As a number of people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons.
No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What little there is in the British press is almost exclusively the routine nonsense of espionage – expulsions and counter expulsions. The recent great brouhaha about Oleg Bitov rather makes the point. What did we learn? The British intelligence services have ‘safe houses’ and defector procedures: the KGB are willing to have all kinds of nonsense talked on their behalf. So what?
The books that are available are mostly rubbish, tales from defectors now in the embrace of the West’s intelligence services; and there are too many obvious examples of such defectors having their scripts written for them for anyone with critical faculties to do anything but be suspicious of them all.
Victor Suvorov’s books exemplify this. (Suvorov is a pseudonym). His first, The Liberators (London 1981) was a sardonic inside account of life in the Red Army which he presents as a large, drunken, corrupt brutal shambles, occasionally putting on charades for the visiting top brass from Moscow. (1) Precisely because this was such a refreshing blast of fresh air on the subject, it seemed ‘real’ to me – I believed it. (Mostly I believed it because it seemed consonant with my view of wider Soviet society – drunken, brutal, charade-mounting.) A year later Suvorov produced Inside The Red Army (1982) which tells the opposite story. Here, in great detail, is the super-efficient, super-dangerous Red Army beloved of the Pentagon’s estimators. So striking was the reversal that even mild-mannered ‘Kremlin watcher’ Andrew Crankshaw was moved to ask in his review if “Suvorov has been persuaded by his new American friends that he must not make fun of such a solemn subject.” (Observer 24 Oct. 1984)
A year later Suvorov produces a third, Soviet Military Intelligence (London 1984) which drove the Times‘ reviewer Iain Elliot to wonder “Could the same man who, as a young tank commander, participated in the ‘liberation’ of Czechoslovakia in ’68, really be so expert in the inner workings of the GRU to produce such a comprehensive manual?” (10 July 1984)
Defectors’ stories are bound to be suspect. How much credence would the world have given to Phillip Agee had he published his book on the CIA while living in Moscow?
The non-defector books are hardly more encouraging. Take two recent examples, John Barron’s KGB Today: The Hidden Hand (London 1983) and Dezinformatzia by Goodson and Schultz (London 1984). Barron’s book consists almost entirely of ‘interviews’ with Soviet defectors, tarted-up with reconstructed ‘dialogue’. Those sections of it which are believable are banal. Barron’s books on the KGB (this is the second: the earlier one was KGB (1974)), like his UK counterparts, Pincher and Deacon, aspire to be scare stories without ever being remotely frightening. But then with the US, UK, much of Western Europe, and recently Canada, all lurching to the right, it is difficult to make the KGB (or the Soviet Union) seem convincingly scary.
Dezinformatzia, the work of a couple of the newer right-wing ‘intellectuals’, manages little better. Despite the gaudy trappings of pseudo-social science – ‘a longitudinal study’ etc, complete with graphs and diagrams – the authors repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot (feet?) by citing examples of Soviet propaganda ‘falsehoods’ which are, to anyone outside the ranks of the fruit-cake right-wing, manifestly true.
For example, in the study of Soviet propaganda themes 1976-1979, they tell us of:
“the Kremlin’s major campaign against the CIA… defaming (sic) the Agency by portraying it as an arm of American imperialism, assisting only dictatorial regimes and employing the most devious and draconian regimes.”
(Agreed the use – if true – of ‘only dictatorial regimes’ would be wrong, but the rest of it?)
To support this claim the authors quote from the Soviet weekly New Times (available in this country from the Novosti press agency in London, but hardly worth the bother – it is awful) which describes the CIA as:
“one of the main tools of the US ruling elite, who would like to remake the world in a way that best suits their purposes.”
This is defamatory?
In their section on disinformation – ‘active measures’ is the new buzz word – all the authors can find to terrify us with is the dear old World Peace Council (which I’m old enough to remember as something of a joke during CND’s first wave, back in the sixties), a French newsletter with a circulation smaller than The Lobster’s, and some forged Army manuals and documents which don’t appear to have ever fooled anybody. The authors, in short, singularly fail to support their conclusion that:
“the Kremlin gained the ability to conduct active measures on a massive, world-wide scale against the US and NATO (as well as other targets).”
This may be true, and I have no doubt that the Kremlin would like it to be true. But where is the evidence? Not here, at any rate. (2)
Perhaps I am just citing the shoddy end of all this. Perhaps there are good, serious-minded books on the KGB et al which I haven’t come across yet. If there are I hope someone will point them out. But at the moment R.W. Johnson’s comments in the London Review of Books (6 September 1984) strike me as the nub:
“Of KGB covert action there is almost no hard evidence at all. Not a single major KGB covert action – comparable, say, to the Bay of Pigs or the Chile destabilisation – has been uncovered.” (3)
Maybe it comes down to this. Were I living in the Soviet bloc I would be extremely interested in – and fearful of – that bloc’s intelligence/security agencies. Living in Britain I can see little reason to be interested in, let alone fearful of, their activities. But looking at Northern Ireland, or the policing of the miners, I can see every reason to be interested in and fearful of this State’s machinery of repression. And looking at Italy, every reason to keep on reading books about the CIA.
RR
Notes
- This view was confirmed by Alexander Cockburn’s The Threat (London 1983) based on interviews with emigre Soviet Jews who had been through the Red Army. The major difference which seems to emerge between the Soviet armed forces and those of the United States is the US soldier’s access to a wider variety of drugs. His Soviet counterpart seems stuck with alcohol and its substitutes such as boot polish. Maybe the occupation of Afghanistan will introduce hashish to a wider section of Soviet society.
- On this it is worth looking at Stephen de Mowbray’s Soviet Deception and the Onset of the Cold War in Encounter (July/August 1984). De Mowbray, ex MI6, is one of the quartet who wrote the introduction to Golitsyn’s New Lies For Old, discussed in Lobster 5. He argues that the Soviet Union misled the other allies during WW2 as to its post-war plans for Eastern Europe (with a little help from one or two friends in the British government at the time.) It’s hard to understand why this thesis is so interesting to Encounter’s editor. All the Allies were playing complex games during the war; all had secret plans for the post-war years; all ran deceptions on allies as well as enemies. On this, on the British side, see, for example, the sections on SOE in Verrier’s Through The Looking Glass (reviewed in Lobster 3); on the American side see the account of the Council on Foreign Relations war-time planning in Imperial Brain Trust, Shoup and Minter (Monthly Review Press, London 1977). The biggest single deception operation run during the war was probably the US plans to take-over the British Empire, dressed up as ‘anti colonialism’.
- This view is (reluctantly) confirmed by the studiedly anti-Soviet journal Survey (Autumn/Winter 1983). In a detailed run-through Soviet assassinations/covert actions etc. the only significant act they can find that took place recently and involved someone who was not a defector, is the attempt on the Pope, and the evidence on Soviet/Bulgarian involvement is thin, at best.