Can it really be that the CPSU, which for a long time had the love and respect of the revolutionary peoples of the whole world, had a ‘bandit’ as its great leader for several decades? From what you have said it appears as if the ranks of the international Communist movement which grew and became stronger from year to year were under the leadership of some sort of ‘shit’.
Kang then dared to say what perhaps no meeting of senior Communists in Moscow had ever heard said aloud since Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956. He taunted Khrushchev by quoting some of his numerous past eulogies of Stalin as ‘a very great genius, teacher, great leader of humanity’, and recalled Khrushchev’s active participation (along with Kang) in the attempt during the Great Terror ‘to wipe all the Trotskyist-rightist carrion from the face of the earth’.
19
The impact of Kang’s extraordinary speech on his shocked Soviet listeners was heightened by the fact that he delivered it through ferociously clenched teeth.
20
The acrimonious collapse of the Moscow talks in the summer of 1963 was followed by the most strident polemics in the history of the international Communist movement. In April 1964 a senior Soviet official even accused Beijing of a racist attempt to set yellow and black races ‘against the whites’ - a policy which, he claimed, was ‘no different from Nazism’. The PRC was also accused of selling drugs to finance the Great Leap Forward. The virulence of Soviet attacks reflected the deep indignation generated in Moscow by the Sino-Soviet schism. For almost half a century after the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviet Union had been able to depend on the unconditional loyalty of other Communist parties around the world. Now it stood accused of heresy by the Communist rulers of the world’s most populous state. Moscow’s alarm was heightened by Beijing’s charm offensive in the Third World. In Asia the PRC established close links with Pakistan, Burma and Indonesia. During 1964 Beijing established diplomatic relations with fourteen African states, all of whom ceased to recognize the Chinese Nationalist regime on Taiwan, to which the PRC laid claim.
21
The Centre was outraged by reports that in some of these states pictures of Soviet-bloc leaders had been displaced or overshadowed by huge portraits of Mao, and demanded that a record be kept of when and where every such portrait appeared. Markus Wolf, the long-serving head of the East German HVA, complained that, at the request of the KGB, he was forced to conduct the ‘senseless exercise’ of counting the number of portraits of the Great Helmsman on public display in each of the African countries where his service operated.
22
The successful test of China’s first atomic bomb in October 1964 both enhanced its international prestige in the Third World and dramatically increased the threat which China posed to the Soviet Union.
Once ‘eternal friendship’ had given way to ‘eternal enmity’, residencies in many parts of the world were told to regard Line K (K for Kitay, the Russian word for China) as a major operational priority, second only to operations against the ‘Main Adversary’ and its leading allies. Within China itself, however, Stalin’s earlier decision to reveal the identities of the entire Soviet intelligence network to the CCP leadership had crippled KGB intelligence collection. Throughout the remainder of the Soviet era the Centre was left with what Nikolai Leonov called ‘an unbridgeable gap in our information sources on China’.
23
Most of the KGB’s former Chinese agents whose names had been given to the Ministry of State Security were executed or left to rot in the
laogai
.
24
The fact that the Beijing Ministry of Public Security knew the real names of the illegals given false Chinese identities in the PRC during the 1950s made it impossible to use them against Chinese targets. As a result most Line K operations were conducted outside the PRC. Chinese officials stationed abroad, however, were under strict instructions to go out only in groups of two or more. As a result, recalls one retired Western intelligence officer, ‘You could never meet any of them alone.’ Line K thus spent much of its time trying to recruit non-Chinese citizens with access to PRC officials. Among its leading agents during the 1960s was the Finnish businessman Harri Ilmari Hartvig (codenamed UNTO), who was on the committee of the Finnish-Chinese Friendship Society and had frequent meetings with the Chinese ambassador and other PRC diplomats. Meetings between the Friendship Society committee and PRC diplomats took place in Hartvig’s department, which, without his knowledge, had been bugged by a KGB listening device concealed in his sideboard. Extracts from the transcript of at least one meeting attended by the Chinese ambassador which discussed Sino-Soviet relations and PRC policy to Scandinavia and Yugoslavia were passed to the Politburo.
25
The fact that the intelligence obtained through Hartvig was accorded such importance, despite the fact that it appears to have included no classified documents, is further evidence of the general weakness of KGB intelligence collection on the PRC.
The ‘Cultural Revolution’ (officially ‘A Full-Scale Revolution to Establish a Working-Class Culture’) launched by Mao in 1966 made China a more difficult and dangerous place for the KGB to operate than anywhere else on earth. In an extraordinary attempt to re-fashion Chinese society on a utopian revolutionary model, Mao unleashed a general Terror. Millions of youthful, fanatical Red Guards were urged to root out revisionist and bourgeois tendencies wherever they found them - and they found them almost everywhere. Veteran Communist officials and intellectuals were paraded in dunces’ hats, abused, imprisoned and in some cases driven to suicide. The leadership of the Soviet Union were denounced as ‘the biggest traitors and renegades in history’. As during the Stalinist Great Terror thirty years earlier, most of the enemies of the people unmasked and persecuted by the Red Guards had committed only imagined crimes. And, as in Stalin’s Russia, the bloodletting was accompanied by a repellent form of Emperor-worship. Mao was hailed as the ‘Great Helmsman’, ‘the Reddest Red Sun in Our Hearts’. Each day began with a ‘loyalty dance’: ‘You put your hand to your head and then to your heart, and you danced a jig - to show that your heart and mind were filled with boundless love for Chairman Mao.’ Rival factions outdid themselves in terrorizing the Great Helmsman’s imagined enemies, each claiming to be more Maoist than the others.
26
Agent recruitment within China during the Cultural Revolution was, as KGB Chairman Semichastny later acknowledged, ‘an impossible task’. In Beijing, ‘Every one of our men, from diplomats to drivers, was as conspicuous as an albino crow.’
27
A September 1967 directive by Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, noted that the Beijing residency was being forced to operate under siege conditions.
28
Soviet contact with Chinese officials was minimal and closely supervised. The spy-mania and xenophobia of the Red Guards made it difficult for diplomats even to walk round Beijing. Owners of foreign books were forced to crawl on their knees through the streets in shame; those caught listening to foreign broadcasts were sent to prison. As an official Chinese report later acknowledged, ‘The ability to speak a foreign language or a past visit to a foreign country became “evidence” of being a “secret agent” for that country.’ The road leading to the beleaguered Soviet embassy was renamed ‘Anti-Revisionist Lane’. The families of Soviet diplomats and KGB officers were manhandled as they left Beijing airport for Moscow in 1967.
The best first-hand reporting to reach the Centre from Beijing during the Cultural Revolution came from KGB officers of Mongolian or Central Asian extraction who could pass as Chinese citizens and were smuggled out of the Soviet embassy compound after dark in the boots of diplomatic cars. Let out unobserved when the opportunity arose, they mingled with the vast crowds roaming through a city festooned with slogans, read the day’s wall posters (which were declared off-limits for foreigners), attended political rallies and purchased ‘little newspapers’ with news from across China. Late in 1967 they saw the first wall posters denouncing the Head of State, Liu Shaoqi, as the ‘Number One person in authority taking the capitalist road’. After Liu was jailed in the following year, more than 22,000 people were arrested as his alleged sympathizers. Even a night-soil collector, who had been photographed being congratulated by Liu at a model workers’ conference, was paraded through the streets with an accusing placard around his neck and maltreated until he lost his reason. Acting on the principle that ‘Revolutionaries’ children are heroes, reactionaries’ children are lice’, Red Guards killed one of Liu’s children by laying him in the path of an oncoming train. Brutally ill-treated and suffering from pneumonia and diabetes for which he was denied medical treatment, Liu himself died naked on a prison floor in 1969.
Deng Xiaoping, Party General Secretary and ‘Number Two person in authority taking the capitalist road’, was dismissed and sent to do manual labour but - probably on Mao’s personal instructions - allowed to survive. The Red Guards took revenge on his eldest son, a physics student, by throwing him from a second-floor window at Peking University.
29
No fellow student dared to come to his aid, and no doctor was willing to operate on him. He was left paralysed from the waist down. Fed with a relentless series of reports of chaos and atrocity, the Centre interpreted the Cultural Revolution not as a convulsion in the life of a one-party state but as a peculiarly Chinese descent into oriental barbarism. Though perhaps 30 million Chinese were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, however, the numbers killed (about a million) were fewer than the victims of the Stalinist Great Terror.
30
The FCD plan for intelligence operations in the PRC and Hong Kong during 1966-67, approved by Semichastny as KGB Chairman in April 1966, made no reference to the hopeless task of recruiting agents in most of mainland China. Instead it concentrated on proposals for the use of illegals and agent infiltration across China’s northern frontiers with the Soviet Union and the Soviet-dominated Mongolian People’s Republic. Plans were made for the establishment of an illegal residency in Hong Kong and for short-term visits by illegals to the PRC (some of them in collaboration with the Mongolian intelligence agency), but it was recognized that planning for an illegal KGB residency in the PRC could not go beyond a preliminary stage. The most ambitious part of the plan for 1966-67 concerned preparations for cross-border operations in collaboration with KGB units in frontier regions and the Mongolian security service.
31
The most vulnerable area for KGB penetration was the remote, sparsely populated Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in north-west China, a vast expanse of mountain and desert on the borders of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz republics and Mongolia, with which it had far closer ethnic, cultural and religious ties than with the rest of the PRC. Though covering one-sixth of China’s territory (an area the size of western Europe), the XUAR still accounts for only 1.4 per cent of the Chinese population (17 million out of 1.2 billion). Even today over half its population is composed of non-Chinese Muslim ethnic groups, by far the largest of which are the Muslim Uighurs. Before the foundation of the PRC the proportion was much larger. In 1944 a Uighur-led movement in northern Xinjiang had established the independent state of East Turkestan. Though its independence ended when it was forcibly incorporated by the PRC in 1950, Beijing remained concerned by the threat of XUAR separatism for the remainder of the century. Han Chinese immigration, promoted by Beijing and deeply resented by the Uighurs, increased their numbers from only 6 per cent of the population in 1949 to 40 per cent thirty years later. The leading Communist Party officials at almost all levels in the XUAR were, and remain, Chinese.
32
The horrors of the Cultural Revolution were arguably even worse for the non-Chinese minorities in the XUAR, Inner (Chinese) Mongolia and Tibet, whose whole way of life was threatened, than for the Han Chinese who constituted 94 per cent of the PRC population. The deputy director of religious affairs in Kashgar, one of the most devoutly Muslim cities of the XUAR, later admitted:
During the Cultural Revolution, I saw with my own eyes, before the Great Mosque in Kashgar, piles of Korans and other books being burnt. Some people ordered the Muslims to burn these copies themselves . . . I also saw people trying to pull down the minarets beside the Great Mosque. The masses were very indignant, but they could do nothing.
Mosques in most of the XUAR were closed. Some were used as pork warehouses and Uighur families were forced to rear pigs.
33
The suffering of Tibetan Buddhists was even greater than that of Muslims in the XUAR, but Tibet was too remote and difficult of access for significant KGB operations (though the Centre investigated the possibility of penetrating the entourage of the exiled Dalai Lama).
34
The XUAR, by contrast, had a 1,000-mile frontier with Kazakhstan and one of 600 miles with Mongolia.
In 1968 the Kazakhstan KGB was instructed to set up an illegal residency in Urumqi, the capital of the XUAR, and agent groups in a number of other areas, including the Lop Nor nuclear test site.
35
The Politburo also authorized the KGB to provide arms and training in Kazakhstan for the underground resistance to Chinese rule in the XUAR, which in Russian took the politically correct name of the Voenno-Trudovaya Narodnaya Revolyutsionnaya Partiya (Military-Labour People’s Revolutionary Party) or VTNRP, codenamed PATRIOTY. The Kazakhstan KGB was instructed to print anti-Chinese newspapers in Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Dungan and the other XUAR languages to be smuggled across the border.
36
Sherki Turkestan Evasi
(‘The Voice of Eastern Turkestan’), published in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, called on Uighurs ‘to unite against Chinese chauvinism and to proclaim the establishment of “an independent free state” based on the principles of self-determination and the constitutional law of the United Nations’. Broadcasts by Radio Alma Ata and Radio Tashkent sought to convince XUAR Uighurs that living conditions for Soviet Uighurs were vastly superior to their own.
37