The Sword and the Shield

^FIFTEEN PROGRESS OPERATIONS Part 1: Crushing the Prague Spring

The KGB and its predecessors had played a crucial part in the creation of the Soviet Bloc after the Second World War. Throughout eastern Europe, Communistcontrolled security services, set up in the image of the KGB and overseen—except in Yugoslavia and Albania—by Soviet “advisers,” supervised the transition to so-called “people’s democracies.” Political development in most east European states followed the same basic pattern. Coalition governments with significant numbers of non-Communist ministers, but with the newly founded security services and the other main levers of power in Communist hands, were established immediately after German forces had been driven out. Following intervals ranging from a few months to three years, these governments were replaced by bogus, Communist-run coalitions which paved the way for Stalinist one-party states taking their lead from Moscow.¹

The German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht announced to his inner circle on his return to Berlin from exile in Moscow on April 30, 1945: “It’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything under our control.”² Because a democratic façade had to be preserved throughout eastern Europe, the open use of force to exclude non-Communist Parties from power had, so far as possible, to be avoided. Instead, the new security services took the lead in intimidation behind the scenes, using what became known in Hungary as “salami tactics”—slicing off one layer of opposition after another. Finally, the one-party people’s democracies, purged of all visible dissent, were legitimized by huge and fraudulent Communist majorities in elections rigged by the security services.³

During the early years of the Soviet Bloc, Soviet advisers kept the new security services on a tight rein. The witch-hunts and show trials designed to eliminate mostly imaginary supporters of Tito and Zionism from the leadership of the ruling Communist Parties of eastern Europe were orchestrated from Moscow. One of the alleged accomplices of the Hungarian Minister of the Interior, László Rajk, in the non-existent Titoist plot for which Rajk was executed in 1949, noted how, during his interrogation, officers of the Hungarian security service “smiled a flattering, servile smile when the Russians spoke to them” and “reacted to the most witless jokes of the [MGB] officers with obsequious trumpetings of immoderate laughter.”⁴

Even after Stalin’s death, any Soviet Bloc intelligence officer of whom the KGB disapproved became a marked man. Among them was Ernst Wollweber, head of the East German Stasi from 1953 to 1957, whose long connection with Soviet intelligence went back to his years as an NKVD agent in the 1930s, specializing in marine sabotage. Wollweber, however, had come to dislike Moscow’s habit of issuing peremptory orders and resented the fact that the KGB kept him ill-informed on its operations in West Germany. The KGB also distrusted Wollweber’s current mistress, Clara Vater, a German Communist who, like many of her comrades, had been unjustly imprisoned during Stalin’s Terror.⁵ Remarkably, it placed both her and her daughter, whom Wollweber had adopted, under surveillance inside East Germany. Wollweber was succeeded in 1957 by the sycophantically pro-Soviet Erich Mielke, who remained in office with Moscow’s blessing until 1989, becoming one of the world’s longest serving intelligence chiefs.⁶

ON EACH OF the three occasions when the Red Army intervened to restore pro-Soviet orthodoxy in a wayward Communist state—Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979—the KGB played a prominent part in what was euphemistically termed the process of “normalization.” When the Hungarian uprising began in October 1956 with mass demonstrations calling for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the KGB chairman, General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov, flew to Budapest to take personal charge of KGB operations. At an emergency meeting of security and police officers in the interior ministry, Serov denounced their reluctance to fire on the demonstrators: “The fascists and imperialists are bringing out their shock troops into the streets of Budapest, and yet there are still comrades in your country’s armed forces who hesitate to use arms!” Sandor Kopácsi, the Budapest chief of police, who was soon to side with the freedom fighters, replied scornfully:

A quarter of a century later Kopácsi still vividly recalled the long, withering glare in his direction from Serov’s steel-blue eyes. Shortly before Kopácsi escaped to the West, Serov told him, “I’m going to have you hanged from the highest tree in Budapest!” On the evening of November 3, 1956 a Hungarian delegation headed by Pál Maléter, the minister of defense, was invited to Soviet military headquarters at Tokol to discuss final details of the Red Army’s withdrawal from Hungarian soil. At midnight, while toasts were being drunk, Serov, brandishing a Mauser pistol, burst into the room at the head of a group of KGB officers and arrested Maléter and his colleagues. A series of mock executions over the next few hours convinced each member of the Hungarian delegation that all his colleagues had been shot.⁸ At 4 a.m. on November 4 the Red Army began the suppression of the Hungarian uprising. Serov and his deputy, KGB General K. Grebennik, who became military commandant of Budapest, stayed on to supervise the “normalization.”⁹

Though it was not until after the Prague Spring of 1968 that the Red Army intervened again to enforce Soviet ideological orthodoxy, Moscow showed growing anxiety during the 1960s at increasing Western influence within the Soviet Bloc. The KGB reported that the West was engaged in wide-ranging “subversive activity in the political and ideological sphere against the socialist countries… seeking to persuade the population of the superiority of the Western way of life.” The “subversion” took many forms: broadcasting, propagandist publications, information distributed by Western embassies, East-West cultural and scientific exchanges, tourism and letterwriting. In the Centre’s view, Western radio stations such as the BBC World Service and Radio Liberty threatened to cause “immense harm” by broadcasting propaganda designed to weaken the fraternal ties between the Soviet Union and the socialist states of eastern Europe.¹⁰ What most worried the KGB was that “the broadcasts were popular with the intelligentsia and young people.” According to statistics probably obtained from its Hungarian ally, the AVH, over 20 per cent of young people in Hungary listened to Western radio stations.¹¹ During 1964 approximately fifty million postal items were exchanged between Hungarian citizens and the West, eight million more than in 1963. The KGB was also exercised by the growth in east European visitors to the West, who were in danger of returning with subversive ideas. In 1964 168,000 Hungarians and 150,000 Czechoslovaks visited Western countries. Worse still, in the Centre’s view, many were unsupervised during their visits. The KGB complained that its Polish ally, the SB, had no officers in its foreign residencies who were responsible for monitoring the behavior of Polish tourists and Poles studying abroad. In 1964 34,500 Poles traveled to the West as individuals rather than as members of groups.¹²

The KGB kept somewhat bizarre statistics of “harmful attitudes” and “hostile acts” in the Soviet Bloc, which it tended to lump together: such disparate phenomena as enthusiasm for Western pop music with cases of ideological deviation. In both 1965 and 1966 Hungarian young people were said to have been guilty of approximately 87,000 “harmful attitudes” and “hostile acts.” According to classified official statistics, the figure fell reassuringly, if somewhat surprisingly, to 68,000 in 1968 and remained at about that level for the next decade. Disturbingly, however, about 30 per cent of the cases recorded concerned members of the Communist youth organization, Komsomol.¹³

“The West’s subversive activities,” complained one KGB report, were “harming the cause of Socialist construction” throughout the Soviet Bloc, encouraging nationalist tendencies in the states of eastern Europe and damaging their ties with the Soviet Union. The greatest harm was being done among the intelligentsia and young people. The KGB noted “an unhealthy tendency” among writers towards “ideological co-existence” with the West and a growing belief that literature was no business of the Party. Students showed a worrying tendency to set up independent non-Party organizations for “free discussion on the model of English clubs.” One undated KGB report picked out two subversive texts currently attracting “growing interest:” The New Class by the heretical Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas, and the works of the late nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.¹⁴

It is easy to see why Djilas’s devastating exposé of the Soviet system as a co-optive oligarchy run by a privileged Party nomenklatura should have been seen as so subversive. In 1963 the twenty-year-old Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was sent to psychiatric hospital for possessing a copy of it. Even for KGB officers The New Class was seen as a potentially dangerous text. When General Oleg Kalugin finally read the book in the KGB library in 1981, twenty-four years after its publication in the West, he found himself secretly agreeing with it.¹⁵ Why Nietzsche should have been mentioned in the same breath as Djilas is more puzzling. His call for a “revaluation of all values” so that the life force of the strongest should not be hampered by the weak, though bearing some relation to the actual practice of Stalinism, was ideological anathema. But the works of Nietzsche, unlike those of Djilas, were scarcely likely to subvert the youth of the Soviet Bloc. The author of the KGB report probably knew no more about the great German philosopher than that he was a well-known enemy of Marxism.

The first stirrings of reform in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, however, caused relatively little concern in the Centre. The chief target of the reformers, the aging and truculent Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) leader, Antonín Novotný, was increasingly regarded in Moscow as a neo-Stalinist nuisance rather than as a bulwark against revisionism. In December 1967 Brezhnev made an unscheduled one-day visit to Prague at the request of Novotný, who was under pressure to relinquish the post of First Secretary, which he had hitherto combined with that of president. Brezhnev refused to intervene, telling Novotný bluntly to deal with the problem himself.¹⁶ Deprived of Soviet support, Novotný gave way to the reformers.

The election of the 46-year-old Alexander Dubček as the new First Secretary on January 5, 1968 initially aroused no disquiet in either the Kremlin or the Centre. Dubček had spent most of his childhood in the Soviet Union, graduating with honors from the Moscow Higher Party School in 1958, and was condescendingly known within the KGB as “Our Sasha.” When the Czechoslovak attempt to create “Socialism with a human face” began, the FCD Eleventh (East European) Department at first concluded that “Our Sasha” was being cleverly manipulated by “bourgeois elements” in the CPCz. Once it became clear that Dubček was himself one of the moving forces behind the reforms, the Centre felt a sense of personal betrayal.¹⁷

Dubček believed, in retrospect, that Moscow took a secret decision to use the Red Army to crush the Prague Spring little more than two months after he succeeded Novotný:

In reality Brezhnev remained unsure about the wisdom of military intervention until almost the eve of the August invasion. The Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, shared some of Brezhnev’s doubts.¹⁹ Both, however, gradually gave way to the hardliners in the Politburo.

The case for military intervention was first put at the Politburo meeting on March 21 by the Ukrainian Party secretary, Petr Yefimovich Shelest, who declared that the fate of the whole “socialist camp” was at stake in the Prague Spring. Though it was “essential to seek out the healthy [pro-Soviet] forces in Czechoslovakia more actively,” he argued that “military measures” would also be necessary. Shelest was vigorously supported by the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, who called for “concrete measures” to prepare for armed intervention.²⁰ Though as yet only a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo, Andropov became an increasingly influential voice during the Czechoslovak crisis, willing to challenge Kosygin and other more senior figures who appeared reluctant to use force.²¹

As Soviet ambassador in Budapest in 1956, Andropov had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution. His insistence that the threat of counter-revolution had reached a critical stage helped to persuade an initially reluctant Khrushchev to agree to military intervention.²² An admiring junior diplomat in the Soviet embassy later recalled how Andropov had been the first to “see through” the reformist prime minister, Imre Nagy, and had seemed completely in control of events even as Soviet tanks entered Budapest: “He was so calm—even when bullets were flying, when everyone else at the embassy felt like we were in a besieged fortress.”²³ As well as being an uncompromising advocate of force, Andropov had demonstrated his mastery of deception, successfully persuading Nagy that the Red Army was being withdrawn while simultaneously plotting his overthrow. When the Hungarian commander-in-chief phoned the Prime Minister’s office early on November 4 to report the Soviet attack, Nagy told him, “Ambassador Andropov is with me and assures me there’s been some mistake and the Soviet government did not order an attack on Hungary. The Ambassador and I are trying to call Moscow.”²⁴

In Czechoslovakia in 1968, as in Hungary in 1956, Andropov’s strategy was based on a mixture of deception and military might. Among the main instruments of deception during the Prague Spring were KGB illegals, all disguised as Westerners. Their deployment in Czechoslovakia in the first of what were henceforth termed PROGRESS operations marked a major innovation in the KGB’s use of illegals. Hitherto illegals had been sent overwhelmingly to the West rather than the East. Most of those deployed within the Soviet Bloc had been sent on missions (codenamed BAYKAL) either to cultivate Western tourists or to monitor contacts between Soviet citizens and Westerners. In 1966 and 1967, for example, a number of illegals were sent to Bulgarian Black Sea resorts to mingle with the growing number of Western holidaymakers and look for possible recruits.²⁵ The illegal Stanislav Federovich Malotenko visited tourist areas of Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and Czechoslovakia posing as a Western visitor in order to investigate, inter alia, “how willingly women agents agreed to have intimate relations with foreigners without permission” from the KGB.²⁶

During the Prague Spring illegals, posing as Western tourists, journalists, business people and students, were for the first time used in significant numbers in a country of the Soviet Bloc for both intelligence collection and active measures. Czechoslovak counter-revolutionaries, the Centre believed, would be much franker in revealing their subversive designs to those they believed Western sympathizers than to their neighbors in eastern Europe. Even within the FCD the PROGRESS operation in Czechoslovakia was known only to a small circle of senior officers. Initially the PROGRESS file was kept in the office of the head of Directorate S (Illegals), General Anatoli Ivanovich Lazarev, though, as operations in Czechoslovakia expanded, the group within the directorate who were privy to the secret also widened.²⁷

Of the first twenty illegals selected by the Centre for PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia during 1968,²⁸ at least five (GROMOV, SADKO, SEVIDOV, VLADIMIR and VLAS)²⁹ and probably another two (GURYEV and YEVDOKIMOV) ³⁰ posed as West Germans. There were also three bogus Austrians (ARTYOMOVA, DIM and VIKTOR)³¹ and three bogus Britons (BELYAKOV, USKOV and VALYA),³² two fictitious Swiss (ALLA³³ and SEP³⁴), one Lebanese (YEFRAT³⁵) and one Mexican (ROY³⁶).³⁷ Probably in March, Andropov ordered that by May 12 at least fifteen of the illegals should be deployed in Czechoslovakia—more than had ever been despatched to any Western country in so short a period of time. Each was given a monthly allowance of 300 dollars as well as travel expenses and enough money to rent an apartment.³⁸

Andropov also expanded the KGB legal representation in Prague. In addition to the KGB liaison office, headed by M. G. Kotov, which had been operating in the headquarters of the StB (its Czechoslovak equivalent) for the past twenty years, Andropov secretly established an undeclared KGB residency, headed by V. V. Surzhaninov, which began work in the Soviet embassy on April 26.³⁹ The deputy head of FCD Directorate S, G. F. Borzov, and another senior Line N officer, V. K. Umnov, were sent to the residency to co-ordinate the work of the illegals.⁴⁰ The main task both of the residency’s Line PR and of the KGB liaison with the StB was to identify reliable, pro-Soviet members of the CPCz to form a quisling government after a Soviet invasion. At the top of their list the KGB put four hardline members of the CPCz Presidium—Alois Indra, Jozef Lenárt, Drahomir Kolder and Vasil Bil’ak—and a former minister of the interior, Rudolf Barák, who had been dismissed and imprisoned in 1962, officially for embezzlement of Party funds but in reality for using the StB to collect an incriminating dossier on Novotný.⁴¹

KGB officers in Prague had little difficulty in arranging meetings with Indra, Lenárt, Kolder and Bil’ak, who were regular visitors to the Soviet embassy. It was considered too risky, however, to approach Barák directly after his release from prison early in May. Instead, the KGB residency used a female illegal, Galina Leonidovna Linitskaya (codenamed ALLA), operating with a Swiss passport in the name of Maria Werner, to make the first approach to Barák. For some years the vivacious ALLA had specialized in making contact with Western visitors to the Soviet Union who were of interest to the KGB. Her KGB file primly complains that she was “too sexually stimulated” and, despite having a daughter, “not a family person” (not a criticism which appears in the files of male illegals). ALLA had first met Barák in 1961, when he was minister of the interior, and succeeded in renewing contact with him soon after his release from prison. At ALLA’s request, Barák agreed to a meeting with B. S. Ivanov of the KGB residency.⁴²

Indra, Lenárt, Kolder and Bil’ak were all to prove stalwarts of the neo-Stalinist regime which later presided over the destruction of “Socialism with a human face.” Barák, however, proved far less useful than the Prague residency had hoped, partly because of resentment—even by some pro-Soviet members of the CPCz leadership—at his brutality as minister of the interior when he had been in charge of the StB. He was not fully rehabilitated until 1975, seven years after his release from prison.⁴³

THE KGB ILLEGALS deployed in Czechoslovakia had two main tasks: to penetrate the allegedly counter-revolutionary groups springing up during the Prague Spring in order to report on their subversive intentions; and to implement a series of active measures designed to discredit them. The main task of penetration was entrusted to YEFRAT, GURYEV, YEVDOKIMOV, GROMOV and SADKO.⁴⁴ Their chief targets were what the Centre saw as the main sources of subversive ideas:

One of the defining moments of the Prague Spring, which epitomized the new climate of political freedom and the near-collapse of official censorship, was the May Day procession through the capital, seen on television throughout the country. Instead of the usual tedious display of sycophantic admiration for the Party leadership and platitudinous slogans celebrating friendship with the Soviet Union, there was a spontaneous celebration of popular support for the reform movement combined with irreverent messages for Moscow such as the banners proclaiming “With the Soviet Union for ever—but not a day longer!” and “Long live the USSR—but at its own expense!” Dubček remembered the day “with deep emotion,” “truly touched” by the support for him from the former political prisoners of K-231 and the non-Party activists of KAN. For Moscow, however, the day was an outrageous counter-revolutionary provocation which demonstrated that the Czechoslovak one-party state was in mortal danger.⁴⁶

The danger was all the greater because, in the Centre’s view, the StB was becoming increasingly unreliable. Probably Moscow’s leading bête noire in Oldřich Černík’s government, which took power in April, was the interior minister, Josef Pavel, who was responsible for the StB. Ironically, the KGB placed much of the blame for Pavel’s appointment on Lubomír Štrougal, who later turned against the reformists and played a prominent part in the return to pro-Soviet orthodoxy. According to a report in the KGB files, Štrougal came into Černík’s office soon after his appointment as prime minister and, fearing that the office was bugged, asked him to come for a stroll by the river Vltava, which runs through the center of Prague. During their walk Štrougal urged Černík to give Pavel the interior ministry. Because Pavel had spent some years in prison during the early 1950s, Štrougal argued that he could be relied upon to ensure that the police and the StB did not abuse their powers. Čerík allegedly agreed with his arguments.⁴⁷ In late April, soon after becoming Interior Minister, Pavel announced that both the ministry and the StB were henceforth to be under government—not Party—control, and that a series of senior officials were to be sacked. Among them was the pro-Soviet head of the StB, Josef Houska, who was dismissed in June. Some weeks before he left, he handed the KGB photocopies of a series of StB personnel files.⁴⁸

On May 10 Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet prime minister, sent Čerík, his Czech counterpart, an outraged letter complaining, among other things, that “agents and saboteurs” disguised as Western tourists had been able to penetrate Czechoslovakia because of poor border security.⁴⁹ What Kosygin predictably failed to mention, however, was that the most active agents and all the saboteurs with Western passports were KGB illegals. On the very day he sent his letter, GROMOV (Vasili Antonovich Gordievsky) and GURYEV (Valentin Aleksandrovich Gutin), both posing as West Germans, were attempting to kidnap two of the most eloquent tribunes of the Prague Spring.⁵⁰ GROMOV had recent experience in kidnapping. Only a month earlier he had been decorated for an assignment in Sweden, which involved exfiltrating another illegal, FAUST, who was considered by the Centre to have developed a persecution syndrome. Once back in the Soviet Union, FAUST had been sent to a psychiatric hospital for a year, then released and sacked from the KGB.⁵¹

The targets selected for exfiltration by GROMOV and GURYEV in May 1968 were Professor Václav Černý and Jan Prochízka.⁵² Václav Černý (codenamed TEMNY),⁵³ one of Czechoslovakia’s leading authorities on Romance literature, had been expelled from his chair at Charles University after the Communist coup in 1948 but re-emerged during the Prague Spring as a founder member of KAN and an eloquent advocate of academic freedom. At the June 1967 Congress of the Writers Union, Jan Prochízka had been one of those who took the lead in denouncing official censorship and demanding “freedom of creativity.”⁵⁴ Claiming to be concerned for his safety, GURYEV tried to persuade Černý that he was in serious personal danger (presumably from the hardline opponents of reform) and offered to find him a temporary hiding place. GROMOV delivered a similar message to Prochízka. Once persuaded of the need to hide, both Černý and Prochízka were to be handed over to thugs from Service V (the FCD “special actions” department), who would drive them in a car with CD plates which could cross unchecked into East Germany.⁵⁵ If they resisted, Černý and Prochízka were to be subdued with what the operational file euphemistically describes as “special substances.”

The operation, however, was a miserable failure. After the persecution Černý had suffered during the previous twenty years, GURYEV could not persuade him that he was in any greater danger than usual. GROMOV discovered to his dismay that Prochízka had been supplied with a bodyguard by Pavel. The Centre had also overlooked the language problems involved in the operation. Though Černý was a good linguist, Prochízka spoke only Czech. Posing as a non-Czech-speaking West German, GROMOV found it difficult to communicate with him. Though he could probably have made himself understood in Russian, he would have risked revealing his real identity.⁵⁶ After a few weeks GURYEV and GROMOV abandoned their kidnap attempts.

In addition to their other missions during the Prague Spring, the illegals were tasked with a series of active measures collectively codenamed KHODOKI (“gobetweens”), which were intended to justify a Soviet invasion by fabricating evidence of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy by Czechoslovak “rightists” and Western intelligence services.⁵⁷ Posing as sympathetic Westerners, the illegals tried to persuade editors and journalists to publish attacks on the Soviet Union and other provocative articles. They also attempted to interest Černý and K-231 in accepting aid from a fictitious underground organization allegedly supplied with arms by the West. Josef Houska, the StB chief sacked by Pavel in June, was secretly informed of operation KHODOKI and agreed to co-operate with it.⁵⁸

By mid-July, as part of KHODOKI, the illegals had succeeded in planting fabricated evidence of preparations for an armed coup. On July 19 Pravda reported the discovery of a “secret cache” of American weapons near the West German border, some conveniently contained in packages marked “Made in USA,” which had allegedly been smuggled into Czechoslovakia by “revenge seekers and champions of the old order.” The Soviet authorities, it claimed, had also obtained a copy of an American “secret plan” to overthrow the Prague regime. The press throughout the Soviet Bloc followed up Pravda’s story with reports that hidden Western weapons were being discovered all over Czechoslovakia. Simultaneously bogus intelligence was fed to the StB implicating K-231 and KAN in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy with Western intelligence services.⁵⁹

The Soviet Politburo met to consider its next step in the crisis on the same day that Pravda produced its first report on the fictitious counter-revolutionary arms caches. Brezhnev began the meeting by proposing a final meeting with the Czechoslovak leadership to try to reach a negotiated settlement. Only if that failed should they take “extreme measures.” Andropov emerged as the chief spokesman of those who wanted extreme measures immediately. Bilateral talks, he argued, would achieve little, while any delay would increase the threat from “the rightists:” “They are fighting for survival now, and they’re fighting frenziedly… Both we and they are making preparations, and theirs are very thorough. They are preparing the working class, the workers’ militia [for a conflict].” It was a bad-tempered meeting. Andropov became involved in a furious argument with Kosygin, whom he accused of “attacking” him, presumably because of his call for immediate military intervention. “I am not attacking you,” retorted Kosygin. “On the contrary, it is you who are attacking me!” The only full member of the Politburo who supported Andropov’s opposition to a final meeting with the CPCz leadership was K. T. Mazurov. However, the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, like Andropov a non-voting member of the Politburo and later his close ally, probably summed up the majority view when he declared that meeting Dubček and his colleagues was no more than a necessary preliminary to invasion: “Clearly they will not accept our proposals. But then we can move to a decision about taking extreme measures…”⁶⁰

As Gromyko had predicted, the meeting between the CPCz Presidium and the Soviet Politburo at the border town of Čierní nad Tisou from July 29 to August 1 ended without agreement. After an StB investigation, Pavel reported to the CPCz Presidium that the alleged counter-revolutionary arms caches were a “provocation.” Though the weapons themselves were American, of Second World War vintage, some of them were in Soviet-made packaging. Other intelligence linking K-231 and KAN with Western secret services was also discovered to be fabricated.⁶¹ The KGB illegals behind operation KHODOKI, however, went undetected. Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB files lend some, though not conclusive, support to the claim by an StB defector that the KGB planned to murder the Soviet wives of a number of Czechoslovak citizens in August and blame their deaths on counter-revolutionaries. The plan was apparently discovered by the StB and aborted.⁶²

At a meeting of the CPCz Party committee of the StB early in August, the head of StB foreign intelligence, Shuoj Frouz (codenamed FARKAC), argued that the KGB advisers in the StB were violating the principles of Czechoslovak-Soviet intelligence liaison and should be recalled to Moscow. A report of the meeting, at which other StB officers supported Frouz, was quickly relayed to the KGB.⁶³ After the Soviet invasion, those who had demanded the recall of the KGB advisers were arrested—with the significant exception of Frouz, who may well have made the demand on KGB instructions in order to identify the main anti-Soviet elements in the StB in advance of the invasion.⁶⁴

As well as producing fabricated evidence of a Western plot for public consumption, Andropov supplied the Politburo throughout the crisis with slanted intelligence designed to strengthen its resolve to intervene. Probably the most important accurate intelligence on American policy to reach the Centre during the Prague Spring came from the Washington residency, where the dynamic 34-year-old head of Line PR, Oleg Kalugin, gained access to what he reported were “absolutely reliable documents” proving that neither the CIA nor any other agency was manipulating the Czechoslovak reform movement. These documents, however, failed to conform to Andropov’s conspiracy theory of an imperialist plot and were thus kept from the Politburo. On returning to Moscow, Kalugin was amazed to discover that the Centre had ordered that “my messages should not be shown to anyone, and destroyed.” Instead, on Andropov’s orders, “The KGB whipped up the fear that Czechoslovakia could fall victim to NATO aggression or to a coup.”⁶⁵

At a meeting in Moscow on August 18, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the other four “reliable” members of the Warsaw Pact—Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary and Poland—formally agreed on the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the biggest armed action in Europe since the end of the Second World War.⁶⁶ At 4 p.m. on August 20 a meeting of “reliable” members of the StB was briefed by Pavel’s pro-Soviet deputy, Viliam Šalgovič, on plans for the invasion which was to begin that night and assigned tasks to assist the Warsaw Pact forces. Josef Houska, dismissed by Pavel two months earlier, returned to take charge of the StB.

At about 9 a.m. on the morning of August 21, with Soviet forces already in key positions in Prague, the StB veteran Lieutenant Colonel Bohumil Molnír, who had been given a specially engraved automatic pistol by the former KGB chairman, Ivan Serov, for his assistance in crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, briefed the group of StB officers selected by the KGB to arrest Dubček and the reformist majority on the CPCz Presidium.⁶⁷ Escorted by KGB officers, the arrest group proceeded to Dubček’s office in the Central Committee building, where one of them announced in what seemed to Dubček the “mechanical voice” of a second-rate amateur actor: “I am placing you in custody in the name of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government led by Comrade Indra.” He added, after a pause in which he seemed to be remembering his lines, that Dubček and his colleagues would shortly be brought before a revolutionary tribunal, also headed by Alois Indra.⁶⁸

Indra and the other leading members of the quisling government-in-waiting selected by Moscow were already in the Soviet embassy ready to take power.⁶⁹ But at this point the invasion plan had to be modified. Indra and his co-conspirators had mistakenly assured Moscow that the invasion would be supported by a majority of the CPCz leadership.⁷⁰ The fact that Dubček retained a majority on the Presidium as well as overwhelming popular support forced Moscow to abandon its plan for a puppet regime and bring Dubček and his colleagues to the Kremlin, under KGB escort, to be browbeaten into a degree of submission. Brezhnev stuck to the fabricated KGB story that “anti-socialist” forces had been preparing a coup:

As the discussion proceeded over the next few days, however, the Soviet Politburo passed from attempts to justify the invasion and the pretense of comradely solidarity to intimidation and coercion. Dubček felt he had no option but to concede the main Soviet demands: “It could not have been otherwise. We were managing the affairs of an occupied country where the barrel of a Soviet gun was trained on our every move.” On August 26 the Czechoslovak delegation signed a secret protocol accepting a “temporary” occupation by forces of the Warsaw Pact. The decisions of the Extraordinary Fourteenth Congress of the CPCz hurriedly convened on August 22, which had condemned the invasion, were annulled. Some of the leading reformists in the Party, government, radio and television who had most outraged Moscow were dismissed.⁷¹

The Kremlin intended the Moscow protocol only as the beginning of a process of “normalization” which would rapidly turn the Prague Spring into winter. As a later official history of the CPCz complained:

Of particular concern to Andropov was the continued strength of the “Right” in the StB, despite Houska’s arrest of some leading reformists. According to KGB reports from Prague, the situation was most serious in foreign intelligence:

The Centre was outraged by a series of resolutions passed by the plenary committee of the StB First Directorate Communist Party:

The KGB discovered that the StB resident in New York, codenamed PATERA, was trying vainly to persuade the Czechoslovak foreign minister, Jiří Hájek, to address the United Nations Security Council on the Soviet invasion, in defiance of the Moscow protocol. “If we did not raise the Czechoslovak question in the Security Council,” PATERA insisted, “the nation would declare us to be traitors.”⁷⁴ The StB resident in Washington, his eyes brimming with tears, told Oleg Kalugin, “My children will hate you for what you’ve done to my country. They will never forgive you for what happened.”⁷⁵ It took several years for “healthy forces,” as the KGB referred to the Soviet loyalists in the StB, to eradicate all trace of revisionism.

After the Soviet invasion KGB illegals remained central to Andropov’s strategy for penetrating and destabilizing “rightist” forces.⁷⁶ PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia were augmented by other Soviet Bloc intelligence services. On August 25 Mielke, who had deployed East German illegals in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, informed the Centre that he was sending a further contingent to Prague, together with Stasi officers to direct their operations and liaise with the KGB residency.⁷⁷ In September Andropov and Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, traveled to Warsaw and agreed a plan for the SB (the Polish KGB) to use both agents and illegals to penetrate the Czechoslovak “counter-revolutionary underground,” émigré groups and hostile intelligence services.⁷⁸

The most valuable unwitting KGB source among the ranks of Czechoslovak “counter-revolutionaries” identified in the files seen by Mitrokhin was Leo Lappi (codenamed FREDDI), a former political prisoner and founder member of K-231. The fact that, though a Czechoslovak citizen, Lappi was an ethnic German made him far easier to cultivate than the majority of Czechoslovak citizens who were not fluent in Western languages. The first contact with Lappi was made by ALLA, posing as a German-speaking Swiss, in October 1968.⁷⁹ After about two months his cultivation was handed over to another female illegal, ARTYOMOVA, who had assumed the identity of an Austrian businesswoman.⁸⁰ From February 1969 onwards, Lappi’s case officer was FYODOROV, who, using a West German passport in the name of Walter Brade, for the next decade became the leading illegal specializing in Czechoslovak operations. Since ALLA and ARTYOMOVA had reported that Lappi let rooms to foreigners, FYODOROV made initial contact with him on the pretext that he was a businessman looking for accommodation in Prague.⁸¹

Lappi had no idea that ALLA, ARTYOMOVA and FYODOROV were KGB illegals sent on missions to assist in the destruction of the last remnants of “socialism with a human face.” Instead, they successfully persuaded him that they were Western supporters of the Prague Spring, anxious to do what they could to assist in its restoration. Given the almost universal revulsion in the West at the Soviet occupation, Lappi’s misplaced trust in his new Swiss, Austrian and German friends was an understandable mistake, cynically exploited by FYODOROV. Lappi’s confidence in FYODOROV was so complete that he left him in charge of his flat when he went on holiday to Romania. He introduced FYODOROV both to K-231 activists and to leaders of the Christian Democrat, People’s and Socialist Parties, which had tried to re-establish themselves during the Prague Spring. Lappi regularly acted as translator at FYODOROV’s meetings with them. Some of FYODOROV’s reports on his meetings with the counter-revolutionaries were rated so highly by the Centre that they were forwarded to the Politburo.⁸²

What the KGB files do not, of course, report are the feelings of the illegals as they betrayed the sometimes heroic survivors of the Prague Spring. Unlike the leaders of the Soviet Union and the Soviet public, who had no first-hand experience of the world outside the Soviet Bloc, the illegals knew the West and the reality of life in Czechoslovakia too well to have deluded themselves into believing that they were engaged in a moral crusade to defend socialist values against Western imperialism. There were recurrent complaints in FCD Directorate S that after postings abroad illegals sometimes returned with an “incorrect” attitude towards life in the Soviet Union.⁸³ Occasionally their attitudes were so incorrect that their careers were cut short. In 1966 the KGB liaison office in Budapest virtuously reported to the Centre a series of politically incorrect observations made by the female illegal ERNA while returning from leave in Moscow to her posting in Canada. Among the comments said to have “shocked” her fellow KGB officers were the following:

Very few illegals dared to voice such seditious comments openly. But the fact that some undoubtedly thought such thoughts cannot fail to have bred in them an increasing cynicism, heightened in some cases by their experiences in Czechoslovakia.

Some insight into the attitude of GROMOV, one of the first five illegals assigned to the penetration of “rightist” groups during the Prague Spring, is provided by the recollections of his younger brother, Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, who worked from 1963 to 1972 in the FCD Illegals Directorate and Line N in the Copenhagen residency. GROMOV had been born in 1933 and, in Oleg’s view, “had grown up among boys brutalized by war,” becoming a cynical, materialistic adult who much preferred life in the West to the relative privations of Czechoslovakia. When Oleg was informed during his training that he had to choose between learning Czech and Swedish, his brother told him he would be an idiot not to choose Swedish: “If you take Czech, you’ll spend the rest of your life sitting in the pathetic consular departments in Prague and Bratislava… [But] Sweden’s a nice country… From there you can go anywhere in Europe.”⁸⁵ There are signs of a less blatant cynicism towards the Czechs in FYODOROV’s reports to the Centre. He wrote of the role of the Red Army in Czechoslovakia : “The Soviet forces play the role of a policeman standing at a crossroads where there is heavy traffic; everyone notices him and this disciplines the traffic.” The Czechoslovak population, in other words, was being cowed into submission.⁸⁶

In the case of a minority of illegals, their Czechoslovak experiences probably had more serious consequences than simply an increased level of cynicism. A few years later ALLA attempted to commit suicide. Though her KGB file attributes the episode solely to the fact that her partner had left her,⁸⁷ it is difficult to believe that the betrayal of the Czechoslovaks ALLA had befriended did not add to her emotional scars. A more common reaction by the illegals to their experiences in Czechoslovakia was probably to turn to alcohol. Unable to stop drinking even after he contracted hepatitis B during a mission in south-east Asia, GROMOV died in 1972 at the age of only thirty-nine.⁸⁸ Both BOGUN and his wife also became alcoholics. In 1976 he was admitted for “a full course of anti-alcohol therapy” at the Burdenko military hospital, while his wife was treated for alcoholism in the psycho-neurological department of the Central KGB Polyclinic. The previous few years, during which BOGUN had worked extensively on PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in eastern Europe, seem to have taken a much heavier psychological toll than his earlier period as an illegal in the United States.⁸⁹

In the case of one member of the Illegals Directorate there is no doubt about the shattering impact of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For GROMOV’s brother, Oleg Gordievsky, then serving in Copenhagen, “It was that dreadful event, that awful day, which determined the course of my own life.” The crushing of the Prague Spring convinced him that the Soviet one-party state was, by its very nature, destructive of human liberties. He spent much of the next few years secretly pondering how to work for its overthrow before taking the decision to become a British penetration agent within the KGB.⁹⁰