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Arch-Important Witness
The Mitrokhin Archive, the most scandalous book about the KGB, was published six years ago. The continuation of the story of the KGB’s secret operations has been just released, after the author’s death, to bring more sensations.
Any literary critic will say that a sequel is normally inferior to the first book in both content and reader’s attention. Publishers of the UK version The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume 2: The KGB and the World and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World US edition had good reasons to be afraid that KGB officer Vasily Mitrokhin and British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew’s joint work would have a similar fate. The amazing success of the first Mitrokhin Archive was, after all, the result of quite a fancy story [see the article below].
The publishers’ apprehensions did not come true, though. Many events described in the book have been widely covered long before. But they get some evidence only now. The book greatly broadens the view on the KGB’s role in the international policy. Many national heroes of emerging countries are now seen in a drastically different light.
Vano
The first and, probably, the main victim of the second volume of The Mitrokhin Archive is Indira Gandhi, code-named “Vano”. The documents disclosed in London state that India’s most famous woman was a KGB agent. It is quite obvious that she was under practically unlimited influence of the Soviet intelligence.
The KGB started paying attention to Indira Gandhi as early as in the mid-50s but at that time, she played an insignificant part of someone who could influence her father Jawaharlal Nehru, the first leader of the independent India. The first present that the KGB gave to Indira in 1955 was a fur coat. Gifts were getting more and more valuable. In the 1960s, the Soviet secret service bankrolled the election campaign of some prominent leaders of India’s ruling party, and after the party split up the Soviet supported Gandhi’s faction. From this moment, the Soviet influence on Indira Gandhi and her party became total. The KBG papers say that the Soviet intelligence service deliberately fostered the Indian’s distrust to the United States by constantly providing her with materials on the links of the opposition with the stateside intelligence. Gandhi’s fear of conspiracies ended up in paranoia.
Meanwhile, the KGB still financed the ruling party of India. Suitcases full of money were sent right to the prime minister’s residence. By late 1970s, the Soviet secret service funded several ministers, many regional leaders, ten newspapers and one news agency. Not a single step in India’s foreign policy was at odds with the Soviet diplomacy. Here is an example that could show how many spies worked for the USSR in the country. When an Indian minister offered a KGB against to sell important information and charged $50,000 for it, he got a refusal since this information was no longer a secret for the Soviet Union. It would be certainly impossible without the leadership of “dear Ms. Indira Gandhi”, aka “contact Vano”.
Leader
In contrast, the KGB’s efforts in Latin America were not that successful. Judging by the document published in the second volume of The Mitrokhin Archive, a major victory of the Soviet secret service was Chile’s Salvador Allende’s rise to power in early 1970s. The Soviet gave him the code name “Leader”.
Allende’s victory cost the KGB $420,000. The documents published in London do not answer the question whether Allende knew where the money for his election campaign was coming from. But even if he did not, he must be suspecting. It was not the Soviet Ambassador to Santiago that he regularly met as the main Soviet representative after assuming power but it was a KBG chief in Chile, Svyatoslav Kuznetsov, who personally “guided” Allende. The president’s lover, Miria Kontrereas Bell, known in Moscow as “Marta”, organized the meetings. It was at the first date with Kuznetsov that the Chilean leader agreed to launch the military and intelligence service reform to strengthen the mutual understanding between the two countries.
The KGB, however, soon realized that Allende was not the best candidate to contest the CIA in Chile. He was quite diligent in realizing all Soviet recommendations but he evidently lacked the rigidity. He was unwilling to turn Chile into a second Cuba. What is more, he was sure that the people would back him without the Soviet’s support, and evidently took pride in being the first Marxist to rise to power in Latin America democratically.
The KGB’s work halted when the new Soviet Ambassador to Chile, who would not play the part of the mission’s nominal head, arrived in 1972. The opposition between the member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee Alexander Basov and the KGB chief in Chile Svyatoslav Kuznetsov drowned the idea on the creation of the pro-Soviet regime in Chile. In September 1973, unreformed units of the Chilean army rebelled, and Salvador Allende shot himself with the rifle Fidel Castro had given him as a present.
Hydrologist
The project to turn Nicaragua into a socialist state was somewhat more successful for the KGB. The documents that Mitrokhin made public have it that Carlos Fonseca, the founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, who countered the pro-US regime and finally rose to power, was an active KGB agent, known as “Hydrologist”.
The Front was initially created not only to seize power in Nicaragua but also as to form sabotage groups to act throughout the whole of Northern and Central America. At the end of the 1960s, that a Sandinist group was sent to Mexico to examine the region with the view to carry out sabotage operations in the United States. Almost all operations of the Sandinists were fulfilled under the control or, at least, with the agreement of the KGB chiefs in Chile. It was the case in 1978 when a group led by Eden Pastora, another Sandinist and a future leader of contras, seized the building of the Nicaraguan Parliament and took the deputies hostages. Beforehand, Pastora agreed upon the details of the operation, aimed to release the imprisoned Sandinist leaders, with the KGB chief in Managua. The undertaking went off well. Pastora, the released leaders and a $500,000 ransom arrived in Cuba. The island was still the base of the KGB’s activities in the regions, and was called “Outpost” in the state committee’s documents.
The Second Caribbean Crisis
Fidel Castro did not catch the eye of the Soviet intelligence straightaway, in defiance of the popular opinion. According to the papers of Mitrokhin’s archive, the Soviet made first contacts with Castro only after he assumed office. It took the KGB some time to examine him until they let him make the island the Soviet outpost in the Western hemisphere.
The documents on Cuba are perhaps the tritest from Mitrokhin’s archive. Many things published now have been already widely known for a long time. And yet, the book contains some new and interesting details. For one, when Raul Castro, the younger brother of Fidel Castro went to Czechoslovakia to buy armaments, KGB agents in Prague reported that the second man in Cuba slept in his shoes and showed an exceptional fastidiousness in relationships with women demanding that all prostitutes who visited him be blond.
Readers of the second volume of The Mitrokhin Archive will naturally be surprised to learn that Cuba could have become the reason for the third world war twice, not only once, as was earlier thought. The book cites a report on the meeting between Fidel Castro and some Soviet general who went to Havana on inspection in 1982. The Cuban leader offered his country’s territory as a base to station nuclear missiles, which, as he claimed, was an adequate response to the basing of American missiles in Europe. The Mitrokhin Archive does not describe the reaction of the Soviet. This time was the beginning of constant reshuffles of General Secretaries in the USSR, and the KGB, as all other parts of the system, probably had to time to consider Cuba’s proposal.
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The Fate of the Re-Writer
Vasily Mitrokhin was born in 1922 in the village of Yurasovo, Ryazan Region. After the graduation from the university and a short-lived job in the military prosecutor’s office in Kharkov, he entered the MGB in 1948. He served various assignments overseas during the 1950s. In 1956, for example, he accompanied the Soviet national team at the Olympics in Sydney. The same year he was accused of negligence and was moved from the operational duties to the archives of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. As Mitrokhin said, he got disillusioned in the Communist ideas after the Khrushchev’s speech at the close-door plenary session of the party’s Central Committee. The officer started gathering the documents in 1972 when the archives of the First Directorate were moved from the Lubyanka headquarters to a new building in Yasenevo. Mitrokhin buried his personal archive at his dacha outside Moscow.
He went to Latvia with the archive in 1992 to place it at the disposal of the US intelligence. Yet, CIA officers did not consider Mitrokhin credible and thought that his archive, which was mainly made up of handwritten copies of top-secret documents, was fake. Mitrokhin, his family and the whole of his archive, which covers the operations of the Soviet secret service from the 1930s to the late 20th century, were taken to Britain. The authenticity of the archive was confirmed. As Christopher Andrew, historian and Mitrokhin’s co-writer says, “Forging dozens of thousands of documents so that none of them contradict any other that we have is so difficult that seems to be utterly impossible.”
The first part of Mitrokhin’ archive which includes documents on the KGB’s operations against the countries of the West was published in 1999. The world learnt about the taping of Kissinger’s calls, about Soviet spies at US major companies contracted with the Pentagon, about the fact that at least 35 high-ranking officials in France were KGB agents and that Soviet agents got into governing bodies of all parties, courts and the police in Germany.
Mitrokhin died in the UK on January 23, 2004.
Vyacheslav Belash
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 10, 2005
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