a machine gun with ammunition, four revolvers, two portable transmitters, ciphers and codes… topographical maps, cameras, blank Soviet passports, military identity cards and certificates, counterfeit seals of Soviet institutions, Swedish and Norwegian crowns and 80,00 roubles.
A KGB statement reported in the Soviet media gives details of their capture and can be accessed in English (for a fee) here http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/13847060
36 A Secret Life by Benjamin Weiser (Public Affairs, 2004). See also www.kuklinski.us
37 He was interviewed by Bower in the Red Web documentary. Algirdas Vokietaitis, the Lithuanian émigré who made the first contact with the Western secret services in Stockholm in 1943, moved to America, where he was a notable instructor in photography.
38 Two lengthy KGB archive documents (in Estonian) give a thorough picture of the activities of American, British, French, German and Swedish espionage in the Baltics. Dated 4 January 1956 http://www.esm.ee/public/projektid/5/2.osak55.html and 20 February 1957 http://www.esm.ee/public/projektid/5/dokumendid/dok454.html
39 ‘Spies caught and exposed’, Izvestia, 7 March 1957 https://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/13972020
40 This link (in Swedish) gives an account of the story and of a filmed version of Hallisk’s life. http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/1.3727/verklighetens-ramona
41 Ininbergs gives an excellent account of this little-known history.
42 The mission was dogged by bad luck. The three men were dropped a hundred miles from their supposed destination. One of their supply containers was found by a peasant who gave it to what he thought were real partisans, but who were in fact a phoney group run by the KGB (what happened to the peasant is not known, but can be imagined). ‘Broken promises reward Lithuania’s forgotten heroes’ by Edward Lucas, Independent, 9 September 1991.
43 Interviewed in the Red Web documentary.
44 Interviewed by Tom Bower, Independent Saturday Magazine, 22 September 1990.
45 A partial account of this remarkable story (in Czech) is in Československobritské Zpravodajské Soupeřen (Czechoslovak–British Intelligence Rivalry) by Dr Prokop Tomek, Úřad dokumentace a vyšetřovánízločinů komunismu (Institute for the Documentation and Research of the Crimes of Communism, 2006. http://aplikace.mvcr.cz/archiv2008/policie/udv/securita/sbornik14/sbornik14.pdf
46 Along with Hallisk, van Jung and others, they featured in an Estonian documentary, Külalised (The Visitors) in 2002. I am grateful to the producers for providing me with a copy of their film, which deserved a wider audience. http://www.allfilm.ee/web/index.php?lang=en&page_id=111&file_id=1052&cat_id=116
10 The Upside Down World
1 I draw heavily here on The Main Enemy: the Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB by Milt Bearden and James Risen (Random House, 2003). The ‘Gavrilov’ backchannel is discussed on p. 184.
2 Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War by David Murphy and Sergei Kondrashev (Yale University Press, 1999).
3 ‘Death of a Perfect Spy’ by Elaine Shannon, Time, 24 June 2001 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/,8816,164863,0.html
4 This article gives a good indication of what the West was trying to buy – and by implication what it would obtain by other means if necessary. ‘US Is Shopping as Soviets Offer To Sell Once-Secret Technology’ by William Broad, New York Times, 4 November 1991 http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/4/world/us-is-shopping-as-soviets-offer-to-sell-once-secret-technology.html
5 The KGB cannily tried to revive the story of ‘Red Web’ to derail the Baltic independence movements in the late 1980s. The aim was to contrast the frankness of Gorbachev’s approach to history with the silence of the West about its use of fascist collaborators in the post-war era, and the cynical and incompetent behaviour of the CIA and SIS. In November 1987 the KGB brought its greatest trophy, Kim Philby, to Riga, and filmed him in a meeting with Lukaševičs, purportedly (and quite possibly truly) the first time that the two men had met. Philby’s lizard-like face lights up as he discusses Operation Jungle with his host (who spoke fluent English, having been posted to London, under a pseudonym, as a reward for his efforts). The initial aim was to demoralise the Baltic independence movements by highlighting the past. The Soviet authorities then made the material, and former KGB officers, and surviving partisans, available to Mr Bower. In the West, SIS – never before the subject of an unauthorised and unflattering exposé – was furious, telling retired officers that they risked their pensions if they talked to Mr Bower. He short-circuited the ban by talking to CIA veterans and pensionless émigrés. But the tide of history was running too strongly, and Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were in no mood to believe Soviet propaganda of any kind, even when it was true. Mr Bower, quite unfairly, was assumed to be a Kremlin stooge.
An early example of KGB propaganda is Polymany s polichnim: sbornik faktov spionazhom protiv SSSR (Caught red-handed: a collection of facts about espionage against the USSR), State Publishing House for Political Literature, Moscow, 1963. See also KGB, Stasi ja Eesti luureajalugu (KGB, Stasi and Estonian intelligence history) by Ivo Juurvee http://rahvusarhiiv.ra.ee/public/TUNA/Artiklid_Biblio/JuurveeIvo_KGB_Stasi_TUNA2008_2.pdf
6 The Friends: Britain’s post-war secret intelligence operations by Nigel West (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).
7 A gripping account of his defection comes in his autobiographical Tower of Secrets (Naval Institute Press, 1993).
8 The journalist David Satter, then the Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, gives a vivid account of his attempt to meet dissidents in Estonia in 1977.
‘So,’ I said, ‘you are trying to tell me that someone arranged for you to meet me in Tallinn?’ Several of them nodded their heads yes. ‘Show me some identification,’ I said. ‘No, we don’t show any identification,’ said the sandy-haired man, shaking his head firmly. ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ I said, ‘because for a moment it occurred to me that you might actually be the dissidents, but if you won’t identify yourselves, it only proves to me that you’re the KGB.’ The superficial politeness that had prevailed up until that point disappeared. The tall, solemn member of the group leaned over the table. ‘I spent twelve years in the camps,’ he said. ‘My friends have spent six, seven, and eight years in the camps. You’re not going to treat us like a bunch of niggers.’
Stung by the rebuke, Satter resolved to trust his hosts, who gave every appearance of being terrified by KGB surveillance and of making elaborate precautions to avoid it. Only when he returned to Moscow did he find out that the entire meeting had indeed been a charade staged to find out more about his own views and contacts. The real Estonian dissidents had waited in vain for their visitor. ‘Never Speak to Strangers: A memoir of journalism, the Cold War, and the KGB’ by David Satter, The Weekly Standard, 6 August 2007 (vol. 12, no. 44) http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/00/00/13/932plsuu.asp. Satter’s article ‘The Ghost in the Machine’ in the Financial Times on 5 April 1977 was none the less a remarkable event, which not only shocked Western Sovietologists who thought the Baltic struggle for independence was over, but also boosted spirits in the region.