Dagger and Cloak

Counterintelligence Operations

The USSR's Communist Party and the government called on the KGB to maintain an enhanced counterintelligence posture at nuclear facilities. A 1947 resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers regarding security at the warhead R&D facility in Sarov, for example, directed that, "[I]n order to prevent infiltrations of Object No. 550 (code-name of the R&D center] by spies, saboteurs, and other enemies . . . the USSR Ministry of State Security (comrade Abakumov) is obligated to step up its operational and chekist work at Object No. 550 and in the areas of Mordov republic and Gorky region adjacent to the special regime zone."

In response, the KGB established a Department K in its headquarters in Moscow and "K" units in the regions. The KGB worked with nuclear facilities to develop suitable cover stories to conceal their true missions, monitored information protection measures, and implemented countermeasures against technical collection systems (see below). It also conducted classic counterintelligence operations involving the penetration of foreign intelligence organizations, working against suspected and confirmed foreign intelligence officers in the Soviet Union, and monitoring nuclear facilities and their surroundings.

According to KGB analysis, its success in preventing the insertion of clandestine agents inside the Soviet Union from the late 1940s to early 1950s forced Western intelligence services to rely on intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover and agents entering the country via such other legitimate channels as tourism, scientific meetings, and cultural exchanges. This allowed the KGB to focus its operational resources on a relatively small number of targets. In 1961, KGB surveillance against Canadian and British diplomats led to the exposure of Col. Pen-kovskiy, who had provided the West with information on a range of nuclear-related matters. Later on, according to the KGB's 1967 Annual Report:

[I]n the course of counterintelligence countermeasures with regard to enemy intelligence officers under diplomatic cover and other foreigners under suspicion of being affiliated with the enemy's special services, a number of Soviet citizens who established contact with the aim of passing secret information were discovered and unmasked. Among those persons brought to justice were . . . a technician [named Malyshev] from an installation of special significance of the Ministry of Medium Machine-Building.

Technical Countermeasures

The effectiveness of the KGB's counterintelligence operations, on one hand, and improvements in US signals intelligence, overhead imagery, and nuclear test monitoring capabilities, on the other hand, led the US atomic energy intelligence program to rely increasingly on technical collection systems. KGB historians observe that the 1950s marked the beginning of the massive use of novel espionage technologies. In the nuclear energy area, for example, "[T]o locate Soviet atomic facilities . . . American, British, and Canadian intelligence officers and their agents were armed with state-of-the-art radio-electronic equipment, . . . radio-navigational systems . . . . Massive application of modern means of science and technology was a characteristic feature of activities by imperialist intelligences during that period [1953-58]."

In response, the KGB "took measures . . . to bring to further perfection the protection of state secrets from the radio-technical and aerial-space means of reconnaissance of the enemy." At a test site, for example, operations on nuclear devices in the field were conducted under a tent to prevent visual observation. Furthermore, "[T]he organs of military counterintelligence of the KGB did significant work on camouflaging . . . depots of nuclear weapons and other objects from the enemy's space reconnaissance." Moreover, most communications between nuclear facilities and the complex's headquarters in Moscow were by teletype or telephone and involved the use of landlines and microwave systems. These were considerably more difficult to intercept than short-wave radio transmissions, the target of the National Security Agency's listening stations at that time. Particularly sensitive documents, such as production data for the nuclear warhead assembly complex, were hand-delivered by couriers.

Radiological analysis of radioactive residues from Soviet atmospheric tests, collected by the US atomic Energy Detection System (USAEDS), was the primary tool for tracking the progress of the USSR's nuclear weapons R&D program and its atomic capabilities during the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, benchmarked by US nuclear test data, the analysis of Soviet nuclear test residues allowed scientists from US national laboratories to determine the Soviet devices' "design space," yield, efficiency, materials, and other parameters. After 1963, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the partial test ban treaty prohibiting nuclear explosions above the ground, each country made a transition to underground nuclear testing. The end of atmospheric testing was a major setback to the US intelligence effort. According to National Intelligence Estimate 11-2A-65, "[O]ur estimates of Soviet nuclear weapon technology . . . are based almost entirely upon analysis of the tests through 1962 . . . and upon extrapolation from that analysis." The radiological method remained useful to some extent because of radioactive venting from Soviet underground explosions. However, Soviet efforts to reduce venting eventually made the US radiological method ineffective against Soviet targets.

In 1973, the increasing threat from Western technical collection systems caused the Soviet government to establish a new organization, the State Technical Commission, with the main mission of developing and implementing a comprehensive system of countermeasures against technical espionage.

Gauging the Effectiveness of Soviet D&D

During the Cold War, US intelligence agencies invested considerable resources and effort to understand and predict Soviet nuclear technologies and policies. Despite the fact that the United States was off by several years in predicting the first Soviet atomic explosion in August 1949, it subsequently enjoyed numerous and remarkable achievements. For example, from the first Soviet explosion through the test series of 1961-62, US intelligence detected and correctly characterized many milestone designs of Soviet fission and thermonuclear weapons. Much of this success was based on the fact that atmospheric nuclear explosions by nature were so powerful that they were physically impossible to contain or conceal.

The Soviet Union also was unable to hide from overhead imagery systems its huge nuclear weapons production infrastructure. By 1965, the US intelligence program had correctly identified and characterized facilities with more obvious nuclear signatures, including all fissile material production centers, some uranium processing facilities, the Sarov warhead R&D center, the serial warhead assembly facilities in Lesnoy and Trekhgorny, and the component manufacturing plant in Zarechny. It appears that some facilities, especially those lacking distinct signatures, escaped detection. It is not clear, for example, that the CIA was aware in the 1960s of the non-nuclear warhead component manufacturing facilities and R&D institutes in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and Nizhni Novgorod.

Soviet D&D measures were very effective in preventing the United States from learning what was going on inside the buildings it could easily see from space. For example, US intelligence had a hard time assessing the Soviet program to produce enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and reactors. According to a 1954 National Intelligence Estimate:

Only meager evidence is available that is relevant to the isotope separation phase of the program . . . . The absence of sufficient evidence from which to estimate installed or planned isotope separation capacity continues to be one of the most serious gaps in intelligence information on the Soviet atomic energy program.

More than 10 years later, in 1965, US intelligence observed that while it had reasonably accurate estimates of power inputs into the Soviet gaseous diffusion plants—based on data obtained from overhead imagery and electric grid analysis—its assessments of plant efficiencies and, as a result, production capabilities, were very uncertain. Reliable estimates of plant efficiency would have required detailed knowledge of the Soviet gaseous diffusion technology and plant operations, which stand-off collection systems simply could not deliver.

Perhaps even more importantly, the USSR succeeded in preventing US intelligence from detecting its transition to the more advanced centrifuge uranium enrichment technology. A 1964 National Intelligence Estimate judged that "[T]he present size of the Soviet gaseous diffusion complex . . . tends to indicate that significant U-235 production by the ultracentrifuge and other methods is unlikely." In fact, a pilot centrifuge facility had begun operation in Novouralsk in 1957. By 1962, the initial phase of a much larger complex at that site had commenced operations, and by 1964 the entire industrial centrifuge enrichment facility had been completed and was fully operational.

The Soviet government worked hard to keep the centrifuge effort secret. The critical point was the repatriation of the German scientists who had participated in the project. According to Nickolai Sinev, the Soviet chief centrifuge designer during the 1950s:

Immediately upon his return from the USSR, Gernot Zippe [a talented engineer from Austria] . . . patents in the West the Soviet invention [the design of a subcritical centrifuge] . . . . Having learned about this plagiarism, the Soviet atomic management decided not to react to this information—to keep quiet in order not to give any indication that the USSR was working on a new, progressive method of uranium enrichment. Let them think that the USSR . . . continued using the inefficient gaseous diffusion method. Indeed, that was the price of the concealment for over 30 years of the industrial deployment of a new economic uranium enrichment technology in the USSR.

Another participant in the centrifuge program adds bitterly that "the damage to morale and economic damage done by the notorious regime of secrecy, which did not allow the USSR to patent abroad the Soviet centrifuge design, was [enormous]."

In Conclusion

Throughout the Cold War, the United States and its allies mounted a massive atomic energy intelligence effort against the Soviet Union. It was countered with a highly effective, defense-in-depth system of countermeasures. The precise score of this competition is unlikely ever to be established. It is clear, however, that long-range, stand-off technical systems proved to be the best collection sources for the United States, allowing for successful tracking of many aspects of the Soviet nuclear program. Overhead imagery enabled the detection and analysis of critical elements of the Soviet nuclear infrastructure. The USAEDS system, designed to monitor radioactive effluents from nuclear explosions and nuclear material processing, yielded important data on the development of Soviet nuclear weapons science and technology. Because of denial and deception countermeasures, however, the USSR's nuclear program was an exceptionally hard target. The lack of reliable on-the-ground intelligence made it difficult for the West to understand important developments inside the Soviet nuclear complex, which resulted in significant intelligence gaps.

The Cold War Atomic Intelligence Game, 1945-70 - From the Russian Perspective - part 2

2007-07-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

Continue reading - Counterintelligence Operations

Personnel Isolation

The isolation of construction workers and facility personnel to prevent potential recruitment by foreign spies was another critical security task. The construction force was particularly difficult to control. At least 15 of 114 GULAG camps supported the construction of nuclear facilities. In late 1947, over 20,000 prisoners were working in Ozersk, and about 10,000 were in Sarov. There were over 18,000 prisoners in Novouralsk during 1950-51. Over 27,000 were in Zheleznogorsk in 1953.

The Soviet government adopted several measures to minimize the security risk posed by the prison labor force. The KGB's policy was not to send prisoners with sentence terms of less than five years or those with sentences expiring in less than three years to nuclear sites. After completing nuclear construction projects, the prisoners finished their terms at the Vorkuta camps in Siberia, which were famous for their remoteness and harsh conditions. When released from the camps, the prisoners were sent to far away regions in the north and to Central Asia. Only in 1955, after several cooling-off years, were some of them allowed to return to central Russia. According to a journalist's account: "[T]he news spread quickly throughout all GULAG camps that [a nuclear construction assignment] was effectively the same as a death sentence."

Soldiers comprised the other large segment of the nuclear construction force. Once they completed their service, they all had to sign a 25-year non-disclosure agreement. The KGB, the agency in charge of construction, was directed to retain discharged soldiers and to hire them as civilians to work on other special projects.

German and Austrian scientists and engineers, who became involved in the Soviet nuclear program after World War II, presented the Soviet security apparatus with a particularly delicate problem. The program needed their expertise. Yet, it was clear that most of them eventually would go home and become accessible to Western intelligence organizations. Moscow decided to concentrate them to the extent possible at NKVD-run facilities (such as the Sukhumi laboratory on the Black Sea); to exclude German scientists from work that was directly related to nuclear weapons R&D and production; and to institute a two-year cooling-off period prior to repatriation. Even so, German scientists gave the West much of the initial data on the facilities, personalities, and technical directions of the Soviet project.

Tens of thousands of workers and engineers were required to operate the newly built facilities. Personnel selection was under the control of the Communist Party's Central Committee, the Council of Ministers, and regional party organizations. There was a process of double selection of personnel based on recommendations by those already working in the program and background investigations by the KGB and its predecessor organizations.

Closed cities made the job of insulating and controlling nuclear workers relatively straightforward. Upon arrival, new residents received instruction in security procedures and signed a nondisclosure agreement, which, among other things, prohibited them from disclosing information about the city and the nuclear facility; the names of nearby towns, rivers, lakes, and other landmarks; the transportation routes to the area; and other information that could help in locating the city. New workers were also encouraged to limit correspondence and social contacts with people outside the closed cities. Personal phone contacts with the outside world were prohibited. All correspondence was censored. Generally, people lived and worked behind barbed wire, all aspects of their lives penetrated and controlled by the security services. According to Yuli Khariton, a famous warhead designer from Sarov, "Beria's people were everywhere."

Initially, closed-city residents could leave their areas only for business. On rare occasions, they could go to sanatoriums for medical treatment or leave for family emergencies. Every such trip had to be approved by the security director, and its duration was checked by security officers.

In the 1950s, these security rules were somewhat relaxed. By 1954, facility directors, in coordination with the KGB, could grant permission to selected workers to leave their cities for vacations, medical treatment, or study. Nonetheless, workers willing to spend their vacations inside a city received bonuses amounting to 50 percent of their monthly salaries. All travelers still had to have their travel routes approved and sign nondisclosure agreements. Blanket permission to leave the cities was not issued until 1957, when all residents were issued passes permitting them to leave for one day any time they wanted. By that time, the Soviet Union already possessed a credible nuclear deterrent (including nuclear-armed medium-range ballistic missiles) against the West.

Keeping Technology Secret

Secrecy was a hallmark of Soviet nuclear science and technology. As late as the 1980s:

[C]lassification stamps Secret and Top Secret concealed everything even remotely connected with our activities and achievements in high technologies . . . . The stamp For Official Use (DSP) was on every piece of conceivably interesting science and technology information. Only after the Chernobyl disaster . . . was the censorship system forced into permitting publications in the open literature about the real state of the nation's atomic industry.

Even within this generally secretive environment, the nuclear weapons program existed inside a cocoon of secrecy of its own. Nuclear materials and operations had codenames, which were different at different facilities and which were changed periodically. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, natural uranium was assigned such names as strontium, lead, tar, phosphorus, bismuth, titanium, kremnil, A-9, Azh-9, BR-10, and P-9, while HEU had the codenames of kremnil-1 and moist kremnil.

Compartmentalization of information and operations was near absolute. Mikhail Gladyshev, former chief of the plutonium purification shop at the Mayak complex in Ozersk, has remarked:

[A]ctivities of the "regime services," headed by Beria, were very stern and bordered on insanity . . . . Often, there was a threat to the safety of workers . . . . As you see, our work had double risks—losing health and losing freedom. This was the difficult fate of those who made the atomic bomb.

Information about production outputs was particularly sensitive. According to Gladyshev:

[W]e put the [plutonium] paste in a box and transferred it to the consumer plant. How much plutonium was in that box we didn't know and it was not recommended for us to know. Even later, when I was the plant's chief engineer, the plans for plutonium production were known only to the facility's director, and all documents were prepared in single copies.

Supported in large part by the fear of punishment—an important consideration, given Stalinist repressions and campaigns to unmask spies and saboteurs—the regime of secrecy was further cemented by genuine patriotism and the sense of purpose among nuclear workers.

The Cold War Atomic Intelligence Game, 1945-70 - From the Russian Perspective

2007-07-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

Since its inception in the early 1940s and through much of the Cold War, the Soviet atomic project was the focus of a massive intelligence effort by the United States and its allies. Of primary interest were the issues of uranium availability; the production of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium; nuclear warhead R&D and testing; and the nuclear weapons production and management infrastructure.

Washington needed such information to assess the Soviet nuclear strike capability. Estimates of the Soviet inventories of HEU and plutonium when put together with data on warhead designs would allow CIA analysts to gauge the size and composition of the Soviet nuclear weapons stockpile. Information on Moscow's knowledge of nuclear weapons effects was needed to evaluate the capability of the Soviet Union to design warheads for air-defense and anti-missile missiles and to develop hardened warheads capable of surviving US ballistic missile defenses. Analysis of the impact on the Soviet nuclear weapons program of testing moratoriums and the proposed limited test ban treaty was critical when Washington was developing its position on these issues in the 1950s and 1960s.

In pursuing these objectives, the US atomic energy intelligence effort was global in scope. It involved a wide range of covert operations, exploitation of open source materials, and the use of technical collection systems. While much has been written about US operations against Soviet targets (including in Studies in Intelligence), relatively little attention has been given to the USSR's elaborate countermeasures intended to prevent the West from learning about its nuclear program. Based on public information, this article seeks to examine the Soviet nuclear denial and deception (D&D) campaign from 1945 until 1970.

This period is of particular interest. The 1950s and 1960s were the formative years of the Soviet nuclear program. By the end of this period, Moscow had a mature nuclear weapons technology base and a thoroughly integrated and redundant weapons complex, the configuration of which remained largely the same until the end of the Cold War. In many ways, these were also the most dangerous years of the Cold War. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis and other dramatic events of that period were of critical significance in shaping approaches to national defense, foreign policy, and intelligence that served each country for the balance of the Cold War confrontation.

Protecting Nuclear Secrets

The nuclear weapons program, the crown jewel of Soviet military power, has always been a closely guarded secret. During its early years, the program was directed by the Special Committee chaired by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the Soviet NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs). State security generals were appointed to key management positions at nuclear research institutes and production facilities. The NKVD, which eventually became the KGB, played a key role in nuclear safeguards and the physical protection of nuclear facilities. The NKVD also was charged with nuclear construction and had the power to establish and run its own nuclear R&D and production facilities. For example, the Bochvar Institute of Inorganic Materials (VNIINM), responsible for the development of plutonium production and processing technologies, was established in 1944 as the NII-9 research institute in the NKVD system—it was not transferred to the broader nuclear program until October 1945.

The pervasive role of state security organizations in the Soviet atomic effort was due to the program's high priority for national security; the requirement for absolute secrecy; the ability of nuclear managers with state security backgrounds to get things done; and the NKVD's vast resources, which included funding, materiel, and a workforce drawn from the GULAG prison network.

Beria was executed following the death of Stalin in 1953, and subsequent purges of many former and active NKVD/KGB officers reduced the state security presence in the nuclear complex. The program itself was reorganized in June 1953 to become the USSR Ministry of Medium Machine Building (Minsredmash, the predecessor of today's Ministry of Atomic Power, Minatom), and it started to resemble other ministries of the Soviet military-industrial complex.

The emphasis on secrecy and security in the nuclear area remained, however. To thwart foreign intelligence operations, the Soviet Union built an elaborate, multi-layered system of denial and deception, the main elements of which included the restriction of access to nuclear facilities and personnel, strict information protection measures, an enhanced counterintelligence posture, and technical countermeasures.

Denial of Access

Secrecy considerations were paramount in the development of the nuclear infrastructure. While some research and design laboratories were established in Moscow and other open cities, the more critical fissile material production centers and nuclear weapons research and production facilities were built in 10 closed nuclear cities, which are now known by their Russian acronym ZATO. The construction of the first-line nuclear weapons R&D center (Sarov) and fissile material production facilities (Ozersk, Novouralsk, and Lesnoy) began during 1946-47. Subsequently, they were joined by a cluster of second-line facilities (Snezhinsk, Trekhgorny, Seversk, Zheleznogorsk, Zelenogorsk, and Zarechny), most located in the Urals and western Siberia.

To conceal operations from foreign spies and increase survivability against an atomic bombardment, nuclear cities were built in densely forested areas deep inside the USSR's land mass. The cities did not appear on maps. In non-secret documents, they were assigned the names of nearby towns and a numerical suffix. The use of post-box numbers continued until the early 1990s.

D&D considerations at times were decisive in determining the design and location of new nuclear facilities. For example, secrecy was the main factor in moving the first plutonium production complex (now the Mayak complex) from the initially proposed remote location near the Ufa River to its current location in Ozersk, near Lake Kyzyltash. According to a letter from the atomic project's science director Igor Kurchatov to Beria:

[I]n considering issues related to the construction of Plant 817 [the code-name of the Mayak complex] it was established that water in cooling towers would have a temperature of about 80o C. The resulting steam, which would be inevitably produced in large quantities (especially during winter), would thereby compromise the concealment . . . siting the plant near a lake would simplify the problem considerably because large quantities of water would allow cooling without cooling towers . . . and steam formation would be avoided . . . . The site near Lake Kyzyltash was proposed to the Special Committee. The [main] argument against this site . . . is that the lake could serve as a navigation landmark for aerial reconnaissance. I consider this argument unconvincing because the site is located in the part of the Urals, which, within a small area, contains a very large number of similarly shaped lakes. I therefore urge you to consider moving Plant 817's site to Lake Kyzyltash.

This was how the closed city of Ozersk and the plutonium complex, a source of several major environmental disasters in the Urals, was established.

The closed cities represented an integral part of the layered security system built around nuclear weapons facilities. Each city occupied a large restricted area—232 square kilometers in the case of Sarov, for example—that was surrounded by double fences. Inside the restricted area were a town for the facility workforce, large wooded areas, and several isolated technical areas that housed primary research and production facilities, testing areas, and support infrastructure. Technical areas within the restricted area were surrounded by their own double or triple fences, which were patrolled by armed guards.

A layer outside the perimeter was designated as a special regime zone, where every resident had to have a permit and a passport. Temporary residence—even overnight accommodation of non-residents—was prohibited. Non-residents could not even pick mushrooms and berries or hunt in the zone. Ex-criminals and other undesirable elements were prevented from residing in the special regime zones.

Critical nuclear facilities were on the government's priority list for "active air defense measures."5 All military and civilian over-flights were prohibited. The U-2 plane piloted on 1 May 1961 by Gary Powers over the plutonium complex in Ozersk (and shot down shortly thereafter by an SA-2 surface-to-air missile near Yekaterinburg) was the first airplane over this facility in the almost 15 years of its operation.

Continue reading - Personnel Isolation

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2007-07-12T09:47:00.000-07:00

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The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 8

2007-07-12T00:14:00.000-07:00

The inventor's name was Worm. When he saw what fabulous prices Krupp was getting for the industrial diamonds which he had created and which cost the company so little, he decided to build secretly a plant of his own and realize some of these profits for himself. He borrowed money from the bank, rented a little shop, made an oven like the one he had constructed for Krupp, installed the minimum equipment needed, and made a few profitable sales of vidi to foreign customers. With the proceeds of these he was able to pay off part of the loan, and it looked as though he was on the way to becoming a rich man. But at this point the Krupp concern learned about his disloyal competition and swooped down on him with all the fury of an industrial giant. He was summarily fired. Customers were warned that if they bought a single ounce of vidi from him Krupp would never sell them anything. The bank suddenly became rigid and demanded prompt repayment. In spite of his talents as an engineer and inventor Worm could not find work. All doors were politely but firmly closed in his face.

Dr. B. hurried to see Herr Worm. Here too, he contrived to ring the doorbell when the man was not at home; he had found that women are more talkative than men, especially when they have an opportunity to do a bit of advertising for their husbands. Frau Worm was overjoyed that someone was interesting himself in her husband. The Krupps were brutes, she said; they ruled the country. Her husband was a martyr. They had driven him to desperation. All his savings had gone into the enterprise, and it was ruined with one blow.

Dr. B. listened to her story with unfeigned sympathy. He said he had an interesting proposition for her husband which might get him out of his difficulties. From that moment he became her trusted friend, the man who was going to save her husband from strangulation by the Krupps. He left his telephone number for Worm to call.

The next day they met at the Technische Hochschule and from there went to Dr. B.'s apartment. Dr. B. suggested that in order to escape from the Krupp stranglehold Worm would have to offer his talents to a foreign concern. He said he knew a big Scandinavian company which might be interested in acquiring the secret process of vidi production and entering the field in competition with Krupp; he would check. A few days later he informed Worm that the company was definitely interested; it had authorized him to advance the inventor up to ten thousand German marks. He asked Worm to submit a description of the vidi production process and furnish data on equipment needed, cost, etc.

For the time being, Dr. B. declined to name the company. This did not necessarily look suspicious, because as a gobetween he was entitled to a commission and would need to protect his own interests. But Worm got a strange hunch. "I want to warn you," he said, "that if my invention is needed for the Russians I will have nothing to do with them!" Dr. B., taken aback, hastened to reassure him that it was a Scandinavian concern all right. It turned out that Worm was a fanatical Nazi and Russian-hater.

Something had to be done to overcome that burning hatred if Worm was to be maneuvered into giving his vidi invention to Russia. While he was writing up his process Dr. B. would supplement the advance, giving him another thousand marks every week or so, which delighted Frau Worm. He also had the Worms several times for dinner at his home. When Frau Worm wanted to buy things which she had been denying to herself for long, but her husband kept too wary an eye on his dwindling advances, Dr. B. sensed this and immediately came to her assistance. He privately gave her money for herself with the understanding that she would repay it when her husband struck it rich; he was convinced that a prosperous future was just around the corner for them.

Worm's description of his process was sent to Moscow. After a close study, the Russian engineers declared that without the personal guidance of the inventor they would have trouble constructing and operating the special oven required; it was supposed to make several thousand revolutions a minute under an enormously high temperature. Moscow wanted to have the inventor at any cost. Now the friendship Dr. B. had cultivated with Frau Worm paid off. She cajoled her husband and wrangled with him for a whole week and at last brought him to the realization that they had no choice, that this was their last and only chance.

The Soviet trade delegation in Berlin signed an official twoyear contract with Worm, under which he received a flat sum in German currency, a monthly allowance in marks for his wife-who preferred to remain in Germany-and a salary for himself in Russian rubles. He was entitled to a suite in a first-class Moscow hotel with restaurant and other services and to a chauffeured automobile and two vacations in Germany per year at Russia's expense. He took with him to Moscow a German engineer by the name of Mente who had been his assistant at the Krupp plant.

Worm's letters to his wife breathed hatred toward everything Russian. He contracted rheumatic fever during his stay and returned to Germany a broken and embittered man. But he had fulfilled his contract with the Soviets to the letter, turning over to them his cherished brainchild, the priceless vidi process.

The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 7

2007-07-12T00:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the theft of all the necessary formulas, blueprints, and instructions would still not enable Soviet engineers and inventors to construct a complicated mechanism or duplicate a production process. They would need the human component, the special skill or engineering know-how. In such cases officers of the Division for Industrial Intelligence would, with offers of additional rewards, persuade the appropriate foreign engineers to make a secret trip to Russia to instruct the Russian engineers or supervise the laboratory experiments on the spot. Precautions were taken to insure that the traveler's passport should not bear any border stamps or other traces of his visit to the Soviet Union: the engineer would travel with his own passport only to the capital of an adjacent country, where he would turn it over for safekeeping to the local Soviet agent and get from him a false one on which he would proceed to Russia; then on the return trip he would turn this in and pick up the genuine passport where he had left it. The fees paid by the Russians for such trips ran sometimes as high as ten thousand dollars for a few days, but the savings realized amounted to millions of dollars. The following is a typical such operation.

A Worm Turns

In view of the fact that the Soviet government was spending huge sums of money on industrial diamonds needed for the expanding oil industry, metallurgy, and various geological projects, it was naturally interested in an offer made by the German Krupp concern to supply newly invented artificial diamonds almost as hard and good as natural ones. The new product was named "vidi," from the German wie Diamant, "like diamond." The Commissariat of Heavy Industry bought some of the vidi, tested them in drilling operations, and was amazed at their high quality. It decided to buy the patent from Krupp and have German engineers build a plant to produce them in the Soviet Union.

Soon a delegation of German experts headed by two Krupp directors arrived in Moscow. Knowing how badly the Russians needed industrial diamonds for the five-year plan, they demanded a staggering price for this technical aid. When the deal was being discussed at the Politburo Stalin turned to the head of the NKVD and said: "The bastards want too much money. Try to steal it from them. Show what the NKVD can do!" This challenge was taken up eagerly, and one of the chiefs of the Foreign Department was charged with the operation.

The first step was to find out the location of the vidi factory and the names of the inventor and the engineers in charge of production. This task was assigned to a German agent, scientist Dr. B. In the Berlin Technische Hochschule, with which he was associated, Dr. B. looked up all the available treatises on achieving hard metal alloys and then approached a noted professor who had written some of them. From him he learned that a Krupp inventor had succeeded in attaining the hardest alloy known and that this was being produced in a plant on the outskirts of Berlin.

Dr. B. now went to the site of the plant and dropped in at a beer hall frequented by its technical personnel. After visiting the place a few times, he engaged some of the technicians in conversation. He represented himself as a scientist who was writing a book on hard metal alloys. "Oh, then you are working with our Cornelius," said one technician. Dr. B. said no, but he had known a Professor Cornelius. "No," said the technician, "he is not a professor, he is only a foreman in our plant, but he is a man who could teach the professors how to make industrial diamonds."

Through an inspector of the Berlin Polizei Presidium, another secret Soviet informant, the Russian residentura obtained information on Cornelius, including his home address, and the next day Dr. B. rang the doorbell there. He was admitted by Cornelius' wife, who told him that her husband had not yet returned from the plant. This Dr. B. knew; he had come early on purpose, hoping to learn something about Cornelius rrom his wife. He told her that he was a Doctor of Science and was writing a treatise on hard metal alloys and that his colleagues at the Technische Hochschule advised him to see Herr Cornelius, who might be helpful to him. He added that if Herr Cornelius was really an expert in that field and if he was willing to contribute to the research he might earn some money on the side.

Frau Cornelius, flattered that a scientist from the famous Technische Hochschule should come to seek advice from her husband and stimulated by the prospect of earning extra money, began to praise her husband's abilities and high reputation at the plant. She said that the engineer who had invented the process for producing artificial diamonds had trusted only her husband, because he alone knew how to handle the specially built electric oven. and now that the inventor had fallen out with Krupp and quit. her husband was practically in charge of the whole thing. He could demand from Krupp any salary he wanted, and they would have to give it to him; but he was not that kind of man. For him devotion to the company came first.

When Cornelius returned home Dr. B. restated the purpose of his visit and, in order to underscore his purely scientific interest in the matter and allay any possible suspicion, invited him to his personal room at the Technische Hochschule for the following Saturday. On Saturday, after a talk at the Hochschule, he took him for dinner to his luxurious tenroom flat in the eight-story apartment house which he had inherited from his father. He had seen at once that Cornelius was too illiterate technologically to be able to explain in scientific terms the secrets of production, even if he wanted to. He was only a foreman trained by the inventor to operate the oven. What Dr. B. wanted was to find out the name of the inventor, his whereabouts, and the history of his break with the Krupp concern. After an excellent dinner and a few glasses of brandy, Cornelius enjoyed telling the story to his genial host.

The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 6

2007-07-12T00:11:00.000-07:00

Political Action

The sixth line of Soviet intelligence is to influence the decisions of foreign governments through secret agents occupying important positions within them. In the last two decades there have been quite a few instances in which highly placed Soviet secret agents were able to tip the scales of policy in favor of the Soviet Union. Some of these agents started out as junior diplomats in the foreign offices of the West and climbed with the help of their socially prominent families to high government positions. Others were already mature politicians and statesmen when they were seduced by money and other base considerations. One of the leading members of Mussolini's cabinet and the Fascist Grand Council succumbed to an offer of money and agreed to collaborate with Soviet Russia.

A leading member of the parliament of a mid-European country, who was not thought to be a friend of the Soviet Union, would meet secretly with the Soviet ambassador and take his instructions concerning the position he should assume in certain matters affecting Soviet interests. In another European country an inspector of the national secret police, who had become a Soviet informant, reported the police had documentary proof that an influential member of the cabinet was a partner in a big narcotics ring and owned, together with a famous racketeer, a luxury brothel a few blocks away from the presidential palace in the center of the capital. This minister was so powerful in the councils of the government, as well as in the underworld. that the head of the secret police was afraid to tangle with him. MoEcow ordered the residentura to steal all the incriminating documents, and photographs of them were shown to the minister at the Soviet embassy, as a "friendly gesture," by the soviet ambassador himself, who happened to be a former chief of the Foreign Department of the OGPU, i.e. of Soviet intelligence. The friendly gesture was well understood, and it inaugurated a period of close collaboration between the minister and Soviet intelligence. His task was not merely to provide information but to influence the policies of his government as directed by the Soviet Foreign Commissariat.

Another type of KGB political action is to pave the way in ticklish international matters for later negotiations between the Soviet Foreign Office and other governments. If exploratory talks conducted, directly or through go-betweens, by Soviet intelligence agents with representatives of a foreign government produce results satisfactory to both sides, the official diplomats of both countries can then take over. If not, the Kremlin remains free to disclaim any knowledge of them. A Russian intelligence officer by the name of Ostrovsky who had secretly negotiated the establishment of diplomatic relations with Roumania became the first Soviet ambassador to that country.

Another activity along this line consists of clandestine attempts to induce leaders of a political opposition to stage a coup d'etat and take over the government. The inducement would be a promise of political and financial support and, if the state happened to border on Soviet territory, military aid as well. In 1937, for instance, one of the chiefs of intelligence was commissioned by Stalin personally to enter into secret negotiations with former Roumanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Titulesku, who lived at that time in Menton, on the FrancoItalian border, and persuade him to overthrow the reactionary regime of Prime Minister Maniu. Stalin offered financial and military aid against a promise by Titulesku that upon assumption of power he would sign a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union.

Industrial Intelligence

Although intelligence activity is as old as society, this seventh line of Soviet operation is something new, first begun in 1929. Its purpose was to assist in the industrialization of the Soviet Union by stealing production secrets-new inventions, secret technological processes, etc.-from the advanced countries of Europe and America. Soviet intelligence organizations abroad began to recruit engineers, scientists, and inventors working in the laboratories and plants of the big industrial concerns of the world.

At this time the Soviet Union, besides buying big quantities of machinery and even whole plants from the industrial companies of the West, negotiated with them for the purchase of patents and the know-how for production processes. A number of such purchases were made and foreign engineers came to instruct the Russians in the application of the new methods. But often, when the price demanded by foreign concerns for their "technical aid" was too high-it always ran into many millions of dollars-the head of the Soviet government would challenge the Foreign Department of the NKVD to steal the secrets in question from them. The response to these challenges was invariably enthusiastic, and after a number of them had been successfully met the new Division for Industrial Intelligence was created within the NKVD Foreign Department.

The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 5

2007-07-12T00:09:00.000-07:00

Penetration

The fifth line of Soviet intelligence is infiltration into the security agencies and intelligence services of foreign countries. This activity holds a special challenge and a peculiar fascination for Soviet intelligence officers. Although they regard foreign intelligence officers as mercenary spies (while thinking of themselves as devoted revolutionaries carrying out dangerous assignments for the Party) , the Soviet officers do have a feeling of kinship with them and react to an encounter with one of them with the same thrill and curiosity that enemy fighter pilots feel on sighting each other across a space of sky. Their hostile attitude toward their foreign counterparts becomes sincerely friendly the moment the latter begin to cooperate as informants.

The principal aims pursued in infiltrating foreign security agencies are the following: to find out what these agencies know about Soviet intelligence operations in the country in question; to determine whether they have succeeded in planting counterspies in the Soviet network or in recruiting anyone connected with the residentura; to learn in good time of any intended arrests of network personnel; and to use their facilities to check up on persons in whom the Soviet residentura happens to be interested. The penetration of foreign intelligence services is done to find out whether they have succeeded in creating a spy network in Soviet Russia, and if so who these spies are, what secret information they have transmitted, and what lines of communication they use.

In some of the Western countries, furthermore, the intelligence services have access to the confidential papers of other departments of the government, including defense and foreign affairs. This practice is justified on the ground that it helps them evaluate the information from their own secret sources abroad and render more accurate estimates of the intentions and capabilities of other countries. Whatever the merits of this argument, the NKVD was quick to take advantage of the resulting convenient concentration in one place of secret documents from several government departments; it instructed its residenturas abroad to try to procure from the intelligence services not only their own information but also that which they receive from other government departments, for example military attache reports and the political analyses and estimates of ambassadors.

Although the intelligence services of different capitalistic countries do not always have harmonious relations with one another, thanks to national rivalry and personal jealousies, they do cooperate with one another to a certain extent in combatting Soviet espionage and subversion. Some of them exchange information in this field, forwarding to each other photographs of known or suspected Soviet spies. Soviet acquisition of this correspondence reveals what they know about Russian intelligence activities and may sometimes warn of an impending exposure and arrest of an agent. In my time, however, the secret information procured from foreign intelligence services rarely gave us cause for alarm. Much of it was incompetent and out of date. As a rule the strength of the Soviet armed forces was ridiculously belittled. The reports on Soviet espionage activities were based more on hindsight than foresight, and they frequently contained outright fantasies concocted by unscrupulous doubles and falsifiers. But though much of the information collected by the foreign intelligence services about Russia was found to be worthless, it was by no means worthless to Soviet intelligence to know about this.

It is generally said that knowledge of two things is indispensable to the charting of foreign policy in a time of crisis-the real power of one's own country and the power of the potential enemy. But to these a third must be added: one must also know what image one's own power creates in the eyes of the adversary. This is very important, because however distorted that image, it is what he is going to act upon. By infiltrating the intelligence services of foreign countries Soviet intelligence can learn and report to policy makers how each country assesses the capabilities and deficiencies of the Soviet Union. It is then up to the policy makers to figure out what mistakes the potential enemy will be likely to make when the chips are down as a result of the distortions in his view of the Soviet Union as a world power.

The infiltration of a foreign intelligence service is a much more hazardous operation than the acquisition of informants in other government departments, because the foreign intelligence officers are wise to such practices and may maneuver the recruiting officer into a trap or grab him outright before he can get away. The KGB therefore advises its residenturas not to rush things but to approach and cultivate first a friend or relative of the target officer and use him as a go-between. Then the actual recruiting and all meetings until the recruited officer has proved his sincerity (by turning over important information) should take place on territory outside the jurisdiction of the target country.

The safest way to infiltrate a foreign intelligence service without fear of being trapped is to transplant a completely reliable agent into that organization, for example to induce an old and trusted informant in some other branch of the government to seek employment with the intelligence service. Sometimes it may be necessary for him first to cultivate socially for this purpose a senior officer of the intelligence service. Agents planted in a foreign intelligence service can be used not only to procure secret information but also as a channel through which misinformation about the Soviet Union and other countries can be introduced.

The intelligence and security services of none of the big world powers have escaped infiltration by Soviet agents. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, as head of the CIA, was aware of Soviet successes in this field, and in September 1953 he expressed his apprehension in the following words: "I believe the communists are so adroit and adept that they have infiltrated practically every security agency of the government."

The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 4

2007-07-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

Part 3

As we have said, the KGB does not look for this information in public documents. Neither is it interested in monitoring foreign radio transmissions and distilling from them crumbs of random information. It procures the military secrets of foreign governments from the classified files of the general staffs of those countries, from the secret reports of foreign defense ministries, from military research laboratories and proving grounds, and so it knows that what it gets represents, even if incompletely, the true facts on which Soviet policy makers can confidently base their decisions.

In wartime, military intelligence becomes the principal function of every branch of the Intelligence Directorate of the KGB. The main task of its field posts, its underground residenturas abroad, is then to inform the Soviet government by radio and other means about the war plans of the enemy, his troop concentrations and movements, the size of his uncommitted reserves in men and materiel, and the extent of the damage inflicted on the enemy by the air forces of the Soviet Union and its allies. Diplomatic intelligence concentrates the efforts of its informants and secret agents on watching the relations among the governments of the enemy coalition, with special emphasis on frictions among them. The residenturas must keep a sharp eye also on Russia's allies in the war, immediately signaling to the Soviet government if an ally puts out peace feelers and is gravitating toward a separate peace with the enemy. It may be recalled that during World War II the Kremlin sounded an alarm when it intercepted rumors that British representatives were about to meet in Franco's Spain with emissaries of Hitler. During the worst days of the last war, when Russia's defenses were crumbling and the Western allies were slow in opening a second front, there were moments when the Western leaders were jittery at the thought that Stalin might try to save what was left of the country by making a separate peace with Germany.

While the residenturas abroad keep the government informed of the enemy's grand strategy and his capabilities and vulnerabilities, day-to-day tactical or combat intelligence is taken care of by the intelligence sections of the Soviet armed forces and by the special detachments (Osoby Otdel) of the KGB attached to all army units down to the regimental level. It is their duty co supply the Soviet commander with data on the size, disposition, and fighting strength of the enemy force with which the troops under his command will soon be locked in battle. The standard sources of military intelligence are supplemented by material obtained in raids the KGB guerrilla detachments make on enemy headquarters, by ground and aerial photo reconnaissance, and by the interrogation of prisoners, refugees, and spies who pose as refugees.

Economic Warfare

The third line of Soviet intelligence is called economic intelligence, which contrary to what might be supposed has little to do with studying the economy of foreign countries. It was created for the purposes of exercising State control over Soviet export and import operations and of protecting Soviet foreign trade from the pressures and abuses of international cartels and other organizations of monopolistic capital.

In the 1930's, for instance, the Division of Economic Intelligence discovered that the biggest electric concerns of the world had entered into a "gentlemen's agreement" according to which they would not compete with each other in their dealings with Soviet Russia and would overcharge her on purchases up to 75% over current world prices. I myself saw a letter signed by the vice president of General Electric Co. addressed to the presidents of the German AEG and the Swiss Brown Bovery Co. which contained a list of prices made up especially for the Soviet Union 60 to 75% higher than the regular market prices. General Electric tried to justify this extortion by pointing out that Russia's credit standing was "not too good." The gentlemen's agreement was finally broken up by the Soviet government, but not before Soviet trade had suffered losses totaling tens of millions of dollars.

Plants

The fourth line of Soviet intelligence is misinformation. The Soviet government is interested not only in obtaining information about the policies and impending moves of other countries but also in misinforming and misleading the foreign governments concerning its own position and intentions. But whereas in procuring secret information from abroad the intelligence officer is given free rein to steal whatever he considers valuable, the task of misinforming the outer world about the Soviet Union cannot be left to the discretion of the individual officer or even of the intelligence service as a whole. What false information or rumors should be deviously placed within earshot of some foreign government is a question of high policy, since the purpose is to induce this government to do what the Kremlin wants it to do, perhaps to bluff it into inaction or into making a concession. In this area, therefore, Soviet intelligence cannot act without specific directives as to the substance of the misinformation and the way it should be planted.

When in the 1930's, for instance, the Soviet government wanted to obtain a mutual defense treaty with France in order to counteract the growing menace of Hitler's Germany, Soviet intelligence was given instructions to introduce into French General Staff channels certain pages from a German army report which showed that Germany was planning to occupy the Rhineland at the beginning of 1936 and invade France within eighteen months after that. Similarly, at about this same time, an effort was made to shake England out of her complacency by slipping into British intelligence channels (through a German double agent) inflated figures concerning German aircraft production; these created quite a stir in the highest councils of the British government. Here the task of the misinformation desk of the NKVD had been to fabricate ostensible photocopies of the German documents with such skill that they would seem genuine even to trained military experts.

During the Spanish civil war; in which a Russian tank brigade fought against the forces of General Franco and Russian pilots flew the newest and best Soviet fighter planes (I-15 and 1-16) and medium bombers (CB) against the German air squadrons supporting him, the misinformation desk was ordered to introduce into German military intelligence channels the information that these Soviet planes were not of the latest design, that Russia had in her arsenal thousands of planes of second and third succeeding generations possessing much greater speed and higher ceiling. In August 1937 German experts had examined and tested two Soviet I-16 fighters when they landed by mistake on an enemy air strip in the Madrid sector, and they had been amazed at the quality and performance of the planes, which in some respects surpassed German fighters. Now the false information that the Russians had on the production line still better and more modern models served Stalin's evident aim of impressing upon Hitler that the Soviet Union was better armed than he thought and that it would be wiser for Germany to have Russia as a partner than as an opponent.

The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 3

2007-07-12T00:06:00.000-07:00

Political Intelligence

While The Main Intelligence Department (GRU) of the Soviet Ministry of Defense does only military intelligence, the Foreign Directorate of the Committee of State Security (KGB), successor to the NKVD, is actively engaged in at least seven lines of intelligence and related work, not counting sabotage and guerrilla warfare.

The first line, which is considered the most important, is the so-called diplomatic intelligence, the purpose of which is to keep the Soviet government informed of the secret deals between the governments of capitalistic countries and of the true intentions and contemplated moves of each of these governments toward the Soviet Union. This information is to be procured from primary sources within the secret councils of the foreign governments. The principal sources are the following: foreign diplomats, including ambassadors; the staffs of foreign ministries, including code clerks, secretaries, etc. ; private secretaries to members of the cabinet; members of parliaments; and ambitious politicians seeking financial aid and leftwing support. The life history of such officials is studied beginning with their school years, and their character traits, weaknesses and vices, and intimate lives and friendships are analyzed with the purpose of finding the Achilles' heel of each and securing the right approach to him through the right person, say a former classmate, intimate friend, or relative.

These well-prepared approaches have often paid off. Some politicians have been lured into the Soviet network by promises that the Soviet Union would use its secret levers of influence in their countries to further their political fortunes. Such promises have often been accompanied by "subsidies," ostensibly to promote good will toward Russia but in reality a bribe. A number of high officials have succumbed to outright offers of money. Others, especially those who in their youth had be longed to Fabian and other idealistic circles, were influenced by humanitarian arguments and persuaded that they must help the Soviet Union stop the march of fascism. Considerable success was achieved among foreign diplomats tinted with homosexual perversions; it is no secret that the biggest concentration of homosexuals can be found in the diplomatic services of Western countries. Those of these who agreed to work for the Russian network were instructed to approach other homosexual members of the diplomatic corps, a strategy which was remarkably successful. Even when those approached declined the offer to collaborate, they would not denounce the recruiter to the authorities. Soviet intelligence officers were amazed at the mutual consideration and true loyalty which prevailed among homosexuals.

It is usually supposed easier to lure into the Soviet network a code clerk or secretary than a diplomat or statesman; a man in an important government position is expected to know better than to take the road of treachery, and he has much more to lose if caught doing so. The experience of Soviet intelligence has in many instances, however, not borne out this view. Honesty and loyalty may often be more deeply ingrained in simple and humble people than in men of high position. A man who took bribes when he was a patrolman does not turn honest when he becomes the chief of police; the only thing that changes is the size of the bribe. Weakness of character, inability to withstand temptation, lightmindedness, wishful thinking, and bad judgment are also traits that accompany a man to the highest rungs of his career.

The consensus of Soviet intelligence chiefs has been that departmental and private secretaries in a foreign ministry are often more valuable as sources of information than an ambassador, because a well-placed secretary can supply documentary data on a wider scale, covering the policies of the foreign government toward a number of countries. An ambassador is considered a much bigger prize, however, because he can be used not only as a source of information but also as a competent consultant for the Russian Foreign Office and even as an agent who can influence to a certain extent the foreign policy of his government.

Military Intelligence

The second line of Soviet intelligence activity is to procure data on the military posture of Western and other countries, the quality and strength of their armies, navies, and air forces, their degree of mechanization, mobility, fire power, technological advancement, and modernization, and the productive capacity of the armament industries and the mobilization plans of the big powers. Soviet intelligence watches with a jealous eye every new invention in the field of arms and tries to steal it while it is still in the blueprint stage or on the drawing board so that Soviet inventors and engineers can be the first to apply it. With the advent of the nuclear and rocketry age, which has completely revolutionized the material base, strategy, and very concept of warfare, Soviet intelligence strains all its efforts to obtain immediate information on the progress being made by the leading Western countries in these advanced fields and to gauge the striking and retaliatory power of the Western world.

The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 2

2007-07-11T09:01:00.000-07:00

Stalin, who was his own intelligence boss and liked to take a personal part in the cloak-and-dagger business, warned his intelligence chiefs time and again to keep away from hypotheses and "equations with many unknowns" and concentrate instead on acquiring well-placed informants and access to the secret vaults of foreign governments. He used to say, "An intelligence hypothesis may become your hobby horse on which you will ride straight into a self-made trap." He called it "dangerous guesswork." In 1932 he had ordered that our quarterly intelligence surveys of foreign countries no longer be sent him. Although based on secret data, these surveys were interspersed with unsubstantiated hypotheses and subjective views; they corresponded roughly to the national estimates which the American intelligence agencies produce for the National Security Council. After that the NKVD sent him the cream of raw intelligence only-summaries of important documents stolen from other governments and reports from exceptionally valuable secret informants like foreign ambassadors and general staff officers.

During his periodic conferences with the chiefs of the intelligence services Stalin would often interject: "Don't tell me what you think, give me the facts and the source." But sometimes he would violate his own rule and ask one or another intelligence chief for an opinion. Such was the case during a joint conference which Stalin and Voroshilov had in the summer of 1936 with the chiefs of the NKVD and the Red Army intelligence Department. Stalin asked Artouzov, deputy chief of military intelligence, "With whom would Poland side in a war between Germany, Italy, and Japan on the one side and Russia, France, and England on the other?" Without hesitation An touzov answered: "Poland will always be with France and England." "You are a jackass," retorted Stalin. "If Poland didn't side with Germany against us, she would be crushed by the German mechanized divisions on their way to the Soviet Union and would not live to see another day, whereas if she allied herself with Germany she could hope to expand if things went well, and if things went badly she might still get a negotiated settlement." Artouzov did not live to see his illogical prediction come true; he was shot in the great purge, in 1937.

Soviet Intelligence

In the Soviet Union research on publicly accessible materials is conducted by the Academy of Sciences, the universities, the scientific journals, and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Industry, Trade, Finance, and Statistics. The NKVD based its work 100% on secret sources and undercover agents. The Main Intelligence Department of the Army did study some legitimately accessible sources, but only those dealing with military matters, such as foreign military and scientific journals, army and navy manuals, military textbooks, topographic explorations, and anything printed anywhere about the armed forces of the world. But even in army intelligence the main efforts, at least 80% of the total, were concentrated on building and operating networks of secret informants and on the procurement of secret documents.

Had the Soviet intelligence agencies put their main efforts and resources into building up encyclopedias of world-wide information from overt sources and on processing and analyzing that enormous amount of incoming raw material, they would have never been able to acquire the secrets of the manufacture of the atomic and hydrogen bombs or the blueprints of the American nuclear-powered submarines or to infiltrate the key departments of the American, British, and European governments. Important state secrets and especially clues to the intentions and plans of potential enemies cannot be found in libraries or encyclopedias, but only where they are kept under lock and key. The task of intelligence services is to acquire the keys and deliver the secrets to their governments, thus providing them with the foreknowledge and orientation needed for the making of decisions.

When General Douglas MacArthur, who had been blamed for not having foreseen certain developments in the Korean War, was asked by the Senate investigating committee in 1951 to explain why the North Korean invasion caught the Americans by surprise, he gave a classic reply from which many an intelligence chief could take his cue. He said:

I don't see how it would have been humanly possible for any man or group of men to predict such an attack as that . . . There is nothing, no means or methods, except the accidental spy methodsif you can get somebody to betray the enemy's highest circles, that can get such information as that. It is guarded with a secrecy that you cannot overestimate.

Thus, under the fire of the investigation, General MacArthur, who was not an expert in intelligence, arrived with excellent logic at an idea which touches the very heart of the intelligence problem. "There is nothing, no means or methods, except ... spy methods ... that can get such information as that." This is the essence of the Soviet doctrine of intelligence.

The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence

2007-07-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

Like the Western intelligence services, the Russians get information about foreign states from two principal sources, from secret informants and undercover agents and from legitimate sources such as military and scientific journals, published reference material, and records of parliamentary debates. But the Russians regard as true intelligence (razvedka) only the first type of information, that procured by undercover agents and secret informants in defiance of the laws of the foreign country in which they operate. Information obtained from legitimate sources and publications they consider mere research data. In the eyes of Russian officers it takes a real man to do the creative and highly dangerous work of underground intelligence on foreign soil, while the digging up of research data in the safety of the home office or library can be left to women or young lieutenants just beginning their careers. The Western intelligence services, on the other hand, treat both types of information as intelligence, often with a much higher regard for research than for undercover work.

Fundamental Doctrine

It is in these variant attitudes toward the two types of information that the difference between Soviet and Western intelligence doctrine begins to emerge. The difference is not just a theoretical one; in practice it affects every phase of intelligence activity from operational planning and choice of strategy to evaluation of the reliability of information procured and its importance to policy makers.

Both Soviet and Western intelligence services strive to learn the secret intentions, capabilities, and strategic plans of other states, but they don't go about it in the same way. The Russians believe that such important secrets can and should be procured directly from the. classified files in offices of the government in question and from informants among its civil servants. When the Russians suspect that another country is trying to form a coalition directed against the Soviet Union, they don't seek information about it in newspaper editorials, panel discussions, or historical precedents, although all these sources may shed some light on the matter; they set out to steal the secret diplomatic correspondence between the conspiring states or to recruit an informant on the staff of the negotiators if they don't have one there already. When the Russians want to know the number of bombers in the air force of a potential adversary, they get the figure, not by doing library research on the productive capability of airplane plants or assembling educated guesses and rumors, but by asking their secret informers within the foreign air force or war ministry and by stealing the desired information from government files.

The Americans, on the other hand, and to a certain extent the British, prefer to rely more heavily on legitimately accessible documents. The American intelligence agencies are said to monitor as many as five million words daily-the equivalent of 50 books of average length-from foreign radio broadcasts alone. From enormous quantities of open material like this analysts derive a lot of information about foreign countries, their economies and finance, their industries, agriculture, and trade, their population and social trends, their educational and political systems, the structure of their governments, their leaders' past lives and present views, etc. Drawing on that colossal warehouse of encyclopedic data, intelligence officers write reports and compose national estimates of foreign countries for the benefit of policy makers.

Admiral Ellis Zacharias, Deputy Chief of Naval Intelligence in the last war, wrote that in the Navy 95% of peacetime intelligence was procured from legitimately accessible sources, another 4% from semi-open sources, and only 1% through secret agents. Another authority on American intelligence, Gen. William J. Donovan, who headed the Office of Strategic Services during the war, expressed the same predilection for "open sources" by saying that intelligence is not the "mysterious, even sinister" thing people think it is, but more a matter of "pulling together myriad facts, making a pattern of them, and drawing inferences from that pattern." This predilection for open sources lies at the core of the American doctrine of intelligence.

But how can intelligence officers pick out from the vast amount of encyclopedic data that flows in to them the key developments for their purposes? One of the chiefs of American intelligence, a distinguished professor and noted scholar, had this to say on the subject:

How can surveillance [of the world scene] assure itself of spotting . . . the really unusual? How can it be sure of putting the finger on the three things per week out of the thousands it observes and the millions that happen which are really of potential import? The answer is ... procure the services of wise men and wise in the subject-and pray that their mysterious inner selves are of the kind which produce hypotheses of national importance.

In the Russian view, such an approach is but one step removed from mysticism and metaphysics. What if the "mysterious inner selves" of the researchers and analysts fail to produce the right hypotheses? How safe is it, in general, to rely on hypotheses in matters of such profound complexity as world politics, where nothing is stable and enemies of yesterday become today's friends and fight together against their former allies? A hypothesis may be wisdom itself, yet turn out to be utterly wrong. Not only intelligence officers but statesmen of the highest caliber have time and again been proved wrong in acting on undeniably wise hypotheses.

In 1940-41 Stalin based his strategy on the calculation that Hitler would not attack the Soviet Union. He knew that it was not in Germany's interests to get into a two-front war, and he thought that Hitler understood this too. In the spring of 1941 the British Joint Intelligence Committee also estimated that Hitler would not be so foolish as to add the powerful Soviet Union to his formidable enemies in the West. But these logical hypotheses went up in all-too-real smoke on 22 June that year.

CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 - part 4

2007-07-11T02:00:00.000-07:00

Source - CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90, Central Intelligence Agency

Part 3

The 1970s and 1980s: The UFO Issue Refuses To Die

The Condon report did not satisfy many UFOlogists, who considered it a coverup for CIA activities in UFO research. Additional sightings in the early 1970s fueled beliefs that the CIA was somehow involved in a vast conspiracy. On 7 June 1975, William Spaulding, head of a small UFO group, Ground Saucer Watch (GSW), wrote to CIA requesting a copy of the Robertson panel report and all records relating to UFOs. Spaulding was convinced that the Agency was withholding major files on UFOs. Agency officials provided Spaulding with a copy of the Robertson panel report and of the Durant report.

On 14 July 1975, Spaulding again wrote the Agency questioning the authenticity of the reports he had received and alleging a CIA coverup of its UFO activities. Gene Wilson, CIA's Information and Privacy Coordinator, replied in an attempt to satisfy Spaulding, "At no time prior to the formation of the Robertson Panel and subsequent to the issuance of the panel's report has CIA engaged in the study of the UFO phenomena." The Robertson panel report, according to Wilson, was "the summation of Agency interest and involvement in UFOs." Wilson also inferred that there were no additional documents in CIA's possession that related to UFOs. Wilson was ill informed.

In September 1977, Spaulding and GSW, unconvinced by Wilson's response, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Agency that specifically requested all UFO documents in CIA's possession. Deluged by similar FOIA requests for Agency information on UFOs, CIA officials agreed, after much legal maneuvering, to conduct a "reasonable search" of CIA files for UFO materials. Despite an Agency-wide unsympathetic attitude toward the suit, Agency officials, led by Launie Ziebell from the Office of General Counsel, conducted a thorough search for records pertaining to UFOs. Persistent, demanding, and even threatening at times, Ziebell and his group scoured the Agency. They even turned up an old UFO file under a secretary's desk. The search finally produced 355 documents totaling approximately 900 pages. On 14 December 1978, the Agency released all but 57 documents of about 100 pages to GSW. It withheld these 57 documents on national security grounds and to protect sources and methods.

Although the released documents produced no smoking gun and revealed only a low-level Agency interest in the UFO phenomena after the Robertson panel report of 1953, the press treated the release in a sensational manner. The New York Times, for example, claimed that the declassified documents confirmed intensive government concern over UFOs and that the Agency was secretly involved in the surveillance of UFOs. GSW then sued for the release of the withheld documents, claiming that the Agency was still holding out key information. It was much like the John F. Kennedy assassination issue. No matter how much material the Agency released and no matter how dull and prosaic the information, people continued to believe in a Agency coverup and conspiracy.

DCI Stansfield Turner was so upset when he read The New York Times article that he asked his senior officers, "Are we in UFOs?" After reviewing the records, Don Wortman, Deputy Director for Administration, reported to Turner that there was "no organized Agency effort to do research in connection with UFO phenomena nor has there been an organized effort to collect intelligence on UFOs since the 1950s." Wortman assured Turner that the Agency records held only "sporadic instances of correspondence dealing with the subject," including various kinds of reports of UFO sightings. There was no Agency program to collect actively information on UFOs, and the material released to GSW had few deletions. Thus assured, Turner had the General Counsel press for a summary judgment against the new lawsuit by GSW. In May 1980, the courts dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the Agency had conducted a thorough and adequate search in good faith.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects. Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using US citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive US weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft), the vulnerability of the US air-defense network to penetration by foreign missiles mimicking UFOs, and evidence of Soviet advanced technology associated with UFO sightings.

CIA also maintained Intelligence Community coordination with other agencies regarding their work in parapsychology, psychic phenomena, and "remote viewing" experiments. In general, the Agency took a conservative scientific view of these unconventional scientific issues. There was no formal or official UFO project within the Agency in the 1980s, and Agency officials purposely kept files on UFOs to a minimum to avoid creating records that might mislead the public if released.

The 1980s also produced renewed charges that the Agency was still withholding documents relating to the 1947 Roswell incident, in which a flying saucer supposedly crashed in New Mexico, and the surfacing of documents which purportedly revealed the existence of a top secret US research and development intelligence operation responsible only to the President on UFOs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. UFOlogists had long argued that, following a flying saucer crash in New Mexico in 1947, the government not only recovered debris from the crashed saucer but also four or five alien bodies. According to some UFOlogists, the government clamped tight security around the project and has refused to divulge its investigation results and research ever since. In September 1994, the US Air Force released a new report on the Roswell incident that concluded that the debris found in New Mexico in 1947 probably came from a once top secret balloon operation, Project MOGUL, designed to monitor the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests.

Circa 1984, a series of documents surfaced which some UFOlogists said proved that President Truman created a top secret committee in 1947, Majestic-12, to secure the recovery of UFO wreckage from Roswell and any other UFO crash sight for scientific study and to examine any alien bodies recovered from such sites. Most if not all of these documents have proved to be fabrications. Yet the controversy persists.

Like the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the UFO issue probably will not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence.

Interested in UFOs? Take a look at this blog.

CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 - part 3

2007-07-11T01:58:00.001-07:00

The 1960s: Declining CIA Involvement and Mounting Controversy

In the early 1960s, Keyhoe, Davidson, and other UFOlogists maintained their assault on the Agency for release of UFO information. Davidson now claimed that CIA "was solely responsible for creating the Flying Saucer furor as a tool for cold war psychological warfare since 1951." Despite calls for Congressional hearings and the release of all materials relating to UFOs, little changed.

In 1964, however, following high-level White House discussions on what to do if an alien intelligence was discovered in space and a new outbreak of UFO reports and sightings, DCI John McCone asked for an updated CIA evaluation of UFOs. Responding to McCone's request, OSI asked the CD to obtain various recent samples and reports of UFO sightings from NICAP. With Keyhoe, one of the founders, no longer active in the organization, CIA officers met with Richard H. Hall, the acting director. Hall gave the officers samples from the NICAP database on the most recent sightings.

After OSI officers had reviewed the material, Donald F. Chamberlain, OSI Assistant Director, assured McCone that little had changed since the early 1950s. There was still no evidence that UFOs were a threat to the security of the United States or that they were of "foreign origin." Chamberlain told McCone that OSI still monitored UFO reports, including the official Air Force investigation, Project BLUE BOOK.

At the same time that CIA was conducting this latest internal review of UFOs, public pressure forced the Air Force to establish a special ad hoc committee to review BLUE BOOK. Chaired by Dr. Brian O'Brien, a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, the panel included Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer from Cornell University. Its report offered nothing new. It declared that UFOs did not threaten the national security and that it could find "no UFO case which represented technological or scientific advances outside of a terrestrial framework." The committee did recommend that UFOs be studied intensively, with a leading university acting as a coordinator for the project, to settle the issue conclusively.

The House Armed Services Committee also held brief hearings on UFOs in 1966 that produced similar results. Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown assured the committee that most sightings were easily explained and that there was no evidence that "strangers from outer space" had been visiting Earth. He told the committee members, however, that the Air Force would keep an open mind and continue to investigate all UFO reports.

Following the report of its O'Brien Committee, the House hearings on UFOs, and Dr. Robertson's disclosure on a CBS Reports program that CIA indeed had been involved in UFO analysis, the Air Force in July 1966 again approached the Agency for declassification of the entire Robertson panel report of 1953 and the full Durant report on the Robertson panel deliberations and findings. The Agency again refused to budge. Karl H. Weber, Deputy Director of OSI, wrote the Air Force that "We are most anxious that further publicity not be given to the information that the panel was sponsored by the CIA." Weber noted that there was already a sanitized version available to the public. Weber's response was rather shortsighted and ill considered. It only drew more attention to the 13-year-old Robertson panel report and CIA's role in the investigation of UFOs. The science editor of The Saturday Review drew nationwide attention to the CIA's role in investigating UFOs when he published an article criticizing the "sanitized version" of the 1953 Robertson panel report and called for release of the entire document.

Unknown to CIA officials, Dr. James E. McDonald, a noted atmospheric physicist from the University of Arizona, had already seen the Durant report on the Robertson panel proceedings at Wright-Patterson on 6 June 1966. When McDonald returned to Wright-Patterson on 30 June to copy the report, however, the Air Force refused to let him see it again, stating that it was a CIA classified document. Emerging as a UFO authority, McDonald publicly claimed that the CIA was behind the Air Force secrecy policies and coverup. He demanded the release of the full Robertson panel report and the Durant report.

Bowing to public pressure and the recommendation of its own O'Brien Committee, the Air Force announced in August 1966 that it was seeking a contract with a leading university to undertake a program of intensive investigations of UFO sightings. The new program was designed to blunt continuing charges that the US Government had concealed what it knew about UFOs. On 7 October, the University of Colorado accepted a $325,000 contract with the Air Force for an 18-month study of flying saucers. Dr. Edward U. Condon, a physicist at Colorado and a former Director of the National Bureau of Standards, agreed to head the program. Pronouncing himself an "agnostic" on the subject of UFOs, Condon observed that he had an open mind on the question and thought that possible extraterritorial origins were "improbable but not impossible." Brig. Gen. Edward Giller, USAF, and Dr. Thomas Ratchford from the Air Force Research and Development Office became the Air Force coordinators for the project.

In February 1967, Giller contacted Arthur C. Lundahl, Director of CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), and proposed an informal liaison through which NPIC could provide the Condon Committee with technical advice and services in examining photographs of alleged UFOs. Lundahl and DDI R. Jack Smith approved the arrangement as a way of "preserving a window" on the new effort. They wanted the CIA and NPIC to maintain a low profile, however, and to take no part in writing any conclusions for the committee. No work done for the committee by NPIC was to be formally acknowledged.

Ratchford next requested that Condon and his committee be allowed to visit NPIC to discuss the technical aspects of the problem and to view the special equipment NPIC had for photoanalysis. On 20 February 1967, Condon and four members of his committee visited NPIC. Lundahl emphasized to the group that any NPIC work to assist the committee must not be identified as CIA work. Moreover, work performed by NPIC would be strictly of a technical nature. After receiving these guidelines, the group heard a series of briefings on the services and equipment not available elsewhere that CIA had used in its analysis of some UFO photography furnished by Ratchford. Condon and his committee were impressed.

Condon and the same group met again in May 1967 at NPIC to hear an analysis of UFO photographs taken at Zanesville, Ohio. The analysis debunked that sighting. The committee was again impressed with the technical work performed, and Condon remarked that for the first time a scientific analysis of a UFO would stand up to investigation. The group also discussed the committee's plans to call on US citizens for additional photographs and to issue guidelines for taking useful UFO photographs. In addition, CIA officials agreed that the Condon Committee could release the full Durant report with only minor deletions.

In April 1969, Condon and his committee released their report on UFOs. The report concluded that little, if anything, had come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years and that further extensive study of UFO sightings was unwarranted. It also recommended that the Air Force special unit, Project BLUE BOOK, be discontinued. It did not mention CIA participation in the Condon committee's investigation. A special panel established by the National Academy of Sciences reviewed the Condon report and concurred with its conclusion that "no high priority in UFO investigations is warranted by data of the past two decades." It concluded its review by declaring, "On the basis of present knowledge, the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings." Following the recommendations of the Condon Committee and the National Academy of Sciences, the Secretary of the Air Force, Robert C. Seamans, Jr., announced on 17 December 1969 the termination of BLUE BOOK.

Continue reading - The 1970s and 1980s: The UFO Issue Refuses To Die

CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 - part 2

2007-07-11T01:52:00.000-07:00

Continue reading - The 1960s: Declining CIA Involvement and Mounting Controversy

The Robertson Panel, 1952-53

On 4 December 1952, the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC) took up the issue of UFOs. Amory, as acting chairman, presented DCI Smith's request to the committee that it informally discuss the subject of UFOs. Chadwell then briefly reviewed the situation and the active program of the ATIC relating to UFOs. The committee agreed that the DCI should "enlist the services of selected scientists to review and appraise the available evidence in the light of pertinent scientific theories" and draft an NSCID on the subject. Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, Director of Air Force Intelligence, offered full cooperation.

At the same time, Chadwell looked into British efforts in this area. He learned the British also were active in studying the UFO phenomena. An eminent British scientist, R. V. Jones, headed a standing committee created in June 1951 on flying saucers. Jones' and his committee's conclusions on UFOs were similar to those of Agency officials: the sightings were not enemy aircraft but misrepresentations of natural phenomena. The British noted, however, that during a recent air show RAF pilots and senior military officials had observed a "perfect flying saucer." Given the press response, according to the officer, Jones was having a most difficult time trying to correct public opinion regarding UFOs. The public was convinced they were real.

In January 1953, Chadwell and H. P. Robertson, a noted physicist from the California Institute of Technology, put together a distinguished panel of nonmilitary scientists to study the UFO issue. It included Robertson as chairman; Samuel A. Goudsmit, a nuclear physicist from the Brookhaven National Laboratories; Luis Alvarez, a high-energy physicist; Thornton Page, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Operations Research Office and an expert on radar and electronics; and Lloyd Berkner, a director of the Brookhaven National Laboratories and a specialist in geophysics.

The charge to the panel was to review the available evidence on UFOs and to consider the possible dangers of the phenomena to US national security. The panel met from 14 to 17 January 1953. It reviewed Air Force data on UFO case histories and, after spending 12 hours studying the phenomena, declared that reasonable explanations could be suggested for most, if not all, sightings. For example, after reviewing motion-picture film taken of a UFO sighting near Tremonton, Utah, on 2 July 1952 and one near Great Falls, Montana, on 15 August 1950, the panel concluded that the images on the Tremonton film were caused by sunlight reflecting off seagulls and that the images at Great Falls were sunlight reflecting off the surface of two Air Force interceptors.

The panel concluded unanimously that there was no evidence of a direct threat to national security in the UFO sightings. Nor could the panel find any evidence that the objects sighted might be extraterrestrials. It did find that continued emphasis on UFO reporting might threaten "the orderly functioning" of the government by clogging the channels of communication with irrelevant reports and by inducing "hysterical mass behavior" harmful to constituted authority. The panel also worried that potential enemies contemplating an attack on the United States might exploit the UFO phenomena and use them to disrupt US air defenses.

To meet these problems, the panel recommended that the National Security Council debunk UFO reports and institute a policy of public education to reassure the public of the lack of evidence behind UFOs. It suggested using the mass media, advertising, business clubs, schools, and even the Disney corporation to get the message across. Reporting at the height of McCarthyism, the panel also recommended that such private UFO groups as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in Wisconsin be monitored for subversive activities.

The Robertson panel's conclusions were strikingly similar to those of the earlier Air Force project reports on SIGN and GRUDGE and to those of the CIA's own OSI Study Group. All investigative groups found that UFO reports indicated no direct threat to national security and no evidence of visits by extraterrestrials.

Following the Robertson panel findings, the Agency abandoned efforts to draft an NSCID on UFOs. The Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs (the Robertson panel) submitted its report to the IAC, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, and the Chairman of the National Security Resources Board. CIA officials said no further consideration of the subject appeared warranted, although they continued to monitor sightings in the interest of national security. Philip Strong and Fred Durant from OSI also briefed the Office of National Estimates on the findings. CIA officials wanted knowledge of any Agency interest in the subject of flying saucers carefully restricted, noting not only that the Robertson panel report was classified but also that any mention of CIA sponsorship of the panel was forbidden. This attitude would later cause the Agency major problems relating to its credibility.

The 1950s: Fading CIA Interest in UFOs

After the report of the Robertson panel, Agency officials put the entire issue of UFOs on the back burner. In May 1953, Chadwell transferred chief responsibility for keeping abreast of UFOs to OSI's Physics and Electronic Division, while the Applied Science Division continued to provide any necessary support. Todos M. Odarenko, chief of the Physics and Electronics Division, did not want to take on the problem, contending that it would require too much of his division's analytic and clerical time. Given the findings of the Robertson panel, he proposed to consider the project "inactive" and to devote only one analyst part-time and a file clerk to maintain a reference file of the activities of the Air Force and other agencies on UFOs. Neither the Navy nor the Army showed much interest in UFOs, according to Odarenko.

A nonbeliever in UFOs, Odarenko sought to have his division relieved of the responsibility for monitoring UFO reports. In 1955, for example, he recommended that the entire project be terminated because no new information concerning UFOs had surfaced. Besides, he argued, his division was facing a serious budget reduction and could not spare the resources. Chadwell and other Agency officials, however, continued to worry about UFOs. Of special concern were overseas reports of UFO sightings and claims that German engineers held by the Soviets were developing a "flying saucer" as a future weapon of war.

To most US political and military leaders, the Soviet Union by the mid-1950s had become a dangerous opponent. Soviet progress in nuclear weapons and guided missiles was particularly alarming. In the summer of 1949, the USSR had detonated an atomic bomb. In August 1953, only nine months after the United States tested a hydrogen bomb, the Soviets detonated one. In the spring of 1953, a top secret RAND Corporation study also pointed out the vulnerability of SAC bases to a surprise attack by Soviet long-range bombers. Concern over the danger of a Soviet attack on the United States continued to grow, and UFO sightings added to the uneasiness of US policymakers.

Mounting reports of UFOs over eastern Europe and Afghanistan also prompted concern that the Soviets were making rapid progress in this area. CIA officials knew that the British and Canadians were already experimenting with "flying saucers." Project Y was a Canadian-British-US developmental operation to produce a nonconventional flying-saucer-type aircraft, and Agency officials feared the Soviets were testing similar devices.

Adding to the concern was a flying saucer sighting by US Senator Richard Russell and his party while traveling on a train in the USSR in October 1955. After extensive interviews of Russell and his group, however, CIA officials concluded that Russell's sighting did not support the theory that the Soviets had developed saucerlike or unconventional aircraft. Herbert Scoville, Jr., the Assistant Director of OSI, wrote that the objects observed probably were normal jet aircraft in a steep climb.

Wilton E. Lexow, head of the CIA's Applied Sciences Division, was also skeptical. He questioned why the Soviets were continuing to develop conventional-type aircraft if they had a "flying saucer." Scoville asked Lexow to assume responsibility for fully assessing the capabilities and limitations of nonconventional aircraft and to maintain the OSI central file on the subject of UFOs.

CIA's U-2 and OXCART as UFOs

In November 1954, CIA had entered into the world of high technology with its U-2 overhead reconnaissance project. Working with Lockheed's Advanced Development facility in Burbank, California, known as the Skunk Works, and Kelly Johnson, an eminent aeronautical engineer, the Agency by August 1955 was testing a high-altitude experimental aircraft--the U-2. It could fly at 60,000 feet; in the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew between 10,000 feet and 20,000 feet. Consequently, once the U-2 started test flights, commercial pilots and air traffic controllers began reporting a large increase in UFO sightings.

The early U-2s were silver (they were later painted black) and reflected the rays from the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset. They often appeared as fiery objects to observers below. Air Force BLUE BOOK investigators aware of the secret U-2 flights tried to explain away such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions. By checking with the Agency's U-2 Project Staff in Washington, BLUE BOOK investigators were able to attribute many UFO sightings to U-2 flights. They were careful, however, not to reveal the true cause of the sighting to the public.

According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project. While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the coverup controversy of the 1970s. The percentage of what the Air Force considered unexplained UFO sightings fell to 5.9 percent in 1955 and to 4 percent in 1956.

At the same time, pressure was building for the release of the Robertson panel report on UFOs. In 1956, Edward Ruppelt, former head of the Air Force BLUE BOOK project, publicly revealed the existence of the panel. A best-selling book by UFOlogist Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine Corps major, advocated release of all government information relating to UFOs. Civilian UFO groups such as the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) immediately pushed for release of the Robertson panel report. Under pressure, the Air Force approached CIA for permission to declassify and release the report. Despite such pressure, Philip Strong, Deputy Assistant Director of OSI, refused to declassify the report and declined to disclose CIA sponsorship of the panel. As an alternative, the Agency prepared a sanitized version of the report which deleted any reference to CIA and avoided mention of any psychological warfare potential in the UFO controversy.

The demands, however, for more government information about UFOs did not let up. On 8 March 1958, Keyhoe, in an interview with Mike Wallace of CBS, claimed deep CIA involvement with UFOs and Agency sponsorship of the Robertson panel. This prompted a series of letters to the Agency from Keyhoe and Dr. Leon Davidson, a chemical engineer and UFOlogist. They demanded the release of the full Robertson panel report and confirmation of CIA involvement in the UFO issue. Davidson had convinced himself that the Agency, not the Air Force, carried most of the responsibility for UFO analysis and that "the activities of the US Government are responsible for the flying saucer sightings of the last decade." Indeed, because of the undisclosed U-2 and OXCART flights, Davidson was closer to the truth than he suspected. CI, nevertheless held firm to its policy of not revealing its role in UFO investigations and refused to declassify the full Robertson panel report.

In a meeting with Air Force representatives to discuss how to handle future inquires such as Keyhoe's and Davidson's, Agency officials confirmed their opposition to the declassification of the full report and worried that Keyhoe had the ear of former DCI VAdm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who served on the board of governors of NICAP. They debated whether to have CIA General Counsel Lawrence R. Houston show Hillenkoetter the report as a possible way to defuse the situation. CIA officer Frank Chapin also hinted that Davidson might have ulterior motives, "some of them perhaps not in the best interest of this country," and suggested bringing in the FBI to investigate. Although the record is unclear whether the FBI ever instituted an investigation of Davidson or Keyhoe, or whether Houston ever saw Hillenkoetter about the Robertson report, Hillenkoetter did resign from the NICAP in 1962.

The Agency was also involved with Davidson and Keyhoe in two rather famous UFO cases in the 1950s, which helped contribute to a growing sense of public distrust of CIA with regard to UFOs. One focused on what was reported to have been a tape recording of a radio signal from a flying saucer; the other on reported photographs of a flying saucer. The "radio code" incident began innocently enough in 1955, when two elderly sisters in Chicago, Mildred and Marie Maier, reported in the Journal of Space Flight their experiences with UFOs, including the recording of a radio program in which an unidentified code was reportedly heard. The sisters taped the program and other ham radio operators also claimed to have heard the "space message." OSI became interested and asked the Scientific Contact Branch to obtain a copy of the recording.

Field officers from the Contact Division (CD), one of whom was Dewelt Walker, made contact with the Maier sisters, who were "thrilled that the government was interested," and set up a time to meet with them. In trying to secure the tape recording, the Agency officers reported that they had stumbled upon a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace. "The only thing lacking was the elderberry wine," Walker cabled Headquarters. After reviewing the sisters' scrapbook of clippings from their days on the stage, the officers secured a copy of the recording. OSI analyzed the tape and found it was nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station.

The matter rested there until UFOlogist Leon Davidson talked with the Maier sisters in 1957. The sisters remembered they had talked with a Mr. Walker who said he was from the US Air Force. Davidson then wrote to a Mr. Walker, believing him to be a US Air Force Intelligence Officer from Wright-Patterson, to ask if the tape had been analyzed at ATIC. Dewelt Walker replied to Davidson that the tape had been forwarded to proper authorities for evaluation, and no information was available concerning the results. Not satisfied, and suspecting that Walker was really a CIA officer, Davidson next wrote DCI Allen Dulles demanding to learn what the coded message revealed and who Mr. Walker was. The Agency, wanting to keep Walker's identity as a CIA employee secret, replied that another agency of the government had analyzed the tape in question and that Davidson would be hearing from the Air Force. On 5 August, the Air Force wrote Davidson saying that Walker "was and is an Air Force Officer" and that the tape "was analyzed by another government organization." The Air Force letter confirmed that the recording contained only identifiable Morse code which came from a known US-licensed radio station.

Davidson wrote Dulles again. This time he wanted to know the identity of the Morse operator and of the agency that had conducted the analysis. CIA and the Air Force were now in a quandary. The Agency had previously denied that it had actually analyzed the tape. The Air Force had also denied analyzing the tape and claimed that Walker was an Air Force officer. CIA officers, under cover, contacted Davidson in Chicago and promised to get the code translation and the identification of the transmitter, if possible.

In another attempt to pacify Davidson, a CIA officer, again under cover and wearing his Air Force uniform, contacted Davidson in New York City. The CIA officer explained that there was no super agency involved and that Air Force policy was not to disclose who was doing what. While seeming to accept this argument, Davidson nevertheless pressed for disclosure of the recording message and the source. The officer agreed to see what he could do. After checking with Headquarters, the CIA officer phoned Davidson to report that a thorough check had been made and, because the signal was of known US origin, the tape and the notes made at the time had been destroyed to conserve file space.

Incensed over what he perceived was a runaround, Davidson told the CIA officer that "he and his agency, whichever it was, were acting like Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamster Union in destroying records which might indict them." Believing that any more contact with Davidson would only encourage more speculation, the Contact Division washed its hands of the issue by reporting to the DCI and to ATIC that it would not respond to or try to contact Davidson again. Thus, a minor, rather bizarre incident, handled poorly by both CIA and the Air Force, turned into a major flap that added fuel to the growing mystery surrounding UFOs and CIA's role in their investigation.

Another minor flap a few months later added to the growing questions surrounding the Agency's true role with regard to flying saucers. CIA's concern over secrecy again made matters worse. In 1958, Major Keyhoe charged that the Agency was deliberately asking eyewitnesses of UFOs not to make their sightings public.

The incident stemmed from a November 1957 request from OSI to the CD to obtain from Ralph C. Mayher, a photographer for KYW-TV in Cleveland, Ohio, certain photographs he took in 1952 of an unidentified flying object. Harry Real, a CD officer, contacted Mayher and obtained copies of the photographs for analysis. On 12 December 1957, John Hazen, another CD officer, returned the five photographs of the alleged UFO to Mayher without comment. Mayher asked Hazen for the Agency's evaluation of the photos, explaining that he was trying to organize a TV program to brief the public on UFOs. He wanted to mention on the show that a US intelligence organization had viewed the photographs and thought them of interest. Although he advised Mayher not to take this approach, Hazen stated that Mayher was a US citizen and would have to make his own decision as to what to do.

Keyhoe later contacted Mayher, who told him his story of CIA and the photographs. Keyhoe then asked the Agency to confirm Hazen's employment in writing, in an effort to expose CIA's role in UFO investigations. The Agency refused, despite the fact that CD field representatives were normally overt and carried credentials identifying their Agency association. DCI Dulles's aide, John S. Earman, merely sent Keyhoe a noncommittal letter noting that, because UFOs were of primary concern to the Department of the Air Force, the Agency had referred his letter to the Air Force for an appropriate response. Like the response to Davidson, the Agency reply to Keyhoe only fueled the speculation that the Agency was deeply involved in UFO sightings. Pressure for release of CIA information on UFOs continued to grow.

Although CIA had a declining interest in UFO cases, it continued to monitor UFO sightings. Agency officials felt the need to keep informed on UFOs if only to alert the DCI to the more sensational UFO reports and flaps.

CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90

2007-07-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

An extraordinary 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and 57 percent believe they are real. Former US Presidents Carter and Reagan claim to have seen a UFO. UFOlogists--a neologism for UFO buffs--and private UFO organizations are found throughout the United States. Many are convinced that the US Government, and particularly CIA, are engaged in a massive conspiracy and coverup of the issue. The idea that CIA has secretly concealed its research into UFOs has been a major theme of UFO buffs since the modern UFO phenomena emerged in the late 1940s.

In late 1993, after being pressured by UFOlogists for the release of additional CIA information on UFOs, DCI R. James Woolsey ordered another review of all Agency files on UFOs. Using CIA records compiled from that review, this study traces CIA interest and involvement in the UFO controversy from the late 1940s to 1990. It chronologically examines the Agency's efforts to solve the mystery of UFOs, its programs that had an impact on UFO sightings, and its attempts to conceal CIA involvement in the entire UFO issue. What emerges from this examination is that, while Agency concern over UFOs was substantial until the early 1950s, CIA has since paid only limited and peripheral attention to the phenomena.

Background

The emergence in 1947 of the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union also saw the first wave of UFO sightings. The first report of a "flying saucer" over the United States came on 24 June 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot and reputable businessman, while looking for a downed plane sighted nine disk-shaped objects near Mt. Rainier, Washington, traveling at an estimated speed of over 1,000 mph. Arnold's report was followed by a flood of additional sightings, including reports from military and civilian pilots and air traffic controllers all over the United States. In 1948, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, head of the Air Technical Service Command, established Project SIGN (initially named Project SAUCER) to collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to such sightings, on the premise that UFOs might be real and of national security concern.

The Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Material Command (AMC) at Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton, Ohio, assumed control of Project SIGN and began its work on 23 January 1948. Although at first fearful that the objects might be Soviet secret weapons, the Air Force soon concluded that UFOs were real but easily explained and not extraordinary. The Air Force report found that almost all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria and hallucination, hoax, or misinterpretation of known objects. Nevertheless, the report recommended continued military intelligence control over the investigation of all sightings and did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial phenomena.

Amid mounting UFO sightings, the Air Force continued to collect and evaluate UFO data in the late 1940s under a new project, GRUDGE, which tried to alleviate public anxiety over UFOs via a public relations campaign designed to persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary. UFO sightings were explained as balloons, conventional aircraft, planets, meteors, optical illusions, solar reflections, or even "large hailstones." GRUDGE officials found no evidence in UFO sightings of advanced foreign weapons design or development, and they concluded that UFOs did not threaten US security. They recommended that the project be reduced in scope because the very existence of Air Force official interest encouraged people to believe in UFOs and contributed to a "war hysteria" atmosphere. On 27 December 1949, the Air Force announced the project's termination.

With increased Cold War tensions, the Korean war, and continued UFO sightings, USAF Director of Intelligence Maj. Gen. Charles P. Cabell ordered a new UFO project in 1952. Project BLUE BOOK became the major Air Force effort to study the UFO phenomenon throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The task of identifying and explaining UFOs continued to fall on the Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson. With a small staff, the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) tried to persuade the public that UFOs were not extraordinary. Projects SIGN, GRUDGE, and BLUE BOOK set the tone for the official US Government position regarding UFOs for the next 30 years.

Early CIA Concerns, 1947-52

CIA closely monitored the Air Force effort, aware of the mounting number of sightings and increasingly concerned that UFOs might pose a potential security threat. Given the distribution of the sightings, CIA officials in 1952 questioned whether they might reflect "midsummer madness.'' Agency officials accepted the Air Force's conclusions about UFO reports, although they concluded that "since there is a remote possibility that they may be interplanetary aircraft, it is necessary to investigate each sighting."

A massive buildup of sightings over the United States in 1952, especially in July, alarmed the Truman administration. On 19 and 20 July, radar scopes at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked mysterious blips. On 27 July, the blips reappeared. The Air Force scrambled interceptor aircraft to investigate, but they found nothing. The incidents, however, caused headlines across the country. The White House wanted to know what was happening, and the Air Force quickly offered the explanation that the radar blips might be the result of "temperature inversions." Later, a Civil Aeronautics Administration investigation confirmed that such radar blips were quite common and were caused by temperature inversions.

Although it had monitored UFO reports for at least three years, CIA reacted to the new rash of sightings by forming a special study group within the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) to review the situation. Edward Tauss, acting chief of OSI's Weapons and Equipment Division, reported for the group that most UFO sightings could be easily explained. Nevertheless, he recommended that the Agency continue monitoring the problem, in coordination with ATIC. He also urged that CIA conceal its interest from the media and the public, "in view of their probable alarmist tendencies" to accept such interest as confirming the existence of UFOs.

Upon receiving the report, Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI) Robert Amory, Jr. assigned responsibility for the UFO investigations to OSI's Physics and Electronics Division, with A. Ray Gordon as the officer in charge. Each branch in the division was to contribute to the investigation, and Gordon was to coordinate closely with ATIC. Amory, who asked the group to focus on the national security implications of UFOs, was relaying DCI Walter Bedell Smith's concerns. Smith wanted to know whether or not the Air Force investigation of flying saucers was sufficiently objective and how much more money and manpower would be necessary to determine the cause of the small percentage of unexplained flying saucers. Smith believed "there was only one chance in 10,000 that the phenomenon posed a threat to the security of the country, but even that chance could not be taken." According to Smith, it was CIA's responsibility by statute to coordinate the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts.

Led by Gordon, the CIA Study Group met with Air Force officials at Wright-Patterson and reviewed their data and findings. The Air Force claimed that 90 percent of the reported sightings were easily accounted for. The other 10 percent were characterized as "a number of incredible reports from credible observers." The Air Force rejected the theories that the sightings involved US or Soviet secret weapons development or that they involved "men from Mars"; there was no evidence to support these concepts. The Air Force briefers sought to explain these UFO reports as the misinterpretation of known objects or little understood natural phenomena. Air Force and CIA officials agreed that outside knowledge of Agency interest in UFOs would make the problem more serious. This concealment of CIA interest contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and coverup.

The CIA Study Group also searched the Soviet press for UFO reports, but found none, causing the group to conclude that the absence of reports had to have been the result of deliberate Soviet Government policy. The group also envisioned the USSR's possible use of UFOs as a psychological warfare tool. In addition, they worried that, if the US air warning system should be deliberately overloaded by UFO sightings, the Soviets might gain a surprise advantage in any nuclear attack.

Because of the tense Cold War situation and increased Soviet capabilities, the CIA Study Group saw serious national security concerns in the flying saucer situation. The group believed that the Soviets could use UFO reports to touch off mass hysteria and panic in the United States. The group also believed that the Soviets might use UFO sightings to overload the US air warning system so that it could not distinguish real targets from phantom UFOs. H. Marshall Chadwell, Assistant Director of OSI, added that he considered the problem of such importance "that it should be brought to the attention of the National Security Council, in order that a communitywide coordinated effort towards it solution may be initiated."

Chadwell briefed DCI Smith on the subject of UFOs in December 1952. He urged action because he was convinced that "something was going on that must have immediate attention" and that "sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major US defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles." He drafted a memorandum from the DCI to the National Security Council (NSC) and a proposed NSC Directive establishing the investigation of UFOs as a priority project throughout the intelligence and the defense research and development community. Chadwell also urged Smith to establish an external research project of top-level scientists to study the problem of UFOs. After this briefing, Smith directed DDI Amory to prepare a NSC Intelligence Directive (NSCID) for submission to the NSC on the need to continue the investigation of UFOs and to coordinate such investigations with the Air Force.

Continue reading - The Robertson Panel, 1952-53

The Berlin Tunnel

2007-07-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

No single operation more typifies Berlin's importance as a strategic intelligence base then the construction of the Berlin Tunnel. Probably one of the most ambitious operations undertaken by the CIA in the 1950s, it succeeded despite the fact that the KGB knew about the operation even before construction of the tunnel had began!

The genesis of the tunnel operation lay in Berlin's location in Europe and its prewar status as the capital of a militarily and economically dominant Germany. The largest city on the Continent, Berlin lay at the center of a vast network of transportation and communications lines that extended from Western France to deep into Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. This was still true in the 1950s; Soviet telephone and telegraph communications between Moscow, Warsaw, and Bucharest were routed through Berlin, for example. This became a factor of crucial importance beginning in 1951, when the Soviets began to shift from wireless communications to encrypted land lines for almost all military traffic. Land lines existed in two forms: overhead lines strung from telephone poles and underground cables. Both carried encrypted messages as well as nonsecure voice communications.

CIA officers examining this situation in 1952 concluded that underground cables offered the more valuable target, since they were buried and hence not subject to constant visual surveillance. If a tap could be placed covertly, it would be likely to remain in place for some time. Thus was born the idea of tunneling into the Soviet sector of Berlin to tap into Soviet military communications. The concept was tested in the spring of 1953, when an agent in the East Berlin telephone exchange patched an East Berlin telephone line into West Berlin late one night to sample what might be obtained. Even after midnight the communications traffic was sufficiently valuable that CIA Headquarters decided to go ahead with the operation.

During 1953, CIA continued to gather data and test the idea of tapping communications in East Berlin. By August 1953, detailed plans for the tunnel were completed and a proposal was drawn up for approval by DCI Allen Dulles. After much discussion, this was obtained on 20 January 1954.

Having learned the location of the underground cables used by the Soviets from an agent inside the East Berlin post office, the Altglienicke district was selected as the best site for a cable tap. Work began in February 1954, using the construction of an Air Force radar site and warehouse as a cover. The tunnel itself was completed a year later, at the end of February 1955, and the taps were in place and operating shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately, the whole operation was blown even before the DCI approved the project. On 22 October 1953, US intelligence officers briefed a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) audience that included KGB mole George Blake. Blake reported the existence of the tunnel project during his next meeting with his case officer, Sergei Kondrashev, in London the following December. However, a full report was not sent to Moscow until 12 February 1954.

Although the KGB was aware of the potential importance of the tap, its first priority was to protect Blake. Knowledge of the tunnel's existence was very closely held within the KGB--neither the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) nor the East German Stasi was informed. Rather than immediately shutting down the tunnel, the Soviets thus implemented a general tightening up of security procedures. A small team was formed to secretly locate the tap, which they did by late 1955. Early in 1956 the Soviets developed a plan whereby the tap would be "accidentally" discovered without putting Blake at risk. On the night of 21-22 April 1956, a special signal corps team began to dig. By 0200 they had discovered the tap chamber. At 1230 the following day they opened a trapdoor leading from the tap chamber down a vertical shaft to the tunnel. By 1420 they had penetrated the tunnel in the full glare of a well-organized publicity coup.

The digging operation had been seen from an observation post atop the warehouse in West Berlin and the tunnel evacuated long before the Soviets entered the tap chamber. A microphone was left in place to record what was going on. The Soviet publicity coup backfired: rather than condemning the operation, the non-Soviet press hailed it as audacious and well-planned. Of course, at the time, no one knew the extent of Soviet foreknowledge.

Since KGB archives remain closed, we cannot be certain that the Soviets did not exploit their prior knowledge of the cable tap for their own purposes--to plant false information, for example. However, according to former DCI Richard Helms, the possibility that the Soviets used the tunnel for "disinformazia" (disinformation) was closely examined after Blake's exposure and arrest in 1961. Finally, it was concluded that the intelligence that had been collected was genuine.

The sheer volume of the "take" from the tunnel operation would tend to support that conclusion. In all, about 40,000 hours of telephone conversations were recorded, along with 6,000,000 hours of teletype traffic. Most of the useful information dealt with Soviet orders of battle and force dispositions--information that was invaluable in the days before reconnaissance satellites and other, more sophisticated means of collection became operational. Not until more than two years after the tunnel was exposed and shut down was the task of processing this immense volume of data completed.

Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping - part 4

2007-07-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

Part 3

II. Radio Free Europe:

The New York Times reported on an attempt to poison the staff of RFE on November 21, 1959, by placing atropine in the salt shakers of the cafeteria used by RFE personnel. Atropine is a derivative of the deadly nightshade plant; it can cause paralysis of death if taken in sufficient quantity. The amount of poison in each salt shaker was said to be 2.36% by weight of the contents. White crystalline alkaloid is indistinguishable from salt.

III. Stein:

In March 1955, Lisa Stein, an interviewer with RIAS, the American propaganda radio station in West Germany ("Radio in American Sector"), was fed candy containing the highly dangerous poison scopolamine. (Scopolamine is used in the so-called "twilight sleep." Given in small doses it induces a kind of euphoria; in larger doses it is supposed to be a deadly poison.) It was intended that Frau Stein would become ill and would be abducted. The plan was that the agent-someone whom Frau Stein trusted and with whom she was meeting in a West Berlin cafe-would offer the poisoned candy toward the end of the meeting. The lady was expected to become ill while walking from the caf6 to her nearby residence. On becoming unconscious, she was to be picked up by a waiting car which would appear to be passing by chance. The plot was not carried to fruition, however, because Frau Stein did not become ill until she was near her apartment, at which point neighbors came to her aid and she was moved to a hospital. She was severely ill for 48 hours, after which an antidote was found. (Unclassified, from the testimony of Theodor Hans, formerly with U.S. Military Intelligence, Germany, September 21, 1960, before a Congressional investigating committee.)

IV. Other:

Another weapon used is described as a noiseless gas pistol, powered by a 300-volt battery, which fires a lethal, odorless, unidentified gas. The gas acts in two or three seconds, and is effective up to 15 or 20 meters. The pistol has three buttons: one for arming, one for firing, and the third for recharging the battery. (After 50 firings the battery may be recharged by plugging a transformer into normal house power source.) The piston is normally fired 20 times, very rapidly and automatically-" Bzzzd." (Although one squirt could kill, 20 squirts are emitted in order to saturate the area, inasmuch as the gun is fired at a silhouette, rather than at a point.) The gas shot by the pistol would penetrate the victim's clothing and enter the skin. There is allegedly no danger to the user.

Trends

Since World War II, and especially in the years since Stalin's death, assassination attempts abroad have become increasingly rare. Currently the emphasis in the executive action field is placed on sabotage and sabotage planning, rather than terrorism against individuals. The Soviets now apparently resort to murder only in the case of persons considered especially dangerous to the regime and who, for one reason or another, cannot be kidnapped. A kidnapped person is obviously more valuable inasmuch as the Soviets may be able to extract from him information of interest, as well as use him for propaganda purposes by making it appear that he defected to the Soviet side of his own fee will. This course was followed in the case of Dr. Trushnovich. It is also likely that the Soviets find it increasingly difficult to find persons willing to undertake murder assignments, while the same may not be true of abduction operations. It can further be conjectured that the Soviets are now more concerned about the adverse publicity generated by Soviet assassinations in general than they were in previous years.

In this connection, comments made by state security defectors Petr Deryabin and Yurv Rastvorov in 1954 about what the Soviets would or would not do are still of interest. Both believed that the Soviets would murder one of their officials on the verge of defecting if that were the only way of preventing the act. The same would apply to a Soviet official who had just defected, if thereby state secrets could be preserved, and if they believed that killing him would not bring about a more adverse situation in terms of politics and propaganda than already existed. Deryabin and Rastvorov doubted, however, that the Soviets would murder an official who had been in non-Communist hands long enough to have been exploited for intelligence and propaganda purposes. While both granted that in particular cases the Soviets might go to any extreme, they both believed, generally speaking, that the adverse propaganda resulting from such an act would negate its original purpose. On the other hand, Khokhlov, who might have been in a better position to know, has stated without qualification that the Soviets would continue to assassinate defectors in the future. The threat of Soviet executive action against defectors is also considered a real one by Reino Hayhanen, who defected from the KGB in 1957. A still more recent Soviet intelligence source also believes that standard Soviet practice is to mount a kidnapping or assassination operation "through all intelligence opportunities" against defectors from the Soviet intelligence services.

Deryabin and Rastvorov further agreed that the Soviets, without hesitation, would forcibly return to the USSR someone on the verge of defecting at a mission abroad. This was borne out by the aforementioned Strygin and Zelenovskiy cases. Deryabin and Rastvorov also believed that the same policy would apply to a Soviet official who had just defected, or one who had been in non-Communist hands long enough to have been exploited for intelligence and propaganda purposes, if the capability existed for returning him physically to the USSR.

Lastly, Deryabin believed that the assassination of an Allied official would be highly unlikely and probably unprofitable. He also doubted that the Soviets would attempt to kidnap any U.S. officials unless they were particularly knowledgeable. Such an incident would not be worth the trouble for an average official, but an important person conceivably would have sufficient information to make it worthwhile.

Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping - part 3

2007-07-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

Continue reading - II. Radio Free Europe

Techniques

Many known or suspected executive action cases in the post-war period have involved the use of poison rather than guns or explosives. It is conceivable that the Soviets tend to favor poisons because murders can be accomplished more surreptitiously in this manner and in some instances without leaving easily recognizable traces of foul play. Drugs are also used to incapacitate a person temporarily for abduction purposes, as reportedly happened in the Trushnovich case and in the kidnapping of another NTS member, Valeri P. Tremmel, from Linz, Austria in June 1954. There are, however, many unknown, uncontrollable factors in the use of poisons and drugs which limit and often preclude their usage. Probably the most important is the narrow span between a dose that will cause disability and one that will cause death. Dosages vary from one individual to another depending on weight, state of health, and how the poison enters the body. The type used obviously is determined by the result desired. It is no problem to cause death, but often difficult to control dosage successfully when the objective is to incapacitate an individual only temporarily.

There appears to be no consistency in the use of poisons by Soviet intelligence to cause disability or death, or in the repetitious use of any one drug. Chemicals which have been used in cases known or suspected to be Soviet-instigated include arsenic, potassium cyanide, scopolamine, and thallium. Other likely substances are atropine, barbiturates, chloral hydrate, paraldehyde and Warfarin. Combinations of two or more substances may also be used, which further complicates diagnosis and tracing.

One well-publicized poisoning case involved the defector Nikolay Khokhlov. Khokhlov suffered a sudden and severe illness while attending an anti-Communist meeting in Frankfurt, Germany in September 1957. A positive diagnosis was precluded by the initial treatment given him at a German hospital, but there was evidence of his having been poisoned by a thallium derivative of arsenic and/or other chemical agents, and a strong possibility that the poison had been administered at RIS instigation. Khokhlov himself believed, and allegedly had supporting medical opinion, that he had been poisoned by radio-activated thallium. He believed that the poison was of Russian origin because it was such a complicated substance that it was difficult to analyze and had been carefully prepared to leave virtually no trace. A unique mechanism for administering poison was described by a knowledgeable source as a pneumatically operated poison ice "atomizer" which leaves no wound or other evidence of the cause of death. The equipment and techniques used in the poisoning of Rebet and Bandera are treated below in some detail as examples of the most recent and sophisticated methods in use by the KGB.

Specific Cases

I. Stashinskiy:

In November 1961 a Soviet intelligence officer, Bogdan Stashinskiy, surrendered to the West German police, stating that he had, acting under official orders, assassinated two individuals during the previous few years: Lev Rebet, a Ukrainian emigrr6 writer, and Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement. In both cases, a similar type of weapon had been used: a gun which fired vaporized poison which killed almost instantly upon being inhaled. The properties of the killing agent were such that, until the defection of the assassin, both victims were officially believed to have died from heart attacks. In the case of Bandera, however, there was some unconfirmed suspicion of potassium cyanide poisoning, although there was insufficient evidence to prove it.

The Weapon: The weapon used to assassinate Rebet was a light-weight aluminum cylinder, 15 to 18 cm. long and approximately 3 cm in diameter, weighing about 200 grams. The cylinder was divided into three separate chambers, one of which contained liquid poison sealed hermetically into a plastic-type ampoule container under low pressure. (At normal temperatures the poison would evaporate, disappearing without trace in about two minutes.) The three components could be assembled by means of a thread which allowed one part to screw into the other. The first component was the poison ampoule portion, the front end of which had a fine metallic screen. The poison ampoule fitted solidly against the walls of the metal cylinder. The center component contained a piston and a piston arm which extended into the third or activating component. The latter contained a spring-mounted activating arm which, when drawn back, armed the weapon. The releasing arm was appended to the third component at an angle, and was attached to the activating arm by means of a releasing catch. A small safety arm permitted the weapon to be placed in the safety position. The third component also contained a few grams of powder.

The maximum effective range of the weapon was about one-half meter; at one and one-half meters the effect of the vapors would be questionable; and at two and one-half meters, the vapors would be totally ineffective. (The assassin was instructed to fire the weapon only inches from the face.)

The weapon was activated as follows: The activating arm was pulled back and the safety released. The weapon was then activated. It was held in the palm of the hand in such a fashion that it fired when the user pressed the releasing arm towards the activating arm. The releasing arm, when pressed, acted upon the releasing catch, permitting the spring-held activating arm to fly forward against the small charge of powder. The exploding powder (which made a noise approximating the sound of a loud handclap with the hands cupped) drove the piston arm forward, causing the piston to strike against the poison ampoule. The poison was thus driven out through the fine screen in the form of a liquid spray.

The weapon used for the second assassination was similar, except that it was double-barreled. Each barrel contained a charge of poison similar to that contained in the single-barreled weapon. The two barrels could be discharged separately, or together as a unit. Thus, in the event the first charge did not kill the victim, a second attempt could be made. The two barrels were welded together, and the weapon had two releasing arms, two releasing catches, two safeties, and two activating arms. The effect of the poison was the same.

Utilization of the Weapon: For maximum effective results it is recommended that the liquid poison be shot directly into the face of the victim, in order to introduce the vapors most quickly into the respiratory system. Since the vapors rise upward very rapidly, the poison is still effective when aimed at the chest; conceivably, this would give sufficient time to allow the victim time to scream.

Effects of the Poison: The effect of the poisonous vapors is such that the arteries which feed blood to the brain become paralyzed almost immediately. Absence of blood in the brain precipitates a normal paralysis of the brain or a heart attack, as a result of which the victim dies. The victim is clinically dead within one and one-half minutes after inhaling these poisonous vapors. After about five minutes the effect of the poison wears off entirely, permitting the arteries to return to their normal condition, leaving no trace of the killing agent which precipitated the paralysis or the heart attack.

Allegedly, no foreign matter can be discovered in the body or on the clothes of the victim, no matter how thorough an autopsy or examination. The liquid spray can be seen as it leaves the nose of the weapon, however, and droplets can also be seen on the face of the victim.

Stashinskiy claimed that before using the weapon on his first victim, he tested it on a dog. He fired the gun directly into the dog's face, holding his hand approximately one and one-half feet from its nose. Almost immediately after the liquid spray had hit its face, the dog rolled over, without making any sound whatever. It continued to writhe for almost three minutes, however. Stashinskiy was told that the poison affected a human much sooner, causing death within one and one-half minutes.

Safety Precautions for the User: Stashinskiy was told that neither the poisonous liquid nor the fatal fumes affected any portion of the body other than the respiratory system, and that, since it could not enter the body through the skin or the pores, one could safely place his hands into a pail of the poison. Inasmuch as the weapon was held at arm's length when fired and the liquid spray ejected forward in a conical pattern, the user, under normal conditions, is safe from the effects of the poisonous vapors. Nevertheless, as an extra precaution, Stashinskiy was provided with counteractive agents to use if he so desired.

Concealment Methods: For transportation, the weapon was transported hermetically sealed in a container, and inserted between sausages in a can which was itself hermetically sealed. It was suggested to Stashinskiy that he should carry the weapon to the site of the planned assassination wrapped in a light newspaper, in which he had torn a small hole to enable him to reach the safety quickly just before using the weapon.

Method of Attack: In the first assignment, Stashinskiy observed Rebet debarking from a streetcar at about 0930 hours. Observing that the victim was heading for his office, the assassin preceded him into the building and climbed the circular staircase to the first floor. On hearing Rebet's footsteps on the staircase, Stashinskiy turned and started walking down, keeping to the left, and carrying the weapon, wrapped in newspaper, in his right hand. The two met about halfway between the two floors. Firing directly into Rebet's face from a distance of approximately one-half meter, Stashinskiy continued walking downstairs without even breaking his pace. The victim lurched silently forward and fell on the staircase. While still in the building, Stashinskiy shook off the liquid drops from the weapon and put it in the breast pocket of his suit. (A laboratory examination of the suit later revealed nothing of significance.) Although he had no reason to believe that he had inhaled the poisonous fumes, he used the counteractive measures provided. He later disposed of the murder weapon in a shallow canal in the city.

In carrying out his second mission, Stashinskiy used a similar approach. Having previously abandoned an attempt to corner Bandera in the latter's garage, the assassin gained entry to the victim's apartment house by reproducing a key which he had observed being used in the front door lock. On the day of the assassination, having seen Bandera drive into his driveway, Stashinskiy let himself into the apartment building and waited. Bandera, carrying several packages of fruit and vegetables in his right hand, entered the front door with the aid of a key which was on a key ring together with other keys. As he was attempting to disengage the key from the lock, Stashinskiy moved away from the elevator, where he had been standing, toward the front door. The weapon was in his hand with the safety released. As he walked past the victim, who was still trying to extricate the key from the lock, the assassin took the door handle with his left hand, as if to assist Bandera, asking him "Doesn't it work?" By this time, Bandera had succeeded in pulling the key out of the lock. Almost at the instant he replied "Yes, it works," Stashinskiy fired both barrels simultaneously into his face at almost point-blank range. Seeing the victim lurch backward and to the side, the assassin walked out of the apartment building and closed the front door. Although he (lid not wait to see Bandera drop to the ground, Stashinskiy is certain that, contrary to press reports, the man did not scream or otherwise call for help. Stashinskiy later threw the murder weapon into the same canal in which he had discarded the first weapon.

Although the press reported that Bandera had been attacked physically before he was poisoned, Stashinskiy insisted that he had used no force, since it had not been necessary to do so. Some newspapers also reported that Bandera had died of potassium cyanide poisoning. Stashinskiy claimed that he was told, and believes, that the chemical was not potassium cyanide, since (1) he thinks that substance could not have been introduced into the body by the method employed, and (2) he believes the RIS would have no reason to deceive him on this matter, especially since he had to be provided with counteractive precautions. Stashinskiy claimed that one of his Soviet contacts was pleased to learn that the police suspected potassium cyanide, as this allegedly indicated that the true cause of the victim's death was not evident.

Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping - part 2

2007-07-10T23:14:00.000-07:00

Continue reading - Techniques

Organization

The executive action component of the Soviet government is currently designated the 13th Department of the KGB intelligence directorate (First Chief Directorate). The earliest known predecessor of the 13th Department was the so-called "Directorate of Special Tasks" reportedly established within the NKVD in December 1936 for terror purposes. During World War II terror missions were performed by the NKGB Fourth Directorate, which was responsible for partisan activity behind German lines. In late 1945 or early 1946 this directorate was replaced by a unit of the MGB known as Spets Byuro #1, which was organized to retain Fourth Directorate personnel to support and direct partisan activities behind enemy lines in the event of a future war. In the summer of 1952, however, the long-range aspects of Spets Byuro #1 mission were abandoned, and emphasis was shifted to using all available agents for sabotage and other violent activities. Spets Byuro #1 was given a new, and at present still unknown, designation some time in 1953 and assigned to carry out "special action tasks," such as sabotage, political murders, and kidnappings. With the creation of the KGB in 1954, the executive action component was redesignated as the 13th Department. Although the jurisdiction of the department is global, its main target areas are the United States and members of Western treaty organizations. There is no evidence of the existence of any unit within the Soviet military intelligence component (the GRU) responsible for the type of executive action discussed in this paper, although the GRU reportedly can undertake such operations under certain circumstances.

The 13th Department is believed to be divided into sections (otdeleniye) or directions (napravleniye) by countries or groups of countries, such as, for example, the United States ("the principal enemy"), England, Latin America, etc. At Moscow headquarters the department has approximately 50 to 60 experienced employees, and was last known to be headed by a General Rodin, who under the alias Korovin had previously been the KGB resident in Great Britain. Secrecy about the work of this department is maintained through the careful selection and training of its personnel; the officers do not discuss their experience among others; department documents are not circulated.

In addition to headquarters personnel, the 13th Department has its own support officers in legal residencies in Western countries and in some satellite countries. Such support officers work under the instructions of the legal resident and the 13th Department. One of the more active groups is a unit in East Germany which numbers perhaps 20 to 30 persons. As of 1960 there was a group in China, but it probably no longer exists. Prior to 1955 there was also a group in Austria. In a country in which a support officer of the 13th Department is stationed, the legal resident and the headquarters department for that country are aware of the targets of the 13th Department in that country, although they are not aware of illegal agents who are in direct contact with the 13th Department.

Although the 13th Department is the KGB's executive action component, the Emigr6 (Ninth) Department directs all operations, including assassination operations, against Soviet emigr6s. The Emigr6 Department's assassination operations, however, are believed to be conducted jointly with the 13th Department and sometimes other KGB components-for example, the counterintelligence directorate (Second Chief Directorate).

The 13th Department also supports the Disinformation (12th) Department of the First Chief Directorate in the latter's covert propaganda campaigns aimed at the creation of confusion and panic in Western countries. An example is the campaign conducted, in 1959 and later, for the purpose of creating adverse world opinion toward West Germany. This campaign included setting fire to synagogues and painting swastika signs in public places, and attributing these acts to West Germans. Other operations in which both the 13th Department and the Disinformation Department are involved include attempts to remove the threat to Soviet interests posed by certain members of Western governments. Sometimes this entails arranging for the dismissal of such persons from public office, but in theory at least it could mean "eliminating" them physically.

Installations

The defector Khokhlov described two laboratories associated with the executive action department. One produced special weapons and explosive devices; the other developed poisons and drugs for "special tasks." The explosives laboratory was located near Kuchino, outside Moscow, and was responsible for the development and production of weapons, from drawing up blueprints to melting and pouring bullets in no case was assistance obtained from military ordnance or other outside agencies.

The laboratory for poisons was supposedly a large and super-secret installation. No agents were permitted access to it or even knew of its location. Khokhlov could provide no first-hand information on it. Other sources, however, have reported the existence of this type of laboratory dating back to the purges in the late 1930's. A report from one source in 1954 described an experimental laboratory within Spets Byuro #1 known as the "Chamber" (Kamera). This laboratory conducted experiments on prisoners and persons subject to execution to test the effectiveness of different powders, beverages, and liquors, and various types of injections, as well as research on the use of hypnotism to force prisoners to confess. Beside its staff, only certain high-level persons were permitted to enter its premises. Although its existence officially was kept a secret, it was generally suspected or known by many state security functionaries that a unit of this sort was maintained. The Soviet government allegedly abolished the "Kamera" in October 1953, according to an announcement made to selected state security and Party officials, attributing the establishment and operation of the laboratory solely to Beriya and his close associates. Whether or not this step actually was taken does not rule out the possibility, however, that the same type of unit continues to exist in some other form.

Training for executive action operations was conducted at a base in Moscow by a staff of instructors who specialized in such subjects as the use of small arms, jujitsu, code, wireless, driving, surveillance, and photography.

Although executive action operations outside the USSR are planned, directed, and sometimes carried out by state security staff personnel, a mission may also be performed by one or more agents recruited specifically for this prupose. Khokhlov himself, for instance, was categorically forbidden to assassinate Okolovich personally.

Two German agents, Hans Kukowitsch and Kurt Weber, were to carry out the deed under Khokhlov's supervision. This reflected Soviet theory that indigenous personnel would have better access to the target, and also had the advantage of avoiding direct Soviet attribution. It appears from the Stashinskiy case, however, that security considerations ruled out the involvement of non-Soviets in more recent operations.

Even though some sources have made statements to the contrary, it appears that the agents (as opposed to staff employees like Stashinskiy) who perform executive action for the Soviets may be used for more than one mission of this nature. Khokhlov spoke of special executive action units known as "boyevaya gruppa" (literally, combat groups) which consisted of indigenous agents and/or Soviet illegal staff officers situated outside the borders of the USSR on the territory of hostile governments or in close proximity thereto. Such groups were armed and prepared to perform executive actions when required to do so, either in time of peace or war. A group of this type under the direction of the executive action department base at Karlshorst ostensibly was involved in the kidnaping of Dr. Alexander Trushnovich, an NTS leader in West Berlin, in April 1954, Khokhlov believed the abductors to have been recruited and organized by the East German security service at the request of the KGB chief at Karlshorst. The same type of group was mentioned in connection with the abduction of Dr. Linse; the actual abduction was reportedly performed by four German members of a "boyevaya gruppa" from East Germany. It is probable that such teams are a modern variation of the "mobile groups" described by a pre-war source as units dispatched from Moscow to foreign countries to assassinate Trotskyites and state security officers who refused to return to the USSR, as in the case of Reiss and possibly Krivitskv.

Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping

2007-07-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

A 1964 view of KGB methods

It has long been known that the Soviet state security service (currently the KGB) resorts to abduction and murder to combat what are considered to be actual or potential threats to the Soviet regime. These techniques, frequently designated as "executive action" and known within the KGB as "liquid affairs" (Mokryye Dela), can be and are employed abroad as well as within the borders of the USSR. They have been used against Soviet citizens, Soviet émigrés, and even foreign nationals. A list of those who have fallen victim to such action over the years would be a very long one and would include even the co-founder of the Soviet state, Leon Trotsky. Several well known Soviet assassination operations which have occurred since the rise of Khrushchev attest to the fact that the present leadership of the USSR still employs this method of dealing with its enemies.

The sudden disappearance or unexpected death of a person known to possess anti-Soviet convictions immediately raises the suspicion of Soviet involvement. Because it is often impossible to prove who is responsible for such incidents, Soviet intelligence is frequently blamed and is undoubtedly credited with successes it actually has not achieved. On the other hand, even in cases where the Soviet hand is obvious, investigation often produces only fragmentary information, due to the KGB ability to camouflage its trail. In addition, Soviet intelligence is doubtless involved in incidents that never become officially recognized as executive action, such as assassinations which are recorded as accidents, suicides, or natural deaths.

All of the factors cited above have helped to obscure Soviet practices in regard to assassinations and abductions outside the USSR. Certain observations can be made, however, which will help to put these practices into their proper perspective. These observations are set forth in the following paragraphs and are based on information produced by the investigation of known or suspected Soviet operations which have occurred since World War II, as well as from information supplied by defectors during this period.

Targets

The large numbers of former citizens of the USSR (and of Imperial Russia) living abroad in protest against the Soviet regime have been a continuing cause for concern to the Soviets since the early twenties. Reducing and keeping to a minimum the potential threat to the regime represented by these emigres is one of the functions of the state security service. Soviet intelligence seeks to neutralize, discredit and destroy anti-Soviet groups by luring emigres back to the USSR, by penetrating emigre organizations, and by kidnapping or murdering individual emigres considered to be particularly dangerous.

Emigre leaders who participate in anti-Soviet activities have been primary targets of Soviet abduction or assassination operations. Such operations are sometimes designed to demonstrate that the Soviet regime can strike its enemies anywhere in the world. The Soviets hope thereby to create fear, unrest, confusion, and dissension within emigre organizations, and at the same time deter other emigres from joining their ranks. The planned assassination in February 1954 of Georgiy S. Okolovich, leader of the NTS emigre organization, was to have been a particularly significant step toward achieving this goal, but the act was not carried out because of the defection of state security Captain Nikolay Khokhlov.

On the other hand, assassinations of some emigr6 leaders have been carried out so skillfully as to leave the impression that the victims died from natural causes. Details of some of the techniques used to achieve this were brought to light in 1961 when professional KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinskiy defected to the West and revealed that he had successfully performed two such missions. In 1957 he killed Ukrainian emigre writer Lev Rebet in Munich with a poison vapor gun which left the victim dead of an apparent heart attack. In 1959, the same type of weapon was used on Ukrainian emigre leader Stepan Bandera, although Bandera's death was never fully accepted as having been from natural causes. These cases are discussed in more detail later in this paper.

Executive action is also triggered by any signs of possible disloyalty on the part of Soviet officials abroad. The Soviets have gone to great lengths in the past to silence their intelligence officers who have defected, as evidenced by the assassination of former state security officer Ignace Reiss in 1937 and the unexplained "suicide" of former Soviet military intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky in 1941. In the post-war era, determination to prevent such defections was vividly demonstrated by the unsuccessful attempt to force the wife of Vladimir Petrov to return to the Soviet Union from Australia after his defection in April 1954. The practice of physical restraint applies with equal force to other Soviet officials who attempt to defect or are suspected of being on the verge of doing so. Examples were witnessed in Calcutta, India in January 1958 and Rangoon, Burma in May 1959. The respective victims, Aleksandr F. Zelenovskiy and Mikhail Strygin, were both portrayed by the Soviets as mental cases, were taken into custody by means of strong-arm tactics, and were forcibly removed to the USSR in a matter of days.

Foreign nationals are sometimes victims of Soviet executive action. The targets who fall into this category may be indigenous agents who have become suspect, or former citizens of satellite countries who have turned against the Soviet regime. In the latter case, actions against such individuals are usually carried out through the corresponding satellite intelligence service, aided and abetted by Soviet state security. The abductions of Dr. Walter Linse and Bohumil Lausman exemplify this type of operation. Linse had fled East Germany in 1947 and later became a leader of the "Society of Free jurists," an anti-Communist organization that the Soviets considered particularly dangerous. He was kidnaped from West Berlin in July 1952 by agents of the East German security service, with the full knowledge and approval of Soviet state security; he was later turned over to Soviet authorities in Karlshorst, East Berlin, and eventually sentenced to imprisonment in the USSR.* Lausman, prominent Czech anti-communist who fled to the West in 1949, disappeared from Vienna in 1953. It was later learned that he had been kidnapped by agents of Czech intelligence, with the official sanction of Moscow. The Soviet state security rezidentura in Vienna also had been directed to assist the operation by supplying a car for transportating Lausman to Prague and arranging for the vehicle to have free passage through the Soviet Zone of Austria.

Foreign political leaders are also potential targets of Soviet executive action operations and, according to recent information, the KGB's executive action component includes such persons among its targets. There is, however, no evidence proving that any Western leader has been the victim of Soviet executive action.

Continue reading - Organization

Extrasensory agents in CIA

2007-07-10T22:49:00.000-07:00

Extrasensory agents helped the CIA arrest KGB spies and detect secret objects in the USSR

Seventy-three thousand pages of secret documents have recently been declassified in the United States. The information unveiled the activity of two special groups that worked with extrasensory individuals. The CIA had to acknowledge that it used remote viewers and other individuals possessing paranormal abilities for intelligence purposes.

The groups of extrasensory individuals apparently worked without having any links with each other. One of those groups was searching for information about spying on the territory of the USA (counterintelligence), another one was dealing with identification of nuclear and other secret objects in the country of an enemy (strategic intelligence).

The two groups achieved quite impressive results in their work. The Polish and East-German residents, as well as other agents from several “NATO-friendly” countries of Western Europe were destroyed owing to the efforts of the first group. Aldrich Ames, a KGB agent, was detected with special groups' help too.

American counterintelligence officers had a suspicion of having a spy within the CIA, although there was absolutely no information about him. A remote viewer involved in the detecting process gave the following description: “The man lives on the outskirts of Washington, owns a very expensive foreign car, he is married to a Latin American woman, most likely a Colombian, and he likes grey.” Six CIA agents matching the description were put under strict observation – Aldrich Ames was caught as a result of the further investigation.

Extrasensory individuals from the strategic intelligence unit helped the CIA find a Soviet nuclear test ground in Semipalatinsk and a Chinese test ground in Lop-Nor. American agents had information about certain objects of paramount importance in those areas. However, it was impossible for them to find out, what kind of object they were exactly – secret factories, military grounds or powerful centers to test and launch ballistic missiles.

”Psychic spy” Joseph McMoneagle also known as “remote viewing agent #001” was shown a spot on the map of the USSR, where the mysterious secret object was supposedly located, as CIA agents thought. McMoneagle put his finger on the map and described the image that he saw in his mind:

”It is a congregation of low stone and concrete buildings. A huge underground warehouse filled with lethal weapons…Not only missiles. There are other square and round items there. I see a very high column of smoke, bearing some semblance to a huge lifting crane, rising above the area (it was most likely the smoke of a nuclear blast). The people inhabiting that place are sick. Their hair is receding, their bones are putrefying. They deliver sick children, and they are still obsessed with some idea.”

It was quite an eloquent description for secret agents to understand, what kind of an object was located in Semipalatinsk (which is now a town in the republic of Kazakhstan). Then CIA Director Richard Helms moved the paranormal espionage from the category “Research” to the category “Practice.” Joseph McMoneagle's success as a remote viewer increased the funding of such unusual activities, not to mention the improved moral aspect. The US authorities spent about $2 million a year on a rather small group of 20 extrasensory individuals in the 1990s.

Other achievements of American psychic agents include: factories making weapons of mass destruction in third world countries, including Iraq (it is not ruled out that the information about WMD in Iraq sprang from remote viewers. Extrasensory intelligence officers also developed certain recommendations to recruit CIA agents and rendered some other services too.

The CIA administration has apparently come to conclusion that it was not profitable to spend time and money on paranormal activities against the background of the up-to-date technological development. The above-mentioned declassified materials were accompanied with a statement that the work of psychic groups was shut down within CIA's framework in 1997. Now the agency prefers to use spying satellites and “live bugs” - microchips, which can be implanted in flies, cockroaches and ants.

Journalists thanked the CIA administration to exposing such interesting materials, although they did not believe that the remote-viewing project had been closed. Reporters managed to find out that the paranormal project had been handed over to the Pentagon's intelligence, the directors of which declined all comments. An anonymous colonel of the US Air Force said that the American government would eliminate the project completely only if Russia abolished it first.

Inside look at espionage by former CIA and KGB agents

2007-07-10T22:04:00.000-07:00

5:50 p.m., March 13, 2003--Fifteen years ago they would have been archenemies, but Wednesday evening, March 12, Paul J. Redmond, former chief of counterintelligence for the CIA, and Oleg Danilovich Kalugin, former major general of the Soviet KGB, took the stage together at UD’s Clayton Hall to reveal some of the most intriguing episodes of espionage history.

Far from the popularized James Bond spy stereotype, these men look like average Joes, and their personas reveal nothing of the sinister nature of their jobs. Redmond and Kalugin were the men behind the missions—the men who used counterintelligence to deeply infiltrate the deepest secrets of their respective enemy countries.

Redmond and Kalugin painted a picture of espionage during the 40 years of the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ Cold War, as well as offering some insight into the future of counterintelligence work. Their speech, “Spy vs. Spy: Down and Dirty in the Espionage Trenches,” was part of UD’s Global Agenda Speaker Series, “Spies, Lies and Sneaky Guys.” Ralph Begleiter, Rosenberg Professor of Communication and Distinguished Journalist in Residence, moderated the event.

“The U.S. and the Soviet Union were locked in battle for supremacy,” Begleiter said. “The Soviet Union finally collapsed under their own political and economic failures. It was a war that ended without a shot being fired, but not without blood shed.

“The guests we have here tonight were secret agents. Each fought and survived the Cold War, carrying out clandestine operations around the world.”

Redmond and Kalugin were each given an opportunity to speak and then faced off in a friendly banter about topics raised by Begleiter. The guests then participated in a question-and-answer session with the audience.

Redmond’s speech focused on the American misconception that spies are not a large part of the workings of the U.S. government. He said it is an absolute certainty that spies infiltrate the U.S. government on a daily basis, a fact he termed “Redmond’s Law.”

“Counterintelligence is an effort to bring sanity to a world that’s very murky and full of spin,” he said. “ Intelligence can’t serve a country unless at least the truth is sought for.

“Americans never get the point that people are going to spy on us. It’s cultural—we don’t like spying so we don’t want to think about it. We don’t like secrets either,” Redmond said.

Before retirement, Redmond served in several top positions for the CIA in East Asia, Europe and Eastern Europe. He received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal in 1994, the Federal Order of Merit from the president of Germany in 1995 and the U.S. National Distinguished Service Medal in 1999. He also served as director of the CIA’s internal investigation of the Robert Hanssen spy case.

Redmond acknowledged the KGB’s deep penetration into the U.S. government during the Cold War. He said if the Soviets had not collapsed and a military war resulted, the United States would have lost.

“When you look at what would have happened if there was a war, it was terrifying,” he said. “We would have lost because the Soviets and the Hungarians had the lot.

“When you look at the Soviet shuttle, it’s ours. The holes for the bolts are in the same place right down to the last millimeter.”

Redmond stressed that spying is still a large part of U.S. operations, even though the Cold War ended in 1989. He said since 1995, 96 significant spy cases have been uncovered against the United States. Furthermore, more than 80 entities have attempted to spy or successfully spied on the United States, including Germany, France, Greece, China, Iraq, Russia, Ghana, Ecuador, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and El Salvador.

Kalugin’s speech centered on KGB methodology and ideology. He said during the Cold War, the Soviet government was focused on the United States as its number-one enemy. The KGB received solid support from the government, which asked no moral questions about the KGB’s actions and policies.

“We conducted a clandestine war with assassination if necessary,” he said. “Our mission was to do everything we could to have a war without the fighting. This was seen as amoral in America, but it was our ideology.”

Kalugin infiltrated the United States as a journalist, attending Columbia University in New York City as a Fulbright Scholar in 1958. From 1965-70, he served as deputy resident and acting chief of the residency at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., quickly becoming the youngest general in the history of the KGB. Eventually, he became the head of worldwide foreign counterintelligence, serving at the center of some of the most important espionage cases, including the Walker spy ring.

Finding that the KGB’s internal functions had little to do with the security of the state and everything to do with keeping corrupt Communist Party officials in power, Kalugin retired from the KGB in 1990 and became a public critic of the communist system. He currently teaches at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.

Kalugin said one of his most effective spying techniques was pitting American citizens against their own government.

“We appealed to pacifists and told them, ‘You cannot have peace unless you stop the internal situation of the U.S.,’” he said. “We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world,” he joked.

Kalugin listed several astonishing facts from a classified KGB report, proving just how much the organization is committed to counterintelligence. He said that in 1981 the KGB reported that they had funded or supported 70 books, 66 feature and documentary films, more than 100 television stations, 4,865 articles in magazines or newspapers, 300 conferences or exhibitions and 170,000 lectures around the world.

“Friendship, companionship—that is fine,” Kalugin said, “but national interests remain. Counterintelligence will never cease to exist. The U.S. remains priority number one.”

The face-off after each guests’ speech was filled with friendly banter and a competitive edge. When Begleiter asked Kalugin if he knew Redmond during his counterintelligence work, he replied with a wink, “I came across his name in a list of CIA agents the KGB compiled of over 11,000 names but not very often.”

“Little did you know,” Redmond answered.

In a discussion of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, both men agreed that the Al Qaeda organization could have been penetrated before the attacks, and Kalugin questioned why the CIA did not take more aggressive action toward infiltrating it.

Kalugin said the KGB would have sent a Muslim agent or an individual posing as a Muslim into the network five to 10 years ago. Redmond responded by explaining the extreme difficulty of such a task, and the cultural differences that exist between KGB and CIA ideology.

“We are a country of making the next quarter’s numbers,” Redmond said. “We’re a country of fast food and automatic replays. Culturally, we don’t ever think in the long-run.”

The Global Agenda Speaker Series is a program of the University’s “America and the Global Community” initiative and is presented in association with the World Affairs Council of Wilmington.