Oleg Kalugin,
Smith Gryphon, London 1994
Subtitled ‘My 32 years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West’, this is a mildly interesting read if you want to know how the crumbling Soviet empire looked to an intelligent radical inside the Soviet system. There might be some fragments of interest to those seriously interested in the history of US-Soviet espionage. However, I am not interested in that subject, and to me, on a quick skim, only three snippets struck me.
- On p. 53 Kalugin reports that he and other Soviet intelligence officers were responsible for the rumours that the CIA had killed UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold.
- On p. 170 he reports that ‘after the fall of the Salazar regime Portuguese working for the KGB drove a truck to the Security Ministry and hauled away a mountain of classified intelligence data’. This, presumably, is the ultimate source of the story, which began in this country in Searchlight, linking the Monday Club to the Lisbon-based Aginter Press terror network.
- On p. 192 Kalugin reports that Philip Agee ‘approached our KGB station in Mexico City, offering us reams of information about CIA operations. But our station chief in Mexico City thought Agee was a CIA plant spreading disinformation, and rejected him. Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms.’
This is interesting because Agee has always denied approaching the KGB.
Is Kalugin lying? Agee was accused of going over to the KGB at the time of the publication of his first book, CIA Diary. In 1992 he was accused of being in the pay of Cuban intelligence by former Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga, who had defected in 1987. (This is discussed in Unclassified Aug-Sept 1992, p. 20)
When Agee was in Britain in the mid 1970s, the campaign to prevent the British government expelling him was led by Phil Kelly. I wrote to Kelly and quoted the Kalugin memoir. ‘Beware statements made by former KGB officers’, replied Kelly, preferring to take Agee’s word against Kalugin’s. For the moment, I do too.*
This alleged Agee connection with the KGB is presumably the flimsy basis of the allegation, from MI5, in the notorious ‘Gable memo’ (reprinted in Lobster 24) that Kelly was a ‘KGB man’. You can see how the smear went: Agee went to the KGB (or can be said to have done so); Kelly is the leader of Agee’s defence committee in London, therefore Kelly is KGB.
*Phil Kelly is now a Labour Councillor in Islington and chair of its Education Committee.