, trying to drag down his moral character in the public eye.

In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, but the KGB revoked his external passport, and his wife had to go to Stockholm to read his acceptance speech.

By 1980, the KGB struck back even harder. Sakharov couldn’t be shot or even jailed; he was simply too important a figure in Russia as well as in the rest of the world. They did the next best thing by exiling him to the closed city of Gorki, now called Nizhniy Novgorod, out in the boondocks three hundred miles east of Moscow. While he was there, the KGB continually harassed him, following him, listening to his phone calls, reading his mail, and even breaking into his apartment and stealing manuscripts he’d written. Sakharov wrote:

It wasn’t until 1986, with Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, that Sakharov was finally allowed to return to Moscow for the last three years of his life.

That was still in the distant future for the officers and crew aboard the Storozhevoy getting ready to get under way this crisp early November evening. But if the Soviet Union’s most influential and famous citizen zen couldn’t stand up to the KGB, how could Sablin and his mutineers expect to do any better?

Just about every modern nation has its variety of secret service, but none of those organizations, not the CIA, not Britain’s MI6, not even the Nazi’s Gestapo, ever came even close to the all-encompassing power of the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Besopasnosti.

The KGB was into just about everything, with roughly the same powers and responsibilities as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Division, the Federal Protective Service, the Secret Service, and the Border Patrol and Coast Guard.

Besides spying on other countries, conducting sabotage and assassinations, the KGB regulated all thought, behavior, and speech in the Soviet Union. It controlled the arts, religion, education, the sciences, the news media, the police, and, in some ways most important, the military. Every unit and ship, including the Storozhevoy, had its KGB snitch embedded. On this evening Captain Lieutenant Aleksey Bykov, the KGB representative aboard the Storozhevoy, was gone. He’d been transferred to another ship, and his replacement wasn’t due aboard until after the refit at the shipyard.

The KGB kept track of the ethnic minorities across all of Russia and her republics, it stopped its citizens from skipping over the border to freedom, it kept a constant surveillance of troublemakers, such as Sakharov, and it made sure that every man, woman, and child in the country worked for the Rodina and for nothing else. No person, no thought, no ideal, was more important than the Motherland.

The KGB conducted its own arrests, its own interrogations, very often involving brutal torture: electric prods to the genitals, bamboo shoots under the fingernails, toenails ripped out with pliers, skin flayed off in long strips, hot branding irons under the armpits and in the groin, dentist drills without anesthetic, cold water hoses up the anus, not to mention various forms of psychological torture, including the use of a wide variety of drugs, including hallucinogens.

And the KGB conducted its own trials, usually in secret, the outcomes of which were never in doubt. After all, if the KGB had reason to believe you were guilty of a crime against the Soviet people, you must be guilty.

Lenin himself wrote that the “scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing more or less than unlimited power resting directly on force… not limited by anything… nor restrained by any laws or any absolute rules.”

Nothing had changed between the October Revolution of 1917 and the cold November night of 1975, except that the KGB, which had been christened the Cheka under its first chief, the sadist Felix Dzerzhinsky, was more efficient and scientifically brutal than ever.

One of the primary missions of the KGB was the suppression of dissidents and dissent, what was officially termed unorthodox beliefs, which included keeping things quiet. KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who would later become president of the Soviet Union, made it his prime mission to make sure every Soviet citizen toed the Party line: “…every example of dissent is a threat to the Soviet State… and must be challenged and… all the resources of the KGB must be mobilized to achieve this goal.”

Andropov even set up a separate organization within the KGB— the Fifth Directorate—to look out for and put down dissent anywhere and everywhere, including inside the military. The KGB was serious, and it was into this buzz saw that Sablin was leading the officers and crew of the Storozhevoy.

Among the more successful methods of dealing with dissidents and so-called threats against the Rodina was the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow. Behind tall stone walls and iron gates, guarded by armed KGB troops, a KGB colonel and doctor of psychiatry, Daniil Lunts, was in charge of what was called Diagnostic Department I, where Soviet citizens who had been arrested for political noncomformity were locked up for treatment. By definition, enemies of the Rodina were insane and therefore had either to be executed before their insanity could infect the entire nation or be treated with drugs, psychoanalysis, or, in the most extreme cases, prefrontal lobotomies.

Sometimes more conventional treatments seemed to work best. In 1969 Army Major General Peter Grigorenko publicly called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia. He had been awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War, and two Orders of the Red Banner, his nation’s highest honors, yet he was arrested for unorthodox beliefs.

Colonel Lunts determined that the general was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and immediately transferred him to the mental hospital/prison at Chernyakhovsk for immobilization treatments. The patient was tightly wrapped in wet canvas, head-to-toe. As the canvas dried it began to shrink. Slowly. The pain was said to be excruciating. Most patients, when asked, promised that they were cured and no further treatments would be necessary.

The KGB was very good at what it did.

Nobody was safe, not famous scientists, not decorated war heroes, and certainly not Catholic priests. In 1971 the KGB accused a Lithuanian priest, Father Juozas Zdebskis, of teaching the catechism to children in his parish. In the eyes of the state this was a crime of political noncomformity, because no idea or ideal higher than the religion of the Motherland could be taught.

The priest’s trial was supposed to be a secret, but the word got out and more than five hundred people, most of them carrying flowers, showed up to hear the testimony of several children who told the court that Father Zdebskis taught them that they should never steal or break windows.

KGB thugs scattered the crowd, breaking ribs and arms and bloodying some noses. But enough people were there to see a battered priest being led out of the courthouse to serve a one-year sentence at what was called a corrective labor camp.

“Whatever children need to know will be taught in school, not in church,” the judge ordered.

Catholics and Jews could live quite openly in the Soviet Union, as long as they didn’t preach any of their mumbo jumbo or teach children or try to get out of the country. Valeri Panov, a Jew who was one of the top dancers with the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, announced one day in 1972 that he wanted to emigrate to Israel. Less than three weeks later he was denounced as a traitor to the Rodina and kicked out of the ballet company, and his wife, a prima ballerina at the Kirov, was demoted and her salary cut.

But that wasn’t the end of it. A couple of months later he was arrested on the street and thrown in jail for two weeks for spitting in public. Less than one week after he was released he was again arrested for spitting and spent another two weeks in a jail for political criminals.

Some dancers in the West tried to send him money, but the KGB put a stop to that, so Panov was out of work and out of money, for which he was subject to arrest again because he was unemployed. Obviously the hapless man was guilty of hooliganism. There was absolutely no way out for him once he had come to the attention of the KGB.

Anyone who got in the way of the KGB was in trouble. It didn’t matter who. It didn’t even matter if you weren’t a Soviet citizen.

Three years before Sablin took over the Storozhevoy, the KGB went after a Danish boat fishing for salmon just forty miles off Sweden’s coast, not even close to Soviet territorial waters, and, coincidentally, 350 miles from Riga.

She was the Windy Luck, her skipper Arne Larsen. Early in the afternoon one of the crewmen spotted a small, open motorboat coming up behind them from the east. Larsen came out on deck as the motor-boat came alongside.

“Sind Sie Kommunists?” the man in the boat shouted in German. Are you Communists?

He was the only person on the boat, and he appeared to be frightened out of his skull and half-delirious with exposure and probably hunger and thirst.

“No, we are a Danish fishing vessel!” Larsen called back. “Where do you come from? What are you doing out here?”

“I’m from Lithuania,” the man explained. “I am defecting to Sweden, but I’m out of food and water and very nearly out of gas, and I’m cold and very tired. Can you help me?”

“Yes, of course!” Larsen shouted down to the man. He motioned for his crew to bring the man aboard and take the motorboat in tow.

“God bless you!” the defector cried. “Are we far from Sweden?”

“Only a few hours,” Larsen assured him.

“I’ve been making my plans for a long time,” the Lithuanian explained. “I thought I had enough gas and food and water to make the crossing. But I ran into a headwind, and the seas were too big, so I was slowed down.” He shook his head. “I would not have made it without you.”

The crew pulled in their nets as Larsen brought the bow of the Windy Luck around to the west on a direct bearing for the Swedish coast and increased power to cruising speed.

Within a half hour a fast-moving ship appeared from astern on the horizon. Larsen added a little more power, but it soon became apparent that the ship chasing them could not be outrun and that he was a warship. As he got closer Larsen identified the ship as a Russian Shershen fast-attack hydrofoil boat, and what’s worse, it was flying a green ensign with the hammer and sickle, which meant it was a KGB coast guard boat.

But these were international waters, so the Russians had no jurisdiction. Larsen did not reduce speed or alter his course, but he ordered the Lithuanian defector to go below and hide in one of the cabins.

Within a half hour the KGB boat pulled alongside the Windy Luck and an officer came out on deck and raised a megaphone. “Heave to!” the officer shouted in Russian.

Larsen ignored the command.

The officer said something to another officer at the open door to the bridge, and within seconds several sailors scrambled out on deck manning a pair of 30mm guns.

Suddenly the KGB patrol boat veered directly into the Windy Luck’s stern, just brushing her with a glancing blow.

“Heave to; we mean to board you,” the Russian officer ordered, this time in English. “If you do not comply we will open fire.”

Larsen threw up his hands. There was nothing he could do. He cut power, and as soon as his boat had slowed down, four Soviet officers armed with pistols scrambled aboard.

“We will search the ship,” one of them told Larsen.

“These are international waters!” Larsen shouted. “You have no rights!”

The officer smirked and nodded toward the KGB warship. “We give the orders here.”

Within five minutes the Lithuanian defector was found and brought up on deck. “Auf Wiedersehen,” he said as he was hustled aboard the KGB ship.

The KGB took the man’s motorboat in tow and within a half hour they were gone over the horizon. Poor bastard, Larsen thought. But at least that’s the end of it for us.

But that wasn’t to be the end of it, because the KGB has not only a long arm; it also has a very long memory.

Three weeks later another Danish fishing vessel, this one the Thomas Moeller, fishing for salmon well within Swedish waters, was rammed by a Soviet warship and nearly sunk. After the collision, the Soviets plowed through the fishing nets and then took off, not bothering to see if there were any injuries or to offer any help.

The incident was a clear warning to all Danish fishermen that trying to help Soviet defectors could be a very risky business.

If Sablin knows these stories and countless others of a similar nature, which he very well may have, he is not deterred as the mooring lines are cut and the engines are engaged.

The Storozhevoy shudders as if he is a racehorse that has thrown off his reins, heading toward a future that no one can predict, except that the KGB will undoubtedly play a major role in how it all turns out.

Sablin looks out the bridge windows, the fog still so thick that he can’t see much of anything beyond the bows. But there are enough buoys marking the safe passage downriver that making it out to the open sea won’t be impossible.

But only if their luck holds.