In this moment, the candidate panicked. On further questioning, the way he put it was that he feared one day, “in the event of a complication of the international situation,” his former associates would uncover his role.[338] The KGB promised him that no one would ever know. On that basis Rimkus consented to recruitment. He became an effective informer, helping the KGB to keep tabs on nationalists and their activities both at home and abroad.
Agent Rimkus was not the first person to worry about the stability of Soviet rule in the event of an international conflict. This was a central concern of secret police reports to the Soviet leaders through all the decades of Soviet rule.[339] Nonetheless, the KGB kept its promise to Rimkus. His personal file was either destroyed or removed to Moscow in 1991. Today the world can read about Rimkus in the files that were left, but there is no record of his real name.
Agent Rimkus had once sided with the Soviet Union’s enemies. The KGB found him just as he began to reconsider his past loyalties. The obstacle that remained was that Rimkus feared exposure. His recruitment was unblocked by the KGB’s commitment never to allow his identity to be revealed. Rimkus might have accepted it at face value, or he might have concluded he had no choice but to accept it—a fine distinction, but a necessary one. Either way, the vertical trade of trust for commitment opened the way for him to become an effective informer.
Trust os Motivation: Agent Gobis
This person lived in Siauliai, a provincial town that gained significance in the Cold War as a staging post for Soviet missile troops. A Jewish male born in 1916, college-educated, fluent in several languages, he is described as a rounded person, calm, responsive, sociable, and businesslike. During the Soviet-German war he served in the Red Army; at some point he joined the party. The war ended, however, with several of his family members living abroad. The report does not say directly where they went, but Israel was evidently the destination. Because he persisted in corresponding with them, he was expelled from the party in 1950—in other words, during the late-Stalinist campaign against Jewish “rootless cosmopolitans.”
The MGB, forerunner of the KGB, recruited Agent Gobis in July 1951. The circumstances are not reported. It would be reasonable to see him as compromised by the links that he maintained with Jewish emigrants, one of them active in Israeli politics. We are not told whether he was recruited under pressure. We are told that he twice asked to be released, and was refused, which does suggest absence of consent.
Serving as an agent, Gobis remained under surveillance and investigation until 1957. What did the KGB learn from its surveillance? Gobis was not disloyal. He did complain to others, but only about everyday problems (po bytovym voprosam, a phrase often used as KGB code for consumer shortages). The KGB concluded that Agent Gobis was falling short of his potential, not from disloyalty, but because he was distrusted and mismanaged.
The World Festival of Youth and Students of 1957, held in Moscow from 28 July to 11 August, created an opportunity for the KGB to reset its relationship with Agent Gobis. Beforehand, he had been contacted by an Israeli visitor, who asked to meet him at the festival—which the KGB now encouraged and enabled. From there, Gobis entered a web of dealings with Israeli diplomats, and with a Jewish aviation engineer in Chisinau who apparently looked for a way to pass state secrets to the Israeli embassy. There were telephone procedures and code words. The KGB facilitated the travel of Gobis between Vilnius, Moscow, and Chisinau. At the time of the report, nothing had come of the aviation secrets, but a good deal had become known to the KGB about other citizens who maintained unauthorized contact with Israeli embassy staff.
The sensitivity of the mission is marked by a note that “For operational reasons the agent’s code name and the names of his contacts, passwords, and meeting places have been changed.”
During his meetings with the various people involved, Gobis was himself kept under covert observation by street watchers and eavesdroppers. The KGB learned that he was generally truthful when reporting on operational matters. But he did hold something back, in a pattern consistent with his past conduct. In the company of his foreign contacts, he complained continually about his poor standard of living, and he went so far as to ask for favors. Could they help him obtain a passenger car? Would they bring him imported goods? The agent risked compromising himself in this way although, in the KGB’s judgement, he “lived well materially.” Worse still, Gobis covered up this aspect of his conduct when reporting to his case officer, who found out only because the additional layer of surveillance.
In due course the case officer challenged Gobis about his selective reporting of his own behavior, and the lack of basis for his complaints against Soviet life. This was done “carefully and tactfully,” with the aim of avoiding a confrontation.
In this post-Stalin era, the KGB learned to value Gobis as a senior agent with a complex personality. They treated him sensitively. They acknowledged his service by sending him to be pampered in water spas. At every meeting, his case officer took time to chat to him about the state of the world and of Soviet society; listen to him holding forth on highbrow literature and spy novels, which the case officer used to improve his tradecraft; and, not least, remind him of his duty of gratitude for the advance of Soviet living standards.
On the surface, this was a story of early mistakes eventually corrected. Until the Moscow festival of 1957, Gobis underperformed for lack of trust. When entrusted with an important mission, he rose to the level that the mission demanded. The reporting officer pontificated:
Correctly arranged mutual relations with the agent are of no little significance. Mutual relations and work should be organized so that the agent continually feels interest in the work and our trust, care, and attentiveness toward him.
Too Much Trust: Agent Stanislav
A male railway employee, Agent Stanislav worked the main line connecting Vilnius to Kuznica in Poland. His work gave him access to foreigners and to international shipments of goods and letters. He was recruited by consent (“on an ideological basis”) in 1958. His case officer saw him as capable, educated, well motivated, and fully cooperative. So far, so good.
Another railway worker was found to be smuggling goods across the border. Because he worked closely with Stanislav, who should have known, questions were raised about the agent’s conduct: he had withheld information about his colleague’s criminal activities from the KGB. In turn this led to questions about the quality of his supervision: his case officer had trusted him too much.
The KGB brought Agent Stanislav under tighter discipline. The case officer reeducated him in the importance of truth telling and the legal consequences of failing to report offences, particularly when they involved foreigners and foreign goods. From now on, he was kept on a shorter leash. Less trust and closer supervision made Agent Stanislav a more effective informer. (From another perspective, the KGB now held kompromat against him—evidence that he had concealed a crime.) He went on to uncover various other cross-border crimes, some of them organized, and he was able to win the confidence of people engaged in more significant crimes against the state and secure evidence of their activities.
Yearning to Belong: Agent Ruta
In 1957 a twenty-year-old male was sentenced to five years of forced labor for his part in organized resistance to Soviet rule in Lithuania. He served his time thoughtfully, seeking the company of like-minded prisoners, but also trying to understand more about politics. His “long and complicated path to collaboration” with the KGB began when he realized that organized resistance to Soviet rule had become futile. Thinking it through, the young man concluded that he had picked the wrong side. He had been fighting for a society that no longer existed and that few really wanted to restore. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was building the future. For the time being, he kept his conversion to himself.
338
Agent Rimkus resembled the Chinese agents in Liaoning province, bordering Korea, recruited during the Korean War, as described by Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 121. One of them “insisted he be told by his handlers what they had in store for him if and when ‘the situation becomes critical’”: “Some agents could not bring themselves to believe that the [People’s Republic of China] stood any chance of emerging victorious from a military confrontation with the United States. In conversation with their handlers, they raised questions such as ‘How many aircraft do you have?’ ‘Do you have any B-29 bombers?’ ‘When the situation becomes really tense, will I be able to go with you?”’
339
For examples from the Stalin period see Harrison, “Dictator and Defense,” 5-7. From the Cold War, the reports of six urban and rural district KGB commissioners to the KGB and party leaders in Vilnius about rumors of war circulating in Soviet Lithuania in June 1956, sparked by a partial mobilization of Soviet army reserves, are preserved in Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/506,336-56.