The KGB vs. the CIA
For a long time, the “Done Secret” vulture lay on the work of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR. Especially on the work of the First Main Directorate of Foreign Intelligence of the USSR against the United States of America.
Doctor historical Sci., Lieutenant General, former Deputy PSU, Head of the Information and Analytical Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, Nikolai Leonov tells how the work of Soviet intelligence went on different continents.
"TOMORROW". Nikolai Sergeevich, you were a specialist in the Latin American direction of work of the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, how important was your work in this area of Soviet intelligence for the USSR?
Nikolay LEONOV. The confrontation between the USSR and the USA at that time was mainly manifested in the rivalry for influence in the third world.
Then, strictly speaking, such a principle was formed: “With whom the third world will go, he will win, in the end, a geopolitical victory!”. From a politico-military point of view, our positions at that time in the third world countries were preferable. Because the leaders of most of the countries that have united in the non-aligned movement, to a much greater extent shared socialist ideas than the ideas of a liberal market sense. Due to the fact that the social nature of production and the socialist form of economic management made it possible to concentrate the resources of the state in one fist and solve national problems quite quickly enough, and this attracted them in the socialist economic system.
But in terms of economic advantage was on the side of the United States of America. There were countries that were politically and politically connected with our country, receiving both ideological support and weapons, but the real civil-economic connection was with the United States.
For example, Syria, a very close and friendly country in relation to the USSR. The military and merchant ships of our country were based in its ports, however 98% of its economic ties were in the West. This was the imbalance of relations between the USSR and the third world countries.
But we, the staff of the PGU KGB of the USSR, sought to strengthen the position of our country in the countries of Latin America, and Cuba, of course, was supported by Cuba, and to a lesser extent Nicaragua, and other countries of the region, who tried to repeat the construction of a socialist experiment. The leaders of these countries can undoubtedly include the President of Chile, Dr. Allende.
After the revolution in 1968, we helped the Panamanian people a lot so that they could regain control of the Panama Canal and get it into their own property, which was the American water artery.
We then achieved great success and if what happened in the 1991 year, a bummer in our state itself, did not happen, then the forces that were involved on the external front, including in Latin America, were large enough to practically guarantee our final victory.
"TOMORROW". Your main task, as an employee of the USSR’s External Political Intelligence, was to influence the governments of Latin American countries, or to recruit US CIA employees, since without knowing the plans of the enemy, it is impossible to accept either offensive or counter measures?
Nikolai Leonov. I would not even divide these issues, because the staff of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR always had to solve complex problems, and recruitment of employees of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Americans in general, who could be admitted to the state secrets of their country as diplomatic, economic and military departments. In parallel with this, in those countries where it was possible to influence the political situation through its establishment. There, of course, we worked with the governments of these countries, with prominent political figures, with parliamentarians, with journalists in order to prepare the ground for strengthening the positions of the Soviet Union, or now Russia, in these countries, since these will be eternal intelligence tasks.
"TOMORROW". Then let me ask you a question about technical methods of work. In a number of books it is said that in the territory of Mexico where you were a resident, did your colleagues hold operational meetings with PSU agents from the NSA, like R. Lipka and the CIA, like O. Ames?
Nikolai Leonov. We did meet with our agents, which were acquired in the United States of America and other capitalist countries in Mexico.
This was done for the reason that the counterintelligence regime in the United States was naturally more strict and harsh, and many Americans themselves preferred to meet with Soviet intelligence agents, traveling abroad of their country. For example, in Canada or Mexico - since their border with the United States is very long and transparent, hundreds of thousands of people cross it daily. Control on these borders, neither then nor now, as the Americans do not try, cannot be 100% effective.
Moreover, the US submitted drove across the border with a small load, these meetings were successful, without causing problems, from the point of view, the security of the intelligence communications of our intelligence.
"TOMORROW". But your agency could not have a large number of agents in the Brazilian or Mexican Counterintelligence Offices. In this regard, did your colleagues, receiving information from local agents and analyzing them, to find out what the United States would do in the Latin American continent, to request information about this situation in the residency of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR in order to take countermeasures on the actions of the CIA this continent?
Nikolai Leonov. This was the usual procedure. After all, the residency of intelligence of any country, planning an event, necessarily sets a couple of tasks. They can be formulated in the following way, but what will this lead to, what will be the final result, and what will be our plans if the result of our actions is unfavorable?
In case of failure or even disruption of the operation, Therefore, it is always planned to plan in advance the ways of escape, or the ways of localizing those negative consequences that may arise as a result of the actions taken by the intelligence of some country.
And the process of analysis is simple everywhere, it consists of two stages, first some kind of information base is accumulated. After all, if you have little operational base, then no analysis of the situation, wherever it was, will not help, because in this case one can only guess. But, when there is a sufficient amount of information, as in a mathematical problem, and you start to build logical solutions from this material, then there is an analytical approach. Analysis is a secondary phase in working with information, primary is always its collection, and when there is enough information to reflect on what trend and direction begins to dominate and what direction the development will take, this phase is called analysis.
"TOMORROW". Nikolai Sergeevich, I mentioned Mexico for a reason, where you, if I am not mistaken, were a resident of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR. How could you comment on the statement of one of the democratic newspapers, where it was said, not without the help of O. Kalugin, that the colonel of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR from Office “K” O. Nechyporenko was expelled from Mexico due to the fact that he was preparing for it territory of a military coup. And his responsibilities included bribing the pro-Soviet press and the military, which would have brought to power in Mexico City a pro-Soviet government?
Nikolay LEONOV. This statement can be qualified as ignorant nonsense and fiction. We did not plan any coup d'état in one country of the world, and it would have been funny at all if intelligence could carry out state system coups in such a way, the whole world would be shaking endlessly from them.
I know very well Oleg Maksimovich Nechiporenko, now he is a colonel in the SVR reserve, the author of all the circumstances of the murder of US President Kennedy. He was expelled from Mexico for very different reasons. The Americans managed to recruit then and take to their side one young woman, an employee of the USSR Trade Representation in Mexico. I don’t know all the details about how she went to the Americans, what information she told them, which she knew about the situation in the Soviet colony, the only thing that she knew for sure that Nechyporenko is a personnel intelligence officer. And so all the arrows of this traitor went on Nechiporenko, after which he was declared persona non grata. And not because he was preparing a coup, but because he was an intelligence officer of the KGB SSS, and it was necessary to betray more of the noise of the departure of this traitor. And thus the double resonance to escape of this, in general - that insignificant figure, which was the commercial correspondent of the trade mission, turned out!
"TOMORROW". Above, you touched upon the problem of Chile and the help of Dr. Allende. So, what, in your opinion, did not give the USSR the opportunity to provide military assistance to this President of Chile, who was one of the few allies of the USSR on the Latin American continent. Indeed, in the 1979 year, the PGU of the KGB of the USSR had strong positions, in the form of agents in the CIA of the USA, who could warn their supervisors from among the employees of the PGU of the USSR KGB that a military coup in Chile is inevitable?
Nikolai Leonov. And this prevented us from knowing that the coup was inevitable, and the balance of power in Chile, obviously, was not in our favor. Therefore, we did not provide all the assistance that could be provided.
I remember that there were discussions of this issue, whether to give Chile a new loan, 30-40 million dollars, whether to send weaponwhich, by the way, was requested by none other than Pinochet, who, being the commander-in-chief of the land forces under Allende, came to Moscow and negotiated the acquisition of Soviet weapons.
We, the intelligence of the KGB of the USSR, have always been against both of them, because Allende has always played by purely democratic rules. He was a naive Democrat, he did not in any way dare to apply some kind of force to his obvious opponents, who, by the way, unleashed real terror against him. Nevertheless, Allende believed that everything in Chile should develop within an absolute, clean and sterile democracy.
After all, he always turned to the parliament and the courts, and ended up with the very "fighters for democracy" staged a military coup with the shooting of the presidential palace, with the assassination of the president himself.
"TOMORROW". Let's touch the technology of recruiting agents of the PGU KGB of the USSR in the United States. The voluntary appearance at the USSR Embassy in the United States by many US intelligence officers with a proposal for cooperation is a consequence of the poor performance of the FBI or the good performance of counterintelligence units of the KGB intelligence services, which were also probed by US CIA officers Lee Howard, Ames and Lipka from the NSA?
Nikolai Leonov. Counterintelligence of the KGB of the USSR has nothing to do with it, because many US intelligence officers came, as you rightly noted, to the Soviet Embassy of the USSR offering their services, which, of course, indicates the poor performance of the FBI.
But this also suggests that US citizens who served in the special services of their country had sympathy for our country. To her system, her culture, and volunteered to offer their services to our intelligence officers, and the history of intelligence knew a lot of similar facts. After all, the best agents of our country were acquired by intelligence officers of the USSR not for money, but on the ideological basis of their sympathies for our country.
And the service of our counterintelligence in these operations played a very important role, because it had to make a decision and answer the question, who was the provocateur or an honest well-wisher? And to solve this question was not very easy, because the provocateur could bring documents. Or call you to a meeting in the city, during which you can fall into a trap, with all the subsequent scandalous history, noise in the press and so on. Here in this case counterintelligence helped.
When the American intelligence services learned that many people from among the US citizens came to us in this way, they began to send us provocateurs, and dozens, and we quickly learned how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and this is a great merit of our counterintelligence.
"TOMORROW". In a number of books written on a documentary basis, for example, The Hanssen Case. "Moles" in the USA "A. Kolpakidi and D. Prokhorov, it is argued that the main motive for cooperation with the PGU of the KGB of the USSR among its gold agents, as the head of the CIA counterintelligence department O. Ames, as the representative of the FBI in the State Department R. Hanssen was only material motive.
Nikolai Leonov. In the PGU of the KGB of the USSR there was a special unit that conducted cases of particularly important agents, but I remember that the American special services on the basis of the trials of those whom you named, came to the conclusion that in the United States there is a category of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. the special services of other countries in terms of their material difficulties.
Then the US intelligence agencies conducted surveys of the main categories of employees of the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies and revealed more than four thousand names of employees of state institutions of their country who, to varying degrees, experienced financial difficulties.
Debts, large loans for the construction of houses, which was not entirely secured by their financial support. All of these four thousand people came under the hood of the FBI as potentially vulnerable individuals. But you yourself understand that it is never possible to talk only about the material factor, as the predominant factor of cooperation of US intelligence officers with intelligence services of the KGB of the USSR. He could become a detonator, or one of the components of a decision to cooperate with Soviet and then Russian intelligence. In addition, the money for the information provided could be paid by both China and Israel, who also conduct intelligence work in the United States. And since the Soviet Union was an opponent of the United States, the coming to the special services of the USSR deliberately carried a charge of political will.
"TOMORROW". And what could have killed off agents like Hanssen, Ames and the like?
Nikolay LEONOV. In my opinion, this is a betrayal. Agents of this level could not fail by themselves.
"TOMORROW". Could Aldrich Ames be involved in the discovery in his ranks of such large "moles" in the PGU of the KGB of the USSR as Gordievsky, Yuzhin and Motorin?
Nikolay LEONOV. Ames could give out recruitment materials that went through his hands.
As for Oleg Gordievsky, his disclosure is not connected with any of the American sources of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR. Counterintelligence has long suspected Gordievsky of collaborating with the enemy. This whole epic, in the form of a call to Moscow, an unsuccessful attempt at detention,
the flight from the USSR was caused by the fact that the KGB had very strong suspicions about him. However, there were no “iron” materials that would allow us not to play cat and mouse with him, but to put handcuffs on him and send him to the detention facility
"TOMORROW". So, no matter how he boasts in his memoirs that for a long time he was the most elusive agent in the KGB of the USSR - is this not entirely true?
Nikolay LEONOV. Any traitor, when writing memoirs, does not deserve the slightest confidence, because he has to justify himself to those people who have become his new masters. He necessarily exaggerates its significance. Therefore, from ordinary workers in their own memoirs, everyone turns into super-spies, although in reality, as a rule, they occupied a more than modest place in the system of the intelligence service of our country.
"TOMORROW". If we touched upon the betrayal, then who, by your assessment, was a traitor or, as he himself stated, the victim of the CIA officers who kidnapped him in Rome in 1985, and then who came to the Soviet Embassy in Washington in the spring of that year, Colonel PGU KGB of the USSR V. Yurchenko?
Nikolay LEONOV. I remember this fact well because I myself sent Vitaly Yurchenko abroad and formulated him a task for this business trip, and was ready to take responsibility for the action that Yurchenko carried out with the departure to the enemy. By the time of the short-term business trip to Rome, he was an employee of the First Department of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR and was under my direct subordination. Everything he said later at his press conference in Moscow is, by and large, a lie. Because, as soon as he returned to the USSR Embassy in Washington, our workers took his urine and blood tests, which showed that everything he had was normal for a normal healthy person, although he claimed that he was stuffed with drugs in the CIA dungeons. His flight and return remain to a large extent a certain mystery.
And we, the employees of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR, have no doubts about his betrayal, and all the measures that were taken through the operational line were dictated by the firm conviction that he left voluntarily.
He was not subjected, on his return to Moscow, to prosecution, because it happened at a politically advantageous moment for us. He returned to the USSR when Gorbachev was facing the first meeting with US President Ronald Reagan. It was very important for us to use the version of Yurchenko that the Americans stuffed him with psychotropic drugs. And Yurchenko played his role as a political actor. But there is no doubt that he gave the enemy things that constitute a state secret.
"TOMORROW". And you can assume that Yurchenko issued during the interrogation of two agents of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR, who in the same 1985 had to be taken out of the game, by CIA officer Edward Lee Howard, and the head of the Russian department of Radio Liberty Oleg Tumanov, whom your colleagues managed to deliver safely to Moscow?
Nikolai Leonov. I can assume that your version is correct to the account of those whom Yurchenko issued, since I do not know if he knew them. Yurchenko did not admit that he had given out, he kept saying the same record all the time that he was befuddled with some kind of drugs, as a result of which he didn’t remember what he was saying to US intelligence officers who had interrogated him.
"TOMORROW". Is it possible in the practice of intelligence work that Yurchenko described after his return from the United States?
Nikolai Leonov. Intelligence often agree among themselves about the rules of their behavior. And we had meetings with the CIA of the United States, during which an agreement was reached that it was impossible to transfer a war of minds to a war with purely physical elements. A scout is defenseless - you can catch him, inject him, whatever, but then it will open up an endless series of murders. No intelligence will do this.
"TOMORROW". And is the cooperation of the CIA residency of the United States on different continents from Latin American to African with drug trafficking curators, with other criminal elements - is it possible?
Nikolay LEONOV. This was the permitted tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency. There was a special directive that allowed US CIA employees to make contacts and use criminal elements, among them there might be drug barons and clean criminals.
But the workers of the PGU KGB of the USSR were forbidden to make such contacts, we had instructions that made it impossible to communicate with any criminal element.
"TOMORROW". How do you think the security services are invulnerable to the US authorities? Many historians and journalists claim that the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Edgar Hoover, was involved in the assassination of US President D. Kennedy. He wanted to limit the influence of the special services on his policies, took off after an unsuccessful landing in the Bay of Pigs of the landing of Cuban immigrants from the post of CIA Director A. Dulles, was going to send in his resignation and Hoover.
Nikolay LEONOV. The US intelligence agencies, like the press, as well as big business, of course, from time to time begin to make their policies, influencing the leadership of the United States of America. Suffice it to say that Jimmy Carter, having come to power in 1976, has very strongly disseminated the CIA. He then created a special Congressional Commission to investigate the activities of the CIA. It was then that such information surfaced that the CIA of the United States, on its own, was used to killing government officials from foreign countries. It turned out that they were involved in the murder in Lumumba in Africa, in Latin America in the murder of Che Guevara, several plans were discovered to kill Fidel Castro.
Thanks to the Commission’s report, a plan was opened for the CIA to cooperate with the military junta in Chile with the aim of a military coup and the overthrow of Dr. Allende in Chile. From this report, as from a horn of plenty, other nightmarish facts about the activities of the CIA were raining. As a result of this investigation, the size of the CIA was reduced, it was forbidden to engage in direct terrorist acts, it was recommended that the US Congress not to allocate huge amounts of money to extract information.
And such strikes the presidents of the United States from time to time inflicted on the CIA.
"TOMORROW". Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation also vulnerable to US presidents?
Nikolay LEONOV. The FBI is far less vulnerable to the authorities of its country, since the organization operates within the United States and has a rather glorious history of its origin. It conducts not only political and counterintelligence operations in the United States, the FBI has the task of investigating all major crimes in the United States of America. In this sense, Americans see the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an effective body to protect the security of their interests. And this authority, acquired by the FBI on internal affairs, is reinforced by the successes that the FBI had in the fight against foreign intelligence services, including the intelligence of our country, therefore the FBI enjoys a fairly high reputation in American society.
Although it is impossible to call the FBI flawless and absolutely effective. After all, the agents of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR, whose names often appear in the press, worked in it and wore an enormous amount of material for our intelligence services, the FBI, as they say, were slamming their ears at that time. Until the democratic time came and the Americans somehow learned about the presence of valuable agents of our intelligence in the walls of the FBI.
"TOMORROW". After August 1991, an FBI office was opened in Moscow. Can this department provide any support to pro-American forces in Russia?
Nikolai Leonov. Not only can, it is and goes in the open. A number of oligarchs, who in the United States are considered to be pillars of democracy, all the time received instructions from the US State Department, and for a long time owned influential publications.
A miracle is still happening in Russia. In Moscow, the special status of the radio station "Freedom". This is a huge bureau with a huge staff of correspondents all over Russia, in other words, with its intelligence network.
And all the information in our “independent” press on 80% comes from American sources. George W. Bush from the first meeting with President V. Putin repeated to him that he would personally follow how the so-called “free press” works in Russia. The United States is always important to have a presence in Russia. In 2003, in the Kommersant newspaper, US Ambassador Vershbow openly linked Russia's entry into the free community of market economy states with the presence of journalists like Yevgeny Kiselev.
Russia is crammed with the agents of the United States of America, because they have a whole network of non-governmental and so-called non-profit organizations for which I was a State Duma deputy when I was, and a law was passed to limit their contacts with the West.
Does the United States have non-profit and non-governmental organizations that would work in the interests of Russia? They immediately require that you register as an agent of a foreign country. In Russia, their network operates legally. I can not, of course, get the personal files of some journalists from the archives of the CIA USA, but their behavior and actions for a long time speak about work against Russia.
There is no doubt that Americans work among deputies of the State Duma, among their assistants, and among journalists, especially those with a liberal orientation. There are enough people who are ready to carry out their orders - as it was during the collapse of the USSR.
By the way, we, the workers of the special services of the USSR, at one time, in the same way, looked for members of parliament who were ready to help pursue our foreign policy if necessary. But Americans have such people now.
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