In a totalitarian state, every lower level is completely dependent on its superior, and there is no organ which can defend it from the caprices of its superior. This is the very essence of the Soviet Union, and this is why it is necessary for the leaders of Soviet intelligence to have recourse to such cunning. The system has been well-tried up to the present time and serves as a kind of lightning conductor. The chief of the GRU camouflages his own opinion, always adopting the position adopted by the general secretary of the Party at a given moment, and at the same time he is able to present the developing situation to the leadership in a most objective way, thus transferring all responsibility from his shoulders to the shoulders of his subordinates. The overseas intelligence organs, separated by thousands of kilometres from Moscow, cannot possibly know what opinion their rulers hold at a given moment. They are therefore forced to give simply objective material which can be directly reported to the higher command. Only in this way can the intelligence leadership exert any influence on its stubborn masters when the latter do not wish to listen to any opinion which contradicts their own.
But the totalitarian system still exerts a crushing influence on all branches of society, including the intelligence services. Nobody has the right to object to, or contradict, the supreme command. Thus it was under Lenin and Stalin and Kruschev and Brezhnev, and thus it will be in the future. Should the supreme command have an incorrect view of things, then no intelligence or information service can convince it otherwise; it does not dare. Nor does first-class American equipment help, nor the very best specialists. It is not the fault of the intelligence services, it is the system's fault. In cases where the supreme command is frankly deluded, as Stalin was in 1941, intelligence has absolutely no chance of influencing him and its effectiveness at that moment is nil.
However, it is not always like that. If the desires of the dictator and his intelligence service coincide, then the latter's effectiveness grows many times greater. In this case, the totalitarian system is not a brake but an accelerator. The dictator does not care at all for moral sides of a question. He is not at all answerable before society for his actions; he fears no opposition or discussion; and he is able to supply his intelligence service with any amount of money, even at a moment when the country is suffering from hunger. The GRU has carried out its most brilliant operations at exactly such moments, when the opinions of the dictator and the intelligence service coincided. And the information service has played a first-class role on these occasions.
Let us consider one example. During the Second World War a section of the tenth directorate (economics and strategic resources) was studying the trends in the exchange of precious metals in the United States. The specialists were surprised that an unexpectedly large amount of silver was allocated 'for scientific research'. Never before, either in America or in any other country, had such a large amount of silver been spent for the needs of research. There was a war going on and the specialists reasonably supposed that the research was military. The GRU information analysed all the fields of military research known to it, but not one of them required the expenditure of so much silver. The second reasonable assumption by the GRU was that it was some new field of research concerning the creation of a new type of weapon. Every information unit was brought to bear on the study of this strange phenomenon. Further analysis showed that all publications dealing with atomic physics had been suppressed in the United States and that all atomic scientists, fugitives from occupied Europe, had at the same time disappeared without trace from the scientific horizon. A week later the GRU presented to Stalin a detailed report on developments in the USA of atomic weapons. It was a report which had been compiled on the basis of only one unconfirmed fact, but its contents left no room for doubt about the correctness of the deductions it made. Stalin was delighted with the report: the rest is well known.
Chapter Twelve
Support Services
All GRU organs which are not directly concerned with the provision or processing of intelligence material are considered as support services. It is not possible for us to examine all of these, but we will simply take briefly the most important of them.
The Political Department is concerned with the ideological monitoring of all GRU personnel. The military rank of the head of the political department is lieutenant-general and again he is a deputy to the GRU chief. As opposed to any other political departments the GRU political department is made up not of party officials but of professional intelligence officers. There are also several other differences. All political directorates and departments of the Soviet Army are subordinated to the chief political directorate of the Soviet Army, which is at the same time one of the Central Committee departments. The GRU political department, however, is subordinated directly to the Central Committee administrative department. The political department of the GRU has considerable weight in Moscow, especially as regards staff movements, but it has no right to interfere in intelligence work. It exerts practically no influence on the activities of overseas branches of the GRU. Overseas the residents are personally responsible for the ideological monitoring of their officers.
The Personnel Directorate is directly beneath the chief of the GRU. The head of the directorate, a lieutenant-general, is also a deputy to the chief of the GRU. The directorate is staffed only by intelligence officers who, in common with officers of the procurement and processing organs, the political department and other branches of the GRU, regularly go abroad for a period of several years and then return to work at domestic postings.
The personnel directorate has exceptional influence both in the GRU and outside. It directs the movements of all officers, not only inside the GRU, but in a number of satellites, in fleet intelligence, intelligence directorates of military districts and groups of forces too, and also in the intelligence services of Eastern bloc countries.
The Operational/Technical Directorate is concerned with the development and production of all espionage equipment and apparatus. Within its dominion fall several scientific research institutes and specialised undertakings. On the orders of the procurement organs the directorate prepares equipment for secret writing and micro-photography, several kinds of dead letter-box, radio appliances, eavesdropping material, armaments and poisons, to name but a few. Its head is a lieutenant-general, although he is not classed officially as a deputy.
The Administrative/Technical Directorate is in charge of foreign currencies and other items of value, gold and diamonds, for example. This directorate is the currency middle-man between the military industrial commission and the operational users. It controls all the currency resources of the GRU and also carries out secret speculative operations on the international market. Possessed of colossal currency resources, it frequently uses them in order to exert secret pressure on individual businessmen, statesmen and sometimes even on whole governments. No less important, it is responsible for the growth of capital belonging to the GRU and for the acquisition of 'clean' currency.
The Communications Directorate deals with the organisation of radio and other communication between the GRU and its overseas units. Needless to say, it controls several powerful reception and transmission centres of its own, but should the need arise to secure special channels of communication, in case of a worsening of operational conditions, for example, then it can make use of the services of the cosmic intelligence directorate, communicating with illegals and agents by means of GRU satellites.
The Financial Department: unlike the administrative/technical directorate, the financial department deals only with Soviet money, not with foreign currency. The financial department carries out legal financial operations in the Soviet Union.
The First GRU Department (Passport) studies passport regulations worldwide. In the pursuit of this esoteric duty it has the greatest collection in the world of passports, identity cards, driving licences, military documents, passes, police documents, railway, air and sea tickets. The department keeps maps of many thousands of frontier posts, customs and police posts, and so on. The department can at any moment say what documents are required at any given control point in the world, what sort of questions are asked, and what stamps are to be put on the passports and other documents. Within a few hours, it can forge the passport of any country to conform with the latest changes in the passport and visa regulations of that country, having at its disposal hundreds of thousands of blanks for new passports, identity cards and driving licences for every country in the world. In my experience, the preparation of the papers which will preserve one's true identity can be done in a very short time.
The Eighth GRU Department is the most secret of all the top secret units of the GRU. The eighth department possesses all the GRU's secrets. It is here that the enciphering and deciphering of all incoming and outgoing documents is carried out.
The Archives Department is possibly the most interesting of all the departments. In its cellars are millions of personal details and files on illegals, domestic officers, undercover residencies, successful recruitment of foreigners (and unsuccessful ones), material on everyone from statesmen and army heads to prostitutes and homosexuals and designers of rockets and submarines. In every file lies the fate of an individual, in every file there is an unwritten novel.
PART TWO
Chapter One
Illegals
We can define an illegal as an officer of strategic intelligence performing the tasks of the Centre on the territory of a foreign state, who passes himself off as a foreigner but not as a Soviet citizen. Illegals are frequently confused with agents, but these are completely different things. The crucial difference is that the agent is an inhabitant of a foreign country who has been recruited by, and works in the interest of, Soviet intelligence, whereas an illegal is first and foremost a Soviet officer passing himself off as a foreigner. Sometimes some of the most valuable and deserving agents receive Soviet citizenship as an incentive and are awarded the rank of an officer of the GRU or the KGB, but even so, an agent remains an agent. However, in the occasional case when a foreigner has been recruited by Soviet intelligence and for some reason or other changes his appearance or name and continues his activities with false documents, then he is called an illegal agent.