Spymaster, page 31
My first and only trip to Afghanistan came in August 1978. Four months earlier, a pro-Communist coup headed by Noor Mohammad Taraki had overthrown the government of Mohammad Daoud, killing him and his family. Moscow had not been overjoyed by news of the coup, for in Daoud we had enjoyed a stable ally and relative peace along our southern border. By midsummer 1978, reports were filtering back to KGB headquarters of growing Islamic opposition to the Taraki regime, prompting Andropov to send Kryuchkov and me to Kabul on a fact-finding mission. While there, we were to sign a cooperation agreement between the Soviet and Afghan intelligence services.
We flew on Andropov’s personal Tu-154 jet, a passenger plane converted into a spacious and comfortable airliner. Kabul struck me as a big village, with worse poverty than I had seen even in India in 1971. During the course of our five-day visit, we stayed at the Soviet embassy, and all was quiet in and around the Afghan capital. Kryuchkov and I had wanted to visit Djelalabad in the southeast, but Afghan officials said it was not safe—our first inkling that the situation was not as rosy as our hosts portrayed it.
Kryuchkov and I proceeded to meet the Afghan leaders who had slaughtered their opponents in the power struggle and who ultimately would die by the sword themselves. Taraki, the grandfather of Afghan Communists, was a fragile, stooped old man. He struck me as a fuss-budget given to general utterances, and I saw then that he didn’t have the physical strength or the backing to continue to lead the country for long. It was Taraki who had ordered the murder of Daoud, and a year after I chatted with Taraki he too was overthrown and executed. The man who eventually would do away with Taraki, Hafizullah Amin, was a far more impressive figure. His rule, however, would be even shorter that Taraki’s and his end would be just as violent.
Amin was a dark, handsome man with glittering eyes and an intelligent face. He was the shrewdest and most literate of the officials I met in Afghanistan, and when we discovered that we had both been at Columbia University at about the same time, we hit it off immediately. We switched to English and reminisced about old haunts and familiar landmarks in New York. Amin’s eyes shone, as if he had truly found a kindred spirit, and when we parted he gave me a big hug and invited me back as his personal guest. I would never get the chance. The following year, KGB special forces troops gunned down Amin at the presidential palace as Soviet troops took over the city.
After I met with Amin, our local KGB officers described him as a homosexual and said it was rumored he had been recruited by the CIA. I found no evidence to back up either allegation, and concluded it was made simply because the young officer had lived briefly in America.
I also met the head of state security, A. Sarvari, who impressed me as a young, energetic officer. A half year later, he would personally participate in the execution of leading Muslim clergymen and their families. I was appalled when I read the reports of Sarvari’s actions, which I knew would set off a never-ending cycle of revenge and violence.
On several occasions, I met with top officers from the police and state security, instructing them on how to fight the growing CIA presence in Kabul and throughout Afghanistan. The Afghans had almost no experience with the Americans, and I told them, among other things, about how to follow and eavesdrop on the American intelligence agents. We later provided them cameras and electronic listening equipment.
“You have lots of American agents here and good opportunities to work against them,” I told the Afghan security officers. “We’ll do everything we can to help you.”
Kryuchkov signed an agreement with the Afghans to share intelligence and deepen our cooperation. Our hosts took us on a picnic to the old royal palace on the outskirts of town, where we passed a pleasant afternoon. We were treated as elder brothers, and I left feeling that, though opposition was growing, the situation was relatively well in hand.
Returning to Moscow, I drew up, on Andropov’s orders, a plan of active measures and general strategy in Afghanistan. My list included the following ideas:• The Afghans should gather evidence on the training of Islamic guerrilla groups in Pakistan and then publicly accuse Pakistan of unleashing aggression against the Afghan people.
• The Afghan leadership should send a letter to the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini professing support for the Iranian revolution and expressing hope the two governments will work closely together.
• The rebels in the Herat area should be declared mercenaries of U.S. imperialism and world Zionism, as well as remnants of the overthrown Iranian monarchy.
• American citizens suspected of CIA affiliations should be expelled from Afghanistan.
• Pro-government clergy should address the people and rallies should be held among youth, workers, and peasants in support of the revolution.
• Popular militias and committees “In Defense of the Revolution” should be established.
• The rebels’ rear should be raided to destroy their radio transmitters, bases, and munitions warehouses.
• More pro-Taraki radio stations must be created inside the country and the number of Afghan broadcasts from stations inside the Soviet Union should be increased.
• Soviet advisers should be sent into Afghanistan, reconnaissance flights over Afghanistan should be increased, and Soviet troops on the Afghan border should be reinforced and put on combat alert.
Many of these suggestions were approved by Andropov and the Politburo and put into effect. But, as would soon be evident, Afghanistan would not bend to our will. We would deploy hundreds of thousands of troops and lose fifteen thousand men before realizing our mistake and withdrawing in humiliation in 1988.
In the fall of 1979, after Amin deposed and murdered Taraki, the situation in Afghanistan was clearly deteriorating. KGB officers there reported that if Moscow did not intervene more aggressively, Amin would surely be overthrown and an Islamic government installed. I attended a meeting of KGB intelligence and Soviet military intelligence in which the GRU chief, General Ivashutin, argued strenuously for an invasion.
“There is no other alternative but to introduce our troops to support the Afghan government and crush the rebels,” Ivashutin said.
Kryuchkov then spoke, saying that Andropov was against the introduction of troops.
Over the next several months, however, Andropov was to change his mind. Under pressure from Defense Minister Dimitri Ustinov, the KGB chairman reluctantly came around to the view that Soviet troops would have to invade. From that moment on, the KGB played a pivotal role in the events in Afghanistan. And as Soviet and KGB involvement deepened, Kryuchkov compounded the initial error by insisting that all intelligence information—from the GRU, the KGB, and the Foreign Ministry—be funneled through KGB intelligence before being presented to the Politburo. It was a serious mistake, for Kryuchkov began filtering out bad news, exaggerating our achievements, and telling Leonid Brezhnev and the Politburo what they wanted to hear. It only prolonged the war and the suffering.
Soviet troops streamed into Afghanistan in late December 1979, murdering my chum Amin and flying in Soviet puppet Babrak Karmal to replace him. The world reacted with outrage. At the time, none of us had any idea that the bloody conflict would drag on for nine more years, killing thousands of Afghans and creating a huge refugee problem.
The truth is that I was paying scant attention to the invasion taking place to the south. By Christmas 1979, my career had taken a sharp turn for the worse. I had clashed with the shadowy brotherhood that ran the world’s largest secret police agency. I had violated an unwritten code and challenged the dictums of the men at the top. I had gone up against them and lost, and my star was flaming out.
CHAPTER 7
Collision
IT WAS KNOWN SIMPLY AS “THE WOODS.” SITUATED IN A HEAVILY forested area in southwestern Moscow, just a half mile beyond the outer ring road that encircles the capital, The Woods was the KGB’s new intelligence headquarters at Yasenovo. The complex, modeled after the CIA’s suburban headquarters in Langley, Virginia, opened in 1972, and for eight years I worked there next to the men who ran Soviet intelligence operations around the world. When colleagues in downtown Moscow or in foreign stations asked me, “How are things in The Woods?” they were not talking about my country dacha but our sprawling intelligence headquarters. Even by Western standards, Yasenovo was a luxurious compound, a place that reflected the power and the privilege, the mystery and the isolation of the KGB. During my eight years at Yasenovo, I was afforded a close-up view of the men who ran the KGB and its intelligence operations, from the crusty Alexander Sakharovsky to the treacherous Vladimir Kryuchkov to the wily cold warrior Yuri Andropov. Most of these men worked side by side with me at Yasenovo, and to those of us sitting in the bucolic confines of The Woods the world seemed a far more manageable place than it actually turned out to be.
We moved to Yasenovo in 1972 because the stately building at Lubyanka had long been overcrowded. For years, Soviet intelligence officials had argued that they needed their own separate headquarters in a secure compound far from the center of Moscow. Andropov eventually approved the plans for a new headquarters, and Moscow’s chief architect designed a spacious, seven-story building that was virtually invisible from the highway. Later, when it was clear to everyone that the CIA knew every inch of the Yasenovo layout, Vladimir Kryuchkov approved the construction of two twenty-story buildings that could be seen from miles around.
As could be expected for an organization as wealthy as ours, nothing was spared in the construction of the Yasenovo headquarters. The builders used Japanese and European materials; the furniture was from Finland. Nearly all the glass-walled offices, even those of junior officers, enjoyed a view of surrounding fields and forests or of the artificial lake that had been dug on the premises. My own wood-paneled office, located on the third floor, was enormous (50 square meters) and boasted a bathroom with shower and an adjacent sitting room where I could sleep. I even had a little exit off my backroom, which I occasionally used if there was a visitor in my antechamber I had no desire to see. The entire building was air-conditioned, a rarity in the Soviet Union, and underneath the compound were several basement levels with communications and technical facilities. The roofs of the buildings at Yasenovo bristled with antennas.
Security was extraordinarily tight. The compound was surrounded by rings of barbed wire and electronic sensing devices. Special Interior Ministry and KGB guards, accompanied by dogs, patrolled the area in and around Yasenovo and stood in watchtowers. Domestic KGB officers couldn’t even enter Yasenovo without special permission. Thousands of secretaries and lower-level intelligence employees rode into the compound every morning on special buses. We at the top, however, had our own chauffeured Volgas, reflecting Soviet officialdom’s love of a car and a driver: two full-time drivers were assigned to me alone, providing twenty-four-hour service. Toward the end of my time at Yasenovo, in 1979, intelligence chief Vladimir Kryuchkov spent $100,000 to buy a handful of foreign cars, including Mercedes, Volvos, and Jaguars. Ostensibly the cars were purchased to teach intelligence officers headed for the West how to drive good automobiles. As could be expected, however, young intelligence officers never got their hands on the luxury cars. Kryuchkov and other big shots appropriated the machines for their own personal use; the intelligence chief himself cruised around town in a Mercedes.
We at Yasenovo, like all the Soviet elite, lived in a privileged cocoon that left us far removed from the travails of daily Soviet life. For us Communism was a good thing; all our needs were cared for as we glided above the fray, impervious to the lines and the humiliation and the squalor that had become the hallmarks of Soviet existence. It’s no wonder that people like Kryuchkov fought to the bitter end for the Soviet way of life. They enjoyed a standard of living worth protecting, even if it meant staging something so monstrously foolish as the coup of August 1991.
The self-contained world at Yasenovo had an excellent canteen where officers could purchase the best salmon, sausage, cheese, and caviar. There was a swimming pool, two saunas, indoor volleyball and basketball courts, and numerous tennis courts. We had a special shop where we could buy imported clothes and consumer goods. By the late 1970s, the KGB had constructed twenty dachas for intelligence chiefs in a remote, wooded section of Yasenovo, a mile or two from the main headquarters building. In addition to my modern, spacious, KGB-supplied apartment in Moscow, I had a fine KGB dacha in the Moscow suburbs, in the same village in which Nazi Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus had been confined following his surrender at Stalingrad.
Yasenovo had an excellent medical clinic, and whenever I got a cold a doctor would make a special visit to my office to dispense medicine. Should I have needed more sophisticated medical treatment, the KGB operated two good clinics in downtown Moscow and also controlled a network of a dozen sanitariums in the best vacation spots in the country.
We even had a masseuse at Yasenovo, a pretty blond woman in her early thirties. I never availed myself of her services. But just after I left foreign counterintelligence in 1980, a scandal erupted when it was discovered that at least a half dozen top KGB officials were making love to the masseuse on her rubdown couch in the heart of the intelligence complex. Kryuchkov called the offenders on the carpet and warned them never to do such a thing again, though no one was dismissed. The unfortunate masseuse, however, was fired. But after she wrote a letter threatening to expose the scandal, Kryuchkov found her another job to hush her up. The KGB could be far more moralistic at times, and during Kryuchkov’s reign any intelligence officer who was twice divorced was expelled from the First Chief Directorate. Such was the case with one of our ablest officers, Mikhail Lyubimov, the KGB station chief in Denmark.
In my ten years in foreign counterintelligence, I worked under three intelligence chiefs. The first, Alexander Mikhailovich Sakharovsky, was by far the best. He was a KGB institution, having served a record fifteen years as head of intelligence, from 1956 until 1971. A veteran of World War II, Sakharovsky was a tough, almost authoritarian leader who gave his underlings freedom to work but devoured them if they showed signs of laziness or made a serious blunder. Following the 1971 defection of KGB officer Oleg Lyalin in London, Sakharovsky showed his ruthlessness, sacking several of Lyalin’s superiors and recalling scores of officers home. We spoke of Sakharovsky with awe and fear in our voices, but not once did I hear someone inside the organization say anything bad about the intelligence chief.
Sakharovsky was a taciturn figure who often seemed lost in thought. I think now that his melancholy air was due to the enormous pressures of the job and the fact that, in his fifteen years as head of Chief Directorate One, Sakharovsky personally ordered the assassination of several KGB defectors and Soviet dissidents living overseas. By the time I came to work for him in 1970, KGB “wet jobs” were mainly a thing of the past. But Sakharovsky’s hands were well bloodied by then. Though he never spoke of the assassinations he had ordered, they seemed to weigh on his conscience.
It was on the express orders of Sakharovsky, and with the approval of Khrushchev, that two well-known Ukrainian émigré activists were murdered in Germany in the 1950s. A KGB assassin using a gun that fired poison gas killed Lev Rebet of the National Labor Alliance in 1957 and Stepan Bandera of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1959. Earlier, Sakharovsky also had ordered the assassination of National Labor Alliance leader Georgi Okolovich, but the plot backfired when the assassin Nikolai Khoklov defected to the West and described in detail the plot to kill Okolovich. Later, Sakharovsky approved a plan to kill the turncoat assassin, but the poisoning attempt failed, and all Khoklov suffered was the temporary loss of his hair.
Sakharovsky ordered a half dozen other assassination attempts on KGB defectors, but the turncoats couldn’t be found or the Soviet leadership balked. Later, when I became head of foreign counterintelligence, we located two KGB defectors from the 1950s (one in Australia and one in America), and I approached Andropov and asked permission to order the assassination of the traitors.
“The hell with them. They’re old men now,” replied Andropov.
“Leave these old geezers alone. Find [recent KGB defectors] Oleg Lyalin or Yuri Nosenko, and I will sanction the execution of those two.”
But we never located Lyalin or Nosenko, and when they finally surfaced, the KGB was no longer interested in carrying out their death sentences.
As I discovered when I opened my safe after taking over as head of foreign counterintelligence, Sakharovsky also ordered the poisoning of Sean Burke, the Irishman who helped engineer the bold escape of George Blake from England, by dispensing a brain-damaging substance in Burke’s drink. Sakharovsky feared that once back in England, Burke would disclose the whereabouts of George Blake to British authorities.
In the end, Sakharovsky lost his position largely because of politics. He was a stubborn, loyal professional who refused to butter up the Communist Party officials and Brezhnev cronies who gradually were taking over the KGB—a clique that, in honor of Brezhnev’s hometown, came to be known as the Dnepropetrovsk Mafia. In 1971, a timid, ill-qualified functionary from the Communist Party Central Committee, Fyodor Konstantinovich Mortin, was named to replace Sakharovsky as chief of intelligence.
A short, balding man with pale blue eyes, Mortin lacked culture, education, and, above all, practical experience as an intelligence officer. To think that this was the man who headed the feared KGB spy operations was laughable. I have rarely met a person who was more unsure of himself, more indecisive, more cowardly. On several occasions I was in Mortin’s office when Andropov phoned. Mortin literally jumped when the special line from Andropov rang, and he would cringe and stutter as he sought to assure the chairman that everything would be carried out according to his wishes. His behavior wasn’t much better when someone called from the Central Committee; after hanging up with a Communist Party big shot, Mortin would get on the phone with his subordinates and demand that the Party’s order—no matter how foolish—be carried out. If I or another of his underlings resisted the order, Mortin would literally implore us to somehow “close the matter” and fulfill the Party directive. The one good thing about Mortin was that he would allow more aggressive department leaders like myself to take matters into our own hands. He realized we were professionals, and if things generally were going smoothly he would not interfere with our operations. And unlike his successor—the double-dealing Vladimir Kryuchkov—Mortin was fundamentally a decent, if weak person.
