The KGB’s tactical successes, however, had little strategic significance. A few days after the cancellation of Eisenhower’s visit, the US-Japanese Security Treaty was ratified by the Japanese Diet. The resignation of the Kishi government shortly afterwards took the steam out of the protest movement. The left failed to make the treaty a major issue in the November elections at which the ruling LDP, which dominated Japanese politics from 1955 until 1993, gained another comfortable majority. The JCP received less than 3 per cent of the vote and won only three seats.
11
The degree to which Japan was seen by the Centre as effectively a NATO member is indicated by the extensive activity during the 1960s by Line F (‘special actions’) at the Tokyo residency. In the event of war with NATO, Moscow planned a massive campaign of sabotage and disruption behind enemy lines. Each year residencies in NATO and some neutral European countries were expected to draw up detailed plans for the sabotage of four to six major targets.
12
The same applied in Japan, where both Japanese and US installations were targeted. In 1962, for example, Line F made preparations for the sabotage of four major oil refineries in different areas of Japan
13
as well as of US bases on Okinawa.
14
As in NATO countries, Line F in Tokyo was also instructed to reconnoitre possible wartime bases in remote parts of Japan for Soviet sabotage and intelligence groups (DRGs). In 1970, for example, Line F identified four possible DRG landing sites on the north-west coast of the island of Hokkaido.
15
As well as containing precise map references and detailed descriptions of the terrain, each file on a possible DRG base used a standardized coded jargon. Each DRG landing area was known as a DOROZHKA (‘runway’); each site for a DRG base was termed a ULEY (‘beehive’).
The Tokyo residency also made plans for peacetime acts of sabotage intended to damage US-Japanese relations. In Line F jargon each act of sabotage was termed a ‘lily’ (
lilya
), the explosive device a ‘bouquet’ (
buket
), the detonator a ‘little flower’ (
tsvetok
), the explosion of the device a ‘splash’ (
zaplyv
), and the saboteur the ‘gardener’ (
sadovnik
).
16
Among the sabotage plans devised by Line F was operation VULKAN, an attack on the library of the American Cultural Center in Tokyo which was planned to coincide with demonstrations against the Vietnam War in October 1965. The illegal agent NOMOTO was to place a book bomb in a bookcase in the library shortly before it closed one evening, together with a detonator concealed in a pack of American cigarettes which was timed to go off in the early hours of the morning. In order to conceal the KGB’s hand in the operation, Service A was to prepare leaflets purporting to come from Japanese nationalist extremists calling for attacks on US property.
17
The most dramatic scheme devised by Line F to cause a major crisis in US-Japanese relations was a 1969 plan to scatter radioactive material in Tokyo Bay in the expectation that it would be blamed on US nuclear submarines using the Yokosuka naval base and cause a national outcry. Though supported by the Tokyo resident, the plan was turned down by the Centre because of the difficulty of obtaining suitable radioactive material from the United States and the danger that the source of Soviet material might be detected.
18
Two years later KGB plans for ‘special actions’ were drastically scaled down after some of them were compromised by the defection in London of the Line F officer, Oleg Lyalin.
19
The main problem encountered by Line PR during the 1960s was the loss of what had hitherto been its main intelligence asset, the assistance of the JCP, Asia’s largest non-ruling Communist party. As the Sino-Soviet split developed, the Japanese Communist leadership sided more with Beijing than with Moscow. In 1964 Moscow, already engaged with Beijing in the most vitriolic polemics in the history of international Communism, accused the JCP of kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party and declaring war on the CPSU. The JCP retaliated by denouncing the CPSU’s ‘brazen and unpardonable’ attempts to dictate to its Japanese comrades: ‘The chief cause for the disunity in the international Communist movement and the socialist camp today is precisely your self-conceit and the flagrant interference with, and attacks on, the fraternal parties unleashed brazenly by you as a result of this self-conceit.’
The JCP also complained of ‘the destructive activities against our Party of Soviet Embassy staff members and special correspondents’ - doubtless with the activities of the Tokyo residency particularly in mind. It correctly accused Moscow of using spies and informants to maintain contact with, and promote the interests of, those Japanese Communists pursuing ‘anti-party [pro-Moscow] activities’.
20
The Chairman of the JCP Central Committee, Hakamadi Satomi, boasted of burning CPSU literature to heat his
ofuro
(Japanese bath).
21
In the space of a few years the JCP had changed from an important KGB intelligence asset into a hostile target.
22
The Centre’s Japanese operations suffered another major blow in 1963 with the loss of what seems to have been the main illegal KGB residency in Tokyo run by a veteran pro-Soviet Chinese Communist, JIMMY, who, with assistance from Communist Chinese intelligence, had succeeded in setting up an export-import company based in Hong Kong and Tokyo and in procuring bogus Hong Kong identity papers for other KGB illegals. When JIMMY failed to return from a visit to China to see his relatives after the Sino-Soviet split, the Centre decided to wind up his residency, probably fearing that it had been compromised.
23
The Tokyo residency’s lack of major Japanese intelligence sources during the mid-1960s was reflected in the fact that its most productive agent from 1962 to 1967 was a journalist on the
Tokyo Shimbun
, codenamed KOCHI, who appears to have had access to high-level gossip from the cabinet and Foreign Ministry but probably not to classified documents.
24
Line PR’s main strategy after the breach with the JCP was to recruit leading members from the left wing of the main opposition party, the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), which it codenamed KOOPERATIVA,
25
and to use them as agents of influence. On 26 February 1970 the Politburo approved the payment by the KGB of a total of 100,000 convertible rubles (35,714,000 yen) to a number of leading figures in the JSP and to subsidize the party newspaper.
26
Similar subsidies seem to have been paid each year.
27
Probably by the time the Politburo approved secret subsidies to the JSP, five influential party members had already been recruited as KGB agents: Seiichi Katsumata (codenamed GAVR), runner-up in the 1966 election for the post of JSP General Secretary, who in 1974 was given 4 million yen to strengthen his position in the party;
28
Tamotsu Sato (transparently codenamed ATOS), leader of a Marxist faction in the JSP, who was used to place active-measures material in four party periodicals;
29
ALFONS, who was paid 2.5 million yen in 1972, and used to place articles in the JSP daily
Shakai Shimpo
;
30
DUG, a JSP official close to the Party Chairman, who was given 390,000 yen in 1972 for his election campaign;
31
and DIK, paid 200,000 yen in 1972 to publish election leaflets and posters.
32
Other recruits in the 1970s included JACK, a JSP deputy and prominent trade unionist;
33
Shigero Ito (codenamed GRACE), also a deputy and a member of the party’s Central Committee,
34
and DENIS, who had been a close aide of the former JSP Chairman Saburo Eda.
35
KGB confidential contacts included a former Communist codenamed KING, who had become one of the leading figures in the JSP,
36
and KERK, a member of Katsumata’s JSP faction in the Diet.
37
Mitrokhin’s notes on the files of DENIS and GRACE record that their motivation was both ideological and financial.
38
The same was probably true of most of the KGB’s other agents in the JSP. The KGB’s influence operations in the Diet were also assisted by the academic YAMAMOTO, who was described in his file as being ‘ideologically close’ to Moscow. After being recruited as an agent in 1977, he successfully prompted at least two parliamentary questions in each session of the Diet, which, according to the residency’s possibly optimistic assessment, had a significant impact.
39
Of the politicians recruited by the KGB outside the JSP, the most important was Hirohide Ishida (codenamed HOOVER), a prominent parliamentary deputy of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), formerly Minister of Labour. In February 1973 Ishida became Chairman of the newly founded Parliamentary Japanese- Soviet Friendship Association (codenamed LOBBY),
40
and led a delegation to the Soviet Union from 27 August to 6 September, shortly before the visit of Kakuei Tanaka, the first by a Japanese Prime Minister for seventeen years. On this and subsequent visits to Moscow, Ishida was publicly fêted at the request of the Centre by Brezhnev, President Nikolai Podgorny, Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin and other notables.
41
The KGB also went to great pains to flatter Ishida and assure him of the high regard in which he was held by the Soviet leadership. The leading Japanese newspaper,
Asahi Shimbun
, on which the KGB had at least one well-placed agent, reported after Ishida’s visit to Moscow in the summer of 1973: ‘The Soviet Union today said it would immediately release all forty-nine Japanese fishermen detained on charges of violating Soviet territorial waters. The announcement was made by the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet during his meeting with Hirohide Ishida, head of a visiting Japanese parliamentary delegation.’
According to Stanislav Levchenko, then working on the FCD Japanese desk, the Japanese fishermen released in honour of Ishida were among those ‘routinely shanghaied and held for use as bargaining chips’. Ishida was also co-opted into the network of global flattery which the KGB used to service Brezhnev’s voracious appetite for world-wide recognition. He was persuaded by Vladimir Pronnikov, head of Line PR at the Tokyo residency, to show his appreciation for the liberation of the fishermen by presenting Brezhnev with a maroon Nissan limousine to add to his considerable collection of luxury foreign cars. Levchenko, who suspected - probably correctly - that the Nissan had been purchased with KGB funds, was put in personal charge of the car, which was delivered in a crate to FCD headquarters, in order to prevent parts being stolen before its formal presentation to Brezhnev.
42
In 1974, already a KGB confidential contact, Ishida was recruited as an agent by Pronnikov, who was rewarded with the Order of the Red Banner.
43
Ishida became one of the Tokyo residency’s leading agents of influence.
The priority attached by the Centre to operations in Japan in the early 1970s was reflected in the fact that the budget for them in 1973 was almost as large as for India and almost three times as large as for any of the eleven other Asian states which were then the responsibility of the FCD Seventh Department.
44
KGB active measures before and during Tanaka’s visit to Moscow in 1973 were intended to promote a peace treaty and agreement on Japanese- Soviet relations on the lines agreed by the Politburo on 16 August. If progress was made during the negotiations, Tanaka was to be offered the return of the Habomais and Shikotan as well as concessions on fishing rights in return for the abrogation of the US-Japanese Security Treaty and the closure of US military bases.
45
Though Tanaka was not expected to accept these terms, it was hoped to increase Japanese public support for an agreement on these lines.
46
The visit, however, achieved little. Tanaka insisted that return of all the Northern Territories was the pre-requisite for economic cooperation and other forms of improved relations with the Soviet Union.
47
During the remainder of the 1970s, Ishida continued to be used as an agent of influence within both the LDP and the Parliamentary Japanese-Soviet Friendship Association. In 1977, at the request of the KGB, he complained personally to the LDP Prime Minister, Takeo Fukuda, that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and his wife had made themselves unwelcome by their contacts with dissidents and to hint that it was time for him to be recalled.
48
During the 1970s there were at least two further recruitments within the LDP: FEN, a confidant of Kakuei Tanaka,
49
and KANI, a deputy whose career the Tokyo residency claimed to be actively promoting.
50
The key to the KGB’s penetration of conservative politics was the corruption endemic in some factions of the LDP and other parts of Japanese society. Tanaka owed much of his phenomenal success in rising through the ranks to become a cabinet minister at the age of only thirty-nine, despite never having finished secondary school, to the consummate mastery of the politics of the pork barrel which helped to raise his remote prefecture of Niigata ‘from rural obscurity to contemporary affluence’. All those who won contracts for the numerous public works in Niigata were expected to contribute handsomely to Tanaka’s political war chest. In December 1974 he was forced to resign, allegedly on health grounds, after some details of his corruption appeared in the press. In 1976 much more damning evidence emerged that the US aircraft company Lockheed had paid Tanaka and other prominent LDP politicians large bribes to win a contract to supply its Tri-star planes to All Nippon Airways. Lockheed followed in an already long tradition of bribery by foreign firms.
51
The KGB, though able to exploit that tradition, was never able to compete financially with the kick-backs on offer from such major players as Lockheed and, partly for that reason, never truly penetrated the commanding heights of Japanese conservative politics.