Abstract
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union's secret police—the KGB—was the neglected stepchild of Soviet studies. Very few Western scholars made serious attempts to assess the impact of the Committee for State Security (kGb) on the Soviet political process, on Soviet society or on Soviet foreign policy.
Now, thanks to a former KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, we have a random—but detailed— account of the inner workings of the foreign intelligence operations of the KGB from 1917 to 1984. From 1972 until his retirement in 1984, Mitrokhin was responsible for the inventory of documents in the KGB's First Chief Directorate, which oversaw foreign intelligence. Outraged by the harassment of Boris Pasternak in the 1950s and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Mitrokhin made notes of innumerable documents, filling a milk churn, a tin clothes-boiler, two tin trunks, and two aluminum cases hidden below the floorboards of his dacha outside Moscow.
Mitrokhin initially tried to defect to the CIA but the agency rebuffed him and he defected to the British. As a result, his documents now fill two filing cabinets six feet high and three feet wide in the offices of Britain's intelligence service. The British also were responsible for spiriting Mitrokhin, his family, and his private archives from Moscow to London in 1992. British intelligence selected Christopher Andrew, a well-known scholar who worked with another illustrious KGB defector—Oleg Gordievsky—on a major history of the KGB 10 years ago, to be the primary author of the “Mitrokhin Archive.”
The book's tales of “Romeo” agents, clandestine operatives who seduced women working in sensitive government agencies, and accounts of so-called “illegals,” spies who operated without diplomatic cover or immunity, have created a stir in British academic circles and U.S. media outlets. But perhaps the primary importance of The Sword and the Shield is that it documents the early successes of the First Chief Directorate in purloining the secrets and achievements of Western science and technology. This information was used to the economic benefit of Soviet industrial enterprises, but it did nothing to close the gap between Soviet and Western technology—ei-ther inside or outside the defense establishment.
Andrew's claim that the stolen secrets were responsible for the development of most Soviet weapons systems is, however, false. In fact, Moscow's geostrategic position and its need for defensive weaponry were the principal driving forces in Soviet weapons development. But the Soviet Union was unable to repeat the successes of the early years of the Cold War and, in the 1970s and 1980s, it fell far behind U.S. military weaponry and technology. A close reading of the book confirms that the KGB failed to develop an “essential agent apparatus” for its three major targets: the United States, China, and the European members of NATO.
The First Chief Directorate was also responsible for running the most notorious American agents of the Cold War, including the Walker family spy ring and Aldrich Ames. Unfortunately, the book offers nothing of interest on these important subjects or on the Rosenberg case or Alger Hiss. The book does, however, provide a great deal of information about Soviet “active measures,” primarily the KGB's propaganda efforts against the United States that employed forged press releases and spurious letters to discredit American interests around the world. The kgb had very little success in this department.
We also learn that the KGB's disinformation unit tried to prevent the reelection of President Ronald Reagan, to compromise the reputation of J. Edgar Hoover, and to destroy the political career of Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, an ardent foe of the Soviet Union. Also the target of a kgb smear campaign was Martin Luther King. The kgb hoped to undermine King's nonviolent protests and thus increase the chances of racial confrontation in the United States.
These kgb campaigns were often ineffective, and their choice of targets sometimes preposterous. Kgb Chairman Yuri Andropov, for example, once authorized the recruitment of hard-liners Pat Buchanan and William Safire. As a result, the spy agency usually failed to gain political and military intelligence on the United States, and the Mitrokhin files contain no evidence of any significant recruitment in the U.S. government. Vladimir Kryuch-kov, who headed the First Chief Directorate from 1974 to 1988, acknowledged that his agency did not have “great success in operating against the main adversary.”
British intelligence's decision to choose Andrew as the book's writer, and the fact that he was working with notes and not original documents, raise important questions about the value of the information he presents— questions which, unfortunately, he fails to address. Nor does he discuss why he chose to ignore certain types of documents in the archive. For example, the book says nothing about Felix Bloch, the former State Department official who allegedly passed secrets to the KGB, and it provides few clues about Kremlin assessments of KGB espionage.
Andrew has written widely on both U.S. and Soviet intelligence activities. His leading work on the CIA, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, is very laudatory of the agency. In the book, Andrew downplays the involvement of former CIA director William Casey in the Iran-contra operation and former director Robert Gates's role in politicizing intelligence on the Soviet Union. In The Sword and the Shield, Andrew draws from his own works as well as from well-known, anti-communist literature, which makes it difficult to determine whether the charges in the book come from the Mitrokhin archives or the Andrew archives.
An example of the kind of confusion that Andrew creates is his handling of the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981. Although Mitrokhin makes it very clear that there is nothing in the archives linking the plot to the KGB, Andrew coyly insinuates that there must be more information on the subject and perhaps the next volume on the archives will tell more. Another example is Andrew's discussion of Soviet involvement with international terrorism, which basically corroborates what was known to the intelligence community in the 1980s. Andrew teases that more will follow in his next book, despite the fact that Mitrokhin's notes apparently offer no revelations about Soviet support for major terrorist organizations.
More than anything else, The Sword and the Shield confirms the inanity of most espionage and covert activities. Before Mitrokhin, we had the revelations of East German spy-master Markus Wolf, Man Without a Face: the Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster, and CIA spymaster Duane Clarridge, A Spy for All Seasons, both of which demonstrate the exaggerated value of secret intelligence and endorse open sources over clandestine collection. These books also confirm that the CIA paid a great deal to double agents.
The memoirs of Mitrokhin, Wolf and Clarridge remind us of what the historian John Lukacs wrote 40 years ago: “In the history of nations the influence of spying has been generally exaggerated. The clandestine activities [of secret services] were seldom formative or decisive; what most of the dramatic achievements of secret agents amounts to is the gathering of precious fragments of information that may or may not confirm but that does not formulate already existing diplomatic and strategic policies.”