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

There is no more convincing evidence of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” towards the West during his first year as general secretary than his denunciation of the traditional bias of the FCD’s political reporting. The fact that the Centre had to issue stern instructions at the end of 1985 “on the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs in messages and informational reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other ruling bodies” is a damning indictment of the KGB’s subservience to the standards of political correctness expected by previous Soviet leaders.

For all their distortions, however, intelligence reports are sometimes crucial to an understanding of Soviet foreign policy. Khrushchev’s policy towards the United States, in particular the horrendously dangerous gamble of the Cuban missile bases, was heavily influenced by erroneous reports of American preparations for a nuclear first strike. The growing authority of Andropov in the 1970s and his policymaking troika with Gromyko and Ustinov is evidence of the influence of the Centre’s intelligence assessments during the Brezhnev era. The increasingly apocalyptic language used by Andropov as Brezhnev’s successor, culminating in denunciations of the “outrageous militarist psychosis” allegedly imposed on the American people by the Reagan administration, reflected, as in the early 1960s, alarmist Centre assessments of the (non-existent) threat of an American first strike.

Despite Gorbachev’s early denunciation of KGB assessments, he came to rely on foreign intelligence in reorienting Soviet foreign policy to the United States. Hence his unprecedented decision to take the head of the FCD with him on his first visit to Washington in 1987 and his disastrous subsequent appointment of Kryuchkov as chairman of the KGB. Kryuchkov’s successor as head of the FCD, Shebarshin, insists that foreign intelligence reports were by now free from past, politically correct distortions. As the Soviet system began to crumble in 1990-91, however, some of the old, anti-American conspiracy theories began to resurface. The United States and its allies were variously accused by Kryuchkov and other senior KGB officers of infecting Soviet grain imports, seeking to undermine the rouble, plotting the disintegration of the Soviet Union and training agents to sabotage the economy, administration and scientific research.⁴¹

THE SOVIET SYSTEM found it far easier to digest scientific and technological than political intelligence. While Western politics were inherently subversive of the one-party state, most Western science was not. “The achievements of foreign technology” had first been identified as a Soviet intelligence target by Dzerzhinsky in 1925.⁴² By the Second World War ST, particularly in the military sphere, was seen as crucially important. Nothing did more than intelligence on BritishAmerican plans to build the first atomic bomb to bring home to Stalin and the Centre the necessity of ST in ensuring that Soviet military technology did not fall behind the West. As in the case of nuclear weapons, the early development of Soviet radar, rocketry and jet propulsion was heavily dependent on the imitation of Western technology. Stalin, indeed, had greater confidence in Western scientists than in his own. He did not trust Soviet technological innovation unless and until it was confirmed by Western experience.⁴³

The enormous flow of Western (especially American) ST throughout the Cold War helps to explain one of the central paradoxes of a Soviet state which was famously described as “Upper Volta with missiles”: its ability to remain a military superpower while its infant mortality and other indices of social deprivation were at Third World levels. The fact that the gap between Soviet weapons systems and those of the West was far smaller than in any other area of economic production was due not merely to their enormous priority within the Soviet system but also to the remarkable success of ST collection in the West. For most of the Cold War, American business proved much easier to penetrate than the federal government. Long before the KGB finally acquired a major spy in the CIA with the walk in of Aldrich Ames in 1985, it was running a series of other mercenary agents in American defense contractors. Soviet agent penetration was accompanied by interception of the fax communications of some of the United States’ largest companies.⁴⁴ During the early 1980s probably 70 percent of all current Warsaw Pact weapons systems were based on Western technology.⁴⁵ To an astonishing degree, both sides in the Cold War depended on American know-how.