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

Andropov and, at least initially, Gorbachev, saw greater use of ST in nonmilitary spheres as one of the keys to the rejuvenation of the Soviet economy as a whole. The real economic benefit of Western scientific and technological secrets, though put by Directorate T at billions of dollars, was, however, severely limited by the structural failings of the command economy. The ideological blinkers of the Soviet system were matched by its economic rigidity and resistance to innovation by comparison with the market economies of the West. Hence the great economic paradox of the 1980s: that despite possessing large numbers of well-qualified scientists and engineers and a huge volume of ST, Soviet technology fell steadily further behind its Western rivals. Before Gorbachev’s rise to power, the extent of that decline was concealed from the Soviet leadership. Politically correct FCD reports dwelt overwhelmingly on the economic problems of the capitalist West rather than on those of the “Socialist” East. In a biennial report on foreign intelligence operations completed in February 1984, Kryuchkov emphasized “the deepening economic and social crisis in the capitalist world,” but made no mention of the far more serious crisis in the Soviet Bloc.⁴⁶ Even Gorbachev, in his speech to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986 calling for “new thinking” in Soviet foreign policy, claimed that the crisis of capitalism was continuing to worsen.⁴⁷

Until the closing years of the Cold War, there was an extraordinary contrast between the Kremlin’s privileged access to the secrets of state-of-the-art Western technology and its failure to grasp the nature and extent of its own economic mismanagement. Gorbachev was the first post-war Soviet leader who gained access to moderately accurate statistics on the performance of the Soviet economy. Abel Aganbegyan, his most influential economic adviser in the early years of perestroika, calculated that between 1981 and 1985 there had been “a zero growth rate.” The revelation of the extent of Soviet economic stagnation and long-term decline relative to the West had a much more profound effect on Gorbachev’s policy than the successes of ST collection against Western targets which had previously so impressed him. By the end of the decade, he had moved from trying to rejuvenate the command economy to accepting the market as the main economic regulator.⁴⁸

The conclusion of the Cold War, so far from ending Russian ST operations in the West, created new Line X opportunities through the expansion of East-West scientific exchanges and business joint ventures, which the SVR was eager to exploit. The reactivation in the early 1990s of the leading British Line X agent Michael Smith was one sign among many of the continued priority given to ST collection in the Yeltsin era.⁴⁹ For the SVR, as for the FCD, the main Line X target remained the United States. The relaxation of US security checks, in an attempt to build bridges to Moscow and Beijing, led in 1994 to a dramatic increase in the number of Russian and Chinese scientists allowed to visit the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear laboratories, as well as other institutes conducting classified research. Line X, however, has found less enthusiasm for its product than during the Cold War. The collapse of the Russian command economy left the military-industrial complex—previously the chief customer for S—in disarray. During (and perhaps even before) the Yeltsin presidency, Russian S operations seem to have been upstaged by those of the Chinese. A congressional enquiry concluded in 1999 that, over the two previous decades, China had obtained detailed intelligence on every warhead in the US nuclear arsenal.⁵⁰ There is little doubt that the phenomenal achievements of Chinese ST collection were inspired, at least in part, by the Soviet Union’s earlier success in copying the first American atomic bomb and in basing the majority of its Cold War weapons systems on Western technology.

IT IS IMPORTANT not to judge the success of KGB foreign operations by purely Western standards. The Centre had, ultimately, an even higher priority than intelligence collection in the West. The Cheka had been founded six weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of power “for a revolutionary settlement of accounts with counter-revolutionaries.” In that primary role—to defend the Bolshevik one-party state against dissent in all its forms—the Cheka and its successors were strikingly successful.