INTRODUCTION
The Secret Intelligence Service has existed for 150 years.* We, for 10. That is their advantage. But we have our advantages: a clear goal, our incorruptibility, sense of purpose; but above all, devotion to the cause of socialism.
—ARTUR ARTUZOV, head of counterintelligence OGPU, 19271
As recently as July 2010, the United States expelled eleven Russian spies who had been operating deep under cover for up to a decade. The leak was discovered to have come from Colonel Aleksandr Poteev, whose daughter was living in the United States. Poteev had been deputy head of S Directorate, responsible for agents under deep cover (“illegals”) at the SVR, the KGB’s successor for foreign intelligence.
A senior official from the Kremlin warned, “We know who he is and where he is. He committed treachery either for money or he simply got caught for something. But you cannot doubt the fact that a Mercader [Trotsky’s assassin] has already been sent after him. The fate of such a person is unenviable. He will drag this along behind him throughout his entire life and each day he will live in fear of retribution.”2
Was this just an idle boast? Four years earlier, on November 23, 2006, Aleksandr Litvinenko, a Russian citizen formerly an officer in Soviet intelligence (FSB), died in agony from an obscure cause (poisoning by radioactive polonium-210) at University College Hospital in London. Litvinenko had taken tea at the Millenium Hotel, Grosvenor Square, with two other Russians, one also a former officer of the FSB, Andrei Lugovoi. Lugovoi and his compatriot Dmitrii Kovtun left a trail of polonium across London, leading to a frantic search for others who might also have been poisoned by fortuitous contact.
Litvinenko’s previous boss, Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Gusak, branded him “an out-and-out traitor” on the grounds that he had betrayed Russian agents to British intelligence. For this he would have faced the death penalty in Soviet times. Indeed, one of those exposed had offered to assassinate him.3 Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, later confirmed that her husband had indeed received tens of thousands of pounds from MI5 and MI6 for services rendered.4
Litvinenko and others had originally found a patron in a rising oligarch, the late Boris Berezovsky, the victim of an attempted assassination in July 1994. The former head of Moscow counterintelligence claims that Litvinenko, flanked by others, approached him about forming an assassination squad to wipe out organised crime to protect figures such as Berezovsky. He ejected them from his office, brusquely dismissing the proposal with the comment that Russia was not Brazil, at one time a country of death squads run by policemen.5
In 1997, Litvinenko became deputy to Gusak, then head of the seventh department of the directorate, responsible for investigating and prosecuting criminal organisations. Here, Litvinenko and his colleagues engaged in kidnapping, assault, and “protection.”6 Litvinenko was safe, however, only so long as his benefactor Berezovsky remained close to power. Once Vladimir Putin took over, having been funded by Berezovsky on extravagant expectations of political influence, Putin turned against the oligarchs as potential usurpers. More astute than some and with much to lose, Berezovsky fled into exile. Meanwhile, Litvinenko was imprisoned, and on release, he followed his erstwhile patron to London.
If, at this point, Litvinenko did indeed identify to MI6 former fellow officers involved in his nefarious practices, those officers would have been exposed to blackmail, vengeance, and penetration by MI5 or MI6. Worse still, some were by then operating in Britain: in 2003, Putin had given the FSB, formerly the Second Main Directorate of the KGB with no experience of foreign operations, unprecedented permission to operate abroad. This measure is said to have infuriated the SVR, formerly the First Main Directorate and uniquely responsible. So when the FSB apparently bungled the Litvinenko murder, a certain amount of schadenfreude was evident at the SVR.7
In Britain, the Crown Prosecution Service sought to bring the accused, Lugovoi, to trial. But the Russian government vociferously refused to consider extradition; Lugovoi had, in the meantime, managed to secure a seat in the Russian parliament, thus forestalling any question of extradition. The two countries remain at an impasse, and the British government, fearing revelations about the behaviour of the secret services, prohibited the release of information that could throw light directly on Litvinenko’s assassination. Now, however, a public enquiry has been opened in Britain to determine responsibility for the murder. This enquiry can oblige the British government to divulge classified information and resolve the matter, though the final report is to be censored.
The significance of these stunning events is extraordinary. Russia paid a price in the deterioration of relations with a leading European power and in damage to its public image. This surely outweighed the meagre advantage gained by defending the assassination of a minor former intelligence officer who had turned coat.
Yet this was by no means the first time Moscow chose to affirm its unrestricted sovereignty by sacrificing international relations at the altar of vengeance, allowing a cascade of pent-up emotions to overwhelm the normal constraints of reason. The most striking precedent was set nearly a century ago, under Stalin. At the time, the revolution was a very recent memory. Only the Reds were fully aware of how close they had come to defeat at the hands of the Whites. The obsession with a possible reversal of fortune, even after victory had been secured, was therefore completely natural.
The tsarist counterrevolutionary organisation in Paris, ROVS, counted twenty thousand active members. Its leader was the notoriously psychopathic Lieutenant General Aleksandr Kutyepov. He had ordered his men to step up terrorist activity within the Soviet Union; their attacks were aimed at the Party and the secret police (OGPU). The Kremlin decided to dispose of him once and for all. Next in line of fire was his deputy, Major General Nikolai Skoblin, but here the idea was to turn him and his wife, the celebrated opera singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, which they did within a matter of months.
Operation Zamorskie sprang into action. At around 11:00 a.m. on January 26, 1930, while on his weekly walk to church, Kutyepov was bundled into a car at the corner of rue Oudinot and rue Rousselet. He was never seen again. On holiday in the South of France at the time, Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs Nikolai Krestinsky suddenly found the climate change from mild to malevolent. “The situation may become serious,” the Soviet ambassador in Paris warned. “[Prime Minister André] Tardieu is in London, [Foreign Minister Aristide] Briand has returned for only a few days. The government is in fact headless. It is possible that anti-Soviet forces will try to use this anarchy to create an atmosphere conducive to a breach of relations.” The Soviet mission was effectively in a state of siege. Yet, in Moscow, the leadership reacted with indignation rather than fear. Its official mouthpiece, Izvestiya, aggressively asked whether the French government “prefers the maintenance of diplomatic relations with the government of the Soviet Union to co-operation with white guard emigrés?”8
The Russians vigorously rebutted all allegations, though few believed them. Not until September 22, 1965, did the Soviet military newspaper Krasnaya zvezda refer to Sergei Puzitskii, former deputy head of counterintelligence, as having “brilliantly carried out the operation to arrest Kutyepov.” The operation had been organised by Yakov Serebryanskii, who headed the “Special Group Uniquely Designated,” which was separate from and not subordinate to the foreign department of the OGPU (formerly the Cheka). The unit was also known as “Yasha’s Group,” after “uncle” Yasha, “Yasha” being the Russian diminutive of Yakov. This unit was directly controlled by Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, head of the secret police and successor to his friend and fellow Pole Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the former religious fanatic who had created the Cheka. When Serebryanskii reached Moscow on March 30, 1930, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his achievement.9
Massively overweight with wide, drooping shoulders and roving eyes, Menzhinsky, the son of a Polish admiral, gave every impression of being seriously unwell. Indeed, he had chronic asthma, and after a car accident, he was plagued by a severe spinal problem that meant he could barely sit and spent most of his days stretched out on a sofa. He disappeared on sick leave for weeks on end.10 But Menzhinsky was a gifted intellectual given to paradox who had found his true métier representing Soviet Russia in Berlin after peace was signed at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. It was here that he developed a strong taste for covert action.11 After his young wife died under the knife on the operating table, however, the life went out of him:12 he was “not a man but the shadow of one,” Trotsky opined.13 As a result, Menzhinsky’s two deputies, Meer Trilisser (for foreign operations) and Artur Artuzov (for domestic matters), gradually took over.
In response to the Kutyepov assassination and Soviet subversion of its empire overseas, the French government embargoed trade with the Soviet Union, debated a breach in diplomatic relations, and sought to rally the other great powers to its cause. The timing could scarcely have been worse for the Russians. At that very moment the die-hard anticommunist Adolf Hitler was hustling his way into power in Germany.Moscow needed allies, not more enemies.
Decades separate Kutyepov from Litvinenko, yet both cases offer a litmus test of Moscow’s commitment to Western values. Today, Russia approximates a democracy. The KGB abroad has been replaced by the SVR. The massive and traumatic changes unleashed by the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991–1992 nevertheless appear to have left something fundamental unchanged in Russia. These continuities are evidence of a deeper determinant that predates the Bolshevik revolution and explains its extraordinary vigour: a primitive political culture originating in a medieval despotism. It was buttressed by a sense of identity antithetical to the West. Fyodor Dostoevsky, for instance, was far from alone in despising Western rationalism. The Slavophile and Eurasian movements shared these prejudices to the full.
Ironically, the October Revolution’s internationalism proved the greatest asset for Soviet intelligence. The degree to which the services were manned in the field by non-Russians (the greater number being Jews and Poles) for the first two decades highlights the international nature of the Communist cause. They could recruit for not merely a Russian but also a worldwide revolutionary movement. No other intelligence service relied so extensively on identifying and turning waverers in the enemy camp, on playing the Pied Piper of the Promised Land and turning credulous believers into ruthless agents who followed wherever they were led and did whatever they were told to do, without hesitation. “In intelligence,” Stalin counselled, “one must have several hundred who are friendly (i.e., more than the agents) and ready to fulfill whatever task is set them.” This was written towards the end of 1952.
The Cambridge Five could not have been far from his thoughts, as two of them, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had defected just over a year before. Such friends were appreciated by Stalin as “the highest class of intelligence.”14 Yet no other service had so many of their own shot from behind by their own comrades. This brutal paradox brings us to the heart of the history of the world’s two largest secret services: the civilian KGB and the military GRU, the “near” and “distant” neighbours of the Foreign Ministry.
The birth of Soviet intelligence was entirely unanticipated by the evil genius behind the revolution, Lenin—“Ilyich” to his comrades. The Russia he returned to after years in exile was a brutish place, the backwater of Europe, a Eurasian hodgepodge without the benefits of the Renaissance, the Reformation, or, to any sustained degree, the Enlightenment. Nor could it claim to have a proud Asiatic past like the civilisations of India and China. And, crucially, Russia was behind the industrialised world, as Lenin openly complained, defeated in war even by the hated Japanese (1904), themselves Asian newcomers to the states system. But Lenin and Trotsky were by no means alone in the hope that once the revolution triumphed in Germany, they would move bag and baggage to civilised Berlin, the rightful seat of socialist revolution. This would lead directly to the dawning of a new order, the communism envisaged by Marx and Engels, built on the back of European culture, not barricaded against it in rank defiance.
After the civil war was won, Trotsky, the second great figure of the Bolshevik revolution, delivered a dramatic declaration of war on the capitalist world:
From provincial Moscow, from half-Asiatic Russia, we will embark on the expansionist path of the European revolution. It will lead us to a world revolution. Remember the millions of the German petite bourgeoisie, awaiting the moment for revenge. In them we will find a reserve army and bring up our cavalry with this army to the Rhine to advance further in the form of a revolutionary proletarian war. We will repeat the French revolution, but in the reverse geographical direction: the revolutionary armies will advance not from the west to the east, but from the east to the west. The decisive moment has come. You can almost literally hear the footsteps of history.15
Even Stalin, hitherto the dour sceptic, urged Lenin in the heady summer of 1920 to recognise that
we have already entered the field of direct conflict with the Entente [Britain and France], that the policy of tacking to the wind has already lost its overwhelming significance, that we can and must now conduct an offensive policy (not to be confused with a policy of collision), if we wish to hold the initiative to ourselves in foreign affairs that we recently attained. Thus we need to set as the agenda for Comintern [Communist International] the matter of organising an uprising in Italy and in such states that have not yet bolstered themselves such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia (Romania must be smashed) … In short, we need to weigh anchor and take to sea while imperialism has yet to get ship shape …16
In the autumn chill of 1923, Stalin crowed about moving “the centre of revolution from Moscow to Berlin.”17 Yet these idle boasts bore little in common with the cruel reality: the much-promised uprising in Germany collapsed ignominiously in November 1923, just as it had in March 1921. And this left the Bolsheviks with a recalcitrant, backward country peopled overwhelmingly by illiterate peasants facing the choice of giving up entirely or going it alone.
It was this unrelieved, desperate sense of isolation, and a damned inheritance from a benighted past, that more than anything ensured Stalin’s victory in the struggle for power. Stalin, at times the unblinkered realist, saw the Soviet Union as “this country of the Middle Ages.”18 Under him, it very soon began reverting to the savagery of arbitrary rule, a “kingdom of darkness,” as the author of Life and Fate, Vasilii Grossman, called it. The consequences for the future were critical. No Westernised Bolshevik (notably Nikolai Bukharin even more than Trotsky) could feel comfortable in such conditions. “Let’s not forget that Russia is an Asiatic country,” a senior Soviet diplomat (likely as not the anglophile Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov) commented at the time, “the way of Genghis Khan and Stalin suits it better than the European civilisation of Leon Davidovitch [Trotsky].”19
Because Russia stood substantially alone, secret intelligence operations became critical not just for the furtherance of a receding revolution but also as a vital safeguard for national security—hence the Cheka’s insignia of sword and shield. Russia had no army worthy of the name and relied instead upon extensive disinformation spread by the intelligence services to fool adversaries as to its true military capabilities.
The tsarist legacy of unenlightened autocracy had an impact upon Soviet secret intelligence that is easily underestimated. Not that there existed a continuity of personnel. Quite the opposite—the Bolsheviks had to start from scratch. But life underground and in exile, poisoned by pervasive conspiracy, left its ugly scars. It reached its frightening apogee in the person of Stalin and the paranoid condition that drove him to suffocate the Soviet people in an unrelenting embrace. His most devoted follower, Vyacheslav Molotov, was not much different, according to Molotov’s grandson Nikonov.20
The crucial secret intelligence deficit was in code making and codebreaking, and the technologies that could render them paramount, all of which had flourished under the tsars. This led Moscow to rely more than anything upon human intelligence. Stalin had anyway placed more emphasis on morale than materiel, particularly in war: “technology does not decide everything,” he scoffed at the die-hard modernisers.21 The ultimate irony is that a dictator so relentless in his distrust of others was left with no choice but to place confidence in agents he had never met. It was the technological backwardness of Russia that made this inevitable.
The KGB’s predecessors were always known as the “near neighbours” of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs because the Lubyanka, where they were housed, neighboured the Commissariat, which was a short walk away at Kuznetsky Most. From 1953 the Foreign Ministry occupied a brutish Stalinist gothic skyscraper on the other side of the city at Smolenskaya, but the term near neighbours nonetheless stuck.
Military intelligence, which became known as the Fourth, or Razvedupr (from 1942, the GRU), was always a long reach from Kuznetsky Most. As of the summer of 1919, it could be found in Arbat, at 19 Bol’shoi Znamenskii Pereulok, a large, reddish-brown house that belonged to the millionaire Ryabushkin. There, the offices occupied two buildings surrounding a courtyard. The entrance lay to the back; the benches opposite the entrance, used for occasional meetings, were incessantly patrolled by secret policemen under civilian cover, typecast in canvas coats. Those at the Fourth called it “the little chocolate house.” This complex also encompassed the main building of the Commissariat of Military and Naval Affairs, which included the army staff and the army’s political directorate. The contrast between this low level of visibility and the prominence of the Lubyanka is striking, as was the difference between the crammed and dilapidated offices of the military as against the red-carpeted grandeur lavished on their civilian rivals.
In 1968, after pressing chief of the General Staff Matvei Zakharov and Defence Minister Andrei Grechko for more space on one purpose-built integrated site—he himself had the third floor of the General Staff building in Arbat—GRU director Pyotr Ivashutin reluctantly accepted a compromise. Located well out of the centre by the Khodynka airfield from which he once flew sorties, it became known as the “Steklyashka” (Glass House). Later, the defector Vladimir Rezun (“Suvorov”) introduced it to the reading public as the “Akvarium” (Aquarium). Located at 76 Khoroshevskoe Chaussée, the new GRU headquarters had been designed as a hospital and only latterly retrofitted for a less therapeutic role. Those at headquarters referred to it not as the Aquarium but asPolezhaevskii ob”ekt (“the Polezhaevskii place”), Polezhaevskaya being the nearest station on the Metro.22
Thus, military intelligence remained “distant neighbours”—indeed, they were ever more distant and ever larger, too. Not to be outdone, the ever-expanding foreign directorate of the “near neighbours” burst out of the crowded Lubyanka, which had already been enlarged to its limits, and moved to an extensive new complex far away in “the woods,” to purpose-built premises south of Moscow at Yasenevo on June 20, 1972.
The terminology stuck. It highlighted the fact that both organisations were instruments of the country’s foreign policy dictated from the Kremlin and by the Party, but implemented by diplomats who relied upon the neighbours’ specialist expertise. Not all were entirely grateful. Neighbours do not always get on with one another. Rivalry was never far away. Indeed, at one extreme, quondam Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgii Chicherin keenly felt that the KGB’s predecessor was one of two “internal enemies” (along with the Communist International).23
Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Haslam
Maps copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward