The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence

A Never-Ending Necessity

The need for counterintelligence (CI) has not gone away, nor is it likely to. The end of the Cold War has not even meant an end to the CI threat from the former Soviet Union. The foreign intelligence service of the new democratic Russia, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki Rossii (SVRR), has remained active against us. It was the SVRR that took over the handling of Aldrich Ames from its predecessor, the KGB, in 1991. It was the SVRR that ran CIA officer Harold James Nicholson against us from 1994 to 1996. It was the SVRR that was handling FBI special agent Earl Pitts when he was arrested for espionage in 1996. It was the SVRR that planted a listening device in a conference room of the State Department in Washington in the summer of 1999. And it was the SVRR that was handling FBI special agent Robert Hanssen when he was arrested on charges of espionage in February 2001.

The Russians are not alone. There have been serious, well-publicized concerns about Chinese espionage in the United States. The Department of Energy significantly increased security at its national laboratories last year in response to allegations that China had stolen US nuclear weapons secrets.

Paul Redmond, the former Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence at the CIA, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in early 2000 that a total of at least 41 countries are trying to spy on the United States. Besides mentioning Russia, China, and Cuba, he also cited several “friends,” including France, Greece, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. He warned of a pervasive CI threat to the United States.

The United States, as the world’s only remaining superpower, will be the constant target of jealousies, resentments, rivalries, and challenges to its economic well-being, security, and leadership in the world. This inevitably means that the United States will be the target of large-scale foreign espionage.

A Choice Assignment

When I joined the CIA, one of my first interim assignments was with the old CI Staff. I found it fascinating. I was assigned to write a history of the Rote Kapelle, the Soviet espionage network in Nazi-occupied Western Europe during World War II.

With its expanded computer power, NSA was breaking out the actual messages sent between the NKVD center in Moscow and the clandestine radios of the various cells in Western Europe. Incredibly, these messages came to me.

There I was, a brand new junior officer, literally the first person in the CIA to see the day-to-day traffic from these life-and-death operations. I was deeply affected by the fear, heroism, and drama in these messages. Above all, I felt privileged to have been given such an opportunity.

Building on an earlier study of the Rote Kapelle by the CI Staff, I completed a draft several months later that incorporated the new material. To my great surprise, this study was well received by my immediate superiors, and I was told that I was to be rewarded with a personal interview and congratulations from James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of the CI Staff from 1954 to 1974.

Angleton’s office was on the second floor of the Original Headquarters Building. I was first ushered into an outer office, where Angleton’s aides briefed me on how to conduct myself. Then I went alone into the inner sanctum.

The room was dark, the curtains were drawn, and there was just one small lamp on Angleton’s desk. I later heard that Angleton had eye trouble and that the light hurt his eyes, but I was convinced the real reason for the semidarkness was to add to his mystique. It certainly worked on me!

I nervously briefed Angleton on my study, and he listened without interrupting, just nodding from time to time. When I finished, he methodically attacked every one of my conclusions. Didn’t I know the traffic was a deception? Hadn’t it occurred to me that Leopold Trepper, the leader of the Rote Kapelle, was a German double? He went on and on, getting further and further out.

Even I, as a brand new officer, could tell that this great mind, this CI genius, had lost it. I thought he was around the bend. It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my career.

When the meeting was over, I was glad to get out of there, and I vowed to myself that I would never go anywhere near CI again. I did not keep that vow. In my overseas assignments with the Agency, I found myself drawn toward Soviet CI operations. Nothing seemed to quicken my pulse more, and I was delighted when I was called back to Headquarters in 1989 to join the new Counterintelligence Center (CIC) as Ted Price’s deputy. When Ted moved upstairs in early 1991 to become the Associate Deputy Director for Operations, I was named chief of the Center.

Today, many years after that initial disagreeable encounter with CI, I find it hard to believe that it is actually my picture on the wall of the CIC conference room at CIA Headquarters, where the photos of all former CIA counterintelligence chiefs are displayed. There I am, number seven in a row that begins with Angleton.

So, after a career that ended up being far more CI-oriented than I could ever have imagined, I would like to offer some personal observations in the form of “The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence.” I have chosen the form of commandments because I believe the basic rules of CI are immutable and should be scrupulously followed. In my view, it makes little difference whether the adversary is the Russians, the Cubans, the East Germans, the Chinese, or someone else. It likewise makes little difference whether we are talking about good CI practices in 1985 or in 2005. Unfortunately, as I watch US CI today, I am increasingly concerned that the principles I consider fundamental to effective CI are not being followed as carefully and consistently as they should be.

These commandments were not handed down to me from a mountaintop, and I make no claim that they are inspired or even definitive. They are simply the culmination, for what they are worth, of my experience. They are intended primarily for my fellow practitioners in CI today, but also for any younger officers in the Intelligence Community (IC) who might someday want to join us.

The First Commandment: Be Offensive

CI that is passive and defensive will fail. We cannot hunker down in a defensive mode and wait for things to happen. I believe we are spending far too much money on fences, safes, alarms, and other purely defensive measures to protect our secrets. That is not how we have been hurt in recent years. Spies have hurt us. Our CI mindset should be relentlessly offensive. We need to go after our CI adversaries.

Aggressive double agent (DA) operations are essential to any CI program, but not the predictable, hackneyed kind we have so often pursued. We need to push our bright and imaginative people to produce clever new scenarios for controlled operations, and we need more of them. The opposition services should be kept constantly off guard so that they never suspect that we have actually controlled the operations they believe they initiated from the beginning. When the requirements, modus operandi, and personality objectives of the DA operation have been achieved, we should in a greater number of cases pitch the opposition case officer. If only one out of 10 or 20 of these recruitments takes, it is worth it. And CI professionals, of course, should not rely exclusively on their own efforts. They should constantly prod their HUMINT colleagues to identify, target, and recruit officers from the opposition intelligence services. The key to CI success is penetration. For every American spy, there are several members of the opposition service who know who he or she is. No matter what it takes, we have to have penetrations.

We should operate aggressively against the nontraditional as well as the traditional adversaries. How many examples do we need of operations against Americans by so-called friendly countries to convince us that the old intelligence adage is correct: there are friendly nations, but no friendly intelligence services. If we suspect for whatever reason that the operatives of a foreign intelligence service, friend or foe, are operating against us, we should test them. We should dress up an enticing morsel, made to order for that specific target, and send it by them. If they take it, we have learned something we needed to know, and we have an operation. If they reject it, as true friends should, we have learned something, too. In either event, because we are testing a “friend,” plausible deniability has to be strictly preserved. Every foreign service is a potential nontraditional adversary; no service should get a lifetime pass from US offensive CI operations.

The Second Commandment: Honor Your Professionals

It has been true for years—to varying degrees throughout the IC—that CI professionals have not been favored, to the extent they deserved, with promotions, assignments, awards, praise, esteem, or other recognition. The truth is that CI officers are not popular. They are not always welcome when they walk in. They usually bring bad news. They are easy marks to criticize when things go wrong. Their successes are their failures. If they catch a spy, they are roasted for having taken so long. If they are not catching anyone, why not? What have they done with all that money they spent on CI? It is no-win.

For much of my career, many of our best people avoided becoming CI specialists. CI was not prestigious. It had a bad reputation. It was not fast track. It did not lead to promotions or good assignments. Angleton left a distasteful legacy that for years discredited the CI profession. Ted Price did more than anyone else in the Agency to reverse that trend and to rehabilitate CI as a respected professional discipline.

Nevertheless, that battle is still not completely won. We have to do more to get our CI people promoted, recognized, and respected so that our best young officers will be attracted to follow us into what we know is a noble profession and where the need is so great.

The Third Commandment: Own the Street

This is so fundamental to CI, but it is probably the least followed of the commandments. Any CI program worthy of the name has to be able to engage the opposition on the street, the field of play for espionage. And when we do go to the street, we have to be the best service there. If we are beaten on the street, it is worse than not having been there at all.

For years, we virtually conceded the streets of the world’s capitals, including the major espionage centers, to the KGB, the GRU, and the East European services because we either did not know how to do it or we were not willing to pay the price for a thoroughly professional, reliable, full-time, local surveillance capability.

Opposition intelligence officers have to be watched, known meeting areas have to be observed, and, when an operation goes down—often on short notice—undetectable surveillance has to cover it, identify the participants, and obtain evidence.

This capability is expensive—selection, training, vehicles, photo gear, video, radios, safe apartments, observation posts, and on and on—but, if we do not have it, we will be a second-rate CI service and will not break the major cases.

The Fourth Commandment: Know Your History

I am very discouraged when I talk to young CI officers today to find how little they know about the history of American CI. CI is a difficult and dangerous discipline. Many good, well-meaning CI people have gone wrong and made horrendous mistakes. Their failures in most cases are well documented, but the lessons are lost if our officers do not read the CI literature.

I find it inconceivable that any CI practitioner today could ply his or her trade without an in-depth knowledge of the Angleton era. Have our officers read Mangold? Have they read Legend and Wilderness of Mirrors? Do they know the Loginov case, HONETOL, MHCHAOS, Nosenko, Pollard, and Shadrin? Are they familiar with Aspillaga and the Cuban DA debacle? Have they examined our mistakes in the Ames and Howard cases? Are they staying current with recent releases like The Mitrokhin Archive and The Haunted Wood?

I believe it is an indispensable part of the formation of any American CI officer—and certainly a professional obligation—to study the CI failures of the past, to reflect on them, and to make sure they are not repeated.

The many CI courses being offered now are a positive step, but there will never be a substitute for a personal commitment on the part of our CI professionals to read their history, usually on their own time at home.

The Fifth Commandment: Do Not Ignore Analysis

Analysis has too often been the stepchild of CI. Throughout the CI community, we have fairly consistently understaffed it. We have sometimes tried to make it up as we go along. We have tried to do it on the cheap.

Generally speaking, operators make bad analysts. We are different kinds of people. Operators are actors, doers, movers and shakers; we are quick, maybe a little impulsive, maybe a little “cowboy.” Our best times are away from our desks. We love the street. Research and analysis is really not our thing—and when we have tried to do it, we have not been good at it.

True analysts are different. They love it. They are more cerebral, patient, and sedentary. They find things we could not. They write better.

A lot of CI programs in the past have tried to make operators double as their own analysts. As a result, in the United States, CI analysis historically has been the weakest part of the business. Professional CI analysts have been undervalued and underappreciated.

A good CI program will recruit and train true analysts in sizable numbers. I do not think it would be excessive as a rule of thumb in a top notch CI service to be evenly divided between operators and analysts. Very few of our US CI agencies come anywhere close to that ratio.

Wonderful things happen when good analysts in sufficient numbers pore over our DA reports, presence lists, SIGINT, audio and teltap transcripts, maps, travel data, and surveillance reports. They find the clues, make the connections, and focus our efforts in the areas that will be most productive.

Many parts of the US CI community have gotten the message and have incorporated trained analysts into their operations, but others have not. Across the board, we still have serious shortfalls in good, solid CI analysis.

The Sixth Commandment: Do Not Be Parochial

More harm probably has been done to US CI over the years by interagency sniping and obstruction than by our enemies. I remember when the CIA and the FBI did not even talk to each other—and both had disdain for the military services. It is no wonder that CI was a shambles and that some incredibly damaging spies went uncovered for so long.

Occasionally in my career, I encountered instances of sarcasm or outright bad mouthing of other US Government agencies by my officers. That kind of attitude and cynicism infected our junior officers and got in the way of cooperation. These comments often were intended to flaunt our supposed “superiority” by demeaning the capabilities of the other organizations. I dealt with these situations by telling the officers to “knock it off,” and I would encourage other CI supervisors around the community to do the same.

CI is so difficult, even in the best of circumstances, that the only way to do it is together. We should not let personalities, or jealousies, or turf battles get in the way of our common mission. Our colleagues in our sister services are as dedicated, professional, hardworking, and patriotic as we are, and they deserve our respect and cooperation. The best people I have known in my career have been CI people, regardless of their organizational affiliation. So let us be collegial.

The Seventh Commandment: Train Your People

CI is a distinct discipline and an acquired skill. It is not automatically infused in us when we get our wings as case officers. It is not just a matter of applying logic and common sense to operations, but is instead a highly specialized way of seeing things and analyzing them. CI has to be learned.

I do not know how many times in my career I have heard, “No, we do not really need a separate CI section. We are all CI officers; we’ll do our own CI.” That is a recipe for compromise and failure.

There are no substitutes for professional CI officers, and only extensive, regular, and specialized CI training can produce them. Such training is expensive, so whenever possible we should do it on a Community basis to avoid duplication and to ensure quality.

CI is a conglomerate of several disciplines and skills. A typical operation, for example, might include analysts, surveillance specialists, case officers, technical experts, and DA specialists. Each area requires its own specialized training curriculum. It takes a long time to develop CI specialists, and that means a sustained investment in CI training. We are getting better, but we are not there yet.

The Eighth Commandment: Do Not Be Shoved Aside

There are people in the intelligence business and other groups in the US Government who do not particularly like CI officers. CI officers have a mixed reputation. We see problems everywhere. We can be overzealous. We get in the way of operations. We cause headaches. We are the original “black hatters.”

Case officers want their operations to be bona fide. Senior operations managers do not want to believe that their operations are controlled or penetrated by the opposition. There is a natural human tendency on the part of both case officers and senior operations managers to resist outside CI scrutiny. They believe that they are practicing good CI themselves and do not welcome being second-guessed or told how to run their operations by so-called CI specialists who are not directly involved in the operations. I have seen far more examples of this in my CI career than I care to remember.

By the same token, defense and intelligence contractors and bureaucrats running sensitive US Government programs have too often tended to minimize CI threats and to resist professional CI intervention. CI officers, in their view, stir up problems and overreact to them. Their “successes” in preventing CI problems are invisible and impossible to measure, but their whistle blowing when problems are uncovered generate tremendous heat. It is not surprising that they are often viewed as a net nuisance.

When necessary, a CI service has to impose itself on the organizations and groups it is assigned to protect. A CI professional who is locked out or invited in only when it is convenient to the host cannot do his job.

My advice to my CI colleagues has always been this: “If you are blocked by some senior, obtuse, anti-CI officer, go around him or through him by going to higher management. And document all instances of denied access, lack of cooperation, or other obstruction to carrying out your CI mission. If not, when something goes wrong, as it likely will in that kind of situation, you in CI will take the blame.”

The Ninth Commandment: Do Not Stay Too Long

CI is a hazardous profession. There should be warning signs on the walls: “A steady diet of CI can be dangerous to your health.”

I do not believe anyone should make an entire, uninterrupted career of CI. We all who work in CI have seen it: the old CI hand who has gotten a bit spooky. It is hard to immerse oneself daily in the arcane and twisted world of CI without falling prey eventually to creeping paranoia, distortion, warping, and overzealousness in one’s thinking. It is precisely these traits that led to some of the worst CI disasters in our history. Angleton and his coterie sadly succumbed, with devastating results. Others in the CIA and elsewhere have as well. The danger is always there.

My wife, who was working at the CIA when I met her, was well acquainted with this reputation of CI and the stories about its practitioners. When I was serving overseas and received the cable offering me the position as Ted Price’s deputy in the new Counterintelligence Center, I discussed it with her that evening at home. Her response, I thought, was right on the mark: “Okay, but do not stay too long.”

Sensible and productive CI needs lots of ventilation and fresh thinking. There should be constant flowthrough. Non-CI officers should be brought in regularly on rotational tours. I also believe it is imperative that a good CI service build in rotational assignments outside CI for its CI specialists. They should go spend two or three years with the operators or with the other groups they are charged to protect. They will come back refreshed, smarter, and less likely to fall into the nether world of professional CI: the school of doublethink, the us-against-them mindset, the nothing-is-what-it-seems syndrome, or the wilderness of mirrors.

The Tenth Commandment: Never Give Up

The tenth and last commandment is the most important. What if the Ames mole hunters had quit after eight years instead of going into the ninth? What if, in my own experience, we had discontinued a certain surveillance operation after five months instead of continuing into the sixth? CI history is full of such examples.

The FBI is making cases against Americans today that involved espionage committed in the 1960s and 1970s. The Army’s Foreign Counterintelligence Activity is doing the same. The name of the game in CI is persistence. CI officers who are not patient need not apply. There is no statute of limitations for espionage, and we should not create one by our own inaction. Traitors should know that they will never be safe and will never have a peaceful night’s sleep. I applauded my CI colleagues in the FBI when I read not long ago of their arrest in Florida of a former US Army Reserve colonel for alleged espionage against the United States many years earlier. They obviously never gave up.

If we keep a CI investigation alive and stay on it, the next defector, the next penetration, the next tip, the next surveillance, or the next clue will break it for us.

If there were ever to be a mascot for US counterintelligence, it should be the pit bull.

In Conclusion

These are my ten commandments of CI. Other CI professionals will have their own priorities and exhortations and will disagree with mine. That is as it should be, because as a country and as an Intelligence Community we need a vigorous debate on the future direction of US CI. Not everyone will agree with the specifics, or even the priorities. What we should agree on, however, is that strong CI has to be a national priority. Recent news reports from Los Alamos, Washington, and elsewhere have again underscored the continuing need for CI vigilance.

Source: James M. Olson

New Light on Old Spies - A Review of Recent Soviet Intelligence Revelations - part 6

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Part 5

Soviet Motives

As is often true of Russian policy, the objectives to be served by the surfacing of Soviet espionage activities abroad are not immediately evident. The reasons for the adoption of such a policy are difficult to disentangle. Perhaps the interplay of personal ambitions and jealousies among Party and government leaders has played its part. Although no evidence on the point is available, this unusual Soviet frankness may reflect the growing influence of Alexander Shelepin, former chief of the KGB who has played an increasingly prominent role in Soviet affairs since the overthrow of Khrushchev. It may be assumed, in any case, that the decision to admit to the Soviet people that their government also engages in actions hitherto credited only to bourgeois and fascist states was not lightly reached on the spur of the moment. Undoubtedly it was made at the highest Party levels, after lengthy and possibly acrimonious discussion. Party leaders must have agreed that the advantages of such a revelation outweighed any ill effect on the Soviet population.

What are the possible advantages of the revelation?

Such foreign espionage operations as have been surfaced up to this time are related to the Germany of Hitler and the second world war. The work of Manevich, if that was in fact his name, is presented as having been done in Eastern Europe, probably in Germany or a German-occupied area, and in a Nazi concentration camp. A series of paperbacks on the frontier guards and wartime partisan operations continue the anti-Nazi defense theme. Abel, it is said, worked against the Germans; his postwar activities were motivated by a desire to get at former Nazis who were active in the West. Lonsdale is made to admit the same motivation. Although Sorge's prewar operational activity cannot be denied, his intelligence targets were obvious--the German embassy in Tokyo and Japan, Germany's ally. Work against the Nazi, at whatever time it was undertaken, would be applauded by Soviet citizens. Such espionage operations, although carried on abroad, can be interpreted as defensive in intent and purpose. The Soviets, it must be noted, have not yet admitted that their postwar operations were directed primarily against the British and Americans.

The Soviet authorities may believe that revelations of Western espionage against the Soviet Union in recent years call for defensive action. Operations such as the U-2 flights and the Popov and Penkovskiy penetrations have certainly resulted in talk and speculation within the USSR. The Powers and Penkovskiy show trials must have convinced even optimistic Soviets that, despite official disclaimers, some harm had been done to Soviet security. Many must have asked, why don't our people do that same thing? It is possible, therefore, that several terminated espionage operations have been surfaced to assure the Soviet people that their government is also active in such operations abroad. The first line of Soviet defense, they are being told, is in good hands.

The new publicity is probably designed to improve the image and morale of military intelligence and the state security service. The Penkovskiy case (and the Popov case as well, although it received little publicity) must have been disastrous to the morale of military intelligence officers. State security officers must have been affected adversely by previous efforts of the Soviet authorities to create a bland image of their service. Public acclaim of service heroes, even of those who at first glance appear to have failed in their missions, has undoubtedly improved the tone and morale of both services.

Such revelations can also be made to serve operational purposes. It will be noted that the Soviets use fictionalized biographies to surface both operations and intelligence agents. Fictional techniques permit the telling of a lively story without need to adhere to the facts of the case. Embarrassing aspects and significant operational details may be distorted or omitted without endangering the seeming integrity of the account. Even though not so labeled--possibly because they were intended for foreign consumption--the Lonsdale "memoirs" are largely fictional. The Soviets have enlisted fiction as an intelligence weapon.

Although at first glance it would seem to be a pointless task, these fictionalized memoirs and biographies should be subjected to expert counterintelligence analysis. Such accounts must contain at least a substratum of fact. This may be discovered through analysis. Significant omissions and distortions may be ascertained by comparison of the fictionalized versions with data available in counterintelligence files. But the most important purpose of such analysis is the discovery of the disinformation objectives that these accounts may serve. We must assume that all memoirs, biographies, and historical studies of the Soviet intelligence services are prepared with the aid of disinformation experts.

A careful watch must be kept on this new Soviet program of controlled intelligence revelations. Although their goals are not yet clear, for the Soviets it is a new technique and one that may do serious injury to Western morale. It must be analyzed and closely followed.

Source

New Light on Old Spies - A Review of Recent Soviet Intelligence Revelations - part 5

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Other Chekists

Few other officials of state security have been honored with biographies. I. V. Viktorov's rather sparse and matter-of-fact biography of Mikhail Sergeyevich Kedrov, an old Bolshevik and associate of Dzerzhinskiy, is unusual in that it covers in part the period of the great purges. According to Viktorov, Kedrov's son Igor and a friend, one Volodya Golubev, both employed by state security, discovered in early 1939 that Beriya and his associates were betraying the USSR in the interest of Hitler. The two young Chekists, after consulting the elder Kedrov, who by then was out of the service, decided to make the facts known to Stalin and the Party Control Commission. When the young men were arrested, as they anticipated being, M S. Kedrov was to approach Stalin, reveal the facts of the matter, and call Stalin's attention to a letter accusing Beriya that he (Kedrov ) had written to Dzerzhinskiy in 1921.

But Igor Kedrov and Golubev were arrested in late February 1939 and shot. The elder Kedrov was arrested several months later. Despite the fact that he succeeded in proving his innocence, he was not freed, and in late 1941 Beriya disposed of him also. This story, which also serves to denigrate Stalin, is reported without details or substantiating facts. Viktorov's book perhaps serves to rehabilitate M. S. Kedrov, but it adds little or nothing to our knowledge of the state security service.

An Estonian official of the Cheka, Viktor E. Kingisepp, has also been honored with a biography. Kingisepp took a prominent part in the investigation of the attempt on Lenin's life in August 1918. Memoirs of old Chekists are rare in Soviet literature. The memoirs of F. T. Fomin, a retired member of state security, were published in 1962 in an original edition of 350,000 copies, certainly a very large printing for a book of this type. A second, revised edition appeared in 1964. Fomin, it is interesting to note; admits that Chekists could misuse their authority for personal goals, citing the activities of a Baltic baron in the Ukrainian Cheka to prove the point. Perhaps it is significant that the miscreant was of noble birth. It is also noteworthy that Fomin presents a highly favorable picture of V. R. Nlenzhinskiy, DzerzhinskiyIs successor as chief of state security, a weak man whose tour at the head of the service is considered an interregnum between Dzerzhinskiy and G. G. Yagoda. Fomin, however, does not mention the much more significant Yagoda, whose role in state security until he was purged by Stalin was considerable.

Operations

Histories of the state security service and its operations have been even more rare. When they do appear, such volumes cover the early period of the service, the time of the Cheka. The most significant historical study of the Cheka to appear in recent years is P. G. Sofinov's volume, Historical Sketches, published in 1960.

The Soviets have also seen fit to surface in part the highly successful TRUST operation of the mid-twenties. This counterintelligence operation, which was mounted by state security, was designed to neutralize the anti-regime activities of Russian émigrés and the intelligence operations of European services. Using as decoy a national organization, the "Monarchical Organization of Central Russia," usually called TRUST, Soviet state security was able to deflect and control the attempts of its enemies to overthrow the Soviet regime during the time of its greatest weakness. A new and untested service thus succeeded in misleading the most experienced intelligence services of Western Europe and in almost completely neutralizing the dedicated work of its émigré opponents.

Not the least of its achievements was the enticement into the Soviet Union and seizure in 1925 of Sidney George Reilly, an able British intelligence officer who had operated in Russia with Robert Bruce-Lockhart in 1918. Lev Nikulin has described the enticement and seizure of Reilly in an article in Nedelya. Not unnaturally, Nikulin shows great pride in this achievement of the security service and its young officers. He undertakes to smear the image of Reilly, however, quoting what purports to be Reilly's offer to Dzerzhinskiy to give full information on the organization and staff of the British intelligence service, members of the Russian emigration with whom he had worked, and--significantly--the American intelligence service. Since U.S. intelligence was moribund by the middle twenties, any information thereon supplied by Reilly, if indeed he wrote such a letter to Dzerzhinskiy, would have been historical.

Nikulin's article was described as a chapter from his forthcoming "novel-chronicle" on TRUST. This book, Mertvaya Zyb (The Swell) apparently has not been published up to this time.

Continue reading - Soviet Motives

New Light on Old Spies - A Review of Recent Soviet Intelligence Revelations - part 4

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Dzerzhinskiy

For several decades the Soviet regime has endeavored to justify the counterintelligence activity of its security service, calling it the "punishing sword of the Revolution," the defender of the Soviet nation and state against foreign and domestic enemies. Its intimate relationship to the party leadership was deliberately blurred; its full role in intra-party struggles for power has been concealed.

The participation of the security service in these struggles and the purges they brought forth, events that are well remembered by the Soviet people, made difficult the task of investing it with any sort of glamour. In practice it was necessary to concentrate on the earliest period of its history, the period of revolution, civil war, and early post-revolutionary years, when it was headed by Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskiy, the Polish revolutionary idealist, friend and associate of Lenin, who died before Stalin began his purges. The Dzerzhinskiy period of the service is portrayed as a time of high idealism, a golden age.

The exigencies of Soviet internal politics have made it impossible to glorify Dzerzhinskiy's successors, who were either nonentities (Menzhinskiy), mere tools of Stalin (Yagoda, Yezhev) or latter-day villains in their own right (Beriya). Soviet party leaders will do nothing that might undermine the effectiveness of the security service as the defender of the regime, hence the history of the service under Stalin's dictatorship is not likely to be revealed. Their efforts to refurbish its image will never be allowed to endanger its internal efficiency. It is unlikely, therefore, that any detailed history of state security will appear in the foreseeable future.

Historical material on the service nevertheless continues to appear. As noted above, much attention is given to the life and personality of Dzerzhinskiy, so much in fact that something of a cult of personality seems to have grown up around him. In 1956, selections of his diary and family letters, all pre-revolutionary in date, made their appearance. P. G. Sofinov published during the same year a popular biography of Dzerzhinskiy that made use of certain hitherto unpublished archival material. In the following year, a selection of Dzerzhinskiy's writings that emphasized his work in other components of the Soviet government such as the Commissariat of the Interior, Commissariat of Transportation, and Supreme Council of the National Economy made its appearance. A more rounded view of his career is thus now available.

During recent years Soviet authors have continued to mine the ore of Dzerzhinskiy's life and career. A. Khatskevich published a careful biographical study of him in which he uses his subject's prerevolutionary documentary files. On the other hand, N. Zubov has produced another popular biography repeating well-worn facts and stories. Dzerzhinskiy's eighty-fifth birthday was commemorated by the appearance of a rather barren volume of reminiscences that adds little or nothing to our knowledge of the man.

Perhaps the most interesting volume on Dzerzhinskiy to appear in recent years is Mme. Dzerzhinskiy's memoirs, published in 1964. She gives the texts of letters never before published or previously published only in part. She also provides an interpretation of her husband's background and development based on an association of many years that should contribute significantly to an understanding of the man. It will be interesting to see whether Soviet historians produce additional significant material on Dzerzhinskiy's career as chief of state security. If, as one authority contends, the Cheka archives were destroyed, that task may be difficult.

Continue reading - Other Chekists

New Light on Old Spies - A Review of Recent Soviet Intelligence Revelations - part 3

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State Security: Abel

The admission to the Soviet people that the state security service, long portrayed as a defensive, counterintelligence arm of the state, does in fact engage in peacetime espionage abroad is equally dramatic. By virtue of its internal, repressive activity, the security service is only too well known to the Soviet population. Few Soviet citizens can have avoided some brush with the heavy hand of the security component, but equally few of them have known until recently what every literate Westerner has long known, that the state security service is also a principal arm of Soviet espionage abroad. In keeping with the dogma that only aggressive imperialist states engage in espionage, the existence of the First Chief Directorate of the security service, the foreign arm, was never admitted. The surfacing of its espionage in foreign countries, therefore, represents a major shift in Soviet intelligence policy.

This policy shift was signaled by an article on the career of Col. Rudolf Abel that appeared in Nedelya (The Week) during May 1965. According to its author, Abel was born in a city near the Volga, entered the state security service about 1927, and worked before and during World War II as an intelligence agent against Germany, being covered as a member of the German minority in Latvia. It is significant that Abel's espionage activity after the war is shown as motivated by a personal desire to neutralize the activity of "fascist criminals" who had taken refuge in the West. The theme of working against Nazi criminals presumably would be popular with the Soviet people and fits the time-honored portrayal of state security as a defensive organization.

Colonel Abel is also the hero of a novel by Vadim Kozhevnikov now being serialized in Znamya, the organ of the Union of Writers. Kozhevnikov's novel has not yet appeared in book form in the USSR. It is also being serialized in the Yugoslav newspaper Borba.

According to the author, Abel's true name is Aleksandr Ivanovich Belov. Since the work is frankly fiction, however, none of the data it contains can be accepted without verification. The significant fact is that the Soviet government has thus belatedly chosen to portray Abel as a hero Chekist employed in espionage abroad.

The theme of work against postwar Nazis, it is interesting to note, also appears in the purported memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale (Conon Molody), the state security officer who was convicted of espionage in the United Kingdom and later exchanged for Greville Wynne, a British subject involved in the Penkovskiy trial. Lonsdale claims that he wished to operate against former Nazis who were employed in the United Kingdom. The Lonsdale "memoirs," which have been serialized in the British press but not published in the USSR are clearly designed as a deception operation. Their accounts of his Canadian birth, a childhood spent in Poland, and intelligence work with Colonel Abel in the United States before going to the United Kingdom are, from evidence on hand, complete fabrications. They are designed to confuse Western intelligence services, sow dissension between the British and American governments, and denigrate both British security and British justice. Any truth they may contain is merely incidental to these purposes.

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New Light on Old Spies - A Review of Recent Soviet Intelligence Revelations - part 2

Part 1

Other GRU Cases

Soviet authorities have also seen fit to give publicity to an obscure officer of the GRU surfaced under the name of Colonel Lev Yefimovich Manevich. This man was made posthumously a Hero of the Soviet Union in early 1965, presumably for wartime services. He is credited in the Soviet press with service in an unidentified foreign country, possibly Germany or German-occupied Europe. According to the Soviet accounts he was betrayed through the cowardice of an assistant and imprisoned in German concentration camps, where he was known under the name Ya. N. Starostin. Before his death from tuberculosis at the Ebensee camp in Austria on 12 May 1945, he is said to have confided to a fellow inmate, one Grant Gregoryevich Ayrapetov, that his cryptonym was Etienne and to have asked that the Soviet authorities be notified.

Manevich is portrayed as a devoted intelligence agent who continued his work despite serious illness. According to Ayrapetov, Manevich compiled files on Soviets in Vlassov's unit, on followers of Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader, and on other collaborators, all of which he turned over to one F. N. Dontsov for transmittal to the Soviet authorities. Interviews with Manevich's sister and Ayrapetov have appeared in the Soviet provincial press. The reason for surfacing Manevich in particular is unclear, unless the script called for an intelligence agent whose activities could be related to the second world war. This criterion could also be applied to Sorge.

One former chief of Soviet military intelligence, a victim of the great purge, has recently been rehabilitated, apparently as part of this publicity campaign. Yu. Geller has written a brief account of the career of Semen Petrovich Uritskiy, chief of the GRU between 1935 and 1937 until he was purged and executed by Stalin. Only the most general information on Uritskiy's career is given. His intelligence work is passed over with the excuse that it cannot yet be made public, but he is credited with having directed officers of the caliber of Sorge and Manevich.

The German portion of the loosely connected Soviet wartime espionage operation now known as Rote Kapelle has been surfaced in the guise of a German resistance movement. Through the device of an interview with Greta (Margareta) Kuckhoff, a member of the group and presently a banking official in East Germany, the Soviet authorities have lifted a corner of the veil that still covers their wartime military intelligence operations in Europe. Rote Kapelle (the Nazi origin of this name is admitted by the Soviets) is portrayed as an antifascist group that began to take shape before the Hitler dictatorship was established. Although the upper-class origin of its leaders, Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen, and of other members is admitted, a determined effort is made to show that it also contained many persons of working-class origin. The espionage role of the group is presented in rather incidental fashion, without emphasis. No mention is made of the GRU networks that existed in France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. Greta Kuckhoff presents East Germany as the heir to the cause for which the Rote Kapelle fought.

Continue reading - State Security: Abel

New Light on Old Spies - A Review of Recent Soviet Intelligence Revelations

Note - language is not corrected. Keep in mind that this article was written during the Cold War era.

Espionage is needed by those who prepare for attack, for aggression. The Soviet Union is deeply dedicated to the cause of peace and does not intend to attack anyone. Therefore it has no intention of engaging in espionage.--Nikita Khrushchev to Saneo Nozaka, Chairman of the Japanese Communist Party, 1962.

The average Soviet citizen, had he been asked, would have denied that his Government engaged in espionage against other states. Such a dirty practice, he could have added if he faithfully followed the official propaganda line, was employed only by the imperialists, with the USSR as their target. Had not the Soviet Union been compelled to create and maintain a state security service to protect itself from just such imperialist machinations?

The average Soviet, if he was ever so naive, is now disabused of his illusions. His government has reversed a policy in force since Lenin's day to admit that it has been practicing espionage abroad all the time. For reasons not yet clear, it has created a new hero: the intrepid intelligence agent spying abroad in peacetime for the Soviet fatherland at great personal sacrifice and danger.

By this action the Soviet regime has in effect surfaced the military intelligence service (GRU) to its own citizens. The hero intelligence operative has joined the hero Chekist in the Soviet pantheon. Moreover, the hero Chekist, hitherto portrayed as the valiant defender of the regime against foreign and domestic enemies, has now become an aggressive collector of intelligence abroad. For the first time since the Revolution the espionage exploits of the Soviet military intelligence service and state security have been officially acknowledged. True, the official accounts of these exploits must seem inadequate to any Soviet mind bold enough to reflect on the matter, but their quality is not the point at issue. The crucially significant fact is that Soviet espionage activities were surfaced at all. An official policy dating back to the Revolution has been dramatically and unaccountably revised.

Richard Sorge

When surfacing the GRU, the Soviet authorities chose to highlight Richard Sorge, the German citizen whose exploits for Soviet military intelligence in China and Japan before the second world war, although never revealed in the Soviet Union, have been known in the West for almost two decades. Sorge's career in espionage, and especially his penetration of the Japanese government and the German embassy in Tokyo, had been earlier examined in detail by General Charles Willoughby, Hans Otto Meissner, and Chalmers Johnson. Their works, although differing in detail and interpretation of events, are largely based on reports of the Japanese investigation of the Sorge network and certain memoirs and secondary publications. All are inaccurate in varying degrees. The Japanese investigation, the principal non-Communist source on the case, was inadequately handled and left many unanswered questions but did supply the broad outlines of the affair. David Dallin, it should be noted, has barely mentioned the case. As of 1965, little had been added to our knowledge of the operation.

Richard Sorge has been surfaced in the Soviet Union by means of a series of newspaper articles and popular books. His glorification was begun in late 1964 with an article by Viktor Mayevskiy in Pravda. Written after a visit to Sorge's grave in Tokyo, this article is an unrelieved panegyric on its subject. Other articles on Sorge in the Soviet central and provincial press quickly followed. Ya. Gorev, who is said to have served in the GRU with Sorge in Berlin, presented what seems to be an official account of Sorge's career. Gorev claims to have helped prepare Sorge for his Far East assignment and to have operated near him there. His use of Sorge's letters and messages indicates that he had access to official files, but he has furnished little new data on the case. Sorge is presented as a paragon of virtue; his weakness for alcohol and women is ignored. Gorev's version of the Sorge operation generally corresponds to that presented by Meissner and Willoughby. In all probability he drew heavily on these sources.

Although Moscow has for some reason suppressed Gorev's account, the glorification campaign has continued unabated since late 1964. Persons who knew Sorge even slightly have given interviews for publication. On occasion, these individuals have admitted they did not know Sorge was engaged in intelligence work. Gerhardt Eisler has contributed a short memoir. V. Kudryavtsev, a Tass correspondent in Tokyo during 1931-1937, told of meeting Sorge and Branko Vukelic in Japan. He had no knowledge of their intelligence work at the time. Gerhard Stuchlik and Horst Pehnert, East German journalists, wrote a series of articles drawing on those by Mayevskiy and Gorev, interviews with Max Klausen, Sorge's radio operator, and with Gerhardt Eisler, and such Western sources as Meissner and Willoughby. Except for certain details on Sorge's early life, these add relatively little.

Several people living outside the Soviet Union have recently contributed reminiscences of Sorge. Kai Moltke and Richard Jensen, former Communists, have written of Sorge's stay in Denmark during 1928. Sorge's wife Christine has published a short and uninformative memoir in a Swiss periodical. None of these accounts makes any significant contribution to an understanding of the Sorge operation.

A popular, semi-fictional version of Sorge's career was carried by the Soviet periodical Ogonek, beginning on 28 February 1965. Its authors, Sergey Golyakov and Vladimir Ponosovskiy, fail to throw new light on the case. They present Sorge as declaring himself a Soviet citizen to his Japanese jailers. A sizable paperback edition of this series (300,000 copies) was published early in 1965.

It is clear that the Soviet authorities wish to present Sorge as a popular hero but have no desire at this time to publish an accurate history of his intelligence operation. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, on 5 November 1964 he was posthumously awarded the title, Hero of the Soviet Union. In January 1965, Max Klausen was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and his wife Anna received the Order of the Red Star. Branko Vukelic was posthumously awarded the Order of the Patriotic War (First Degree). The East German Government has conferred on Max and Anna Klausen the Gold Medal of Merit of the National People's Army. But perhaps the most significant honor bestowed on Sorge was the issuance, early in 1965, of a Soviet stamp bearing his portrait. He thus joins Nathan Hale as an intelligence agent who has been paid philatelic honors by his government. No further proof is required of the intention of the Soviet authorities to add Sorge to the Soviet pantheon.

Continue reading - other GRU cases

The Cold War Atomic Intelligence Game, 1945-70 - From the Russian Perspective - part 3

Part 1

Part 2

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.

Source

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

Part 1

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.

Continue reading - Counterintelligence Operations

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

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.

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The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 8

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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.

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The theory and practice of Soviet intelligence - part 7

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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.

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