Every Soviet organization of significance received secret plans and other instructions from higher authority through a secure channel, maintained by its secret department. In turn, the secret department was staffed by party members and supervised directly by the KGB. Under these arrangements, the KGB was responsible not just for secret communications but also for selecting the people to fill the positions requiring access to the secret communications. In effect, there was a partition of the Soviet labor market between secret and nonsecret work that no one could cross without KGB clearance.
The Soviet economy was plagued by permanent shortages. The shortages, a result of the mobilization style of administrative allocation, extended to nearly all products from toothpaste and toilet paper to gasoline. Because there was a deficit of supply compared to demand, these were commonly known as “deficit commodities.” Because goods were in short supply, so were the workers needed to produce them. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Soviet Lithuania at least, it turns out that workers of certifiable loyalty were another deficit commodity.
The shortage of loyal managers in Lithuania had two proximate causes. On the supply side, the investigative capacity of the local KGB to investigate and resolve the large number of doubtful cases for clearance was limited. On the demand side, the sphere of secret work tended to expand faster than nonsecret employment. This left the KGB always struggling to catch up with the growing demand for cleared employees.
The Supply of Clearances
For a country of three million people, the Soviet Lithuania KGB was not a large organization. In the 1960s and early 1970s it employed around 1,200 officers and other salaried staff, two-thirds of them in Vilnius with the rest scattered around Lithuania’s other towns and villages. In Vilnius the counterintelligence administration had 140 career officers, of whom 26 belonged to its economic department.[248]
The officers of the KGB economic department were probably a cut above the average. In 1977 three-quarters of economic department officers had college degrees.[249] This compares very favorably with the wider Lithuanian workforce, less than half of whom had college experience (including incomplete) according to the 1970 census a few years earlier.[250] To supplement their resources, they ran their own network of civilian informers in important factories and offices. The informers were also relatively well educated and motivated. As of 1968, there were 239 informers reporting to the economic department (a small fraction of the roughly 9,000 KGB informers of various categories in Lithuania at the time). The typical informer was an engineer, with higher education, aged 25 to 50 years and with 5 to 15 years’ experience of collaboration with the KGB. Of particular interest is that only 13 of the 239 informers had kompromat in their files. Of the 13, moreover, only five were recorded as having been blackmailed into cooperation; the others, although vulnerable to pressure, had agreed to work for the KGB without the pressure being exerted.[251]The officers of the economic department had many duties. They were responsible for work on the railways and air transport, and in important industrial facilities, research institutes, and civil-defense organizations. In the facilities for which they were responsible, they were expected to organize surveillance, with particular scrutiny of the employees cleared for access to government secrets; to recruit additional informers; and to make security plans for events such as visits and exhibitions.[252] Their duties included the raising of vigilance among the workers with regard to security lapses and suspicious behavior by means such as delivering interminable lectures in the workplace on “the struggle with the adversary’s ideological diversions.”[253]
What was it like to work at a secure facility under KGB surveillance? As described by the historian Kristina Burinskaité, the territory of a closed facility was screened from regular passers-by and secured by controlled access. Employees’ workplace conversations were monitored and their contacts with visitors were restricted. Foreign visitors were excluded altogether or, if admitted, were shown equipment and products designed to mislead, while secret activities were suspended.[254]
In short, the officers whose duty it was to investigate and certify the loyalty of those admitted to secret work were high in quality but few in number. They also had a vast range of competing responsibilities and priorities. Thus, the supply of clearances was limited by the resources available, which were scarce.
The Demand for Clearances
In just one year, 1973, the rather small KGB economic department issued 4,584 clearances in total—nearly 90 per week—but this was not enough to meet the demand. In any case, not all applications for clearance succeeded. In the same year, 321 candidates (or 7 percent of the total) were rejected.[255] When the KGB barred an employee from secret work, it generally caused difficulties for the managers responsible for their selection, who were already invested in the unsuccessful candidate, and they now became reluctant to enforce the KGB’s decision.
How large was the sphere of secret employment? In Soviet Lithuania in the 1960s, more than 100 offices and factories were secured by direct KGB supervision. Some were industrial plants, often specialized in research and defense-related production—Lithuania did not have any weapon plants, but there was considerable emphasis on defense-related lines including radar, radio electronics, and marine engineering. Other workplaces that demanded KGB regulation were focused on Lithuania’s topography (mapping and aerial photography) and external borders (border security, ports, and airports). Fisheries came under KGB supervision because trawlers could be used to spy on foreign shipping and their crews might find opportunities to defect. The network utilities supplying power, gas, and water, and railway, highway, mail, and cable and wireless services also came under surveillance, as did the Vilnius offices of the Soviet Union’s planning and statistical agencies and central bank.[256]
The number of KGB-regulated facilities increased only a little over the period of our data (1961 to 1971), but their workforce doubled, rising from 98,000 at the beginning of the 1960s to 200,000 at the beginning of the 1970s. This was substantially faster than the growth of aggregate employment in Lithuanian state-owned enterprises and offices, so the share of the secret sphere also expanded from 14 to 17 percent of public employment.[257]
Not everyone that worked in the secure facilities required access to secret communications. A handful of workplaces—six in 1961, ten by 1971— was designated “especially important” (osobo vazhnyi, the highest grade of secrecy). In these facilities around one-third of the workforce was cleared for access to paperwork classified “secret” or higher, and their number tripled over the 1960s.[258] The increase would have been even greater, but for a purge in 1963 (discussed below) which resulted in a sudden large drop in the number of cleared employees.
248
The KGB bureaucracy was divided into numbered subunits. In Soviet Lithuania the second administration was responsible for counterintelligence and its third department was responsible for the economy. So, the full title of what this book calls the economic department of the KGB counterintelligence administration was “the third department of the second administration of the Soviet Lithuania KGB.” Its functions as of 1966 are described in Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/644, 39-47 (“Report on the Second Administration of the KGB of the Council of the Ministers of the Lithuanian SSR,” by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB second administration Col. Obukauskas, 31 January 1966). The KGB economic department also supervised visits by foreigners to economic facilities.
251
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/670, 92-94 (1968). According to Anusauskas, KGB Lietu- voje, 88, there were just over 9,000 KGB “agents” and “trusted persons” in 1967 and 10,000 in 1969. The role of pressure in recruiting KGB informers is discussed in Chapter 6.
252
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/664,1-13 (“Plan of agent and operative work of the third department of the second administration of the Soviet Lithuania KGB for 1968,” from chief of the third department of the second administration of the Soviet Lithuania KGB Lt.-Col. Akimov, 4 March 1968).
253
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/656, 87 (Summary of speech “On the condition of agent and operative work on reinforcement of the regime of secrecy at facilities of industry, communications, and transport and provision of secrecy and security of movement of special-purpose military transports by rail,” 24 February 1966); K-1/3/668, 4-13 (“Plan of agent and operative measures at industrial facilities for the first half of 1969,” from Soviet Lithuania KGB Kaunas city department third division chief Trukhachev, 12 February 1969); K-1/3/668, 179 (“Report on results of work of the third division for 1969,” from Soviet Lithuania KGB Kaunas city department third division chief Trukhachev, 9 December 1969).
254
Burinskaité, “Lietuvos SSR KGB dezinformaciné veikla,” 101. Such visits could be made only with the approval of the USSR Council of Ministers, after consultation with the KGB and armed forces General Staff. Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/670, 29-30 (“Extract from instructions on the procedure for application of the Rules of residence for foreigners and stateless persons in the USSR,” 28 February 1969).
256
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/664, 120-132 (“List of institutions, organizations, and enterprises of the Lithuanian SSR at which the second administration of the Soviet Lithuania KGB is obliged to undertake counterintelligence work,” from Soviet Lithuania KGB second administration chief Col. Naras, 18 June 1968).
257
For KGB-regulated facilities in 1961 and 1971, employment figures are from Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/793, 60 (“Information on basic elements of the operational situation on the territory served by the KGB of the republic,” undated but evidently compiled in early 1972 in response to a request from Moscow for this information.) For public-sector employment in 1961 and 1971, figures are linear interpolations on data for i960, 1965, 1970, and 1975, found in TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v i960 g., 638, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. 1922-1972 gg, 601, and Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. 1922-2982, 402.