The KGB against the Main Enemy: How the Soviet Intelligence Operates against the United States. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 22, 1989 by Brian Crozier

* The West doesn't deserve to be winning World War III, and strictly speaking it isn't-the other side is losing. In The KGB against the Main Enemy: How the Soviet Intelligence Service Operates against the United States (Lexington Books, 384 pp., $19.95), Herbert Romerstein and Stanislav Levchenko illustrate the proposition. Theirs is an eye-opening history of Soviet spying and "active measures" in the U.S. since 1920.

An open society is, by definition, more vulnerable than a closed society to hostile secret activities. It doesn't follow, however, that the U.S. must handicap itself in the secret war; yet America is handicapped, if not paralyzed. An example: in 1981, a GRU (military intelligence) officer called at the office of a Republican congressman and asked for a copy of a plan for basing MX missiles. Sensibly, an aide refused the request and called the FBI. "These agents," said the aide, "operate with impunity on Capitol Hill." Of course, the CIA enjoys no reciprocal rights in the Kremlin, and although the U.S. has enforced travel restrictions on most Soviet diplomatic personnel-to match those imposed upon American embassy officials in Moscow-no such checks apply to Soviets at the UN. Fair enough, one might say, except that both Capitol Hill and the UN are off limits to the FBI.

The congressional talent for selfinflicted wounds reached its zenith with the passage of the Privacy and the Freedom of Information Acts, which deprived the FBI of 90 per cent of its sources. At the same time, congressional surveillance was gravely hampering the CIA. The nadir came during the Carter Administration, when CIA Director Stansfield Turner fired several hundred Soviet specialists, and switched the intelligence effort from HUMINT (spies: bad) to SIGINT (signals and technology: good). It takes years to train a spy; only minutes to fire one.

To say the authors are highly qualified is an understatement. Levchenko (a former KGB major) was deeply involved in active measures in Japan before defecting ten years ago. Romerstein was Director of the Office to Counter Soviet Active Measures at the U.S. Information Agency, and the very fact that USIA had such an office is a credit to the more realistic Reagan approach. The President's decision, in June 1985, to balance diplomatic representation in Washington and Moscow was a massive counterblow, as was the expulsionsome months later of 105 spies from the Soviet mission at the UN. But as CIA Director William Webster has publicly acknowledged, Soviet espionage has grown dramatically even as the charismatic Gorbachev has proffered the seductions of glasnost.

While Western governments may admit the threat of espionage-not only by the KGB and GRU, but also by the various satellite intelligence services under Soviet control-they find it harder to reach a consensus about active measures, which may include the dissemination of forgeries and other disinformation, and the use of agents of influence. When no money changes hands, it is difficult to ban our citizens from acting as agents of influence. As a French intelligence officer told me "If we did . . . we'd have to lock up the entire staff of L'Humanite." Ail agent of influence, witting or not, can always argue that he agrees with Soviet policy objectives; peace, for example. The authors give the example of the manipulation, by five members of the Communist Party, of a New York peace-march steering committee in 1982. As for forgeries, Romerstein himself was a victim of one: a letter on USIA stationery, allegedly signed by him, that was distributed to various American publications. The KGB has even forged letters "signed" by such notables as Caspar Weinberger and Ronald Reagan.

Recently, KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov actually called a Moscow press conference to demonstrate what good guys he and his spies have become, and Gorbachev, himself a former KGB informer, must agree: in the latest reshuffling, he brought Kryuchkov into the Politburo.