The arrival in Israel of Speter and Zalmonson in September 1974 was thus interpreted by some Western observers as evidence that the Kremlin had decided on a more conciliatory policy towards Jewish emigration.
Time
magazine’s Moscow correspondent saw their release as a Soviet attempt to influence the US Congress by making a humanitarian gesture. Andropov appeared delighted with the outcome of the negotiations for Linov’s release and presented Okhulov and Khokhlov with formal letters of congratulation.
58
The Centre was less pleased with Linov. Officers in the FCD Illegals Directorate believed that he had given away more than he should have done under Israeli interrogation.
59
During the mid-1970s Soviet policy towards Jewish emigration hardened once again. The immediate cause was the passage through Congress in 1974 of the Jackson-Vanik and Stevenson amendments to the 1972 US/Soviet Trade Agreement, making most-favoured-nation status dependent on the relaxation of curbs on emigration. The numbers of exit visas given in the mid-1970s declined from the record numbers of over 30,000 a year in 1972-73 to 20,000 in 1974 and less than 15,000 a year in 1975-76. Andropov continued to take a close, even obsessive, personal interest in the surveillance of would-be Jewish emigrants and all contacts between Soviet Jews and their foreign supporters.
60
He regarded even the sending of
matsos
(unleavened bread) from the West to Soviet Jews for the
seder
(the Passover meal) as an issue of such grave importance that it needed to be brought to the attention of the Politburo, writing in March 1975:
From the experience of previous years, it is clear that the delivery of such parcels [of
matsos
] to the addressees gives rise to negative processes among the Jewish population of the USSR, and reinforces nationalist and pro-emigration feelings.
In view of this, and in view of the fact that at the present time Jewish communities are fully supplied with locally baked
matsos
, the Committee of State Security considers it essential for parcels containing
matsos
sent from abroad to be confiscated . . .
61
The claim that Soviet Jews were already well supplied with Passover
matsos
was disinformation designed to pre-empt opposition to Andropov’s proposal from those Politburo members who, like Brezhnev, occasionally grasped that the obsession with Zionist conspiracy was ‘making us stupid’. Andropov regarded foreign telephone calls as an even greater danger than imported
matsos
, in view of the politically incorrect tendency of Soviet Jews to complain to foreigners about the various forms of persecution to which they were subject. In June 1975 he reported personally to the Politburo on the success of KGB measures ‘to prevent the use of international communications channels for the transfer abroad of tendentious and slanderous information’ by Soviet Jews. During the previous two years over a hundred telephone lines used by ‘Jewish nationalists’ to make phone calls abroad had been disconnected, ‘thereby inflicting a noticeable blow on foreign Zionist organizations’. More recently, however, Jews had taken to using telephone booths in telegraph offices, giving the staff non-Jewish names in order not to arouse suspicion, and direct-dial international telephone lines where there was no operator to keep track of them.
62
Zionism was second only to the United States (‘the Main Adversary’) as a target for KGB active measures. For some conspiracy theorists in the Centre and elsewhere in Moscow, the two targets were in any case closely linked. Arkadi Shevchenko, the Soviet Under Secretary-General of the United Nations in the mid-1970s, was struck by the puzzlement in Moscow at how the United States functioned with such technological efficiency despite so little apparent regulation: ‘Many are inclined towards the fantastic notion that there must be a secret control centre somewhere in the United States.’
63
The power behind the scenes, they believed, was monopoly capital which, in turn, was largely identified in some Soviet imaginations with the Jewish lobby.
The Centre devoted enormous energy to anti-Zionist active measures within the United States which, it was hoped, would also discredit the Jewish lobby. Probably the Centre’s most successful tactic was to exploit the activities of the extremist Jewish Defense League (JDL), founded by a Brooklyn rabbi, Meir Kahane, whose inflammatory rhetoric declared the need for Jews to protect themselves by ‘all necessary means’ - including violence. The JDL so perfectly fitted the violent, racist image of Zionism which the KGB wished to project that, had it not existed, Service A might well have sought to invent a similarly extremist US-based underground movement. In September 1969, six Arab missions at the UN received threatening telegrams from the League, claiming that they were ‘legitimate targets’ for revenge attacks for terrorist acts committed by Arabs.
64
A year later, on 4 October 1970, KGB officers in New York posted forged letters containing similar threats, purporting to come from the JDL and other Zionist extremists, to the heads of Arab missions. The Centre calculated that these letters would provoke protests by the missions to both U Thant, the UN Secretary-General, and the US government.
65
In the early hours of 25 November 1970 there was a bomb attack on the Manhattan offices of the Soviet airline Aeroflot, followed by an anonymous phone call to Associated Press by a caller who claimed responsibility for the bombing and used the JDL slogan, ‘Never again!’ Another bomb attack on 8 January 1971, this time outside a Soviet cultural centre in Washington, was followed by a similar phone call and the use of the same slogan. A spokesman for the JDL denied the League’s involvement in the bombing but refused to condemn it. Once again, the Centre decided to imitate the example of the League. On 25 July the head of the FCD First (North American) Department, Anatoli Tikhonovich Kireyev, instructed the New York residency to implement operation PANDORA: the planting of a delayed-action explosive device in ‘the Negro section of New York’, preferably ‘one of the Negro colleges’. After the explosion, the residency was ordered to make anonymous phone calls to black organizations, claiming responsibility on behalf of the JDL. PANDORA was merely the most dramatic in a series of active measures designed to stir up racial hostility between the black and Jewish communities. Simultaneously Andropov approved the distribution of bogus JDL leaflets fabricated by Service A, which denounced the crimes perpetrated by ‘black mongrels’. Sixty letters were sent to black student and youth groups giving lurid accounts of fictitious JDL atrocities and demanding vengeance. Other anti-semitic pamphlets, circulated in the name of a non-existent ‘Party of National Rebirth’, called on whites to save America from the Jews.
66
The main data base used by Service A in its active-measures campaigns against Zionist targets from 1973 onwards was obtained during operation SIMON, carried out by an agent of the Viennese residency codenamed CHUB (‘Forelock’) against the Paris headquarters of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). Preliminary reconnaissance by CHUB established that the premises were unguarded at night and had no burglar alarm. Using a duplicate key to the main entrance, he entered the WJC Paris offices on the night of 12- 13 February 1972 and removed the entire card index listing names and addresses of the WJC’s 20,000 French supporters together with details of their financial contributions, address plates giving the 30,000 addresses in fifty-five countries to which the WJC French-language periodical
Information Juive
was despatched, finance files relating to the activities of the WJC European Executive and details of the financing of a book on anti-semitism in Poland. At 11 a.m. on 14 June CHUB delivered all this material, which filled two suitcases and a shopping bag, to the Soviet consulate in Paris, then returned to Vienna using a false passport.
67
Service A spent much of the next year planning the production of forgeries based on the format of the stolen documents which were designed to discredit the WJC and Zionism. On 4 January 1973, N. A. Kosov, the head of Service A, submitted a large-scale plan for active measures based on the forgeries which was approved by Andropov on the following day. Many of the fabricated documents were posted to addresses in Europe and North America over the next few years in the name of a fictitious ‘Union of Young Zionists’: among them a letter from one of the leaders of the French branch of the WJC containing compromising information on the World Zionist Organization (WZO), which, through its executive arm, the Jewish Agency, was responsible for Jewish emigration to Israel; financial documents purporting to show that WJC leaders had embezzled large sums of money which had been collected to provide aid for Israel; evidence that a series of newspapers had been bribed to publish pro-Israeli propaganda; and material designed to show that the WJC had links with Jewish extremists who were secretly trying to provoke outbreaks of anti-semitism in order to encourage emigration to Israel.
68
There is no evidence, however, that this elaborate disinformation exercise had any significant impact. No KGB active-measures campaign was capable of countering the adverse publicity generated by the persecution of the refuseniks. The Centre’s obsession with the menace of Zionist subversion also introduced into the campaign an element of sometimes absurd exaggeration. It decided, for example, to exploit the murder in October 1973 of a female relative of the future French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, by distributing in the name of a fictitious French Israeli support group a ludicrous fabrication declaring that she had been killed by Zionists in revenge for Giscard’s part in the prosecution some years earlier of a group of Jewish financiers. So far from grasping the pointlessness of this dismal active measure, the Centre was unaccountably proud of it.
69
Though estimating the impact of KGB anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli active measures in Europe is inevitably difficult, they appear to have achieved no more than marginal successes. Among these marginal successes was the visit to the Soviet Union of the British Chief Rabbi, Immanuel (later Lord) Jakobovits, in December 1975. On his return he was greeted by the headline in the
Jerusalem Post
: ‘Jakobovits “Duped” by Soviets, Say Those Who Have Lived There’. Though the headline was exaggerated, the Chief Rabbi had shown a degree of naivety when subjected during his visit to a succession of carefully prepared active measures. Even when he wrote an account of his visit in his memoirs nine years later, it seems not to have occurred to him that the Russian Jews with whom he had lengthy discussions during his visit inevitably included a series of well-trained KGB agents.
70
Mitrokhin’s notes contain the codenames of eleven of them; their task included ‘conveying slanted information about the situation in the Soviet Union’.
71
Though Jakobovits met dissidents as well as official representatives during his visit, he returned with an inadequate grasp of the numbers who wished to emigrate, telling a packed audience in the St John’s Wood Synagogue: ‘Even if the doors of the Soviet Union were freely opened to emigration, the most optimistic estimate is that only about half a million Jews would avail themselves of the opportunity, while some believe that the figure would not be much above 100,000.’
The fact that Jakobovits even mentioned the highly implausible hypothesis that as few as 100,000 Soviet Jews might wish to emigrate strongly suggests that he had been influenced by the ‘slanted information’ passed on to him by KGB agents. In fact, within twenty years of his visit the total number of emigrants had risen to over a million. Convinced that ‘the bulk of Soviet Jewry’ did not wish to emigrate, the Chief Rabbi placed as much emphasis on improving the conditions of Jewish life in the Soviet Union as on supporting the refuseniks.
72
But if Jakobovits showed a degree of naivety, so too did the KGB. Agent SHCHERBAKOV was given the impossible task of cultivating the executive director of the Chief Rabbi’s office, Moshe Davis, with a view to his recruitment by the KGB.
73
Probably the greatest success of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign was its role in promoting the passage in the UN General Assembly by sixty-seven to fifty-five votes (with fifteen abstentions) of Resolution 3379, denouncing Zionism as a form of racism, in November 1975. In Jakobovits’s view, ‘UN resolutions hostile to Israel had been commonplace, but none could compare in virulence to this one. Its impact on Jews everywhere was devastating . . . ’
74
The anti-Western majority which voted for Resolution 3379, however, was achieved as much by the lobbying of the Arab states as by the Soviet bloc. Though the KGB officers operating under diplomatic cover in New York and elsewhere doubtless played their part in the lobbying, there is no indication in any of the files noted by Mitrokhin that the KGB made a substantial contribution to the success of the vote. Soviet diplomacy appears to have contributed far more than Soviet intelligence to the passage of Resolution 3379.
In 1977 the Soviet Union began a gradual increase in the number of exit visas granted to would-be Jewish emigrants in an attempt to demonstrate its compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords of 1975.
75
Almost 29,000 Jews emigrated in 1978, followed by a record 51,000 in 1979.
76
KGB pressure on the refuseniks, however, was unrelenting. In March 1977 the leading refusenik, Anatoli (Natan) Shcharansky, was arrested. For the next year he resisted all the attempts of his KGB interrogators to bully and cajole him into co-operating in his own show trial by admitting working for the CIA. Andropov refused to admit defeat. In June 1978 he falsely informed the Politburo that, ‘Shcharansky admits his guilt; we have caught him in his espionage activities and can present the appropriate materials.’ How long a sentence Shcharansky received, Andropov added, would ‘depend on how he behave[d] himself’ in court.
77
The trial, though almost unpublicized inside the Soviet Union, ended in a moral victory for Shcharansky, who made a movingly defiant final address: