Spymaster, page 23
One of the more outlandish episodes in the KGB’s European operations during my tenure occurred in the mid-1970s in Portugal, not long after the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship. The Portuguese Communist Party was the third largest in Europe (after those of Italy and France), and in the mid- to late 1970s socialism and Communism enjoyed wide support in Portugal. Indeed, we had agents throughout the Portuguese intelligence service, and in the chaos that followed the socialist revolution that overthrew Salazar, our agents came up with a bold stroke. One night, with the help of moles and sympathizers inside the security apparatus, Portuguese working for the KGB drove a truck to the Security Ministry and hauled away a mountain of classified intelligence data, including lists of secret police agents working for the Salazar regime. The truckload of documents was delivered to our embassy in Lisbon, then sent by plane to Moscow, where analysts spent months poring over the papers. Portugal was a member of NATO, and there was some material of limited interest on American military operations in Europe. But the really valuable material was the list of the thousands of agents and informers who worked for the Salazar dictatorship. Our officers later used this information to force some of these agents to work for us. In the history of cold war intelligence coups, the Portuguese operation was not a signal achievement. But for the sheer audacity of making off with a truckload of material right out of the Security Ministry, it had few rivals. In the 1990s, I traveled to Portugal, where the Portuguese authorities treated me in a most cordial manner, taking me around the country, entertaining lavishly, encouraging me to speak to different groups of people. I was interviewed by major national media and did not mince words about the role of the Portuguese Communist Party in providing generous support for Soviet intelligence operations. I was immediately denounced by Álvaro Cunhal, the Party leader, as a liar and a traitor. Speaking the next day on national television, I did not respond to Cunhal’s accusations. I repeated what I had been saying over and over again: “The Communist Party of Portugal is our best and most loyal ally in Europe, and as a citizen and a Communist Party member of the former USSR I can only be grateful to them.”
As for NATO’s strongest European power, West Germany, we also had access to huge quantities of intelligence, and virtually without lifting a finger. The East German foreign intelligence agency, headed by the brilliant Markus Wolf, had so deeply penetrated the West German government, military, and secret services that about all we had to do was lie back and stay out of Wolf’s way. KGB intelligence naturally had close ties with the secret services of all of the “fraternal countries” of Eastern Europe, though none would be as fruitful as our relationship with East Germany and Wolf. In my seven years as head of foreign counterintelligence, I would spend a great deal of time working with and visiting my counterparts in the Warsaw Pact countries. Our Communist colleagues provided us with some invaluable help in our fight against the U.S. and NATO powers. My Eastern European colleagues also showed me some of the finest hospitality and hunting I encountered in all my years in the KGB.
Shortly after taking over foreign counterintelligence in 1973, I made my first trip to Berlin and met Wolf, a tall, dark-haired man with a humorous glint in his eyes. We had a lengthy talk in his office, followed by a lunch at East German intelligence headquarters with his deputies. Later, Wolf arranged a banquet for us at the KGB’s residency in Karlshorst. Wolf immediately struck me as the most capable and shrewd of all the intelligence professionals I had known; his skill and expertise put someone like Kryuchkov, our intelligence chief, to shame. When I first met Wolf, I sensed that he and some of his deputies were skeptical of this young Soviet intelligence officer, perhaps fearing I was not a true enough believer in Communism. But I broke the ice with them when, at our first lunch, I proposed a toast and recalled Stalin’s words that the creation of an East German state “was a turning point in the history of Europe, and the existence of a peace-loving, democratic Germany beside the peace-loving Soviet Union rules out a new war on the European Continent.” As I sat down after the toast, Wolf looked pleased, and one of his deputies said something about me being a member of a “new generation” of Soviets. I don’t know whether the deputy was referring to my age or whether he had in mind that I was one of a new generation of Stalinists. My toast wasn’t just empty words: I truly believed then that if the Soviet Union and East Germany worked closely together, there was a chance that a united, socialist Germany might emerge one day. In that case, the USSR and Germany would dominate Europe. My bitterness over our invasion of Czechoslovakia had diminished, and in 1973 I still had faith in our system. I was focusing all my energy on one goal: our struggle with the United States and the West.
Wolf had created a model intelligence agency that had achieved spectacular results. His greatest coup was the selection and training of East German agents who moved to West Germany and penetrated the highest levels of the West German government. Wolf’s task was made easier by the fact that he was using Germans to infiltrate opposing German security structures. Yet despite that advantage, the East German’s achievements still looked dazzling. Hundreds of East German agents penetrated the West German government and military at the height of the cold war. The most famous was Günther Guillaume, who became one of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s most trusted aides and passed reams of material to East German intelligence.
Wolf also masterminded the technique of using East German illegals to seduce single, middle-aged West German women who worked in government agencies such as the Foreign Office. These “Red Casanovas,” as they came to be called, provided Wolf (and us) with valuable material on NATO, among other things. I remember sitting in my office in Moscow and reading with awe, and amusement, the field reports of some of the East German intelligence gigolos. These agents not only described the intelligence information they were receiving from the West German women, but they also, in typically Teutonic, detailed fashion, described their sexual encounters. The accounts read like pornography, and I found myself sympathizing with some of the married agents who described the disgust they felt at having to make love to unattractive older women.
The most successful Red Casanova had managed to seduce a woman fifteen years his senior who worked for one of the top men in West German intelligence. He wined and dined her and gave her expensive gifts. Inevitably, the time came to sleep with her. In the reports I read, the East German agent described the wild passion of this sex-starved woman. In pornographic detail he talked about their oral sex sessions, about the moans and groans she made in bed, and about how hard it was becoming for him to maintain an erection with his Fräulein. He posed as a nationalistic, anti-Communist West German businessman, and broached the subject of acquiring intelligence material by claiming he was worried that the West German government was angling to make peace with East Germany. Arguing that patriotic German groups needed to know what was going on inside their government, he persuaded his lover to begin passing him materials from West German intelligence.
We had an extraordinarily close relationship with Wolf and the East Germans, though it was not without tension. Nowhere in the world did the KGB have an operation like that in East Germany. In East Berlin alone, our station numbered some 450 officers; dozens more were scattered about East Germany’s provinces. (Most Eastern European countries only had about fifteen to twenty KGB officers.) Our East Berlin station acquired the status of a regular KGB directorate, and the station chief assumed the rank of a deputy chief of Intelligence. For KGB officers, particularly those who had been expelled from Western countries for spying, East Berlin was a plum assignment, offering regular trips to West Berlin and a salary that was paid partly in hard currency.
Toward the end of my time in foreign counterintelligence, there were growing complaints from some East German politicians that the KGB presence in their country, particularly in the provinces, was too large. We made contingency plans to move some of our agents into less conspicuous positions, with joint ventures and trade missions, for example. But the East German leadership never pressed the point, and large numbers of agents remained in the country. Our relationship with the East Germans was a complex one in which they helped us a great deal but never played the role of subservient junior partner. We could never dictate to the East Germans, as we did with such Warsaw Pact countries as Bulgaria. Nor did the leaders of East Germany’s security services bow and scrape in front of their Moscow colleagues. I met East German security minister Erich Mielke on several occasions, and he was self-assured to the point of arrogance. Once, at a party at the East German embassy in Moscow, the stout, hard-drinking Mielke carried on in a boisterous manner, seemingly unintimidated by the presence of KGB chief Andropov and other members of the Politburo. Clearly Mielke, the second-ranking East German official after Erich Honecker, had been seduced by the dictatorial powers that he and Honecker possessed.
Whenever possible, we did what we could to help the East Germans, since they were always doing far more for us than we for them. We came to Wolf’s aid in 1978, when an informer betrayed several East German intelligence agents living in West Germany. Two of Wolf’s agents took refuge in the Soviet embassy in Bonn and two in our military mission in Wiesbaden, West Germany. Our problem was how to get them out of West Germany, where they were wanted for espionage, and back to East Berlin.
In Moscow, I argued strenuously that the only way to extricate the four was to give them fake Soviet diplomatic passports and smuggle them out of West Germany in cars with USSR diplomatic license plates. Others at KGB headquarters in Moscow retorted that there would be a major scandal if we were caught smuggling East German spies out of West Germany using phony Soviet passports. The KGB station chief in Bonn agreed, contending that the four should surreptitiously be allowed to abscond from the embassy and the military mission and then find their way back to East Germany on their own.
“That won’t do,” I said to the station chief over a secure line. “The East Germans have confidence in us. They give us all the intelligence secrets they get. We must help their people. We have no right to abandon them.”
I pressed my case, and eventually Andropov agreed, saying it was highly unlikely that the West Germans would stop a Soviet diplomatic vehicle. So our technical people counterfeited four Soviet passports for the East Germans, sent the documents to our embassy and military mission in West Germany, and in a matter of days Wolf’s agents were joyfully embracing their colleagues on the East German border.
The one East German activity that made my superiors at KGB headquarters squirm was its support of international terrorists, such as the infamous Carlos. We knew full well that a wide variety of terrorists—including those from the PLO, the Italian Red Brigades, and the West German Baader-Meinhof gang—were receiving refuge and support in East Germany. I didn’t know of any actual incidents in which the East Germans trained such terrorists or helped them carry out specific terrorist attacks, but I realized that Wolf and his agency were doing more than providing R&R for these international outlaws. My superiors in Moscow viewed this East German “hospitality” more as a sign of solidarity with forces struggling against world imperialism. But the fact remained that none of us delved too deeply into what the East Germans were doing with these unsavory characters.
Carlos, responsible for some of the most heinous Middle Eastern terrorist acts in the 1970s and 1980s, came to the Soviet Union twice while I was in charge of foreign counterintelligence. On both occasions, I was notified that he had applied for a Soviet visa at one of our consulates in Eastern Europe. We gave him permission to come to Moscow, where he had been a student at Patrice Lumumba University in the 1960s, but kept him under close surveillance. When he arrived on his first visit, our officers met him at Sheremetyevo Airport and took him to his hotel, where he was questioned extensively about his trip to the USSR. He claimed that he was in the Soviet capital to visit old friends for a few weeks, and our tight surveillance of him turned up nothing that contradicted his assertion. In fact, our surveillance officers were astounded that this infamous international criminal would turn out to be such a playboy; he seemed to spend most of his time in Moscow at parties, and our agents marveled at the number of women Carlos courted in the Soviet capital. After a couple of weeks Carlos left without incident. In 1976, knowing that we could not remain forever immune from the growing terrorist threat, on Andropov’s instruction, I formed a small unit to do research on the world’s leading terrorists and terrorist organizations. Using published Western documents as well as our own extensive network of sources in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and other regions, we compiled a handbook identifying more than two thousand international terrorists. The book was sent to all Soviet border posts in an effort to stop terrorists from entering the USSR.
In addition, our officers in Eastern Europe set out to discover how involved our socialist neighbors were in sponsoring international terrorism. We learned that not only East Germany, but Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania were giving support to a variety of terrorist groups. The Romanians were supplying terrorists with training and weaponry, and the Czechs were selling them large quantities of light weapons and plastic explosives. We discussed penetrating these terrorist organizations, but backed off, fearing that we could end up being accused of participating in terrorist acts. Andropov even once suggested that we attempt to penetrate the Mafia. He must have seen The Godfather. “Why don’t we try to use Mafia to recruit Americans of Italian origin?” he asked. It wasn’t a bad idea, but we pointed out that an international scandal would arise if it ever became known that we had anything to do with Italian organized crime.
“You’re probably right, but you should look into it,” said Andropov. “There is a risk involved, but you have to keep an eye on all these groups. We can’t let them grow without our knowledge.”
As close as we were to Markus Wolf and East German intelligence, we had an even tighter relationship with the secret services of Bulgaria. That Eastern European country, headed by Todor Zhivkov, was so firmly bound to the USSR that people in both countries referred to Bulgaria as the sixteenth Soviet republic. The Bulgarian Interior Ministry was little more than a branch of the KGB. Our station chief in Sofia for many years, General Ivan Savchenko, virtually ran Bulgaria’s secret services; no general in Bulgarian intelligence or in the Interior Ministry dared do anything of consequence without first picking up the telephone and checking with Savchenko.
I went to Bulgaria on numerous occasions in the 1970s, and the trips usually turned out to be more pleasure than work, thanks to the Bulgarians’ legendary hospitality. Compared to East Germany, Bulgaria was of little intelligence interest to us, though the Bulgarians did give us some useful information about Greece, Turkey, and the southern front of NATO. At our urging, the Bulgarians also worked aggressively in their Black Sea resorts and in the port of Varna to recruit foreigners. Shortly before I left for Leningrad in 1980, Bulgarian intelligence agents struck up a relationship with a young West German woman who was the wife of a West German legislator. Her husband also served on the legislature’s security committee, and the Bulgarians kept in touch with her after the couple returned to Germany. I never found out whether the relationship bore fruit.
Mostly what I remember about Bulgaria is being squired around in chauffeured limousines to the country’s beautiful mountains and beaches, where, sometimes accompanied by my wife, I was treated like a pasha. I never encountered hospitality like it, before or since. The Bulgarians drowned us in their delicious wines. They laid out enormous feasts at the finest Communist Party retreats. They put on hunts for deer, duck, and pheasant at the game preserves reserved for President Zhivkov and the Bulgarian elite. On several occasions, their desire to please their elder Slavic brothers reached absurd proportions.
Once, on a bird shoot with some officers from the Interior Ministry, a Bulgarian gamekeeper walked up to our party carrying a large sack. He dumped the contents on the ground, and out scrambled a dozen barely fledged pheasants. The dazed birds scampered a few yards away and hid in a cornfield.
“Go ahead, shoot!” said one of my hosts, flashing me a proud smile.
It was clear that my Bulgarian colleagues were so bent on showing me a good time that they wanted to spare me the embarrassment of a missed shot. But I could hardly execute these young birds as they crouched in terror on the ground. My hosts tried to kick a few of the pheasants up, but to no avail. I scared up one young bird, and he frantically beat his wings but only managed to get off the ground for a few seconds before dropping back to earth. The Bulgarians were eagerly watching me; if I declined to shoot these adolescent pheasants, I would deeply offend my hosts. So I took aim at one of the poor creatures on the ground and pulled the trigger. The Bulgarians seemed relieved. It was the last young bird I shot that day.
On another occasion, this time during a deer hunt, I once again ran into all-consuming Bulgarian hospitality. A group of beaters had driven a deer out of a patch of woods, and my Bulgarian host and I stood in a clearing, ready to down the animal. The deer bounded out of the forest and paused for a second. I raised my gun and was preparing to fire when my host said, “Oleg, give me your gun. I’ll shoot him for you.”
“No,” I replied. “I didn’t come all this way to let you do all the work.”
“No,” the Bulgarian insisted. “I’ll shoot him for you. What if you miss!”
“I don’t care if I miss!” I barked back, the two of us nearly wrestling for the gun.
By the time I fended off my host and was ready to fire, the deer was long gone.
All my memories of Bulgaria and the Bulgarians are not so amusing, however. Another kind of hunt, this one for a human being, turned out to be the most infamous example of cooperation between our two intelligence services and the blackest mark on my career.
