1986 after becoming overly suspicious of a mention of the KGB resident in a defector’s debriefing, and dropped in and out of contact over the next fifteen years. It would be a long time before he might need an escape plan. As it transpired, Robert Hanssen was only five weeks away from retirement when he was eventually caught.
12
THE LONG TWILIGHT STRUGGLE
In June 1985, President Ronald Reagan told the American people that they were ‘in a long twilight struggle with an implacable foe of freedom’. Very few people would have predicted at the end of The Year of the Spy that within six years the KGB would be no more, the Cold War would be over, and the intelligence services of the West would find their future role under discussion.
During the late eighties, the KGB continued its policy of misinformation, planting propaganda stories that would influence other countries’ views of America and the CIA. The CIA’s involvement in the Iran — Contra affair suggested that the dark times of the sixties might be returning. The game of Spy vs Spy seemed to be at its height, with the trade-offs of the Daniloff affair equivalent to some of the ill-matched spy swaps of the earlier decades. But Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms — coupled with some genuine accidents, such as the one that led to the end of the Berlin Wall — meant that the era of the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe was drawing to a close.
Spreading lies and disinformation about the Main Enemy was not a new tactic for the KGB; through front organizations and receptive writers, they had propagated many false theories over the years, such as Soviet agent Joachim Joesten’s book
These operations, known as ‘active measures’, became more prevalent in the late eighties, despite Chairman Gorbachev’s claim in July 1987 that ‘We tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ In one of Yuri Andropov’s last decrees as Chairman of the KGB in 1982, he stated that it was the duty of all foreign intelligence officers, no matter which department they were part of, to participate in active measures. It was an area that was often ‘sub-contracted’ to satellite states, such as East Germany. As Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, director of Department X (disinformation) of East German foreign intelligence, once said, ‘Our friends in Moscow call it ‘‘dezinformatsiya’’. Our enemies in America call it ‘‘active measures’’, and I, dear friends, call it ‘‘my favourite pastime’’.’
After attempts were made to blacken the name of Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole, came under attack. The KGB had been treating him as an enemy since 1971 for his anti-Communist tendencies, and in December 1984 they began further measures designed to tar him as a reactionary. President Reagan’s speech to the European Parliament in May 1985 was heckled as an active measure. Forged letters were used to bolster the impression of an out-of-control American government: CIA director William Casey apparently planned to overthrow Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1987; in January 1988 documents suggested President Reagan gave instructions to the NSA to destabilize Panama. South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha referred to a secret and sinister agreement with the US in a letter he supposedly sent in 1989.
The most potentially damaging active measures were stories about medical experiments carried out by the Americans. The story that the Aids virus was manufactured during a genetic engineering experiment at Fort Detrick, which had been the home of the US biological weapons’ programme, first appeared in a pro-Soviet Indian newspaper,
In August 1987, Soviet officials formally denied that they considered Aids to be an American creation, but by then the story had become established, particularly in the Third World. In March 1991, a letter to the Zimbabwean
A later variant of the same Aids story suggested that it had been created as an ethnic bioweapon by the Americans, targeting non-whites. This was partly a continuation of the KGB’s attempts to foment racism at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics where offensive letters supposedly from the Ku Klux Klan were sent to African and Asian countries promising their athletes ‘a reception you’ll never forget’.
One particular active measure gained some recognition from the European Parliament, who passed a motion condemning trafficking in ‘body parts’ in which Latin American children were butchered to provide organs for sick Americans. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses were taken in by this one, publishing the story in their magazine
The sometimes byzantine nature of the spying game in the late eighties is amply demonstrated by the Daniloff case from August-September 1986, which saw the Soviets falsely accuse Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist, of spying in Russia mere days after one of their own agents at the UN was arrested by the FBI, in what
The Soviet agent, a physicist working at the United Nations, had been cultivating a Guyanese resident of New York, known only as CS or Birg, who worked at a defence contractor. What Zakharov didn’t realize was that Birg had been working with the FBI for three years, ever since the initial contact. When he handed Birg $1,000 in exchange for three classified documents, the FBI were waiting. A few days later, Daniloff, who had spent the previous five and a half years as a correspondent for the
Part of the problem was that the KGB did have some very slight cause for concern about Daniloff. A letter had been passed to him by a dissident Russian Orthodox priest back in January 1985 for onward transmission to CIA DCI William Casey. Daniloff had given it to the Second Secretary at the US Embassy. According to the KGB, this was proof that he was working with the CIA.
After many days of tense discussions, during which the summit due to be held in Reykjavik in mid-October looked likely to be cancelled if the stalemate wasn’t resolved, and the US threatened to send home two dozen Soviet delegates from the United Nations, the Soviets finally agreed to release Daniloff on 30 September. The
