10
The Upside Down World
In early 1990, an unusual delegation began touring the spy agencies of Western Europe. It comprised the senior security officials of Czechoslovakia – a country where communist power had collapsed only weeks previously. The scruffy trio were more at home in the smoky cafés of the dissident cultural scene than in the taciturn and besuited world of espionage. But the message they bore from their country’s new leadership was simple: a request for the greatest possible cooperation. Not only did they want help in building up new security and intelligence services, untainted by the communist past. They wanted defectors to return in glory, and for any of their citizens working undercover for Western spy agencies to come out into the open and receive medals.
The world had turned upside down. Security and intelligence had been both the citadel of communist power and the spearhead of outside attempts to breach it. Now the communist system’s spooks were defeated while their Western counterparts blinked bewildered over the silent battlefield. Shortly after the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in November 1989 I was one of the first outsiders to visit the Prague headquarters of the feared StB secret police.[66] I had been the only newsman in Prague for the English-speaking media before the collapse of the regime. The building (a former theological college confiscated by the communists) had long been a source of fascination to me. It lay on the way to the airport, with a roof marked by distinctive antennae; the headquarters of a KGB front organisation was near by. It had a grim air to it: this was where the nastiest people in the country cooked up their witches’ brew of blackmail and betrayal, where husbands and wives were set to spy on each other under threats of reprisals against their children, each wracked by guilt but believing that doing so was a necessary sacrifice. I had heard tales of torture in the cellars, and of the ever-present role of ‘advisers’ from Moscow – the ultimate bosses of the Czechoslovak communist state. Only weeks before any attempt to enter the building would have resulted in instant arrest. Now the regime was defeated; instead of scurrying past, I marched boldly in.
Our glum guide showed little enthusiasm for his task. All other employees, he droned, had been sent home to await instructions. I slipped away from the tour party of other nosy Westerners and roamed the unguarded offices, opening doors at random and browsing through files and card indexes. I hoped, not very realistically, to find some trace of the StB officers who in the past year had snooped on me, tried to recruit me, and bullied my friends. But the echoing corridors were not as deserted as they seemed. Around one corner I found an armoured door with an intercom. I pressed it. A peremptory voice asked me to identify myself. ‘I’m a British journalist – can I come in?’ I replied cheekily. Lucifer in the Vatican would have had a less frosty reception. Seconds later, my hosts crossly whisked me away. ‘He was trying to get to the cipher room,’ one muttered to the other. I was puzzled. If the service was dead, who was sending messages, and about what? As I was to find out, toppling communism was one thing, uprooting its structures another.
Well before the end of the Soviet empire in 1991, the battle lines had softened. As early as 1986, the CIA and KGB had set up a spooks’ back-channel at a meeting in Vienna: the aim was to have a practical, depoliticised way of avoiding crises and misunderstandings, and to explore cooperation on subjects of common interest such as terrorism.1 It later developed to include agreement about the treatment of defectors and haggling over spy swaps. After the Berlin Wall fell in October 1989, British, American and French spies found themselves hobnobbing with their Soviet counterparts, comparing notes on the troubling prospect of German unity. Milt Bearden, a top CIA man dealing with Eastern Europe, listened sympathetically as his KGB counterpart bemoaned the fact that he would soon need a visa to visit a city that his forebears had liberated from fascism at such enormous cost. In some cases, old foes went into business: setting up security companies or, in the case of two station chiefs from Berlin, KGB and CIA respectively, co-authorship.2
As the Kremlin lost its grip, the fringes of the former Soviet Union became a perfect springboard for spying on its core. The borderlands from Tallinn to Tbilisi, formerly a hostile operating environment, were now friendly and rewarding. Moreover, as the stick and the carrot of the Soviet system disappeared, the costs and risks of spying had never been lower. Treachery had once led not just to dismissal and imprisonment, but quite likely to death. The change came quickly. The last Western agent to be executed in the Soviet Union was the idealistic Dmitri Polyakov, a retired GRU major-general, in 1988.3 But by 1989 the regime had largely lost its power to terrify. It could still blackmail, but the murderous fire in the belly of the system lit by Lenin in 1917 was all but extinguished. The intricate system of privileges used as rewards – access to a better shop, spacious housing, higher education for a child, maybe even a trip to a foreign country – was no longer attractive. With a bit of hard currency, the humblest individual could buy a better lifestyle than the system could offer its most favoured servants.
The ideological climate had changed too. For those with vestigial loyalties to the old regime, it was hard to stay motivated as its day of judgement loomed. Treating the West as a predatory enemy had been a bulwark of the Soviet mentality. Now the ‘capitalist camp’ was a valued partner, lending money and sending food aid. In the former satellite states, people were positively eager to help anyone wanting to bury the vestiges of the ‘evil empire’. Even inside the most senior and sensitive parts of the state, the collapse of morale corroded loyalty.
The Cold War had been an existential struggle, in which ruthlessness generally triumphed over sentiment. The new era provided more complex choices. Was the big prize German reunification on the West’s terms? In that case the priority should be to prop up the faltering regime in Moscow while it did the necessary deals. That would mean going easy on aggressive intelligence collection, which might seem like a further humiliation for the Soviet leadership. Others argued that it was futile to believe that the West could bolster the reformists, who might be out of power at any moment. It was better to press home what might be a temporary advantage. Counter-intelligence services in particular argued hard for the latter. The CIA and SIS both suspected that they had been badly penetrated during the Cold War, but had failed to nail the traitors. The Czechoslovak, East German, Hungarian and Polish spy agencies had all been fearsome adversaries. Now they were in friendly hands, offering a trove of clues about their past activities. With even the KGB in trouble, it had never been easier to track down moles, illegals, double agents and other sources. Indeed KGB officers were queuing – in some cases even literally – to offer their services to Western spycatchers, to the point that the CIA office dealing with defector resettlement complained it could not handle any more. In at least one instance, a would-be KGB defector was told to apply for an American visa through the normal channels.
But the spycatchers’ needs were only one pile of paper on the desks of the harried spymasters. Their political masters were desperate for more information too. Would the reforms in the Soviet Union continue? What was the likelihood of a coup? Would the USSR break-up? An industry grew up in stealing (or obtaining, depending on your viewpoint) military technology. Electronics, and insights into it, were in particular demand: radar beacons, friend-or-foe identification, encryption technology, nuclear command and control systems, submarine radio systems and the like.4 Amid the haggling of the arms bazaar were more subtle questions. Who was in charge of the nuclear arsenal, particularly the highly portable tactical weapons, some of them no bigger than a suitcase? Were they properly guarded? What capabilities did the Soviet submarine fleet maintain? And what was the state of Soviet signals intelligence? Could it really listen to phone calls in Stockholm? Or Berlin? Or Washington? The pull-out of the Soviet forces from Eastern Germany and the Baltic was a top political priority until 1994. But so was spying on them. Discipline was ragged and corruption colossal. Everything was on sale, from gadgets such as night-vision goggles to humdrum commodities such as petrol – and also military secrets.