No More Secrets
LOWE, CHRISTIAN
No More Secrets The opening of a KGB archive. BY CHRISTIAN LOWE It was a postulate held by Cold War hawks that Soviet imperialism was the real cause of international tension after World War II....
...The Sword and the Shield provides further vindication that the Cold Warriors were right...
...They chose instead to exaggerate his "weak intellectual abilities" by placing KGB-authored stories in newspapers in Denmark, France, and India...
...For nearly twelve years, from 1972 to 1984, KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin, while on assignment to transfer the official KGB archive to a new headquarters, painstakingly transcribed the material onto scraps of paper...
...Upset over the corruption and oppression his totalitarian homeland promoted around the world, Mitrokhin took excessive risks to conduct his espionage, sneaking the records out of his office in his clothing and burying them under the floorboards of his dacha...
...The KGB found a vulnerability even in the CIA, when liberal politicians around the world seized on accusations of CIA misdeeds in Cuba and Vietnam as emblematic of America's misguided role in the Cold War...
...Harvard physicist Theodore Hall, for instance, became a Soviet spy because he felt his espionage would "help the world...
...The Western press showered praise on Agee's book, without ever realizing that throughout the period of Agee's celebrity, the KGB was feeding him detailed information that permanently damaged American intelligence work in the Cold War...
...Initially, the Soviets thought of trying to sow doubt about Reagan's mental stability by taking advantage of his being the son of an alcoholic...
...In 1992, Mitrokhin defected to England with all of his records, handing over to the British intelligence services the most comprehensive and detailed history of Soviet intelligence activities ever obtained by the West...
...And the combined effect of these records is the complete vindication of the old Cold Warriors...
...Mitrokhin notes that "By 1959, if not earlier, the most vulnerable points of power transmission lines, oil pipelines, communications systems, and major industrial complexes in most NATO countries" were marked for sabotage...
...Christian Lowe is a defense policy analyst at Empower America...
...The release of the Venona intercepts, the publication of Stasi chief Marcus Wolf's memoirs, and now the recent issuing of The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB have all shed light on Soviet conduct...
...The archive also provides insight into the Soviets' penetration of the Manhattan Project...
...And, Mitrokhin adds, as early as 1966, Sandinista guerrillas were being dispatched to camps in the Soviet Union for training in sabotage and subversion against the United States—instructed by the KGB on how to infiltrate America by posing as immigrant workers, pick up explosives and weapons at caches throughout the country, and destroy key infrastructures...
...It had been Mitrokhin's intent to make the archive public...
...The influential French journal Le Monde, a frequent critic of conservative Cold War policies, proves to have been heavily subsidized and penetrated by Soviet agents...
...But British intelligence convinced him to delay the release of the material, offering in return the services of the historian Christopher Andrew to help Mitrokhin translate and publish the archive...
...While The Sword and the Shield will prove an enthralling read for any espionage enthusiast, it is primarily a historical treasure trove, proving beyond any possibility of doubt that the Soviet Union was in fact what the Cold War hawks always said it was: an aggressive and subversive antagonist to the Western democracies...
...After almost a decade of research and investigation, The Sword and the Shield has at last appeared, one of the most detailed and comprehensive histories of the Soviet KGB...
...But perhaps the most overwhelming effect of The Sword and the Shield is Mitrokhin's demonstration of just how single-mindedly the Soviet Union devoted its resources to destabilizing the West...
...The poster child of this campaign was Philip Agee, a former CIA employee...
...Some of the most sensational revelations in The Sword and the Shield concern the KGB's plans to sabotage strategic targets in the event of war with the West...
...And thus doves' support for "peaceful coexistence" served, according to this hawkish theory, primarily to aid the Soviet Union...
...The politicians, activists, and media figures who advocated appeasement and coexistence were being blackmailed, paid, or manipulated by the KGB astonishingly often...
...Certainly there was no more important target for the KGB during the Cold War than Ronald Reagan...
...Intelligence operatives buried hundreds of caches of arms, communications equipment, and explosives throughout Europe...
...Not even the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, was unscathed...
...Acting on a tip from the archive, Swiss authorities earlier this year uncovered one of the covert caches near the village of Berne, finding a container of radio equipment and explosives in the exact spot provided by Mitrokhin...
...Mitrokhin's notes reveal that most of the scientists recruited by the NKVD were "ideological agents": spies who believed that it was unjust for the United States to be the sole nuclear power...
...The first significant information in the Mitrokhin archive is the confirmation of historians' suspicion that the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) had deeply penetrated the American government...
...The archive confirms that Franklin Roosevelt's close wartime adviser, Harry Hopkins, was tipping off the NKVD residence in Washington to FBI surveillance and counter-espionage activities...
...For Reagan's reelection bid in 1984, the KGB initiated its most aggressive media campaign, instructing its consulates around the world to promote the slogan "Reagan Means War...
...While the definitive history of the Cold War has yet to be compiled, several books have provided new insights...
...The doves, of course, labeled this kind of thinking "paranoid McCarthy-ism," and the hawks had little with which to answer the charge—until now...
...As early as 1976, the KGB active-measures division was intensively searching for a way to discredit Reagan...
...Agee, who defected to Cuba in the 1970s, published a tell-all book called Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which exposed hundreds of agents and operations around the world...
...American lawmakers quickly joined the campaign, labeling the CIA a "rogue elephant" and demanded open investigations...
...Duncan Chaplin Lee, the personal assistant to the OSS's chief "Wild Bill" Donovan, passed on secrets throughout the war...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 15
