The Sword and the Shield

^SIXTEEN PROGRESS OPERATIONS Part 2: Spying on the Soviet Bloc

Dubček later described the eight months after the Soviet invasion as “an organized retreat, in which no inch of territory was given up without calculated resistance.”¹ It was a retreat, however, which was doomed to end in defeat. Dubček’s position and that of the other leading reformers was steadily undermined by a combination of Soviet pressure, the old guard within the CPCz and former allies who decided to throw in their lot with the invaders to save their own careers.

The immediate pretext for Dubček’s removal was the World Ice Hockey Championship in Stockholm in March 1969. On March 21, Dubček later recalled, “The whole country watched [on TV] as Czechoslovakia played the Soviets; it was much more than ice hockey, of course. It was a replay of a lost war…” The national rejoicings after the Czechoslovak victory led the KGB to prepare, with assistance from its stooges in the StB, an anti-Soviet riot to follow the next match between Czechoslovakia and the USSR on March 28. Shortly before the match a team of police agents disguised as city workers unloaded a pile of paving stones in front of the offices of the Soviet airline, Aeroflot, in Wenceslas Square. Prague police documents show that the whole operation was directly supervised by a Soviet agent in the Czech ministry of the interior.² Immediately after the Czechoslovak team had defeated the Soviets for the second time in a week, StB plain clothes personnel mingling with the celebrating crowd began to throw the conveniently placed stones at the Aeroflot office. The office furniture was dragged out on to the pavement and set alight.

Moscow now had the fabricated evidence it required to demand that, “The counter-revolution must be beheaded.” Dubček believed he had no option but to resign. “Otherwise the Soviets would set up another provocation that could lead to further public turmoil and even a bloodbath.”³ On April 17 he was succeeded as First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Party by the Slovak first secretary, Gustáv Husák. As Dubček broadcast the news of his replacement, he broke down and wept.

PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia continued. A senior officer from FCD Directorate S, Dmitri Kirillovich Vetrov, arrived in Prague to supervise and coordinate the work of the illegals as they penetrated the ranks of the unrepentant reformists.⁴ Posing as a Swiss sympathizer with the Prague Spring, Galina Vinogradova (ALLA) was instructed to cultivate Ladislav Lebovič (codenamed KHAN), one of the trainers of the victorious Czechoslovak ice hockey team which was viewed with deep suspicion in the Centre.⁵ The illegal Yuri Linov (KRAVCHENKO), who pretended to be Austrian, succeeded in gaining the confidence of the international chess grand master and sports columnist Luděk Pachman, one of the organizers of the illegal broadcasts transmitted in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. As soon as Linov had identified those of Pachman’s friends and associates who were ready to continue “the struggle against the Soviet occupiers,” Pachman himself was arrested and imprisoned.⁶

Though delighted by Dubček’s departure, the KGB liaison office in Prague remained unenthusiastic about his successor, Gustáv Husák, who had been imprisoned in 1952 on trumped-up charges as an alleged Trotskyist and “bourgeois nationalist.” “Spending nine years in prison,” it reported, “has left its mark on Husák’s psychology, in that he shows unwarranted indulgence towards clear adversaries of the Czechoslovak Communist Party line.” The KGB liaison office complained to the Centre that there was “no genuine internal unity” within the CPCz leadership, which was divided between “internationalists” such as Bil’ak and Indra, who had supported Soviet intervention in August 1968, and “realists” led by Štrougal, who had opposed intervention but now accepted it as a fact of life. The two sides were engaged in a power struggle, seeking to gain key positions and place their supporters within the Party apparatus.⁷ Over the next year both realists and internationalists had some successes. In January 1970 Štrougal replaced Černík as prime minister. Simultaneously, however, Bil’ak was put in charge of an operation to purge the CPCz of all reformists during the introduction of new Party cards.⁸ A fellow hardliner, Miloš Jakeš, head of the Central Committee’s Control and Auditing Committee, became his right-hand man and regularly reported on the progress of the purge to the KGB liaison office.⁹ Seventeen years later Jakeš was to succeed Husák as general secretary of the CPCz.

The Centre’s assessment of the work of the KGB liaison office and residency in Prague during 1970 concluded:

Indra, whom Moscow had originally intended to take power after the invasion at the head of a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Government,” was reported by the liaison office to be “biding his time,” waiting for an opportunity to press his claims as general secretary.¹¹ His wait was to prove in vain.

KGB agents and Soviet sycophants within the CPCz continued to protest that Štrougal and other former reformists retained far too much influence at the expense of the Soviet Union’s true friends. One informant in the Ministry of the Interior, Jaroslav Zeman, complained that Štrougal was discriminating against the internationalists: “And what sort of person is Štrougal? In 1968 he was preparing to emigrate to the West and had currency and documents ready for his escape.” While turncoats prospered under Štrougal’s patronage, “Officials who cooperate with the USSR are looked down on in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic; they are kept in the dark, and are not promoted or rewarded.”¹²

By January 1971 310 foreign intelligence officers had been dismissed and 170 expelled from the Party. The whole of the senior staff of the internal StB had been replaced along with many more junior officers.¹³ The Centre, however, was not satisfied. The KGB liaison office was instructed during 1971 to press the interior ministry and the StB “in a tactful manner” to carry out a thorough reorganization of Czechoslovak intelligence “in view of the fact that the central apparatus was tainted and the possibility that committed agents of the adversary were present in it.” The Centre wished for active assistance from a reformed StB in the collection of scientific and technological intelligence, the deployment of illegals and other FCD operations.¹⁴

Despite continuing doubts about the reliability of some StB personnel, the KGB liaison office reported that the minister of the interior, Radko Kaska, displayed a satisfactory level of subservient cooperation:

The KGB was provided with copies of StB operational orders and reports, and proposed staff changes were submitted for its approval.¹⁶ At Husák’s instructions, Kaska began secretly collecting material on “leading right-wing personalities” in order to determine how many could be held to have broken state laws.¹⁷ The KGB was, however, embarrassed to be asked by Kaska in March 1971 whether it had any “adverse information” on past contacts with the West by the chairman of the National Assembly, Dalibor Hanes. The Centre was concerned that, if it replied to Kaska’s enquiry, it would give the (perfectly accurate) impression that “the KGB is engaged in collecting information on officials of fraternal Parties in friendly countries.” The head of the KGB liaison office in Prague, Ye. G. Sinitsyn, was instructed to reply that it had “no reports of links between Hanes and foreign intelligence,” but that, since it followed the principle of not spying on its allies, it would be unable to respond to such requests in future. Sinitsyn was privately informed by the Centre that Bil’ak had complained to the Soviet ambassador that Hanes had “taken up incorrect positions” during the Prague Spring and that his father had been responsible for “crushing workers’ demonstrations in Slovakia” between the wars.¹⁸ Soon afterwards Hanes was replaced as chairman of the National Assembly by the impeccably orthodox Indra.¹⁹

On May 4, 1971 Kaska met Semyon Konstantinovich Tsvigun, KGB deputy chairman, to report on the progress of “normalization.”²⁰ Tsvigun owed his job almost solely to the fact that he was one of Brezhnev’s oldest drinking partners. Kalugin found him “downright stupid but relatively harmless.”²¹ Tsvigun cannot have been wholly reassured by Kaska’s briefing. Over the past two years, Kaska told him, about 450,000 CPCz members had left or been expelled, “making contact between the Party and the population more difficult.”²² With one exception, the heads of all directorates in the interior ministry had been replaced. In all, about 3,000 of its employees in the StB and other agencies had been dismissed. There was, however, still widespread evidence of anti-Soviet feeling. Soviet films and plays were systematically boycotted. At the Czechoslovak premiäre of the film The Kremlin Chimes there were only five people in the audience; at the second showing there were only ten. There were numerous anonymous threats, malicious rumors and acts of sabotage on the railways. But there were also successes to report. The StB had succeeded in setting up a bogus organization dedicated to “socialism with a human face,” in order to smoke out secret supporters of the Prague Spring. Finally, Kaska assured Tsvigun that he and his ministry were in close touch with the KGB liaison office and its head, General Sinitsyn.²³

In the spring of 1972 Andropov had a private meeting with Kaska. His manner was more assertive than that of Tsvigun a year earlier. He insisted that opposition forces were still strong, despite the “stabilization” in Czechoslovakia and the strengthening of the Communist Party’s authority, and that they were being infiltrated by Western intelligence services. Agent penetration of the opposition therefore remained essential. ²⁴ The opposition source to which Andropov attached most importance probably remained Leo Lappi (FREDDI). Still posing as a committed West German supporter of the Prague Spring, the illegal FYODOROV had regular meetings with Lappi in Prague and East Berlin. On January 25, 1972 Fyodor Konstantinovich Mortin, who had succeeded Sakharovsky as head of the FCD, sought Andropov’s permission to trick Lappi into becoming a Soviet agent by a “false flag” deception which concealed the role of the KGB. Andropov gave his approval on January 29 and FYODOROV went ahead with the recruitment, claiming to be working for the West German BND. An additional reason for the Centre’s interest in Lappi was that his brother Karl was a West German citizen who, according to KGB files, was “close” to two prominent FRG politicians.²⁵

Despite Kaska’s personal sycophancy towards his KGB advisers and the extensive purge which he had overseen, the Centre remained dissatisfied with the ideological purity of the StB. In August 1972 Andropov reported to the CPSU Central Committee that “internal adversaries” in the StB were striving to prevent the completion of “normalization.”²⁶ A further KGB report to the Central Committee in November cited complaints from its agents and informers within the Czechoslovak Ministry of Internal Affairs that leading posts in the ministry continued to be occupied by “people who do not inspire political confidence.”²⁷ The KGB also received numerous protests from its informants that the disgraced leaders of the Prague Spring and their families were being insufficiently persecuted. Viliam Šalgovič, who had assisted the Soviet invasion in 1968 and had been promoted to the CPCz Central Committee in 1970, complained that the children of “right-wing leaders” were being allowed to enter the universities. Worse still, the children of three disgraced former members of the Presidium—Dubček, Štefan Sádovský and Julius Turček—had been given “excellent marks” in their entrance examinations.²⁸

Šalgovič’s complaint reflected the self-righteous vengefulness of the Soviet sycophants rather than any failure to purge the universities. In 1969-70 900 out of 3,500 university professors were dismissed. All Czech literary and cultural journals were closed down. Unemployed academics and writers were forced to seek new careers as lavatory cleaners, building laborers and boiler-room stokers. Soon after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, Heinrich Böll described Czechoslovakia as “a veritable cultural cemetery.”²⁹

MANY OF THE reports received by the Centre throughout the period of “normalization” concerned continued covert feuding within the CPCz leadership. In December 1972 Jakeš complained to the KGB liaison office that Husák had ordered the telephones of all Presidium members to be tapped. The working atmosphere within the Central Committee was now, he claimed, so poisonous that the Novotný era appeared, by comparison, a golden age.³⁰ In February 1973 Jakeš and three other leading Soviet loyalists—Presidium members Karel Hoffmann and Antonín Kapek and party secretary Miloslav Hruškovič—again protested to the KGB about what they claimed were “attempts to squeeze out internationalist Communists from important posts.”³¹ Among other intrigues within the Party leadership reported by the KGB to Moscow during 1973 was the claim that the realist Prime Minister Štrougal was seeking to ingratiate himself with Husák’s internationalist deputy Bil’ak by methods which included giving Bil’ak’s daughter a present costing 10,000 crowns, debited to the budget of the Czechoslovak television service.³²

On February 28, 1973 Kaska was killed in an aircrash while visiting his Polish opposite number and was succeeded as Minister of Internal Affairs by Jaromír Obzina, who promptly gave a sycophantic display of his internationalist credentials. “For the CPSU and for Comrade Brezhnev,” he told the KGB liaison, he was “ready to carry out any assignment.”³³ Obzina, however, quickly became caught up in Husák’s attempts to increase his personal prestige by combining, like Novotný before the Prague Spring, the post of President of the Republic with that of General Secretary of the CPCz. At the end of 1973, probably at Husák’s request, Obzina began trying to win over internationalists opposed to his ambitions for the presidency. According to KGB reports from Prague, a group of Soviet loyalists headed by Hoffmann, Indra, Jakeš and Kapek (all in close touch with both the KGB and the Soviet embassy) continued to resist any attempt to combine the two posts.³⁴ The growing senility of Ludvík Svoboda, who had succeeded Novotný as president in 1968, however, played into Husák’s hands. In May 1975 he replaced the by now demented Svoboda as head of state. Rudé právo celebrated the occasion by publishing five large photographs of Husák, each showing him in the company of one of the leaders of the five Warsaw Pact countries who had invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968.³⁵

At the time of Husák’s apotheosis, Dubček was working as a mechanic with the Slovak Forestry Commission under constant surveillance and frequent harassment by the StB.³⁶ On October 2, 1975 the Centre reported to Brezhnev that Dubček had sent compromising material on Husák to the Western media. Based on information supplied by Dubček, the West German and Austrian press had reported that during the war Husak had accompanied a group of Nazi journalists to the Katyn Wood near Smolensk, where the Germans had exhumed the bodies of several thousand Polish officers shot by the NKVD (an atrocity blamed by Moscow on the Germans). Dubček was twice summoned for questioning by the StB at the Slovakian interior ministry. The KGB was deeply dissatisfied by the outcome. “At the interrogation,” it informed Brezhnev, “Dubček conducted himself provocatively, categorically refusing to answer questions and declaring that in future he would protest against being subjected to pressure.” Dubček refused to sign either a denial that he had provided the information on Husák or a protest at the use of his name by the Western press, and threatened to react “decisively” if “repressive measures” were taken against him. Husák meanwhile wrote to Obzina to protest his innocence of the charges against him.³⁷

Despite Husák’s success in capturing the presidency, his power was more circumscribed than Novotný’s a decade earlier. His second-in-command, the internationalist Bil’ak, enjoyed greater authority and influence than any other deputy in eastern Europe. Having rejected the idea of a regime wholly dominated by notorious hardliners, the Kremlin, with some misgivings, regarded the Husák-Bil’ak combination as the best available. A KGB report from Prague at the end of the decade reported in thinly disguised language that, despite growing friction between Husák and Bil’ak, neither was attempting to topple the other because they knew that Moscow would not allow it:

Despite its jaundiced view of the political leadership, the KGB liaison office in Prague was fully satisfied with the willingness of Obzina and the StB to do its bidding. Obzina, it reported, kept it “objectively informed” both about what took place in the CPCz Presidium and about the activities of each of its members, Husák included.³⁹ Sinitsyn reported in 1977 that there were “operational contacts” between KGB and StB residencies in twenty-six countries.⁴⁰ In 1975 the StB had agreed to a Soviet request to open a residency in Albania, a country which the KGB found hard to penetrate.⁴¹ In 1976, when the StB discovered that Jozef Grohman, editor-in-chief of the state technical literature publishing house and the Czechoslovak representative at UNESCO, was working for West German intelligence, Obzina invited the Centre to send KGB officers to Prague to help in the investigation of the Grohman case at what he deferentially termed “a higher professional level.”⁴² Sinitsyn concluded his annual report from Prague in 1977:

The crushing of the Prague Spring and the “normalization” which followed marked a turning point in the KGB’s policy towards eastern Europe. The PROGRESS operations by illegals pioneered in Czechoslovakia were extended to the rest of eastern Europe to monitor the state of public opinion, penetrate subversive groups and watch for signs of “ideological sabotage” by Western intelligence agencies. From 1969 onwards the KGB was also allowed to recruit agents and confidential contacts throughout the Soviet Bloc. In addition to the KGB liaison offices in the countries of the Warsaw Pact, the Centre now established, as in Czechoslovakia, secret residencies operating under diplomatic cover in Soviet embassies.⁴⁴

In March 1968, partly as a result of the Prague Spring, there had been several weeks of confrontation between Warsaw students and the police, during which the aging Polish leader Władisław Gomułka had seemed in danger of losing control. Gomułka survived in the short term only because of his steadfast backing for intervention in Czechoslovakia and the Kremlin’s desire to avoid simultaneous upheavals in another part of the Soviet Bloc. His position, however, was already under threat from his eventual successor, Eduard Gierek. According to reports from the KGB liaison office in Warsaw, the hardline, anti-Semitic minister of the interior, Mieczysław Moczar, who was responsible for the SB (the Polish KGB), feared that his own position would also be threatened under Gierek and began plotting to prevent his succession. Compromising material on Gierek was passed, on Moczar’s instructions, to Radio Free Europe via an SB agent. Moczar also ordered the bugging of a series of leading figures in the PUWP, the Polish Communist Party.⁴⁵

Late in 1970 Gomulka’s position was fatally undermined by a new round of public protest. On December 14 workers at the Baltic shipyards of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Szczecin struck in protest at a sudden rise in food prices. Clashes next day with security forces left 300 strikers and demonstrators dead.⁴⁶ According to KGB reports from Warsaw, the order to open fire on the shipyard workers was given by Zenon Kliszko, Gomułka’s closest supporter on the Politburo, and General Grzegorz Korczyński, deputy defense minister and a supporter of Gierek.⁴⁷ The KGB also forwarded to Moscow the minutes of the Polish Politburo meeting held to discuss the crisis on December 19. With Gomułka in a Party clinic suffering from nervous exhaustion, the meeting was chaired by the prime minister, Józef Cyrankiewicz, who asked the Minister of Defense, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, to report on the situation.

Jaruzelski’s assessment sealed Gomułka’s fate. He reported that 350 tanks and 600 troop carriers had been deployed in Gdańsk and Gdynia alone. If unrest on a similar scale occurred in Warsaw, he could not guarantee the security of the capital, though special measures would be taken to protect Party and government buildings. Army morale was seriously affected. On the Baltic coast it was being met with shouts of “Gestapo!” and “Murderers!” Jaruzelski was followed by Moczar, who summarized SB and other reports reaching the interior ministry. The Party, he said, has never found itself so helpless in the face of a crisis. Hitherto, even when times were hardest, Party members had felt they were fighting for “a righteous cause”—but no longer. In Party meetings, when the Politburo letter justifying the price increases was read out, some Communists were reduced to tears and left the room. The rise in family allowances from 15 to 25 zlotys caused derision among rank and file members, stunned by the leadership’s incomprehension of ordinary living conditions. After an agitated debate it was agreed that Gomułka should be replaced as first secretary by Gierek. There was then an acrimonious discussion about who should tell Gomułka to submit his resignation, before it was finally decided to send Cyrankiewicz and the hitherto faithful Kliszko.⁴⁸

Gomułka’s downfall marked the first occasion anywhere in Europe since the Second World War when spontaneous working-class protest had brought about a change of political leadership.⁴⁹ The Centre was predictably alarmed at the extent and success of the popular revolt and immediately embarked on a PROGRESS operation to assess how far it had been contained. A group of illegals, posing once again as Western visitors, were instructed to investigate the role of the Catholic Church in organizing protest, its attitude towards the Gierek regime and the general mood of the population. ⁵⁰ Among the illegals was the experienced Gennadi Blyablin (BOGUN), disguised as a West German press photographer, who was given a list of five individuals to cultivate and told to persuade two or three of them to “co-operate under false flag,” in the belief that they were supplying information not to the KGB but to West German wellwishers. Probably the most important name on the list was that of Father Andrzej Bardecki, personal assistant to Cardinal Archbishop Karol Wojtyła of Kraków, whom the Centre considered the leading ideological influence on the Polish Church. The KGB doubtless did not foresee that less than eight years later Wojtyła would become the first Polish pope, but it showed some foresight in identifying him as a potential threat to the Communist regime.⁵¹

DURING 1971, IN addition to the illegals sent on PROGRESS operations to Czechoslovakia and Poland, thirteen were deployed in Romania, nine in Yugoslavia, seven in East Germany, four in Hungary and three in Bulgaria.⁵² Though all had broadly similar objectives, there were also specific causes of KGB concern in each country.⁵³ The priority given to Romania in 1971 reflected growing Soviet displeasure at the foreign policy of its leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, who combined a nepotistic version of neo-Stalinism at home with increasing independence from the Warsaw Pact abroad. After condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ceauşescu was rewarded in the following year by a state visit from Richard Nixon, the first by an American president to Communist eastern Europe. In 1970 Ceauşescu paid the first of three visits to the United States. Moscow showed its displeasure at his visit to Beijing in 1971 by staging Warsaw Pact maneuvers on the Romanian borders.⁵⁴

KGB reports on Romania were written in a tone which combined indignation with deep suspicion:

The illegals sent to Romania under Western disguise in 1971 were ordered to collect intelligence on Romanian relations with the United States and China; Romanian claims on Soviet territory in Bessarabia and north Bukovina; the political and economic basis of opposition to the Soviet Union; the position of German and Hungarian minorities; the Ceauşescu cult; and the state of the Romanian Communist Party.⁵⁶ The illegals’ main sources included staff of the Party newspaper Scintea and the German language Volk und Kultur.⁵⁷

PROGRESS OPERATIONS IN Yugoslavia during 1971 were prompted chiefly by the most serious internal crisis since Tito’s break with Moscow in 1948. The dramatic resurgence of nationalist tensions during the Croat Spring of 1971 culminated at the end of the year with Tito’s arrest of the Croat Communist leaders and 400 Croat nationalists and in his resumption of direct control over the Croat secret police. The claim that Yugoslav socialism was resolving ethnic rivalries was exposed as an illusion. ⁵⁸ The illegals were given a long list of institutions in which they were instructed to “strike up acquaintances:” the Academy of Sciences, the Public Opinion Institute in Belgrade, the editorial offices of Kommunist, Politika and Borba, the Tanjug Agency, the Institute for International Politics and Economics at Belgrade University, Zagreb University, Yugoslav businesses and the Union of Journalists (in particular, the writer Dobrica Ćosić, who was believed to be close to Tito). Some of the reports sent back to the Centre by illegal courier, radio and the post were judged sufficiently important to be forwarded to Brezhnev.⁵⁹

BY FAR THE largest KGB presence in eastern Europe was in East Germany. Ever since the Second World War there had been a large KGB enclave within the headquarters of the Soviet military administration in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. During the period which preceded the establishment of the GDR it had closely monitored political parties, churches, trade unions and public opinion within the Soviet zone of Germany. Though the KGB claimed after the foundation of the GDR that the role of its Karlshorst base was to mount operations against the FRG and other Western countries, as well as to provide liaison with the Stasi, it also continued to monitor developments within East Germany.⁶⁰ In 1971 the intelligence personnel stationed at Karlshorst, not including liaison officers, totaled 404, of whom fortyeight were operations officers working under cover. Another forty-seven KGB operations officers were stationed elsewhere in the GDR.⁶¹

The advent of Willy Brandt’s socialist-liberal coalition in West Germany in 1969 offered opportunities for détente which Moscow was more anxious to pursue than Walter Ulbricht, the aging and inflexible neo-Stalinist leader of East Germany. KGB reports from Karlshorst complained that, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ulbricht was posing as the wisest and most far-sighted statesman of the Soviet Bloc, implying (probably correctly) that he had been quicker than Brezhnev to identify the subversive nature of the Dubček regime.⁶² Ulbricht’s refusal to abandon his commitment to a united “socialist” Germany made him unwilling to consider an agreement with Brandt involving, for the first time, mutual recognition by the FRG and the GDR.⁶³

By 1969, if not before, both Willi Stoph, the East German prime minister, and Erich Honecker, who had overseen the building of the Berlin Wall, were fueling Moscow’s growing irritation with Ulbricht at meetings with the KGB and the Soviet ambassador, Pyotr Andreyevich Abrasimov. Ulbricht, they reported, had described Soviet cut-price imports of East German uranium as “the plundering of the GDR’s natural resources.” When Abrasimov suggested that allowance needed to be made for Ulbricht’s age (he was seventy-six in 1969), Stoph and Honecker retorted that he should have resigned when he was seventy.⁶⁴ In 1971 Ulbricht was kicked upstairs to the newly created post of Party chairman, and succeeded as Party leader by Honecker. In the following year the GDR and FRG formally recognized each other’s existence as separate states.

Though bickering continued within the Party leadership, the KGB’s main concern was “the impact of the adversary’s ideology on citizens of the GDR” through Western broadcasts and visits by West Germans. The Centre calculated in the mid-1970s that “500,000 citizens are hostile to the existing system and the [Western] adversary will for a long time retain a base of support in the GDR.”⁶⁵ A long-running KGB operation, codenamed LUCH, monitored opinion within the East German population and Party, contacts between East and West Germans and alleged “attempts by the USA and the FRG to harm the building of socialism” in the GDR. In 1974 the section of the Karlshorst KGB responsible for LUCH was raised in status to a directorate.⁶⁶

The majority of the Centre’s intelligence on East Germany, however, came from the Stasi, whose network of internal informers was vastly greater than the KGB’s. The GDR had seven times as many informers per head of population as Nazi Germany. ⁶⁷ In 1975 65 percent of all reports from Soviet Bloc security services received by the Centre came from the Stasi.⁶⁸ Some of the reports were, in effect, classified East German opinion polls. In an opinion survey of factory workers in 1974, for example, 20.6 percent of those questioned “considered that friendship with the USSR restricted the GDR’s autonomy and brought more benefit to the Soviet Union than to the GDR.” A majority, when asked to explain the phrase “achieving working-class power,” claimed not to know what it meant. Some of the comments on the phrase, however, were described in the report forwarded to the Centre as “bitter, wounding and vicious.” Among them were “Working-class power is all right [in theory], but what is it like in practice?”; “This is just a slogan!”; and “Justice for every worker, not just for a newly created privileged group!” Given the inevitable caution of those questioned in expressing politically incorrect views, the real level of dissatisfaction was probably considerably higher. Both the size of the KGB’s Karlshorst base and the volume of intelligence from the Stasi made the Centre less dependent on PROGRESS operations by illegals for intelligence from East Germany than from the rest of eastern Europe.⁶⁹

THE KGB’S MAIN concern in Hungary was the extent of Jewish influence within the Party and the AVH (the Hungarian KGB). Always prone to Zionist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the Centre was deeply disturbed by Hungarian reluctance to agree in 1969 to its suggestion for holding “an anti-Zionist conference in Budapest of progressive Jews opposed to the policy of Israel” or for assisting the KGB in making an anti-Zionist film alleging cooperation between Hitler and Hungarian Zionists. “The Hungarian security agencies,” the Centre concluded, “were forced to look over their shoulder when working on the [anti-]Zionist line, as Jewish nationalists within the leadership of the highest Party organs were morbidly cautious with regard to this sector of work.” The KGB also looked askance at the number of Jews within the Hungarian interior ministry, among them—it reported—two deputy ministers, the heads of the AVH First and Third Directorates (responsible, respectively, for foreign intelligence and the surveillance of domestic political opposition), the head of the police directorate and the head of military counter-intelligence. The situation was worst of all in foreign intelligence, where, according to KGB calculations, thirteen of the seventeen department chiefs were Jewish.⁷⁰

The illegals sent to Hungary on PROGRESS operations in 1971 posing as Western visitors were sent primarily to investigate the extent of Zionist influence. They were instructed to report on attitudes to Israel and its trade and economic relations with Hungary, “the links of Hungarian organizations and individuals with Zionist circles” and the situation in the Writers’ Union and other “creative unions” (where Jewish influence was also believed to be strong). The illegals were also told to “identify anti-Semitic attitudes,” presumably in the hope that they would discover popular opposition to the number of Hungarian Jews in high places. According to an alarmist Centre assessment, “Pro-Zionist domination was entrenched in Party, state and public organizations.”⁷¹

DURING 1972 PROGRESS operations were extended to areas of nationalist unrest within the Soviet Union. On October 4, 1972 KGB Directive No. 150/3-10807 instructed the FCD Illegals Directorate to investigate the mood of the population and the activities of Western tourists in the Baltic republics. The Centre’s analysis of the reports received from ARTYOM, FYODOROV, SEVIDOV and VLAS was uniformly depressing. Posing as Western visitors, all four illegals noted inefficient administration; an apathetic workforce “just sitting out the appointed [working] hours, with no pride in their profession;” intolerance between ethnic groups; and widespread drunkenness. The population of the Baltic republics were, however, “well informed about events in the West and in the Soviet Union.” Letters were taken to the West by foreign tourists, frequently written by people anxious to enter into marriages of convenience with Westerners to provide pretexts for emigration: “Many people of either sex marry ethnic Jews, although they themselves are not Jews; their only aim is to leave the USSR.” As frequently occurred with analyses of internal dissidence, the main scapegoats were the Jews. Because they were “conscious of the moral support of Israel and the USA and other Western countries,” they were alleged to be even more idle than the rest of the population—admitting to the illegals that “We work just enough to avoid being sacked.”⁷²

ALL OVER EASTERN Europe the illegals appear to have given franker, and therefore more depressing, assessments of public attitudes than the KGB liaison offices and residencies, who were under pressure to produce flattering accounts of local reaction to dreary set-piece speeches by Soviet leaders. Even in Bulgaria most of the population had lost their traditional sense of Slav kinship with Soviet Russia. According to one report:

When the illegal TANOV was sent on a two-month PROGRESS mission to Bulgaria in 1974, posing as a Western journalist preparing travel brochures, he was advised by the Centre to win the confidence of the Bulgarians he talked to by giving them presents. Everywhere he went he found resentment at the low standard of living and the well-founded conviction that Bulgaria was being pressurized by the Soviet Union to squander resources on Cuba and other profligate foreign friends, as well as on a huge police and state security system. From the Centre’s viewpoint, the only silver lining in TANOV’s bleak report was that Bulgarians were too afraid of the DS, their security service, to grumble publicly.⁷⁴

PROBABLY THE MOST depressing intelligence on the Soviet Bloc to reach the Centre during the 1970s came from Czechoslovakia. An illegal reported after a PROGRESS mission in 1976:

Lines in plays which were capable of being interpreted as “negative allusions” to the Soviet Union, such as “Love for the enemy is not love” in Gorin’s Till Eulenspiegel, were liable to provoke storms of applause from the audience.⁷⁶

In view of the popular rejoicings after the Czechoslovak defeat of the Russian team in the 1969 World Ice Hockey Championships in Stockholm, there was considerable anxiety before the 1979 world championships which were held in Prague. A special commission headed by one of the leading internationalists on the CPCz Presidium, Antonín Kapek, tried to ensure good crowd behavior by introducing a variety of security measures, arranging for ticket allocations to Party organizations and conducting what was called “educational work” among both players and spectators. Most of its efforts proved in vain.

Throughout the championships, which opened at the end of April, Brezhnev received regular reports from both the KGB and the Soviet embassy in Prague. They made dismal reading. Irrespective of who the Russian team was playing, the Czechoslovak spectators cheered the other side and shouted anti-Soviet insults. The United States, Canadian and West German teams, by contrast, all received a warm reception. The KGB reported that the Soviet defeat of the Czechoslovak team was “greeted coldly” even by Štrougal and other ministers in the government box. After the match senior CPCz officials avoided members of the Soviet embassy.

The KGB did, however, succeed in preventing one potentially acute embarrassment. After the Soviet match against East Germany, a Russian player who had taken proscribed stimulants was summoned to a drug test. Had he failed the test, as no doubt he would have done, the Soviet victory might have been annulled. The KGB reported proudly to Brezhnev that, “as a result of measures taken by the [Prague] residency,” the player concerned was let off the drug test.⁷⁷

KGB reports from Prague complained that, after the Soviet team won the world championship, the medal ceremony was conducted in English and German with no Russian translation. At the gala reception which followed, the Russians were coldshouldered. The Soviet flag was ripped from the team. Even the CPCz newspaper Rudé právo paid more attention to the Canadian, Swedish and Finnish teams than to the Soviet world champions.⁷⁸

The KGB was also outraged at the sometimes visible lack of enthusiasm displayed by Czechoslovak representatives at tedious official celebrations in the Soviet Union. The Centre wrote a damning report on the behavior of Miroslav Vasek, head of a delegation from the Czechoslovak ministry of culture at the Ninth Conference of Ministers of Culture of the Socialist Countries, held in Moscow in July 1978. At the end of this doubtless mind-numbing occasion, Vasek had had the impertinence to leave behind in his room at the Hotel Mir both the souvenir conference folder and a series of probably unreadable volumes solemnly presented to him by the Soviet ministry of culture: Lenin: Revolution and Art, Brezhnev: A Brief Biography, Sixty Jubilee Years: Facts and Figures about the Achievements of Culture and Art in the Soviet Union and Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments in the USSR. The KGB report insisted that these valuable items had been deliberately “abandoned, not simply forgotten.” The Centre was not prepared for this outrage to be passed over. A full report on it was sent both to Andropov and to the KGB liaison office in Prague.⁷⁹

For all the KGB’s dissatisfaction with the state of Czechoslovak public opinion and the fractious leadership of the CPCz, the Communist one-party state in Czechoslovakia was under no visible threat at the end of the 1970s. At the beginning of 1977 a series of small dissident groups came together in “Charter 77,” which described itself as “a free, informal, open community of people of different convictions, different faiths and different professions, united by the will to strive, individually and collectively, for the respect of civil and human rights.” Within six months, over 750 courageous individuals had signed the Charter. All endured public vilification and persecution, ranging from attacks on the street to prison sentences and incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. One of the founders, the philosopher Jan Patocka, died after a brutal interrogation by the StB. The power of the StB, the sense of powerlessness induced in the mass of the population by the process of “normalization” and the presence of Soviet troops robbed Charter 77 of any chance of recapturing the mass enthusiasm generated by the promise nine years earlier of “socialism with a human face.”⁸⁰

Throughout the Soviet Bloc the KGB’s east European clones, urged on by the Centre, were among the moving forces during the decade which followed the Prague Spring in the creation of an intellectually monotone and moribund society. Václav Havel, one of the founders of Charter 77 (and later the first president of the post-Communist Czech Republic), wrote later of this period:

The clock which had stopped in eastern Europe with the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 was to start again ten years later with the election of a Polish pope.