The Sword and the Shield

^TWENTY-SEVEN FRANCE AND ITALY DURING THE COLD WAR Agent Penetration and Active Measures

For much, probably most, of the Cold War, the Paris residency ran more agents—usually about fifty plus—than any other KGB station in western Europe. Its most remarkable achievement during the Fourth Republic (1946-58) was the penetration of the French intelligence community, especially SDECE, the foreign intelligence agency. An incomplete list in KGB files of the residency’s particularly “valuable agents” in 1953 included four officials in the SDECE (codenamed NOSENKO, SHIROKOV, KORABLEV and DUBRAVIN) and one each in the domestic security service DST (GORYACHEV), the Renseignements Généraux (GIZ), the foreign ministry (IZVEKOV), the defense ministry (LAVROV), the naval ministry (PIZHO), the New Zealand embassy (LONG) and the press (ZHIGALOV).¹ In 1954 30 per cent of all reports to the Centre from the Paris residency were based on information from its agents in the French intelligence community.²

The basis for Soviet penetration of France during the Cold War had been laid at the end of the Second World War. Thanks both to the leading role played by the Communist Party in the French Resistance and the presence of Communist ministers in government until 1947, the few years after the Liberation had been a golden age for agent recruitment.³ Though the British and American intelligence communities were probably unaware of the identities of most Soviet agents in France, they were acutely conscious of the weakness of post-war French security and—for that reason—cautious about exchanging classified information with the SDECE and the DST. A 1948 assessment by the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), infused by a somewhat absurd sense of ethnic superiority, blamed the success of Soviet penetration on “inherent defects in the French character” as well as “the wide appeal of Communism in France.” Soviet intelligence, the JIC concluded, was able to exploit:

The JIC’s supreme confidence in the inherent superiority of British over Gallic security was, presumably, at least slightly deflated three years later by the defection of Burgess and Maclean, Philby’s recall from Washington and the suspicion which fell on Blunt and Cairncross.

After the compromise of the British Magnificent Five in 1951, France became for the remainder of the decade the KGB’s most productive source of intelligence on Western policy to the Soviet Bloc.⁵ The KGB defectors Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov reported in 1954 that the Centre “found intelligence work particularly easy in France… The French operational section was littered with what looked like photostat copies of original French documents.”⁶ The Paris residency obtained important intelligence on Western negotiating positions before both the Berlin Conference early in 1954, the first between Soviet, American, British and French foreign ministers since 1949, and the Geneva four-power summit in July 1955, the first meeting of heads of government since the meeting of the Big Three at Potsdam ten years before.⁷ Thanks to the diplomatic ciphers provided by JOUR, a cipher clerk in the Quai d’Orsay recruited in 1945, the Centre also seems to have had access to plentiful French SIGINT. In 1957 JOUR was awarded the Order of the Red Star.⁸ It was probably largely thanks to JOUR that during the Cuban missile crisis, the KGB was able to supply the Kremlin with verbatim copies of diplomatic traffic between the Quai d’Orsay and its embassies in Moscow and Washington.⁹

During the early Cold War, the Paris residency also appears to have been the most successful promoter of active measures designed to influence Western opinion and opinion-formers. Between 1947 and 1955 the residency sponsored a series of bogus memoirs and other propagandist works, among them: J’ai choisi la potence (I Chose the Gallows) by General Andrei Vlasov, who had fought with the Germans on the eastern front; the equally fraudulent Ma carriäre Ö l’êtat-major soviétique (My Career in the Soviet High Command) by “Ivan Krylov;” and bogus correspondence between Stalin and Tito, published in the weekly magazine Carrefour, in which Tito confessed to being a Trotskyist. The main author of the forgeries was Grigori Besedovsky, a former Soviet diplomat who had settled in Paris. Some of Besedovsky’s fabrications, which also included two books about Stalin by a non-existent nephew, were sophisticated enough to deceive even such a celebrated Soviet scholar as E. H. Carr, who in 1955 contributed a foreword to Notes for a Journal, fraudulently attributed to the former foreign commissar Maksim Litvinov. The resident in Paris from 1946 to 1948, Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, who had launched the Besedovsky frauds, was later appointed head of the FCD’s first specialized disinformation section, Department D (subsequently Service A), founded in 1959.¹⁰

The post-war Paris residency also had what was, in effect, its own weekly newspaper, focusing on international relations: La Tribune des Nations (codenamed ÉCOLE). Founded in 1946 by André Ulmann with the help of Soviet subsidies,¹¹ the Tribune’s subscribers included both French government departments and foreign embassies. Publicly, Ulmann disclaimed any connection with the French Communist Party (PCF). According to his friend Pierre Daix:

Ulmann’s KGB file, however, reveals that he was a secret member of the PCF. Recommended by the Party leadership to the Paris residency, he had been recruited as agent DURANT in 1946. From 1948 onwards Ulmann also worked as an agent of the Polish intelligence service, which gave him the codename YULI and provided monthly subsidies of 200,000 francs to help finance the publication of La Tribune des Nations.¹³ Between 1946 and his death in 1970, Ulmann received a total of 3,552,100 francs from the Paris residency, as well as an (unidentified) Soviet decoration for his work for the KGB.¹⁴ To at least some Paris journalists, however, Ulmann’s cover was somewhat transparent. The historian of the PCF, Annie Kriegel, herself a former militante, recalls hearing Ulmann being described by one of her friends as “a secret agent disguised as a secret agent.”¹⁵

Despite the Paris residency’s successes during the 1950s, the Centre was dissatisfied with the number of its new recruits. It took Moscow some years to accept that, following the end of Communist participation in government in 1947, the pace of subsequent agent recruitment was bound to be slower. In a despatch to the Paris residency on February 3, 1954, the Centre insisted that it step up its campaign to acquire new agents in the foreign ministry, the cabinet secretariat, the SDECE, the DST, the general staff’s Deuxiäme Bureau, the armed forces and NATO. “The residency,” it complained, “is living on its old capital and is not taking energetic measures to acquire new, valuable sources of information.”¹⁶

In 1955 the Paris residency recruited a major new agent inside NATO, codenamed GERMAIN, who was controlled by an (unidentified) illegal despatched from the Centre. GERMAIN, like JOUR, was later awarded the Order of the Red Star. His wife NINA trained as a KGB radio operator and was given the medal “For combat services.”¹⁷ In 1956 a residency agent, DROZDOV, reported that one of his wife’s friends, ROZA, who worked at SDECE headquarters, had become pregnant after a one-night stand with “a chance acquaintance.” On instructions from the residency, DROZDOV gave ROZA financial help after the birth of her daughter in the following year in the hope of laying the basis for an eventual recruitment. ROZA’s cultivation, however, proceeded slowly. By 1961 the residency had concluded that she would rebuff any direct attempt to turn her into a KGB agent, and decided instead on a false flag recruitment. DROZDOV successfully persuaded her to provide regular intelligence reports to assist a fictitious “progressive organization” of which he claimed to be a member.¹⁸ Other French recruits during the early years of the Fifth Republic, established in January 1959 under the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle, included two cipher clerks (LARIONOV¹⁹ and SIDOROV²⁰), two Paris police officers (FRENE²¹ and DACHNIK²²) and two young scientists (ADAM²³ and SASHA²⁴). In 1964, like his fellow cipher clerk JOUR seven years earlier, SIDOROV was awarded the Order of the Red Star²⁵—a further indication of the success of KGB SIGINT operations in decrypting French diplomatic traffic.

The French embassy in Moscow was also a major KGB target. During the early 1960s both the ambassador, Maurice Dejean, and the air attaché, Colonel Louis Guibaud, were seduced by KGB swallows after elaborate “honeytrap” operations directed by the head of the Second Chief Directorate, Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, with the personal approval of Khrushchev. Dejean was beaten up by a KGB officer posing as the enraged husband of the swallow, a Moscow ballerina who had seduced him. Guibaud was confronted with the usual compromising photographs of his sexual liaison. Both seductions, however, failed as intelligence operations. In 1962 Guibaud shot himself with his service revolver. The following year, a defector revealed Gribanov’s plan to compromise Dejean, who was recalled to Paris before serious KGB blackmail had begun. De Gaulle welcomed the ambassador home with the now celebrated reproof, “Alors, Dejean, on couche!”²⁶ The KGB files noted by Mitrokhin reveal for the first time that a third French diplomat in Moscow was successfully targeted by Gribanov. A female member of the embassy staff, codenamed LOUISA, was seduced by a male swallow, confronted with photographs of her seduction and persuaded to work as a Soviet agent. Once back in Paris in the early 1960s, however, she broke off contact with the KGB.²⁷

The most successful French recruitment in Moscow recorded in the files seen by Mitrokhin was that of the businessman Franáois Saar-Demichel (codenamed NN) in the 1960s.²⁸ After fighting in the Resistance, Saar-Demichel had served briefly in the DGER and its successor, the SDECE, before leaving in 1947 to begin a business career. In 1954 he won an exclusive, and lucrative, contract to import Soviet wood pulp for French paper manufacture. A year later, during a visit to Moscow, he was recruited by the SCD as a KGB agent. Acting on instructions from the Centre, Saar-Demichel used his Resistance connections to make contact with some of de Gaulle’s leading supporters and contributed almost 15 million francs to the Gaullist cause during the final years of the Fourth Republic.²⁹

After the change of regime and de Gaulle’s election as President of the Republic, Saar-Demichel succeeded in gaining an entrée to the êlysée and supplied regular reports on his meetings with Soviet leaders during business trips to Moscow. According to Constantin Melnik, security adviser to the first prime minister of the Fifth Republic, Michel Debré, “More than any other political movement, Gaullism was swarming with agents of influence of the obliging KGB, whom we never succeeded in keeping away from de Gaulle.” The most important of them may well have been Saar-Demichel. His reports were designed by the Centre to reinforce de Gaulle’s belief that Soviet leaders were guided not by Communist ideology but by traditional Russian interests, and to persuade him that they were genuinely anxious for an understanding with France:

During his visits to Moscow, Saar-Demichel also provided the Centre with regular reports on de Gaulle’s foreign policy. He claimed that after the signature of the cooperation treaty between France and West Germany in January 1963, which had been badly received in Moscow, de Gaulle had said privately, “We extended our hand to the Germans so that we could at least be sure they were not holding a knife in theirs.”³¹

AS WELL AS collecting intelligence, the Paris residency continued to be energetically engaged in active measures. In its annual report for 1961, the residency proudly reported that it had been responsible for inspiring 230 articles in the press, 11 books and pamphlets, 32 parliamentary questions and statements, 9 public meetings and the circulation of 14,000 copies of 10 posters and flysheets.³² In addition to André Ulmann (DURANT), editor of La Tribune des Nations,³³ the residency’s agents of influence included at least two socialist politicians, GILBERT and DROM.³⁴ GILBERT (later GILES), who was reported to be “close” to the future president, Franáois Mitterrand, was recruited by the Czechoslovak StB in 1955 under the codename ROTER. KGB contacts with GILBERT began a year later.³⁵ DROM was first cultivated by the KGB in 1959, recruited as an agent in 1961 and paid a monthly retainer of 1,500 francs for the next twelve years.³⁶

The Paris residency’s most ambitious active measure during de Gaulle’s decade as President of the Fifth Republic was to fund a new news agency, the Centre d’Information Scientifique, Économique et Politique, founded in 1961 by Pierre-Charles Pathé, a newly recruited KGB agent codenamed PECHERIN (later MASON). The journalist son of the millionaire film magnate who had founded Pathé newsreels, he had first come to the residency’s attention two years earlier after publishing a naively pro-Soviet Essai sur le phénomäne soviétique:

From 1961 to 1967 the KGB paid Pathé 6,000 francs a month to publish a weekly newsletter (codenamed OBZOR) from his center, which was sold by subscription but sent free of charge to opinion-formers in politics, business, journalism and diplomacy.³⁷

The main purpose of the active measures implemented by Pathé and the Paris residency’s other agents of influence during the early Fifth Republic was to damage Franco-American relations, encourage a Franco-Soviet rapprochement and distance France from NATO.³⁸ Saar-Demichel reported progress on all three fronts. His finest hour as a KGB agent came during a visit to Moscow to negotiate the sale of the French SECAM color system to Soviet television in March 1965, when he told his controller that de Gaulle wished to visit the Soviet Union in the following year. De Gaulle, he claimed, attached no importance to Franco-Soviet ideological differences and had told him:

As for the reunification of Germany, to which the Soviet Union was resolutely opposed, de Gaulle wished to postpone it as long as possible: “The later, the better.” A doubtless exultant Centre passed on Saar-Demichel’s message to the Central Committee.³⁹

It remains unclear whether, as the KGB believed, the êlysée had asked Saar-Demichel to sound out Moscow on the question of a state visit—or whether, knowing de Gaulle’s wishes, he took the initiative himself. The Centre, however, claimed much of the credit for de Gaulle’s decision to distance France from NATO and improve relations with the Soviet Union.⁴⁰ In March 1966 France withdrew from the integrated NATO command. Three months later de Gaulle made a triumphal state visit to the Soviet Union. The KGB had, in reality, little influence on either decision. Ever since the United States and Britain had rejected his proposal early in the Fifth Republic to join with France in a three-power directorate at the head of NATO, de Gaulle had been increasingly inclined to distance himself from it. His attempt to use the Soviet Union as a counterweight to American influence in Europe went back to his wartime years as leader of the Free French, when Roosevelt and Churchill had failed to treat him as an equal. “Ah, Monsieur le Secrétaire Général,” he told Brezhnev during his visit to Moscow, “how happy we are to have you to help us resist American pressure—just as we are pleased to have the United States to help us resist pressure from the Soviet Union!” But if—contrary to the private boasts of the Centre—KGB active measures did not determine de Gaulle’s foreign policy, they played at least a minor role in reinforcing his conviction that the Soviet Union was a traditional great power with an increasingly thin Communist veneer. His report to the French cabinet on his state visit to Russia concurred with the views expressed by Saar-Demichel. The Soviet Union, de Gaulle declared, was “evolving from ideology to technocracy:

KGB active measures may have had a somewhat greater, though doubtless not decisive, influence on the evolution of French public opinion. According to opinion polls after de Gaulle’s state visit, 35 percent of French people held a favorable opinion of the Soviet Union (as compared with 25 percent two years earlier) while only 13 percent were hostile. Those with favorable opinions of the United States fell, partly as a consequence of the Vietnam War, from 52 percent in 1964 to only 22 percent at the beginning of 1967.⁴²

After the apparent successes of the previous few years, the Paris residency saw little purpose in continuing to fund Pathé’s Centre d’Information Scientifique, Économique et Politique, on which it had spent 436,000 francs since 1961. The center closed and its newsletter ceased publication. Pathé continued, however, to work as an agent of influence, writing regular articles in national newspapers under the pseudonym “Charles Morand.” From January 1967 to June 1979, he received a total of 218,400 francs in salary, plus 68,423 francs for expenses and bonuses.⁴³ In 1969 Pathé was one of the organizers of the Gaullist-dominated Mouvement pour l’Indépendance de l’Europe, which the Centre regarded as a potentially valuable means of destabilizing NATO.⁴⁴

KGB PENETRATION OF the French intelligence community continued during the 1960s. Mitrokhin’s notes record that at least four French intelligence officers and one former head of department in the Sñreté Générale were active KGB agents during the period 1963-6, but give few details.⁴⁵ In the years after de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969, the quality, though not the quantity, of the KGB’s French recruits seems to have declined. The total number of agents run by the Paris residency rose from 48 in 1971 to 55 in 1974; in 1974 the residency also had 17 confidential contacts.⁴⁶ However, the files seen by Mitrokhin contain no indication that the 1974 agents included any senior civil servants or intelligence officers. The KGB had also lost the services of DROM, one of its two leading agents within the Socialist Party. In 1973 he was given “substantial funds” to pay off his debts. Shortly afterwards, however, DROM was reported to be in contact with the DST.⁴⁷

The best indication of the main strengths of the KGB’s French agent network in the mid-1970s is a list of thirteen “valuable agents” of the Paris residency who, with Andropov’s personal approval, were given substantial New Year gifts in 1973, 1974 and 1975. In each of these three years JOUR was given a bonus of 4,000 francs; ANDRÉ, BROK and FYODOR received 3,000 francs; ARGUS, DRAGUN, DZHELIB and LAURENT 2,000 francs; NANT and REM 1,500 francs; BUKIN-IST, MARS and TUR 1,000 francs.⁴⁸ Two reservations need to be registered about this list. First, it does not include the residency’s most important ST agent, ALAN, who was paid on a different bonus system.⁴⁹ (The same may apply to some other Line X agents.) Secondly, three of the agents who received the New Year bonuses were foreign officials stationed in Paris who provided intelligence chiefly on non-French matters. DZHELIB was a staff member of an Asian embassy, who provided ciphers and other classified documents;⁵⁰ REM was a Canadian in the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, who acted as an agent-recruiter;⁵¹ BUKINIST worked in a Middle Eastern embassy.⁵² The eleven French recruits selected for New Year gifts in 1973-5 do, however, give an important insight into the Centre’s and Paris residency’s perception of their main French assets.

The most highly rated French agent in the mid-1970s was also the longest-serving: JOUR, the cipher clerk in the Foreign Ministry (codenamed ELITA) recruited thirty years earlier, who was singled out for the largest bonus. During the period 1968-73 he provided intelligence on the cipher machines in the French embassy in Moscow and at NATO headquarters which enabled the Sixteenth (SIGINT) Directorate to decrypt a probably substantial amount of diplomatic traffic. In 1973 JOUR was posted to a French embassy abroad, where contact with him was maintained through dead letter-boxes.⁵³ Intelligence provided by JOUR probably assisted the bugging of the new teleprinters installed in the Moscow embassy between October 1976 and February 1977. All, remarkably, were left unguarded for forty-eight hours during their journey by rail to Moscow. The bugs secretly fitted to the teleprinters during this period transmitted to the KGB the unenciphered text of all incoming and outgoing embassy telegrams for over six years.⁵⁴ The head of the bugging operation, Igor Vasilovich Maslow, was awarded the Order of Lenin and later promoted to head the Sixteenth (SIGINT) Directorate.⁵⁵

Until 1983, thanks to JOUR and Maslov, the Centre had far better information on French policy to the Soviet Union than that of any of France’s NATO allies. JOUR simultaneously continued to talent-spot other Foreign Ministry cipher and secretarial personnel. In 1978-9 he cultivated “L” (identified only as a member of the ministry “support staff”), obtained his private address, carried out a background check on his home and facilitated his recruitment by a residency operations officer.⁵⁶ During the period 1978-82 no less than six cipher personnel at the Quai d’Orsay were under active KGB cultivation.⁵⁷

A majority of the most highly rated French agents in the mid-1970s (six of the ten who received New Year bonuses in 1973-5: ANDRÉ,⁵⁸ BROK,⁵⁹ ARGUS,⁶⁰ NANT,⁶¹ MARS⁶² and TUR⁶³) were journalists or involved with the press: a clear indication that, whatever the real effectiveness of KGB disinformation campaigns against French targets, the Centre regarded active measures as one of the main strengths of the Paris residency. Of the three other most valuable French agents, FYODOR held a major position in a foreign policy institute and provided documents on the USA, NATO and China;⁶⁴ LAURENT was a scientist in a NATO aeronautical research institute;⁶⁵ and DRAGUN was a businessman and agent-recruiter. ⁶⁶ LAURENT and DRAGUN were probably Line X (ST) agents. Pathé (MASON), one of the leading agents of influence in the 1960s, had declined in importance and did not figure on the list of most valuable agents in 1973-5. His career, however, was to revive during the second half of the decade.

The Centre’s probably exaggerated confidence in the agents of influence run by the PR Line of the Paris residency led it to undertake an ambitious series of active measures throughout the 1970s. According to KGB files, ANDRÉ, a senior journalist, “had access to President Georges Pompidou,” who had succeeded de Gaulle in 1969, and to some of his senior ministers, including Pierre Messmer, who became prime minister in 1972, and Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann.⁶⁷ Reports from the Paris residency claimed that ANDRÉ was used to pass to Pompidou’s office “slanted information” calculated to increase the President’s suspicion of the United States.⁶⁸ In this, as in most influence operations, it is difficult to estimate the level of success. Given ANDRÉ’s access to the highest levels of the Pompidou administration, it is difficult to believe that he was simply ignored. It is equally difficult to credit, however, that he had more than—at best—a marginal influence on French foreign policy. The Centre’s reports to the Central Committee tended to claim more credit than it probably deserved for provoking, or worsening, tension within the Atlantic Alliance.

The limitations of KGB active measures in influencing French policy were clearly illustrated by the failure of the LA MANCHE (“English Channel”) operation, designed to sow distrust between Pompidou and the British prime minister, Edward Heath, to persuade the President to maintain de Gaulle’s veto on British entry into the European Community.⁶⁹

Though the journalist ARGUS appears to have had no direct access to Pompidou, he was in even closer contact than ANDRÉ with Messmer. According to reports from the Paris residency he had regular discussions with the Prime Minister during the campaign for the March 1973 general election and continued to advise him afterwards. The main aim of the KGB disinformation channeled through ARGUS was to damage the electoral prospects of the Gaullist-led ruling coalition by sowing distrust between the Gaullists and their allies. ARGUS falsely alleged to Messmer that Michel Poniatowski, general secretary of the Independent Republicans, and the Reformist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber had secretly agreed to cooperate in undermining the position of Gaullist candidates. On KGB instructions, ARGUS also planted similar disinformation in the press. Other active measures devised by Service A to damage “Atlanticist” (pro-American) candidates included planting false reports that the campaigns of Servan-Schreiber and the Christian Democrat leader, Jean Lecanuet, were being financed by American money. In Servan-Schreiber’s constituency of Meurtheet-Moselle, letters were posted to local notables purporting to come from a neo-Nazi group in the FRG which called on all those “with German blood flowing in their veins” to vote for Servan-Schreiber.⁷⁰ While such operations may well have impressed the Centre, it is difficult to believe that they had a significant influence on French voters. Though the vote of the left increased at the general election, the Gaullist-led coalition retained a comfortable majority of seats.

Having greatly exaggerated its success in 1973, the Centre was also confident of its ability to influence the outcome of the May 1974 presidential election. It informed the Central Committee that the Socialist leader, Franáois Mitterrand, standing as the candidate of all the main left-wing parties, had a real chance of victory,⁷¹ and mounted a major active measures campaign against his chief right-wing opponent, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (codenamed KROT—“Mole”). In one week during the campaign, ten officers of the Paris residency Line PR carried out fifty-six allegedly “significant operational measures.”⁷²

A leading part in the active measures against Giscard was taken by one of the residency’s most highly rated and longest-serving agents, BROK, then a well-connected journalist. Originally recruited as an ideological agent in 1946, BROK had begun working for money within a few years to supplement his income as a journalist and to purchase a Paris apartment. In the mid-1970s he was paid over 100,000 francs a year.⁷³ As well as having a total of at least ten case officers,⁷⁴ BROK was so highly regarded that he had meetings with five heads of the FCD Fifth Department, whose responsibilities included operations in France.⁷⁵ During the 1974 presidential election campaign, BROK was provided, on Andropov’s personal instructions, with a fabricated copy of supposedly secret campaign advice given to Giscard d’Estaing by the Americans on ways to defeat Mitterrand and Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Giscard’s unsuccessful Gaullist rival for the right-wing vote during the first round of the election. The forged document was then shown to Chaban-Delmas and others, doubtless to try to make collaboration between him and Giscard more difficult at the second round, when Giscard was the sole candidate of the right.⁷⁶

The only other operation to discredit Giscard d’Estaing during the 1974 presidential election which is described in detail in Mitrokhin’s notes was a somewhat bizarre active measure which reflected the obsession of the KGB’s many conspiracy theorists with Zionist intrigues. In France, as in the United States and elsewhere, the Centre believed that a powerful Jewish lobby was at work behind the scenes, manipulating much of the political process.⁷⁷ The KGB decided to exploit the murder of a female relative of Giscard d’Estaing in October 1973 to mount an extraordinary operation designed to embroil him with the Jewish lobby. Service A concocted a forged document supposedly distributed by a (non-existent) French pro-Israeli group, claiming that she had been killed by Zionists in revenge for Giscard’s part in the prosecution of Jewish financiers while serving as finance minister some years earlier. The Centre was unaccountably proud of the whole absurd operation.⁷⁸ In the second round of the presidential election, Giscard defeated Mitterrand by less than 2 percent of the vote. There is no evidence that KGB active measures had the slightest influence on the result.

IN THE MID-1970S Le Monde (codenamed VESTNIK—“Messenger”—by the KGB)⁷⁹ became embroiled in a controversy over its alleged left-wing, anti-American bias. The most distinguished of its leading conservative critics, Raymond Aron, contrasted Le Monde’s readiness to mention US bombing raids on North Vietnam in the same breath as Nazi wartime atrocities with its reluctance to engage in serious, detailed criticism of Soviet abuses of human rights.⁸⁰ Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipelago provided the best-documented evidence of those abuses, received particularly unfair treatment. In July 1975 Le Monde used a distorted account of a speech by Solzhenitsyn in the United States to smear him as a Nazi sympathizer:

Two months later, Le Monde reported—also inaccurately—that Solzhenitsyn had accepted an invitation to visit Chile from the brutal military dictatorship of General Pinochet.⁸² There is no proof that either of these smears was planted by the KGB. Both, however, were entirely in line with disinformation which the KGB was seeking to plant on the Western press.⁸³ In 1976 a former member of Le Monde’s editorial staff, Michel Legris, published a detailed analysis of what he claimed was its equally biased reporting in favor of the Portuguese Communists, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge and the Palestinian PLO.⁸⁴

The extent of bias in Le Monde reporting during the 1970s still remains controversial, as do claims that it was far readier to condemn American than Soviet policy.⁸⁵ KGB files, however, provide some support for the charges of pro-Soviet bias made by Le Monde’s critics. Mitrokhin’s brief notes on KGB contacts with Le Monde identify two senior journalists and several contributors who were used, in most cases doubtless unwittingly, to disseminate KGB disinformation.⁸⁶ During the 1970s and early 1980s the Paris residency claimed to have influenced Le Monde articles on, inter alia, US policy in Iran, Latin America, the US bicentennial, the dangers of American influence in Europe, the threat of a supranational Europe, US plans for the neutron bomb, causes of East-West tension and the war in Afghanistan.⁸⁷ In July 1981 Andropov received a message from the leadership of the French Communist Party, urging him to arrange for an invitation to visit Afghanistan to be sent to a named journalist on Le Monde, whose reporting, it claimed, would be “sympathetic.”⁸⁸ Some years earlier the same journalist had been generous in his praise of Colonel Muhammar Qaddafi. Le Monde’s susceptibility to KGB disinformation probably derived chiefly from naivety about Soviet intelligence operations. In the aftermath of Watergate and the revelations of abuses by the US intelligence community, Le Monde showed itself—like some other sections of the media—acutely aware of the sins, real and imagined, of the CIA but curiously blind to the extensive active measures program of the KGB.⁸⁹

Unlike Le Monde, the main news agency, Agence France-Presse, attracted little public controversy. It was, however, successfully penetrated both in Paris and abroad. Mitrokhin’s notes identify six agents⁹⁰ and two confidential contacts⁹¹ in the agency recruited between 1956 and 1980. The most senior, LAN, was recruited under false flag by the businessman DRAGUN in 1969 and paid 1,500 francs a month, which he was told came from the Italian company Olivetti, supposedly anxious to have inside information on French government policy.⁹²

Perhaps the most ambitious active measure begun by the KGB during the presidency of Giscard d’Estaing was the launching of the fortnightly newsletter Synthesis (codenamed CACTUS) by its agent of influence Pierre-Charles Pathé (MASON). The first issue of Synthesis, ostensibly left-wing Gaullist in tone, appeared in June 1976 and was sent free of charge to 500 opinion-formers,⁹³ among them 70 percent of the Chamber of Deputies, 47 percent of the Senate and 41 journalists.⁹⁴ The seventy issues published over the next three years, at a cost to the KGB of 252,000 francs,⁹⁵ covered a series of well-worn Service A themes. France was portrayed as the victim of an “underhanded” American economic war in which the US balance of payments deficit allowed Washington to act as a parasite on the wealth of other states.

Giscard d’Estaing was portrayed as an “Atlanticist” who was failing to protect French interests against American exploitation. The United States was a sinister “police democracy” which employed systematic violence against its black minority and all others who stood in its way. The assassination of President Kennedy was “an essential aspect of American democracy.” By contrast, Pol Pot’s massacres were either played down or explained away and the Vietnamese boat people dismissed as middle-class emigrants.⁹⁶

Pathé’s downfall began in 1978 when the DST started tailing his case officer at the Paris residency, Igor Aleksandrovich Sakharovsky (alias “Kuznetsov”), son of a former head of the FCD. After Sakharovsky reported his suspicions that he was being followed to his superiors, his meetings with Pathé were temporarily suspended. When they resumed two months later, Sakharovsky inadvertently led his watchers to Pathé. On July 5, 1979 the radio-intercept post in the Paris residency, while listening into a frequency used by a DST surveillance team, heard its leader announce, “The actors are in place. Let’s start the show!” Immediately afterwards Pathé was arrested in the act of receiving money and documents from Sakharovsky.⁹⁷ In May 1980 Pathé became the only Soviet agent of influence ever convicted in a Western court. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment but was released in 1981. During his trial Pathé admitted to having received small sums of money for articles written on Moscow’s behalf. His KGB file reveals that, in reality, by the time of his arrest he had received a total of 974,823 francs in salary and expenses.⁹⁸

At almost the same time as the Synthesis active measure came to an ignominious end, the Paris residency took the decision to cease funding La Tribune des Nations, founded by its agent André Ulmann (DURANT) in 1946. Since Ulmann’s death in 1970, further KGB subsidies to the Tribune, totaling 1,527,500 francs by 1978, had been channeled through agent NANT, a former associate of Ulmann. In the mid-1970s NANT was considered one of the residency’s dozen most valuable agents, providing intelligence obtained from his contacts in official circles as well as carrying out active measures. According to his file, from 1970 to 1978 he supplied 119 intelligence reports, published 78 articles on topics devised by Service A and helped to cultivate 12 potential agents. In the late 1970s, however, the KGB began to suspect him of “dishonesty” and of being in contact with the DST. Contact with NANT was broken off in 1980. Thus ended the longest and most expensive active measures operation ever run by the Paris residency. The KGB files on DURANT, NANT and three agents closely associated with them—VERONIQUE, JACQUELINE and NANCY—fill 26 volumes, totaling over 8,000 pages.⁹⁹

Each year the Paris residency, like other KGB stations abroad, sent the Centre somewhat crude statistics on its active measures. Those for 1979 totaled 188 articles in the press (despite the demise of Synthesis), 67 “influence conversations;” 19 operations to convey disinformation by word of mouth; 7 operations involving forged documents ; the organization of 2 public meetings; 4 speeches at public gatherings; 2 books; and 4 leaflets.¹⁰⁰ In 1980, largely as a result of the breach with NANT, the number of press articles for which the Paris residency claimed the credit fell to 99. “Influence conversations,” however, increased to 79 and operations to convey disinformation verbally to 59. The residency also reported two active measures involving forged documents, and claimed the credit for organizing two public meetings, inspiring sixteen conference speeches and arranging one leaflet distribution.¹⁰¹

If Paris residency reports are to be taken literally, the “influence conversations” achieved some striking successes. Several leading French politicians from across the political spectrum as well as a few well-known academics, whom it would be unfair to name, are said to have adopted views on the threat posed by American defense policy, the future of East-West relations and the menace to French national sovereignty from a “supranational Europe.” Some of these individuals may well have been imprudent in their contacts with individuals from the Soviet embassy whom they might reasonably have suspected were KGB officers. It seems probable, however, that in many instances the Paris residency merely claimed the credit for policy statements which were relatively favorable to Soviet positions but which it had, in reality, done little to influence. Among the residency’s more absurd claims was the boast that KGB active measures “compelled” two of de Gaulle’s former prime ministers, Michel Debré and Maurice Couve de Murville, the latter the current head of the Foreign Affairs Commission in the National Assembly, to “defend France’s independence from the United States”—a policy to which both were already committed. Though the KGB also claimed to have brought influence to bear on close advisers of the President, Giscard d’Estaing, the Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, the Foreign Minister, Jean Franáois-Poncet, and the Socialist leader, Franáois Mitterrand, this supposed “influence” had no discernible effect on their policies.¹⁰²

KGB policy during the 1981 presidential election campaign was less clear-cut than during the election seven years earlier. At the end of the 1970s the left-wing alliance including both Socialists and Communists, which had supported Mitterrand in 1974, had broken down, and on the first round of the election he had to face opposition from the PCF leader, Georges Marchais, as well as from candidates of the right. Though KGB active measures in 1981 reflected greater hostility to Giscard d’Estaing and the candidates of the right than to Mitterrand, they were no longer, as in 1974, guided by the simple strategy of securing a Mitterrand victory. (It was clear from the outset that Marchais, who won only 15 percent of the vote, had no chance of winning the election.) The individual active measures recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin suggest that bringing pressure on all the leading candidates was considered a more important objective than ensuring the victory of any one of them. As in 1974, however, the Centre seriously exaggerated its ability to influence the course of events.

In May 1980, Giscard d’Estaing had become the first Western leader to hold talks with Brezhnev since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, thus helping to rescue the Soviet Union from its pariah status in the West. In preparing for the meeting, Brezhnev’s advisers must have been greatly assisted in their continuing access to all the diplomatic traffic exchanged between Paris and the French embassy in Moscow. On Giscard’s return to Paris, he announced, perhaps somewhat naively, that the Soviet Union had agreed to withdraw one of its divisions from Afghanistan.¹⁰³ Though Giscard’s attitude to the Soviet Union subsequently appeared to harden, the Paris residency embarked on active measures designed to persuade him that he would increase his chances of reelection by presenting himself as “the advocate of dialogue with [eastern Europe] against American domination.” Disinformation was sent to a member of Giscard’s staff which it was hoped would convince him that the most damaging scandal of his presidency, that of the diamonds given him by “Emperor” Jean Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, had been engineered by the CIA.¹⁰⁴ The residency also claimed the credit for “inciting” attacks by the unofficial Gaullist candidate, Michel Debré, on alleged “departures from Gaullist principles” and pro-American tendencies on the part of the official Gaullist candidate, Jacques Chirac. Other active measures included schemes “to expose pro-Atlantic and pro-Israeli elements” in the policies of Mitterrand and one of his future prime ministers, Michel Rocard.¹⁰⁵

According to an opinion poll during the campaign, 53 percent of Jewish electors intended to vote for Mitterrand as compared with only 23 percent for Giscard d’Estaing. ¹⁰⁶ The KGB was predictably suspicious of Mitterrand’s popularity with Jewish voters. As in 1974 the active measures devised by Service A reflected the KGB’s anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, in particular its belief in the power of the French Jewish lobby. The most absurd of the residency’s operations during the election was probably its attempt to “compromise the Zionists” by passing bogus information to the French authorities purporting to show that they were planning “extremist measures” to disrupt the campaigns of Giscard d’Estaing and Debré.¹⁰⁷ It is highly unlikely that this or any other active measure had any significant influence either on the main candidates or on the outcome of the presidential election.

Mitterrand’s success in May 1981 was followed by a landslide Socialist victory in the legislative elections a month later. Though the career of the veteran Socialist Party agent GILES, recruited a quarter of a century earlier, was by then almost over, he remained in touch with his case officer, Valentin Antonovich Sidak (codenamed RYZHOV), who was stationed in Paris from 1978 to 1983 under diplomatic cover as second secretary at the Soviet embassy. He continued to provide Sidak with what the Centre considered inside information from “the close entourage of F[rançois] Mitterrand.”¹⁰⁸

The arrest of Pathé in 1979 and the decision to break off contact with NANT in 1980 caused a major change of strategy in KGB active measures to influence the French press after Mitterrand’s election as president in May 1981. An unusually frank enquiry by the FCD Fifth Department concluded—probably correctly—that Synthesis, La Tribune des Nations and other periodicals funded by the KGB had had “practically no influence on public opinion.” In future the Paris residency was instructed to concentrate on the cheaper and more productive task of acquiring agents in established newspapers and magazines.¹⁰⁹ The value of some of its existing media agents, however, was called into question—among them BROK, probably the KGB’s longest-serving journalist recruit. During the 1970s BROK had been one of the best-paid and most highly regarded French agents. A subsequent review of his work concluded, however, that he was “insincere, untruthful in his contacts with operational officers, exaggerating his information and operational possibilities, inflating the value of his information, and developing mercenary tendencies, lack of discipline and failure to carry out assignments.” In 1981 BROK’s 35-year service as a Soviet agent was abruptly terminated.¹¹⁰ The Centre continued to seek new agents among French journalists, but concluded that, in a television age, the Western press lacked the influence on public opinion which it had possessed twenty years earlier.¹¹¹

AT THE BEGINNING of the 1980s, partly as a result of the KGB’s declining confidence in its Paris agents of influence, the Centre probably regarded ST as the most successful part of its French operations. By the mid-1970s (if not sooner), the Paris residency had twice as many Line X officers and agents (over twenty of each) as any other residency in the European Community.¹¹² Line X operations continued to expand during the late 1970s and—probably—the early 1980s. ST documents sent to the Centre (835 in 1973, 829 in 1974, 675 in 1975) rose to a record 1,021 in the first half of 1977.¹¹³ A total of 36 Line X officers served in Paris for all or part of the period 1974 to 1979, far more once again than in any other EC country.¹¹⁴ By 1980, if not before, France had become the KGB’s third most productive source of ST, providing 8 percent of all ST received by the Soviet Military Industrial Commission (VPK).¹¹⁵

The most important and best-paid French ST agent during the 1970s identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin was ALAN (also codenamed FLINT and TELON), an employee of a defense contractor (codenamed AVANTGARDE). ALAN was a walk-in. In 1972 he went to the Paris embassy, explained that he was earning 7,000 francs a month, needed extra money to buy a house (possibly a second home) in the 150,000-200,000 francs price range and was willing to sell his firm’s secrets. Over the next six years he provided technical documentation and parts of missile guidance systems, laser weapons, detection systems for high-speed low-flying targets and infrared night-vision equipment for tanks, helicopters and other uses. ALAN’s file records that his ST “fully met the requirements of the highest authorities [Politburo].”¹¹⁶ In December 1974 his controller, Boris Federovich Kesarev, a Line X officer at the Paris residency, was recommended for the Order of the Red Star in a citation signed personally by Andropov.¹¹⁷ ALAN was paid over 200,000 francs a year,¹¹⁸ but was dismissed by his firm in 1978 on suspicion of passing its secrets to a Western intelligence service. The KGB appears to have escaped suspicion.¹¹⁹

Apart from ALAN’s intelligence, the French ST most highly rated by the Centre probably concerned France’s Ariane rocket and its fuel, Cryogäne.¹²⁰ From 1974 to 1979 a French engineer, Pierre Bourdiol, recruited by the KGB in 1970, was employed on the Ariane project by SNIAS, the predecessor of the state-owned aerospace group Aerospatiale.¹²¹ Probably in 1979 or 1980, agent KARL, a specialist in electromagnetism, succeeded in obtaining further intelligence on Ariane from an unidentified subsource. KARL was paid a salary of about 150,000 francs a year and received bonuses of over 30,000 francs in 1979 and 1980.¹²² In 1982 KARL recruited NIKE, another highly rated Line X agent, who worked in one of the laboratories of the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques. NIKE was enlisted under false flag, believing he was in the pay of a foreign firm. His file records that his information “satisfied priority requirements” of Directorate T.¹²³

Just as Line X operations in France reached their apogee in the early 1980s, they were compromised by a French agent inside Directorate T, Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov (codenamed FAREWELL), who had been stationed at the Paris residency from 1965 to 1970. Vetrov was an ardent Francophile, deeply disillusioned with the Soviet system, and resentful at his treatment by Directorate T which had transferred him from operations to analysis. In the spring of 1981 he sent a message, via a French businessman returning from Moscow, to the DST headquarters in Paris, offering his services as a spy. Over the next year Vetrov supplied over 4,000 documents on Soviet ST collection and analysis. The FAREWELL operation came to an abrupt end after a brutally bizarre episode in a Moscow park in February 1982 whose explanation still remains unclear. While drinking—and probably quarreling—with a KGB secretary with whom he was having an affair, Vetrov was approached by a KGB colleague. Startled, and perhaps fearing that his double life had been discovered, he stabbed his colleague to death. When his lover tried to run away, Vetrov stabbed her too, probably to prevent her revealing what had happened, but she survived to give evidence against him. Though Vetrov began a twelve-year sentence for murder at Irkurksk prison in the autumn of 1981, it was several months before the KGB began to suspect that he was also guilty of espionage. Vetrov wrote his own death sentence with a confession which concluded, “My only regret is that I was not able to cause more damage to the Soviet Union and render more service to France.”¹²⁴

Vetrov’s documents added enormously to Western intelligence services’ knowledge of Soviet ST operations.¹²⁵ In July 1981, two months after he became president, Franáois Mitterrand personally informed Ronald Reagan of the documents being received from FAREWELL. Soon afterwards, Marcel Chalet, the head of the DST, visited Washington to brief Vice-President George Bush, a former Director of Central Intelligence, in greater detail. The first public disclosure of Vetrov’s material followed the discovery early in 1983 that bugs in the teleprinters of the French embassy in Moscow had been relaying incoming and outgoing telegrams to the KGB for the previous seven years. Mitterrand responded by ordering the expulsion from France on April 5, 1983 of forty-seven Soviet intelligence officers—the largest such exodus since operation FOOT in Britain twelve years earlier. Many of those expelled, in particular the Line X officers, had been identified by Vetrov. When the Soviet ambassador, Yuli Vorontsev, arrived at the Quai d’Orsay to deliver an official protest, Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson reduced him to silence by producing one of the KGB documents on ST operations supplied by Vetrov.¹²⁶

THOUGH THE KGB residency in Rome ran less than half as many agents as its counterpart in Paris (just over twenty in the mid-1970s as compared to about fifty in France),¹²⁷ the pattern of agent recruitment in the two countries was broadly similar. Immediately after the Second World War Soviet intelligence succeeded, with the assistance of the Communist Party leadership, in penetrating a number of major ministries in both Italy and France. By the 1970s, however, a majority of the best-paid Line PR agents run by the Rome and Paris residencies were journalists rather than civil servants.

As in France, the post-war popularity of the Communist Party and the brief period of Communist participation in government created the best opportunities Soviet intelligence was ever to enjoy in Italy for agent penetration.¹²⁸ Like JOUR, probably the most important of the post-war French recruits, DARIO, the longest-serving and probably the most valuable Italian agent, worked in the foreign ministry, where he had recruited his first three female agents before the Second World War. On his return to the ministry after the war, he recruited two more female typists: TOPO (later renamed LEDA), whom he married, and NIKOL (later INGA).¹²⁹

For most of the next three decades DARIO was instrumental in obtaining a phenomenal amount of classified foreign ministry material.¹³⁰ During the mid-1950s he succeeded in recruiting three further female agents: VENETSIANKA, who was on the staff of the Italian embassy in Paris; OVOD, on whom Mitrokhin’s notes provide no further information; and SUZA, who worked for the diplomatic adviser to President Giovanni Gronchi and gained access to a wide variety of ambassadors’ reports and other classified foreign ministry documents.¹³¹ During the early 1960s DARIO’s wife LEDA met her case officer from the Rome residency once a week in cinemas and other locations in the city. As she shook hands with him, she passed over a microfilm of the classified foreign ministry documents she had photographed during the previous week.¹³²

In 1968 the Centre decided to put DARIO “on ice,” and awarded him a pension for life of 180 hard currency roubles a month. Four years later, however, it reactivated him in order to cultivate a female cipher officer in a foreign embassy and another typist at the Italian foreign ministry, who appears to have been given the codename MARA.¹³³ In March 1975, forty-three years after DARIO’s recruitment, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Red Star. He subsequently collected his pension at regular intervals by traveling abroad either to the Soviet Union or to some other country.¹³⁴

After the Second World War the Rome residency also successfully penetrated the interior ministry, thanks chiefly to DEMID, a ministry official recruited in 1945 who acted as agent-recruiter.¹³⁵ DEMID’s first major cultivation inside the ministry was a cipher clerk codenamed QUESTOR, who agreed to supply information on the contents of the classified telegrams which he enciphered and deciphered. QUESTOR, however, believed for several years that his information was being passed by DEMID not to Soviet intelligence but to the PCI, and refused to hand over the ciphers themselves. Late in 1953 the Rome residency decided to force the pace and instructed DEMID to offer QUESTOR 100,000 lire for the loan “for a few hours” of the code and cipher books used by the ministry. QUESTOR accepted. On March 3, 1954 DEMID finally told him that he was working not for the PCI but for the KGB, and obtained a receipt from him for the 100,000 lire. Soon afterwards QUESTOR was handed over to the control of STEPAN, an operations officer at the Rome residency, to whom he supplied a phenomenal range of official ciphers to which he succeeded in gaining access. Among them were those of the prefectures, the finance ministry, central and regional headquarters of the carabinieri, Italian diplomatic missions abroad, the Italian general staff and the military-run foreign intelligence service, SIFAR (Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate). QUESTOR also obtained interior ministry lists of Italian Communists, foreign nationals and others who were under surveillance by the Police security service (Pubblica Sicurezza).¹³⁶

The Centre considered its penetration of the Italian interior ministry to be so important that in 1955 it handed over control of it to a newly established illegal residency in Rome, headed by YEFRAT (“Euphrates”). YEFRAT was Ashot Abgarovich Akopyan, a 40-year-old Armenian from Baku who had assumed the identity of a live double, Oganes Saradzhyan, a Lebanese Armenian living in the Soviet Union. Like many illegals, he was a gifted linguist, fluent—according to his file—in Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, French, Italian, Romanian and Turkish. His wife, Kira Viktorovna Chertenko, an ethnic Russian from Baku, was also an illegal, codenamed TANYA. YEFRAT and TANYA began their careers as illegals in Romania in 1948, obtained Italian visas by bribery and moved to Rome where they acquired passports in the name of Saradzhyan from the Lebanese embassy. YEFRAT’s original mission was to prepare the establishment of a new illegal residency in Iran, but in 1952 he and his wife were directed to Egypt instead. In 1954 they were recalled to Rome where YEFRAT was given 19,500 dollars to purchase a business to provide cover for an illegal residency. He was not, however, a successful businessman; an Italian firm with which he was involved went bankrupt.¹³⁷

YEFRAT’s residency was given control of DEMID, QUESTOR and a third agent in the interior ministry, CENSOR, who had probably been recruited by DEMID. CENSOR’s greatest coup was to abstract top secret documents from the safe of the director general of the security service in the ministry.¹³⁸ YEFRAT also succeeded in renewing contact with a former agent, OMAR, who had been sacked from the interior ministry cipher department in 1948 and had obtained a job in what Mitrokhin’s notes describe as “a service attached to the American embassy.” For unexplained reasons, however, the quantity of high-grade intelligence produced by the agents in the interior ministry declined during the later 1950s. When exhortations by the Centre and a personal meeting between YEFRAT and Lazarev, the head of the Illegals Directorate S, failed to produce results, YEFRAT was recalled and his illegal residency closed. Control of his agents was handed back to the legal Rome residency.¹³⁹

THE ITALIAN EMBASSY in Moscow, like that of France, was a major KGB target. Whereas Second Chief Directorate operations against French diplomats culminated in an embarrassing public scandal, those against the Italian embassy achieved spectacular, unpublicized success. The weapons used against Italian diplomats were the normal stock-in-trade of the SCD: a combination of sexual compromise and blackmail. The SCD’s first victim was IKAR (“Icarus”), one of the service attachés in the Italian embassy who was seduced in the late 1950s by a KGB swallow, who then claimed to be pregnant and pretended to have an abortion. IKAR was confronted by an SCD officer, posing as the swallow’s enraged husband and signed a document agreeing to become a KGB agent in return for the supposed scandal being hushed up. In addition to providing classified information, IKAR also gave his SCD controller the combination number of his safe and a copy of the cipher he used to communicate with Rome.

IKAR, however, became increasingly anxious at the KGB’s hold over him—finally handing his controller a rather pathetic letter, promising to continue work as a Soviet agent but appealing for the undertaking he had signed to be destroyed:

IKAR was given a copy of his signed undertaking, carefully fabricated to look like the original, and destroyed it with evident relief in the presence of his controller. The original, however, remained in IKAR’s file, together with a Russian translation which was later transcribed by Mitrokhin.¹⁴⁰

Another member of the Italian embassy staff, codenamed PLATON, was also successfully blackmailed into becoming a KGB agent after falling victim to the same SCD honeytrap. The swallow (codenamed R) planted on him by the SCD moved into his Moscow flat, then pretended that she was pregnant. PLATON paid for her to have a (fictitious) abortion (a criminal act under Italian law), was threatened with exposure and agreed to become a KGB agent. By the time Mitrokhin saw PLATON’s file in 1976, he had left Moscow and a plan had been drawn up for Georgi Pavlovich Antonov, an Italian-speaking FCD officer formerly stationed in Rome, to renew contact with him in Belgium.¹⁴¹ Whether PLATON continued as a KGB agent after 1976 remains unknown.

One senior married Italian diplomat in Moscow was the victim of two honeytraps. When first targeted, ENERO (also codenamed INSPECTOR) was having an affair with a secretary at the French embassy. The SCD concluded that he had an insatiable “appetite for women,” selected a swallow, agent SUKHOVA, as his maid and secretly photographed them making love. During a visit to Tashkent, ENERO was seduced by another KGB swallow, Diana Georgiyevna Kazachenko, and further photographs were taken of their lovemaking. A Russian friend of ENERO (who, unknown to ENERO, was a KGB officer) then told him that the KGB had come into possession of photographs of him in bed with SUKHOVA, taken by a criminal gang who were about to stand trial, charged with taking compromising photographs which they intended to use for blackmail and extortion. Almost simultaneously, ENERO was informed that Kazachenko’s relatives had lodged an official complaint, accusing him of rape and claiming that he had made Kazachenko pregnant. Kazachenko, it was claimed, was now an invalid as a result of medical complications arising from the abortion.

An SCD operations officer, I.I. Kuznetsov, told ENERO that the Soviet authorities were prepared to hush both matters up if he agreed to “help” them. Though ENERO protested that Kuznetsov’s proposal was straightforward blackmail, he quickly gave way to it. According to his file, the intelligence he provided included information that the embassy was illegally smuggling into Moscow by diplomatic bag roubles purchased abroad at a fraction of the official exchange rate. Before leaving Moscow in the early 1970s, ENERO agreed to continue work as a KGB agent on his return to Italy and was given an initial payment of 500 US dollars. Soon afterwards Kusnetsov visited him in Rome to introduce his new case officer from the local residency. A year later, however, the residency reported that ENERO was avoiding meetings with his controller and had changed his private address. In 1979 a residency officer resumed contact but, since ENERO was now retired and in poor health, he was removed from the agent network.¹⁴²

The SCD’s greatest triumph in its operations against the Italian embassy in Moscow was the recruitment of a senior diplomat, successively codenamed ARTUR and ARLEKINO (“Harlequin”). ARTUR was first recruited by the Czechoslovak StB in the 1960s, which threatened to expose both his affair with a prostitute and his currency speculation unless he agreed to cooperate. When he was posted to Moscow some years later, control of him was transferred by the Czechs to the SCD. ARTUR’s file records that he was rewarded with “valuable presents” and all-expenses-paid hunting expeditions in the Moscow area. After his return to Italy, ARTUR continued to work for the KGB until 1983, several years after his retirement, when his muchreduced access to classified information led to his removal from the agent network.¹⁴³

A number of other Italian embassies around the world also contained KGB agents: among them DENIS, a cipher clerk stationed in the Middle East and recruited in 1961;¹⁴⁴ VITTORIO, a former member of the PCI recruited in Latin America in 1970;¹⁴⁵ and PLEMYANNIK (“Nephew”), a cipher clerk in the Middle East recruited with the help of Bulgarian intelligence in 1977.¹⁴⁶ As well as providing large numbers of documents, the KGB’s agents inside the Italian foreign ministry and embassies abroad must also have made a major contribution to the success of the Sixteenth Directorate in decrypting Italian diplomatic telegrams, which continued at least until the mid-1980s.¹⁴⁷ Mitrokhin’s notes provide very few details on the content of the remarkable number of diplomatic documents which reached the Centre and nothing on the content of the decrypts. The implications of the KGB files on Italy and France to which he had access are, none the less, very great. So great was the Centre’s access to classified French and Italian diplomatic traffic that, at numerous points during the Cold War, both France and Italy were conducting, so far as the Soviet Union was concerned, something akin to open diplomacy.

THOUGH LINE X operations in Italy were on about half the scale of those in France, they included some striking successes. In 1970 the co-owners of a small high-tech company, METIL (“Methyl”) and BUTIL (“Butyl”), jointly supplied the KGB with full technical documentation on the production of butyl rubber, which was used in the construction of the Soviet Sumgait rubber factory and led to the redesign of production lines at the Nizhnekama Combine and the Kuybyshev Synthetic Rubber Works. Directorate T calculated that their ST had produced a saving of 16 million roubles. METIL and BUTIL were paid 50,000 dollars. In the mid-1970s BUTIL provided other highly rated intelligence, some from American sources, on chemical and petrochemical processes.¹⁴⁸

In 1970 the Rome residency had nine Line X officers who ran about ten agents,¹⁴⁹ composed chiefly of businessmen but including an important minority of academics.¹⁵⁰ There was some expansion of ST operations during the later 1970s both in Rome¹⁵¹ and in Milan, where a senior Line X officer, Anatoli Vasilyevich Kuznetsov (codenamed KOLIN), was posted in 1978 under consular cover.¹⁵² Probably the most important Line X agent at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s was UCHITEL (“Teacher”), who taught at a major university and was controlled by Kuznetsov.¹⁵³ Using his wide range of academic and business contacts, UCHITEL provided ST from a total of eight major companies and research institutes in Italy, West Germany, France and Belgium, and carried out other KGB assignments in the USA and FRG. UCHITEL’s most valuable intelligence seems to have concerned military aircraft, helicopters, aero-engine construction and airborne guidance systems. Among the intelligence he supplied was information on NATO’s newest combat aircraft, the Tornado, jointly developed by Britain, the FRG and Italy.¹⁵⁴ Doubtless unknown to UCHITEL, at least one of his university colleagues, a nuclear physicist codenamed MARIO, was also a KGB agent.¹⁵⁵ Another academic, KARS, who operated as a Line X agent in both Italy and the United States, also appears to have been based at the same university.¹⁵⁶

Though Soviet scientists working as KGB agents or co-optees used a variety of methods to lure their Western colleagues into secret collaboration, they commonly promised both money and privileged access to Soviet research in their fields. A probably typical example was the agreement, dated September 12, 1976, concluded by Professor Georgi Nikolayevich Aleksandrov (agent AYUN) of the Lenin Polytechnic Institute Imeni Kalinin (LPI) with KULON, a senior member of an Italian research institute:

Most meetings between KULON and his KGB contacts took place in Switzerland. ¹⁵⁷ Though KULON seems to have remained a confidential contact, similar approaches to other Western scientists sometimes led to their recruitment as agents.

ST operations in Italy suffered a serious setback on August 5, 1981 with the unpublicized expulsion of probably the most senior Line X officer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, which caused inevitable KGB anxiety as to whether UCHITEL and his other agents had been detected by Italian counterintelligence. An investigation at the Centre arrived at three possible explanations for the expulsion: that some of Kuznetsov’s Line X operations dating from his period at the Paris residency from 1970 to 1975 had come to light; or that his work as security officer for the Soviet colony in northern Italy, which he combined with his Line X work, had blown his cover as consul in Milan; or that his frequent trips from Milan to Turin had aroused suspicion.¹⁵⁸ It does not seem to have occurred to the Centre until its investigation of the FAREWELL case in 1982 that the leak which led to Kuznetsov’s downfall might have come from within Directorate T.

BY THE 1970s a majority of the most highly rated Line PR agents run by both the Rome and Paris residencies were journalists. One of the files noted by Mitrokhin contains a list of the thirteen most highly paid political intelligence agents run by the Rome residency at the beginning of 1977.¹⁵⁹ Of the six best-paid, each of whom received 240 hard currency roubles a month, at least three were journalists: FRANK, recruited in 1966, who held a senior position on a major newspaper;¹⁶⁰ POD-VIZHNY (“Agile”), also a well-known journalist;¹⁶¹ and STAZHER (“Trainee”), who had been recruited in 1969 and worked in the Rome bureau of a news agency.¹⁶² The other three agents paid 240 roubles a month by the Rome residency were DARIO, the veteran agent-recruiter in the Foreign Ministry; NEMETS (“German”), a well-known left-wing politician; and ORLANDO, who cannot be clearly identified from Mitrokhin’s notes.¹⁶³

The next best-paid agents of the Rome residency at the beginning of 1977 were six who received 170 roubles a month. No information is available on the occupation of one of the six, ACERO; Mitrokhin’s notes reveal his identity and indicate that he was probably recruited not later than 1969, but give no further details.¹⁶⁴ Of the five whose occupations are identified, three—FIDELIO, RENATO and MAVR—were journalists. RENATO, recruited in 1974, was editor of a periodical.¹⁶⁵ FIDELIO, who became an agent in 1975, was director of a press agency.¹⁶⁶ MAVR, a left-wing journalist on a leading Rome daily recruited some years earlier than RENATO or FIDELIO, also acted as agent-recruiter. Among his recruits was ARALDO, a civil servant who, according to MAVR, regarded the whole Italian political establishment as a “den of thieves” and was happy to earn a share of the spoils by selling classified documents.¹⁶⁷

The other two agents paid 170 roubles a month by the Rome residency were LORETO, a (probably disillusioned) Maoist militant who provided information on China’s contacts with its supporters in the European left,¹⁶⁸ and METSENAT (“Patronage”), a corrupt civil servant whose motives were assessed as purely mercenary. ¹⁶⁹ The final codename on the January 1977 list of the Rome residency’s most valuable agents is that of TURIST, a newspaper publisher who was paid 150 roubles a month.¹⁷⁰ In all, at least seven of the residency’s thirteen best-paid recruits, who each received between 150 and 240 roubles a month, were journalists. As in Paris, where a majority of the KGB’s most highly rated Line PR agents were also journalists, the Centre’s probably exaggerated confidence in their potential as agents of influence led it to undertake an ambitious series of active measures throughout the 1970s.

A Centre report on the Rome residency in August 1977 concluded that it had “an effective and reliable agent network” with sources in the foreign ministry, cabinet office, defense ministry and the main political parties. Each month the residency obtained between 40 and 50 intelligence reports from its agents. It was, however, criticized for its comparative lack of success against American, NATO and European Community targets. The Centre’s greatest praise was reserved for the residency’s influence operations: “[Its] agents coped successfully with active measures, including those on a large scale.” During 1977 operation CRESCENDO, which used forged documents to discredit the human rights policy of the Carter administration, and operation BONZA, targeted against the Chinese, were singled out for particular praise.¹⁷¹

The Rome residency’s annual statistics for its active measures in 1977 were as follows:

Such statistics, of course, mean relatively little unless it can be demonstrated that the active measures to which they refer had a significant influence on Italian opinion. Nowhere in the files examined by Mitrokhin, however, is there any sign of a serious, critical assessment of what active measures in Italy (or in most other countries) had actually achieved. Instead, any sign that Western opinion was hostile to any aspect of American policy or sympathetic to the Soviet Union was liable to be seized on uncritically as evidence of a successful KGB operation. Just as it suited the residencies to exaggerate the success of their active measures, so it also suited the Centre to report these successes to the Politburo.

AT LEAST HALF the Rome residency’s best-paid Line PR Italian agents in January 1977 were either taken off the KGB payroll or retired over the next five years.¹⁷³ The first to go was TURIST. Apparently disillusioned by the evidence of Soviet abuses of human rights, TURIST made various pretexts for declining to co-operate during 1977 and by the end of the year had broken contact. According to his case officer, he “did not correctly understand and interpret the situation of believers and of the Church itself in the USSR, or that of dissidents.” In other words, TURIST had been alienated by the persecution of Soviet religious and political dissidents. An examination of TURIST’s file led Mitrokhin to doubt whether he had ever been a fully committed KGB agent.¹⁷⁴

In 1978 FIDELIO was also removed from the agent network after it was discovered that he was in regular touch with—and doubtless receiving money from—Hungarian intelligence, and had also made contact with the Czechoslovak and Polish services.¹⁷⁵ In 1979 DARIO retired, followed by METSENAT in the following year.¹⁷⁶ Simultaneously, RENATO and FRANK—like TURIST—were becoming disillusioned. RENATO was put on ice in 1980, initially for a four-year period;¹⁷⁷ there is no evidence as to whether contact with him was subsequently resumed. FRANK’s case officer complained that he was too easily “influenced by anti-Soviet propaganda” following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland two years later. FRANK was also reported to be associated with one of those arrested for involvement with the Red Brigades. He was removed from the agent network in 1982.¹⁷⁸

The disillusion of FRANK, who a few years earlier had been one of the KGB’s most highly paid Italian agents, epitomized the problems faced by Service A as it tried to devise new influence operations in the early 1980s. Though no KGB report dared say so, active measures could not possibly repair the damage done to the image of the Soviet Union by the invasion of Afghanistan and the suppression of Solidarity.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE of the KGB’s active measures during the early and mid-1980s in Italy and France, as in western Europe as a whole, were those which exploited popular currents of anti-Americanism and the fear of nuclear war. Though the first step in the renewed nuclear arms race had been the Soviet decision in 1978 to begin the deployment of SS20s (a new generation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles), Western peace movements were far more critical of the subsequent decision by NATO to station Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe from 1983. As Mitterrand once drily observed, “The missiles are in the East, but the peace protests are in the West.” It is reasonable to assume, but difficult to prove, that the constant stream of Soviet peace propaganda, reinforced by KGB active measures, encouraged—even if it did not cause—the overconcentration by most Western peace activists on the nuclear menace posed by Reagan and his NATO allies rather than on that from the Soviet Union. In February 1984, Kryuchkov reported to a conference of senior FCD officers, when reviewing active measures over the previous two years:

The Centre’s confidence that it now possessed a nerve-hold on Western public opinion was reflected in the first three priorities which it laid down for active measures in 1984, the year before Gorbachev became Soviet leader:

KGB active measures in western Europe were much less successful during the Gorbachev era as a result both of East-West détente and of glasnost within the Soviet Union. By 1987 Gorbachev and his advisers were visibly concerned that Western exposure of KGB disinformation might take the gloss off the new Soviet image in the West. The claim that the AIDS virus had been “manufactured” by American biological warfare specialists—one of the most successful active measures of the mid-1980s—was officially disowned by Moscow, though it continued to circulate for several years in the Third World and the more gullible sections of the Western media. During the later 1980s Soviet front organizations were increasingly exposed as frauds. The most important of them, the World Peace Council, lost most of its remaining credibility in 1989 when it admitted that 90 percent of its income came from the Soviet Union.¹⁸¹

In September 1990 Kryuchkov acknowledged in an “Order of the Chairman of the KGB” that there had been a serious decline in the effectiveness of active measures—and in the FCD’s faith in them:

Like other members of the KGB old guard, Kryuchkov refused to accept that the end of the Cold War implied any decline in the importance of active measures either in western Europe or elsewhere.¹⁸² That view still appears to be well-represented in the senior ranks of the SVR today.