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

THE CENTRE’S MAIN weakness in the field of political intelligence was not, as it supposed, in intelligence collection but rather in its ability to interpret what it collected. Under both Stalin and Khrushchev, the Centre forwarded each day to the Kremlin a selection of foreign intelligence reports received from residencies and other sources, but usually shrank from offering more than perfunctory interpretation of the reports for fear of contradicting the views of the political leadership.³⁷ Both Stalin and Khrushchev acted as their own, ill-qualified chief intelligence analysts. Brezhnev, by contrast, spent little time interpreting intelligence or any other information, thus giving Andropov greater scope than any of his predecessors to submit intelligence assessments.

Intelligence assessment was worst in the Stalin era. Stalin himself bears a large measure of personal responsibility for the failure to heed repeated intelligence warnings of the 1941 German invasion. The institutionalized paranoia of the Stalinist system led to a series of other failures of assessment—among them the deluded belief in the middle of the war that the Magnificent Five, some of the Centre’s most gifted and productive agents, were part of an elaborate British deception. Though intelligence analysis after Stalin’s death never again descended to quite such paranoid depths, at moments of crisis in the Cold War the KGB tended to substitute conspiracy theory for balanced assessment. Within a year of becoming KGB chairman, Andropov was submitting distorted intelligence assessments to the Politburo designed to strengthen its resolve to crush the Prague Spring by armed force. His obsession with Western attempts to promote ideological sabotage in the Soviet Bloc made him unwilling to consider any evidence which suggested otherwise. In 1968 the Centre destroyed classified US documents obtained by the Washington residency which showed that neither the CIA nor any other American agency was manipulating the reformers of the Prague Spring.³⁸

In both the early 1960s and the early 1980s the Centre believed that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Though some FCD officers in Western residencies, far better acquainted with the West than Soviet leaders and KGB chairmen, privately dismissed such fears as absurd alarmism, they did not dare dispute the Centre’s judgment openly. The East German foreign intelligence chief, Markus Wolf, who resented the waste of time caused by KGB demands for HVA assistance in discovering non-existent plans for an American first strike, also knew better than to complain to Moscow. “These orders,” he claims, “were no more open to discussion than other orders from above.”³⁹

The distortion of Soviet intelligence analysis derived, at root, from the nature of the one-party state and its inherent distrust of all opposing views. The Soviet Union thus found it more difficult than its Western rivals to understand, and therefore to use, the political intelligence it collected. Though the Soviet leadership never really understood the West until the closing years of the Cold War, it would have been outraged to have its misunderstandings challenged by intelligence reports. Heterodox opinions within the Soviet system always ran the risk of being condemned as subversive. Those intelligence officers who dared to express them openly during the late 1930s were likely to have their life expectancy dramatically reduced. Even during the post-Stalin era, when their survival was no longer threatened, their careers, like that of Mitrokhin, were almost certain to suffer. Closed or semi-closed societies have an inbuilt advantage over open societies in intelligence collection from human sources, because Western capitals invariably have much lower levels of security and surveillance than their counterparts in Communist and other authoritarian regimes. Equally, however, one-party states have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to intelligence analysis, since analysts usually fear to tell the Party hierarch what it does not want to hear.

Though careful to avoid offending the sensibilities of the political leadership, INO report-writers during the 1930s knew that they were on safe ground if they produced evidence of British anti-Soviet conspiracies. During the Cold War, their FCD successors similarly knew that they were taking no risks if they used the United States as a scapegoat. One Line PR officer, interviewed a few weeks after the abortive 1991 coup, told Izvestia that he and his colleagues had spent much of their careers acting on the principle “Blame everything on the Americans, and everything will be OK.”⁴⁰ The intelligence reports received by the Soviet leadership thus tended to reinforce, rather than to correct, their misconceptions of the outside world.