The defection of Stanislav Levchenko in the autumn of 1979 did major damage to KGB operations in Japan, particularly those of Line PR. Soon after 8 p.m. on the evening of 24 October, Levchenko approached a US naval commander in the Hotel Sanno near the US embassy in Tokyo and asked him to arrange an urgent meeting with a CIA officer. By dawn the next day Levchenko had a US visa in his passport and a first-class ticket on a Pan Am flight to Washington. After Levchenko refused to meet representatives of the Soviet embassy, he and his CIA escort, surrounded by Japanese policemen, made their way across the tarmac at Narita airport to a waiting aircraft.
87
The Centre, meanwhile, embarked on an immediate damage limitation exercise. Contact with a series of the Tokyo residency’s agents was suspended
88
and planning begun for the creation of a new Line PR network.
89
The most important of the agents compromised by the defection was probably NAZAR. He and the other agents put on ice by the residency must have spent the next few years nervously wondering if they would be publicly exposed. The difficulties encountered by the Tokyo residency in finding replacements for the Line PR agents compromised by Levchenko was reflected in the directives sent in 1980 to residencies in twelve other countries instructing them to cultivate likely Japanese recruits.
90
The disruption of the political intelligence network coincided with a worsening of Soviet-Japanese relations following an increase in the numbers of Soviet SS-20 medium-range missiles stationed in the Far East, the construction of new military bases on the Kuriles (‘Northern Territories’) and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Kenko Suzuki declared in 1980, ‘If the Soviet Union wants to improve its relations with Japan, it must fulfil Japan’s two requests for a withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and the reversion of the Northern Territories.’ He later added a third request for the removal of Soviet SS-20s from the Soviet Far East.
91
On 7 February 1981 the Suzuki government inaugurated an annual Northern Territories Day to promote public support for the return of the four islands.
92
When Suzuki and his Foreign Minister, Yoshio Sakurauchi, visited Moscow to attend Brezhnev’s funeral in November 1982, they invited Gromyko to visit Tokyo for talks aimed at improving relations but were firmly rebuffed. The Kuriles, Gromyko declared, were Soviet territory and ‘the timing and atmosphere’ were not right for a visit.
93
The atmosphere was further damaged in December by Levchenko’s first public revelations of KGB operations in Japan since his defection three years earlier, among them the sensational disclosure that ‘Among the most efficient [KGB] agents were a former member of the Japanese government, several leading functionaries of the Socialist Party of Japan, one of the most eminent Sinologists with close contacts with government officers, and several members of the Japanese Parliament.’
94
Though the Centre had doubtless been expecting such revelations, they were none the less a public relations disaster which undermined much of its active-measures offensive.
Given the US military bases in Japan, it was inevitable that Soviet relations with Tokyo in the early 1980s should suffer from the fear of both the Centre and the Kremlin that the Reagan administration was making preparations for a nuclear first strike. The main priority of the Tokyo residency, as of residencies in the West, was to collect intelligence on these non-existent preparations as part of operation RYAN.
95
Meanwhile, even the JSP, which only a few years earlier had been regarded by the Centre as an important vehicle for active measures, had become alarmed by the Soviet arms buildup in the Far East. In 1983 the JSP leadership officially informed the CPSU that the SS-20 missile bases in Soviet Asia were ‘the cause of great concern to the Japanese people and to those in other regions of Asia’.
96
According to opinion polls the proportion of Japanese people concerned by ‘a military threat coming from the Soviet Union’ grew from 55 per cent in 1981 to 80 per cent in 1983.
97
The foreign intelligence ‘work plan’ for 1984, circulated to Tokyo and other residencies in November 1983 at the height of operation RYAN, declared, ‘The threat of an outbreak of nuclear war is reaching an extremely dangerous position. The United States is involving its NATO allies and Japan in pursuing its aggressive designs.’ Japan was elevated, along with the United States, its NATO allies and China, to the status of one of the ‘main targets’ for KGB agent penetrations. Residencies were instructed to embark on an active-measures offensive ‘exacerbating contradictions between the USA, Western Europe and Japan’.
98
While the dawn of the Gorbachev era dissipated the dangerous tension of the early 1980s, it did little to bring closer the long-delayed peace treaty with Japan. As Gorbachev embarked on ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy, Georgi Arbatov, the Director of the US-Canada Institute, tried to persuade him that the Soviet Union ‘should give back two or even all four of the [Kurile] islands to the Japanese, otherwise we’d never get anywhere with them’.
99
Gorbachev did not listen. In April 1991, eight months before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he complained during a speech in the Soviet Far East, on the eve of his first visit to Tokyo, ‘Everybody keeps asking me . . . how many islands I am planning to give away.’ When voices in the audience shouted, ‘Don’t give away a single one!’ Gorbachev replied, ‘I feel the same as you.’
100
Despite the damage to the Line PR agent network as a result of Levchenko’s defection, Line X appears to have been little affected and may well have expanded its activities at least until the spring of 1987. In May of that year, it was revealed that a Toshiba subsidiary had joined with a Swedish firm to sell to the Soviet Union sophisticated machine tools and computers which made it possible to manufacture submarine propellers whose low noise emissions made them difficult to detect. Almost simultaneously a Japanese spy ring working for Soviet intelligence was discovered to have supplied secret documents on AWACS technology to Soviet intelligence. The Japanese government responded by expelling an officer from the Tokyo residency. Moscow retaliated by expelling the Japanese naval attaché and a Mitsubishi executive.
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Though the KGB offensive in Japan generated many tactical operational successes, it ended in strategic failure. The enormous quantity of S&T collected by Line X from the West and Japan could not save the Soviet system from economic collapse. Nor were KGB active measures able to persuade Tokyo to sign a peace treaty acceptable to Moscow. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Russia and Japan were the only major combatants in the Second World War that had not yet ‘normalized’ their relations.
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The Special Relationship with India
Part 1: The Supremacy of the Indian
National Congress
The Third World country on which the KGB eventually concentrated most operational effort during the Cold War was India. Under Stalin, however, India had been regarded as an imperialist puppet. The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
dismissed Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, who led India to independence in 1947, as ‘a reactionary . . . who betrayed the people and helped the imperialists against them; aped the ascetics; pretended in a demagogic way to be a supporter of Indian independence and an enemy of the British; and widely exploited religious prejudice’.
1
Despite his distaste for Stalinist attacks Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, ‘had no doubt that the Soviet revolution had advanced human society by a great leap and had lit a bright flame which could not be smothered’. Though later eulogized by Soviet writers as ‘a leader of international magnitude’ who ranked ‘among the best minds of the twentieth century’,
2
Nehru was well aware that until Stalin’s death in 1953 he, like Gandhi, was regarded as a reactionary. During the early years of Indian independence, secret correspondence from Moscow to the Communist Party of India (CPI) was frequently intercepted by the Intelligence Branch (IB) in New Delhi (as it had been when the IB was working for the British Raj). According to the head of the IB, B. N. Mullik, until the early 1950s ‘every instruction that had issued from Moscow had expressed the necessity and importance [for] the Indian Communist Party to overthrow the “reactionary” Nehru Government’.
3
Early in 1951 Mullik gave Nehru a copy of the latest exhortations from Moscow to the CPI, which contained a warning that they must not fall into government hands. Nehru ‘laughed out loud and remarked that Moscow apparently did not know how smart our Intelligence was’.
4
Neither Nehru nor the IB, however, realized how thoroughly the Indian embassy in Moscow was being penetrated by the KGB, using its usual varieties of the honey trap. The Indian diplomat PROKHOR was recruited, probably in the early 1950s, with the help of a female swallow, codenamed NEVEROVA, who presumably seduced him. The KGB was clearly pleased with the material which PROKHOR provided, which included on two occasions the embassy codebook and reciphering tables, since in 1954 it increased his monthly payments from 1,000 to 4,000 rupees.
5
Another Indian diplomat, RADAR, was recruited in 1956, also with the assistance of a swallow, who on this occasion claimed (probably falsely) to be pregnant.
6
A third KGB swallow persuaded a cipher clerk in the Indian embassy, ARTUR, to go heavily into debt in order to make it easier to compromise him. He was recruited as an agent in 1957 after being trapped (probably into illegal currency dealing) by a KGB officer posing as a black-marketeer .
7
As a result of these and other penetrations of the embassy, Soviet codebreakers were probably able to decrypt substantial numbers of Indian diplomatic communications.
8
As KGB operations in India expanded during the 1950s and 1960s, the Centre seems to have discovered the extent of the IB’s previous penetration of the CPI. According to a KGB report, an investigation into Promode Das Gupta, who became secretary of the Bengal Communist Party in 1959, concluded that he had been recruited by the IB in 1947.
9
Further significant IB penetrations were discovered in the Kerala and Madras parties.
10
By the 1960s KGB penetration of the Indian intelligence community and other parts of its official bureaucracy had enabled it to turn the tables on the IB.
11
After the KGB became the main conduit for both money and secret communications from Moscow, high-level IB penetration of the CPI became much more difficult. As in other Communist parties, this secret channel was known only to a small inner circle within the leadership. In 1959 the PCI General Secretary, Ajoy Gosh, agreed with the Delhi residency on plans to found an import-export business for trade with the Soviet bloc, headed by a senior Party member codenamed DED, whose profits would be creamed off for Party funds. Within little more than a decade its annual profits had grown to over 3 million rupees.
12
The Soviet news agency Novosti provided further subsidies by routinely paying the CPI publishing house at a rate 50 per cent above its normal charges.
13
Moscow’s interest in Nehru was greatly enhanced by his emergence (together with Nasser and Tito) as one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, which began to take shape at the Bandung Conference in 1955. An exchange of official visits in the same year by Nehru and Khrushchev opened a new era in Indo-Soviet relations. On his return from India in December, Khrushchev reported to the Presidium that he had received a warm welcome, but criticized the ‘primitive’ portrayal of India in Soviet publications and films which demonstrated a poor grasp of Indian culture. Khrushchev was, however, clearly pleased with the intelligence and personal security provided by the KGB during his trip and proposed that the officers concerned be decorated and considered for salary increases.
14
American reliance on Pakistan as a strategic counterweight to Soviet influence in Asia encouraged India to turn to the USSR. In 1956 Nehru declared that he had never encountered a ‘grosser case of naked aggression’ than the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, but failed to condemn the brutal Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in the same year. India voted against a UN resolution calling for free elections in Hungary and the withdrawal of Soviet forces. The Kremlin increasingly valued Indian support as, with growing frequency, the Non-Aligned Movement tended to vote in the UN with the Soviet bloc rather than the West. During the 1960s India and the Soviet Union found further common cause against Mao’s China.
15
Within Nehru’s Congress Party government the KGB set out to cultivate its leading left-wing firebrand and Nehru’s close adviser, Krishna Menon, who became Minister of Defence in 1957 after spending most of the previous decade as, successively, Indian High Commissioner in London and representative at the United Nations. To the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, ‘It was . . . plain that [Menon] was personally friendly to the Soviet Union. He would say to me heatedly: “You cannot imagine the hatred the Indian people felt and still feel to the colonialists, the British . . . The methods used by American capital to exploit the backward countries may be oblique, but they’re just as harsh.” ’
16