The Sword and the Shield

On becoming chairman of the KGB in 1967, Andropov immediately announced his intention to revive KGB “special actions” as an essential tool of Soviet policy during the Cold War. The FCD, he declared, “must take the offensive in order to paralyze the actions of our enemies and to get them involved in a struggle in conditions which are unfavorable to them.”¹ Two years earlier dissatisfaction with the recent record of the Thirteenth Department, which was responsible for FCD special actions, had led to its reorganization as Department V.² Following Andropov’s call for a new “offensive to paralyze the actions of our enemies,” the main priority of Department V became “special actions of a political nature”—the peacetime use of sabotage and other forms of violence in the furtherance of Soviet policy.³ Line F officers in residencies were instructed to show greater ingenuity in devising special actions in which the hand of the KGB would be undetectable. All of the newly devised sabotage proposals employed the same standardized coded jargon. Each act of sabotage was termed a “Lily” (Liliya), the explosive device a “Bouquet” (Buket), the detonator a “Little Flower” (Tsvetok), the explosion of the device a “Splash” (Zaplyv) and the saboteur the “Gardener” (Sadovnik).⁴

The most important special action being planned at the beginning of the Andropov era was in Greece, where a group of army colonels seized power in April 1967, suspended parliamentary government and declared martial law. The Greek Communist Party (KKE) was driven underground and its leaders temporarily lost touch with Moscow. In July 1967 the KGB was formally instructed by the CPSU Central Committee to renew contact with the underground Party (a task it had doubtless already begun) and to give it “political and material assistance.”⁵ The “material assistance” included both financial subsidies, usually handed over to Party representatives in Budapest,⁶ and help in preparing for guerrilla warfare. The Centre decreed that Department V’s main priority for 1968 should be to set up sabotage and intelligence groups (DRGs) on Greek territory to prepare for an uprising against the military regime.⁷ Department V also made preparations for possible guerrilla operations in Italy. The leaders of the PCI were seriously afraid of an Italian military putsch on the Greek model and had requested Soviet assistance in preparing the Party for the possibility that, like the KKE, it would have to transform itself into an illegal underground movement.⁸

In 1968, all KGB residencies were sent operational letters headed “Recommendations for Creating the Necessary Conditions on the Territory of a Potential Adversary for Special Group [DRG] Operations in an Emergency.” The letter to the resident in Athens, Ivan Petrovich Kislyak (codenamed MAYSKY), added: “It is not possible that the course of events will in practice require us to assist local progressive forces in the near future, and we must therefore make preparations for this in advance.”⁹ The Centre issued instructions that all locally recruited DRGs operating in Greece were to be headed by KGB agents, but that this was to be concealed from other members of the groups.¹⁰ In 1968 the illegal PAUL was sent to Greece with orders to select “runways” (doroshki) for the landing of airborne Soviet DRGs and bases—“beehives” (ulya)—from which to operate, as well as to check the suitability of those sites identified earlier. “Runway ALFA,” reconnoitered by PAUL, was located in the southern part of the Thessalia plain, about forty kilometers north-west of the town of Lamia. “Runway BETA” was on the north-west of the Thessalia plain, four or five kilometers south of the Kalambaka settlement. The wooded hilly districts of Belasitsa, Piri and Sengal were chosen as areas suitable for smuggling agents and equipment across the Bugarian—Greek border.¹¹

In August 1968 the Bulgarian DS confidently informed the Centre that it was capable of overthrowing the Greek junta with the assistance of one of its agents, whom it identified as the former head of a Greek intelligence agency. The Bulgarian Central Committee had approved the proposed coup d’état in Athens and instructed the leadership of its intelligence service to coordinate plans for it with the KGB and the CPSU Central Committee.¹² The KGB files seen by Mitrokhin do not explain why the Bulgarian proposal was turned down. There were, however, at least three probable reasons. The Centre may well have assessed the risks of failure more highly than the Bulgarians. The Politburo, which at almost the moment the Bulgarian proposal reached it was deciding on the invasion of Czechoslovakia, was doubtless disinclined to give its simultaneous approval to a risky coup attempt in Greece. Further complications were caused by the split in the Greek Communist Party which, after the suppression of the Prague Spring, divided into the pro-Soviet KKE and the Eurocommunist KKE-es. Brillakis (codenamed SEMYON), who had hitherto been one of the KGB’s chief contacts in the underground Greek Party, refused further meetings with the Athens residency in protest at the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.¹³

Though the KGB continued to channel large amounts of money into the KKE,¹⁴ it seems to have made little progress in setting up DRGs on Greek soil. The main material successfully smuggled across the Greek—Bulgarian border was not sabotage equipment into Greece but the archives of the KKE which were taken in the opposite direction. Weighing 14 tons, filling 1,598 packages and four crates, guarded by thirty Greek Communists, they were transported from Bulgaria to Romania and thence to the Soviet Union, where they were deposited for safekeeping in the town of Ivanovo.¹⁵

AMONG DEPARTMENT V’S most ambitious proposals for special actions during 1968 was an operation to distract Western opinion from the suppression of the Prague Spring by sabotaging a major oil pipeline, codenamed ZVENO (“Link”), near the Austrian end of Bodensee Lake, which was believed by the Centre to carry 10 million tons of oil a year between Italy and West Germany. By breaching the pipeline at the point where it crossed the Rhine canal, Department V calculated that it could pollute the Bodensee, and thus contaminate the main source of drinking water on the West German—Austrian frontier. To carry the explosive, the Vienna residency purchased four Western-manufactured 1-liter thermos flasks, as well as ten ballpoint pens—presumably to conceal the detonators. The scapegoats for the environmental disaster caused by the explosion were to be Italian extremists allegedly retaliating for acts of sabotage carried out by South Tyrol terrorists.

ZVENO set the pattern for most Department V peacetime special actions: immensely laborious and detailed preparations, followed by a reluctant decision not to go ahead because of the political risks involved—in particular, the possibility that, despite all the precautions taken, the hand of the KGB might somehow be discovered. The operation was postponed several times, kept under review for a number of years and finally abandoned.¹⁶

Many, perhaps most, of the proposed special actions in Europe were intended to cause dissension within NATO. A characteristic example (reproduced at the end of this chapter) was the proposal by the Athens residency in April 1969 for a bomb attack on the Turkish consulate-general in Thessaloniki, which would be blamed on a Greek extremist. Though complimenting the Athens residency on its initiative, the Centre once again dared not take the risk of giving the go-ahead. Instead, on May 12, 1969, it sent a temporizing reply:

Probably the first Department V plan approved by Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, for a major special action in Britain was operation EDDING, a scheme to disrupt preparations for the investiture of the 20-year-old Prince Charles as Prince of Wales on July 1, 1969. Security at the ceremony itself in Caernavon Castle, when the Queen presented Prince Charles with the coronet, rod, ring, sword and mantle of his office in front of 4,000 invited guests and a worldwide television audience of 500 million, was expected to be too tight for a special action. Instead, about a month beforehand, Department V proposed to blow up a small bridge on the road from Porthmadog to Caernavon, near the junction of the A487 and the A498, using British-manufactured gelignite. On the eve of the explosion a letter was to be sent to the Welsh Nationalist MP Gwynfor Evans, at the House of Commons, warning him that MI5 and Scotland Yard were planning a “provocation” in order to discredit the Welsh Nationalists and provide a pretext for a major security clampdown in Wales.

When the explosion took place Evans and his colleagues were then expected to unmask the conspiracy by the “British organs of power” against Welsh liberties. Though backed by the FCD, however, operation EDDING was postponed by higher authority—either Andropov or the Politburo (the file does not specify which)—doubtless because of the fear, once again, that KGB involvement might come to light.¹⁸

A CENTRE REPORT in 1969 subjected the past record of both the Thirteenth Department and Department V to scathing criticism. Only the training of sabotage and intelligence groups (DRGs) was judged reasonably satisfactory. Some special tasks had proved beyond the capacity of both the Thirteenth Department and its successor to implement; others had become redundant. The report argued that there was little point in making elaborate preparations for DRGs to sabotage American and NATO military installations which were also targeted by the considerably more numerous GRU spetsnaz, and in many cases by the Soviet nuclear missile strike force. It was noted that, during the previous three years, there had been only one successful “special action of a political nature”—operation PEPEL (“Ashes”) in Istanbul (although what this was exactly remains unclear).¹⁹ The report, however, predictably failed to mention that the lack of special actions involving the peacetime use of sabotage and other forms of violence was due chiefly to Andropov’s refusal to sanction the proposals put to him.

Andropov’s reluctance to accept the risks of the peacetime special actions for which he had called on becoming chairman forced him to rethink his strategy. Having reassessed the scope for direct involvement by the KGB, he increasingly turned to using terrorist proxies. Among the first opportunities for their use was a new wave of troubles in Northern Ireland. On November 6, 1969 the general secretary of the Irish Communist Party, Michael O’Riordan, a veteran of the International Brigades,²⁰ forwarded a request for Soviet arms from the Marxist IRA leaders Cathal Goulding and Seamus Costello. According to O’Riordan:

The IRA had been widely criticized by its supporters for failing to defend the Catholic community during the Belfast troubles of August 1969, when seven people had been killed, about 750 injured and 1,505 Catholic families had been forced out of their homes—almost five times the number of dispossessed Protestant households. One Catholic priest reported that his parishioners were contemptuously calling the IRA, “I Ran Away.”²² In his message to Moscow, O’Riordan said that during the “August crackdown” the IRA had failed to act as “armed defender” of the nationalist community because “its combat potential was weakened by the fact that it had previously concentrated its efforts on social protests and educational activity.” He claimed that there was now a real possibility of civil war in Northern Ireland between the two communities, and of serious clashes between British troops and the Catholics. Hence the IRA’s appeal for arms. In a report to the Central Committee, Andropov insisted that, before going ahead with an arms shipment, it was essential to verify O’Riordan’s ability “to guarantee the necessary conspiracy in shipping the weapons and preserve the secret of their source of supply.”²³ It was more than two and half years before Andropov was sufficiently satisfied on both these points to go ahead with the arms shipment.

While talks were continuing with O’Riordan, the illegal PAUL was instructed to explore the possibility of using extremist Quebec separatists in special actions against the United States.²⁴ Given the violence of the terrorist methods employed by the FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec) and its apparent interest in Cuban and Soviet Bloc assistance, the hopes placed in it by the Centre were by no means fanciful. In 1969 the FLQ bombed both the home of the Montreal mayor and the National Defense Headquarters in Ottawa. During 1970 it failed in its attempts to kidnap the American and Israeli consuls-general in Montreal, but succeeded in kidnapping British trade official James Cross and Quebec labor minister Pierre Laporte. Cross was eventually released in return for a promise of safe conduct to Cuba for his kidnappers, but Laporte was murdered—strangled by the chain of the crucifix he wore around his neck.²⁵

Though PAUL probably succeeded in making at least indirect contact with the FLQ, the Centre almost certainly decided that the risks of establishing a direct KGB—FLQ connection were too great. The KGB did, however, seek to cover its own tracks by circulating forged documents indicating that the CIA was involved with the FLQ. On September 24, 1971 the Montreal Star published a photocopy of a bogus CIA memorandum dated October 20, 1970:

Questions followed in the Canadian parliament. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared that if the CIA was operating in Canada, it was “without the knowledge or consent of the government.”²⁶ Twenty years later the forged memorandum was still being quoted in Canadian publications, even by some academic authorities.²⁷ Further forgeries suggesting CIA involvement with Quebec extremists were circulated on the eve of the visit to Canada by President Nixon in 1972.²⁸

ANDROPOV’S FRUSTRATION AT the difficulty of mounting peacetime special tasks which would leave no trace of the KGB’s involvement was heightened by his mistaken conviction that the CIA was pursuing its own series of special tasks against KGB officers and other Soviet citizens living abroad. In a letter to Brezhnev of May 21, 1970, headed “of special importance,” Andropov gave three instances of actual or attempted “abductions” by the CIA: the unsuccessful attempt to abduct the KGB officer Georgi Petrovich Pokrovsky in Tokyo on March 17, 1966; similarly, Yuri Sergeevich Pivovarov of the GRU in Buenos Aires on March 29, 1970; and the disappearance without trace of a Novosti correspondent in Delhi, Yuri Aleksandrovich Bezmenov, on March 9, 1970.²⁹

Andropov’s allegations derived not from any real CIA program of covert action but from his own addiction to conspiracy theory. Pivovarov had been the victim of an attempted kidnap and assassination by the right-wing Argentinian terrorist group Mano (“Hand”), which claimed to be avenging the kidnapping of a Paraguayan diplomat by left-wing terrorists.³⁰ Most other cases of alleged CIA special actions against KGB officers were in reality cases of actual or attempted defection. Some FCD officers realized—as Andropov did not—that “abductions” were convenient fictions used by residencies to conceal the shameful reality of defection. Such was the case, for example, in the disappearance of Bezmenov. Anxious to save face, the Delhi residency had reported that he had been abducted, and his son (the closest surviving relative) was given financial compensation.³¹ In reality, as Bezmenov later admitted:

Eventually Bezmenov approached the CIA, who exfiltrated him first to Greece, where he was debriefed, then resettled him in Canada.³² The KGB abandoned the myth of Bezmenov’s abduction after he was seen visiting an exhibition in Montreal in 1974, and ordered his bewildered son to return all the money they had paid to him.³³

The conspiracy theorists in the Centre, however, remained convinced that the CIA was out to abduct KGB officers, as well as to induce them “to commit treason” (in other words, to defect). That belief survived until the end of the Cold War. When Kryuchkov became the first head of the FCD to visit Washington in 1987, Robert Gates, then deputy DCI, found it impossible to persuade him that a Soviet scientist, Vladimir Valentinovich Aleksandrov, who had gone missing in Spain, had not been physically abducted by the CIA.³⁴

In his letter to Brezhnev of May 21, 1970, Andropov insisted that the CIA dared to engage in “brazen” provocations towards the KGB only because of “the lack of appropriate measures on our part.” It was, he argued, high time to retaliate in kind and abduct a CIA officer to teach the Americans a lesson. To avoid the risk that a KGB special action might go wrong and become publicly known, Andropov asked Brezhnev’s permission to use a proxy.

The precedent set by the previous use of Sandinista guerrillas against American targets in central and north America.³⁵ encouraged both Andropov and Department V to consider the use of Palestinian terrorists as proxies in the Middle East and Europe. The man chiefly responsible for exporting Palestinian terrorism to Europe was Dr Wadi Haddad, deputy leader of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by Dr George Habash. In 1968-9 Haddad had attracted favorable attention in the Centre with a spate of aircraft hijackings and attacks on Israeli offices and Jewish businesses in European capitals. In 1970 he was recruited by the KGB as agent NATSIONALIST. Andropov reported to Brezhnev:

Andropov sought Brezhnev’s approval to use Haddad for a special action against the CIA:

Brezhnev gave his consent on May 25, 1970. The Beirut residency then passed on to Haddad a detailed dossier on the CIA officer (codenamed VIR), his home address (a fourth-floor apartment), car (a light blue Ford Comet with diplomatic numberplates), route to and from work at the US embassy and personal habits. It was noted, for example, that VIR regularly went for walks accompanied by his black poodle.

Haddad agreed to select three of the “most experienced and reliable” gunmen to kidnap VIR. As soon as he had been seized, his captors would press over his mouth and nose a mask impregnated with a general anaesthetic supplied by Department V. While VIR was unconscious, he would be given an injection (also provided by the KGB) which would leave him disoriented and unable to resist when he recovered consciousness. The PFLP would then drive VIR, dressed in fedayeen clothes, into Syria along a route carefully reconnoitered by the KGB and hand him over to Line F officers from the Damascus residency in a hamlet near Zabadani. From there he was to be exfiltrated by the KGB to the Soviet Union.³⁷

One of Haddad’s probable reasons for agreeing to work as a Soviet agent was to obtain arms for the PFLP. In July 1970 Brezhnev agreed to an initial request from Andropov that Haddad be supplied from the KGB arsenal with five RPG-7 handheld anti-tank grenade launchers for terrorist operations. The head of Department V, Nikolai Pavlovich Gusev, and his assistant, Aleksei Nikolayevich Savin, then met Haddad to discuss the handover of further arms supplies which it was agreed to deliver under cover to darkness in an inflatable rubber boat at a pre-arranged spot near Aden. Control of the operation, codenamed VOSTOK (“East”), was entrusted to the deputy head (later head) of Department V, Aleksandr Ivanovich Lazarenko. On the orders of the defense minister, Marshal Ustinov, the arms for Haddad were loaded on an intelligence-gathering vessel of the Pacific Fleet, the Kursograf, at Vladivostok. With S. M. Grankin from Department V on board to supervise the handover, the Kursograf then set sail for the gulf of Aden to rendezvous with Haddad’s motor launch at a point 12°34′ north and 45°12′ east, at 2100 hours local time. As arranged, Haddad signaled his presence with a 360-degree red signal light. The Kursograf extinguished its lights, locked on to the launch’s radio beacon and signaled its presence with two brief flashes, repeated after a short interval. On receiving the answering signal (four brief flashes) from Haddad, the Kursograf launched the rubber boat containing the arms supplies and gave the agreed signal “Load launched” (three brief flashes) twice. Haddad’s launch gave the same signal in reply, then made a “dot-dash” signal twice as soon as it had picked up the arms.

The arms supplied to Haddad consisted of 50 West German pistols (10 with silencers) and 5,000 rounds of ammunition; 50 captured MG-ZI machine guns with 10,000 rounds of ammunition; 5 British-made Sterling automatics with silencers and 36,000 rounds of ammunition; 50 American AR-16 automatics with 30,000 rounds of ammunition; 15 booby-trap mines manufactured from foreign materials; and 5 radio-controlled SNOP mines, also assembled from foreign materials. The two varieties of mine were considered some of the most sophisticated small weapons in the Soviet arsenal, and, like some of the silencers given to Haddad, had never previously been supplied even to other members of the Warsaw Pact. The SNOP mines could be detonated by radio signal at distances of up to two kilometers in cities and fifteen to twenty kilometers in the countryside.

The successful completion of operation VOSTOK was greeted in the Centre as a major triumph. On the recommendation of the FCD, and with the approval of Rear Admiral Radchenko, head of the KGB Special Department in the Pacific Fleet, VOSTOK souvenirs (each valued at 600 roubles) and cash bonuses of 600 roubles were awarded to seven of the naval commanders who had taken part: Captain V. P. Lebedev, commander of the Kursograf; Captains (First Rank) A. G. Shtyrov and E. P. Lopatin; Captains (Second Rank) G. S. Babkov and V. I. Avramenko; and Lieutenant Commanders A. V. Garnitsky and A. S. Klimchuk. The Centre also sent a formal letter of thanks to the Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral of the Fleet N. D. Sergeyev.

The Centre was to make what it considered successful use of Haddad and the PFLP in a number of special actions in the Middle East, particularly against Israel (which will be covered in the next volume of this book). But operation VINT, the attempt by the PFLP to abduct the deputy head of the CIA station in Beirut, ended in failure. VIR varied his daily routine and Haddad’s gunmen found it impossible to implement the original plan for his abduction. During 1971 Department V devised a number of alternative plans to kidnap VIR. One simply proposed that Haddad arrange VIR’s assassination. All failed. So did operation INTIKAM, an attempt to use PFLP terrorists to kill two Soviet defectors, P. S. Branzinkas and his son (codenamed PIRATY, “Pirates”), who in 1970 hijacked an Aeroflot aircraft and escaped to Turkey. The operational file records that NATSIONALIST did not realize how difficult the assignment would be, and overestimated his capabilities.”³⁸

Plans to make larger use of the PFLP to hunt down Soviet defectors were largely abandoned. Andropov’s decision to use Haddad for special actions, and Brezhnev’s approval for it, none the less marked a turning point in the history of KGB operations. Henceforth, other Soviet Bloc intelligence services were to follow the Soviet lead in using, or conniving in the use of, terrorist groups.³⁹

LIKE THE OPERATIONS of the Thirteenth Department during the Khrushchev era, those of Department V were seriously compromised by defections. The most important defector was the Line F officer in the London residency, Oleg Adolfovich Lyalin, an expert in hand-to-hand combat as well as a highly proficient marksman and parachutist who had been recruited by MI5 as a defector-in-place in the spring of 1971. During the six months before he defected in September, Lyalin provided details of KGB sabotage plans in London, Washington, Paris, Bonn, Rome and other Western capitals. In addition to compromising preparations for a number of peacetime special actions, he revealed Department V’s hair-raising contingency plans for operations during periods of international crisis or conflict which would be carried out by illegals, local agents and sabotage and intelligence groups (DRGs) who would infiltrate each target country.⁴⁰

In Washington, according to Oleg Kalugin, head of Line PR and deputy resident, Line F “did everything from plotting ways to poison the capital’s water systems to drawing up assassination plans for US leaders.”⁴¹ Projected sabotage in Britain included plans to flood the London Underground, blow up the early-warning station at Fylingdale, North Yorkshire, and destroy V-bombers on the ground. Some of Department V’s schemes were as bizarre as any of those devised by the CIA in its unsuccessful attempts to kill Castro a decade earlier. One plan revealed by Lyalin was for KGB agents posing as messengers and delivery men to scatter colorless poison capsules along Whitehall corridors of power which would kill all those who crushed them underfoot. Though the British government released few details about Lyalin after his defection, the Attorney General told the Commons that he was charged with “the organization of sabotage within the United Kingdom” and “the elimination of individuals judged to be enemies of the USSR.”

The Centre was caught completely off-guard by Lyalin’s defection and the almost simultaneous action against the London residency taken by the British government. On September 24, 1971 the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Sir Denis Greenhill, summoned the Soviet chargé d’affairs, Ivan Ivanovich Ippolitov (a KGB agent), and informed him that 90 KGB and GRU officers stationed in Britain under official cover were to be expelled and another fifteen, then on leave in the Soviet Union, would not be allowed to return, making a grand total of 105 expulsions.⁴² Many of the Soviet intelligence officers concerned had been known to MI5 and SIS for some time, but over the past six months Lyalin had confirmed a number of probable identifications and added new names to the list.⁴³ Preparations for operation FOOT, as the mass expulsion was codenamed in Whitehall, had been under secret discussion throughout that time. In a joint memo to the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, on July 30, the Foreign and Home Secretaries, Sir Alec Douglas Home and Reginald Maudling, argued that the sheer numbers of KGB and GRU officers in London were “more than the Security Service can be expected to contain.”⁴⁴ The horrendous nature of some of the Department V sabotage plans revealed by Lyalin added weight to the arguments for expulsion.

Almost immediately after Ippolitov’s return from the FCO on Friday September 24, the MI5 surveillance team near the Soviet embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens reported that a KGB officer had been seen sprinting across the road from the residency opposite, no doubt summoned by telephone for an urgent briefing on the mass expulsion.⁴⁵ In the short term Lyalin’s defection probably caused even greater concern than operation FOOT. Over the weekend the Centre informed the Soviet leadership that Lyalin was likely to compromise Department V operations in other countries. On Monday September 27 Brezhnev cut short a tour of eastern Europe for an emergency meeting of the Politburo in the VIP lounge at Moscow airport. Shortly afterwards most Line F officers were recalled from Western capitals, leaving Department V effectively crippled and unable to fulfill its task of coordinating sabotage operations abroad in time of crisis.⁴⁶ The Centre investigation into the London débécle, which, as was traditional, emphasized the alleged personal depravity of the defector, claimed that Lyalin had seduced the wives of a number of his Soviet colleagues in London, and heavily criticized the former resident, Yuri Nikolayevich Voronin, for covering up Lyalin’s misdeeds to avoid a scandal .⁴⁷ The head of the FCD Third Department, whose responsibilities included operations in Britain, was among those senior KGB officers who were demoted or sacked as a result.⁴⁸

JUST AS STASHINSKY’S defection in 1961 had made the Centre much more cautious in ordering assassinations, so Lyalin’s defection a decade later dealt a further blow to its plans for peacetime sabotage. Department V found itself in limbo pending a reorganization which took three and a half years to complete. The files seen by Mitrokhin record no new schemes for KGB “special political actions” during the few years immediately after Lyalin’s “treachery.” (It is, of course, possible that some special actions are recorded in files not seen by Mitrokhin.) One example of the Centre’s declining enthusiasm for such operations which made a particular impression on Mitrokhin was its response to the defection of another star of the Kirov Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov, while on a tour of Canada in June 1974. Baryshnikov’s flawless classical style and apparently effortless grace had made him one of Mitrokhin’s personal favorites. Among the intercepted messages sent to Baryshnikov after his defection which found their way into his KGB file, Mitrokhin noted one from a female balletomane in Leningrad which told him that he “was, is and forever will be my dear little brother… one of the brightest, most beautiful and most notable people I have ever met.” Unsurprisingly, the KGB kept Baryshnikov under close observation after his defection. Its agents included another ballet dancer, codenamed MORIS, who also reported on Nureyev and Makarova. What struck Mitrokhin, however, was the apparent lack of plans to maim Baryshnikov similar to those which had been devised, though not apparently implemented, against Nureyev and Makarova a few years earlier.⁴⁹

Despite the KGB’s increased reluctance to take the risks involved in implementing directly special actions in the West, it continued to use—or connive at the use of—terrorist groups as proxies in the struggle against the United States and its allies. The Centre’s mood, however, remained distinctly cautious. It was almost three years before the arms requested by the IRA in November 1969 through the intermediary of the Irish Communist leader, Michael O’Riordan, were finally delivered by the KGB. Shortly after the request had been made, the IRA had split into two: the Officials under Cathal Goulding and the Provisionals led by Sean MacStioftin.⁵⁰ The sympathies of the KGB were wholly with the Marxist Officials rather than the more nationalist Provisionals. Though Goulding’s long-term aim was to create a nonsectarian, non-military, all-Ireland revolutionary movement, the Officials were responsible for some of the bloodiest episodes in the Troubles of the early 1970s. The only answer to the “forces of imperialism and exploitation,” Goulding declared in 1971, lay “in the language that brings these vultures to their senses most effectively, the language of the bomb and the bullet.” The Official IRA’s bloodthirsty attempts to upstage the Provisionals ended by alienating some of its own supporters. In February 1972 a bomb planted at the Aldershot headquarters of the Parachute Regiment killed seven people, including a Catholic priest and five women canteen workers. Nationalist anger at the killing of an off-duty British soldier on home leave in Derry on May 21 led the Officials’ army council to announce a ceasefire eight days later. Since the Officials reserved the right to take what they described as “defensive action,” however, the ceasefire had little immediate effect. Though Goulding gradually succeeded in scaling down “military operations,” local militants continued terrorist attacks during the remainder of 1972 and 1973.⁵¹

On July 3, 1972 the Irish Communist leader, Michael O’Riordan, wrote to remind the CPSU Central Committee that the arms he had first requested on behalf of the IRA in November 1969 had still not been received. Since then, on behalf of the Official IRA, he had held numerous discussions on the means of shipment with the KGB’s “technical specialists:” “The fact that there has not been the slightest leak of information for two and a half years proves, in my opinion, a high level of responsibility with regard to keeping the secret, so to speak.” Andropov agreed. On August 21 he presented to the Central Committee a “Plan for the Operation of a Shipment of Weapons to the Irish Friends,” codenamed SPLASH. SPLASH was a variant of operation VOSTOK, which had delivered arms to Haddad and the PFLP two years earlier. Once again, the weapons and munitions—2 machine-guns, 70 automatic rifles, 10 Walther pistols, 41,600 cartridges, all of non-Soviet origin to disguise the involvement of the KGB—were transported by a Soviet intelligence-gathering vessel, on this occasion the Reduktor. On this occasion, the arms, in waterproof wrapping, were submerged to a depth of about 40 meters on the Stanton sandbank, 90 kilometers from the coast of Northern Ireland, and attached to a marker buoy of the kind used to indicate the presence of fishing nets below the surface. KGB laboratories carefully examined the arms shipment before it left to ensure that there was no trace of Soviet involvement. The Walther pistols were lubricated with West German oil, the packaging was purchased abroad by KGB residencies and it was specified that the marker buoy should be Finnish or Japanese. A few hours after the arms had been deposited on the sandbank, they were retrieved by a fishing vessel belonging to the “Irish friends,” whose crew were unaware of their contents.⁵² Operation SPLASH was supervised on board the Reduktor by an officer from the 8th Department of Directorate S (the successor to Department V). Several further Soviet arms shipments to the Official IRA were delivered by similar methods.⁵³

The KGB can have had few illusions about the likely use of the arms it supplied, since the man in charge of their collection from the sandbank was the Officials’ most hard-line terrorist, Seamus Costello.⁵⁴ Late in 1974, after a dispute with Goulding, Costello was expelled from the Officials and founded a new Trotskyite movement, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). The Officials set up four assassination squads to liquidate the dissidents, but came off worse in a series of shoot-outs in the spring of 1975. They had, however, rather the better of a feud later in the year with the Provisionals. The Official IRA eventually succeeded in murdering Costello in 1977.⁵⁵ The probability is that some of the arms smuggled into Ireland by the KGB were used in the internecine warfare between republican paramilitaries.

As well as shipping arms to the Official IRA, the KGB also continued to use some Third World terrorists and guerrillas—notably the PFLP and the Sandinistas—as proxies. In Latin America, the KGB found itself—somewhat to its irritation—being upstaged by its Cuban ally, the DGI. By 1970, in the Centre’s view, the DGI had effectively “expropriated” the Sandinista ISKRA guerrilla group. In 1969 the DGI financed the guerrilla operation to free the FSLN (Sandinista) leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador (GIDROLOG), from a Costa Rican jail, where he had been imprisoned for bank robbery.⁵⁶ Fonseca was recaptured shortly after his jailbreak, but freed again and flown to Cuba after the Sandinista hijack of a plane carrying American executives of the United Fruit Company, who were released in exchange.⁵⁷ The DGI also organized guerrilla training for the Sandinistas in Cuba, and gave them 100,000 dollars to purchase weapons. The head of the DGI, Manuel Piñeiro Losado, whose nickname “Redbeard” reflected his fiery temperament, told the deputy head of the FCD, Boris Semenovich Ivanov,

At a meeting with Fonseca in February 1971, Piñeiro restated the conviction of the Cuban leadership that for most Latin American countries armed conflict was the only path to liberation. Though Cuba remained willing to offer the Sandinistas “any kind of support and assistance,” they would need to make major changes in their organization if they were to avoid the defeats and heavy losses they had suffered during the past decade. The Centre concluded that future attempts to use the Sandinistas for special actions against United States targets would have to be made in collaboration with the DGI.⁵⁸

The KGB did, however, retain a number of agents within the Sandinistas, among them GRIN (not identified by Mitrokhin’s notes), who was used to identify possible operations in which the KGB could make use of the FSLN. In May 1974 a Sandinista delegation visited the Soviet embassy in Havana and delivered a letter to the CPSU Central Committee asking for assistance. The most dramatic Sandinista attack on a United States target was the attempt, assisted by the DGI with the personal blessing of Fidel Castro, to kidnap Turner B. Shelton, the American ambassador in Managua and a close friend of the Somoza family.⁵⁹ Remarkably, Shelton and President Anastasio Somoza Debayle appeared together on the 1974 twenty cordoba note, the ambassador’s head inclined deferentially towards the president; the note quickly became known as the sapo (“toady”).⁶⁰ The original plan of attack appears to have been for a guerrilla group to force an entry into the US embassy during a diplomatic reception.⁶¹ On December 27, 1974, however, an unexpected opportunity arose during a party in honor of Shelton given by the former minister of agriculture, José Maria (Chema) Castillo. A Sandinista working undercover as a waiter at the reception telephoned the guerrilla group to report that Castillo’s house was poorly guarded, providing an excellent opportunity to kidnap the ambassador.⁶²

Shelton escaped kidnap by the skin of his teeth. He left the reception minutes before a well-drilled assault group of Sandinistas (ten male, three female) stormed Castillo’s mansion at 10:50 p.m. Finding the ambassador gone, they killed his host, held the rest of the guests hostage and demanded that the Archbishop of Managua act as mediator. After several days of tense negotiations, President Somoza released eighteen imprisoned FSLN members, paid a million-dollar ransom for the release of the hostages, agreed to publish a 12,000-word denunciation of himself and US imperialism and provided a plane to fly the Sandinistas to Cuba.⁶³ On the Sandinistas’ arrival at Havana, the Cubans took possession of the million dollars.⁶⁴

Though the FSLN had won an enormous propaganda victory, the period of brutal martial law which followed in Nicaragua led to the death of many of its guerrillas and internal conflict among the Sandinistas over how to wage a victorious guerrilla war.⁶⁵ Still in awe of the Russian revolutionary tradition,⁶⁶ Fonseca turned to Moscow for advice. On February 14, 1975 he asked the Soviet embassy in Havana to arrange a trip to Moscow for himself and other Sandinistas so that they could study and learn from both Bolshevik experience before the October Revolution and methods of partisan warfare during the Great Patriotic War. He also requested further financial assistance.⁶⁷ Late in 1975, probably soon after his return from Moscow,⁶⁸ Fonseca traveled secretly to Nicaragua to try to resolve the factional conflict within the FLSN. On November 8, 1976 he was killed in a shoot-out with a National Guard patrol. After the Sandinista victory in 1979, Fonseca was reburied as a Hero of the Revolution.⁶⁹

IN FEBRUARY 1976 the Politburo approved increase staffing and funding for the FCD Illegals Directorate S. As part of the reorganization of the enlarged Directorate by KGB order no. 0046 of April 12, 1976, the former Department V was formally incorporated into it as Department 8 with, by 1980, 23 operational officers at headquarters out of the total for the directorate of 400.⁷⁰ The head of Department 8, Vladimir Grigoryevich Krasovsky, mournfully reflected on the decline of KGB special actions in recent years. His self-image as a man of action was symbolized by the cigarette lighter mounted on a fragmentation hand grenade which he kept on his desk. But, he complained, “We move paper from place to place. That’s all we do!.⁷¹ Department 8’s most basic task—the liquidation of traitors who had fled abroad—was by now an almost hopeless one. But the Centre could not bring itself either to give up the ritual of passing death sentences on KGB defectors or to abandon the pretence that the sentences would one day be carried out.

According to Oleg Kalugin, head of FCD Directorate K (counterintelligence) from 1973 to 1979, the KGB succeeded in tracking down only two post-war defectors, one in Australia (probably Vladimir Petrov) and the other in the United States (probably Pyotr Deryabin)—both of whom had defected in the 1950s. “The hell with them—they’re old men now!” Andropov told Kalugin. “…Find Oleg Lyalin or Yuri Nosenko, and I will sanction the execution of those two!”⁷² Probably in 1974, Nikolai Fyodorovich Artamonov (codenamed LARK), a former Soviet naval officer working as an analyst in the US Office of Naval Intelligence under the alias “Nicholas Shadrin,” told his KGB controller that he could discover the whereabouts of Nosenko who, he claimed, was living near Washington.⁷³ In 1975 a KGB agent among the Russian Orthodox clergy in the United States found a gangster willing to take out a contract on Nosenko for 100,000 dollars. But before he could do so, the gangster was arrested for other crimes.⁷⁴ Almost simultaneously, Artamonov was discovered to be a double agent working for the FBI. In December 1975, after being lured to Austria, ostensibly to meet a new controller, he was bundled into a car by operations officers from the Vienna residency who intended to exfiltrate him to Moscow for questioning. The sedative injected into Artamonov to stop him struggling in the back seat was so powerful that it killed him. Kryuchkov, however, was delighted that at last a traitor had received his just deserts. “Which medal do you want?” he asked Kalugin. “The October Revolution or the Combat Red Banner?” Kalugin chose the Red Banner.⁷⁵

From 1976 to 1981 the Line KR (counterintelligence) officer E. R. Ponomarev (codenamed KEDROV) was stationed at the Washington residency with the sole task of tracking down defectors and was given the cover post of deputy head of the Consular Department in order to give him a pretext for making enquiries in the Departments of Immigration and Naturalization, as well as in lawyers’ offices. Ponomarev also gained access to the file of purchasers at a Russian-language bookshop and cultivated academics thought likely to come into contact with defectors.⁷⁶ His five years in Washington appear to have been an expensive waste of time and effort.

Some of the KGB’s Soviet Bloc allies, in particular the Bulgarian Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS), were much less cautious than the Centre in their pursuit of defectors. The zeal with which the DS hunted down traitors who had fled abroad owed much to the personal outrage with which the Bulgarian dictator, Todor Zhivkov, the most colorful and grotesque of the rulers of eastern Europe, responded to émigré criticism and mockery. The best known of the émigré writers, Georgi Markov, broadcast regular commentaries on the corruption and excesses of the Zhivkov regime in the Bulgarian-language services of the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe, ridiculing Zhivkov himself as a man with a “a distastefully mediocre sense of humor,” the bullying manner of “a village policeman,” a penchant for “pompous phrases” and the deluded conviction that he was a great huntsman.

In 1974 Boris Arsov, another of the defectors who had dared to attack the excesses of the Zhivkov regime, suddenly disappeared from his flat in Aarhus, Denmark, where he had been publishing the Bulgarian émigré newspaper Levski. Two months later he resurfaced in Sofia and was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. An official statement during Arsov’s trial virtually admitted that he had been kidnapped by the DS:

In 1975 Arsov was officially declared to have been found dead in his prison cell. At about the same time three Bulgarian exiles who had been helping others to defect—Ivan Kolev, Peter Nezamov and Vesselina Stoyova—were shot in Vienna. The assassin, quickly identified by the Austrian police, was a DS agent who had penetrated the émigré group and escaped to Sofia after the murders.⁷⁷

The KGB eventually became embroiled in DS special political actions. Early in 1978 General Dimitar Stoyanov, Bulgarian interior minister and head of the DS, appealed to the Centre for help in liquidating Georgi Markov, then living in London and accused of “slandering Comrade Zhivkov” in his many radio broadcasts. The request was considered at a meeting chaired by Andropov and attended by Kryuchkov, Vice Admiral Mikhail Usatov (Kryuchkov’s deputy) and Oleg Kalugin, head of FCD counterintelligence. Though reluctant to take the risks involved in helping the Bulgarians, Andropov eventually accepted Kryuchkov’s argument that to refuse would be an unacceptable slight to Zhivkov. “But,” he insisted, “there is to be no direct participation on our part. Give the Bulgarians whatever they need, show them how to use it and send someone to Sofia to train their people. But that’s all.”

The Centre made available to the DS the resources of its top secret poisons laboratory, the successor to the Kamera of the Stalinist era, attached to the OTU (Operational Technical) Directorate and under the direct control of the KGB chairman. Sergei Mikhailovich Golubev, head of FCD security and a poisons specialist, was put in charge of liaison with the Bulgarians. The murder weapon eventually chosen was concealed in an American umbrella, one of a number purchased at Golubev’s request by the Washington residency in order to disguise the KGB connection if the weapon was ever discovered. The tip was converted by OTU technicians into a silenced gun capable of firing a tiny pellet containing a lethal dose of ricin, a highly toxic poison made from castor-oil seeds. On September 7, 1978, while Markov was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge, he felt a sudden sting in his right thigh. Turning instinctively, he saw a man behind him who had dropped his umbrella. The stranger apologized, picked up his umbrella and got into a taxi waiting nearby. Though Markov felt no immediate ill effects, he became seriously ill next day and died in hospital on September 11. During the autopsy a tiny pellet was recovered from Markov’s thigh, but the ricin, as Golubev had calculated, had decomposed. Markov’s assassination alerted another Bulgarian émigré, Vladimir Kostov, to the significance of an earlier, unexplained attack he had been subject to in Paris on August 26. Nearly a month later, on September 25, a steel pellet of the kind that had killed Markov was removed, still intact, from Kostov’s back. During a visit to Sofia soon afterwards, Kalugin was presented by General Stoyanov with an expensive Browning hunting rifle in gratitude for KGB assistance in the murder of Markov.⁷⁸

THE CHIEF ADDITION to Soviet special tasks capability during the later Cold War was the creation of KGB special forces (spetsnaz) with the foundation of the Alpha group in 1974, on Andropov’s personal instructions.⁷⁹ Intended for foreign operations and initially kept secret from all but a minority of FCD officers, the special forces grew steadily in numbers during the late 1970s. Their first major operation, by far the most important special action of the Andropov era, was the murder of President Hafizullah Amin of Afghanistan, who seized power in a blood-thirsty palace coup in September 1979.⁸⁰ Cautious though Andropov had become in ordering assassinations, he convinced himself that in this case he had no option. Amin, he believed, was contemplating ending the Communist regime in Afghanistan and turning to the West. There were even reports, which Andropov appears to have taken seriously, that Amin was plotting with the CIA.⁸¹ As during the Czechoslovak crisis in 1968,⁸² Andropov took the lead in insisting on the enforcement of the “Brezhnev doctrine” which asserted Moscow’s right to prevent the defection of any member of the Soviet Bloc.

For the first time since its foundation, Department 8 of FCD Directorate S (Illegals) moved into the front line of KGB operations. Its plot to assassinate Amin, operation AGAT (“Agate”), formed part of a larger invasion plan.⁸³ By late November, after Amin had demanded the replacement of A. M. Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador, Andropov and defence minister Ustinov, the two leading hawks in the Politburo, were agreed on the need for Soviet military intervention as well as the elimination of Amin.⁸⁴ Early in December, Andropov sent Brezhnev a handwritten letter, reporting “alarming information [intelligence] about Amin’s secret activities, forewarning of a possible shift to the West,” bringing with it both the end of Communist rule and a catastrophic loss of Soviet influence.⁸⁵ On December 8 Andropov and Ustinov jointly obtained Brezhnev’s approval for a draft invasion plan.⁸⁶

While Marshal Akhromeyev and the General Staff operations group in charge of the invasion established their headquarters near the Afghan border in Uzbekistan, the head of Directorate S, Vadim Vasilyevich Kirpichenko, and the head of Department 8, Vladimir Krasovsky, flew secretly into Kabul to supervise the overthrow of Amin. Dayto-day control of operation AGAT was entrusted to Krasovsky’s deputy, A. I. Lazarenko. A team from the KGB Seventh (Surveillance) Directorate flew in to monitor Amin’s movements. Meanwhile, elaborate attempts were made to avoid arousing Amin’s suspicions. His requests for military supplies were granted and two radio stations were constructed for him. On December 23, however, the KGB residency in Kabul reported that Amin’s suspicions had been aroused both by Western radio reports of Soviet troop movements and the frequent flights into the Soviet airbase at Bagram, outside Kabul. The main invasion began at 3 p.m. (local time) on December 25.⁸⁷

According to some accounts of the Soviet invasion, Amin was successfully duped into believing that the Red Army was arriving to provide him with “fraternal assistance” against anti-Communist rebels.⁸⁸ The Kabul residency thought otherwise. On December 26 it reported to the Centre the publication of an article in the Englishlanguage Kabul Times entitled “The Will of the People will be the Deciding Factor.” Though the article made no direct reference to the massive arrival of Soviet troops, it ended with the slogan “Down with the interventionists!” The residency concluded:

The assault on the presidential palace on December 27 was led by 700 members of the KGB Alpha and Zenith special forces, dressed in Afghan uniforms and traveling in military vehicles with Afghan markings. The signal for the attack to begin was the detonation of an explosive device concealed some days earlier beneath a tree in the central square of the capital. The palace guards, however, put up much stiffer resistance than had been expected, and over a hundred of the KGB troops were killed before the palace was taken and Amin gunned down. Among the casualties was the leader of the assault group, Colonel Grigori Boyarinov, commandant of the Department 8 special operations training school at Balashikha.⁹⁰

It was normal KGB procedure for the portraits of officers who fell in combat to be displayed in black frames at the Centre as a sign of mourning. On this occasion, since the fallen heroes of operation AGAT were so numerous, Andropov decided not to put their hundred portraits on display. Some of the survivors, however, were honored for their part in the operation. Kirpichenko was promoted from major-general to lieutenant-general, and soon afterwards made First Deputy Head of the FCD. Lazarenko was promoted from colonel to major-general. Leonid Aleksandrovich Kozlov of Department 8 was made a Hero of the Soviet Union.⁹¹ The head of Line N (Illegals Support) at the Kabul residency, Ismail Murtuza Ogly Aliev, was awarded the Order of the Red Star, as were an unknown number of the members of the assault group who had stormed the presidential palace.⁹²

Immediately after the storming of the palace, the exiled Afghan Communist and veteran KGB agent Babrak Karmal, who had been chosen by Moscow to succeed Amin, asked senior KGB officers in Kabul to assure Comrade Andropov that, as president, he would unswervingly follow his advice. He also called for the “severest punishment” of Amin’s former associates and all those who had opposed Soviet troops. Karmal was fulsome in his praise for the heroism shown by the KGB and other special forces who had stormed the presidential palace:

The long-drawn-out Afghan War (which will be covered in volume 2 of this book) rescued Department 8 from the doldrums into which it had lapsed for most of the 1970s. In 1982 its special operations training school at Balashikha set up a “Training Centre for Afghanistan,” headed by V. I. Kikot, previously a Line F officer in Havana, who was well-informed on the Cuban experience of irregular warfare.⁹⁴ Department 8 also made an intensive study of the methods used both by the Palestinians against the Israelis and by the Israelis against Palestinian camps in Lebanon.⁹⁵ Balashikha made a significant, though unquantifiable, contribution to the increasing use of special forces and methods of terrorizing the population—among them incendiary bombs, napalm, poison gas, tiny mines scattered from the air, even booby-trapped toys which maimed children and so demoralized their parents. But though Soviet forces and the terror campaign drove a quarter of the Afghan population into refugee camps in Pakistan, they failed to win the war.

WITH THE INTENSIFICATION of the Cold War in the early years of the Reagan presidency and fears in the Centre that the new president was planning a nuclear first strike, Andropov became increasingly willing, both as KGB chairman and as Brezhnev’s successor from 1982 to 1984, to use, or connive in the use of, terrorism against United States and NATO targets. With Andropov’s knowledge (and doubtless his blessing), East Germany became what its last, non-Communist, interior minister, Peter-Michael Diestel, later called “an Eldorado for terrorists.” Among East Germany’s favorite terrorist groups was the West German Red Army Faction (RAF). Contemptuous of working-class reluctance to make a revolution and inspired by slogans such as “Don’t argue—destroy!,” the well-educated members of the RAF saw themselves as the militant vanguard of the deplorably inert proletariat, committed to the destruction of the “bourgeois power structures” of both the FRG and NATO. After a series of successful terrorist attacks in the mid-1970s, however, a grand offensive planned by the RAF in 1977 failed, and four of its leaders committed suicide in prison.

Thanks to the sanctuary offered by East Germany to its main surviving activists from 1977 onwards, the RAF was able to regroup. With training, weapons, funds and false identity documents provided by the Stasi, the Red Army Faction launched a new offensive during the early 1980s. In August 1981 a car bomb attack on the European headquarters of the US airforce at Ramstein in West Germany injured seventeen people; a month later RAF terrorists made an unsuccessful rocket attack in Heidelberg on the car of General Frederick Kroesen. During another terrorist offensive in 1984-5, the RAF attempted to blow up the NATO school at Oberammergau, bombed the US airbase at Frankfurt/Main, and attacked American soldiers at Wiesbaden. The Stasi also connived in the bombing of the La Belle discothèque in West Berlin, helping to transport the explosives which killed an American sergeant and a Turkish woman and wounded 230 people, including fifty US servicemen. Other Stasi contacts included the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA and Carlos the Jackal.⁹⁶

In 1983, at the height of operation RYAN (the combined KGB/GRU attempt to find (nonexistent) evidence of US and NATO plans for a surprise nuclear attack), Andropov ordered preparations by Department 8 for terrorist attacks on British, American and NATO targets in Europe. Plans were made for a campaign of letter bombs to be sent to Mrs. Thatcher’s office at 10 Downing Street and to a series of prominent US and NATO representatives.⁹⁷ At about the same time the KGB organized a series of dead drops in bars and restaurants near American bases in West Germany, intended to conceal explosives which could be detonated in a manner that would give the impression of terrorist attacks. The dead drop sites included behind a vending machine, in a ventilation cavity under a sink, on a wooden beam over a lavatory and underneath a paper-towel dispenser. By the time the sites were discovered by the CIA in 1985, however, operation RYAN was winding down and plans for a KGB terrorist campaign against NATO targets had been shelved.⁹⁸

In August 1983, while RYAN was still in full swing, the Centre instructed the main residencies in European NATO countries to step up their search for NATO preparations for

Though, as with most of the requirements for operation RYAN, there was no such intelligence to collect, the Centre’s instructions give an important insight into Moscow’s contingency plans for the role of Department 8 and its DRGs in an attack on NATO.

THE DECLINE AND fall of the Cold War brought a further decline in KGB special actions. The last major special action of the Soviet era was directed not against the traditional Main Adversary and its NATO allies, but against the reformers within the Soviet Union. On December 8, 1990 Kryuchkov, who had become KGB chairman two years earlier, summoned to his office in the Lubyanka his former chief-of-staff, Vyacheslav Zhizhin, now deputy chief of the FCD, and Alexei Yegorov of Counter-intelligence. There he instructed them to prepare a report on the measures needed to “stabilize” the country following the declaration of a state of emergency—in other words, the “special” and other actions required to preserve one-party rule and a centralized Soviet state.

Over the next eight months Kryuchkov repeatedly tried and failed to persuade Gorbachev to agree to the declaration of a state of emergency and the “stabilization” of the Soviet Union. The point of no return for himself and his co-conspirators was the agreement on July 23, 1991 of the text of a new Union Treaty which would have transferred many of the powers of central government to the republics. On August 4 Gorbachev, whom Kryuchkov had placed under close surveillance some months earlier as SUBJECT 110, left for his summer holidays in a luxurious dacha at Foros on the Crimean coast, intending to return to Moscow for the signing of the Union Treaty on August 20. The day after Gorbachev’s departure, Kryuchkov and his fellow plotters—chief among them the defence and interior ministers, Dmitri Yazov and Boris Pugo (former head of the Latvian KGB)—met at OBJECT ABC, a KGB sanatorium equipped with swimming pool, saunas, masseuses and cinema. There they secretly constituted themselves as the State Committee for the State of Emergency, and met over the next fortnight to make preparations for a coup which would forestall the signing of the Union Treaty. The committee ordered the printing of 300,000 arrest forms and the supply by a factory in Pskov of 250,000 pairs of handcuffs. Kryuchkov called all KGB personnel back from holiday, placed them on alert and doubled their pay. Two floors of cells in the Lefortovo prison were emptied to received important prisoners and a secret bunker prepared for the committee in the Lubyanka in case the going got rough.

On August 18 the plotters made a final attempt to intimidate Gorbachev into declaring a state of emergency. Having failed, they kept him incommunicado under house arrest in Foros and announced next day that the president was prevented by “ill health” from performing his duties, and that Vice-President Gennadi Yanayev had become acting president (in fact a mere figurehead) at the head of an eight-man State Committee for the State of Emergency. The plotters quickly discovered, however, that the old autocratic machinery of the one-party state was in too serious a state of disrepair for them to be able to turn back the clock. The Alpha group spetsnaz was supposed to storm the Moscow White House, the seat of government of the Russian Federation, and arrest its president, Boris Yeltsin, but failed to do either. Not one of the 7,000 reformers on the plotters’ detention list was arrested. The coup crumbled farcically and ignominiously in only four days. Pugo committed suicide. “Forgive me,” he wrote in a note to his children and grandchildren. “It was all a mistake. I lived honestly, all my life.” As Yazov was being led to a prison van, he said to those who arrested him, “Everything is clear now. I am such an old idiot. I’ve really fucked up.” Kryuchkov lacked sufficient self-knowledge to reach a similar conclusion.¹⁰⁰

The result of the final special action organized by the KGB was thus the precise opposite of what Kryuchkov and his fellow plotters had intended, accelerating both the collapse of the Communist one-party state and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The coup also ended in unprecedented humiliation for the KGB. On the evening of August 21 a heavy crane arrived in front of the Lubyanka and, before a cheering crowd, hoisted the giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky by a noose around his neck, toppled him from his pedestal and dragged him away to a field near the Tretyakov gallery, which became a graveyard for statues of the Soviet regime.

^APPENDIX “SPECIAL POLITICAL ACTION” PROPOSED BY THE ATHENS RESIDENCY TO THE CENTRE IN APRIL 1969

Our operational letter No. 24/[Line]F of April 14, 1969 sets out a draft plan for carrying out a Lily [sabotage operation] against the target codenamed VAZA [“Vase”].

The operation is codenamed YAYTSO [“Egg”].

The aim and purpose of the operation is to cause moral and political damage to the south-east wing of NATO.

Constant disagreements between Greece and Turkey cause great concern to the leadership of the USA and NATO and are a weak link in American policy in the area of southeast Europe.

Carrying out a Lily on the VAZA could exacerbate relations between Greece and Turkey.

The operation would be carried out in the name of a Greek who had come from Turkey and was dissatisfied with the situation of the Greek minority there (there can also be another variant [pretext] for carrying out the sabotage).

VAZA is a two-storey house in Thessaloniki. The house and its annex belong to the Turkish consulate-general… There is no furniture, only a table, iron troughs and a cooking stove.

On the upper floor of the house there are displays with Atatürk [the Turkish national hero]’s clothes and a photographic portrait of him. Apart from a desk there is no furniture.

Next to the VAZA, about 15-20 m away, there is the two-storey building of the Turkish consulate-general. This house is also used as living accommodation for consulate officials.

The VAZA and the consulate have a common courtyard. (A detailed description of the layout of the houses and the courtyard is attached.)

The most suitable place for planting a Bouquet [explosive device] is in the bushes growing about one meter from the VAZA.

The VAZA is not open to the general public. It can be visited with the permission of the Turkish consulate; a special official is assigned to watch over the VAZA and to accompany visitors to the VAZA.

The VAZA and the consulate are guarded round the clock by two gendarmes. The guard posts are mobile and the approaches to VAZA are restricted. The most convenient time to approach the target is at nightfall.

Specifications of the Bouquet:

The size and weight of the Bouquet must be related to the results which are desired from the attack on the VAZA. Evidently, there is no point in causing serious damage to the VAZA; it is better to achieve a moral and political effect. When calculating the force of the Bouquet, one must bear in mind that the distance from the Splash [explosion] to the consulate living quarters is 15-20 m.

…In order to increase the impact and achieve the desired results, the Bouquet must be wrapped in a newspaper published in Turkey for Greek citizens.

The temperature in Thessaloniki ranges in winter from below zero to 14°C, while in summer it ranges from 24°C upwards. Occasionally there are thick fogs.

The Gardener [saboteur] must be sent to the country as a foreign tourist at the height of the tourist season. The greatest influx of tourists occurs from June to August. According to his identity documents, the Gardener’s identity documents must show him to be a citizen of a country friendly to Greece or a neutral state (the USA, Britain, West Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Canada, Libya), excluding the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Holland and Belgium.

On arriving in Athens the Gardener can hire a motor car, visit historical sites in the south of the country and some of the islands. Simultaneously, the Gardener is acclimatizing himself and becoming fully accustomed to the situation in the country.

After collecting the Bouquet from the residency via a DLB [dead letterbox], the Gardener travels to Thessaloniki by rail.

The estimated time span for carrying out the Lily and for the Gardener’s activities is as follows:

AFTER ARRIVING IN Athens, the Gardener can hire a motor car the next day, spend one or two days in Athens and its suburbs, then travel the following route by car: Athens-Pátrais-Spártia-Návplion-Epidhauros-Kóinthos-Athens. This route will take the Gardener four or five days. On arriving in Athens, the Gardener books into a hotel. The next day he places a signal indicating he is ready to carry out the DLB operation to receive the Bouquet. The DLB operation takes place next day.

After collecting the Bouquet, the Gardener leaves by the next train to Thessaloniki, having previously booked out from the hotel. A train leaves Athens at 11:42, and arrives at Thessaloniki at 19:29; he travels in a first-class compartment.

At Thessaloniki he does not stay at a hotel. In order to acquaint himself with the situation around the VAZA he walks past the VAZA after checking for surveillance.

As darkness falls, the Gardener goes off on a route of his own choice, but at the final stage goes into the old fort, where he inserts the little flower [detonator] into the Bouquet. From the northern gates of the fort, the Gardener goes down Isail Street which leads to the VAZA and comes out on St. Paul Street. This takes 15-20 minutes.

On coming out on to Isail Street, the Gardener goes from the garage towards St. Paul Street. While moving along the [VAZA] fence, the Gardener causes the Splash [explosion]. The Gardener can throw the Bouquet into the bushes which are close to the VAZA fence or he can drop the Bouquet on the ground inside the VAZA fence. (A diagram of the route and of the location of the installations is attached.)

After completing the Splash, the Gardener goes out on Áyios Dhimitrios Street and moves in the direction of the stadium (20-25 minutes walk). In the stadium area there is some waste ground where the Gardener can bury the TWA or BOAC airline bag used for keeping and transporting the Bouquet. From Thessaloniki, the Gardener can go to Athens by train or air (buying the air ticket 5-10 minutes before takeoff, using any surname).

If the situation does not permit the Gardener to put the Bouquet together, then he can get rid of it… in the area of the stadium where there is some waste ground. If he attracts the attention of the VAZA security guard, he must say that he is a foreign tourist going from the fort to the Delta Hotel, where he intends to spend the night, but that this is his first visit to the town and he is not sure of the way to the hotel.¹⁰¹