During the clash between Jadid and Asad, KERIM continued to operate as a KGB agent inside the BNS. Among the operations recorded in KGB files in which KERIM took part was a secret nighttime entry into the West German embassy in Damascus to abstract (and presumably photograph) classified documents. The operation, which began at 10 p.m. on 20 April 1968 and was concluded at 4 a.m. the following day, was assisted by a Syrian BNS agent inside the embassy. On 24 April the German embassy was burgled again in a similar operation probably also involving KERIM.
13
In November 1970, with the support of both the army and security forces, Asad deposed Salah Jadid and seized power. ‘I am the head of the country, not of the government,’ Asad used to claim. In reality, the fear of taking any decision which might displease him meant that even the most trivial issues were frequently referred to President Asad for a decision. The KGB seems to have found his immediate entourage difficult to penetrate. Within the inner circle of his authoritarian regime Asad placed a premium on personal loyalty. Even the clerks and coffee makers on his presidential staff were rarely changed. The key members of his regime - his foreign and defence ministers, chief of the general staff and intelligence chief - remained in power for a quarter of a century or more.
14
During the early 1970s Muhammad al-Khuly, previously head of air-force intelligence, built up what was in effect a presidential intelligence service answerable only to Asad, who began each day with security and intelligence briefings.
15
The fact that Asad, like a majority of his high command and intelligence chiefs, came from the ‘Alawi sect (whose beliefs fused Shi’ite doctrine with elements of nature worship), in defiance of the tradition that power was held by Sunni Muslims, strengthened his anxiety for regular intelligence reports on the mood in the country. (Even Jadid, an ‘Alawi like Asad, had chosen a Sunni to act as nominal President.) Asad eventually had fifteen different security and intelligence agencies, all relatively independent of each other, with a total personnel of over 50,000 (one Syrian in 240) and an even larger number of informers. Each agency reported to the President alone and was instructed by the deeply suspicious Asad to keep watch on what the others were up to. Though brutal and above the law, routinely abusing, imprisoning and torturing its victims, Asad’s security system was also cumbersome. A Human Rights Watch investigation concluded:
A casual visitor to Damascus cannot fail to notice the confusion at airport immigration, the piles of untouched official forms, and the dusty, unused computer terminal. Local security offices convey the same disorderly impression with their yellowing stacks of forms piled on tables and officials chatting on the phone while supplicants wait anxiously to be heard. The atmosphere is one of chaos mixed with petty corruption and the exercise of bureaucratic power, not of a ruthlessly efficient police state.
16
The disorderly appearance of Syrian security offices was, however, somewhat misleading. Very few dissidents escaped their huge network of surveillance. Obsessed with his own personal security, Asad was protected by a presidential guard of over 12,000 men. Though his image was ubiquitous - on the walls of public buildings, on trucks, trains and buses, in offices, shops and schools - Asad’s leadership style became increasingly remote. By the 1980s most cabinet ministers met him only at their swearing in.
17
Only a handful of key figures had the right to telephone him directly. Foremost among them were his security chiefs. As British ambassador in Damascus in the mid-1980s, Sir Roger Tomkys once had occasion to ring up the head of one of the Syrian intelligence agencies, who replied half an hour later, having just spoken to Asad.
18
During the early 1970s the KGB residency in Damascus succeeded in establishing what it claimed was ‘semi-official contact’ with Asad’s youngest brother, Rif’at, codenamed MUNZIR, who was a member of his inner circle until the early 1980s. Rif’at’s importance in the KGB’s view, according to a report of 1974, was that he commanded Asad’s élite ‘Defence Brigades’, the best armed and trained units in the Syrian army, as well as - it believed - having a leading role in the intelligence community.
19
Unlike his relatively reclusive and austere elder brother, Rif’at al-Asad acquired a taste for foreign travel and Western luxuries, acting with little regard for the law and using his position to accumulate private wealth. Under his command the Defence Brigades held a weekly market in Damascus to sell black-market goods smuggled in from Lebanon. Rif’at was sometimes referred to by the Lebanese as ‘King of the Oriental Carpets’ because of the frequent confiscation of these prized objects by his personal Lebanese militia, popularly known as the ‘Pink Panthers’ .
20
Access to the corrupt, high-living Rif’at was thus very much easier than to the reclusive Asad. The KGB claimed in 1974 that, through its active measures, it succeeded in using Rif’at ‘unconsciously’, but Mitrokhin’s brief note on the report does not indicate how it did so.
21
A further KGB report of 1974 also identifies as a confidential contact a relative of Asad (codenamed KARIB) with Communist sympathies who was a senior official in the Syrian Council of Ministers. According to KARIB’s file, he provided ‘valuable and reliable’ intelligence on Asad’s entourage as well as on his policies.
22
KGB files also claim that SAKR, a department head in military intelligence recruited in 1974, was used to channel disinformation to Asad and the Syrian high command.
23
Other KGB contacts in, or close to, the Syrian government during the early years of the Asad regime continued to include the long-standing agent IZZAT, Tarazi Salah al-Din, director-general of the Syrian foreign ministry and later a member of the International Tribunal in The Hague.
24
Other KGB contacts included two generals in the Syrian army, OFITSER and REMIZ;
25
SARKIS, an air-force general;
26
PREYER and NIK, both Syrian ministers;
27
PATRIOT, adviser to Asad’s first Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ra’hman Khulayfawi (1970-74);
28
SHARLE (‘Charles’), adviser to Asad’s second Prime Minister, Mahmud al-Ayyubi (1974-76);
29
VATAR, who provided copies of cipher telegrams obtained by Syrian intelligence from the US embassy in Beirut;
30
BRAT, an intelligence operations officer;
31
FARES and GARGANYUA, both proprietors and editors-in-chief of Syrian newspapers;
32
VALID, a senior official in the Central Statistical Directorate;
33
and TAGIR, a leading official of the Syrian Arab Socialist Union.
34
There is no indication, however, that any had significant direct access to Asad. Mitrokhin’s brief notes on them also give very little indication of the intelligence which they supplied and whether most were agents or confidential contacts.
35
The KGB’s best opportunities to penetrate Asad’s entourage almost certainly came during his travels to the Soviet Union, which he visited six times during his first three years as Syrian leader. ‘He might look slightly ineffectual’, Andrei Gromyko later recalled, ‘but in fact he was highly self-controlled with a spring-like inner tension. ’
36
While in Moscow, Asad was housed in luxurious apartments in the Kremlin which were inevitably bugged - ‘with a view’, according to a report to Andropov by Grigori Fyodorovich Grigorenko, head of the KGB Second Chief Directorate, ‘to obtaining information about the plans and reactions of Hafiz Asad and his entourage’.
37
The information of most interest to the KGB probably concerned Asad’s response to the pressure put on him to sign a Friendship Treaty. Though anxious for Soviet arms, Asad wished to avoid the appearance of becoming a Soviet client. It may well have been from bugging Asad’s Kremlin apartment during his visit in July 1972 that the KGB discovered that he was so annoyed by Brezhnev’s pressure for a Friendship Treaty that he had ordered his delegation to pack their bags. Alerted to his imminent departure, Brezhnev visited Asad in his apartment and assured him that there would be no further mention of the treaty during their talks. On the last day of Asad’s visit, Brezhnev admitted that, despite the Soviet-Egyptian Friendship Treaty, Egypt had just expelled all Soviet advisers: ‘I know you will tell me that our treaty with Egypt has not saved us from embarrassment there.’ Asad resisted pressure from Sadat to expel Soviet advisers from Syria also, declaring publicly, ‘They are here for our own good.’
38
Though unwilling to sign a Friendship Treaty, Asad had given the still-illegal Syrian Communist Party two posts in his cabinet. In March 1972 the Party was allowed to join the Ba‘th-dominated National Progressive Front, thus giving it
de facto
legality, and permitted to publish a fortnightly newspaper,
Nidal al-Sha’b
(‘The People’s Struggle’). Membership of the Front, however, strengthened the growing breach between Khalid Bakdash (codenamed BESHIR by the KGB), a dogmatic Soviet loyalist who had been Party leader for the past forty years, and the majority of the Party Politburo who resented both Bakdash’s autocratic leadership and Moscow’s support for Asad. In April 1972 Bakdash’s critics within the Party leadership took advantage of his temporary absence in Moscow for medical treatment to pass resolutions accusing him of Stalinist methods. In July pro- and anti-Bakdash factions were summoned to Moscow to resolve their differences at a meeting hosted by senior officials of the CPSU International Department. Though one of Bakdash’s critics complained that he had created a personality cult and suffered from ‘ideological sclerosis’ which made him ‘unable to identify the new phenomena in our Arab Syrian society’,
Pravda
announced that the meeting had taken place in ‘a warm, friendly atmosphere’ and had agreed on the importance of ‘the ideological, political and organizational unity of the Syrian Communist Party’. Bakdash outmanoeuvred his opponents by playing the role of a loyal supporter both of the Soviet Union and of the Asad regime. The ‘Moscow Agreement’ papered over the cracks within the Party, and lauded both Soviet-Arab friendship and Syria’s achievements under Asad’s leadership. For the remainder of the Soviet era, however, the conflict between Bakdash and his Party critics continued to complicate Soviet policy towards Syria.
39
The most successful KGB penetration during the Asad era recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin was of the Syrian embassy in Moscow. As well as bugging the ambassador’s office and several other parts of the embassy, the KGB regularly intercepted diplomatic bags in transit between the embassy and Damascus, and opened, among other official correspondence, personal letters from Asad’s first ambassador in Moscow, Jamil Shaya, to the Foreign Minister, ‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam, marked ‘MOST SECRET, ADDRESSEE ONLY’. As usual, the KGB’s letter-openers paid meticulous attention to replicating the glues, adhesive tapes and seals used on the envelopes and packets in the diplomatic bag. Though Shaya asked for all his envelopes to be returned to him so that he could check personally for signs that they had been tampered with, he seems to have detected nothing amiss.
40
Mitrokhin’s notes from KGB files include the codenames (and a few real names) of thirty-four agents and confidential contacts used in the penetration of the Syrian embassy. Though this total may well be incomplete, it is sufficient to indicate the considerable scale of KGB operations. The majority of the agents used were Soviet citizens; only six can be clearly identified as Syrian. The operational methods were similar to those employed against many other Moscow embassies. As in the case of other embassy penetrations, the agents were tasked to report on the personalities as well as the opinions of the diplomats. Ambassador Shaya’s file, for example, recorded that he was somewhat lax in his Islamic observance and contained such trivial details as a report from Agent MARIYA that he was planning to send a piano he had purchased in Moscow back to Damascus. Soviet female employees of the embassy from interpreters to maids were expected to assess the vulnerability of Syrian diplomats to sexual seduction. Agent SOKOLOVA, who worked in the chancery, reported that the ambassador was showing interest in her. VASILYEVA was planted on Shaya at a reception in the Egyptian embassy in the hope, according to a KGB report, that she would ‘be of interest to the ambassador as a woman’. Though there is no evidence in the files noted by Mitrokhin that any Syrian ambassador (unlike a number of his Moscow colleagues) fell for the KGB’s ‘honey trap’, one KGB ‘swallow’ so successfully seduced another Syrian diplomat that they began living together. Unofficial currency exchange was another common method of compromising foreign diplomats. NASHIT reported that an official of the Syrian military procurement office in Moscow had illegally changed $300 for Shaya on the black market. The KGB drew up plans to arrest and expel the official, probably as a means of putting pressure on the ambassador.
One of the KGB officers involved in operations against the Syrian embassy had the responsibility of organizing hunting expeditions for the ambassador and other senior diplomats. The KGB’s hospitality was elaborate. On one expedition to the Bezborodovsky State Hunting Ground, Shaya had the opportunity to shoot elk, wild boar and hares. The entertainment concluded with a visit to a dacha and sauna situated in an orchard on the Volga. The purpose of these expeditions was two-fold: both to ensure that the ambassador was away from the embassy during ‘special operations’ such as the photography of classified documents and to encourage confidential discussions with his hunting companions. One undercover KGB officer codenamed OSIPOV, who accompanied Shaya on hunting expeditions, reported that on 12 September 1973 the ambassador had confided in him that the Arab states had no prospect of destroying the state of Israel for at least ten, perhaps fifteen years. However, within the next few years they would launch an attack on Israel with the more limited aim of destroying the myth of Israeli invincibility and deterring both foreign investment and Jewish immigrants. The KGB subsequently concluded that Shaya had had advance knowledge of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War less than a month later on 6 October.
41