The Sword and the Shield

^SEVENTEEN THE KGB AND WESTERN COMMUNIST PARTIES

The KGB and Western Communist Parties Throughout the Cold War, Communist parties around the world dismissed claims that they were involved in Soviet espionage as crude McCarthyite slander. KGB files, however, give the lie to most of their denials. From the 1920s onwards Western Communists were regularly asked for help in intelligence operations, which they usually considered their fraternal duty to provide. Most leaders of even the largest Western parties equally considered it the fraternal duty of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to provide, via the KGB, annual subsidies whose existence they indignantly denied. Knowledge of the KGB connection in the fields of both espionage and finance was the preserve of small and secretive inner circles within each Party leadership.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the most active assistance in Soviet agent recruitment came from four Communist Parties which were briefly included in coalition governments: the French Parti Communiste Français (PCF), the Italian Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), the Austrian Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (KPÖ) and the Finnish Suomen Kommunistinen Puolue (SKP).

AS SHOWN IN chapter 9, the PCF assisted after the Liberation in a major penetration of the French intelligence community which continued for at least a quarter of a century. From July 1, 1946 to June 30, 1947 the Paris residency forwarded to the Centre a total of 1,289 French intelligence documents.¹ By the early 1950s the KGB’s chief collaborator inside the PCF was Gaston Plissonnier (codenamed LANG), a life-long Soviet loyalist who had established himself by 1970 as second-in-command to the Party leader.² Though little known to the French public and a poor public speaker with a thick regional accent, Plissonnier was a master in the arcane procedures of “democratic centralism” by which the Party leadership imposed its policies on its members.³ As well as providing inside information on the PCF, he assisted the KGB in identifying potential agents and other intelligence operations.⁴ During the later 1970s Plissonnier also passed on reports from an agent in the entourage of President Boumedienne of Algeria.⁵

IN ITALY, AS in France, Communist ministers sat in post-war coalition governments until the spring of 1947. At the end of 1945 the PCI had 1,760,000 members—twice as many as the PCF. All over Italy, photographs of Stalin, affectionately known as Baffone (“Walrus moustache”), were pasted on factory walls and stuck to machinery. “We were all under the impression,” one of the Communist ministers, Fausto Gallo, later acknowledged, “that the wind was blowing our way.”⁶ Washington feared that Gallo and his colleagues might be right. The National Security Council concluded in November 1947, “The Italian Government, ideologically inclined towards Western democracy, is weak and is being subjected to continuous attack by a strong Communist Party.” The very first CIA covert action was an operation to aid the Christian Democrats against the Communists in the 1948 general election by laundering over 10 million dollars from captured Axis funds for use in the campaign.⁷

As in France, the post-war popularity of the Communist Party and the brief period of Communist participation in government created the best opportunities Soviet intelligence was ever to enjoy in Italy for agent penetration. Like JOUR, probably the most important of the post-war French recruits, DARIO, the longest-serving and probably the most valuable Italian agent, was a foreign ministry employee. Born in 1908, and trained as a lawyer, DARIO worked as a journalist and state official in agriculture during the early years of fascist Italy. In 1932 he was recruited as a Soviet agent on an “ideological basis” but, on instructions from his controller, pretended to be a supporter of Mussolini and in 1937 succeeded in enrolling in the Fascist Party. Before the outbreak of war he obtained a job in the foreign ministry, ironically dealing with Soviet and Comintern affairs and succeeded in recruiting three foreign ministry typists (codenamed DARYA, ANNA and MARTA) who regularly supplied him with what the Centre considered “valuable” classified documents. For almost forty years DARIO was instrumental in obtaining a phenomenal amount of classified foreign ministry material.⁸ His remarkable career as a Soviet agent, however, was temporarily interrupted during the war. In 1942, following the discovery by the Italian police of an illegal GRU residency with which DARIO was in contact, he was arrested and imprisoned, surviving a period at the end of the war in a German concentration camp from which he was liberated by the Red Army.⁹

Once back in Italy, DARIO reestablished contact with DARYA and MARTA, both of whom agreed once again to give him foreign ministry documents. Probably on Soviet instructions, instead of joining the PCI he became a member of the Italian Socialist Party led by Pietro Nenni, but was expelled in 1946 after he was denounced as a former fascist and threatened with prosecution. At the request of the Rome residency, the Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, secretly interceded with Nenni and DARIO was given back his Socialist Party membership. Togliatti’s intervention, however, leaked out and DARIO was publicly identified as having links with the Soviet embassy. He succeeded, none the less, in recruiting two more foreign ministry typists: TOPO (later renamed LEDA), who for fifteen years provided what the Centre considered “valuable documents,” and NIKOL (later INGA), who also supplied “consistently valuable” information. Probably soon after her recruitment under a false flag (not identified in Mitrokhin’s notes), TOPO and DARIO were married.¹⁰ In March 1975, forty-three years after DARIO’s recruitment, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Red Star. He finally retired in May 1979 after one of the longest careers as a Soviet agent in the history of the FCD.¹¹

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the Rome residency also achieved a highly successful penetration of the interior ministry, thanks chiefly to a Communist civil servant, codenamed DEMID, who acted as agent-recruiter. On instructions from the residency, DEMID left the Communist Party immediately after his recruitment in 1944. His first major cultivation inside the ministry was QUESTOR, whom he helped to obtain a job in the cipher department. By 1955 the penetration of the Italian interior ministry, begun by DEMID, was considered so important that control of it was handed over to a newly established illegal residency in Rome, headed by Ashot Abgarovch Akopyan, a 40-year-old Armenian from Baku codenamed YEFRAT.¹²

THE THIRD STATE in which Soviet agent penetration was assisted by Communist participation in post-war coalition governments was Austria. Though placed under joint occupation until 1955 by the Soviet Union, United States, Britain and France (a cumbersome arrangement likened by Karl Renner, the first post-war chancellor, to “four elephants in a rowing boat”), Austria—unlike Germany—was allowed to govern itself. In Renner’s provisional government, formed in April 1945, the Communists were given three ministries, including the key post of Minister of the Interior taken by Franz Honner. In the November 1945 elections, however, the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ), which had expected to do as well as the French PCF, picked up a mere 5 percent of the vote and was given only the comparatively unimportant ministry of electrification in the new coalition. The KPÖ left government altogether two years later, and its two half-hearted attempts to stage a coup d ’état in 1947 and 1950 failed to gain serious Soviet support.¹³

Franz Honner used his seven months in 1945 to pack the Austrian federal police force (Bundespolizei) with Communist Party members. Though many were purged or sidelined by Honner’s socialist successor, Oskar Helmer,¹⁴ Soviet penetration of the Austrian police, especially its security service (Staatspolizei or Stapo), continued until the 1980s. In an attempt to evade Helmer’s purge, Communists in the police force were instructed to disavow or conceal their Party membership.¹⁵ The files noted by Mitrokhin record the recruitment of a series of major KGB police agents: EDUARD in 1945,¹⁶ VENTSEYEV in 1946,¹⁷ PETER in 1952,¹⁸ two further recruits in 1955, ZAK in 1974¹⁹ and NADEZHDIN in 1978.²⁰ There may well have been others; Mitrokhin’s list is probably not exhaustive. At least some of them took part in operations (one of them codenamed EDELWEISS) to remove and copy top secret documents held in the safe of the head of the Stapo. In 1973 Andropov personally authorized the payment to one of its Stapo agents of a reward of 30,000 Austrian schillings.²¹

IN THREE OF the four countries of Scandinavia—Denmark, Norway and Finland—Communist ministers also served in post-war coalitions. By far the most influential of the Scandinavian Communist parties was the Finnish SKP.²² Alone among Germany’s eastern allies, Finland was not forced to become part of the Soviet Bloc. At the end of the Second World War, however, Stalin still kept his options open. In 1945, at Soviet insistence, the SKP was given several key positions within the Finnish government, secretly instructed via a “special channel” on their relations with “bourgeois parties,” and held in readiness for a possible coup d’état. That Finland was not in the end forced to become a people’s democracy was probably due chiefly to memories of the Winter War in 1939-40, when the greatly outnumbered Finns had inflicted heavy casualties on the Soviet invaders. Stalin was well aware that the price of Finnish incorporation in the Soviet Bloc might be another blood bath.²³ Finland was, however, deprived of 12 percent of its territory, forced to pay enormous reparations (five times those of Italy) and required to sign a non-aggression pact in 1948.

In Finland, as in Austria, the Communists succeeded in 1945 in claiming the key post of minister of the interior. But whereas the Austrian Communist Franz Honner left office after only seven months, his Finnish counterpart, Yrjî Leino, continued in power for three years. Leino’s aim, like Honner’s, was “to deprive the bourgeoisie of one of its most important weapons in supporting reactionary policies, the police force.” By the end of 1945 the security police had been purged and reconstituted as a new force, usually known as Valpo. As Leino later acknowledged, “the new recruits were naturally, as far as possible, Communists.”²⁴ The rapidity of the purges and the inexperience of the new recruits, however, led to a good deal of confusion. According to Leino, “Valpo in SKP hands never became the kind of weapon that had been hoped for… They did not have the skill to use it to advantage in the right way.” Leino himself found it increasingly difficult to cope. By 1947 he was drinking heavily and sometimes absent from his office for days on end. At the end of the year he was summoned to Moscow, given a severe dressing down by two senior members of the Politburo, instructed to resign from the Finnish government and told to go for a health cure in the Soviet Union. Though Leino refused to tender his resignation, he was dismissed by President Paasikivi in April 1948 on the grounds that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of Parliament. His dismissal brought to an end Communist participation in the Finnish government.²⁵ Leino’s memoirs, completed ten years later, caused such embarrassment in Moscow that, at the insistence of the Soviet ambassador in Helsinki, the whole edition was destroyed on the eve of publication, leaving only a few copies in private circulation.²⁶

THE REMOVAL FROM power by 1948 of all those Western Communist parties which had taken part in post-war coalitions reduced, but did not end, their ability to assist Soviet intelligence penetration of government bureaucracies. By far the biggest disappointment experienced by the Centre at the beginning of the Cold War in its relations with fraternal parties in the West, however, was the dramatic decline in the assistance offered by the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). From the mid-1930s to the onset of the Cold War, Communism had been a major force in the American labor movement, a significant influence on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and a rite of passage for several hundred thousand young radicals. During the Second World War the Party had played an important part in assisting Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration, the MANHATTAN project and the intelligence community.²⁷ The onset of the Cold War, however, dealt the CPUSA a blow from which it never fully recovered.

In 1949 Gene Dennis, the general secretary, and ten other Party leaders were put on trial for advocating the forcible overthrow of the federal government. Dennis and nine of the defendants were sentenced to five years in jail, the eleventh was jailed for three years and all the defense attorneys were found in contempt of court. After the Supreme Court upheld the sentences in 1951, more than a hundred other leading Communists were convicted on similar charges. For most of the 1950s the Party was forced into a largely underground existence. It was deeply ironic that when McCarthyism was at its height the CPUSA was among those Western parties which were least able to give assistance to Soviet espionage. Not till the Supreme Court backed away from its earlier decision in 1957 was the CPUSA able to regroup. By the time the Party had drawn up a new membership list in 1958, there were only 3,000 open members and a much smaller number of undeclared members left.²⁸

What the CPUSA might have achieved during the 1950s had it been less persecuted was well illustrated by the neighboring Canadian Party, which in 1951-3 assisted the Ottawa residency in the recruitment of Hugh Hambleton, probably the most important Canadian agent of the Cold War, and ten other agents.²⁹ Like most other Western parties, the Canadian Communist Party also provided help in documenting illegals—among them Konon Trofimovich Molody (codenamed BEN), the most celebrated of the Cold War illegal residents in Britain.³⁰ In 1957, with the help of the Canadian Communist Party, the Ottawa residency succeeded in obtaining a new passport for the illegal resident in the United States, “Willie” Fisher (better known as “Rudolf Abel”) in the name of Robert Callan, born on March 10, 1903 in Fort William, Ontario. “Abel,” however, was arrested before he could adopt his new identity. The Ottawa residency was subsequently fearful that the clerk who issued the passport might recognize the photograph of “Abel” published in the press after his arrest in June 1957 as that of “Robert Callan.” Unsurprisingly, the clerk, who doubtless saw—and paid little attention to—many photographs a day, seems not to have noticed.³¹

One of the rare cases in which the assistance given by Western Communists in fabricating the legend of a Soviet illegal became public was that of Reino Hayhanen (codenamed VIK), who was helped to adopt the identity of the Finn Eugene Maki by the Finnish Communist Olavi Åhman (codenamed VIRTANEN). When Hayhanen defected to the FBI in 1957, Åhman and his wife were secretly taken into hiding in the Soviet Union. For almost twenty years Åhman pleaded to go back to Finland, but the Finnish Communist Party insisted that he stay in Russia for fear that his return would expose it to “anti-Communist propaganda.” In 1975 the Party leader, Ville Pessi (codenamed BARANOV), finally relented. Åhman was allowed back home and awarded a KGB pension of 200 roubles a month.³²

A number of Western Communist parties were also asked to provide various kinds of assistance to KGB illegals. In 1957 a group of undeclared members of the French Communist Party, recommended by the PCF leadership, began training as radio operators for illegal residencies. Initially the new recruits found difficulty in transcribing the coded number groups broadcast in test transmissions from the Centre. By the end of the year, however, some had successfully completed their training course.³³

The files seen by Mitrokhin give no sense that the Centre’s demands on the fraternal assistance of Western Communist parties declined in the course of the Cold War. On the contrary, the KGB’s solicitations of its “friends” appear to have been greater during the 1970s than in the previous decade. The increased deployment of experienced illegals in eastern Europe after the Prague Spring and the difficulty experienced by the FCD in finding enough suitably qualified and well-motivated Soviet replacements led it to seek renewed inspiration from the era of the Great Illegals, some of the greatest of whom—the Austrian Arnold Deutsch and the German Richard Sorge chief among them—had been Communists from other European countries. Deutsch’s career, however, still remained top secret, not least because two of his most important recruits, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, were still at liberty in the West. Sorge, by contrast, was the best-publicized member of the Soviet intelligence pantheon. he had been posthumously declared Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964 and further honored by the first postage stamps ever issued to commemorate a spy. Sorge’s reputation as a romantic heart-throb added to his popular appeal. His was the example chosen by the Centre to inspire a new generation of non-Soviet KGB illegals.³⁴

The recruitment campaign began on the eve of the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) in April 1971. The FCD took advantage of the presence in Moscow of a large number of leaders of fraternal parties in the West to ask some of them to search out a new generation of Sorges. The files noted by Mitrokhin record meetings between senior FCD officers and six different Western Communist leaders to discuss the recruitment of illegals. There may well have been many more such approaches.

Shortly before the Party congress opened, the former resident in Copenhagen, Leonid Sergeyevich Zaitsev, met Knud Jespersen, the chairman of the Danish Communist Party, at the Sovetskaya Hotel, and asked him to find “two or three” totally reliable, dedicated Communists, loyal to the Soviet Union, who could be trained to become “Danish Richard Sorges.” They should be male, between twenty and forty years of age, and preferably undeclared rather than open Party members. If married, their wives would have to meet the same conditions. Potential Danish Sorges would also need to be well educated and in a suitable occupation—such as journalist, businessman or foreign language student. According to Zaitsev, Jespersen responded enthusiastically, saying that he fully understood both the importance and the secrecy of the request, and already had one candidate in mind, whose details he would send to the current resident in Copenhagen, Anatoli Aleksandrovich Danilov.³⁵

Meanwhile at the Ukraina Hotel, I. P. Kisliak, a former operations officer at the Athens residency, was asking Kostas Koliannis, first secretary of the Greek Communist Party, to find “one or two” Greek Richard Sorges. Like Zaitsev, Kisliak emphasized that candidates must be “totally reliable ideologically,” but added that they also needed “charm.”³⁶ At a subsequent meeting with Ezekias Papaioannou, general secretary of AKEL (the Cyprus Communist Party), Kisliak was slightly less demanding. Though Cypriot candidates would require high moral, political and professional qualities, they need not necessarily be “the equals of Richard Sorge.”³⁷

While Zaitsev and Kisliak were approaching the heads of the Danish, Greek and Cypriot Parties, Anatoli Ivanovich Lazarev, head of the FCD Illegals Directorate, was engaged in talks with Gaston Plissonnier, the second-in-command of the French Communist Party. Plissonier agreed to select two or three undeclared members of the PCF with the potential to become French Sorges and later suggested two possible candidates. He was also asked to supply the KGB with the names of poorly paid (and, by implication, corruptible) staff in the French foreign ministry whose work included photocopying classified documents.³⁸

One of the FCD’s approaches to a leading member of a fraternal delegation to the Twenty-fourth Party Congress took place in hospital. Geinrich Fritz of the Austrian Communist Party (KPô) Central Committee suffered an acute attack of sciatica shortly before the congress opened and was taken for treatment to the CPSU Central Committee Polyclinic at Kuntsevo. While undergoing treatment in Ward 103, he was visited by Ivan Alekseyevich Yerofeyev, deputy head of the Fourth (German and Austrian) Department, who raised the question of finding “one or two” Austrian Sorges. Fritz said that the KPô chairman, Franz Muhri, refused to become involved in intelligence matters because of his precarious position within the Party. However, Fritz agreed to find suitable candidates himself and to keep N. V. Kirilenko, head of Line PR at the Vienna residency, informed of his progress.³⁹

The most cautious of the Party leaders whose responses to the 1971 illegal recruiting drive were noted by Mitrokhin was the general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), William Kashtan. Though a rigidly orthodox pro-Soviet loyalist, Kashtan “made much of the practical difficulties.” The CPC had to be particularly careful to avoid any suspicion of involvement with the KGB, he explained, because of memories of the Gouzenko affair in 1945, when the Party’s only MP, Fred Rose, and its national organizer, Sam Carr, had both been exposed as Soviet agents. Kashtan was assured that he was expected only to select reliable candidates, provide character references and suggest ways of making contact with them. The KGB would do the rest and ensure that, even in the event of “complications,” he would not become involved. Kashtan is said to have replied that this arrangement “suited him completely.” ⁴⁰

During the Twenty-fourth Party Congress senior FCD officers also held discussions with at least eight leaders of Latin American Communist parties. The aim was not as yet to solicit a new generation of Latin American Sorges, but rather to identify potential agents in registry offices who could supply the documents required to support illegals’ legends.⁴¹ Within a year or so, however, the Centre was actively seeking Latin illegals to operate in North America.⁴² In 1975 Kryuchkov personally approached the general secretary of the Argentinian Communist Party, Alvarez Arnedo, to “seek help from our Argentinian friends in building up the illegal agent apparatus of Soviet intelligence.” According to the KGB record of the conversation, Arnedo was “wholly sympathetic.”⁴³ During 1975 Andropov also gave personal instructions for approaches to Communist Party leaders in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as part of a quest for Arab illegals.⁴⁴

OVER A QUARTER of a century after the collapse of the post-war coalitions which had given Communists a brief experience of office in France, Italy, Austria and Scandinavia, Communist ministers once again entered a Western government. They did so as a result of the Portuguese Revolution of April 1974, when the so-called Armed Forces Movement of young, radical officers ended over forty years of civilian dictatorship and promised both to restore democracy and to end Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa. Within days the Communist and Socialist leaders, Álvaro Cunhal and Mário Soares, had returned from exile, standing together in front of their delirious supporters jointly clutching the same red carnation. Soares paid tribute to Cunhal, his former teacher, as “a remarkable man, with a luminous, penetrating glance that bespoke great inner strength.”⁴⁵ But Cunhal was also a hardline Soviet loyalist who in 1968 had been the first Western Communist leader to support the crushing of the Prague Spring. Though the differences between himself and Soares gradually widened, they were to serve together in a series of coalition governments until the summer of 1975.

In June 1974 Portugal and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations for the first time since the October Revolution. Six months later Cunhal had his first meeting with the KGB resident in Lisbon, Svyatoslav Fyodorovich Kuznetsov (code-named LEONID), who operated under diplomatic cover in the recently established Soviet embassy. Though the meeting took place in a Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) safe house, both men were so fearful their conversation might be bugged that they conducted an entirely silent dialogue with pencil and paper. It was agreed that the KGB would train two reliable Party members to detect eavesdropping equipment so that their future discussions could be by word of mouth. Cunhal also undertook to hand over material on the Portuguese security service, NATO (of which Portugal had been a founder member) and other “matters of interest to the KGB.”⁴⁶

Shortly after the revolution of April 1974, a commission of enquiry was given access to the files of the brutal security service of the deposed regime (known successively as the PIDE and DGS), whose vast network of informers had almost rivaled those of the Soviet Bloc. Since the PCP, whose 22-member Central Committee had between them spent 308 years in jail, had been the chief target of the PIDE/DGS, it was, unsurprisingly, well represented on the commission.⁴⁷ As well as passing on large numbers of PIDE/DGS documents (some of which concerned collaboration with Western intelligence services), the PCP also provided the Lisbon residency with files from Portuguese military intelligence and the new security service established after the revolution. According to one of the files noted by Mitrokhin, the total weight of the classified material provided by the PCP to the Lisbon residency in the mid-1970s came to 474 kilograms. In January 1976 a special section was created within the FCD Fifth Department to work on the Portuguese documents which in their microfilm version filled 68,138 frames. Mitrokhin’s summary of the Centre’s report on the material concludes:

Service A made use of the documents, in both authentic and doctored form, as the basis of active measures designed to discredit the CIA, French and West German intelligence services.⁴⁹

In April 1975, at Portugal’s first free post-war elections, the Communists gained only 12.5 percent of the vote—one third of the support won by the socialists under Soares. Cunhal, however, shrugged off the setback, confident that real power would remain with the Armed Forces Movement, which had made the revolution a year before. “The elections,” he told an interviewer, “have nothing or very little to do with the dynamics of revolution… I promise you there will be no parliament in Portugal.” Cunhal’s prediction proved hopelessly mistaken. His support within the Armed Forces Movement crumbled after the failure of a left-wing coup in November, and new elections in April 1976 gave the Communists only 14.5 percent of the vote, as compared with the socialists’ 35 percent. Soares became prime minister and Cunhal led the PCP into opposition.⁵⁰

The PCP leadership continued in opposition to talent-spot for the KGB.⁵¹ During talks in Moscow in July 1977 the FCD asked PATRICK, a member of the PCP Politburo, to identify PCP members suitable for training as illegal agents to operate against NATO. PATRICK saw no difficulty in using experienced Party members for particular intelligence assignments, but was less happy with using them as long-term illegals since this would require them to give up their work for the PCP. Once back in Lisbon, however, PATRICK suggested the names of five possible candidates “without heavy Party responsibilities” and provided blank Portuguese passports and other identity documents to assist in the fabrication of their legends.⁵²

While the FCD was holding discussions with PATRICK in July 1977, an almost identical approach was being made to the veteran chairman of the Finnish Communist Party (SKP), Ville Pessi (codenamed BARANOV), then on holiday in the Soviet Union. Pessi agreed to suggest the names of four or five undeclared members of the SKP or trusted fellow travellers to train as illegal agents who could be used against American and NATO targets in the United States, Norway, Denmark or the Low Countries. He was also asked to find another one or two potential agents in registry offices or other locations able to provide the documentation required for the fabrication of illegals’ legends.⁵³ At about the same time that PATRICK and BARANOV were engaged in discussions in Moscow, Andropov authorized an approach in Dublin by the resident, Mikhail Konstantinovich Shadrin (codenamed KAVERIN), to a leading Irish Communist (codenamed GRUM), who cannot be identified for legal reasons. GRUM agreed that two undeclared members of the Party should be selected for training as the first Irish illegals.⁵⁴

The approaches to Communist Parties outside the Soviet Bloc coincided with a series of exhortations from Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, to residencies to improve their Line N (Illegal support) performance. Increasingly close surveillance of legal residencies by Western counterintelligence agencies made the expansion of the illegal network of increasing importance. Kryuchkov was not satisfied, however, with the efforts made by residencies to follow up recruiting leads for illegal agents provided by Western Communist Parties and other sources. He complained in a circular of April 1978:

By the mid-1970s most Western, Latin American and some Middle Eastern, North African and Asian Communist Parties had been drawn into the quest for a new generation of illegals.⁵⁶ There is, however, no evidence that the almost global recruiting program conducted by the KGB and fraternal parties turned up another Arnold Deutsch or Richard Sorge.⁵⁷ So far as the recruiting leads produced by Western Communist leaders are concerned, Mitrokhin’s notes reveal no major successes and a number of failures.

The failures included Maria, a Portuguese Communist language teacher recommended as a potential illegal agent by PATRICK of the PCP Central Committee. The Centre planned to recruit Maria as the assistant and wife of an illegal KGB officer, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Kunosenko (codenamed YEFREMOV), who was being trained for work in Brazil. A meeting arranged between YEFREMOV and his proposed bride in East Germany, however, ended in disaster. Maria found Kunosenko physically unattractive and refused to sleep with him; her recruitment was discontinued. Without Maria’s assistance, Kunosenko failed to become sufficiently fluent in Portuguese. In 1981 plans for his posting to Brazil were cancelled and he was redeployed in Directorate S headquarters.⁵⁸

Among the more promising illegal agents discovered as a result of leads from Western Communist Parties were a French couple, LIMB and his wife DANA, who were recruited in 1973. LIMB was recommended by the PCF as a man “devoted to Communist ideals” but not to be used against French targets. After two years’ training, however, LIMB’s first recorded success was talent-spotting a French recruit. MARCEL, LIMB’s recruitment lead, worked in the mairie of a Paris suburb and was recruited as a KGB agent in 1975, probably to provide documentation for KGB illegals. In December 1975 LIMB (then aged thirty-six) and DANA were deployed to Belgium, where they set up a small business printing invitation and visiting cards near the headquarters of SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe). But their attempts over the next year to cultivate NATO personnel met with little or no success. By the end of 1976 they had returned to France, settled in the Bordeaux region and abandoned their brief careers as KGB illegal agents.⁵⁹

Thirty or forty years before, the recruiting drive for illegal agents would doubtless have met with much greater success. Its apparent failure in the 1970s reflected the inability of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev’s geriatric leadership to recapture the idealism of an earlier generation of ideological agents inspired by the utopian vision of the world’s first worker—peasant state. By the mid-1970s most of the leading Western Communist Parties were tainted by what Moscow considered the “Eurocommunist” heresy, which advocated a parliamentary road to socialism within a multi-party system rather than slavish imitation of the Soviet model.⁶⁰ Within the new generation of young Western Marxists, unconditional pro-Soviet loyalists were a dwindling breed—if not yet an endangered species.

JUST AS THE Centre expected fraternal assistance from the leaders of Western Communist parties, so the parties themselves depended in varying degrees on subsidies from Moscow secretly delivered by the KGB. The subsidies, like involvement in intelligence operations, were closely guarded secrets within each Party leadership. When stories of “Moscow gold” occasionally leaked out during the Cold War, they were dismissed as McCarthyite disinformation. The Centre, however, was well aware that some details of its secret subsidies were known to Western intelligence agencies. During the late 1970s, for example, the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Yakovlev (later one of Gorbachev’s leading advisers), protested to Andropov, Gromyko and Boris Ponomarev, head of the Central Committee’s International Department, against the practice of Canadian Communist Party representatives—in particular the Party leader, William Kashtan—of calling at the embassy to collect funds (codenamed “US wheat”) from the resident, Vladimir Ivanovich Mechulayev. The residency had already warned Kashtan that he was taking a considerable risk. By 1980 the Centre was convinced that the Canadian authorities were aware that subsidies to the CPC were being funded by the Soviet-owned Ukrainskaya Kniga [Ukrainian Book] Company, based in Toronto. The FCD informed Ponomarev on October 20:

The seizure by Boris Yeltsin’s government of the archives of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) after the failed coup of August 1991 led to the publication for the first time of documentary evidence showing that during the 1980s alone, at a time when the Soviet Union was chronically short of hard currency, the CPSU had distributed over 200 million dollars to fraternal parties outside the Soviet Bloc. The Central Committee’s International Department had tried to destroy the records of the payments shortly before the confiscation of its archive, but the metal paper clips which held the documents together jammed the shredding machines and saved some of them from destruction.⁶²

THOUGH THE LARGEST Subsidies for most of the Cold War seem to have gone to the French PCF and Italian PCI, the two leading Western Parties, the biggest per capita donations probably went to the Communist Party of the United States. The disproportionate share of Soviet funds channelled to the CPUSA reflected Moscow’s desire to encourage the revival of Communism on the territory of the Main Adversary after the near disintegration of the Party in the mid-1950s. The CPUSA repaid Soviet generosity with an impeccable ideological orthodoxy which became particularly valued in Moscow when the heresy of Eurocommunism later took hold of the major west European Communist Parties.

In April 1958 a veteran member of the CPUSA leadership, Morris Childs (whose aliases included “Morris Summers,” “Ramsey Kemp Martin” and “D. Douglas Mozart”) was invited to Moscow to discuss financial help for his ailing party. Boris Ponomarev, the head of the Central Committee international department, offered 75,000 dollars for the current year and 200,000 dollars for 1959, initially channelled via the Canadian Communist Party.⁶³ From 1961 to 1980 the conduits for Soviet subsidies were Childs (codenamed KHAB) and his brother Jack (alias “D. Brooks,” codenamed MARAT), an undeclared Communist who had worked for Comintern in the 1930s. Until the late 1970s Morris Childs usually visited Moscow at least once a year to submit the CPUSA budget and request for funds, receive instructions from the International Department and the KGB and take part in discussions on American affairs. Jack acted as the main point of contact for the handover of money in the United States. The normal procedure was for the Centre to send a coded message to a CPUSA radio operator in New York containing details of the next transmission of funds. The message would then be passed to Jack Childs, who would decode it and inform his brother, Gus Hall (leader of the CPUSA from 1959 and codenamed PALM), or Hall’s wife Elizabeth that the next delivery was imminent.⁶⁴

From 1968 the CPUSA radio operator who passed messages from the Centre on to Jack Childs was another undeclared party member of Russian descent, Albert Friedman, codenamed FORD, who worked as a salesman in a Manhattan radio store on East 49th Street. Using the alias Weber, Friedman had worked between the wars at Comintern’s radio school in Moscow, training other underground radio operators. In January 1969 he travelled to Moscow for further training,⁶⁵ but performed so well that his instructor told him, “You know more than I do” and invited him to lunch.⁶⁶ Though Friedman paid Party dues, his membership of the CPUSA was known only to the KGB and a small group within the Party leadership.⁶⁷ What neither the KGB nor CPUSA leaders knew, however, was that since the end of the Second World War Friedman had been an FBI agent in the Party, codenamed CLIP. He passed every word of the Centre’s communications on to the Bureau.⁶⁸

By the late 1960s Soviet subsidies to the CPUSA amounted to well over a million dollars a year; a decade later they were more than two million. Jack Childs (MARAT) usually took delivery of Soviet subsidies from KGB operations officers during “brush passes” at pre-arranged locations in New York, all at precisely 3:05 p.m. During 1974, for example, money-transfer operations (then codenamed VALDAY) took place at four locations in Lower Manhattan: 10 Pine Street, 10th floor (codenamed DINO); 11 Broadway, 9th floor (FRED); 120 Wall Street, 7th floor (POST); and 81 New Street, 2nd floor (ROLAND). All four addresses were chosen by the New York residency because they had several entrances and exits. MARAT and the KGB operations officer chosen to hand the money over to him entered and left the building selected for their brush contact through different doors. In order to lessen the increasing bulk of the packages of money handed over in brush contacts, the denomination of the bills contained in them was raised in 1974 from 20 dollars to 50 dollars and 100 dollars.⁶⁹ On the grounds that it was too dangerous to pass the money to Hall, who was under close surveillance by the FBI, the New York police and the Internal Revenue Service, Jack Childs gave much of it to his brother Morris for safekeeping.⁷⁰

As well as acting as a conduit for Soviet subsidies, Jack Childs also regularly exchanged written messages with the New York residency either through brush contacts or “dead drops.” Like brush contact sites, dead drops were all given codenames; those in use in 1974 were MANDI, LYUSI, OPEY, RIBA and OVERA. Messages were normally sent on undeveloped film from a Minox camera placed in a magnetic container. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin records that between July 1975 and August 1976 MARAT took part in five VALDAY operations and nine to exchange secret messages (five by brush contact, four by dead drop). In an emergency the residency could arrange an urgent meeting with MARAT by ringing a designated telephone number at precisely five minutes past noon and asking for Dr. Albert. On being told, “There is no Dr. Albert here” the residency officer would reply, “Sorry, must have the wrong number.” He would then meet MARAT at 3:05 p.m. the same day at a Brooklyn location codenamed ELLIOT, at the entrance to the Silver Road pharmacy on the corner of Avenue J and East 16th Street, next to the subway station. MARAT identified himself by carrying a copy of Time magazine and placing a Bandaid on his left hand. The operations officer asked him, “Do you have the time?” When MARAT replied, “It’s 3:05 sharp,” he produced a business card from one of MARAT’s former employers with a note by KHAB, his brother Morris, on the back.⁷¹

The elaborate security employed by the KGB in contacts with both MARAT and KHAB suffered, however, from one fatal flaw. Since the early 1950s both had been FBI agents.⁷² By 1974 the Centre had become suspicious, particularly about KHAB (Morris Childs). He had not been imprisoned during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, nor had he been arrested for travelling abroad on false passports (a fact of which the FBI was believed to be aware). A 1967 report by the Senate Judiciary Committee had referred to him under the names Morris Chilovsky (his name at birth) and Morris Summers (one of his aliases) and mentioned his pre-war links with Soviet intelligence. The Centre also found suspicious KHAB’s determination to accompany Gus Hall on all his trips to Russia and his “nervousness” when Moscow bypassed him and his brother and communicated directly with Hall. In March 1974 Vladimir Mikhailovich Kazakov, head of the FCD First (North American) Department, reported to Andropov and the Central Committee:

Kazakov also urged that Hall be persuaded to find a substitute for MARAT (Jack Childs), whom he described as absent-minded and in poor health.

At a meeting with Hall in Moscow on May 8, another senior FCD officer, B. S. Ivanov, tried to persuade him that the time had come to retire both the Childs brothers, whose long involvement in secret work placed them under increasing danger of FBI surveillance. Ivanov suggested a number of alternative methods of transferring Soviet funds to the CPUSA, among them opening a Swiss bank account or using a cover business in the United States. But, though Hall said he had found a “reliable comrade” to replace Jack Childs, he took no action and the International Department, which evidently did not take Kazakov’s warning very seriously, did not insist.⁷³

In 1975 Morris and Jack Childs were awarded the Order of the Red Banner; Morris received his in person from Brezhnev during a Moscow banquet. Back in the United States both brothers lived in some style, embezzling about 5 percent of the Soviet funds sent to the CPUSA as well as receiving a salary from the FBI. Morris posed as a wealthy businessman with a penthouse in Chicago, expensively furnished with antiques, paintings and oriental carpets, as well as apartments in Moscow and New York. Gus Hall, who naively believed both brothers to be independently wealthy, sometimes asked them to buy clothes for his family.⁷⁴

Among the intelligence which the Childs brothers reported to the FBI for more than twenty years were the claims of the CPUSA leadership to influence on the black civil rights movement. In 1958 Jack Childs had reported a boast by James Jackson, Party secretary in charge of “Negro and Southern Affairs,” that “most secret and guarded people” were “guiding” the civil rights leader Martin Luther King.⁷⁵ According to one KGB file, Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, later asked Hall to stop bringing Jackson, whom he described as “poorly trained politically,” to meetings with him; he also requested the Soviet mission to the UN (by which he probably meant the KGB New York residency) to break off contact with Jackson.⁷⁶

There was, however, some substance to the claim that the CPUSA had penetrated King’s entourage. The Childs brothers reported that one of King’s advisers, Stanley D. Levison, a New York lawyer and entrepreneur, was a secret Party member. ⁷⁷ Levison drafted sections of King’s 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom, and helped prepare his defense against trumped-up charges of perjury on his Alabama tax returns in 1960.⁷⁸ Levison also introduced into King’s entourage a secret black member of the CPUSA, Hunter Pitts “Jack” O’Dell.⁷⁹ The FBI, who put Levison under surveillance, reported that he was meeting Viktor Lesiovsky, a KGB officer working as special assistant to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant.⁸⁰ It was Levison’s alleged influence on King which in 1963 led Attorney-General Robert Kennedy to authorize the bugging of King’s hotel rooms. Though the bugs produced recordings of a number of King’s sexual liaisons, in which President Lyndon B. Johnson took a prurient interest, they provided no evidence of Communist influence on him.⁸¹

At the beginning of the Carter administration in 1977, the CPUSA leadership made exaggerated claims of its influence over King’s former executive secretary, Andrew Young (codenamed LUTHER), newly appointed as US representative at the United Nations. According to Hall, “Young himself did not know that several of his close friends in Atlanta were covert Communists, and he listened to them. The Party, while observing the required clandestinity, would cautiously exert an influence on Young in the necessary areas.”⁸² Lesiovsky’s cover as assistant to U Thant gave him a number of opportunities for discussions with Young. Though he claimed to have obtained “important information” from the discussions, he reported—less optimistically than Hall—that, while Young hoped for better US-Soviet relations, his attitude to the Soviet Union was fundamentally “negative.”⁸³

Though Hall tended to overstate the influence of undeclared members of the CPUSA within the Democratic Party, there was at least one to whom the Centre attached real importance during the 1970s: a Democratic activist in California recruited as a KGB agent during a visit to Russia. The agent, who is not identified by name in the reports noted by Mitrokhin, had a wide circle of influential contacts in the Democratic Party: among them Governor Jerry Brown of California, Senator Alan Cranston, Senator Eugene McCarthy, Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Senator J. William Fulbright and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. During the 1976 presidential election the agent was able to provide inside information from within the Carter camp and a profile of Carter himself, which were particularly highly valued by the Centre since it had so few high-level American sources. On one occasion he spent three hours discussing the progress of the campaign at a meeting with Carter, Brown and Cranston in Carter’s room at the Pacific Hotel. His report was forwarded to the Politburo. During the final stages of the campaign the agent had what the KGB claimed were “direct and prolonged conversations” with Carter, Governor Brown and Senators Cranston, Kennedy, Ribicoff and Jacob Javits. Andropov attached such importance to the report on these conversations that he forwarded it under his signature to the Politburo immediately after Carter’s election.⁸⁴

IN NOVEMBER 1977 the Centre sent a memorandum to the Central Committee complaining that, despite several requests to Hall to replace the Childs brothers, they were still running the American end of the “covert channel of communication with the US Communist Party.” During Jack’s illness in August and September, Morris had replaced him as the CPUSA’s representative at a meeting with a KGB officer in New York:

On November 10 Kazakov and Ivanov raised the question of replacing the Childs brothers at another meeting with Hall in Moscow. Hall said that he had three candidates in mind as a replacement for Jack Childs—John Vogo and the Applekhoums [? Appleholmes] brothers.⁸⁵ He would make his final choice in the near future and announce his decision by a coded telegram to Moscow reporting the completion of a draft article on colonialism. The number of the draft indicated in the telegram (first, second or third) would indicate which candidate he had selected. Jack Child’s successor would then apply for a visa at the Soviet consulate in Vienna so that he could receive one and a half to two months of “special training” in Moscow. Hall also suggested that the KGB use the wife of his personal chauffeur and bodyguard as an additional channel of communication in New York. The residency could telephone her at work, identifying itself by using the parole, “This is Mr. Budnik calling about the old furniture. My friend from Hoboken suggested contacting you.”⁸⁶

Once again, however, Hall delayed taking action. The Childs brothers continued to take part in the “special channel operation” for the remainder of the decade. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin records that during the eight months up to April 1978 Jack Childs conducted nineteen operations: three VALDAY money transfers, two meetings with KGB officers, five dead drops, six brush contacts and three operations to signal contacts.⁸⁷ By the spring of 1980, however, the FBI had concluded that the Childs were in imminent danger of being compromised. On May 28, as a pretext for withdrawing from the “special channel,” Morris Childs told Hall that unidentified men had been calling on his neighbors making enquiries about him and he feared he might have to go into hiding to avoid arrest. He handed Hall 225,437 dollars in cash, which, he claimed, was all the money from Moscow in his possession. Jack Childs, who had been in failing health for some time, died in a New York hospital on August 12. Morris and Eva Childs retired to a luxurious condominium north of Miami with spectacular views over the Atlantic. In 1987, at a special ceremony at FBI headquarters, Morris was presented by President Reagan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He and his brother Jack, who was awarded the same medal posthumously, thus became the only spies ever to be decorated by both the Soviet Union and the United States.⁸⁸

Throughout the decades when the Childs brothers operated the secret channel to Moscow, the CPUSA had been wholly marginal to American politics. In four presidential elections between 1972 and 1984 Gus Hall never received more than 59,000 votes; after falling to 35,000 in 1984, he decided to support the Democrats in 1988. After dropping well below 10,000 members in the mid-1970s, the Party staged a modest revival but in the later 1980s was only about 15,000 strong.⁸⁹ Hall, however, continued to inhabit a fantasy world in which the CPUSA had a major influence on American politics. He wrote to Boris Ponomarev, the head of the International Department, in the autumn of 1981:

As on this occasion, Hall’s fantasy assessments of the CPUSA’s growing influence were accompanied by appeals for Soviet subsidies, which for most of the 1980s ran at 2 million dollars a year. In 1987 Hall asked for a large increase:

The CPUSA’s subsidy for the following year was put up to three million dollars.⁹⁰

Morris Childs believed that the remarkable generosity of Soviet donations to the CPUSA (200 dollars a member in 1987) was due partly to the fact that the Kremlin took Gus Hall’s claims at least semi-seriously and “ludicrously overestimated the influence of the American party.”⁹¹ The generosity was also due, however, to the ideological servility of Hall and the CPUSA leadership. According to Dorothy Ray Healey, a prominent party militant for forty-five years: