State planning and militarization of the economy. Militarization of the economy: concept, examples
Publishes on Monday a review of a recently published book called The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World "The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the Outside World". It is a continuation of the acclaimed work "The Mitrokhin Archive", which the former KGB archivist wrote together with Professor Christopher Andrew.
When a casually dressed Russian pensioner entered the British embassy in Riga in April 1992 and took out several notebooks covered in neat handwriting, no one could have imagined that a turning point in the history of espionage had come, writes the Financial Times (translation on the website Inopressa.ru).
Of course, the CIA did not believe this and refused the services of Major Vasily Mitrokhin when he offered the fruits of his labors to the US Embassy, the British newspaper continues.
But Mitrokhin's materials turned out to be documents that he copied for 10 years before retiring from the KGB in 1984. When he fled to London with his wife and son in November 1992, he brought back his treasure.
The first volume of his revelations came out in 1999 and shed light on hundreds of KGB operations around the world, focusing on Europe and the United States. There is no doubt about the authenticity of the material. In addition to launching dozens of investigations in a number of countries, Mitrokhin's revelations helped agent hunters trap spies and carry out ingenious counterintelligence operations against agents operating under a "false flag." Two of them, Colonel George Trofimoff and Robert Lipka are currently serving prison sentences. Another, former senior State Department diplomat Felix Bloch, is under FBI surveillance.
"The Mitrokhin Archive II" is dedicated to Soviet operations in developing countries. Documented links between former Chilean leader Salvador Allende and the Kremlin and secret funding of high-profile politicians in Delhi have already caused controversy, but there is plenty of evidence of Moscow's involvement in the world's most sinister events. In particular, Mitrokhin provides the most convincing evidence of the secret role of the KGB in the leadership of international terrorism.
During the Reagan era, the CIA tried in vain to find evidence that the Palestinian terrorists received covert support from the Politburo. We now learn that the godfather of modern terrorism, Wadi Haddad, was codenamed "Nationalist" and funded by the KGB, who also provided him with weapons and instructions on specific targets.
Haddad led the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and gained worldwide notoriety in September 1970 when he first used air piracy as a tool of political blackmail. Britain, Germany, Switzerland and the US gave in to his demands and released the prisoners, including Leila Khalid, who was held at a London police station after a failed attempt to hijack a passenger plane.
Thanks in no small part to Haddad's innovative approach to terrorism, air travelers today suffer the inconvenience of security checks and long queues at airports.
In May 1970, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov reported to Leonid Brezhnev that his organization "to a certain extent" controlled the foreign operations of the PFLP, and Mitrokhin faithfully copied this note. This is the irrefutable evidence that CIA analysts have been looking for for years, prompted by Bill Casey and Alexander Haig, who are confident that there is such a connection.
Slightly less compelling is the evidence against Yasser Arafat, who was manipulated by the KGB but apparently never recruited. The Arafat case highlights the problem of drawing a line between Mitrokhin's notes and the contribution of his co-author, who placed them in a historical context. Christopher Andrew says that the KGB "undoubtedly knew that Arafat was lying about being born in Jerusalem," but admits that he came to this conclusion based not on Mitrokhin's materials, but on one of Arafat's biographies.
More convincingly, Arafat's intelligence chief, Hani al-Hassan, was a KGB source operating under the alias "Gidar" since 1968.
This brings up the issue. There are real gems on every page, but without constant reference to footnotes it is impossible to tell when we are reading the factual material of Mitrokhin, and when we are reading Andrew's conclusions.
Take, for example, the episode concerning the kidnapping by the PFLP, at the behest of the KGB, of the American scientist Honey Korda in Beirut in August 1970. Apparently, Korda was taken to Jordan for a tough investigation, but he committed suicide by refusing to confirm KGB suspicions that he was a top-secret CIA agent. Tragic story, but minimal research work shows this incident is not documented.
The footnotes state that "it was not possible to verify the English spelling of Korda's name." In other words, the involvement of the USSR in the death of an innocent American scientist is claimed, but these accusations are not substantiated by anything and it is impossible to establish a correspondence with the description of Korda seized in Lebanon in 1970.
Of course, there are more than enough reasons to accuse the KGB of supporting dozens of other atrocities. And the pernicious influence that the Kremlin had on developing countries, will amaze even hardened cynics.
And yet this is a revised version, a catalog of covert operations that Mitrokhin's Western backers, mainly British intelligence and the CIA, found it possible to make public without prejudice to ongoing investigations and their interests.
The chapters on pervasive political corruption in the Indian subcontinent serve the purpose, as does a detailed analysis of forged and forged documents that the KGB planted on gullible journalists, especially in Africa, while distributing Soviet propaganda. Of course, we should not forget the zeal with which some foreign correspondents wrote articles that today appear to be blatant attempts to defame the CIA and support Soviet efforts.
Although general sentiment turned anti-communist in 1989, there were moments during the previous decade in Latin America and South Africa when Soviet influence increased. Even Fidel Castro, once the staunchest supporter of the KGB, always ready to harm Angola and Central America, lost favor and was condemned for megalomania.
The Politburo was isolated from independent analysts, and self-deception became a way of life, to the extent that inadequate recommendations convinced the Kremlin to enter Afghanistan in December 1979.
Mitrokhin devotes two chapters to the bitter Soviet experience in that country, and footnotes show that much of the material comes from Mitrokhin's study of "KGB in Afghanistan" based on other notes. This highlights another problem with both archive volumes. Few of the documents cited in both books have been declassified and are available for analysis, and the Afghan chapters rely on dozens of other books published during the conflict rather than on Mitrokhin's material.
Mitrokhin's work is dissolved in Andrew's scholarship, which will irritate purists, though they end up with the holy grail of espionage, or at least something close to it, until the Soviet archives are opened.
Mitrokhin's second volume is shorter than the first and contains far fewer excerpts from the original documents. However, it is a diatribe about how the KGB did its job and about the Kremlin's susceptibility to illusions.
Vasily Mitrokhin (Sad) and his archives
Head of the archive department of the State Security Committee Vasily Mitrokhin moved to the UK in 1992 at the age of 70 with his family and six huge containers of secret KGB documents, which he furtively copied over the course of 12 years. He copied documents on small pieces of paper, and then took them out of the archive, hiding them in shoes, socks and trousers. He kept copies in his dacha under the floor in milk cartons. These hand-made copies cover intelligence from 1918 to Soviet intelligence operations around the world in 1980. The papers were subsequently smuggled out of Russia by British intelligence. Based on these data, the former KGB archivist, together with Professor Christopher Andrew, wrote the book "The Mitrokhin Archive".
After the publication was published in the West, noisy revelations began, for example, the case of the "grandmother-spy" Melita Norwood, who supplied British nuclear secrets to Soviet intelligence for almost 40 years, and Felix Bloch, a high-ranking employee of the US State Department, who was suspected of espionage .
Most striking was the exposure of 80-year-old Melita Norwood, who passed British nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union for 40 years, starting in 1937. This revelation caused a scandal, which ended when the then Attorney General told the Secretary of the Interior, Jack Straw, that prosecution beyond that time limit was not possible.
There was also the so-called agent Romeo, London police detective Sergeant John Symonds, who fled the country after being charged with corruption and was recruited by the KGB in Morocco. After completing a special training course, he had to seduce the employees of foreign embassies, meaning to receive secret information from them.
Mitrokhin's other revelations included a plan to disrupt the 1969 investiture of the Prince of Wales and present it as an MI5 plot to discredit the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru; a plan to maim runaway ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Natalya Makarova and ruin their careers; details about Soviet caches in Western Europe and the United States with weapons that could be used by agents and their pro-Soviet henchmen in case of war.
The Mitrokhin Archive contains the names of famous Americans, from Henry Kissinger, whose telephone conversations with Richard Nixon were tapped by the KGB, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's political advisor. national security, whom the KGB tried to recruit.
At the other end of the spectrum were spies, traitors, and suspects: Robert Lipka, a National Security Agency clerk who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1960s and received an 18-year prison sentence, and Felix Bloch, the highest-ranking State Department official who came under investigation for suspicion in espionage (he was fired and deprived of his pension, but the FBI was never able to collect enough evidence and charge him). The book also contains new details about the famous Burges, McLean and Philby.
The FBI calls the Mitrokhin archives "the most complete and extensive intelligence information ever obtained from any source." Mitrokhin died in London at the end of January last year.
“Having handed over to Moscow more than a thousand documents under the heading “Guy Burgess never came to meetings with Soviet liaisons sober, and Donald McLane not only constantly drank, but also chatted about his secret work with his brother and mistress”
Churchill College at the University of Cambridge has opened to the public the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of documents compiled by Vasily Mitrokhin, a former KGB major who defected to the West in 1992. These papers cover the historical period from the 1930s to the 1970s, and at one time allowed British counterintelligence to identify several Soviet spies.
Over the past 20 years, the Mitrokhin archive has been at the center of several spy scandals. At the same time, the materials themselves remained classified, despite the demand of the defector to make everything public. Instead, the British authorities assigned to him the historian Christopher Andrew, who became a co-author of Mitrokhin. Together they wrote two books. About 30,000 cases copied by Mitrokhin were only partially presented in them.
One of the most famous KGB operations in the UK was the Cambridge Five. In the 1930s, Soviet intelligence recruited five students from the University of Cambridge, who later took high positions in the British intelligence services and the Foreign Ministry. They successfully supplied information to the USSR until the mid-50s. The names of four agents are known - intelligence officers Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, diplomat Donald McLain and BBC producer Guy Burgess. Nothing is known about the fifth. However, there is a version that there were actually not five agents, but much more.
The history of the "Cambridge Five" formed the basis of dozens of books, films and radio shows. In particular, a former employee of MI5 and MI6, David Cornwell, under the pseudonym John le Carré, published a novel in 1974, known in Russian translation as "Spy, get out." The book went through two adaptations, in 1979 and 2011.
As it turned out from the Mitrokhin archive, the curators of the "five" in the KGB were extremely dissatisfied with the work of their wards. Yes, in 1945 Burgess handed over 389 top secret documents to Moscow, and another 168 in 1949. But KGB liaisons practically never saw him sober (the cause of his death in 1963 is indeed called alcoholism). Things were even worse with McLain: not only was he constantly drinking, but he was also talking about his secret work. The KGB suspected that he had confessed to working for the Soviet Union, at least to his brother and one of his mistresses.
According to Mitrokhin's materials, among the British residents in the KGB, Melita Norwood was most valued - her work for Soviet intelligence became known in 1999 thanks to the first book by Mitrokhin and Andrew. A low-ranking official and a member of the Communist Party, starting in 1935 and for 40 years, she transferred photographs of secret documents to Moscow. Most of her work was related to nuclear development, although MI5 now describes her role in the Soviet nuclear program as "minor". Norwood died in 2005 at the age of 93 in the UK. She never got to trial. For 11 years after her retirement in 1971, she received monthly allowance from the KGB in the amount of 20 pounds sterling.
Another KGB agent, editor of the Tribune newspaper from 1961 to 1982, and later a high-ranking member of the Labor Party, Dick Clements, according to Mitrokhin's materials, posted pro-Soviet commissioned materials in the 60s for a fee of 200 pounds. In total, the declassified archive speaks of two hundred contacts of the Soviet intelligence service in Great Britain alone. However, many defectors in the past have pointed out that the data in the archives could be significantly inflated for the sake of reporting and increased funding. Likewise, the Clements story could have been fabricated so that some agent would write off his expenses - at least, the journalist insisted on this version until his death.
The Mitrokhin archive sheds light on many spy secrets of the 20th century. For example, it is believed that the KGB archives contain all the diplomatic correspondence of the British Foreign Office with their embassies from 1924 to 1936. The name of the person who stole this data is still a mystery, but now the circle of searches has narrowed a bit. According to a former KGB major, the informant was a cryptographer at the British Embassy in Rome.
Documents handed over to MI6 in 1992 tell of the surveillance of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, who was considered a "dangerous anti-communist element"; about the introduction of an agent in the editorial office of the radical American magazine Ramparts. There is also a list of people who should have been monitored during the suppression of the Prague Spring, and the locations of secret ammunition caches throughout Europe.
Vasily Mitrokhin joined the KGB in 1948. After a series of unsuccessful business trips in 1956, he was transferred to the archive. Disappointment in communism came to him in the same year - after Khrushchev's report "On the cult of personality and its consequences" at the XX Congress of the CPSU. During the archive's move from Lubyanka to Yasenevo from 1972 until his resignation in 1984, Mitrokhin copied by hand the key documents to which he had access and hid these notes in his dacha.
After retiring, Mitrokhin began to put his archive in order: he sorted the records by country, retyped them on a typewriter. In 1992, he left for Riga, where he tried to surrender first to the Americans (according to one version, the embassy staff did not believe him, according to another, he simply did not wait in line), and then to the British. Together with his family and archive, by the end of the year he was taken to the UK.
Handing over the documents, Mitrokhin demanded their open publication, but the British secret services ordered otherwise. 22 years after Mitrokhin's escape and 10 years after his death, the first two thousand typewritten pages are finally presented to the public. The complete printed archive of the former KGB major will be available to anyone in Cambridge, but the original handwritten notes will remain classified.
Artem Astashenkov
Mitrokhin archive
The current history sometimes beats off the taste for the past. "Blessed is he who visited this world in its fatal moments," the poet wrote with reference to Cicero, but he himself lived in the prosperous nineteenth century, mostly in prosperous Germany. The inhabitants of today's Moscow, Volgodonsk, and, especially, Grozny, do not share these historical enthusiasms, and they went sideways to the Roman orator himself when they presented his head on a platter to Mark Anthony.
And yet, I will allow myself to talk about recent history, because the words of the American philosopher George Santayana still hold true: "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it."
A book by the British historian Christopher Andrew "Sword and Shield" was published in the United States. Here is how he himself presents it in the preface:
"This book is based on unprecedented and unrestricted access to one of the most secret and closely guarded archives in the world - the archive of the KGB's foreign intelligence, the First Chief Directorate. Until now, the current Russian intelligence organization, the Foreign Intelligence Service, was absolutely certain that such a book could not When the German magazine Focus reported in December 1996 that a former KGB officer had defected to the UK "with the names of hundreds of Russian spies," SVR spokeswoman Tatyana Samolis immediately ridiculed the story as "complete nonsense." "Hundreds of people! It just doesn't happen," she said. "Any defector can name one, two, maybe three agents - but not hundreds!"
The facts, however, are much more sensational than even this story, which was dismissed by the SVR as unbelievable. The defector from the KGB brought to the UK detailed information about not just hundreds, but thousands of Soviet agents and intelligence officers in all parts of the world, including "illegals" living abroad in deep secrecy, disguised as foreign citizens.
The name of the man who revealed thousands of secrets and caused one of the biggest sensations of the outgoing century is now known: Vasily Mitrokhin. Looking at us from the photographs is a man of middle age and appearance, which you won’t look back at in the crowd - fishing, hunting, at a typewriter. It was he who, over the years, compiled a unique collection of documents that formed the basis of Andrew's weighty volume and the continuation promised by the author.
History, in the words of the already cited Santayana, is false stories about events that never happened, told by people who were not present at them. It is these people who are now diligently busy destroying the past, they publish their sanctioned memories, mixing a spoonful of truth with a barrel of lies - just in such a proportion that the lie acquires the color of plausibility. Their attempts to whiten black are in vain, for the best weapon against fiction is a document. Preserving the truth is one of the greatest services a man can render to posterity.
The documents exported by Mitrokhin are now being studied by the counterintelligence agencies of the Western powers, and if these institutions had fully adhered to their principles, we would hardly have known about the contents of the archives in such completeness as they are presented in the book. The fact that we are now reading about them is another merit of Mitrokhin, who insisted that the truth, or at least part of it, be made public, because the secret truth does not exist anyway.
"Life is everywhere" says a well-known picture of the Wanderer. Most striking of all, this brief aphorism applies even to an organization like the KGB, which seems to lie beyond the limits of everything human. The life of Vasily Mitrokhin is a statement of the possibility of moral survival and achievement even in the belly of the beast.
This life, perhaps, deserves a special book, and one day it will be written. So far, one has to be content with the meager facts set forth in Andrew's book.
Vasily Nikitich Mitrokhin was born in 1922. His career in the KGB began in 1948 in the atmosphere of Stalin's death paranoia, the struggle against "Titoism" and Zionism. One of his first missions was a trip to Paris to spy on the well-known Pravda correspondent Yuri Zhukov, who, because of his wife's nationality, was suspected of being involved in a Zionist conspiracy - the Soviet authorities did not trust even the most devoted of their watchdogs.
The failure came after the 20th Congress, in the atmosphere of the then discussions and weakened vigilance. Mitrokhin, like many others, allowed himself to say too much in the presence of third parties, and his career as a knight of shield and sword came to an end. At the end of 1956, he was transferred to the archives of the First Directorate, where his duties consisted of responding to requests from other directorates and provincial departments of the KGB.
The evolution of his political views is known to us from the words of Christopher Andrew, and to him, in turn, from Mitrokhin himself. The skeptic has the right to doubt and see opportunism in every motive of human actions. Nevertheless, the facts of the biography of Vasily Mitrokhin, who has been doing his painstaking work for many years in an atmosphere of constant danger and without hope of an early reward, encourage him to believe. He was greatly impressed by such events as Khrushchev's persecution of Pasternak, the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, and the persecution of dissidents.
“By the early 1970s, Mitrokhin’s political views were strongly influenced by the struggle of dissidents, which he was able to follow both from KGB documents and Western broadcasts. “I was a loner,” he recalls, “but I knew that I'm not alone." Although it never occurred to Mitrokhin to openly join the human rights movement, the example of the "Chronicle of Current Events" and other publications of samizdat gave him the idea of creating a secret version of dissident attempts to document the abominations of the Soviet system. Gradually, a project began to take shape in his head compiling their own private archive of KGB activities abroad".
In 1972, he had a completely unique opportunity to begin to implement this plan. The archive of the First Main Directorate began to be transported from Lubyanka to new complex The KGB was in Yasenevo, and Mitrokhin was entrusted with overseeing this operation.
Other people had such complete access to archival documents in the KGB, but only Mitrokhin had time to sort them out and give them sufficient attention - after all, this was precisely his job. At first, he limited himself to writing off names, nicknames, and facts of biographies, but then he began to rewrite documents in their entirety and kept them in his dacha under the floorboards.
As Christopher Andrew further reports, in March 1992, Mitrokhin, already a pensioner at that time, went to the capital of one of the Baltic republics that had already gained independence. His luggage consisted of a bag on wheels: sausage, bread, a change of clothes, and at the very bottom - samples of documents from his private archive. He was warmly welcomed at the British Embassy, and on his next visit he took with him two thousand pages. British intelligence no longer had any doubts that they had got the booty of the century. In September, Mitrokhin made his first trip to London, meetings and conversations were held with competent persons, and a month later, an operation known to intelligence officers as "exfiltration" was carried out: Mitrokhin and his family were secretly taken to Great Britain - this time forever. Given the understandable interest in his person from Russian authorities, his place of residence and identity are now classified.
Christopher Andrew, author of a number of other books on Soviet espionage, is interested in maintaining good relations with the agencies that handle the relevant information. Apparently, therefore, he kept silent about one rather delicate circumstance that puts one of these institutions in a not too flattering light. The fact is that Mitrokhin's first choice for contact was the US Embassy, but the Central Intelligence Agency considered his story to be beyond plausibility and showed him the door.
The pages of Christopher Andrew's book reflect the entire history of KGB foreign intelligence, supplemented by the missing links gleaned from Mitrokhin. This organization, one of the most powerful in the history of mankind, appears ferocious and unprincipled, highly professional and, paradoxically, monstrously incompetent.
One of the myths of the foreign intelligence service of the KGB, carefully cultivated by its current heirs, depicts this kind of activity as fundamentally different from the other branches of the organs: there, they say, there are temporary workers, political appointees, Stalinist executioners, and here they are fearless professionals, valiant fighters of the secret front. Mitrokhin's documents drive the final nail into the coffin of this fable. The main methods of Soviet intelligence throughout its history were murder, terror, lies, blackmail, sabotage and provocation. Her fearless knights, side by side with their counterparts from the interior, stained their hands with the blood of countless victims. Foreign intelligence did not arise from scratch: it spun off from the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission and retained all its favorite methods.
Christopher Andrew's book is a coherent historical narrative, and it is sometimes difficult for a non-specialist to single out Mitrokhin's contribution to this story. Here are some of the facts that became known only thanks to the Mitrokhinsky archive.
* There has been a Soviet spy operating in Britain for many years, comparable in importance to Fab Five agents such as Kim Philby and David McLean. Her name is Melitta Norwood, she worked at defense enterprises and supplied scientific and technical information to Moscow. Eighty-seven-year-old Norwood is still alive.
* In the countries of Western Europe and in the USA, warehouses of weapons and spy equipment for sabotage operations were arranged. Some of them, thanks to Mitrokhin, have now been discovered, but not all of them.
* The Soviet Union carried out a major operation to discredit an American fighter for civil rights Martin Luther King. As a result, King received the dubious and unique honor of being the target of compromising actions by both the KGB and the FBI.
* Among the active measures developed against emigrants and defectors was a plan to break the legs of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.
* The overwhelming majority of the achievements of Soviet military technology were based not on the developments of domestic scientists, but on documentation stolen in the West.
Of course, it can be objected that espionage is espionage, and that the methods used by other intelligence agencies are also not taken from the Boy Scouts' rules. Nevertheless, the list of direct crimes of the Soviet foreign intelligence, for which we simply do not have time to announce, is unprecedented even in the history of the battered twentieth century. There is no effective intelligence agency in the world that is less constrained by law and morality.
Efficiency, however, needs to be discussed separately. The KGB's foreign intelligence mission was, in principle, to protect the country from external threat- disregarding the fact that this country was an unprecedented machine of oppression and terror in history. How did intelligence cope with its task?
In their golden years, the State Security Committee and its various predecessors had excellent agents in the West and collected a huge amount of information. But it was forbidden to independently analyze this information - Comrade Stalin and his heirs were engaged in the analysis. Here are some results.
All the thirties were spent on opening up and preventing the threat of military and sabotage operations from the UK. Great Britain itself not only did not hatch aggressive plans against the USSR, but for many years did not have intelligence agents there at all.
In parallel, and, moreover, for many decades, there was a round-the-world struggle against Trotskyism, which cost the life of Trotsky himself, members of his family and hundreds of fighters of the Spanish international brigades. Trotsky's assassin Ramon Mercader was already awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union by Khrushchev.
All the last years of Soviet power, including under Gorbachev, Andropov launched Operation Ryan to detect and prevent a US preventive nuclear attack on the USSR. The threat existed solely in the imagination of the Soviet leadership.
Ultimately, for all its tactical triumphs and operational strength, the work of the KGB was doomed to failure. The State Security Committee was an instrument of incurable Soviet paranoia, for which the main security measure, to put it briefly and sharply, was preventive assassination.
But paranoia is a bad adviser and strategist. The work of the KGB and the regime that gave birth to this organization can be likened to an operation to prevent the invasion of the Martians: the most professional forces and the most decisive measures will null result due to the simple lack of plans for such an invasion.
Returning to the beginning of my story, I want to turn again to the lessons of history. Why is Vasily Mitrokhin and his life's work important to us? Why should we look again into this completed and closed book?
Let's give the floor to Christopher Andrew.
"In 1996, the Foreign Intelligence Service released a CD in Russian and English titled "Foreign Intelligence: VChK-KGB-SVR", which claims to be "for the first time ... provides a professional look at the history and development of one of the most powerful intelligence services in the world." The purpose of all this multimedia celebration of past successes, such as the recruitment of the "Fab Five" and nuclear espionage, is to highlight the direct links between Soviet foreign intelligence and the SVR. On the cover of the CD is a monument to Dzerzhinsky, which the SVR and the FSB hope to see again on a pedestal near the Lubyanka. There is no better illustration of the direct line of succession between Soviet and Russian services foreign intelligence than this attempt by the SVR to reclaim its KGB past."
In other words, the KGB exists. And if you try to remember what, in fact, the Soviet government was, you can put out of brackets the Supreme Council, and the government, and even the Marxist ideology, which has long become a meaningless set of shamanic spells. But without one attribute, it was impossible: the KGB is the Soviet government, plus or minus anything according to the Leninist formula.
Russia has proclaimed itself the legal successor of the Soviet Union, and there is nothing fundamentally shameful in this. Germany, whether it likes it or not, is the legal successor of the Nazi Reich, to this day paying pensions and compensations to the victims of the Nazi regime. But the mentioned publication of the SVR with its Chekist glee, the gendarmerie shouts at the Baltic states and the growing hostility towards the West make it doubtful that Russia considers its inheritance rights solely as credit obligations.
Since all statements about the morally and professionally impeccable past of Soviet foreign intelligence are false, the appeal to the KGB contingent in choosing candidates for the post of head of government is of particular concern - this is the second such case, and if Yevgeny Primakov was just a recruited agent, then Vladimir Putin is a career officer of the organization , which was the moral equivalent of the Gestapo. However, we did not hear from him a word of repentance.
The line of spiritual heritage between the USSR and Russia runs much deeper than individual attributes show. One of the common misconceptions, which I shared up to now, was the conviction that the Soviet leaders did not really believe in their own propaganda. Christopher Andrew's book convinced me otherwise: paranoia was not just a personal quality of Stalin, but a way of existence for the entire state. Andropov seriously believed in the nuclear strike planned by Reagan. One of my colleagues recently remarked in a private conversation that Yeltsin certainly did not believe in the aggressive plans of NATO and opposed its expansion solely for domestic political reasons. Now I have no such confidence.
In conclusion, a few words about the moral significance of Mitrokhin's act, an act that became his whole life. It is possible that someone's favorite terms of the Stalin era will come to mind: betrayal, treason. There is no doubt that they will come to the mind of some of the defector's former colleagues.
During the years of the Hitler regime, the future chancellor of democratic Germany, at that time the leftist Social Democrat Willy Brandt emigrated to Norway, where he founded a small information Agency. The work of this enterprise was to collect intelligence information about Germany and transfer it to the allied powers - including Russia through the NKVD headquarters in Oslo. In modern Germany, Brandt is considered not a traitor, but a hero - with the exception of those narrow circles, whose opinion I will gladly disregard.
The information exported by Mitrokhin helped and continues to expose thousands of foreign KGB agents, most of whom have retired or retired - Mitrokhin himself worked in the KGB only until 1984. There is no more shameful in this action than in the extradition of covert Nazi agents. Words of praise addressed to patriotism are permissible only where morality is not involved, for moral norms are higher than any patriotism. Otherwise, we would be little different from bees or ants.
It is possible, however, and even quite likely that the blow dealt by Mitrokhin from the past will be felt in the current SVR with its KGB ideals. In this case, I have no other court, except as "rightly served." Try to imagine that the belated revelations of the Gestapo are perceived in the FRG as damage to national dignity.
Vasily Nikitich Mitrokhin rendered a great service to the democratic countries of the West. But he rendered an even greater service to his own country, in which he now has no place. Russia, which has yet to emerge, will be grateful to him, and will call his life's work a feat.
The Friday supplement "7 days" of the newspaper "Yediot Ahronot" published the first material of the journalist Ronen Bergman, who gained access to the documents of the former KGB archive officer Vasily Mitrokhin (1922-2004), concerning the Israelis recruited by the Soviet intelligence.
According to the documents, in October 1970, the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, ordered a group of five special agents to be sent to Israel to restore the spy network, the connection with which was lost after the rupture of relations between the USSR and Israel in 1967.
Among the names appearing in Mitrokhin's documents, Bergman highlights the names of three Knesset deputies - Moshe Sne (MAPAM - the predecessor of MERTS, then MAKI - the communist party, now part of the HADASH party), Elazar Granot (MAPAM) and Yaakov Riftin (MAPAM).
The recruitment of members of the communist and socialist parties was one of the important sources of agents for the KGB. So, according to the documents, a member of the Central Committee of the MAKI Shlomo Shamli and a member of the leadership of the "Young Guard" ("a-Shomer ha-Tsair"), engineer Yaakov Vardi, who was responsible for the construction of the water conduit "a-Movil ha-Artsi", worked for the USSR.
Recruitment was also actively conducted among foreign diplomats in Israel. Mitrokhin's list includes the names of the Ambassador of Mexico to Israel, the famous writer Rosa Costallans, the head of the office of the Austrian Ambassador to Israel, Bar Heinz, the Chilean Ambassador to Israel, Deimar Carlos, and the Uruguayan Ambassador to Israel, Yamando La Guardia.
Another source of agents were representatives of various churches. Among such figures is the former Greek Orthodox archbishop of Nazareth and Galilee, Julian Merciadis Isidore. Bergman's publication also mentions a certain priest Adrian Olezhnikov (Oleynikov?), who, while serving in Israel and Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s, worked for the KGB under the agent nickname "Ognev" and allegedly is currently the Archbishop of St. Petersburg. However, there is no name of such a priest on the website of the St. Petersburg Metropolis, just as he is not in the lists of the episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church. According to some reports, another priest, now a retired bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Vilna and Lithuania, who in 1966 visited Israel and Syria, had the undercover nicknames "Restorer" and "Ognev" in the KGB, he is the only bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, admitted the fact of his cooperation with the KGB "in the interests of the church." In the 60s, the former Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga Vladimir (Kotlyarov) served in Jerusalem and Beirut, there were publications that claimed that he worked for the KGB under the agent nickname "Voronov" and reported at the Lubyanka on the situation in the Middle East in 1967, but this is not obviously confirmed by archival documents. Apparently, in the publication of "Yediot Ahronot" we are talking about another person.
Considerable efforts were also made by KGB agents to recruit journalists. Bergman publishes the name of Evita Stan from Ha'Olam HaZe magazine, and also writes about another rising star of Israeli journalism of the time, who was recruited by the Shin Bet and worked as a double agent. According to Bergman, Mitrokhin's documents indicate the places of birth, study and work of the journalist, as well as information about his closeness to the leadership of the ruling Mapai party, but Bergman does not name the journalist. Another journalist, also not named, immigrated to Israel in 1971, worked for radio in Russian and as a journalist for a Russian-language newspaper, but already in 1973 he emigrated to Germany, where he headed a successful conference organizing company.
One of the biggest successes of the KGB was the recruitment of an IDF officer who rose to the rank of general and was part of the general staff forum. Shabak became aware of his work for the USSR only in 1993 from Mitrokhin's documents handed over by British intelligence. The officer was summoned for interrogation, admitted his guilt, however, due to his advanced age and unwillingness to allow a scandal, it was decided to close the case. The retired general died soon after.
The KGB actively recruited repatriates from the aliyah of the 1970s. Many of them immediately surrendered to the Shin Bet, others simply stopped contacting the curators, but there were also those who worked for the USSR.
In 1988, the Shin Bet arrested Grigory Londin, an engineer who had repatriated in 1973 and served as a reservist in the Merkava tank project. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
In 1991, Solomon Makhtei, an engineer who repatriated in 1972 and got a job in the Aviation Industry in the department that worked on the Lavi aircraft, was arrested. In 1982, Makhtei returned to the USSR, and was arrested while trying to repatriate.
In 1996, on the basis of Mitrokhin's documents, Alexander Radlis, the former coach of the Israeli table tennis team, was arrested, who reported to his curators information received during the reserve service in the IDF. He was convicted and sentenced to 4 years in prison.
Another such agent went through the KGB school even before repatriation. After arriving in Israel, he was drafted, took an officer's course and quickly rose through the ranks. career ladder, heading the IDF department responsible for an important infrastructure project. Agent "Bajan" had access to the most secret information, including data on bases, equipment, personnel and operational plans. After demobilization, he held senior positions in the Israeli economy.
Agents "Samaritan" and "Jupiter" also belong to the same type. Having repatriated in 1972, they tried to pass the Shin Bet check, but the investigators did not like their behavior. Both agents were summoned for additional interrogation, where they confessed to working for the KGB and were re-recruited. Both supplied the USSR with disinformation for a long time, and in 1981 they helped uncover Markus Klingberg, who worked at the biological institute in Ness Zion. "Samaritan" worked for the Shin Bet before the collapse former USSR, having made a good career in Israeli business, and now occupies an influential position in the country's economy.
Former members of the Knesset in the "Mitrokhin list". Quick References
Moshe Sne (Moshe Kleinboim, 1906-1972), birthplace Radzyn-Podlaski (Russian Empire) was a leader of socialist Zionism, and later one of the leaders of the Israeli communists. Chief of Staff of the Haganah from 1941 to 1946, member of the board of the World Zionist Organization, member of the board of the Jewish Agency, member of Vaad Leumi, delegate to the World Zionist Congresses, member of the six convocations of the Knesset. Father of former Israeli Minister of Health and Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sne.
Elazar Granot(1927-2013), native of Jerusalem. During the War of Independence, he participated in the battles for Jerusalem and in the liberation of the Negev. He specialized in the study of philosophy, Hebrew literature, Tanakh, sociology and literature. In 1985-1988 he was the general secretary of MAPAM. He was a member of the Knesset of two convocations, was a member of the commission on foreign affairs and security. He was the honorary president of the Socialist International.
Yaakov Riftin(1907-1978), a native of Poland, was one of the leaders of the youth movement "A-Shomer", in 1929 he repatriated to Mandatory Palestine. He was one of the leaders of the Israeli Trade Union, a member of the commission for the security of Jewish settlements and one of the founders of MAPAM. In 1947-1948 he was a member of the Israeli delegation to the UN. In 1948-1954 he was political secretary of MAPAM. He was a member of the Knesset of the first five convocations. In 1968, after forming a bloc with the Labor Party, he left MAPAM and founded the Zionist-Socialist Independent Left Union.
Who is Vasily Mitrokhin and what is the value of his archives
Vasily Nikitich Mitrokhin (March 3, 1922, Yurasovo village, Ryazan province - January 23, 2004, London) - a former employee of the archive department of the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, later a defector.
After graduating from the artillery school, he entered the Kazakh State University. Studied at the Faculty of History and Law. At the end of the Great Patriotic War, he was sent to work in the military prosecutor's office in Kharkov. After graduating from university and briefly serving as deputy military prosecutor in Kharkov in 1948, he was hired by the Committee of Information (the name of Soviet foreign intelligence in 1947-1951).
In Mitrokhin's own words, after Khrushchev's speech at the closed plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he became disillusioned with the ideas of communism. In 1972-1984, he took part in the transfer of the state security archives from the Lubyanka to the new KGB headquarters in Yasenevo. In the same years, for 12 years until his resignation, Mitrokhin secretly outlined them, highlighting the most important. He secretly took out his notes, deciphered and copied them into school notebooks, which he hid at his dacha near Moscow, in particular, placing them in a milk can and burying them. The materials collected by him subsequently accumulated on six suitcases. He managed to copy a huge amount of information: materials on external KGB operations, the names of KGB officers, agents and informants, as well as reports from Soviet intelligence officers. According to some reports, they contained 25,000 pages of secret documents from the USSR.
He retired in 1984.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union (1992) at the US Embassy in Tallinn, he unsuccessfully tried to transfer his microfilms to the CIA. However, the US intelligence agencies took his proposal for disinformation.
With a similar proposal, Mitrokhin in March 1992 turned to the British Embassy in Riga, where he was offered tea and handed over documents for MI-6 to check. His materials were accepted, their removal from his dacha was organized.
On September 7, 1992, British intelligence services smuggled Mitrokhin and his family from Russia to the UK.
Mitrokhin later explained his actions as "the sense of duty of a Russian patriot." He died on January 23, 2004 at the age of 81 from pneumonia.
In 1996, the British authorities decided to make the contents of the Mitrokhin archive public, for which a well-known intelligence historian, professor at Cambridge University, Christopher Andrew, was assigned to help Mitrokhin.
His archive covered Soviet foreign intelligence operations for half a century, from the 1930s to the 1980s. The secret archival documents handed over to him allowed the secret services of the West to identify over a hundred illegal KGB agents and shed light on some KGB operations around the world. As one of the British analysts who participated in the analysis of the Mitrokhin Archive noted, “if the head of the KGB had fled to the West, he would have had much less secret information.”
As noted by prof. Christopher Andrew: “If you open the first volume of our book, then on its second page you will see a dedication in Russian written by Mitrokhin himself. We left this facsimile dedication without translation into English. Here it is: “Dedicated to everyone who wanted to tell the truth, but failed. Mitrokhin".
The materials transferred to the West by Mitrokhin received the code name "Mitrokhin's Archive". It is alleged that the British and American intelligence agencies consider the Mitrokhin archive the most valuable source of information about the activities of the Soviet intelligence agencies.
Perhaps the most extensive source on the work of the PGU KGB in the period of the 40-80s. became the so-called archive of Vasily Mitrokhin, which he took to Britain.
Everyone involved in the history of special services is familiar with the books created on the basis of the archive: "The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West" and "The Mitrokhin Archive 2: The KGB and the World." Released in 1999 and 2005, the books made a lot of noise, led to a number of high-profile revelations, resignations, created many unpleasant consequences for people in the world who worked with the KGB.
The FSB of the Russian Federation has never officially stated its point of view regarding the documents published within the framework of the archives, as well as its assessments in this regard.
From myself I will say the following. The story is kind of weird. From the known information, the following picture emerges. After unsuccessful operational work, out of compassion, in connection with a sick child, he was not dismissed, but transferred to the archive. Accordingly, according to the existing provisions, he and his family could be attached to the KGB polyclinics, the treatment in which was of high quality. Further, he, among others, is entrusted with the transfer of the KGB archive from Lubyanka to a new building in Yasnevo, where the SVR is now located. This is where something incredible begins. For 12 years, he has been copying archives on small pieces of paper, and on weekends he rewrites the leaflets on full-fledged paper media and stores them in his country house.
In 1984, he retired and ceased his archival activities. If you think that after that, with the first rays of perestroika, he rushed to the West, then again you are mistaken. He is waiting for 1992 and in Tallinn he is trying to hand over this archive to the CIA. The dumbfounded Americans refuse, believing it to be misinformation. However, their much more experienced and, judging by many sources, more professional colleagues from MI6 take 25,000 pages of KGB archives and begin to work with them. Here is a story with geography turned out.
Now let's guess. An ordinary archivist, and Mitrokhin by the time he retired was just a major, never worked alone. The archive took into account, processed and transported many people. Those. it turns out that not only did a person take a terrible risk every day by rewriting owls. secret documents on incomprehensible sheets, he also risked in front of his colleagues. And so every day for 12 years. Moreover, he did this at a time when there could be no talk of any perestroika, the construction of developed capitalism and friendship with the West. And the price for curiosity could be the highest measure. At the same time, the motive looks rather strange - betrayal. Since, according to sound logic, in this case, the archive should not have been accumulated for 12 years, but should have been transferred in parts for an appropriate reward to those who are interested in this betrayal.
In general, there is an archive, but there is no point. It's clear that it's dark. At the same time, judging by the revelations and the reaction, the archival materials are in fact genuine. Already 10 years have passed since the death of Mitrokhin, but none of the journalists and writers specializing in the field of special services has tried to solve this riddle.
In the meantime, materials from the Mitrokhin archives in Russian have recently appeared on the network.