The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Far more important than Lenin’s sometimes eccentric interest in intelligence techniques and technology was his belief in the central importance of the Cheka to the defense of the Bolshevik one-party state against imperialism and counter-revolution. The extent of Lenin’s and Dzerzhinsky’s fear of imperialist subversion is well illustrated by their deep suspicion of the aid which they felt forced to accept in August 1921 from the American Relief Association (ARA) to feed millions of starving Soviet citizens. Lenin was convinced that the ARA was a front for United States intelligence, and ordered the closest surveillance of all its members. Once the ARA began work, he was equally convinced that it was using food as an instrument of subversion. He complained to Dzerzhinsky’s deputy, Iosif Stanislavovich Unshlikht, that foreign agents were “engaged in massive bribery of hungry and tattered Chekists [Lenin’s emphasis]. The danger here is extremely great.” Lenin insisted that urgent steps be taken to “feed and clothe the Chekists” in order to remove them from imperialist temptation.³⁹

Though the United States still had no peacetime espionage agency, the Cheka reported that over 200 of the 300 ARA staff, who were devoting all their energies to dealing with one of the most terrible famines in modern European history, were in reality undercover intelligence officers who “could become first-class instructors for a counter-revolutionary uprising.” The Cheka also alleged that the ARA was building up a large food supply in Vienna so that “in the event of a coup [it] could provide immediate support to the White government.”⁴⁰ Lenin was far more exercised by the ARA’s non-existent intelligence operations than by the approximately five million Russians and Ukrainians who starved to death. Without the massive aid program of the ARA, which in 1922 was feeding up to eleven million people a day, the famine would have been far worse. Even after the ARA had departed, however, Soviet intelligence remained convinced that it had been, first and foremost, an espionage rather than a humanitarian agency. A quarter of a century later, all surviving Russian employees of ARA were made to sign confessions that they had been American spies.⁴¹

The priorities of Soviet intelligence under Lenin, and still more under Stalin, continued to be shaped by greatly exaggerated beliefs in an unrelenting conspiracy by Western governments and their intelligence agencies. To understand Soviet intelligence operations between the wars, it is frequently necessary to enter a world of smoke and mirrors where the target is as much the product of Bolshevik delusions as of real counter-revolutionary conspiracy. The Soviet propensity to conspiracy theory derived both from the nature of the one-party state and from its Marxist-Leninist ideology. All authoritarian regimes, since they regard opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, tend to see their opponents as engaged in subversive conspiracy. Bolshevik ideology further dictated that capitalist regimes could not fail to be plotting the overthrow of the world’s first and only worker-peasant state. If they were not visibly preparing an armed invasion, then their intelligence agencies must necessarily be secretly conspiring to subvert Soviet Russia from within.

INO’S FIRST TWO heads served between them for a total of barely eighteen months. The first foreign intelligence chief to make his mark was Mikhail Abramovich Trilisser, appointed as head of INO in 1922—undoubtedly with Lenin’s personal approval. Trilisser was a Russian Jew who had become a professional revolutionary in 1901 at the age of only eighteen. Like Dzerzhinsky, he had spent much of his early career in exile or in Tsarist prisons. Before the First World War, he had specialized in tracking down police spies among Bolshevik émigrés. While serving with the Cheka in 1918, he was reputed to have been caught by “bandits” and hung from a tree, but to have been cut down just in time by Red forces who successfully revived him. Unlike any of his successors, Trilisser sometimes traveled abroad to meet INO agents.⁴² At least until Lenin was incapacitated by his third stroke in March 1923, he continued to take an active, though sometimes ill-informed, interest, in INO reports. He noted, for example, that somewhat inaccurate information received in 1922 from one of the Cheka’s few early British sources, the journalist Arthur Ransome (later famous as a children’s novelist), was “very important and, probably, fundamentally true.”⁴³

The early priorities of INO foreign operations, approved by Lenin, were: