The Sword and the Shield

^THIRTEEN THE MAIN ADVERSARY Part 4: Walk-ins and Legal Residencies in the Later Cold War

Yuri Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967 with extravagant expectations of the potential contribution of political intelligence to Soviet foreign policy, particularly towards the United States. In a report to KGB Party activists soon after his appointment, he declared that the KGB must be in a position to influence the outcome of international crises in a way that it had failed to do during the Cuban missile crisis five years earlier. He ordered the preparation within three to four months of a First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate report to the Central Committee on the current and future policy of the Main Adversary and its allies. The principal weakness of current operations in the United States, Andropov complained, was the lack of American agents of the caliber of the Britons Kim Philby, George Blake and John Vassall, or the West German Heinz Felfe. Only by recruiting such agents, he insisted, could the FCD gain access to really high-grade intelligence.¹

Almost from the moment he became a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo in 1967, Andropov established himself as a powerful voice in Soviet foreign policy. In 1968 he emerged as the chief spokesman of those calling for “extreme measures” to crush the Prague Spring.² During the 1970s he became co-sponsor, with the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, of the main foreign policy proposals brought before the Politburo (of which both were full, voting members from 1973). Dmitri Ustinov, who became Defense Minister in 1977, sometimes added his signature to the proposals worked out with Gromyko. According to the long-serving Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin:

Under Andropov, the FCD, which had traditionally been wary of taking the initiative in issuing intelligence assessments, for fear that they might contradict the opinions of higher authority, reformed and expanded its analytical branch.⁴ On a number of occasions Andropov circulated slanted assessments to the Politburo in an attempt to influence its policy.⁵

Andropov became one of Brezhnev’s most trusted advisers. In January 1976, for example, he sent the General Secretary a strictly personal eighteen-page letter, which began sycophantically:

Though careful not to criticize Brezhnev even in private discussions with senior KGB officers,⁷ Andropov was well aware of both his intellectual limitations and declining health, and set out to establish himself as heir-apparent. The General Secretary paid little attention to the details of foreign policy. Dobrynin quickly discovered that what most interested Brezhnev about foreign affairs were the pomp and circumstance of ceremonial occasions:

During one meeting with Dobrynin, Brezhnev disappeared upstairs and reemerged in field marshal’s uniform, his chest clanking with medals. “How do I look?” he asked. “Magnificent!” Dobrynin dutifully replied.⁸ From 1974 onwards a series of mild strokes caused by arteriosclerosis of the brain left Brezhnev a semi-invalid. At the rear of the cavalcade of black Zil limousines which accompanied Brezhnev wherever he went was a resuscitation vehicle. By the mid-1970s one of his closest companions was a KGB nurse, who fed him a steady stream of pills without consulting his doctors.⁹

THOUGH ANDROPOV STRENGTHENED both his own influence and that of the KGB in the making of Soviet foreign policy, his ambitious plans for dramatically improved political intelligence on the Main Adversary were never realized. Line PR (political intelligence) in the American residencies failed to live up to his high expectations. In 1968, a scandal arose over the New York resident, Nikolai Panteleymonovich Kulebyakin, a former head of the FCD First (North American) Department. After the Centre had received a complaint against him, probably from within his residency, an enquiry revealed that he had entered the KGB with a bogus curriculum vitae. Contrary to the claims in his CV, he had never completed his school education and had evaded military service. Fearing that Kulebyakin might defect if he were confronted with his crimes in Washington, he was told he had been promoted to deputy director of the FCD and summoned home to take up his new office. On arriving in Moscow, however, he was summarily dismissed from the KGB and expelled from the Communist Party.¹⁰

Thanks chiefly to two walk-ins, Line PR in Washington performed rather better than New York during the mid- and late 1960s. In September 1965 Robert Lipka, a twenty-year-old army clerk in NSA, caused great excitement in the Washington residency by presenting himself at the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street, a few blocks from the White House, and announcing that he was responsible for shredding highly classified documents. Lipka (code-named DAN) was probably the youngest Soviet agent recruited in the United States with access to high-grade intelligence since the nineteen-year-old Ted Hall had offered his services to the New York residency while working on the MANHATTAN project at Los Alamos in 1944. Lipka’s file notes that he quickly mastered the intelligence tradecraft taught him by Line PR. Over the next two years he made contact with the residency about fifty times via dead letter-boxes, brush contacts and meetings with a case officer.¹¹

The youthful head of Line PR, Oleg Danilovich Kalugin, spent “countless hours” in his cramped office in the Washington residency sifting through the mass of material provided by Lipka and choosing the most important documents for cabling to Moscow.¹² Lipka’s motives were purely mercenary. During the two years after he walked into the Washington embassy, he received a total of about 27,000 dollars, but regularly complained that he was not paid enough and threatened to break contact unless his remuneration was increased. Lipka eventually did break contact in August 1967, when he left NSA at the end of his military service to study at Millersville College in Pennsylvania and probably concluded that his loss of intelligence access made it no longer worth his while maintaining contact with the Washington residency. To discourage the KGB from trying to renew contact, Lipka sent a final message claiming that he had been a double agent controlled by US intelligence. In view of the importance of the classified documents he had provided, however, the KGB had no doubt that he was lying. Attempts by both the residency and illegals to renew contact with Lipka continued intermittently, without success, for at least another eleven years.¹³

Only a few months after Lipka ceased working as a Soviet agent, the Washington residency recruited another walk-in with access to SIGINT. The most important Cold War agent recruited in Washington before Aldrich Ames walked in in 1985 was probably Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker, a communications watch officer on the staff of the Commander of Submarine Forces in the Atlantic (COMSUBLANT) in Norfolk, Virginia. Late in 1967 he entered the Soviet embassy and announced, “I’m a naval officer. I’d like to make some money and I’ll give you some genuine stuff in return.” Despite his junior rank, Walker had access to very high-level intelligence—including the key settings of US naval ciphers. The sample batch of his material, which he brought with him to the embassy, was examined with amazement by Kalugin and the Washington resident, Boris Aleksandrovich Solomatin. According to Kalugin, Solomatin’s “eyes widened as he leafed through the Walker papers. ‘I want this!’ he cried.” Walker, they later agreed, was the kind of spy who turns up “once in a lifetime.” Enabling Soviet codebreakers to crack US navy codes, claims Kalugin, gave the Soviet Union “an enormous intelligence advantage” by allowing it to monitor American fleet movements.¹⁴

Walker, described in a fitness report from his commanding officer in 1972 as “intensely loyal” with “a fine sense of personal honor and integrity,” found photographing top secret documents and cipher material with a Minox camera in the COMSUBLANT communications center so easy that he was later to claim, “K Mart has better security than the Navy.” He went on to form a spy-ring by recruiting a naval friend, Jerry Whitworth, and his own son and elder brother.¹⁵ For Kalugin the greatest surprise of both the Lipka and Walker cases was their revelation of “how incredibly lax security still was at some of the United States’ top secret installations.”¹⁶

After the foundation in 1968 of the ultra-secret Sixteenth Department to handle SIGINT material collected by the FCD, Walker was transferred to its control and thus no longer figured on the Washington residency’s agent list.¹⁷ Solomatin, however, was careful to ensure that he retained personal oversight of the running of what became the Walker family spyring throughout the extraordinary eighteen years of its existence.¹⁸ The reflected glory of the Lipka and Walker cases was to win Solomatin the Order of the Red Banner and, later, promotion to deputy head of the FCD. Kalugin’s career also benefited; in 1974 he became the FCD’s youngest general.¹⁹

Most walk-ins were less straightforward than Lipka and Walker. During the 1970s KGB residencies, especially that in Mexico City, had to deal with a growing number of “dangles”—double agents controlled by the US intelligence community who offered their services as Soviet agents. One of the most successful dangles was MAREK, a master sergeant of Czech descent at the Fort Bliss army base in Texas, who visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico in December 1966 and offered information on electronic equipment used by the US army. Recruited in June 1968, he had numerous meetings over the next eight years with a grand total of twenty-six case officers in Mexico, West Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Austria. In May 1976, however, the KGB learned from the former CIA officer Philip Agee (PONT) that MAREK was a US dangle, run in a joint CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency operation of which he had personal knowledge. ²⁰

By the late 1970s a special Pentagon panel was selecting classified documents which were given to American dangles, mostly non-commissioned officers selected by the DIA to strengthen their credibility as Soviet spies. As well as providing a potential channel for disinformation in a conflict or crisis, large amounts of KGB time and energy were wasted in distinguishing dangles from genuine walk-ins. The most successful of the real Soviet recruits, Aldrich Ames, said later that the refusal of the Red Army to release classified documents made it impossible for Soviet dangles to compete with those of the United States:

Throughout the Cold War the main weakness of the Washington residency was its inability to recruit agents able to provide high-level political intelligence from within the federal government. At the end of the 1960s, however, it had one non-agent source to which it attached great importance. A line PR officer, Boris Sedov, operating under cover as a Novosti journalist, had succeeded in making contact with Henry Kissinger while he was still a professor at Harvard University. According to Kalugin, “ We never had any illusions about trying to recruit Kissinger: he was simply a source of political intelligence.” When Kissinger became an adviser to Nixon during the 1968 election campaign, he began to use Sedov to pass messages to Moscow that Nixon’s public image as an unreconstructed Cold War warrior was false and that he wanted better relations with the Soviet Union. After Nixon’s election victory, Brezhnev sent personal congratulations to him via Sedov together with a note expressing the hope that together they would establish better US—Soviet relations. While the presidential campaign had been underway, the long-serving Soviet ambassador, Anatoli Dobrynin, had tolerated Sedov’s secret contacts with Kissinger. Once Nixon entered the White House and Kissinger became his National Security Adviser, however, he insisted on taking over the back channel to the Kremlin himself. ²²

When Kissinger took over as Secretary of State in 1973, Dobrynin became the only ambassador in Washington who was allowed to enter the State Department unobserved via the underground garage.²³ The Washington residency complained to the Centre that Kissinger had forbidden his officials to meet members of the Soviet embassy outside office hours, thus making it impossible for residency officers to develop contacts of their own within the State Department and “check Kissinger’s true intentions when negotiating with Ambassador Dobrynin.”²⁴ During his twenty-three years in Washington from 1963 to 1986, Dobrynin’s access to a series of major policy-makers from Dean Rusk under Kennedy to George Shultz under Reagan was never equaled by the Washington residency.²⁵

Line PR at the New York residency had no success in recruiting “valuable agents” within the US administration either. The United Nations, however, was a much softer target. Of the more than 300 Soviet nationals employed in the UN Secretariat, many were KGB and GRU officers, agents and co-optees. KGB officers operating under diplomatic cover became the trusted personal assistants to successive UN secretaries-general: Viktor Mechislavovich Lesiovsky to U Thant, Lesiovsky and Valeri Viktorovich Krepkogorsky to Kurt Waldheim and Gennadi Mikhaylovich Yevstafeyev to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.²⁶ The KGB made strenuous attempts to cultivate Waldheim in particular, arranging for the publication of flattering articles about him in the Soviet press and selecting a painting of Samarkand by a Soviet artist which was personally presented to him by Lesiovsky and Krepkogorsky when he visited the USSR.²⁷

According to Arkadi Nikolayevich Shevchenko, the Russian under secretary-general at the UN who defected in 1978, Lesiovsky and Krepkogorsky were given largely routine responsibilities by Waldheim, checking the order of speakers at the General Assembly or representing him at innumerable diplomatic receptions, but were frozen out of sensitive UN business by what they claimed was Waldheim’s “Austrian mafia.” The UN Secretariat in New York none the less became a much more successful recruiting ground than the federal government in Washington. Shevchenko frequently saw Lesiovsky in the delegates’ lounge, “buying drinks for an ambassador, telling amusing stories, procuring hard-to-get theater or opera tickets, name dropping, ingratiating himself.”²⁸ The Secretary-General’s KGB personal assistants spent much of their time cultivating and trying to recruit members of foreign missions and the UN Secretariat from around the world.²⁹

The Centre, however, frequently expressed disappointment with political intelligence operations by the New York residency outside the United Nations. The residency’s work was seriously disrupted in 1973 when it discovered that the FBI had detailed information on the activities of some of its operations officers, as well as of three “developmental” agents (codenamed GREK, BREST and BRIZ).³⁰ A report at the end of 1974 concluded that Line PR’s performance had been unsatisfactory for some time past:

None of the three new agents was of major significance. SUAREZ was a Colombian journalist recruited by Anatoli Mikhailovich Manakov, a KGB officer operating under cover as Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent in New York. A few years later SUAREZ succeeded in gaining US citizenship.³² DIF was a US businessman who provided political and economic assessments.³³ HERMES, potentially the most important of the three new recruits, was Ozdemir Ahmet Ozgur, a Cypriot born in 1929. In 1977, the New York residency was able to arrange through Arkadi Shevchenko for Ozgur to gain a post at the UN Secretariat. When Shevchenko defected in 1978, however, the KGB was forced to break off all contact with HERMES. ³⁴

DIF, the US businessman, was also included in the Washington residency’s list of its Line PR agents in 1974. Line PR had nine other agents: GRIG, MAGYAR, MORTON, NIK, RAMZES, REM, ROMELLA, SHEF and STOIC.³⁵ GRIG remains unidentified but is reported as operating in Canada.³⁶ MAGYAR was a leading peace activist.³⁷ MORTON was a prominent lawyer recruited in 1970 but taken off the agent list in 1975 because of his advancing years. On his retirement he put the Washington residency in touch with his son, who was also a partner in a well-known law firm.³⁸ NIK was a Colombian who worked on US—Colombian cultural exchange programs.³⁹ RAMZES was an American professor with contacts in Congress, academe, the press and Latin America.⁴⁰ REM was an Italian employee of the UN Secretariat.⁴¹ ROMELLA was a Latin American diplomat in the UN Secretariat, who made contact with the KGB to seek its help in renewing her contract at the UN before it expired in 1975; she supplied both classified documents and recruitment leads.⁴² SHEF was a professor at McMaster University, recruited during a visit to Lithuania in 1974.⁴³ STOIC was a Latin American diplomat in the UN Secretariat. ⁴⁴ As in New York, none of the Washington Line PR agents had high-level access to any branch of the federal government.

Though the New York residency had some successes in electronic eavesdropping, in active measures and in scientific and technological intelligence, its Line PR network mostly consisted of agents at the UN and in émigré communities, only a minority of whom had US citizenship.⁴⁵ The largest concentration of agents was within the Soviet colony itself, most of whom inhabited the residential complex in Riverdale. According to KGB statistics, in 1975 the colony numbered 1,366 Soviet employees and dependents. Of the 533 employees, seventy-six were officially classed as agents and sixteen as “trusted contacts.”⁴⁶ Most, however, were chiefly concerned with informing on their colleagues to Line SK (Soviet Colony) in the residency. The Centre’s assessment in 1974 stressed the limitations of Line PR’s New York agents:

Lacking any high-level agents in the federal government, Line PR officers in New York and Washington, usually operating under cover as diplomats or journalists, devoted much of their time to collecting insider gossip from well-placed non-agent sources in Congress and the press corps.⁴⁸ As head of Line PR in Washington from 1965 to 1970, Kalugin got to know the columnists Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft and Drew Pearson; Chalmers Roberts and Murray Marder of the Washington Post; Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor; Carl Rowan, former director of the US Information Agency; and Henry Brandon of the London Times. Kalugin’s role when he called at their offices or lunched with them in Washington restaurants was not that of agent controller or recruiter. Instead, he “would act like a good reporter,” carefully noting their assessments of the current political situation: “Rarely did I come up with a scoop for the Politburo, but the reporting of our [PR] section enabled Soviet leaders to have a better sense of American political realities…” During the 1968 presidential election campaign some of Kalugin’s sources provided corroboration for Sedov’s reports, based on conversations with Kissinger, that, if elected, Nixon would prove much less anti-Soviet than Moscow feared. One of Kalugin’s most important contacts was Senator Robert Kennedy who, but for his assassination just after he had won the California presidential primary, might have won the 1968 Democratic nomination. Before his death Kennedy presented Kalugin with a tie-pin showing the PT-109 torpedo boat which his brother had captained during the war. Line PR officers in Washington also had regular meetings with such leading senators as Mike Mansfield, William Fulbright, Mark Hatfield, Charles Percy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Jacob Javits. The Centre liked to boast to the Politburo that its assessments of American policy were based on access to the Congressional élite.⁴⁹

Most of the political reporting of the Washington residency was thus based on non-secret sources—to the considerable annoyance of some of the Soviet diplomats whose far smaller foreign currency allowances gave them less freedom to entertain their contacts in Washington restaurants. Despite his insistence on keeping the back channel to himself, Dobrynin took a more benign view of the residency’s work, and seemed genuinely interested in what it discovered from both its contacts and agents.⁵⁰ “In too many Soviet embassies,” Dobrynin complained, “normal personal relations between the ambassador and the KGB resident were the exception rather than the rule.” Ambassador and resident frequently became locked in bitter rivalry as each sought “to show who really was the boss in the embassy” and to demonstrate to Moscow the superiority of his own sources of information.⁵¹

As resident in Washington from 1965 to 1968 Solomatin had got on well with Dobrynin. When he became resident in New York in 1971, however, he quickly began to feud with Yakov Malik, the Soviet representative at the United Nations. Malik strongly objected to Solomatin’s attempts to develop contacts whom he wished to cultivate himself—among them David Rockefeller, brother of Nelson and chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.⁵² Malik was fascinated by Rockefeller’s 30,000-name card file of his contacts around the world, cross-indexed by country, city and business. On a visit to the chairman’s sprawling seventeenth-floor office at the sixty-story Chase Manhattan building, Malik asked to see a sample from the file. Rockefeller picked out the card for Khrushchev.⁵³ Malik also vigorously opposed Solomatin’s contacts with the veteran diplomat Averell Harriman, regarded in Moscow as one of the most influential American advocates of better relations with the Soviet Union.⁵⁴ In co-operation with Dobrynin, Harriman later returned from retirement to act as unofficial channel of communication between Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter during the transition period after Carter’s 1976 election victory.⁵⁵ Solomatin complained to the Centre that Malik’s objections to his attempts to cultivate Rockefeller and Harriman were “characteristic” of his general obstructionism. ⁵⁶ He failed, however, to tell the Centre that there was not the slightest prospect of recruiting either Rockefeller or Harriman.

In an attempt to improve the quality of agent recruitment in the United States, the director of the Institute of Psychology in the Academy of Sciences, Boris Fyodorovich Lomov, a “trusted contact” of the KGB, was sent in 1975 to advise the New York residency on techniques of cultivation.⁵⁷ In 1976 the Centre devised an elaborate incentive scheme to reward successful recruiters, with inducements ranging from medals and letters of appreciation to accelerated promotion, new apartments and cash bonuses in hard currency (which would make possible the purchase of Western consumer goods that could be shipped back to Moscow at the end of the officer’s tour of duty).⁵⁸

As chairman of the KGB, Andropov seemed unable to grasp the difficulties of penetrating the US administration. During the mid-1970s he initiated a series of hopelessly impracticable recruitment schemes. Following Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 after the Watergate scandal, Andropov instructed the Washington residency to establish contact with five members of the former administration: Pat Buchanan and William Safire, former advisers and speechwriters to Nixon; Richard Allen, Deputy National Security Adviser during the first year of Nixon’s administration; C. Fred Bergsten, an economist on the National Security Council (NSC); and S. Everett Gleason, an NSC veteran who died three months after Nixon’s resignation. ⁵⁹ All were wildly improbable recruits. In 1975 Andropov personally approved a series of equally improbable operations designed to penetrate the “inner circles” of a series of well-known public figures: among them George Ball, Ramsey Clark, Kenneth Galbraith, Averell Harriman, Teddy Kennedy and Theodore Sorensen.⁶⁰ Somewhat humiliatingly for the FCD, the KGB’s most productive agent during the 1976 election campaign was a Democratic activist with access to the Carter camp who had been recruited during a visit to Russia by the Second Chief Directorate.⁶¹

The KGB’s most successful strategy for cultivating American policy-makers was to use the prestigious academic cover of the Moscow Institute of the United States and Canada. The secret 1968 statute of the institute kept at the Centre authorized the KGB to task it to research aspects of the Main Adversary which were of interest to it, to provide KGB officers with cover positions, to invite prominent American policy-makers and academics to Moscow and to undertake intelligence-related missions to the United States. Among the KGB’s cover positions at the institute was that of deputy director, occupied by Colonel Radimir Bogdanov (codenamed VLADIMIROV), sometimes described behind his back as “the scholar in epaulets.”⁶² The KGB’s most important agent at the institute was its director, Georgi Arbatov, codenamed VASILI, who built up a large circle of high-level contacts in the United States and was regularly required to cultivate them.⁶³ According to Kissinger:

Though Arbatov’s access to US policy-makers raised KGB hopes of a major penetration of the federal government, Mitrokhin found no evidence in the files of any significant recruitment which resulted from it. In the Centre’s view, Arbatov’s most important contact during the 1970s was former Under-Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, codenamed VIZIR (“Vizier”). During a visit to Moscow in the spring of 1973, Vance unsurprisingly agreed with Arbatov on the need to “increase the level of mutual trust” in US—Soviet relations. Arbatov reported that he had told Vance—doubtless to no effect—that the majority of the American press corps in Moscow were propagating “a negative propagandistic” image of the USSR at the behest of the Zionist lobby in the United States. In 1976 Arbatov was sent on another mission to the United States. While there he claimed an addition 200 dollars for “operational expenses” from the New York residency for entertaining Vance and others. From such inconsequential meetings the Centre briefly formed absurdly optimistic hopes of penetrating the new American administration after Jimmy Carter’s victory in the presidential election of November 1976 and his appointment of Vance as Secretary of State. On December 19 Andropov personally approved operations against Vance which were probably intended to make him at least a “trusted contact” of the KGB. The operations were, of course, doomed to failure. Vance’s file records that, once he entered the Carter administration, any possibility of unofficial access to both him and his family dried up.⁶⁵ Doubtless to the frustration of the Centre, Ambassador Dobrynin continued to have a private entrée to the State Department via its underground garage, just as he had done during Kissinger’s term as Secretary of State, and prided himself on maintaining through Vance the “confidential channel” between White House and Kremlin which the Centre had briefly deluded itself into believing it could take over.⁶⁶

The Centre’s early expectations of the Carter administration were so unrealistic that it even devised schemes to cultivate his hardline National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The FCD drew up a plan to send Arbatov’s deputy, Bogdanov, whom Brzezinski had met previously, to Washington “to strengthen their relationship and to convey to him some advantageous information.” On January 3, 1977 Andropov also approved an operation to collect “compromising information” on Brzezinski as a means of putting pressure on him. Unsurprisingly, as in the case of Vance, the Centre’s early hopes of cultivating Brzezinski quickly evaporated, and the Centre concentrated instead on devising “active measures” to discredit him.⁶⁷

KGB Decree No. 0017 of May 26, 1977 declared that there was an urgent need for better intelligence on the Carter administration. The Centre’s evaluations of the work of the Washington and New York residencies in both 1977 and 1978 make clear that this requirement was not met. Line PR’s agent network in the United States was once again declared incapable of meeting the objectives assigned to it. Not a single agent had direct access to major penetration targets.⁶⁸

Lacking reliable, high-level sources within the administration, the Centre, as frequently happened, fell back on conspiracy theories. Early in 1977 Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, head of the FCD and a protégé of Andropov, submitted to him a report entitled “On CIA Plans to Recruit Agents Among Soviet Citizens,” revealing a non-existent CIA masterplan to sabotage Soviet administration, economic development and scientific research:

Andropov considered this improbable top secret conspiracy theory so important that on January 24, 1977 he forwarded it under his signature to the other members of the Politburo and Central Committee.⁶⁹

THE CENTRE HARBORED far fewer illusions about the incoming Reagan administration in January 1981 than it had done about Carter four years earlier. Any hope that Reagan’s anti-Soviet speeches during the election had been mere campaign rhetoric quickly faded after his inauguration. In April 1981, after a trip to the United States at the Centre’s request, Arbatov sent a report on the new administration to Andropov and Kryuchkov. At a dinner in the White House he had been able to observe Reagan for one and a half hours from a distance of only fifteen meters. Though Reagan seemed to be acting the role of president, he played the part with genuine emotion. Tears came to his eyes when the flags of the four armed services were brought into the room and when he stood up and placed his hand on his heart as the national anthem was played. Nancy Reagan’s eyes never left her husband. Her adoring expression reminded Arbatov of a teenage girl suddenly placed next to her favorite pop star. Though Reagan’s speech to the assembled journalists was “exceptionally shallow,” the President played to perfection the role of “father of the nation,” a great leader who had kept his humanity, a sense of humor and the common touch.⁷⁰

Both the Centre and the Kremlin took a less benign view of Reagan. In a secret speech to a major KGB conference in May 1981 a visibly ailing Brezhnev denounced Reagan’s policies as a serious threat to world peace. He was followed by Andropov, who was to succeed him as general secretary eighteen months later. To the astonishment of most of the audience, the KGB chairman announced that, by decision of the Politburo, the KGB and GRU were for the first time to collaborate in a global intelligence operation, codenamed RYAN—a newly devised acronym for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (“Nuclear Missile Attack”). RYAN’s purpose was to collect intelligence on the presumed, but non-existent, plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union—a delusion which reflected both the KGB’s continuing failure to penetrate the policy-making of the Main Adversary and its recurrent tendency towards conspiracy theory.⁷¹ “Not since the end of the Second World War,” Andropov informed foreign residencies, “has the international situation been as explosive as it is now.”⁷² As Brezhnev’s successor in November 1982, Andropov retained full control over the KGB; his most frequent visitors were senior KGB officers.⁷³ Throughout his term as general secretary, RYAN remained the FCD’s first priority.

For several years Moscow succumbed to what its ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin, fairly described as a “paranoid interpretation” of Reagan’s policy.⁷⁴ Most residencies in Western capitals were less alarmist than Andropov and the KGB leadership. When Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky joined the London residency in June 1982 he found all his colleagues in Line PR skeptical about operation RYAN. None, however, were willing to risk their careers by challenging the Centre’s assessment. RYAN thus created a vicious circle of intelligence collection and assessment. Residencies were, in effect, ordered to search out alarming information. The Centre was duly alarmed by what they supplied and demanded more.⁷⁵ The Washington resident, Stanislav Andreyevich Androsov, a protégé of Kryuchkov, was at pains to provide it.⁷⁶

The Centre interpreted the announcement of the SDI (“Star Wars”) program in March 1983 as part of the psychological preparation of the American people for nuclear war. On September 28, 1983 the terminally ill Andropov issued from his sickbed a denunciation of American policy couched in apocalyptic language unparalleled since the depths of the Cold War. “Outrageous military psychosis” had taken over the United States. “The Reagan administration, in its imperial ambitions, goes so far that one begins to doubt whether Washington has any brakes at all preventing it from crossing the point at which any sober-minded person must stop.” Alarm within the Centre reached a climax during the NATO exercise “Able Archer 83,” held in November 1983 to practice nuclear release procedures. For a time the KGB leadership was haunted by the fear that the exercise might be intended as cover for a nuclear first strike. Some FCD officers stationed in the West were by now more concerned by the alarmism in the Centre than by the threat of a Western surprise attack.⁷⁷

Operation RYAN wound down (though it did not end) during 1984, helped by the death of its two main proponents, Andropov and defense minister Ustinov, and by reassuring signals from London and Washington, both worried by intelligence on Soviet paranoia.⁷⁸ The alarmist RYAN reports obediently provided by KGB residencies were merely an extreme example of Line PR’s habitual tendency to tell Moscow what it wanted to hear. One political intelligence officer later admitted:

During the first Reagan administration, as at other periods, the Centre would have gained a far more accurate insight into American policy by reading the New York Times or Washington Post than by relying on the reports of its own residencies. One of the most striking signs of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” on foreign policy after he became general secretary in 1985 was his early dissatisfaction with the FCD’s political reporting. In December 1985 Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov, KGB chairman since 1982, summoned a meeting of the KGB leadership to discuss a stern memorandum from Gorbachev “on the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs in messages and informational reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other ruling bodies.” The meeting sycophantically agreed on the need to avoid sycophantic reporting and declared the duty of all Chekists both at home and abroad to fulfill “the Leninist requirement that we need only the whole truth.”⁸⁰

Gorbachev was far more impressed initially by the performance of FCD’s Directorate T. Throughout the Cold War the KGB had greater success in collecting scientific and technological intelligence (ST) than in its political intelligence operations against the Main Adversary. Infiltrating US defense contractors and research institutes proved far easier than penetrating the heart of the federal government. ST also rarely suffered from the political correctness which distorted the reporting of Line PR in residencies and political intelligence assessments at the Centre. What remained at least partially taboo, however, was the difficulty experienced by Soviet state-run industry in making full use of the extraordinary ST which it received. In 1971, for example, the defense and electronics industry ministries began a joint project to duplicate Westinghouse cathode-ray tubes. Two years later, because of production problems at the State Optical Institute, little progress had been made.⁸¹ It was ideologically impossible to learn the lessons of failures such as this, for to do so would have involved a recognition of the inferiority of the Soviet command economy to the market economies of the West. FCD reports thus concentrated on the structural contradictions of Western capitalism while glossing over the far more serious economic problems of the Soviet Bloc.⁸²

In 1970 the New York and Washington residencies each ran nine Line X agents and five “trusted contacts.”⁸³ In 1973 the new position of head ST resident for the United States was established in New York, with responsibility for coordinating Line X operations by the three American residencies, as well as attempts to evade the embargo on the export of advanced technology to the Soviet Union. By 1975 Directorate T had seventy-seven agents and forty-two trusted contacts working against American targets inside and outside the United States.⁸⁴

Mitrokhin’s notes identify thirty-two of the ST agents and trusted contacts active in the United States during the 1970s, mostly recruited in the same decade. A further eight whose espionage is not dated in the notes were also probably active in the 1970s.⁸⁵ The companies for which they worked included some of the leading American defense contractors: among them IBM, McDonnell Douglas and TRW.⁸⁶ The ST agent network also contained scientists with access to important defenserelated projects at some of the United States’ best-known research institutes: among them MIKE at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,⁸⁷ and TROP in the Argonne National Laboratory at the University of Chicago.⁸⁸ In addition to the civilian ST agent network, there were also KGB agents in the armed forces who provided intelligence on the latest military technology: among them JOE, an army electronics engineer who provided “valuable information” on military communications systems,⁸⁹ and NERPA, who in 1977 was engaged in weapons research at the US army’s Material Development and Readiness Command (DARCOM).⁹⁰

Though Mitrokhin’s information on the extent and targets of the ST network on the territory of the Main Adversary is far more extensive than any previously available account, it is not comprehensive.⁹¹ There is, for example, no mention in Mitrokhin’s notes of the Californian drug dealer Andrew Daulton Lee, who in 1975-6 provided the KGB residency in Mexico City with the operating manual for the Rhyolite surveillance satellite and technical data on other satellite systems. Lee’s source was his friend Christopher Boyce, an employee of Rhyolite’s manufacturer, TRW Corporations in Redondo Beach. Among the TRW secrets passed on to the KGB was detailed information on how American spy satellites monitored Soviet missile tests. In 1977 Lee and Boyce were arrested, tried and sentenced to, respectively, life and forty years’ imprisonment. Both achieved celebrity status as the subjects of the bestselling book and film The Falcon and the Snowman.⁹² One of the KGB files noted by Mitrokhin reveals that only a year after the arrest of Lee and Boyce the KGB recruited another, possibly even more important, spy in TRW with the codename ZENIT. While Boyce had been only a clerk (though with access to classified documents), ZENIT was a scientist.⁹³

Directorate T was proud of its achievements, particularly against the Main Adversary, and anxious to bring them to the attention of the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev was informed in 1972 that ST had produced a saving during the past year of over a hundred million convertible roubles.⁹⁴ Among the successes singled out for Brezhnev’s attention was intelligence on the construction of the American space shuttle and preparations for unmanned flights to Mars. This, he was told, would solve a number of current problems in the development of Soviet space technology. ST intelligence on the pelletization of seeds, he was further assured (doubtless unrealistically), would increase the Soviet grain harvest by 20 to 30 per cent and shorten growing time.⁹⁵ In 1973 Directorate T reported that it had acquired over 26,000 documents and 3,700 “samples.” Though only a minority of this material was classified, it included top secret information on the Saturn rocket, the Apollo space missions, the Poseidon, Honest John, Redeye, Roland, Hydra and Viper missiles, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet and computer technology subsequently plagiarized in the construction of the Minsk-32 computer.⁹⁶

The triumphs of ST collection figured prominently in the Chekist Hall of Fame opened by the FCD at Yasenevo in 1977 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Directorate T’s exhibit claimed that during the previous fiveyear period it had obtained over 140,000 ST documents and more than 20,000 “samples.” These were alleged to have produced an economic benefit of over one billion roubles for the Soviet economy and to have advanced research work in a number of branches of science and technology by periods of from two to six years.⁹⁷

Leonid Sergeyevich Zaitsev, the dynamic and ambitious head of Directorate T appointed in 1975, argued that it should be allowed to leave the FCD and become an independent directorate within the KGB. It would, he claimed, need a budget of only 1 percent per annum of the value of the ST which it supplied to Soviet industry and agriculture.⁹⁸ The head of the FCD, Kryuchkov, however, was determined not to allow such a prestigious part of his intelligence empire to escape from his control. Despite failing to win its freedom, Directorate T increasingly operated independently from the rest of the FCD. Its new recruits mostly came from scientific or engineering backgrounds, had their own curriculum in the Andropov Institute (the FCD academy) and trained separately from those in other departments. In foreign residencies Line X officers mixed relatively little with their colleagues in other lines.⁹⁹

The Military—Industrial Commission (VPK), which was mainly responsible for overseeing Directorate T, showed greater interest in non-American targets than during the early Cold War.¹⁰⁰ The United States none the less remained a more important ST target than the rest of the world combined. In 1980 61.5 percent of the VPK’s information came from American sources (some outside the USA), 10.5 percent from West Germany, 8 percent from France, 7.5 percent from Britain and 3 percent from Japan.¹⁰¹ In 1980 the VPK gave instructions for 3,617 “acquisition tasks,” of which 1,085 were completed within a year, benefiting 3,396 Soviet research and development projects.¹⁰² Directorate T was its chief collection agency.

Directorate T owed much of its success in meeting so many of the VPK’s requirements to its numerous collaborators in the Soviet scientific community, who numbered approximately 90 agent-recruiters, 900 agents and 350 trusted contacts during the mid-1970s.¹⁰³ Among these collaborators—probably the largest network of talent-spotters in the history of ST—were some of the Soviet Union’s leading scientists. All Western scientists—particularly in the United States—in fields related to Directorate T’s “acquisition tasks” were potential targets for the KGB. The first approach to a targeted scientist usually came from a Soviet colleague in a similar field, who would try to establish cooperation at a personal or institutional level. Directorate T would then seek to recruit the more naive or corrupt of the Western scientists approached in this way as agents or trusted contacts.¹⁰⁴ Among the Directorate’s agent-recruiters was the director of the Physics and Energy Institute of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (codenamed VITOS), who in 1973 recruited MIKE, a senior physicist at MIT.¹⁰⁵ SATURN, a department head at McDonnell Douglas, was recruited in 1978 with similar assistance from the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.¹⁰⁶

The KGB also took an active part in the selection of Soviet students for academic exchange programs with the United States and trained many of them as talent-spotters. Students were told to seek places at universities and research institutes within easy reach of the residencies at New York (Brooklyn Polytechnic, MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic and the universities of Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, New York and Princeton), Washington (American, Catholic, Georgetown, George Washington and Maryland Universities) and San Francisco (the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco, California Institute of Technology, University of Southern California and Stanford).¹⁰⁷

Directorate T’s success in penetrating American targets was greatly assisted by poor security in some of its target companies and research institutes. Appearing in 1985 before a Senate committee investigating security among defense contractors, Christopher Boyce testified that he and colleagues at TRW “regularly partied and boozed it up during working hours with the ‘black vault’” housing the Rhyolite satellite project. Bacardi rum, he claimed, was kept behind the cipher machines and a cipher-destruction device used as a blender to mix banana daiquiris and Mai-Tais.¹⁰⁸ Security failures in most other companies probably took less exotic and alcoholic forms.

Since most major American companies operated abroad, they were vulnerable to penetration outside as well as inside the United States. In the mid-1970s seventeen major US companies and research institutes were targeted by KGB residencies in western Europe: among them IBM by the London, Paris, Geneva, Vienna and Bonn residencies; Texas Instruments by Paris; Monsanto by London and Brussels; Westinghouse Electric by Brussels; Honeywell by Rome; ITT by Stockholm; and the National Institutes of Health by Copenhagen.¹⁰⁹ European residencies were assisted by a number of walk-ins. In 1974, for example, a Canadian resident of Los Angeles (later given the codename SPRINTER) entered the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, announced that he worked for an electro-optical company which was developing laser anti-missile systems and infra-red sights for firearms, tanks, ships and aircraft, and offered to sell its secrets.¹¹⁰ Like SPRINTER, most of the KGB’s ST network in the United States appear to have been mercenary spies.

SIGINT added substantially to the ST provided by agents. The SIGINT stations within the Washington, New York and San Francisco residencies (whose operations are discussed in chapter 21) succeeded in intercepting the telephone and fax communications of the Brookhaven National Laboratory and a series of major companies. Mitrokhin’s notes, however, do not make it possible to assess the proportion of ST provided by SIGINT rather than HUMINT.

Since before the Second World War ST had been regarded as an essential means of preventing Soviet military technology and weapons systems from falling behind the West’s. According to one report noted by Mitrokhin, over half the projects of the Soviet defense industry in 1979 were based on ST from the West.¹¹¹ Andropov claimed in 1981 that all the tasks in military ST set for the KGB had been successfully completed.¹¹² According to an official US report, based largely on documents supplied during the early 1980s by Vladimir Vetrov (codenamed FAREWELL), a French agent in FCD Directorate T:

Other successful military projects made possible by ST were the construction of a Soviet clone of the AWACS airborne radar system and the construction of the Blackjack Bomber modeled on the American B1-B.¹¹⁴

From the late 1970s onwards increasing emphasis was also put on the contribution of ST to the Soviet economy. Directorate T calculated that the main branches of civilian industry were ten years behind their Western counterparts.¹¹⁵ In January 1980 Andropov instructed Directorate T to draw up ST collection plans designed to resolve current problems in Soviet agriculture, metallurgy, power-generation, engineering and advanced technology.¹¹⁶ Of the 5,456 “samples” (machinery, components, microcircuits, etc.) acquired by Directorate T during 1980, 44 percent went to defense industries, 28 percent to civilian industry via the State Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT) and 28 percent to the KGB and other government agencies. In the same, possibly exceptional year, just over half the intelligence obtained by Directorate T came from allied intelligence services, chief among them the East German HVA and the Czechoslovak StB.¹¹⁷

Among the HVA’s greatest ST successes was its penetration of IBM. According to the head of the HVA, Markus Wolf, the East German microelectronics company Robotron “became so heavily dependent on surreptitiously acquiring IBM’s technological advances that it was, in effect, a sort of illegal subsidiary of that company.”¹¹⁸ Though well behind the West, Robotron was rather better than its Soviet equivalents in exploiting IBM computer technology. The KGB’s name-trace system SOUD (“System for Operational and Institutional Data”) used East German computers.¹¹⁹

ST collection continued to expand during the 1980s. At a meeting of senior FCD staff early in 1984 Kryuchkov reported that, “In the last two years the quantity of material and samples handed over to civilian branches of industry has increased by half as much again.” This, he claimed, had been used “to real economic effect,” particularly in energy and food production. Kryuchkov characteristically failed to mention that the sclerotic nature of Soviet economic management made it far harder to exploit ST in the civilian economy than in the imitation of Western armaments. His obsession with operation RYAN also left him dissatisfied with Directorate T’s intelligence on the weapons systems at the heart of Reagan’s non-existent plans for a nuclear first strike. “As previously,” Kryuchkov complained, “we are experiencing an acute shortage of secret information about new types of weapon and their means of delivery.” The FCD “work plan” for 1984 laid down as Directorate T’s main intelligence priorities:

The second priority was “information and specimens of significant interest for civilian branches of the USSR’s economy.”¹²⁰

Like other Soviet leaders, Gorbachev doubtless took it for granted that Soviet military technology required ST from the West. He was probably more interested, however, in the use of ST to invigorate the civilian economy. In an address to embassy staff in London on December 15, 1984, three months before he became general secretary, he singled out for praise the achievements of Directorate T and its Line X officers in foreign residencies.¹²¹ It was already clear that Gorbachev regarded the covert acquisition of Western technology and scientific research as an important part of economic perestroika.

The dramatic improvement in East—West relations during the later 1980s offered new opportunities for Directorate T, which produced 25-40,000 ST “information reports” and 12-13,000 “samples” a year. In 1986 it estimated their value at 550 million roubles; in 1988 and 1989 it put the figure at one billion roubles a year.¹²² In the later 1980s about 150 Soviet weapons systems were believed by Western experts to be based on technology system stolen from the West.¹²³

AS WELL AS being impressed by the achievements of Directorate T, Gorbachev also seems to have revised his initially critical opinion of the political intelligence provided by the FCD. During the early 1980s Kryuchkov had repeatedly berated his subordinates for their lack of success in recruiting important American agents, and demanded “a radical improvement.” As late as February 1985 he denounced “the low standard” of operations against the Main Adversary and “the lack of appreciable results” by KGB residencies in recruiting US citizens.¹²⁴

A walk-in to the Washington embassy two months later came as the answer to Kryuchkov’s prayers. By the time Aldrich Ames offered his services to the KGB in April 1985 he had been working for the CIA for eighteen years. Within two months he had betrayed twenty Western (mostly American) agents: among them Dmitri Polyakov, a GRU general who had worked for the FBI and CIA for over twenty years; Oleg Gordievsky, a British agent in the KGB who had just been appointed resident in London; Adolf Tolkachev, an electronics expert who had provided high-grade intelligence on the Soviet avionics system; and at least eleven other KGB and GRU officers stationed in various parts of the world. A majority were shot, though Gordievsky made an epic escape from Russia, with SIS assistance, while under KGB surveillance. Collectively, they had represented probably the most successful Western agent penetration of the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution. Ames’s main motive for betraying them was probably greed. By the time of his arrest nine years later, the KGB and its successor agency had paid him almost three million dollars (probably more than any other agent in Russian history) and had promised him another two.¹²⁵ As Gorbachev embarked on a new course in policy towards the United States, he was doubtless impressed by the fact that the KGB had, for the first time, recruited a major agent within the CIA. The FCD also appears to have responded to Gorbachev’s demand for less crudely biased reporting on the Main Adversary and its allies. According to Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin, then one of Kryuchkov’s deputies, “the FCD no longer had to present its reports in a falsely positive light,”¹²⁶ though many of its officers must surely have found it difficult to throw off the habits of a lifetime.

In December 1987 Gorbachev took Kryuchkov with him on his historic visit to Washington to sign with President Reagan the first arms control treaty to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers. Never before had a head of the FCD accompanied a Soviet leader on a visit to the West. Gorbachev’s confidence in Kryuchkov—which he would later bitterly regret—doubtless reflected his high opinion of the FCD’s success both in gathering an unprecedented volume of ST and in penetrating the CIA. During the visit to Washington Kryuchkov had dinner at the Maison Blanche restaurant, unnoticed by other diners, with the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Robert Gates (later DCI). Gates wrote later:

In October 1988 Kryuchkov achieved his ambition of becoming the first foreign intelligence chief to become chairman of the KGB. His valedictory address on leaving the FCD was a remarkable mixture of the old and new thinking. “Democratization and glasnost are the motive force of perestroika,” he declared, “and we shall not win through without them:”

The old suspicions and conspiracy theories about the United States, however, still lurked not far below the surface of Kryuchkov’s address. Without mentioning operation RYAN by name, he sought to justify the principles on which it was based:

And he added a warning about what he alleged was the continuing brutality of “provocation operations” by Western intelligence services; he claimed that there had been over 900 such operations during the first half of 1988 alone.¹²⁸ Kryuchkov began 1989 with a dramatic demonstration of the new climate of East—West relations, becoming the first chairman in KGB history to receive the United States ambassador in his office. Thereafter he embarked on an unprecedented public relations campaign designed to win over Western as well as Soviet opinion. “The KGB,” he declared, “should have an image not only in our country but worldwide which is consistent with the noble goals I believe we are pursuing in our work.”¹²⁹

After a brief power struggle, Kryuchkov was succeeded as head of the FCD by the 53-year-old Leonid Shebarshin, the first man with experience of working in countries outside the Soviet Bloc to run foreign intelligence since the Second World War.¹³⁰ One of Shebarshin’s main jobs at the beginning of the Gorbachev era had been to prepare intelligence reports for the Party leadership. The fact that he leapfrogged several more senior candidates for his new post is a certain indication that his briefing had impressed Gorbachev.¹³¹ Foreign intelligence officers interviewed by zvestia after Shebarshin’s resignation in September 1991 described him as “the first really competent head of the FCD in decades.”¹³² According to Shebarshin, his main initial brief from Gorbachev was “to ensure the West did not cheat on arms control.”¹³³

The tactical victories of the FCD against the Main Adversary which impressed Gorbachev failed to avert strategic defeat. Directorate T’s very success in stealing Western secrets merely underlined the structural problems of the Soviet economy. Despite ST worth a billion roubles a year and the Soviet Union’s large numbers of scientists and engineers, Soviet technology fell steadily further and further behind the West. Gorbachev’s reforms served only to weaken further the command economy, without establishing a market economy in its stead. There was a bread shortage even after the good harvest of 1990.¹³⁴ No amount of either economic or political intelligence could stave off the disintegration of the failing Soviet system.

As the Soviet Union’s economic problems multiplied during 1990 and separatist movements strengthened, the Centre’s traditional suspicions of the Main Adversary revived. Kryuchkov did not place all the blame for Russia’s ills on imperialist plots. “The main sources of our trouble, in the KGB’s view,” he declared, “are to be found inside the country.” But he accused the CIA and other Western intelligence services of promoting “anti-socialist” and separatist forces as part of a “secret war against the Soviet state.”¹³⁵ According to Shebarshin, Gorbachev failed to heed the FCD’s warnings. “He and his friends lived in a world of self-delusion… We were hitching our wagon to the Western train.”¹³⁶ With Gorbachev, in the Centre’s view, unwilling to offend the Americans, Kryuchkov began to publicize some of the KGB’s neglected conspiracy theories. In December 1990 he denounced a (non-existent) Western plot, “akin to economic sabotage,” to “deliver impure and sometimes infected grain, as well as products with an above-average level of radioactivity or containing harmful substances.” ¹³⁷ In February 1991 first Kryuchkov’s deputy, Viktor Fyodorovich Grushko, and then the new prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, denounced an equally imaginary plot by Western banks to undermine the rouble. The fullest public version of the Centre’s theory of a vast American-led conspiracy to subvert the Soviet Union was set out in April 1991 in a speech by the head of KGB assessments, Nikolai Sergeyevich Leonov, formerly deputy head of the FCD, responsible for operations in North and South America. The goal of US policy, he declared, was “to eliminate the Soviet Union as a united state.” Gorbachev, he implied, was refusing to listen:

Further dramatic evidence of the resurgence of the KGB leadership’s traditional conspiracy theories about the Main Adversary came in a speech by Kryuchkov to a closed session of the Supreme Soviet on June 17. Kryuchkov read out a hitherto top secret FCD report to the Politburo of January 1977, “On CIA Plans to Recruit Agents Among Soviet Citizens,” which denounced an imaginary CIA masterplan to sabotage the Soviet administration, economy and scientific research. This plan, Kryuchkov claimed, remained actively in force.¹³⁸ The CIA’s most important agent, he solemnly informed Gorbachev, was his own closest adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, allegedly recruited while an exchange student at Columbia University over thirty years earlier.¹³⁹

As Kryuchkov later complained, Gorbachev did not take such nonsense seriously. Nor, no doubt, did many FCD officers with the first-hand experience of the West which the KGB Chairman lacked. Kryuchkov was now Gorbachev’s most dangerous opponent, convinced that, having tamely accepted the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, Gorbachev was now presiding over the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In August 1991 he became the chief organizer of the coup which attempted to topple Gorbachev and preserve the Union.