Secret Leviathan

6. SECRET POLICING AND MISTRUST

Human relations are a deadly serious business here,” a Soviet scientist told the American journalist Hedrick Smith. “We resent it if a foreigner comes to a party and brings Russian friends. It ruins the evening for us because it takes a long time to know someone and come to trust them.”^[298]

This chapter is about trust and the breaking of trust. It describes a low-trust society. The party leaders drove their enemies underground. Having lost direct sight of their enemies, so to speak, they ruled on the basis that their enemies must be hiding in plain view, posing as false friends under the cover of professed loyalty. Such false friends, if not identified, would conspire with each other and with the foreign enemy to disrupt society and weaken the state. The only defense against the hidden enemy was an army of hidden watchers, able to pass among the citizens, win their confidence, learn their secrets, and gauge their true loyalties.

The central figure of this system was the secret police informer. The effectiveness of informers relied on a double relationship of trust. The pattern of the double relationship was:

Target —(1)-> Informer —(2)—» Case officer

In the first part of the relationship, the informer had to secure the trust of the person or group targeted for surveillance. Informers could not force anyone to share their secrets. They had to win trust before they could break it. In the second part, the case officer had to be sure of the informer’s trust: an informer who disclosed an operation to the adversary or withheld the information gained was worse than useless. Understanding this double relationship of trust and its corrosive effect both on trust in society and on Soviet state capacity is the focus of this chapter.

The word trust must detain us briefly. A large social-science literature embraces many meanings of the term. A common starting point is two people (A and B) and an action (X), so “A trusts В to do X.” Usually X is some part of a sequential exchange or a cooperative venture that gives rise to a lasting relationship, one that can be expected to benefit both parties but also exposes A to the risk that В can steal a one-sided gain. Then, A trusts В in the belief that В shares A’s interest in X for the sake of maintaining their relationship.^[299]

For the informer’s double relationship to be productive, the target must trust the informer to keep the target’s secret for the sake of a friendship expected to yield a flow of long-term mutual benefits, and not to disclose it to others for a one-sided gain. And the informer must trust the case officer with the target’s secret in the expectation of the long-term benefits the case officer has promised in return (which could vary from money or affirmation of status to protection from arrest, as we will see), and not to expose the informer to their social circle nor to the courts.

Some questions follow. First, what is trust based on? The sociologist Barbara Misztal divides the answers into two broad streams of sociological thought. In one stream, A is a social being who gives trust under the influence of social norms and obligations. In another stream, the same A is purposeful and self-interested, giving trust according to the expected net benefit.^[300]

Another divisive question is whether В must always be a person, one that is familiar to A. If В is a stranger, can we say that A trusts B? If В is an institution (such as the courts) or a social or professional group (such as lawyers generally), can we say that A trusts B? Some authorities insist that trust can only be interpersonal and based on personal familiarity: if В is “most people” or some impersonal organization or group, some other term should be used, for example “confidence.”^[301]

The usages of the word trust in this chapter are intentionally eclectic and inclusive. My argument does not require the reader to commit to a single meaning or school of thought. It allows that the meanings of trust and the motivations behind it are many and can vary across people and settings. It is inclusive, in the sense that the chapter discusses not only interpersonal trust but also generalized trust (in strangers) and institutional trust (in politics and government). For that purpose, it draws on a third stream of thought, one in which trust is allowed to mean whatever people have in mind when they give scaled answers to social survey questions about trust, even though such questions may leave unstated the precise individual who is trusted or the precise gain that is expected from trust.^[302] The most common form of such questions is “In general how much do you trust most people?”; or “In general how much do you trust most people you know personally?”; or “Even if you have had very little or no contact with these institutions ... how much [do] you personally trust [your country’s] Parliament? The police? The civil service?”^[303]

In relying on survey respondents to work out for themselves what these questions mean, we make a methodological leap like that made by economists and psychologists who study subjective well-being by asking people how they feel as opposed to specifying the elements of a good life in advance.^[304]

What is the value of trust? Trust is one of the mechanisms that can promote mutually beneficial cooperation in society. Trust frees the partners in an enterprise from fear of exploitation and betrayal, whether the enterprise is familial, economic, or political. Trust is important to the quality of cooperation.^[305] If a task is unskilled, and effort is easily observed, it may be enough to secure cooperation by coercion or threats, but if quality and diligence matter to performance (as in the accurate passing of complex information), and cannot be easily monitored, brute force may not be productive. There must be more than force and fear.^[306] From that perspective, trust is more valuable when the quality of performance is at stake.

When trust is defined by social survey respondents, its outcome validity is found when the resulting measures of trust can be causally associated with evidence on outcomes of cooperation that would be impeded by lack of trust. This is not easy, partly because of the scope for reverse causation (just as trust can enable cooperation, the experience of cooperation can build trust), and partly because both cooperation and trust can be influenced by other factors that vary across social settings. When these factors are disentangled, it turns out that higher levels of generalized trust in society, as measured by social surveys, are associated with higher levels of investment and economic development around the world, and some part of the association is probably causal: reduced trust causes investment and development to decline.^[307]

What was the state of trust in Soviet society? The evidence is both qualitative and quantitative; both kinds of evidence require careful interpretation.

The qualitative testimonies recorded by those with first-hand experience of living in Soviet society have been marshalled by historians. Surveying the field, Geoffrey Hosking explains the destructiveness of Stalin’s purges by “the wildfire spread of generalized social distrust.” After Stalin, he writes, relationships of trust were to some extent restored within families and work collectives, but “The paroxysms of distrust manifested in Stalin’s Terror... left permanent outlines in the Soviet landscape.”^[308] These judgements are consistent with other kinds of qualitative evidence to be reviewed later in this chapter. They do not prove that the Soviet Union was a low-trust society compared to others, but they do suggest plausible ways in which aspects of communist rule might have reduced generalized trust.

Quantitative survey evidence has been used to suggest that low trust is a feature of modern Russia.^[309] Can that judgement be extended backward to Soviet times? The measurement of trust in society was still in its infancy at the point when European communism collapsed. The Soviet Union lasted just long enough for the Soviet Russian republic to be included in the second (1990) wave of the World Values Survey. Asked how much they could trust people of their own nationality in general, 38 percent of Russian respondents answered either “a lot” or “somewhat.” This placed Russia last but one out of seventeen countries, far behind the leader (India, with 90 percent) and not much above South Africa (35 percent).^[310]

Russia may have been a low-trust society as communist rule collapsed. Is this evidence that low trust was a direct legacy of communist rule? In favor of that interpretation, trust in society changes slowly, and seems to have considerable persistence across generations. If low trust was a feature of Russia in 1990, then it was probably also the case in 1980 or 1970.

But then a more difficult question arises: was low trust under late communism a result of the experience of communism, or was trust in Russia always low? A sceptic could point to China, another country with traumatic experiences of communist repression. China often does comparatively well on trust measures and was the middle country by rank in the 1990 World Values Survey on the question reported above. This does not mean communism had no effect. Perhaps the levels of trust found in China might always have been higher than in other countries because of factors peculiar to Chinese culture or history. But, if so, the converse might be true of Russia. Trust might be low in Russian history, just because of Russia.

More fine-grained evidence of the effects of communist policies is again suggestive, although not conclusive. A well-known study of levels of trust in Africa finds that it was severely damaged by the incidence of the slave trade. This is untangled by identifying how trust measured today across ethnic groups is systematically related to the varying historical exposure of each ethnic group to enslavement.^[311] Turning to Soviet history, a study of exposure to forced labor under Stalin finds a similar result: the descendants of those citizens more exposed report lower trust in others today.^[312] This result can be compared with another study that starts from Russians’ historical exposure to the prerevolutionary institution of serfdom. That study finds present-day trust unaffected.^[313] Putting these together, it has proved easier to identify a persistent detrimental effect on trust arising from communist policies than from coercive institutions in Russia before communism.

When the Soviet leaders resorted to methods of rule that plausibly lowered trust in society, was this a bug or a feature? Did the Soviet leaders bring about a low-trust society by design? For the autocratic ruler, a society with low trust among citizens should have the great advantage that those who might otherwise join with each other to engage in collective opposition are less likely to find each other in the first place or, if they do, more likely to avoid the other as a likely agent provocateur of the regime. The Soviet authorities were always ready to create and spread mistrust, using unfounded rumors, forgeries, and disinformation as a weapon to divide hostile movements and states (as discussed in Chapter 8). It is tempting to conclude that a low-trust society was the intended outcome of Soviet policies and institutions.

This might be too simple, for the Soviet rulers could achieve nothing without the cooperation of millions of state officials and party members. As the political scientist Yoram Gorlizki has argued, “Whatever its flaws, the Soviet state exhibited levels of cooperation that were simply too high for it to be merely written off as a case-study in pervasive or all-encompassing distrust.”^[314] While the Soviet state may have achieved high levels of cooperation by using coercion and surveillance to compensate for low trust, the party leaders were also aware of trust as a factor in the success of their project and in their own survival. Gorlizki shows that in private they talked obsessively about trust and how to sustain it. In public, they boosted the importance of the trust relationship between the party and the people. This relationship was famously satirized by the playwright Bertolt Brecht after the Berlin workers’ uprising of 1953: the people had forfeited the party’s trust, he said, so the party should now “dissolve the people and elect another.”^[315]

To better understand the basis of cooperation within the Soviet system, some scholars have developed the concept of “forced trust,” applying it to relationships based on deprivation of independence (trust me because what other choice do you have?) or coercive control (trust me because I know your guilty secrets).^[316] This terminology takes the idea of trust too far from the scholarly and everyday meanings discussed so far. The feature distinguishing “forced trust” is force, not trust.^[317] What it points to, however, is the need to fill a gap: how trust works among people of unequal status.

The status that matters here is rank within hierarchies, which were characteristic of Soviet society’s formal organizations. Economists Albert Breton and Ronald Wintrobe define hierarchies as combining vertical relationships (between a principal and an agent of lower rank) with horizontal relationships (between agents of the same rank). Organizational performance is improved, they argue, when principals and agents build mutual trust on vertical lines: the worker who trusts the manager to deliver rewards and protection is more likely to work to the manager’s goals and to tell the manager the truth if those goals are compromised. Horizontal trust, on the other hand, is bad for an organization’s productivity, because workers that trust each other are more likely to protect each against the manager than to cooperate to deliver the manager’s goals.^[318] An implication is that vertical and horizontal trust are likely to be substitutes, not complements.^[319]

The practical focus of this chapter is on the mass surveillance of society. Mass surveillance was the work of a particular hierarchical organization, the Soviet secret police and its agentura (“agent network”). We will see that vertical trust was the key to productive collaboration between the KGB and its informers. In turn, KGB surveillance was nested in the mutually distrustful relationship between the party and the people under communist rule. On one side, the ruling party kept the people uninformed and under secret surveillance. On the other side, those people who had misgivings about the party and its rule, being conscious of surveillance and wary of coming under suspicion, kept their doubts to themselves. If the party lived by conspirative norms, so did the people. In turn, however, widespread reticence and suspicion of others complicated the task of surveillance.

The reader might wonder whether there is anything special in this topic. After all, every state has its enemies, including liberal democracies, and all states engage in counterintelligence. Every country has security services that practice surveillance and recruit informers.^[320] What was different about communist states was the use of undercover informers to watch not just the small numbers suspected of active hostility to communist rule but also much larger numbers of “potential” and even “unconscious” enemies. Those to be watched included all that showed any sign of unauthorized deviation from political and social norms or that voiced any unauthorized criticisms of the Soviet political or social order, even if such behavior was hardly ever on the direct orders of the foreign adversary and was far more likely to indicate the general influence of ideas and values designated as foreign.

Associated with this was an extraordinarily sweeping definition of hostile intelligence activity, which was not limited to the purloining of secrets by professional spies but was extended to the unauthorized spreading of any attitudes or behaviors that might disrupt the social and political order. Under this exceptionally inclusive designation, almost anyone could turn out to be doing the work of a spy. If spies could be anywhere, then it was natural for spy catching to take the form of mass surveillance.^[321]

Related to the exceptionally wide scope of Soviet counterintelligence was the unusually large number of Soviet counterspies. We will see that the number of undercover informers engaged by the Soviet KGB exceeded the number of FBI informers in the United States at the same stage of the Cold War by two orders of magnitude.

Undercover informers acted on the relationship between the Soviet state and society in two ways. One was to tip the balance of information in favor of the state, by giving early warning of the small-scale expressions and actions that might be precursors to more significant disruption of the political order. As a result, the state could usually be one step ahead of the citizen in preempting or promptly suppressing such tendencies. Notably, the informers could achieve this precisely because, working under cover, they did not present themselves as agents of the state. Rather, they were familiar figures—your classmate or colleague, your neighbor, or your drinking companion.

Because of this, the informers also acted on the relationship between state and society in another way. Although the facts of surveillance were strictly censored, it seems to have been widely understood in Soviet society that the KGB used undercover informers in significant numbers, that these would seek to exploit friendship or make friends in order to betray others to the state, and that no one could be sure who the informers were. The effect was to spread fear of informers and to corrode interpersonal (or horizontal) trust.

Secret surveillance was one factor leading to a low-trust society. For the authorities, low levels of trust in society presented pluses and minuses. On the plus side, low trust limited the scope of horizontal social networks and made ordinary people much less likely to join organized criticism of the regime or resistance to it. This enhanced the party leaders’ hold on power. But low trust also limited what they could achieve with the power that they held. Low trust reduced the effectiveness of state-sponsored or pro-regime initiatives because mistrust limited popular support and citizen cooperation. Thus, while secret surveillance added to regime security, security came at the expense of state capacity. From this perspective, the effects can be readily understood in terms of the secrecy/capacity tradeoff.

The first part of this chapter describes the KGB agent network in Soviet Lithuania: how many people, of what types, and where they operated. It introduces various kinds of documentary evidence that shed light on the attributes that made the effective informer, the “contract” with the KGB that formalized their recruitment, and various aspects of their training and motivation. A unique collection of records from the early 1960s shows us a range of stories of the recruitment and training of informers. We will find that the building of vertical trust was a key to the informer/case officer relationship.

In turn, the operations of the KGB agent network were nested within the larger relationship of society to the state. A seeming paradox is that the effectiveness of informers in information gathering relied on operational secrecy, but the existence of the agentlira was an open secret. The fear of informers that disrupted horizontal trust in society arose directly from this open secret. Fear of informers raised the costs of the mass surveillance on which regime survival relied. The result was long-term damage to society and the economy.

Because their existence was an open secret, informers were talked about in Russian society under a variety of names. The literal Russian equivalent to “informer” was osvedomitel. Slang terms showed unofficial society’s distaste for those who side with authority: donoschik (tell-tale or grass) or stukach (stool pigeon, literally a cellmate who relays information by knocking on the pipes). More ironic was seksot (an abbreviation of sekretnyi sotrudnik, or secret collaborator).

Formal responsibility for the KGB’s domestic informers belonged to the officers of its counterintelligence (second) administration. In internal KGB documentation, the term used for informers generally was “undercover helper” (neglasnyi pomoshchnik). Within that class were two main subcategories, the “agent” (agent) and the “trusted person” (doverennoe litso). The term agent was also the basis of the KGB’s collective term for its surveillance apparatus, the agentura (translated here as “agent network”). As well as agents, the agentura also comprised smaller numbers of “residents” (rezidenty, who provided safe houses) and “supernumeraries” (vneshtatnye operativniki, reserve officers that the KGB placed undercover in facilities that it supervised directly).

The common feature of agents and trusted persons was that they were all civilian helpers of the KGB under secret cover. In other respects, they differed. An agent’s recruitment was formalized by a signed agreement and the selection of a code name. A trusted person had not signed anything and would be identified in KGB paperwork by their initials.^[322] At a deeper level, they were separated by political reliability: someone who was politically unreliable or compromised could not be a trusted person. An agent, by contrast, might or might not be politically reliable: there was no presumption either way. Because of this, the motivations of agents could be expected to show greater variety than those of trusted persons. For example, an agent might be recruited by consent or under duress, whereas a trusted person was always a willing recruit.

How many informers were there in the 1960s? In Soviet Lithuania in 1961, the republican KGB of 1,181 officers and staff deployed 2,904 agents and 2,531 trusted persons. This was around 1.9 per thousand of the local population.^[323] The share of informers in Lithuania was substantially larger than across the whole country. In 1962 the KGB agent network in the entire Soviet Union was almost 165,000, a little less than one per thousand of the population, so half the density in Lithuania at the time.^[324]

Such figures imply two things. First, whether one or two per thousand of the population, the prevalence of informers was low enough that many citizens could pass their lives having little or no contact with a KGB informer. Second, therefore, informers were a scarce resource, not to be distributed evenly, but to be focused where they would be of greatest value. The borderlands represented more immediate security risks than the vast Soviet interior. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Baltic region saw more intensive cultivation of informers than other regions.

The same principle of distributing the informers in proportion to perceived risks also operated within Lithuania. The informers reporting to the Soviet Lithuania KGB were heavily focused on the groups regarded as most susceptible to the adversary’s disruptive influences: young people in schools and colleges and adults employed in education, culture, science, and science-based industry, especially those responsible for teaching or managing others. They included people in towns that might see foreign tourists and in enterprises that might be visited by foreign specialists. Looking at fractions of informers among employees in Lithuania in 1963 and keeping 2 to 4 per thousand in mind as the average across the population, we find 14 KGB informers per thousand among schoolteachers, 19 at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, 58 at the Technical College, 70 at the State Conservatory, 85 at Vilnius State University, 112 at Vilnius Teacher Training College, and 214 (more than one in five) at the Art College. The share of informers was 17 per thousand at Klaipéda’s large Baltija shipyard in 1970, and 27 per thousand at KNIIRIT (a radar research facility in Kaunas) in 1968.^[325]

Because most KGB informers were found in such settings, it follows that there were far fewer elsewhere. Those with the best chance of avoiding contact with an undercover informer lived away from the borders, in the countryside, or in communities without external diasporas and unlikely to receive foreign visitors. They worked in farming or small enterprises. They did not go to college, gain higher qualifications, or aspire to highly skilled or responsible work. These were also the people with least opportunity to threaten regime security.

While the Soviet informer network was thinly spread in view of its tasks, it was abundant in international comparison. The American equivalent was the FBI informer. For comparability consider 1971, when the number of KGB informers in Soviet Lithuania had risen to 11,675.^[326] As of 1975, the nearest comparable year, the FBI was running 1,500 informers.^[327] Thus, little Lithuania had several times more KGB informers than there were FBI informers in the entire United States. Across the Soviet Union, and in proportion to its population, the KGB had one hundred times as many.^[328]

What sort of person did the secret police hope to recruit? Some desirable features are obvious. The Romanian Securitate looked for “sociability and social connections.”^[329] An informer that lacked these would have nothing to report. Security officials of China’s Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s looked for “discretion, nerve, and self-motivation.”^[330] An informer that lacked discretion and nerve would not be able to maintain a cover, and one that lacked self-motivation would not want to.

For the Soviet secret police, we have more precise indications. They arise from an exercise that the KGB undertook in the 1970s to upgrade its data handling capacities, which included designing and circulating a lot of forms for officers to fill in with entries that could become fields in databases of one kind of another.^[331] There was a form to register informers who were Soviet citizens, another for foreign informers, and a third for registering changes of status during each calendar year.^[332] The greater part of these forms was devoted to recording the kind of factual detail that you would expect to find in anyone’s work record. Worth noting here are the questions that tried to capture the informer’s capacity for social relationships with others, the presence of other propensities that the KGB defined as “negative,” and the quality of the informer’s cooperation with the KGB.

The KGB form confirms that sociability was highly valued, along with capacities for observation and recall. A section headed “characterization” asks a series of yes/no questions: “has exceptional memory”; “has exceptional observation”; “has the capacity to influence others”; “has exceptional capacity to make and develop acquaintance”; “has personal charm”; “has success with women”; “has success with men”; and, inevitably, “other distinctive qualities”. Later in the form, much attention is paid to categorizing the people in the informer’s social circle, and especially any foreigners.

Possible “negative propensities” are given detailed attention. Bad attributes and habits start from drug addiction, homosexuality, and lesbianism, continue via gambling and illicit trading, take in the status of “reemigrant,” “repatriate,” and “immigrant,” and move on to connections to foreign spy agencies and nationalist, religious, and other anti-Soviet groups, before turning to any criminal record, especially crimes against the state. Still under the heading of “negative propensities,” the form inquires about the informer’s experience of foreign travel and asks for more particular information based on a detailed breakdown of the possible indiscretions a Soviet citizen might have committed while travelling, such as private conversations and commercial and sexual transactions with foreign citizens, losing documents and papers, disclosing secrets, excessive drinking, and voicing comparisons unfavorable to the Soviet Union.

While all these things were classed as negatives, there is no suggestion that any of them would make the subject less desirable as an undercover collaborator of the security police. To the contrary, connections to the political underworld could be an advantage.

Of particular interest is the close attention that the KGB registration form pays to the informer’s cooperation. The readiness with which the informer accepts recruitment is distinguished from the quality of subsequent performance. At the recruitment stage, did the subject accept cooperation based on “patriotic” motives (by implication, shared values or common preferences), or based on “compromising evidence” (blackmail or threats such as prosecution)? Subsequently, did the subject carry out assignments in a wholehearted or enthusiastic way (in Russian, okhotno), or was cooperation limited by second thoughts or latent reservations?

As we will see, all combinations were possible. The reluctant recruit could go on to work productively, while the apparently eager volunteer could hesitate and fall at the first fence.

Managing every informer was a KGB case officer. The relationship between case officer and informer relied ultimately on vertical trust—not trust alone, and not too much, but a degree of trust was understood to be essential.

The need for vertical trust was implicit in the case officer’s goal. The goal was to learn more about the potential adversary. The means was deception: the informer had to win the target’s trust in order to betray it. There was nothing routine about the task. An informer was not an assembly-line worker performing a mechanical task that could be prescribed and monitored to the millimeter. For the informer, the quality of performance was everything—with “performance” meaning both to act out a role and to fulfil the task.

In fact, to be an effective informer required a high degree of personal commitment. The reluctant or ambivalent informer would surely either fail to elicit the necessary information or give themselves away. In the worst case, they would go on to hide the failure from the case officer, leaving the KGB in ignorance of the true picture.

The KGB had limited ways of controlling the risks. The case officer could (and did) try out new informers on assignments where the outcomes were already known or where the task could be observed or recorded. The officer could (and did) set well-tried informers to watch the informers that were new and untried. But the goal remained to gain entry to settings that the KGB could not penetrate without help. Only the informer could find out what the officer needed to know. The point would inevitably be reached where the KGB had to decide whether to trust the informer or not. If the agent’s information could not be believed at that point, there was no point to the collaboration.

To assure the agent’s commitment became the case officer’s fundamental problem. This formulation of the case officer’s problem also makes clear the relationship between commitment and trust: one party trusts the other by accepting some assurance of the other’s commitment.

Commitment was an issue for everyone, even the most apparently loyal people. To become an effective informer took time; it was not decided in a moment. The decision was not just political; it was also social and moral. The informer might be asked to put the interests of the Soviet state not only before the interests of other states, but also before those of colleagues, neighbors, intimate friends, and family members. Even the most loyal citizen might feel torn. For those recruited because their close relatives or they themselves were involved in anti-Soviet activities, the tug of loyalties could be acute.

Every agent was different, and the KGB needed more than one way to manage them. The one common element was a rite of passage: in the decisive moment, the subject chose a code name and signed an agreement with the security police. The code name was incorporated in the wording or was used to sign it. The wording typically obligated the agent to cooperate with the KGB; often, it bound the agent to maintain conspirativeness about their collaboration. Symbolizing the personal nature of the commitment, the agreement did not follow a standardized template and was usually handwritten by the new agent in Russian or Lithuanian, depending on those involved.^[333]

The written terms of the agreement were silent on many matters. The obligations placed on the agent were completely general, and there was no terminal date, so there was never a point at which the agent could say: “I have fulfilled my part of the bargain.” The case officer made no written promise and offered no consideration in exchange. The informer’s expectation of acknowledgment, or reward, or protection, rested entirely on trust—that is, on assurance of the case officer’s unwritten promise.

Considered as a contract, the terms of the informer’s agreement were highly incomplete. In economics a contract is called incomplete when a party agrees to fulfil an assignment in return for a consideration, and qualities such as care and diligence are crucial to the task, and they cannot be fully specified in writing.^[334] Everyday examples that readers maybe familiar with include contracts for employment, for teaching and learning, for publishing, and for marriage.

When a contract is incomplete, certain things follow. The contract itself turns out to be one moment in a process that necessarily begins long before and continues long after. Before the contract, there is a search for the best partner and there is due diligence. There are also implications for after the contract. Despite all the efforts made before the contract, only after it is signed does each side discover the true extent of the other’s commitment and come to understand the further investments that might be required to uphold the spirit in which the contract was signed.

The spirit in which the contract was signed could vary. When the subject’s own motivation was enough, recruitment was recorded as based on “patriotic” or “ideological” considerations. In other cases, coercion (or blackmail) could be applied. Given Lithuania’s troubled history, many citizens had something in their past that might provide leverage if the recruit was reluctant. When coercion was explicit, the agent’s recruitment was recorded as based on kompromat.

There was also a middle ground, which provides scope for misclassification. Sometimes, we will see, coercion was implicit in the candidate’s predicament but not voiced. The subject with a compromised record might logically anticipate that to refuse recruitment would invite the KGB to open the Pandora’s box of the past. In such a case, pressure could be a motivating factor without ever being mentioned.^[335] Then, recruitment would be recorded as voluntary, although the agent’s agreement was motivated by an implicit threat.

Possibly, therefore, the KGB underrecorded the frequency with which coercion was a factor in recruitment. At the same time, even if coercion was more prevalent than the records suggest, it would be surprising if coercion was ever the sole factor in an effective recruitment. As already discussed, when care and diligence matter to a task, they cannot be assured by coercion. There must be more than force and fear.

In KGB practices we will see the varied strategies that the case officer could choose from to maintain the informer’s commitment. Guilt and ambition were powerful drivers for those who wished to atone for a rebellious youth or to wipe the slate clean of past misdeeds. Training, or becoming proficient in tradecraft, allowed the agent to find professional interest and pleasure in a job done well. Lengthy reeducation could put a stop to backsliding. Positive affirmation of status gave the informer who had broken faith with one underground community the chance to find solidarity and recognition in another: the secret community of the state’s undercover operatives. In that context, occasional gifts and privileges could provide a material signal of the state’s respect and gratitude. To the informer with a troubled conscience, they were also the thirty pieces of silver that marked a point of no return.

The influences that brought the citizen into undercover collaboration with the KGB are not easy to lay bare. Accounts of everyday dealing between informer and case officer are rare, for several reasons. Under communism, the informer’s lips were sealed by conspirativeness. After communism, they remained closed by social discrimination or the fear of it.^[336] The historian of the Baltic region might hope to find more detail in the archived personal files of the informers, but most relevant documents that could be used to construct their stories were destroyed or taken to Moscow when the KGB left the region, including many tens of thousands of files from Lithuania alone.^[337]

A few stories can introduce the wide variety of paths to collaboration with the KGB. The cases are selected from a unique, small-scale dataset that will be described and summarized in the following section. They are presented here, not as typical, but to illustrate some of the varied roles of trust in the formation of the effective informer. The agents are identified by code names.

The Desire to Atone: Agent Neman

Recruited in December 1959, Agent Neman worked for the KGB in order to find a path back to respectability and a career. Born in 1925, he was just a teenager when war broke out. Lithuania fell under German occupation, and the young man was deported to Germany as a forced laborer. There, the German authorities recruited him to make anti-Soviet propaganda. Returning to Soviet Lithuania, he entered university, graduating in 1951. He joined the state radio. But his prospects were clouded by his record of wartime collaboration with the enemy. At some point he was dismissed for “political reasons,” and he was reduced for a while to working as a secondary school teacher. Eventually he was reinstated, but he felt that he remained under suspicion. The cloud of mistrust did not lift.

In 1957 the World Festival of Youth and Students (28 July to 11 August) brought an unaccustomed flood of foreign tourists to Moscow and created many opportunities for KGB surveillance. As a journalist, Neman was able to attend, and this put him touch with many foreigners, including Western journalists. The KGB now identified him as a likely prospect and looked at him closely. On a business trip he found himself sharing a room with a “party worker,” in reality an undercover KGB officer, who struck up a friendship with him.

Neman was thought to have many talents: he was able to work on his own, without external supervision, was good with languages, and could win the confidence of strangers. He was just the sort of person whom the KGB could use with tourists at home and abroad. But why would he? For Neman the key to recruitment was that he felt his career was blocked by his war record, about which he was quite open. In December 1959, when the KGB offered him the opportunity to collaborate, he saw the offer as a means of redemption, which he now grasped with both hands.

Thereafter Neman became a prolific informer. In Vilnius he was brought into contact with two Western Europeans—a male diplomat and a female society journalist (or a “spy”?) with connections to Eastern Europe, Lithuanian emigrants, and the Vatican hierarchy. She invited him to visit Warsaw and Rome and supplied him with forbidden books—Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, and Lithuanian nationalist literature. This was surely how the KGB expected foreign spies to cultivate a Soviet citizen. His relationship with the journalist became warm and confidential.

At this point the KGB tried Neman out on a foreign trip: he travelled with a tourist group to China. This was before the Soviet-Chinese split, although relations were already deteriorating. No doubt he had to report on the conduct of his fellow tourists, and more than likely he was himself under surveillance, but the report does not comment on this. Meanwhile, the journalist invited Neman to visit her in Rome or in Warsaw. At the next stage, the KGB planned that Neman would visit Warsaw.

His personal qualities made Neman an ideal recruit. He entered adult society, vulnerable to discrimination because of his bad war record. In another person, that bad war record could have been the lever to force him into the service of the KGB. Neman did not need to be threatened. He wanted to cancel out the past, saw collaboration with the KGB as means to that end, and freely committed himself to it. His case officer returned his commitment with trust.

Can You Protect Me? Agent Rimkus

A male Lithuanian born in 1908, Rimkus was a seminary student in prewar Lithuania, then a Christian Democratic journalist and nationalist. Continuing to work in Lithuania under enemy occupation was enough to have him arrested in 1945 and sentenced to five years of forced labor. On release, he found work as a farm technician (“agronomist”) in the Klaipéda rural district. Based on surveillance reports, the technician attracted KGB attention for two reasons. One, he had information about the misappropriation of collective farm property, was angry about this, and talked about taking the information to the KGB. (The misappropriation was surely a police matter. It seems doubtful that the KGB would have been interested if it did not involve foreigners or anti-Soviet activity.) Two, he appeared to be disillusioned with the nationalist cause and his former nationalist comrades—two of whom he knew to be living locally on forged identification papers.

The KGB made its first approach to the technician under cover. When questioned, he readily shared his information about the property crimes. At first, he was silent about the former nationalists, but eventually he shared this information too. So, he passed a test. The next step was to approach him openly with an offer of recruitment.

In this moment, the candidate panicked. On further questioning, the way he put it was that he feared one day, “in the event of a complication of the international situation,” his former associates would uncover his role.^[338] The KGB promised him that no one would ever know. On that basis Rimkus consented to recruitment. He became an effective informer, helping the KGB to keep tabs on nationalists and their activities both at home and abroad.

Agent Rimkus was not the first person to worry about the stability of Soviet rule in the event of an international conflict. This was a central concern of secret police reports to the Soviet leaders through all the decades of Soviet rule.^[339] Nonetheless, the KGB kept its promise to Rimkus. His personal file was either destroyed or removed to Moscow in 1991. Today the world can read about Rimkus in the files that were left, but there is no record of his real name.

Agent Rimkus had once sided with the Soviet Union’s enemies. The KGB found him just as he began to reconsider his past loyalties. The obstacle that remained was that Rimkus feared exposure. His recruitment was unblocked by the KGB’s commitment never to allow his identity to be revealed. Rimkus might have accepted it at face value, or he might have concluded he had no choice but to accept it—a fine distinction, but a necessary one. Either way, the vertical trade of trust for commitment opened the way for him to become an effective informer.

Trust os Motivation: Agent Gobis

This person lived in Siauliai, a provincial town that gained significance in the Cold War as a staging post for Soviet missile troops. A Jewish male born in 1916, college-educated, fluent in several languages, he is described as a rounded person, calm, responsive, sociable, and businesslike. During the Soviet-German war he served in the Red Army; at some point he joined the party. The war ended, however, with several of his family members living abroad. The report does not say directly where they went, but Israel was evidently the destination. Because he persisted in corresponding with them, he was expelled from the party in 1950—in other words, during the late-Stalinist campaign against Jewish “rootless cosmopolitans.”

The MGB, forerunner of the KGB, recruited Agent Gobis in July 1951. The circumstances are not reported. It would be reasonable to see him as compromised by the links that he maintained with Jewish emigrants, one of them active in Israeli politics. We are not told whether he was recruited under pressure. We are told that he twice asked to be released, and was refused, which does suggest absence of consent.

Serving as an agent, Gobis remained under surveillance and investigation until 1957. What did the KGB learn from its surveillance? Gobis was not disloyal. He did complain to others, but only about everyday problems (po bytovym voprosam, a phrase often used as KGB code for consumer shortages). The KGB concluded that Agent Gobis was falling short of his potential, not from disloyalty, but because he was distrusted and mismanaged.

The World Festival of Youth and Students of 1957, held in Moscow from 28 July to 11 August, created an opportunity for the KGB to reset its relationship with Agent Gobis. Beforehand, he had been contacted by an Israeli visitor, who asked to meet him at the festival—which the KGB now encouraged and enabled. From there, Gobis entered a web of dealings with Israeli diplomats, and with a Jewish aviation engineer in Chisinau who apparently looked for a way to pass state secrets to the Israeli embassy. There were telephone procedures and code words. The KGB facilitated the travel of Gobis between Vilnius, Moscow, and Chisinau. At the time of the report, nothing had come of the aviation secrets, but a good deal had become known to the KGB about other citizens who maintained unauthorized contact with Israeli embassy staff.

The sensitivity of the mission is marked by a note that “For operational reasons the agent’s code name and the names of his contacts, passwords, and meeting places have been changed.”

During his meetings with the various people involved, Gobis was himself kept under covert observation by street watchers and eavesdroppers. The KGB learned that he was generally truthful when reporting on operational matters. But he did hold something back, in a pattern consistent with his past conduct. In the company of his foreign contacts, he complained continually about his poor standard of living, and he went so far as to ask for favors. Could they help him obtain a passenger car? Would they bring him imported goods? The agent risked compromising himself in this way although, in the KGB’s judgement, he “lived well materially.” Worse still, Gobis covered up this aspect of his conduct when reporting to his case officer, who found out only because the additional layer of surveillance.

In due course the case officer challenged Gobis about his selective reporting of his own behavior, and the lack of basis for his complaints against Soviet life. This was done “carefully and tactfully,” with the aim of avoiding a confrontation.

In this post-Stalin era, the KGB learned to value Gobis as a senior agent with a complex personality. They treated him sensitively. They acknowledged his service by sending him to be pampered in water spas. At every meeting, his case officer took time to chat to him about the state of the world and of Soviet society; listen to him holding forth on highbrow literature and spy novels, which the case officer used to improve his tradecraft; and, not least, remind him of his duty of gratitude for the advance of Soviet living standards.

On the surface, this was a story of early mistakes eventually corrected. Until the Moscow festival of 1957, Gobis underperformed for lack of trust. When entrusted with an important mission, he rose to the level that the mission demanded. The reporting officer pontificated:

Correctly arranged mutual relations with the agent are of no little significance. Mutual relations and work should be organized so that the agent continually feels interest in the work and our trust, care, and attentiveness toward him.

Too Much Trust: Agent Stanislav

A male railway employee, Agent Stanislav worked the main line connecting Vilnius to Kuznica in Poland. His work gave him access to foreigners and to international shipments of goods and letters. He was recruited by consent (“on an ideological basis”) in 1958. His case officer saw him as capable, educated, well motivated, and fully cooperative. So far, so good.

Another railway worker was found to be smuggling goods across the border. Because he worked closely with Stanislav, who should have known, questions were raised about the agent’s conduct: he had withheld information about his colleague’s criminal activities from the KGB. In turn this led to questions about the quality of his supervision: his case officer had trusted him too much.

The KGB brought Agent Stanislav under tighter discipline. The case officer reeducated him in the importance of truth telling and the legal consequences of failing to report offences, particularly when they involved foreigners and foreign goods. From now on, he was kept on a shorter leash. Less trust and closer supervision made Agent Stanislav a more effective informer. (From another perspective, the KGB now held kompromat against him—evidence that he had concealed a crime.) He went on to uncover various other cross-border crimes, some of them organized, and he was able to win the confidence of people engaged in more significant crimes against the state and secure evidence of their activities.

Yearning to Belong: Agent Ruta

In 1957 a twenty-year-old male was sentenced to five years of forced labor for his part in organized resistance to Soviet rule in Lithuania. He served his time thoughtfully, seeking the company of like-minded prisoners, but also trying to understand more about politics. His “long and complicated path to collaboration” with the KGB began when he realized that organized resistance to Soviet rule had become futile. Thinking it through, the young man concluded that he had picked the wrong side. He had been fighting for a society that no longer existed and that few really wanted to restore. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was building the future. For the time being, he kept his conversion to himself.

By the time he left the labor camp, the young man was ready to come out as a reformed character. At first, he thought of making a grand public gesture, renouncing his former comrades and their goals, and committing himself to communism. On reflection, he concluded, this would change few minds. Instead, he turned to the KGB to offer his services in the undercover struggle against the Lithuanian nationalist resistance.

Agent Ruta was that rare creature, a walk-in (volunteer). He expected the KGB to greet him with suspicion. Instead, they welcomed him with open arms. From the KGB standpoint the young man was an ideal recruit, being deeply embedded in the “hostile environment” of anti-Soviet nationalism from before and during his time in the labor camp.

Agent Ruta writes of his case officers in glowing terms. The first, named Vitas Domo, showed him only goodwill and sincerity. He describes the second, Julius Antano, as “calm, unhurried, an intelligent person, an experienced Chekist [secret policeman].” In their hands, Ruta experienced a rare moment of optimism and peace of mind.

The honeymoon did not last. Soon, Agent Ruta began to let Julius Antano down, missing meetings and failing assignments. This marked the onset of a personal crisis, the reasons for which Ruta kept to himself. The trigger for this crisis (he explains, looking back) was that in society he now found himself completely isolated. In his own mind, he had become proud of the Soviet Union’s achievements, and he wanted to work with others to help overcome its residual defects—which were exactly the issues that nationalists exploited to promote discontent. As a loyal citizen he hungered for the respect and trust of others who felt like him. But those other loyal citizens continued to avoid and despise him as the unreformed nationalist that he still appeared to be. His only friends were the old comrades of the resistance whom he had come to inwardly reject.^[340]

The people Ruta hated most were the former resisters who had avoided prison and were now making their careers and had even joined the Communist Party, to which they professed loyalty out of self-interest rather than inner belief. As a former state criminal, by contrast, Ruta could not make a career; he could get only low-status work at a “miserly” wage. He turned in on himself and fell into a depression. He began to drink. Eventually he was hospitalized with pulmonary tuberculosis.

A visitor brought Ruta to a turning point. “When Julius Antano visited me in the clinic,” Ruta writes,

he showed himself to be so close to me, just like a father. I began more and more to feel a kind of inner love for the Chekists, and I began to follow them and imitate them. More and more often I repeated to myself the words of F. E. Dzerzhinskii [founder of the Soviet secret police]: “A Chek-ist can only be a person with a cool head, a warm heart, and clean hands.” It was more or less an exercise in self-hypnosis. Today I think that the key to prevailing over that old pessimism, that morbid nightmare, was my old acquaintance with Julius Antano. I am grateful to him for my whole life.

Over several years Ruta emerged from his depression. Helped by his KGB connections, he changed his residence, finished college, and gained employment in accordance with his profession (not specified, but involving conferences, lectures, and some branch of scholarship).

How else did the KGB help him, specifically? This was “hard to say. Maybe it was that I always felt goodwill and sincerity from their side, and trust in me, or maybe it was that I trusted them. Most likely, both at once.” Most important, Ruta was no longer lonely: “There are many good people around me. They trust me—which is most important.”

In the last pages of his memoir, Ruta recounts that he has successfully completed many important assignments to report on former nationalist resisters now released back into society. Sometimes he is invited to write about the evolving “forms, methods, and tactics” of nationalist groups. He concludes with advice for case officers on how to assign surveillance tasks without arousing suspicion and the importance of allowing agents to exercise a degree of initiative. Ruta, it seems, has become an elite collaborator, entrusted not only with low-level tasks but also with advice and analysis.

To summarize, the story of Ruta reveals the psychological stress of the undercover helper whose inner thoughts are known only to the KGB. Trust was the key that unlocked the informer’s ability to perform his role. At first the door was locked on both sides. The KGB turned the key from one side by showing trust in Ruta. But this was not enough: it did not save Ruta from despair. For that, Ruta had to turn the key from the other side by learning to trust the KGB with his darkest inner thoughts.

Trust—but Verify

For the KGB, things worked out best when the agent sought the case officer’s trust and offered trust in exchange. Agent Ruta longed to belong and be trusted, but he had to learn to trust his case officer with his deepest fear, which was of social isolation. Agent Rimkus accepted recruitment without much prompting, but he had to trust the KGB with his new identity. Agent Gobis had to trust the KGB with knowledge of his selfish urges. Agent Stanislav had to learn to trust the KGB more than he trusted his criminal colleagues.

One can doubt that our stories tell the whole truth. Walking into the KGB to offer his services after years in the nationalist underground, Agent Ruta felt trusted from the start. But for the KGB to have accepted such an offer at face value would have gone against all caution.^[341] It seems certain that, while the officers handling Agent Ruta did not show him their doubts, their colleagues behind the scenes would have verified him in minute detail. Agent Rimkus appeared willing to serve, and explained his hesitation over recruitment by fear of exposure, as if it were a merely practical concern, but did he agree to serve only for fear that his bad record would be used against him, while retaining unspoken loyalties to his former comrades after? Agent Gobis felt entrusted with an important mission, but the reality is that the KGB kept him under remote surveillance: the trust they showed him was simulated. Agent Stanislav became more effective when kept on a shorter leash, but the KGB now had evidence that he had helped to conceal a crime, bringing him under a clear threat.

In the informer’s commitment to collaboration, the desire to win trust may have been a strong motivation, strongest among those with a compromised past, such as Agent Ruta. KGB case officers recognized this motivation, but they did not return it in full. While the KGB had to rely on its agents to some degree, good practice demanded that their work should be checked at every opportunity. To allow mistrust to dominate the relationship could spoil an agent, as in the case of Agent Gobis. But unconditional trust was not recommended: it was too much trust that put agent Stanislav at risk. Good practice demanded that every agent’s work should be checked, in the spirit of the Russian proverb: “Trust—but verify.”^[342]

The principal’s problem is presented here as one of verifying an agent’s commitment to a vertical relationship based on trust. This problem is common to all large organizations where quality of performance matters, regardless of ownership or socioeconomic context. What made the case of

KGB officers and agents worthy of special attention? There are two distinctive features. One was the scope for coercion of the agent, made possible by KGB access to kompromat. The other was the ultimate purpose—to enable the KGB to penetrate private households, church congregations, and informal affinity networks in order to learn their secrets and, if necessary, frustrate their projects.

The stories related in the previous section are selected from a unique collection of twenty-one personal narratives assembled from the archive of the KGB of Soviet Lithuania, as described below. The narratives are abstracted in Table 6.1.

The documentary collection arises as follows. The condition of the agentura was a continual preoccupation of the KGB leaders. A related issue was the need to improve the training of agents’ handlers. In the early 1960s a specialist group was formed under Soviet KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastnyi for “study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers and of information about the adversary.” Similar groups were also set up in the Republican KGBs, including that of Soviet Lithuania. Like any large organization, in other words, the KGB was keen to identify and document improved practices and to disseminate them through in-house newsletters and training opportunities like conferences and away-days. The earliest batch of reports in our sample is accompanied by a memo signed by the head of the Soviet Lithuania KGB, responding to a request for information from the Moscow group.^[343] More reports of a similar nature appear elsewhere in the archive, although without accompanying correspondence. All our stories were reported with the aim of uncovering and exemplifying good practices.

The sample is not only small but highly selected. It includes only successes. We know that KGB informer relationships often ended in failure. Elsewhere in the files, anecdotal evidence of unproductive agents and incompetent case officers abounds. When Moscow demanded that the agent network should be “small in numbers and high in quality,” the KGB’s own surveys show, it was easy to let unproductive agents go, but more difficult

table 6.1. Twenty-one effective KGB informers: Their personal data, abstracted from KGB records

table 6.1. (continued)

table 6.1. (continued)

(continued')

TABLE 6.1. (continued)

Sources: Agent Algis: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/323, 24-27 (Report by operative commissioner of the Kaunas city KGB second department Capt. Sidorov, 27 August 1964). Agent Berzas-1: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 34-35 (Report by consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Maj. Gomyranov, March 1961). Agent Berzas-2: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/323, 34-36 (Report by operative commissioner of the Kaunas city KGB second department Capt. Balkus, August 1964). Agent Genys: Hoover/ LYA, K-l/10/311, 22-24 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 26 January 1962). Agent Gobis: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 213-18 (Report by senior operative commissioner of the Siauliai city KGB, Maj. Ostapenko, 26 September 1960). Agent Karklas: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 302-4 (Report by senior operative commissioner of the Siauliai city KGB Capt. Sar-palius, no date but 1961). Agent Komandulis: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311,28-29 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 22 January 1962). Agent Korabel’nik: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300,30-33 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 11 March 1961. Agent Maksim: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311, 19-21 (Report by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers Lt. Col. Babintsev, no date but 1962). Agent Mindaugas: Hoover/ LYA, K-l/10/311, 42-43 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 23 January 1962). Agent Mir: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 38-40 (Report by consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Maj. Gomyranov, 10 March 1961). Agent Neman: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 26-29 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, March 1961). Agent Neris: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311, 17-18ob (Report by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers Lt. Col. Babintsev, 22 January 1962). Agent Nevskii: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311, 34-35 (Report by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers Lt. Col. Babintsev, no date but 1962). Agent Petrauskas: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/323, 28-30 (Report by senior operative commissioner of the Kaunas city KGB second department Capt. Raudis, August 1964). Agent Rimkus: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311, 39-41 (senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 23 January 1962). Agent Ruta: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/440, 15-32 (Remarks of agent Ruta, recruited from a hostile environment, 30 September 1975). Agent Sa-dovskii: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/323,31-33 (Report by senior operative commissioner of the Kaunas city KGB second department Maj. Troinin, 26 August 1964). Agent Stanislav: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300,36-37 (consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Maj. Gomyranov (no date but March 1961). Agent Surikov: Hoover/ LYA, K-l/10/311,25-27 (Report by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers Lt. Col. Babintsev, January 1962). Agent Valdas: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311,36-38 (senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, no date but 1962).

to raise the performance of the rest.^[344] From that perspective, the agent stories we have do not help us much to understand the general quality of informer management or performance. What they show us is good practice as the KGB saw it at the time. Being rich in detail and widely varied, they allow important common features to emerge that can guide further investigation.

Given that the documentation purports to represent good practices, the reader might worry that our agent stories were varnished or fictionalized for the sake of officers’ personal reputation or to cover up their defective work. This is unlikely. Those with most at stake were the case officers with personal responsibility for individual agents. By contrast, all the agent stories in our sample were composed and signed off by KGB officers of higher rank. The authors were of similar seniority to the officers who compiled the critical surveys, already mentioned, that exposed the poor general state of the agent network in various localities in the same period. In fact, two senior officers (Gomyranov and Tumantsev) did both: they wrote half of our stories at the same time as they contributed critical surveys. If they did not cover up poor work in one context, it is not obvious why they should have invented good work in another.

What is described in our twenty-one reports? Twenty, written in the third person and signed off by a senior officer, are from the years 1961 to 1964. The subjects are agents (agenty). While the detail varies, they typically described the person’s background and the circumstances in which the person came to the attention of the KGB. (There are some gaps: four reports, all from the Kaunas KGB office, have a missing first page that probably listed significant personal data.) Each report went on to explain the manner of recruitment and, in most cases, what happened next: how the new informer adapted to the task, what problems arose, and by what means the issues were overcome. Thus, while the informer’s voice is not heard directly, each document attempts to represent the informer’s perspective.

The twenty-first story, that of Agent Ruta, has a different format. Dated 1975, a decade after the others, it was written for an internal limited circulation KGB magazine, the Sbornik.^[345] A ghost writer has surely been at work, so we do not hear the subject’s uncensored voice. Two-thirds of the eighteen-page typescript are devoted to the informer’s inner path from

active resistance to collaboration with Soviet rule. Hard biographical data are missing; circumstantial detail is limited. But the purpose is evidently the same: the KGB wanted to explain to itself how the opportunity arose to recruit an agent “from a hostile environment” and how the opportunity was exploited. That is why it is included here.

What kinds of people are found in our reports? Table 6.2 reports basic demographics. There are few surprises. Most agents were male, urbanized, college educated, and in white-collar employment (including one college student). Three-quarters were ethnic Lithuanians, a share close to that in the general population of the republic.

As the table shows, two-thirds of our sample lived under some shadow arising from their past conduct or associations. As discussed in Chapter 5, at best this meant family connections with Lithuania’s prewar elite or a record of noncommunist political activity before the war; at worst it meant wartime collaboration with the German occupation or

table 6.3. Twenty-one effective KGB informers: Age and service

armed rebellion against Soviet rule. It was such records that made these subjects useful as informers. Correspondingly, only two of the set had any record of Communist Party affiliation (one a former member, the other a Komsomol member). No doubt party members were more likely to be recruited as trusted persons than agents, as was the case in East Germany.^[346]

Table 6-3 shows age and length of service. The median birth year of our informers, if known, was 1931, and their median age at recruitment was twenty-eight. Based on the dates of their reports, nine had been in service for less than one year. This cannot be typical of all agents: rather, the documents’ emphasis on the manner of recruitment has biased the sample to recent recruits. But, as the averages suggest, there was a tail of older, more experienced agents. Seven had served for more than two years, including two who had served up to a decade.

RECRUITMENT, REEDUCATION, REWARDS

The reports in our sample show wide variation in how the recruitment process worked out. Table 6.4 reports a few measurable aspects. Taking the reports at face value, most of the effective agents joined by consent. Only two were recruited under an explicit threat (agents Berzas-i and Genys).

This contrasts to the data in Table 6.2. Two-thirds of informers were recruited with compromising evidence held against them, but in most cases the evidence was not used.

Was recruitment an offer that could not be refused? None of the informers in our sample said no, but some needed persuasion. In other settings, we know, candidates for recruitment did sometimes refuse.^[347]

table 6.4. Twenty-one effective KGB informers: Recruitment and performance

A question that follows is whether those who accepted freely did so because they expected a refusal to be punished.

The individual stories can help us understand the data, but they do not resolve the issue in all cases. A first point is that for some candidates, the offer of recruitment signaled an unspoken menace: the KGB was aware of the subject’s history. The candidate with a compromised record might anticipate that to hesitate would invite the KGB to open the Pandora’s box of the past. Better to accept recruitment immediately than allow the box to be opened.

This does not cover all cases, however. A genuine desire to make up for past misdeeds was possible (agents Neman and Ruta). For those who now felt trapped by youthful misdeeds and wondered how to resume a respectable way of life and a career, the offer of collaboration with the KGB could be welcome: it offered a way to achieve their personal goals. There were also intermediate cases (agents Algis and Genys, for example). KGB officers evidently watched the members of suspicious groups for the weaker links who might be showing mixed feelings about former activities and associates. For these people, KGB intervention could tip the balance from resistance to collaboration without any further pressure.^[348]

Related to this, the KGB subjected all our candidates to scrutiny before selecting them for recruitment. There was a covert stage of preliminary investigation, often followed by prolonged discussion with the candidate: the report on Agent Petrauskas notes, for example, that it took as many as twelve separate conversations with an officer before the KGB was convinced of the sincerity of his conversion. By implication, those who would not have been recruited without heavy coercion, and who could hardly have been trusted with sensitive assignments, were not (or should not have been) selected.

Selection is the simplest explanation of the low incidence of coercive recruitment: the KGB preferred recruits whose incentives to cooperate were already aligned or could be aligned with little pressure.^[349] This was most likely to be the case for those who had resisted Soviet rule in the past and had now lost the courage of their former convictions. People in this situation might quickly be persuaded that resistance was pointless and that to make a show of resistance could leave them worse off.

Further illustration is provided by two informers that, although mentioned in the reports, are not in the data. These are the fathers of Korabel’nik and Komandulis, who were recruited to inform on their sons and their sons’ friends. Evidence from East Germany suggests that informing on the family circle was sometimes a stumbling block for the most willing recruits.^[350] Our documentation makes it appear that the fathers were good citizens who willingly accepted the assignment to spy on their sons (who were eventually recruited as informers themselves). But, setting their political loyalties to one side, considering them only as parents, what choice did the fathers have when the KGB asked them to cooperate? Without some kind of intervention, their children were already on a course leading straight to the labor camp. The KGB was the only outside agency that offered to help. Under those circumstances, what parent would say no?

Any of these people could go on to suffer from further regrets, however. No matter how readily they agreed to cooperate, and whatever their motives, they were often unprepared for the psychological burden of reporting on close friends or family members.

Table 6.4 shows that KGB case officers did not take the quality of compliance for granted. The monitoring of new informers’ performance by an undercover officer or another informer, or by some form of eavesdropping, is mentioned in two-fifths of reports. This might be the extent of it, or the practice of third-party verification might have been considered so normal that it was not mentioned every time.^[351]

Some kinds of underperformance did not require verification because they were obvious to the handler. As Table 6.4 shows, two-fifths of the effective informers showed signs of slacking after recruitment, and this included outwardly willing recruits. Slacking took forms that are instantly recognizable to readers from a college setting, where every student has chosen freely to join the course, yet many still contrive to cut classes, fail to respond to the instructor’s messages, and submit assigned work late or not at all. In a similar spirit, the reluctant informer missed appointments and reporting deadlines and, when cornered, reported verbally while declining to record observations in writing.^[352]

To fix problematic performance often required case officers to make further investments in their agents’ understanding and capabilities. Two words arise frequently in this context: privitie and vospitanie. Privitie (training) addressed deficiencies in the informer’s tradecraft. Vospitanie (education, or even reeducation) addressed deficiencies in the informer’s understanding of the patriotic duty they owed to the Soviet state and the KGB.

All recruits required training in the tradecraft of undercover work: how to approach a person of interest without arousing suspicion, what information to report, and how to report it without risking exposure. The training did not have to be arduous: for example, agents Genys and Gobis were encouraged to read spy fiction and discuss it with their case officers.^[353]

Lack of tradecraft was rarely a significant obstacle, and slacking was often voluntary. Slacking was first and foremost a breach of the trust relationship between agent and case officer. The remedy was to rebuild trust. The first step was to establish on which side the deficiency lay. Sometimes the fault was on the side of the KGB. According to the reports, one officer demotivated Stanislav by trusting him too much. Another did the same to Gobis by distrusting him without sufficient cause. More often, however, the barrier lay on the side of the agent, who withheld full commitment because of some hidden moral or political reservation.

In such cases, the case officer had to undertake the agent’s reeducation, which aimed to restore commitment and trust by reforming the agent’s moral and ideological attitudes. If the agent’s performance improved, the breakthrough could be usefully consolidated by tangible rewards that signaled gratitude and acknowledgment. Thus, reeducation and rewards were used as complements.

The process of thought reform often involved the case officer in many hours of detailed and no doubt repetitive discussion with the agent about the role of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in history and world affairs, the achievements and advantages of the Soviet system, and the rights and obligations of the citizen. Reading such words does little to convey the atmosphere of such discussions. It is an open question whether the balance lay on the side of persuasion or intimidation. Agent Mir may have chosen the path of wholehearted collaboration based on new-found convictions inspired by his mentors. Alternatively, he may have decided that ideological submission followed by loyal cooperation was the only way to bring the bullying lectures to a conclusion. Perhaps persuasion and intimidation were also complements: an important aspect of the process was surely to convince the agent that keeping up the defense of religious or nationalist values would lead inevitably to loss of status and isolation from society.

Successful reeducation could be reinforced by material rewards. These were cash payments or gifts of goods or services (in one case, spa holidays) in short supply. The context is that in principle the services of the informer were unpaid. Rewards were supposed to be small and to reflect exceptional service. These principles were not always observed: just as the KGB was aware that some agents were unsuited to their duties or shirked them, it was reported from time to time that some case officers misused bonus payments to reward routine performance or even nonperformance.^[354] In the records at hand, in contrast, we see that payments and privileges could be productive. Rewards were distributed in a calculated way, not in the petty spirit of incentive payments for results, but to affirm the agent’s status and service and to strengthen the affective tie between agent and case officer. In turn, this improved the agent’s morale and increased motivation and effort.

Fear of informers spread mistrust of strangers through Soviet society. How do we know this? Not directly, but by a series of deductions. First, the existence of informers was widely known, although not necessarily uniformly so. Second, this knowledge induced fear of all but the most intimate relationships, which can be construed as mistrust of strangers. Third, the long-term consequences of mistrust of strangers were greater where informers were most likely to be present.

To begin, the existence of the agentura, although strictly censored, was an open secret to many. Widespread awareness of informers is suggested by memoirs and personal accounts drawn from most if not all periods of Soviet history.^[355] Another kind of evidence is literally anecdotal: informers were the subject of many jokes that circulated and have been recorded. An encyclopedia of nearly six thousand Soviet political anecdotes lists thirty-nine items—in other words, not many, but also not zero—under the index heading “seksot i donoschik” (secret collaborator and informer).^[356] Here’s no. 1,636, which captures the sense of the incalculable risk presented by a stranger:

Parked at the embassy is an American automobile of an expensive make and the latest model. Two pedestrians walk up from opposite directions and stop involuntarily. One of them exclaims: “An amazing foreign car!” Then he panics and tries to correct his gaffe: “An amazing Soviet car. I think it’s Soviet. Yes, yes, it must be. Of course!” “What, can’t you tell an American automobile from a Soviet one at first glance?” “At first glance I can’t even tell an informer from a regular person.”

Given that undercover surveillance was strictly secret, how did awareness of informers enter society? Even gossip and rumor must start from somewhere. Several channels are plausible. One channel was a constant factor: the official ideology. Through the period of Soviet rule, the ruling party leaders presented the people with the image of a society encircled and penetrated by enemies. When anybody could be a spy, it may have become obvious that anyone could also be a counterspy.

Another channel that may have fed the public awareness of the presence of informers in society was the high-water marks left by the periodic waves of radical mobilization and terror. At such times the hunger of the secret police for private information was advertised by campaigns that encouraged all citizens to volunteer denunciations.^[357] The cult of Pavlik Morozov, the son who supposedly denounced his father to the state for resisting the collectivization of local farms, taught this duty to generations of schoolchildren.^[358] Then there was correction: the Great Terror was followed by a campaign against “slanderers,” those who had falsely denounced their colleagues and neighbors to the secret police and were now made scapegoats for some of the more obvious injustices. The campaign against slander was publicized and extensively reported in the press.^[359]

Finally, the carelessness and indiscretion of officials may have helped to stimulate informal understanding of the role of informers in society. Officers could gossip in bars or among neighbors.^[360] The negligent disclosure of informers’ evidence might have enabled some targets of surveillance to identify them.^[361] Some recruits to the agentura gave themselves away, driven by conscience or by carelessness.^[362]

A related question is how far this awareness extended, and where were its limits. The evidence available includes the testimony of relatively urbanized, educated people that left diaries or memoirs or met and confided in Western visitors, who were often journalists or scholars. Perhaps personal awareness of the KGB agentura was higher in towns or among educated or responsible people. If so, it would support the idea that the awareness of informers somehow followed their actual presence in society. But the silence of the less educated and more dispersed sections of society leaves the conjecture untested.

Where the awareness of informers was felt, the effect was a fear of strangers. “You can’t trust anyone but your pillow,” said a young man to the American journalist Hedrick Smith, after learning that one of his friends had reported on him to the KGB.^[363] Without knowing, perhaps, he echoed a remark attributed to Isaak Babel, a writer of the previous generation: “Today a man talks freely only with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”^[364]

A consequence of the fear of strangers was self-censorship. A woman whose father was arrested in 1936 recalls, “We were brought up to keep our mouths shut.”^[365] In postwar Odesa, Jewish parents taught their child that what was said within the home could not be shared at school or outside their intimate circle: “You are not to repeat.... Only to your family members and your friends.”^[366] Instinctively, ordinary people developed their own “conspirative” norms for everyday survival. On meeting strangers or distant acquaintances, it was a mark of good faith not to discuss politics, not to complain about shortages, and not to enquire after missing people. The fear of strangers made such confidences impossible without long and intimate association.

The same fear also limited the scope of horizontal social networks. In any circle, the new arrival was an unknown risk. “We don’t want personal relations with that many other people,” the journalist Hedrick Smith was told.^[367]

New perspectives on the long-term consequences of undercover surveillance are provided by two recent projects on East Germany before and after unification. The anthropologist Ulrike Neuendorf, herself East German by origin, took the life histories of ten former citizens of East Berlin and Brandenburg (supplemented by other shorter interviews), with the aim of working out the effects of secret police surveillance on society. She sought to establish how her subjects remembered feeling at the time, first, living in East Germany under Stasi surveillance, and then, in the aftermath of German unification. She offers a qualitative summary:

During GDR-times: Paralysis—Guarded towards others—Security— Order—Reliance on the system to work/comfort—Shame—Distrust / Trust was even more meaningful, as more was at stake—Anger— Disappointment—Betrayal—Fear—Uncertainty—Dissociative behaviour / escape through alcohol abuse.

Contemporary Germany: Scepticism—Paranoia—Cynicism—Nostalgia (related to order and security)—Events of the past overshadowing present life—Shame—Distrust / Trust—Anger—Disappointment— Disillusionment—Betrayal—Fear—Uncertainty—Dissociative behaviour / escape through alcohol or drug abuse.^[368]

In a quantitative study, economists Lichter, Lôffler, and Siegloch take as their starting point a range of qualitative descriptions of East German society that strongly resemble those found by Neuendorf: a widespread consciousness of informer surveillance, leading to a fear of strangers and the breakdown of bonds of trust among colleagues, neighbors, friends, and family members. They then look for validation of these patterns and their present-day correlates, mapping modern large-scale survey evidence onto historical variation in the density of Stasi informer networks across more than two hundred East German counties in the 1980s.^[369] The variation was substantial, with as few as one informer per thousand in some counties and up to ten per thousand in others.^[370]

This project finds a statistical link from more intensive informer surveillance in the 1980s to lower levels of trust in strangers and civic engagement thirty years later. The authors interpret the correlation as causal, not only because of the passage of time, but also by ruling out other historical factors that might also have been responsible for systematically higher levels of surveillance in particular counties.^[371]

As the wider literature on economic development would predict, it turns out that higher levels of informer surveillance under East German communism are also linked to reduced education, employment, selfemployment, and incomes after communism. The authors estimate that these effects could account for half of the East-West gap in productivity and incomes across unified Germany.

These findings are of interest at more than one level. First, it is remarkable that the outcomes of informer surveillance are found in the variance of fear or mistrust across society. Thirty years later, mistrust is greater where informer surveillance was previously more intense. In other words, the people of an East German county not only registered the experience of being more (or less) under watch in some way but also altered their social norms and preferences to match that experience, and these alterations persisted across a generation.

Second, it appears that the capacities for grassroots political and economic cooperation in civil society are bundled together and cannot be separately treated. When informer surveillance suppressed political cooperation against the regime, it also did long-term damage to the citizens’ ability to join with each other in productive cooperation.

Finally, if a low-trust society was the product of secret police surveillance, it is of interest to return to the question of whether the product was intended. This seems unlikely, for two reasons. One, the party leaders sought and demanded the trust of the people. And two, while distrust of strangers impeded antiregime activities, it also impeded KGB information gathering. The effectiveness of KGB operations relied on the capacity of the agents to win and retain trust in others while persuading them that they were not in fact under surveillance. The targets of surveillance sometimes rejected approaches from informers, based on no more than suspicion. In anticipation of scrutiny, every informer had to be trained to overcome suspicion and win trust. Fear of inadvertent exposure could also hinder the recruitment of potentially useful informers, as in the case of Agent Rimkus.

In all these ways the fear of informers, and the mistrust of strangers associated with it, raised the operating costs of the authoritarian state and consumed resources that would otherwise have been available for other purposes. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff was at work once more.

Stalin’s first requirement of his subordinates was that they should be open with him. The party expected its members to trust it with their personal failings and weaknesses. The KGB expected to be informed of the facts of everything, no matter how intimate.

The glass through which the regime watched society was a one-way mirror. The regime itself was opaque. Its conspirative norms were designed to prevent outsiders from seeing in. Those kept out were not only the nonparty masses but also many ordinary party members, who were not trusted with the inner secrets of the system of power.

Those who were excluded from the system of power had considerable understanding of the spirit in which they were governed. They responded by developing their own informal rules of conspirative behavior. To defend their privacy, they put up barriers against strangers, especially those that seemed unreasonably curious. Conversation in queues or on the telephone became guarded. Children were taught that what is said in the family cannot be repeated in the classroom or even in the playground. In fact, while the Soviet system of power deliberately held back the development of civil society, this unofficial tradecraft provides confirmation that civil society did exist under Soviet rule. The shared conspirative norms of personal interaction were a practical achievement of Soviet civil society, one that helped its self-defense against a suspicious and intrusive state.

The widespread fear of informers raised barriers against the operation of counterintelligence. Every informer had to be trained to overcome the mistrustful instincts of the target, win the target’s confidence, uncover their secrets, and betray them to the state. The same secrecy that enhanced the security of the regime undermined the effectiveness of the state over which the regime presided.

As a result, the Soviet leaders’ efforts to secure themselves against the disruptive influences of ethnic nationalism, cultural rebellion, and hostile religious and ethical values required large investments and incurred increasing costs. Relative to respective populations, the KGB maintained an agentlira of around one hundred times the size of the FBI informer network on the American side at a similar stage of the Cold War. The damage done by informer surveillance to the capacity of citizens to work together in both politics and economics persisted long after the communist state came to an end.