The Sword and the Shield

Assassination had been an integral part of Stalin’s foreign policy. During the late 1930s he had been obsessed with NKVD operations to liquidate Trotsky and his leading foreign supporters. The final act of his foreign policy before he died in 1953 was a plan to assassinate Josip Tito, who had succeeded Trotsky as the leading heretic of the Soviet Bloc.

At the height of the Terror, Tito (born Josip Broz) had, ironically, been one of the few leading Yugoslav Communists (most then living in exile in Moscow) who were trusted by the NKVD. On becoming secretary general of the purged Yugoslav Party in 1937, he had dutifully denounced his persecuted and liquidated comrades, in impeccable Stalinist invective, as Trotskyists, traitors, factionalists, spies and anti-Party elements. He apologized personally to Stalin for his own lack of vigilance in choosing as his first wife a woman who had since been unmasked as an (imaginary) Gestapo agent. When Tito became wartime leader of the Communist partisans, an NKVD agent, Josip Kopinić, codenamed VAZHDUH (“Air”), acted as his radio link with Moscow.¹ At the end of the war, the NKGB resident, Saveli Vladimirovich Burtakov (codenamed LIST), presented the head of Tito’s Bureau of People’s Protection, Alexander-Leka Ranković, with a portrait of Stalin. Apparently deeply moved, Ranković (codenamed MARKO by the Centre) replied that it was the most precious gift he could possibly have received.² There was no sign yet of the violent confrontation between Tito and Stalin which was to erupt only three years later. Despite his own subsequent loathing for Stalinism, the leading Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas later acknowledged:

There were already signs by the end of the war, however, that Tito (codenamed OREL (“Eagle”) by the Centre) would be less sycophantic to Moscow than most other leaders of the emerging Soviet Bloc. Unlike other Bloc members, the Yugoslav partisans had defeated the Germans and Italians chiefly through their own efforts rather than the sacrifices of the Red Army. Tito declared ominously soon after VE Day, “We will not be dependent on anyone ever again.” Burtakov reported to the Centre:

Burtakov also believed Tito was less than frank about his dealings with Britain, “although outwardly he makes a show of his supposed hostility towards the Allies, especially the British.”⁴

Tito and Ranković, in turn, took a dim view of Burtakov, who became notorious for his habit of looting jewelry, crystal, china and rugs from Yugoslav mansions (a practice he was to repeat when posted to Romania and Czechoslovakia).⁵ At the end of 1945 Burtakov was replaced as chief adviser to the Bureau of People’s Protection (OZNA) by Arseni Vasilyevich Tishkov, known to the Yugoslavs as Timofeyev.⁶

The post-war MGB had residencies in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Skopje, as well as four sub-residencies elsewhere in Yugoslavia,⁷ whose imperious behavior caused increasing resentment at Soviet intrusion into Yugoslav affairs. An inspection by the Centre reported that MGB advisers “interfered roughshod in the internal affairs of the Bureau of People’s Protection, and applied pressure in order to obtain information.” Information refused by OZNA’s leaders was surreptitiously obtained from its junior officers.⁸ What caused most resentment in Belgrade, however, was MGB recruitment of Yugoslav agents. Tito was unaware that two of his own ministers—Andriya Hebrang, minister of industry, and Streten Žujović, finance minister—were among them. He was, however, outraged at a Soviet attempt in 1945 to seduce and recruit Dusica Petrović, the female officer in charge of Yugoslav ciphers. When informed of the case by Ranković, Tito exploded: “A spy network is something we will not tolerate! We’ve got to let them know right away.”⁹ Tishkov, however, continued to demand from Tito and Ranković offices for himself and the Soviet “advisers” inside OZNA headquarters, with the right to be informed of all agent files and operations.¹⁰

Of all Tito’s early signs of independence, the one which caused most alarm in Moscow was probably his plan for a Balkan federation—interpreted by Stalin as a potential challenge to Soviet hegemony. In March 1948 the Soviet Union recalled its advisers and angrily denounced the Yugoslav Party as riddled with both ideological heresy and British spies. On June 28 Cominform (the post-war successor to Comintern) expelled the Yugoslavs and appealed to “healthy elements” in the Party to overthrow the leadership. Tito’s flattering secret codename OREL (“Eagle”) was hurriedly downgraded to STERVYATNIK (“Carrion Crow”).¹¹ Stalin, however, initially overestimated the ease with which “Carrion Crow” could be overthrown. “I shall shake my little finger,” he boasted to Khrushchev, “and there will be no more Tito.” When that failed, “he shook everything else he could shake;” but without success. Tito’s hold over the Party, army and state machinery remained secure.

In the summer of 1948 the MGB and UDBA (OZNA’s successor) began a vicious intelligence war. Hebrang and Žujović, the two Soviet moles in Tito’s cabinet, were arrested. Other Soviet agents were discovered in Tito’s bodyguard, of whom the most senior was Major-General Momo Jurović (codenamed VAL). According to Djilas, the UDBA discovered an MGB plot to wipe out the Yugoslav Politburo with automatic rifles while they were relaxing in the billiards room at Tito’s villa. The UDBA’s use of terror against Cominforn “traitors” rivaled in horror, if not in scale, that of the NKVD against Soviet “enemies of the people” a decade before. Djilas mournfully told Ranković, “Now we are treating Stalin’s followers just as he treated his enemies!” ¹² The MGB and its allied intelligence services simultaneously engaged in a purge of mostly imaginary Titoist conspirators throughout the Soviet Bloc. Their most celebrated victims were the Hungarian interior minister, László Rajk, and seven alleged accomplices who confessed at a carefully rehearsed show trial in Budapest to taking part in a vast non-existent plot hatched by Tito and the CIA.¹³

The final, and most ingenious, of the MGB plans to assassinate Tito involved one of the most remarkable of all Soviet illegals, Iosif Grigulevich (at this time codenamed MAKS or DAKS), who had taken a leading part in the first, narrowly unsuccessful, attempt on Trotsky’s life in Mexico City in May 1940, had run a Latin American sabotage network during the Second World War, and in 1951—posing as Teodoro Castro—had become Costa Rican chargé d’affaires (later Minister Plenipotentiary) in Rome.¹⁴ Since Costa Rica had no diplomatic mission in Belgrade, Grigulevich was also able to obtain the post of non-resident envoy to Yugoslavia. The MGB reported to Stalin in February 1953:

Grigulevich volunteered for the role of assassin. At a secret meeting with senior MGB officers in Vienna early in February 1953 he suggested four possible ways to eliminate “Carrion Crow:”

Grigulevich was asked to submit more detailed proposals to the Centre, Meanwhile, the MGB assured Stalin that there was no doubt that “MAKS, because of his personal qualities and experience in intelligence work, is capable of accomplishing a mission of this kind.”¹⁶

The use of an accredited Central American diplomat as Tito’s assassin was intended to conceal as effectively as possible the hand of the MGB. Using his Costa Rican alias, Grigulevich composed a farewell letter addressed to his Mexican wife to be made public and used to reinforce his Latin American cover if he were captured or killed during the assassination attempt.¹⁷ On March 1, 1953 the MGB reported to Stalin that MAK’s attempt to “rub out” Tito had, unfortunately, not yet taken place. This disappointing report, which Stalin read at about midnight, may well have been the last document he saw before he suffered a fatal stroke in the early hours of March 2.¹⁸

After Stalin’s death three days later, plans for the assassination were suspended. That May Grigulevich was hurriedly withdrawn to Moscow when the pre-war Soviet defector Aleksandr Orlov began publishing reminiscences of Stalin and the NKVD in Life magazine. The Centre feared that Orlov, who knew of Grigulevich’s sabotage missions before and during the Spanish Civil War, might blow his cover—though, in the event, he did not do so.¹⁹ So far as the puzzled Costa Rican foreign ministry and Rome diplomatic corps were concerned, Grigulevich and his wife simply disappeared into thin air. A note on his KGB file in 1980 records that Western intelligence services had, apparently, never identified the missing Teodoro Castro as the Soviet illegal Iosif Grigulevich. Back in Moscow, Grigulevich had successfully completed a doctoral dissertation, become a senior scientific researcher at the Ethnographic Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1958, and thereafter made a new life for himself as a leading writer and academic authority on Latin America, ethnography and religion, becoming vice-president of the Soviet—Cuban and Soviet—Venezuelan Friendship Societies.²⁰

UNDER KHRUSHCHEV, PLOTS to assassinate Tito were replaced by attempted conciliation with Belgrade. The public Soviet—Yugoslav conflict was formally concluded during a state visit by Khrushchev to Belgrade in May 1955. Assassination was far less central to Khrushchev’s foreign policy than it had been to Stalin’s. It remained, however, as it had done throughout the Stalin era, a basic part of Soviet policy for dealing with the leaders of anti-Soviet émigré groups: in particular, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the rival Social-Democratic National Labor Union (NTS). As Party secretary in the Ukraine, Khrushchev had ordered the secret poisoning by the MGB of, among others, the nationalist Oleksander Shumsky and of Archbishop Romzha of the Uniate (Catholic) church.²¹

The first major foreign assassination target of the post-Stalin era was Georgi Sergeyevich Okolovich, one of the leaders of the NTS organization in West Germany. The training of Okolovich’s intended assassin, Nikolai Khokhlov, was personally overseen by the MGB head of foreign intelligence, Aleksandr Semyonovich Panyushkin. Khokhlov’s instructors included Mikhail Rubak, a Soviet judo champion, and Lieutenant-Colonel Godlevsky, winner of five national pistol tournaments. The execution weapon was an electrically operated gun, fitted with a silencer and concealed inside a cigarette packet, which fired cyanide bullets developed in the Centre’s secret arms laboratory at Khozyaistvo Zheleznovo. Khokhlov, however, proved to be more squeamish than the assassins of the Stalin era and was at least half-persuaded by some of the NTS publications which he read while plotting Okolovich’s assassination. On February 18, 1954 Khokhlov called at Okolovich’s flat in Frankfurt. His introduction was somewhat disconcerting. “Georgi Sergeyevich,” he told him, “I’ve come to you from Moscow. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has ordered your assassination.” He then informed the startled Okolovich that he had decided not to murder him. Instead, Khokhlov defected to an initially skeptical CIA. On April 20 he gave a sensational press conference at which he revealed the assassination plan and displayed his exotic murder weapon to the world’s media. ²²

In April 1955, following a prolonged post-mortem at the Centre in the wake of Khokhlov’s well-publicized defection, “special actions” were made the responsibility of the reorganized FCD Thirteenth Department, which was represented in residencies by a newly created Line F. Its duties were to prepare and conduct sabotage in collaboration with the GRU; to carry out other “special actions” involving the use of force, ranging from kidnapping to assassination; and to steal Western military technology (a responsibility later handed over to FCD Directorate T on its foundation in 1963).²³

SABOTAGE OPERATIONS REPLACED assassination as the most important “special actions” of the Thirteenth Department during and beyond the Khrushchev era. The main priority of these operations consisted of the identification of targets in the West and preparations for their destruction by Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups (diversionnye razvedyvatelnye gruppy or DRGs) and the local Communist “resistance” in the event of an East—West conflict. One of Line F’s earliest tasks followed the conclusion of the four-power Austrian State Treaty, signed in Vienna in May 1955, which ended the post-war occupation by the wartime allies. Before the withdrawal of the Red Army, the KGB was instructed to select and fill a series of secret arms caches. Among the many sites recorded in the files examined by Mitrokhin were the villages of Mayerling, Mollram, Weinersdorf, Heiligenkreuz and Semmering; the Stift Gîttweig monastery; and two ruined castles, Schloss Starhemberg and Schloss Merkenstein. KGB archives contain detailed plans and written descriptions of these and other locations. The plan of the ruins of Schloss Starhemberg, for example, shows a 7.65 caliber Walter pistol, with a cartridge clip and 21 rounds of ammunition, concealed in a crack in the outer wall at ground level 1.5 meters to the left of an old pine tree; and a 6.35 caliber Walter pistol, with a cartridge clip and 21 live rounds, hidden in the castle courtyard 1.5 meters from an old pear tree. At Schloss Merkenstein a 7.65 caliber Mauser pistol, with cartridge clip and 21 rounds of ammunition, was concealed in a niche underneath a large stone to the left of the gateway arch; a Walter pistol, also with cartridge clip and 25 rounds, was hidden in a crevice in the wall.²⁴

In May 1964, the KGB residency in Vienna made a sample check of the second Schloss Merkenstein cache, and was disturbed to discover that the cover in which the arms had been wrapped had rotted away. Four of the twenty-one rounds of ammunition had disappeared and were assumed to have fallen deeper into the crevice; the other seventeen rounds had deteriorated and were no longer safe to use. The Walter pistol, once rust had been removed, as found to be still serviceable. The Centre prudently decided to leave the other caches undisturbed.²⁵

Potential sabotage targets and landing sites for Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups (DRGs) are recorded in KGB files with the same meticulous detail as the location of the secret arms caches.²⁶ By 1959, if not earlier, the most vulnerable points of power-transmission lines, oil pipelines, communications systems and major industrial complexes in most, if not all, NATO countries were being systematically reconnoitered and marked on the Thirteenth Department’s maps. In the summer of 1959 a KGB agent obtained a temporary job at an electricity substation near Worms in order to assist the preparation of plans to sabotage electric power lines crossing the Rhine.²⁷ From October 2 to 30, 1959 a Soviet delegation of energy experts, headed by the deputy minister for the construction of power plants and including a KGB officer, used a visit to the United States to reconnoiter sabotage targets in power stations and electricity lines.

Files on suitable landing sites and bases for the DRGs which would attack these and other targets included detailed information on the terrain, landmarks, climate in different seasons, prevailing winds, populated areas and local customs. Where the DRGs were to land by sea rather than by air, there were further details on the coastline, tides and operating conditions for submarines and motor boats.²⁸ Much of the information was collected by local agents and by Soviet citizens who were allowed to travel to the West for family reunions. An attempt was also made to recruit illegal agents in the main NATO countries and Japan to assist the DRGs. According to a Thirteenth Department file:

The Thirteenth Department’s preparations for wartime sabotage operations inevitably overlapped with those of the GRU. The resulting duplication of effort was made worse by the traditional rivalry and distrust between the two agencies. On April 7, 1960 the CPSU Central Committee issued Decision No. P-274-XIVI, calling for closer co-ordination between the KGB and GRU. This and other exhortations, however, had little practical effect. In September 1963 the Centre complained that the leadership of the GRU was making no serious attempt to co-ordinate its operations with those of the KGB.³⁰

The KGB found it easier to collaborate with the intelligence agencies of other Soviet Bloc countries, who were usually willing to accept a subordinate role, and sought their help in a number of Line F operations. According to Markus Wolf, head of the HVA (Stasi foreign intelligence) from 1952 to 1986, the Centre offered its allies lethal nerve toxins and poisons which were fatal on contact with the skin for use during “special actions.” Wolf claims that he refused all but a small supply of “truth drugs,” which he had analyzed by an HVA doctor:

In his memoirs Wolf seeks to distance himself from KGB assassination attempts. He claims, for example, that the KGB assassinated Aleksandr Trushnovich, the NTS leader in West Berlin, “while attempting to kidnap him.”³¹ KGB files tell a rather different story. In April 1954 Heinz Gleske, a Stasi officer operating undercover in West Germany, lured Trushnovich to his home, where he was kidnapped and handed over to the KGB at Karlshorst. Gleske then issued a statement, claiming that Trushnovich had become disillusioned with the West and had “voluntarily” defected to East Germany. The Centre awarded Gleske the Order of the Red Star.³²

Even with some assistance from its allies, the KGB’s “special actions” against NTS and OUN leaders during the Khrushchev era had a mixed record of success—not least because of the doubts of its assassins. In an attempt to disguise its involvement in an attempt to murder the NTS president, Vladimir Poremsky, the Thirteenth Department hired the services of a German contract killer, Wolfgang Wildprett. Like Khokhlov, however, Wildprett had second thoughts, decided not to go ahead with the “special action” and in December 1955 informed the West German police. In September 1957 a Thirteenth Department attempt to poison Khokhlov himself with radioactive thallium (chosen in the belief that it would degrade and leave no trace at autopsy) also failed.

These failures, however, were followed by the successful assassination of two leading Ukrainian émigrés: the main NTS ideologist, Lev Rebet, in October 1957 and the OUN leader, Stephen Bandera, in October 1959.³³ The Thirteenth Department assassin in both cases, only twenty-five years of age when he killed Rebet, was Bodgan Stashinsky, who operated out of the KGB compound at Karlshorst. His murder weapon, specially constructed by the KGB weapons laboratory, was a spray gun which fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule and caused death by cardiac arrest. The Centre calculated, correctly, that an unsuspecting pathologist was likely to diagnose the cause of death as heart failure. Stashinsky tested his weapon by taking a dog into a wood near Karlshorst, tying it to a tree and firing at it. The dog had immediate convulsions and died in a few moments. Confident of the deadliness of his spray gun, Stashinsky killed both Rebet and Bandera by lying in wait for them in darkened stairways. In December 1959, he was summoned to Moscow. At a ceremony in the Centre, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin, chairman of the KGB, read aloud a citation praising Stashinsky “for carrying out an extremely important government assignment” and presented him with the Order of the Red Banner. Stashinsky was told he would be sent on a course to perfect his English before being sent on a three- to five-year assignment in the West to carry out further “special actions.”³⁴

Like Khokhlov and Wildprett, however, Stashinsky had second thoughts about his career as an assassin, encouraged by his East German girlfriend, Inge Pohl, whom he married in 1960. In August 1961, the day before the Berlin Wall sealed off the escape route from the East, the couple defected to the West. Stashinsky confessed to the murders of Rebet and Bandera, was tried at Karlsruhe in October 1962 and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. The judge declared that the main culprit was the Soviet government which had institutionalized political murder. Heads were quick to roll within the KGB. According to Anatoli Golitsyn, who defected four months after Stashinsky, at least seventeen KGB officers were sacked or demoted.³⁵ More importantly, the Khokhlov and Stashinsky defections led both the KGB leadership and the Politburo to reassess the risks of “wet affairs” (assassination attempts). Fearful of attracting more of the worldwide publicity generated by Khokhlov’s press conference and Stashinsky’s trial, the Politburo abandoned assassination as a normal treatment of policy outside the Soviet Bloc, resorting to it only on rare occasions such as in the elimination of President Hafizullah Amin of Afghanistan in December 1979.³⁶

Among the chief beneficiaries of the KGB’s declining enthusiasm for assassination plots was probably Nikita Khrushchev. Vladimir Semichastny, then the KGB chairman, claims that he was approached in 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev, the ringleader of the plot to oust Khrushchev, and asked to arrange his “physical elimination.” Semichastny refused.³⁷ He did, however, agree to bug Khruschchev’s private telephone lines. With the KGB’s assistance, the plotters achieved a substantial element of surprise. When Khrushchev left for a holiday on the Black Sea in the autumn of 1964, he was seen off by smiling colleagues. When he returned on October 13, summoned to attend an urgent meeting of the Presidium, he was met at the airport only by Semichastny and a senior security officer from the KGB. “They’ve all gathered in the Kremlin and are waiting for you,” Semichastny told him. Khrushchev surrendered to the inevitable without a struggle, agreeing to resign on the grounds of “advanced age and poor health.” Thereafter, he was relegated almost to the status of unperson, not mentioned again in the press until Pravda published a brief note in 1970 recording his death.³⁸

THOUGH ITS ASSASSINATION operations declined, the Centre showed increasing interest during the 1960s and 1970s in collaboration with “anti-imperialist” guerrilla and terrorist groups in the Third World. In January 1961 Khrushchev publicly pledged Soviet assistance for “movements of national liberation.” The abortive, CIABACKED invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs three months later strengthened his determination to do so. On August 3 he told a private meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders in Moscow, “I wish we could give imperialism a bloody nose!”³⁹ The Centre believed it had devised a way to do so which would conceal the role of the KGB.

The aggressive global grand strategy against the Main Adversary, devised in the summer of 1961 by Shelepin and approved by Khrushchev and the Central Committee, envisaged the use of national liberation movements both in operations against the United States and its allies and in promoting “armed uprisings against reactionary pro-Western governments.” At the top of the list of national liberation movements cultivated by the KGB was the newly founded Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua, which was dedicated to following the example of the Cuban revolution and overthrowing the brutal pro-American dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty.⁴⁰ The FSLN leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador, codenamed GIDROLOG (“Hydrologist”), was described by the Centre as “a trusted agent.”⁴¹ Sandinista guerrillas formed the basis for a KGB sabotage and intelligence group established in 1966 on the Mexican US border with support bases in the area of Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Ensenada. Its leader, Manuel Ramón de Jesus Andara y Ubeda (codenamed PRIM), traveled to Moscow for training in Line F operations. Among the chief sabotage targets across the US border were military bases, missile sites, radar installations and the oil pipeline (codenamed START) which ran from El Paso in Texas to Costa Mesa, California. Three sites on the American coast were selected for DRG landings, together with large-capacity dead-drops in which to store mines, explosive, detonators and other sabotage materials. A support group codenamed SATURN was given the task of using the movements of migrant workers (braceros) to conceal the transfer of agents and munitions across the border. SATURN’s headquarters was a hotel belonging to a Russian-born agent, codenamed VLADELETS (“Proprietor”), in Ensenada fifty miles from the US border in the Baja California. VLADELET’s two sons, both born in Mexico but assessed by the KGB as “Russian patriots,” owned a gas station which was selected as a hiding place for DRGs and their equipment as well as a base from which to conduct sabotage in the United States.⁴²

Canada in the north, like Mexico in the south, was intended by the Thirteenth Department (reorganized in 1965 as Department V) as a base for cross-border operations by DRGs against the Main Adversary. In 1967 a number of frontier crossings were reconnoitred: among them areas near the Lake of the Woods and International Falls in Minnesota, and in the region of the Glacier National Park in Montana. The KGB believed that one of its targets in Montana, the Flathead dam, generated “the largest power supply system in the world.” Department V identified a point (codenamed DORIS) on the South Fork river about three kilometers below the dam, where it could bring down a series of pylons on a steep mountain slope which would take a lengthy period to repair. It also planned a probably simultaneous operation in which DRG commandos would descend on the Hungry Horse dam at night, take control of it for a few hours and sabotage its sluices.

The state with the largest number of targets, however, was almost certainly New York, where DRG’s based along the Delaware river, in the Big Spring Park near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and at other locations planned to disrupt the power supply of the entire state before taking refuge in the Appalachian mountains. In examining the target files of the Thirteenth Department and Department V, Mitrokhin was invariably struck by the thoroughness with which each target had been reconnoitred. The file on the port of New York (target GRANIT), for example, included details of ships’ berths, warehouses, communications systems, port personnel and security procedures. As always, the port’s most vulnerable points were carefully marked.⁴³

As well as being a base of KGB “special tasks” against the United States, Canada was also an important target in its own right. Operation KEDR (“Cedar”), begun by the Ottawa residency in 1959, took twelve years to complete an immensely detailed reconnaissance of oil refineries and oil and gas pipelines across Canada from British Columbia to Montreal. Each target was photographed from several angles and its vulnerable points identified. The most suitable approach roads for sabotage operations, together with the best getaway routes, were carefully plotted on small-scale maps.⁴⁴

Line F operations in north America were part of a much larger strategy. In the event of war with NATO, Moscow planned a massive campaign of sabotage and disruption behind enemy lines. But sabotage on a more modest scale was also envisaged in crises (not precisely defined in files seen by Mitrokhin) which stopped short of war. Within Europe, residencies in NATO countries and some neutral states (notably Austria, Sweden and Switzerland) were all expected to make detailed plans for the sabotage of four to six major targets a year.⁴⁵ In 1964-6, for example, Line F in West Germany planned “special actions” against the Wilhelmshaven-Wesseling oil pipeline; fuel and lubricant depots in Wilhelmshaven and Unterpfaffenhoven; the main electrical substations in Brauweiler and Rommerskirchen and in the hamlet of Feinau; the NATO military transit base in the harbor of Bremerhaven; the FRG government war bunker; the Howaldswerft shipbuilding docks at Kiel and the Weser A G in Bremen; and the main US army arms depot at Misau. On instructions from the Centre, the Bonn residency purchased uniforms and work clothes, used by Bundeswehr soldiers, railway personnel, forestry workers, gamekeepers and roadworkers, to be worn as disguise by DRG saboteurs, for whom landing sites were selected in the Black Forest and Bavaria. Arms and radio equipment for use in the sabotage missions were hidden in dead-drops near the targets.⁴⁶ The standard DRG arms package, packed in a container designed for long-term storage, consisted of: equipment for blowing up railway track; one “Cherepakha” (tortoise) mine with 3 additional explosive charges; 4 “Ugolok” devices (purpose not specified in Mitrokhin’s notes); explosives designed to destroy the main supports of high-voltage power transmission pylons; 3 6-meterlong detonator fuses; and 2 Karandash (“pencil”) detonators with a two-hour delay.⁴⁷ Each arms cache might include more than one container. Radio transmitters and receivers were usually concealed in separate caches, sometimes with local currency for use by the DRGs. In August 1965, for example, 10,000 deutschmarks were placed in the TREZUBETS cache near Bonn; several attempts to locate it a decade later all failed and the money was written off.⁴⁸

Italy was divided by the Centre into four main zones of operations, each with two landing sites and bases for DRGs: the foothills of the Alps (with sites near Venice and in the Milan-Turin region), the remainder of the north (with sites in the Arno valley and the Livorno-Pisa-Florence area), the center and the south. Each site for parachute landings by DRGs had to be a level area without buildings of approximately 1 by 1.5-2 kilometers. In each zone, a large arms cache was hidden in land or property belonging to an experienced agent; radio equipment and money were hidden in dead-drops. The Rome residency was instructed to buy samples of the uniforms worn by the armed services, police, carabinieri, railway and forestry workers, as well as typical clothing of the local inhabitants near the landing sites. For the use of DRGs in the most northerly region, the residency was asked to acquire badges from Alpine units of the armed services. Line F prepared files on power-transmission lines, oil pipelines, bridges, tunnels and military installations within a 120-kilometer radius of each landing site. A four-volume file was prepared on former members of the Italian wartime resistance who, it was hoped, would assist in sabotage missions.⁴⁹

Similar sabotage plans were made for all Department V’s target countries. Each DRG landing site was known as a DOROZHKA (“runway”), each of its bases as a ULEY (“beehive”).⁵⁰ Among the most sinister remnants of the Cold War, still scattered around north America, most of western and central Europe, Israel, Turkey, Japan and some other parts of the world, are the caches of KGB arms and radio equipment intended for use by the DRGs. Mitrokhin’s notes include precise details of their locations in a number of countries. Some are booby-trapped with MOLNIYA (“lightning”) explosive devices designed to destroy their contents if the caches are opened, and are highly dangerous.⁵¹ Indeed, one or more of the caches may already have caused explosions mistakenly attributed to other causes.

LATE IN 1998, the Swiss authorities began removing a radio cache in woods near Berne identified by Mitrokhin,⁵² which exploded when fired on by a water-cannon. A spokesman for the Federal Prosecutor’s office issued a warning that if any further caches were discovered, they should not be touched: “Anyone who tried to move the [KGB] container would have been killed.”⁵³ In Belgium, radio sets were safely removed from three other KGB caches (codenamed ALPHA-1, ALPHA-2 and ALPHA-5).⁵⁴ Given the dangerous condition of an unpredictable number of the KGB’s Cold War radio and arms caches, the SVR now has no excuse for failing to reveal their exact locations to the governments of all the countries in which they have been hidden.

In addition to using Line F officers in KGB residencies to run or supervise its operations, the Thirteenth Department and its successor also had a small group of illegals, trained in sabotage techniques and other “special actions,” who moved around the world from one sabotage target or “wet job” to another.⁵⁵ The most active was Igor Vitalyevich Voytetsky (codenamed PAUL), who began training as an illegal in 1956 at the age of twenty-three. Voytetsky’s father, Gleb Pavlovich Shlyandin, had committed suicide at the height of the Great Terror in 1937. His mother, Sofya Davidovna Rudnitskaya, who worked as a music teacher, had remarried Vitali Panteleymonovich Voytetsky, a film director in the Gorky Film Studio. According to his legend, Voytetesky was “Emil Evraert,” the son of a Belgian father, Ernst Evraert, and a German mother, Hedwig Marta Althammer. Ernst Evraert had lived in Russia since 1933; “Hedwig Althammer” did not exist. However, a KGB agent, codenamed RAG, who worked for the commune of Bellecour in the Belgian province of Hainault, made a bogus entry in the commune records which purported to show that PAUL and his fictitious mother had lived there from October 15, 1943 to December 14, 1944. On the strength of this entry and forged identity documents provided by the FCD Illegals Directorate S, PAUL obtained a Belgian passport in the name of Emil Evraert on November 8, 1962, then crossed the Channel to England.

On January 30, 1963, in Dover Register Office, Voytetsky married another KGB illegal, Yulia Ivanovna Gorankova (codenamed VIRGINIA), who was then able to apply for genuine Belgian identity documents to replace her forged West German passport. Assisted by Gorankova, Voytetsky embarked on a full-time career as an illegal working for the Thirteenth Department.⁵⁶ His first assignment was in Northern Ireland, where he selected sites for airborne and maritime landings by DRGs. He then reconnoitred landing sites in Scotland, where he also identified suitable bases for wartime “resistance movements” by Scottish Communists, prepared large dead-drops for sabotage equipment, identified vulnerable sections of oil pipelines and other targets and selected agents for carrying out sabotage operations. Over the next decade, before becoming an illegal trainer in 1975, Voytetsky carried out similar assignments in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United States—probably the first ever saboteur’s world tour.⁵⁷

THOUGH THE FCD greatly expanded its sabotage capability during the 1960s, it became increasingly confused about the traditional speciality of its “special actions” department—the liquidation of “enemies of the people” abroad. The targets of most of the assassination plots during the 1960s and 1970s recorded in the KGB files seen by Mitrokhin concerned the KGB’s own defectors, all of whom were sentenced to death for treason during secret trials held in absentia. Despite the risks of further bad publicity in the West if they were hunted down, the Centre was determined not to allow the belief to spread within KGB ranks that traitors could escape their just deserts:

Deep concern in the Centre at the damage done by Anatoli Golitsyn’s defection from the Helsinki residency in December 1961 strengthened its determination to deter future defectors. Unaware of the confusion caused inside the CIA by Golitsyn’s increasingly extravagant conspiracy theories, the KGB regarded his defection as a serious setback.⁵⁹ His case prompted a major review by the Centre of its procedures for liquidating traitors outside the Soviet Union. In November 1962 Semichastny, who had succeeded Shelepin as KGB chairman, a year earlier, approved a plan for “special actions” against a group of “particularly dangerous traitors,” jointly drawn up by the heads of the First and Second Chief Directorates, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Sakharovsky and Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov:

The oldest name on the death list was that of the former GRU cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, who had defected in 1945. The remainder were more recent KGB defectors: Anatoli Golitsyn, Pyotr Deryabin, Yuri Rastvorov, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Reino Hayhanen, Nikolai Khokhlov and Bogdan Stashinsky.⁶⁰ The plan approved by Semichastny instructed the Thirteenth Department to train assassins to carry out the death sentences on the traitors. The FCD Counter-Intelligence Department (later Directorate K) was to track them down in their foreign refuges, in collaboration with the Second Chief Directorate, which would maintain surveillance of the traitors’ relatives inside the Soviet Union, monitor their correspondence and carry out periodic searches of their homes.⁶¹ In Golitsyn’s case it was hoped that he would emerge from hiding to give evidence to a Congressional committee and provide an opportunity for a KGB assassin.⁶²

In 1964 reports appeared in the American press that the former illegal Reino Hayhanen, who had betrayed “Willie” Fisher (alias “Rudolf Abel”), had been killed in a road accident. FCD personnel were informed that the “accident” had been arranged by the Thirteenth Department. Though KGB had, in reality, no hand in Hayhanen’s death, most foreign intelligence officers were taken in by their chief’s disinformation.⁶³ The truth, which the Centre could not bring itself to admit even to its own officers, was that it rarely succeeded in tracking down any of those on the list of “particularly dangerous traitors” and that, even when it did so, it could not devise methods of assassinating them which did not carry unacceptable risks.

During the 1960s, the names of several further defectors were added to the list of “particularly dangerous traitors” to be liquidated abroad. The first was Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who had made secret contact with the CIA in June 1962 while serving on the Soviet disarmament delegation in Geneva and who defected to the United States in January 1964.⁶⁴ Unlike any of the other defectors on the 1962 list of “particularly dangerous traitors,” Nosenko was imprisoned, though not executed. By a terrible irony, however, his jailers were not the KGB but the CIA. Golitsyn had claimed that the KGB would send a series of bogus defectors in an attempt to discredit him. Nosenko, he insisted, was one of them. Tragically, Nosenko’s debriefers, like Angleton, the chief of the counterintelligence staff, believed Golitsyn. They paid too much attention to some of the apparent gaps and discrepancies in Nosenko’s story—notably the confusion over his rank. They also wrongly concluded that some of his information was too good to be true—particularly his accurate report in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination that Oswald’s file in the Centre showed that the KGB considered him mentally unstable and had declined to use him as an agent, despite his period in the Soviet Union. And they foolishly regarded as suspicious rather than rational Nosenko’s lack of support for Golitsyn’s conspiracy theories. Pete Bagley, chief of the counterintelligence branch of the CIA’s Soviet Division, complained, “[Nosenko] made everything sound less sinister than Golitsyn. To me, Golitsyn’s version was simply superior.” For four years and eight months Nosenko was imprisoned by the CIA in miserable conditions, without reading material or human contact, while his interrogators insisted he admit that he was a KGB plant. Few cases in American intelligence history have been so appallingly mishandled.⁶⁵

The KGB knew nothing of the CIA’s ill-founded suspicions. Ironically, while Nosenko was languishing in solitary confinement in a prison cell, the Centre was working on a plan for both him and Golitsyn to be assassinated by the illegal PAUL, if they visited the 1967 Montreal World Fair (which, for rather different reasons, neither did).⁶⁶

The Centre’s continuing inability to track down its traitors was well illustrated by the case of the illegal Yevgeni Runge (codenamed MAKS), who defected with his wife Valentina Rush (ZINA) to the CIA in Germany in October 1967. Following the KGB’s traditional practice of using insulting codenames for defectors, MAKS was renamed GNIDA (“Nit”). Like his predecessors, he was secretly condemned to death in absentia. Enormous efforts involving several other Soviet Bloc services were devoted to operation TREZOR, the long and unsuccessful attempt to track down and liquidate Runge. More than fifty of the Runges’ friends and relatives in the Soviet Union, East and West Germany were placed under surveillance; every item of their correspondence which passed through the Soviet Bloc was opened and examined; their homes were bugged and secretly searched. The Stasi mounted a support operation, codenamed COBRA, which set out to cultivate Valentina Rush’s sister, Renata Ludwig, and one of her relatives, Ernst Buchholz, who lived in West Berlin. After fifteen years of failure, operation COBRA was finally abandoned.

The KGB also sought the assistance of other Soviet Bloc intelligence services in finding an assassin capable of liquidating Runge in north America, where it was assumed he had taken refuge. The Centre’s preferred candidate was a Hungarianborn West German criminal, codenamed JAGUAR, who had been recruited by the AVH for “special actions” against anti-Communist Hungarian émigrés. On July 1, 1968 JAGUAR blew up the Danube printing house in Munich, which produced émigré publications. He also set fire to the editorial offices of two Hungarian émigré newspapers, putting one of them out of business. For these operations JAGUAR received 40,000 Hungarian forints and 1,000 West German marks from the AVH. Impressed by his “special actions” in Munich, the KGB decided to employ him for operation TREZOR. JAGUAR was shown photographs of Runge and his wife and agreed to hunt them down. Once he had left for the United States, however, he disappeared without trace—together, presumably, with the operational funds allocated to him by the KGB. Following JAGUAR’s disappearance, the Centre asked the East German Stasi and the Bulgarian DS whether they had contacts among American gangsters or mafiosi who would take out a contract on Runge. Neither was able to suggest a suitable assassin.⁶⁷

AS WELL AS attempting to liquidate major traitors, the Thirteenth Department and Department V were also responsible for administering lesser punishments to other defectors whose crimes were not considered to merit the death penalty. The November 1962 plan for dealing with defectors also specified “special action” against the world-famous ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who had defected at Le Bourget airport in Paris during a tour by the Kirov Ballet in 1961.⁶⁸ The KGB had begun a campaign of intimidation immediately after Nureyev’s defection. On the night of his first major performance with a Western company, when he was due to dance the part of the Blue Bird in a Paris production of Sleeping Beauty, he received emotional letters from both his parents and his former ballet teacher, appealing to him not to betray the fatherland. Having steeled himself to go ahead, Nureyev then found his performance interrupted:

The KGB’s early attempts at intimidation failed. On February 21, 1962, amid a blaze of publicity, Nureyev made his Covent Garden debut, dancing with Margot Fonteyn in Giselle. To those who saw that unforgettable performance and the twenty-three curtain calls which followed, it was already clear that one of the greatest partnerships in the history of dance had been born.⁷⁰ The Centre was outraged not merely by the public adulation of a notorious defector but also by Nureyev’s publication a few months later of memoirs describing his “leap to freedom” in the West. Though the November 1962 plan of campaign against leading defectors did not specify the nature of the “special action” to be employed against him, it was clear from the context that it would henceforth involve a good deal more than sprinkling broken glass on the stage.⁷¹ Subsequent FCD directives discussed schemes (which were never successfully implemented) to break one or both of Nureyev’s legs.⁷²

In the summer of 1970 one of Nureyev’s best-known near-contemporaries, Natalia Makarova, defected from the Kirov Ballet during a London season at the Royal Festival Hall. The KGB report on the defection predictably condemned her as a “politically immature individual, with low moral qualities.”⁷³ In reality, the main motive for her defection, like Nureyev’s, had been the quest for greater artistic freedom.⁷⁴ A joint memorandum by the heads of the First and Second Chief Directorates proposed that, if a way could be found to injure Nureyev without the hand of the KGB being obvious, a similar “special action” should be undertaken against Makarova. As usual, the reference in their memorandum to physical injury was expressed in euphemistic bureaucratic prose:

An approach was made by the Centre to the Bulgarian intelligence service to seek the possible assistance of one of their agents in a company where Makarova was due to dance. On one occasion Makarova was slightly hurt in an accident behind the stage caused by a beam falling from the set. The files seen by Mitrokhin, however, do not make clear whether this was the first nearly successful “special action” by the KGB against a defecting ballerina or merely an act of clumsiness by a stagehand.⁷⁶

Since the defection of the reluctant assassin, Bogdan Stashinshky, in 1960, KGB operations against traitors living in the West had been totally unsuccessful. Though enormous amounts of time and resources had been devoted to tracking down defectors and preparing to kill and maim them, the only successful liquidation claimed by the Centre, the assassination of Hayhanen, was entirely fraudulent. It is just possible that the KGB was responsible for the minor injury to Natalia Makarova. But the probability is that its pursuit of traitors during the decade up to 1970 ended in complete failure.

^{APPENDIX 1} INSTRUCTIONS FOR DISARMING THE MOLNIYA (“LIGHTNING”) EXPLOSIVE DEVICE

1. When digging out the container from the earth, take care not to strike the handle by chance. Dig until the upper surface of the container with the handle comes to light; remove the board and the plywood which cover the container.

2. The handle must only be turned and the container tilted and taken out of the hole after the explosive device has been disarmed.

3. In order to disarm the device, one must have a pocket torch battery of not less than 3.5 volts. Attach two wires of 30-50 cm length to the battery, with sharp probes at the end (a nail or a needle).

4. Without taking the container out of the cache, place one of the battery contacts on the body of the container, and the other on the left lock fitting, assuming that the lid of the container faces the operator. The contact points must be applied after scratching the paintwork on the body of the container and on the lock fitting.

5. When contact is made with the battery, a “click” should be heard inside the container; this indicates that the explosive device has been disarmed. If there is no “click,” check the contact points again and repeat the operation to disarm the device.

6. If when the operation is repeated there is still no “click,” it is forbidden to take the container out of the cache and the cache must be filled in. To open the container and remove the electric detonators from the two-way radio:

• remove the padlocks and lift the lid of the container with the key which is inside the container. Unscrew the four screws and remove the metal casing under which the two-way radio is located in the ALIOT packaging;

• cut each of the wires which connect the container with the ALIOT packaging and remove the package from the container.⁷⁷

^{APPENDIX 2} EXAMPLE OF BOOBY-TRAPPED RADIO CACHE PUT IN PLACE BY THE BERNE RESIDENCY

On May 15, 1966, the KGB residency in Berne, Switzerland carried out an operation to deposit a booby-trapped BR-3U agent radio transmitter No. 624471/2329 in a hiding place codenamed CACHE No. 3. In July 1972, the residency was ordered to check the area where the transmitter had been buried and to devise an operation to remove it. Directorate S sent Berne the following description of the route to the cache and of its location:

After inspecting the area, the Berne residency reported to the Centre that, because of the lack of leaf cover at the site, it would be difficult to conceal signs of excavation. It would also be difficult to devise a cover story for the presence of operational officers in the area of the cache for one or two hours, which might well attract attention. Directorate S eventually proposed to the leadership of the FCD that the cache be written off, partly because of the difficulties of excavation, and partly because the fact that the shelf life of the MOLNIYA device had expired might make removal of the transmitter hazardous. The proposal was approved.⁷⁸

The cache was eventually emptied in December 1998 by Swiss Federal police using the finding instructions from Mitrokhin’s archive reproduced above. The MOLNIYA device was, as Directorate S had anticipated, dangerously unstable and exploded when fired on by a water cannon.⁷⁹ (See illustrations.)

^{APPENDIX 3} EXAMPLES OF RADIO CACHES PUT IN PLACE BY THE ROME RESIDENCY

(THE CACHE WAS emptied by the Rome residency on February 6, 1970, apparently because of concern that the condition of its contents might be deteriorating and becoming unsafe.)⁸¹

(The cache was emptied by the Rome residency on February 7, 1970.)⁸³