In from the Cold War - double standard in prosecuting former spies

National Review, Oct 11, 1999 by David Pryce-Jones

Communism had just gone belly up when early in 1992 Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin caught a train from Moscow to an unnamed Baltic capital-Riga in Latvia, by the sound of it. There he contacted the CIA. A trusted member of the KGB since 1948, he had been one of its senior archivists for more than a decade, with unrestricted access to its files. You might think that our Vasili would have been recognized, and welcomed, as a defector. He, if anyone, knew the KGB's inside story, and he had the documents to tell it. But the CIA geniuses had no time for Mitrokhin. Over the years, the United States had been penetrated by Soviet espionage and subversion at every level, but the CIA no longer felt the need to know. Only a short while before, the Agency had been predicting that by the year 2000 the Soviet Union would have a larger economy than the United States.

So Mitrokhin walked down the road to the British. For decades, Soviet agents had displayed a professionalism against which the British appeared defenseless. Now, at least, the British delivered Mitrokhin and many trunks of documents back to Britain. Exposure and prosecution of Soviet agents might have been expected. The British, though, were in a quandary. Mitrokhin's files were copies, and so might not satisfy the rules of evidence in court. This allowed the grateful secret services to exercise their one real skill of sweeping as much as possible under the carpet, but they nevertheless came to an unusual deal. Mitrokhin was to collaborate with Christopher Andrew, professor of modern history at Cambridge and a well-known expert on the KGB, to publish what the authorities would permit.

What Mitrokhin managed to copy and squirrel away reveals only a small part of the KGB effort internationally, but it is enough to stand as an astounding record of Communism, a commemoration of the Soviets as they really were. The archive shows that one or another department of the KGB considered how to approach, to monitor, or, at best, to recruit everyone who was anyone politically in the United States and Europe throughout the postwar period. Many of these schemes were ridiculous, of course, but the KGB did succeed in assembling a slew of renegade politicians and parliamentarians, civil servants and academics, and opinion-formers in the media, especially the left-wing press.

One significant success was to compromise Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, in a way that led to his resignation. British prime minister Harold Wilson earned himself a code name in the files by shooting his mouth off indiscreetly and often to someone he knew to be a KGB agent. Approaches were made to men as varied as Cyrus Vance and Oskar Lafontaine, the German socialist. In 1975 alone, KGB head Yuri Andropov typically ordered operations to penetrate the "inner circles" of George Ball, Ramsey Clark, Averell Harriman, Edward Kennedy, Theodore Sorensen, and others. Plans existed for the murder of a range of personalities, from Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia to Soviet defectors, especially those from the KGB itself. Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova both escaped the Soviet Union to dance abroad, and their legs were to be broken as fitting punishment. Bomb attacks were arranged in black districts of New York, with the blame laid on the Jewish Defense League. Sexual smears were invented about Senator Scoop Jackson, Martin Luther King, and J. Edgar Hoover. The AIDS virus, the KGB put about, had been "manufactured" in Maryland.

Thanks to the number of agents operating in U.S. defense laboratories, American science effectively became Soviet science. Secret arms caches and radio transmitters, we now learn, were buried in a dozen countries (including America, Turkey, and Israel) for the day when war was openly declared and sabotage behind the lines could begin.

Only weeks ago, researchers happen to have discovered the names of British agents working for the Stasi, the East German secret police. Almost daily, some figures who were always suspected and others who were unknown are being exposed as traitors. It would all be as laughable as a French farce about mistaken identities, except that fundamental questions of security and justice are at stake.

An institutional imagination was at work. The KGB sought and found people who fantasized about the Soviet Union, the huge majority of them deceiving themselves for psychological reasons, living in an illusory dream quite distinct from reality. Like some compulsive seducer, the KGB operated on the principle that you should take every chance, because you could never know your luck, and even clever people were often the fantasizers they wanted.

Remember "Reds under the beds"? Remember how anyone who worried that Communist agents and spies might be undermining the democracies met the reflex sneer "McCarthyite"? The revelation that Reds had more nearly occupied every room in the house has not yet been enough to prompt anyone to apologize. As for those exposed now in the Mitrokhin-Andrew and Stasi archives, either they are defiant or they prevaricate. Brought to confront the reality that they had voluntarily engaged in a world-wide net of blackmail, sexual entrapment, forgery, and lying, they prefer to retreat into more fantasizing about the Soviet Union an d of Communism. The self-deception is altogether a central phenomenon of this age.