A question that follows is whether those who accepted freely did so because they expected a refusal to be punished.
The individual stories can help us understand the data, but they do not resolve the issue in all cases. A first point is that for some candidates, the offer of recruitment signaled an unspoken menace: the KGB was aware of the subject’s history. The candidate with a compromised record might anticipate that to hesitate would invite the KGB to open the Pandora’s box of the past. Better to accept recruitment immediately than allow the box to be opened.
This does not cover all cases, however. A genuine desire to make up for past misdeeds was possible (agents Neman and Ruta). For those who now felt trapped by youthful misdeeds and wondered how to resume a respectable way of life and a career, the offer of collaboration with the KGB could be welcome: it offered a way to achieve their personal goals. There were also intermediate cases (agents Algis and Genys, for example). KGB officers evidently watched the members of suspicious groups for the weaker links who might be showing mixed feelings about former activities and associates. For these people, KGB intervention could tip the balance from resistance to collaboration without any further pressure.[348]
Related to this, the KGB subjected all our candidates to scrutiny before selecting them for recruitment. There was a covert stage of preliminary investigation, often followed by prolonged discussion with the candidate: the report on Agent Petrauskas notes, for example, that it took as many as twelve separate conversations with an officer before the KGB was convinced of the sincerity of his conversion. By implication, those who would not have been recruited without heavy coercion, and who could hardly have been trusted with sensitive assignments, were not (or should not have been) selected.
Selection is the simplest explanation of the low incidence of coercive recruitment: the KGB preferred recruits whose incentives to cooperate were already aligned or could be aligned with little pressure.[349] This was most likely to be the case for those who had resisted Soviet rule in the past and had now lost the courage of their former convictions. People in this situation might quickly be persuaded that resistance was pointless and that to make a show of resistance could leave them worse off.
Further illustration is provided by two informers that, although mentioned in the reports, are not in the data. These are the fathers of Korabel’nik and Komandulis, who were recruited to inform on their sons and their sons’ friends. Evidence from East Germany suggests that informing on the family circle was sometimes a stumbling block for the most willing recruits.[350] Our documentation makes it appear that the fathers were good citizens who willingly accepted the assignment to spy on their sons (who were eventually recruited as informers themselves). But, setting their political loyalties to one side, considering them only as parents, what choice did the fathers have when the KGB asked them to cooperate? Without some kind of intervention, their children were already on a course leading straight to the labor camp. The KGB was the only outside agency that offered to help. Under those circumstances, what parent would say no?
Any of these people could go on to suffer from further regrets, however. No matter how readily they agreed to cooperate, and whatever their motives, they were often unprepared for the psychological burden of reporting on close friends or family members.
Table 6.4 shows that KGB case officers did not take the quality of compliance for granted. The monitoring of new informers’ performance by an undercover officer or another informer, or by some form of eavesdropping, is mentioned in two-fifths of reports. This might be the extent of it, or the practice of third-party verification might have been considered so normal that it was not mentioned every time.[351]
Some kinds of underperformance did not require verification because they were obvious to the handler. As Table 6.4 shows, two-fifths of the effective informers showed signs of slacking after recruitment, and this included outwardly willing recruits. Slacking took forms that are instantly recognizable to readers from a college setting, where every student has chosen freely to join the course, yet many still contrive to cut classes, fail to respond to the instructor’s messages, and submit assigned work late or not at all. In a similar spirit, the reluctant informer missed appointments and reporting deadlines and, when cornered, reported verbally while declining to record observations in writing.[352]
To fix problematic performance often required case officers to make further investments in their agents’ understanding and capabilities. Two words arise frequently in this context: privitie and vospitanie. Privitie (training) addressed deficiencies in the informer’s tradecraft. Vospitanie (education, or even reeducation) addressed deficiencies in the informer’s understanding of the patriotic duty they owed to the Soviet state and the KGB.
All recruits required training in the tradecraft of undercover work: how to approach a person of interest without arousing suspicion, what information to report, and how to report it without risking exposure. The training did not have to be arduous: for example, agents Genys and Gobis were encouraged to read spy fiction and discuss it with their case officers.[353]
Lack of tradecraft was rarely a significant obstacle, and slacking was often voluntary. Slacking was first and foremost a breach of the trust relationship between agent and case officer. The remedy was to rebuild trust. The first step was to establish on which side the deficiency lay. Sometimes the fault was on the side of the KGB. According to the reports, one officer demotivated Stanislav by trusting him too much. Another did the same to Gobis by distrusting him without sufficient cause. More often, however, the barrier lay on the side of the agent, who withheld full commitment because of some hidden moral or political reservation.
In such cases, the case officer had to undertake the agent’s reeducation, which aimed to restore commitment and trust by reforming the agent’s moral and ideological attitudes. If the agent’s performance improved, the breakthrough could be usefully consolidated by tangible rewards that signaled gratitude and acknowledgment. Thus, reeducation and rewards were used as complements.
The process of thought reform often involved the case officer in many hours of detailed and no doubt repetitive discussion with the agent about the role of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in history and world affairs, the achievements and advantages of the Soviet system, and the rights and obligations of the citizen. Reading such words does little to convey the atmosphere of such discussions. It is an open question whether the balance lay on the side of persuasion or intimidation. Agent Mir may have chosen the path of wholehearted collaboration based on new-found convictions inspired by his mentors. Alternatively, he may have decided that ideological submission followed by loyal cooperation was the only way to bring the bullying lectures to a conclusion. Perhaps persuasion and intimidation were also complements: an important aspect of the process was surely to convince the agent that keeping up the defense of religious or nationalist values would lead inevitably to loss of status and isolation from society.
348
From China Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 141-42, gives an example of seizing the right moment to recruit an agent, cited in the original source as exemplifying good practice.
349
In the 1960s, in East Germany at roughly the same time as most of our stories, Stasi researchers estimated that only 7.7 percent of “unofficial collaborators” in Karl-Marx-Stadt were recruited under duress. Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 41, 47. Dennis, Stasi: Myth and Reality, 98, suggests that this was policy: Stasi guidelines of a few years later recommended that recruitment should be based on “the candidates’ positive political stance, on their personal needs, and interests, on the desire to atone for misdemeanors,” or a combination. “Atonement” might be a cynical euphemism for blackmail, but the desire to atone for misdemeanors implies what we see to have been fairly frequent in our Soviet data: a compromised past, followed by regret. On similar lines, Schmeidel, Stasi: Shield and Sword, 38, attributes the low rate of recruitment by threats to career concerns: the typical Stasi officer advanced by recruiting informers and was damaged by failures, so preferred the willing to the unwilling.
351
That third-party verification was considered normal is implied by a report on the condition of the agent network managed by the KGB Trakai office. A stream of criticisms includes the remark: “Following recruitment of an agent, no evidence of verification is added to the personal file.” (Hoover/LYA, K-1/10/300, 48-65, Report on the status of agent-operative work in the apparatus of the Soviet Lithuania KGB administration for Trakai district by Maj. Gomyranov, consultant, February 1961). Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 15, suggests that the East German Stasi aimed to confirm the accuracy of all agent reports by systematic triangulation.
352
Our reports place considerable weight upon the agent’s willingness to report in writing. It was seen as an inferior outcome when the agent reported verbally to the case officer, who had to write up the report afterward. In East Germany, as argued by Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 15, the Stasi discouraged verbal reporting because of the discretion it gave to the case officer to filter the detail given by the informer.
353
For Chinese informers before the Cultural Revolution, the exploits of Sherlock Holmes were recommended reading. Schoenmals, Spying for the People, 179.