Keys of This Blood (36 page)

In all three sections, of course, Lenin had the first and last say as to candidacy to become a member (already an honor) and actual membership. And all three sections reckoned efficiency and excellence primarily in ideological terms. They were there as the internal organs of the CP, devised to keep it clean of contamination and vigorous in its Leninist-Marxist health.

Except for the final darkened months of his life, Lenin would use these extragovernmental structures to dominate every facet of the CP and the all-powerful CC. For what remained to him of life, he would continue to refine those structures and to stamp them with the unmistakable hallmark of genuine Leninism—an explicit and ever-haunting preoccupation with that element so vitally important in the Leninist geopolitics: the counterintelligence mission of the Party-State.

Indeed, as early as December 20, 1917, and under Lenin's inspiration and insistence, the then spanking-new Sovnarkom had already issued the protocol that first established the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Counteract Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. Known by one of the most famous of all Soviet acronyms, CHEKA, this department
was attached structurally as the good right arm of the CC's first section, the Secretariat.

CHEKA became more than the linchpin of the Leninist structure. In a true sense, CHEKA was
the
essential structure. In its later forms—GPU, OGPU, NKVD and KGB—it would remain so, both within and outside the Soviet Union. Unchanged in its purpose, it lived through every change in Soviet government and leadership down to and including the Gorbachevism of our present day. As long as the KGB backs Gorbachev, he will last.

Headed first by a Polish ex-seminarian, Feliks Edmondovich Dzerzhinsky, CHEKA had fused within its charter and its functions all effective police powers, all state security duties and all judicial powers. It was the single most efficient expression of Lenin's concept of the new Bolshevik Russia, and of the new Bolshevik world: state security must be coterminous not with the government, but with the Party. Government security was assured, because the government was the Party's own bailiwick.

Dzerzhinsky, born in Vilna as the son of a country squire, was dismissed from the Catholic seminary at the age of seventeen. Already a Marxist, he spent twenty-two years in and out of Czarist political jails until his mentor and close friend, Lenin, freed him from prison in March 1917.

As a hardened Party member, a cold-eyed fanatic and an experienced student of espionage, torture, subversion and human psychology, Dzerzhinsky was the ideal man to create what Lenin wanted: an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-penetrating, octopus-like organization with its own rules and procedures, its own internal security measures, its political self-purging processes, its mechanism of detecting and foiling the intelligence and subversion activities of the Party-State's enemies, internal and external.

It took Lenin and Dzerzhinsky a short time to realize that the intelligence game between nations was only secondarily a matter of data gathering, of “spying” in the classical sense of the word and of ascertaining the factual condition of opponents and competitors.

As the game of nations, intelligence was and still is, as Angelo M. Codevilla wrote, the art of assessing the opponent's predilections—what he seeks and what he expects of you; and then of shaping and manipulating what he knows about you and what he expects you to do.

That subtlety of induced deception has been the essence of international intelligence since the legendary Sun Tzu, writing in China in the fourth century B.C., set out its principles in the text of
Ping Fa: The Art
of War
. It is of more than passing interest that
Ping Fa
has been obligatory reading in all the military academies of the USSR and its satellites.

Under Dzerzhinsky's twisted and almost preternatural genius for such things, CHEKA developed precisely those sophisticated forms of deception, designed and refined to elicit the consent of those who are being deceived. In one of the few remarks authentically ascribed to him, this “Polish Master of Deception”—Churchill's phrase—boasted that “We get to know what a man insists is real, and we give him precisely that. We have food for everybody's taste.”

The fact that as early as 1918 Lenin and Dzerzhinsky launched their first successful deception scenario—the famous “Lockhart” or “Ambassadors” plot of August 1918—reveals how deeply and sensitively the founders of the new Party-State had studied their role as leaders of an international counterintelligence state. In the twenties, there followed other successes, known to intelligence specialists as the “Trust” and “Sendikat” legends.

If, as a practical matter, the Party had intrusive designs on the totality of human life, CHEKA made those intrusive designs achievable. For, just as the Party was not limited by the government, so CHEKA was not limited by the Party. Somewhat like Frankenstein's monster, CHEKA was at least potentially stronger than its creator and would-be master.

In
Chekisty
, a particularly brilliant analysis of CHEKA, John Dziak puts the matter clearly and—given Lenin's unremitting hatred of all religion in general, and Roman Catholicism in particular—ironically, as well. Lenin, says Dziak, had established a “secular theocracy … in which the Party was Priesthood, served by a combination of Holy Office (Central Committee) and Temple Guard (CHEKA).”

The numbers speak eloquently in favor of that analysis, and of the ever-increasing power of the “Temple Guard.” In 1917, CHEKA had 17 members. In January 1919, it had 37,000 members. By mid-1921, reorganized as GPU, it had 262,400 members. By the time Feliks Dzerzhinsky died in 1926, the troops and civilian staff of this “enforcer arm” of Lenin's creation numbered almost half a million.

It has become a kind of axiomatic shorthand among today's Westerners to talk about this Leninist creation—from CHEKA to KGB—as though it were nothing more than the so-called intelligence services commonly established by other nations as subordinate adjuncts of civil government.

Obviously, however, and by design, CHEKA was not subordinate to any government. Up until that point, Lenin's organizational victories had resulted in the unique creation of a Party-State. With his creation of
CHEKA, that Party-State became in its very essence what it has since remained: a counterintelligence state.

Given that the Party itself was the creature of Lenin's adaptation of Marxist ideology, and given Lenin's own ideal of the worldwide Workers' Paradise, it followed that the Party would have to pursue its built-in ideological millennial imperative. Its mandate, its function and its destiny were to head the worldwide proletarian revolution that would usher in the millennium of that Workers' Paradise on earth. Armed with CHEKA, Lenin's counterintelligence Party-State was ready to become the executor of history's mandate on the geopolitical plane.

Virtually all of the stunning reorganization and creation of Party structures dedicated to that single-minded purpose was well on the way to completion by 1918, when, under Lenin's guidance and at his behest, the infant Sovnarkom transformed itself by a unanimous vote of its delegates into the rawboned youth calling itself the Russian Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFR). Like Sovnarkom, the RSFR was to be but a passing instrument in the hands of the Leninist Party-State. Quickly, the RSFR adopted Lenin's 1917 draft constitution as basic law, complete with its mandate for the overthrow of capitalist regimes by violent force.

In that same year, Lenin already lamented that “our CHEKA unfortunately does not extend to America.”

Seeking the first pegs on which to anchor a geopolitical network that would hasten the day of worldwide proletarian revolution, Lenin seized upon an earlier initiative of European socialists. This was the International Workingmen's Association, founded with Karl Marx's participation in London in 1864. Known as the First International, it had been succeeded by a refurbished Second International in 1889. It was at the Moscow Congress of 1919, convened to produce the Third International, that Lenin seized control and created the Communist International (the Comintern), intending it to be an international clone of his own CP. The Comintern did indeed function as that Party clone, until it was dissolved by Stalin in 1943. He did not need it anymore.

By the end of 1920 and into 1921, Lenin had in place the beginnings of a network covering Western Europe and the Americas. It began with single individuals—“moles,” in latter-day jargon—placed strategically so that they could work clandestinely toward their ultimate function of promoting the revolution, now constitutionally mandated abroad by the Leninist Party-State in its drive to the millennium.

Never one to miss the full opportunities afforded by structural reorganization, Lenin took two more ingenious steps, one hard upon the other. In December 1920, he created the Foreign Department (IND) of his
enforcement arm, CHEKA. Then, in 1921, he reorganized the “third section” of the Red Army into the Intelligence Directorate (RU), which he placed under the direct control of CHEKA's IND.

As night follows day, then, it followed that the secret role of RU in foreign intelligence was to be an obedient extension of Soviet domestic intelligence. That is, the aims of RU abroad were identical with CHEKA's domestic aims: first, to establish and protect the Party-State across the world as nothing more or less than a global counterintelligence state. And, second, to guard the ideological purity of the workers' revolution always and everywhere.

The means used by RU—and by its successor organization, GRU, to this day—in carrying out its assigned role was the intimate and completely clandestine interlayering of its own personnel within the diplomatic missions sent by the Party-State all over the world.

No image more exactly conveys the working ideal of this most clandestine army of the Leninist structure abroad than webs spun by a spider from its very entrails. Webs so transparent as to be invisible unless—improbably—the light of day were to shine directly upon their ever-widening embrace of individuals, governments and societies.

Complementing this invisible structure was a second one that also rode piggyback on diplomatic missions. Or, more exactly, it redefined the basic purpose of Soviet diplomatic missions to include the counterintelligence functions already enshrined in Moscow's machinery.

Under the direction and control of CHEKA, diplomatic missions—in addition to acting as funnels for the entry of RU's moles around the world—were themselves transformed into export vehicles for the Leninist ideal. Every diplomatic mission was to have the same ultimate objective as the Soviet Party-State it represented.

It was not merely logical, therefore, but unavoidable that the foreign policy of the Leninist Party-State would be conducted through its diplomatic missions on two tiers. On the overt level, the necessary diplomatic relations proper to every state were carried on in a more or less usual manner, by more or less usual personnel—ambassadors, consuls, chargés d'affaires and the general contingent of accredited individuals.

At a decidedly unusual level, meanwhile, the IND arm of CHEKA saw to the systematic inclusion of a dedicated intelligence component within the staff of every diplomatic mission around the world.

Separate and independent from the totally covert RU network—and sometimes at odds with it, though both were controlled ultimately by CHEKA—this IND diplomatic intelligence component was multidimensional. It was the chief instrument through which Moscow's policy directives
were delivered to the more or less normal mission personnel. And it was Lenin's organizational insurance policy, guaranteeing that his foreign missions themselves would be kept in line.

But it was far more than a mere monitor and control sector. For this intelligence component was designed as well to carry on its officially assigned and directed program of espionage and counterintelligence abroad.

IND activity abroad wasn't as invisible as the web spun by the RU, to be sure. But it was nicely camouflaged all the same.

Under the cover of such seemingly benign front organizations as “friendship” societies, cultural organizations, labor unions, peace movements, and the like, Lenin used IND to set in place the successful model for what was to become one of the most effective official programs of daily, systematic and dedicated international espionage and counterintelligence ever devised, a program that finally embraced industry, political institutions, military matters and cultural affairs in every nation that hosted an accredited Soviet diplomatic mission.

In 1922, the RFSR transformed itself—again at Lenin's behest, and again by unanimous vote—into the fully formed adult we know as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The home-based Communist Party (CP), therefore, became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

By that time, in his single-minded fanaticism, and with his neverfailing organizational genius, Lenin had established the interlocking domestic and international network upon which the geopolitical institution of Leninist Marxism would continue to be built. And he had established as bedrock the three most basic principles of that institution.

The first principle was that the world dictatorship of the proletariat could be established only by violent revolution, resulting in the overthrow of capitalist-based governments. The choice for violence, made irrevocably before he was twenty, was Lenin's most enduring personal thumb-mark. It stamped all of his thinking, planning and organization for the worldwide proletarian revolution. And, therefore, it determined the course of Soviet history, and that of much of the world, for most of the twentieth century.

The second bedrock Leninist principle dealt with authority and structure. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, because of the experience it claimed in revolution, always knew best. For that reason, all non-Russian CPs were to function as local branches of the CPSU. Any CP outside Russia was to be organized along the same lines. Moreover, each foreign CP must be subject to the CPSU—to the centralized control
of Lenin and his successors—both in its choice of local CC members, and in its policies.