There was also a middle ground, which provides scope for misclassification. Sometimes, we will see, coercion was implicit in the candidate’s predicament but not voiced. The subject with a compromised record might logically anticipate that to refuse recruitment would invite the KGB to open the Pandora’s box of the past. In such a case, pressure could be a motivating factor without ever being mentioned.[335] Then, recruitment would be recorded as voluntary, although the agent’s agreement was motivated by an implicit threat.
Possibly, therefore, the KGB underrecorded the frequency with which coercion was a factor in recruitment. At the same time, even if coercion was more prevalent than the records suggest, it would be surprising if coercion was ever the sole factor in an effective recruitment. As already discussed, when care and diligence matter to a task, they cannot be assured by coercion. There must be more than force and fear.
In KGB practices we will see the varied strategies that the case officer could choose from to maintain the informer’s commitment. Guilt and ambition were powerful drivers for those who wished to atone for a rebellious youth or to wipe the slate clean of past misdeeds. Training, or becoming proficient in tradecraft, allowed the agent to find professional interest and pleasure in a job done well. Lengthy reeducation could put a stop to backsliding. Positive affirmation of status gave the informer who had broken faith with one underground community the chance to find solidarity and recognition in another: the secret community of the state’s undercover operatives. In that context, occasional gifts and privileges could provide a material signal of the state’s respect and gratitude. To the informer with a troubled conscience, they were also the thirty pieces of silver that marked a point of no return.
The influences that brought the citizen into undercover collaboration with the KGB are not easy to lay bare. Accounts of everyday dealing between informer and case officer are rare, for several reasons. Under communism, the informer’s lips were sealed by conspirativeness. After communism, they remained closed by social discrimination or the fear of it.[336] The historian of the Baltic region might hope to find more detail in the archived personal files of the informers, but most relevant documents that could be used to construct their stories were destroyed or taken to Moscow when the KGB left the region, including many tens of thousands of files from Lithuania alone.[337]
A few stories can introduce the wide variety of paths to collaboration with the KGB. The cases are selected from a unique, small-scale dataset that will be described and summarized in the following section. They are presented here, not as typical, but to illustrate some of the varied roles of trust in the formation of the effective informer. The agents are identified by code names.
The Desire to Atone: Agent Neman
Recruited in December 1959, Agent Neman worked for the KGB in order to find a path back to respectability and a career. Born in 1925, he was just a teenager when war broke out. Lithuania fell under German occupation, and the young man was deported to Germany as a forced laborer. There, the German authorities recruited him to make anti-Soviet propaganda. Returning to Soviet Lithuania, he entered university, graduating in 1951. He joined the state radio. But his prospects were clouded by his record of wartime collaboration with the enemy. At some point he was dismissed for “political reasons,” and he was reduced for a while to working as a secondary school teacher. Eventually he was reinstated, but he felt that he remained under suspicion. The cloud of mistrust did not lift.
In 1957 the World Festival of Youth and Students (28 July to 11 August) brought an unaccustomed flood of foreign tourists to Moscow and created many opportunities for KGB surveillance. As a journalist, Neman was able to attend, and this put him touch with many foreigners, including Western journalists. The KGB now identified him as a likely prospect and looked at him closely. On a business trip he found himself sharing a room with a “party worker,” in reality an undercover KGB officer, who struck up a friendship with him.
Neman was thought to have many talents: he was able to work on his own, without external supervision, was good with languages, and could win the confidence of strangers. He was just the sort of person whom the KGB could use with tourists at home and abroad. But why would he? For Neman the key to recruitment was that he felt his career was blocked by his war record, about which he was quite open. In December 1959, when the KGB offered him the opportunity to collaborate, he saw the offer as a means of redemption, which he now grasped with both hands.
Thereafter Neman became a prolific informer. In Vilnius he was brought into contact with two Western Europeans—a male diplomat and a female society journalist (or a “spy”?) with connections to Eastern Europe, Lithuanian emigrants, and the Vatican hierarchy. She invited him to visit Warsaw and Rome and supplied him with forbidden books—Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, and Lithuanian nationalist literature. This was surely how the KGB expected foreign spies to cultivate a Soviet citizen. His relationship with the journalist became warm and confidential.
At this point the KGB tried Neman out on a foreign trip: he travelled with a tourist group to China. This was before the Soviet-Chinese split, although relations were already deteriorating. No doubt he had to report on the conduct of his fellow tourists, and more than likely he was himself under surveillance, but the report does not comment on this. Meanwhile, the journalist invited Neman to visit her in Rome or in Warsaw. At the next stage, the KGB planned that Neman would visit Warsaw.
His personal qualities made Neman an ideal recruit. He entered adult society, vulnerable to discrimination because of his bad war record. In another person, that bad war record could have been the lever to force him into the service of the KGB. Neman did not need to be threatened. He wanted to cancel out the past, saw collaboration with the KGB as means to that end, and freely committed himself to it. His case officer returned his commitment with trust.
Can You Protect Me? Agent Rimkus
A male Lithuanian born in 1908, Rimkus was a seminary student in prewar Lithuania, then a Christian Democratic journalist and nationalist. Continuing to work in Lithuania under enemy occupation was enough to have him arrested in 1945 and sentenced to five years of forced labor. On release, he found work as a farm technician (“agronomist”) in the Klaipéda rural district. Based on surveillance reports, the technician attracted KGB attention for two reasons. One, he had information about the misappropriation of collective farm property, was angry about this, and talked about taking the information to the KGB. (The misappropriation was surely a police matter. It seems doubtful that the KGB would have been interested if it did not involve foreigners or anti-Soviet activity.) Two, he appeared to be disillusioned with the nationalist cause and his former nationalist comrades—two of whom he knew to be living locally on forged identification papers.
The KGB made its first approach to the technician under cover. When questioned, he readily shared his information about the property crimes. At first, he was silent about the former nationalists, but eventually he shared this information too. So, he passed a test. The next step was to approach him openly with an offer of recruitment.
335
This is confirmed from another setting. A Stasi officer “kept several cards up his sleeve to be played depending how the meeting unfolded. Most candidates agreed to become informers on the initial request. If they wavered, however, [he] would remind them in blunt terms of some infraction, however minor, from their past. Very rarely did candidates then have the courage to refuse.” Another officer kept in reserve that the candidate’s wife had been caught with anticommunist leaflets, and she would be prosecuted if the candidate refused to cooperate. The candidate “freely agreed to work for the Stasi” so the threat was never voiced. See Bruce, The Firm, 87.
336
Verdery, Secrets and Truths, Chapter 3, writes of Romania: “What do we know about the relation of officers to their informers? Relatively little, for those two categories of people seldom write memoirs.” The personal histories of a variety of collaborators across Eastern Europe are collected in Apor, Horvath, and Mark, eds., Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration.
337
Skucas, “Lithuania,” 419. The Latvian KGB archive, in contrast, has recently published 4,141 personal files of KGB informers. Latvian Public Broadcasting, “First Batch of Latvia’s KGB Archives Published Online,” 20 December 2018, https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/first-batch-of-latvias-kgb-archives-pub lished-online.a3O37O4/.