Intelligence asymmetry in East and West

In KGB jargon, the United States was the 'Main Adversary’ (glavnyi protivnik) - just as the CIA regarded its main adversary as the Soviet Union. Unlike Western intelligence agencies, however, the KGB had not one but two 'Main Adversaries’. The second was what the KGB called 'ideological sabotage’ - anything which threatened to undermine the authority of the Communist one-party states in and beyond the Soviet bloc.

The asymmetry between the priorities of the intelligence communities in East and West reflected their radically different roles within the states they served. The Cheka, founded six weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, and its successor agencies were central to the functioning of the Soviet system in ways that intelligence communities never were to the government ofWestern states. Their fundamental role within the one-party state was to monitor and repress dissent in all its forms, whether by violence or more sophisticated systems of social control involving huge surveillance networks. Informers in the German Democratic Republic were seven times more numerous even than in Nazi Germany. The KGB and its intelligence allies played a central role in the suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the pressure on the Polish Communist regime to strangle the democratic Solidarity movement in 1981. More of the KGB’s elite corps of illegals (deep-cover intelligence personnel posing as foreign nationals) were used to penetrate dissident movements within the Soviet bloc than were ever deployed against the United States or other Western targets during the Cold War.

The war against the dissidents was a major part of KGB foreign as well as domestic operations. Indeed, some of the most important of the foreign operations were jointly devised by senior officers of the First Chief and Fifth Directorates, responsible respectively for foreign intelligence and countering ideological subversion. Early in 1977, for example, no less than thirty-two 'active measures’ designed to discredit and demoralise the leading dissident, Andrei Sakharov ('Public Enemy Number One’, as Andropov described him), and his wife, Elena Bonner, were either in progress or about to commence both within the Soviet Union and abroad. Seeking to discredit every well-known dissident who managed to get to the West was a major KGB priority - irrespective of whether the dissident’s profession had, in Western terms, anything to do with politics at all. At the world chess championship in the Philippines in 1978, when the dissident Viktor Korchnoi committed the unforgivable sin of challenging the orthodox Anatolii Karpov, the KGB sent eighteen operations officers to try to ensure his defeat.658

Only when the vast apparatus of Soviet social control began to be dismantled under Gorbachev did the full extent of the KGB’s importance to the survival of the USSR become clear. The manifesto of the hard-line leaders of the August 1991 coup, of which the KGB chairman, Vladimir Kriuchkov, was the chief organiser, implicitly acknowledged that the relaxation of the campaign against ideological subversion had shaken the foundations of the one-party state: 'Authority at all levels has lost the confidence of the population _ The country has in effect become ungovernable.’ Crucial to the change of mood was declining respect for the intimidatory power ofthe KGB, which had hitherto been able to strangle any Moscow demonstration at birth. The most striking symbol of the collapse of the August coup was the toppling of the giant statue of the founder of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinskii, from its plinth in the middle of the square outside KGB headquarters. A large crowd, which a few years earlier would never have dared to assemble, encircled the Lubyanka and cheered enthusiastically as 'Iron Feliks’ was borne away, dangling in a noose suspended fTom a huge crane supplied by the Moscow city government.