Bizarre.....
Anyway, onward and upward....
Michael,
Are you intentionally over-enlarging the documents you're posting?
Are you enlarging them this much so you can "break them up" and make even more posts with them?
Isn't that against Forum rules?
-- MWT
PS Regarding KGB's "deception program" (aka The Monster Plot), have you ever heard of KGB's Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB)?
Did you know that
in 1959 a top-secret "KGB within the KGB "called "Department 14" or "The 14th Department" was formed in said Second Chief Directorate?
Did you know that the "mission" of SCD's 14th Department was to penetrate and actively deceive the intelligence services of The Main Enemy (aka the U.S.A.) by sending putative volunteer "double-agents," like (triple-agent) GRU colonel Dimitri Polyakov to the U.S. in 1959 (in other words, he was its very first emissary), and "defectors" like KGB "captain" or "major" or "lieutenant colonel" -- take your pick -- Yuri Nosenko to the U.S. in January 1964, in such a way as to form feedback loops with KGB's traditional (since 1921) "active measures counterintelligence operations"?
Have you ever heard of General Oleg Gribanov, the over-aggressive and somewhat bumbling head of the KGB's Second Chief Directorate who personally ran Department 14?
If not, then you really do need to read Bagley's
Spy Wars and
Ghosts of the Spy Wars and
Spy Master so you can start to get a "handle" on all of this.
Here are their "links":
https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGameshttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362https://archive.org/stream/SpymasterStartlingColdWarRevelationsOfASovietKGBChief/Spymaster%20-%20Startling%20Cold%20War%20Revelations%20of%20a%20Soviet%20KGB%20Chief_djvu.txtCheers!
PPS A little note on Polyakov:
A few years later after he'd left the U.S. for the last time and was posted abroad (in India or Burma, iirc), Polyakov actually did start working for the CIA, and was "uncovered" after he'd retired, arrested, "tried" and ... gulp ... executed.
Interesting, isn't it, that KGB so thoroughly filmed his arrest, almost as though to say to the U.S., "This dirty rat has been a traitor to The Mother Land all along!"
Here's a pertinent excerpt from
Ghosts of the Spy Wars.
(In mid-November 1958, Popov was lured back to Moscow on a ruse, secretly arrested by KGB, and) confessed. For six years he had been passing to the CIA secrets of Soviet weapons developments and tactics for atomic warfare. In addition, he had opened up his own service to the CIA: the GRU's procedures, some of its spies abroad, and hundreds of its officers. The GRU chief, General Mikhail A. Shalin, was fired, and in early December, the KGB chief Ivan Serov himself moved over to replace him and straighten things out.
But to Oleg Gribanov this shattering of the GRU looked more like opportunity than disaster.
Long experience had taught his organization that in counterintelligence work, “he who takes the initiative, all other things being equal, achieves the best results.” (fn
Not to wait passively to detect spies but to go out aggressively to find them (or make them). Working on this principle, the KGB had formed, taken over, and manipulated organizations of resistance to their own regime. They had used these fraudulent structures to expose and mislead their opponents inside the country and abroad; to maneuver hostile intelligence services onto false paths, and to get into contact with their personnel with the aim of compromising them and recruited them as moles. So successful had they been that some of these operations like “Trust” and “Sindikat-2” of the 1920s became celebrated in Soviet history, novels, and films, and this “aggressive counterintelligence” [nastupatelnost'] became the KGB's “guiding principle.” (fn 9)
By the 1970s the KGB had “mastered complex undercover agent-operational schemes” and infiltrated Western intelligence services by “presenting our [Soviet] trusted agents for their recruitment, … conducting operational games using methods similar to those used in the 1920s and 1930s, [and …] recruiting staff personnel of American Intelligence.” KGB people “are obliged to carefully study this postwar experience.” (fn 10)
Gribanov was inspired by all that. Looking over the debris of Popov's betrayal he saw that this fund of GRU secrets—now exposed and no longer truly secret—offered a weapon he could turn back against American Intelligence. He code-named the Popov affair “Boomerang.”
To wield this weapon Gribanov created a new “14th Department” within his internal-counterintelligence directorate and gave it the mission of “mounting complicated counterintelligence operations and operational games to penetrate foreign intelligence services.” (fn 11)
He would direct it personally, but installed as its chief his principal assistant during their investigation and interrogation of Popov, Colonel Valentin Zvezdenkov.
Together they set out to hand the CIA yet another high GRU officer, but this time their own. He would re-use Popov's information (and a bit more) to win the CIA's trust and in the best tradition of nastupatelnost' would expose it, lead it astray, and draw its officers into compromising situations.
Here some intelligence professionals say “Stop!” Hand the enemy a spy from inside your own ranks? Unthinkable! No intelligence service would take such a risk. So firmly did the CIA leaders believe this that in the 1970s and 1980s they even adopted it as a rule of thumb to judge the bona fides of Soviet walk-ins: if one was a Soviet intelligence officer, he was ipso facto a genuine defector. (fn 12)
That false faith burns brightly in America to this day. As recently as 2013 an FBI “counterintelligence expert” stated flatly, “The KGB would never send a staff officer as a false defector.” (fn 13)
The truth was—and is—quite different. Gribanov's new 14th Department (and other KGB components) did it time and again, from within both the GRU and KGB. General Sergey Kondrashev spoke after the Cold War of “repeated” proposals for such operations in his own FCD disinformation unit. He himself had been invited to shift over to the SCD to help Gribanov run the Nosenko provocation. Another KGB veteran even thought that “most” of the CIA spies inside the KGB who were betrayed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames in 1985 were in fact loyal staffers pretending to help the CIA. (fn 14)
The Mysterious PolyakovFor this particular enterprise Gribanov and Zvezdenkov chose GRU Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Polyakov. (fn 15)
As a first step they dispatched him in October 1959 to New York, where he had already served in the past, as a military functionary in the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. The operation was not truly launched until two years later, however, because Polyakov had first to establish himself in his cover position, and then because Gribanov delayed the operation while dealing with an unexpected complication. Having discovered a new, real traitor within the GRU, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, Gribanov had to weigh the effects on his planned operation. So not until the fall of 1961, after safely “cornering [Penkovsky] like a bear in its den,” As expressed by the Soviet Prosecutor at a press conference at the time of Penkovsky's trial in May 1963, did Gribanov feel ready to launch the operation.
Polyakov asked an American military officer to put him in touch with the CIA.
The FBI made the contact, it being their jurisdiction, and for several months they met him secretly in New York (codenaming him “Tophat”). Enthusiastic at the time about what Polyakov was revealing, fifteen years later the FBI looked back and wondered whether Polyakov had been deceiving them during those months. He had wasted their time on useless trails, and nothing he had told them had importantly damaged the Soviet Union beyond what Popov had earlier reported.
After a few months in New York, Polyakov returned to Russia in the fall of 1962 and was not heard from until years later, when he told via a Moscow dead drop, that he would soon come out again. He did, in 1966, as Soviet military attaché and GRU chief in Rangoon, Burma. Because operations abroad are the CIA's jurisdiction, the FBI soon turned over contact to the Agency, which continued to meet Polyakov in Burma from then until his tour of duty expired in 1969.
In his early meetings with Polyakov, CIA case officer Jim F. had the strong impression that he was dealing with a KGB plant, but after a time he noted such dramatic improvement in the reporting that he became convinced that Polyakov was genuinely cooperating. (fn 17)
For years thereafter, Polyakov continued direct and indirect contacts with the CIA, turning over priceless military and intelligence secrets first in Rangoon, then in Moscow, and then in two separate tours of duty in New Delhi where he enjoyed the rank of one-star general, making him the highest-ranked secret source that CIA ever had in Soviet Russia.
But then, in May 1980, the operation came to an abrupt end. On the pretext of a supposed meeting of military attachés, Polyakov was recalled to Moscow and never heard from again.
Ten years later, in 1990, out of the blue, the Soviets announced that they had arrested Polyakov, tried him in secret for being a CIA spy, and executed him. Their publicity chose to date the arrest as 1986, the trial and execution as March 1988.
It took another dozen years to begin explaining these oddities: the secret trial, so unlike Penkovsky's; the lack of even a fuzzy explanation of how the KGB had caught Polyakov; the inexplicable dates; and unusual publicity. The only KGB foreign-operations officer who had known of the SCD's operation, General Sergey Kondrashev (the KGB deputy for disinformation mentioned above), years later revealed to me that Gribanov had sent Polyakov out in the first place. (fn 18)
“But they executed Polyakov!” I said. “Why would the KGB execute a man whom they themselves had sent out to commit this treason?”
“Because they found out he was giving you more than he was supposed to.”
“Found out? How?”
Kondrashev answered: “Through some source inside American Intelligence.”
He would say no more. But the question hung there: Who could have known exactly how much Polyakov was reporting to CIA?
It had to be someone inside CIA's Soviet operations staff. And someone still undiscovered. Two Americans who knew something of the Polyakov case were later discovered to have been traitors, but neither of them could be the answer. Robert Hanssen of the FBI had told the Soviets in 1979 about Polyakov's 1962 cooperation in New York, but of course he knew nothing of what Polyakov later reported to the CIA. And even in the unlikely event that CIA traitor Aldrich Ames had learned the full details of Polyakov's reporting, Ames did not begin betraying until 1985, five years after the KGB had recalled Polyakov on a ruse and terminated the operation.
Not one of the later-discovered CIA traitors could even remotely have been aware of these details. In fact, only a handful of specially-placed CIA operatives even knew that the Agency had a relationship with Polyakov, much less what Polyakov was reporting. In each report that the CIA passed to military and other government agencies it disguised the source and attributed reports on different subjects to different sources.
The whole gamut of Polyakov's reporting could have been known only to his CIA handlers and those dealing with his raw reports.
So the question hangs: Who told the KGB what Polyakov was telling the CIA?
Footnotes: Istoriya Sovetskikh Organov Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti; Uchebnik [Hereafter: The History of Soviet Organs of State Security; A Textbook] (Moscow: KGB Higher School, 1977), classified TOP SECRET. Page references are to an English translation.
9) So defined in the KGB's own in-house secret dictionary, brought out by Vasily Mitrokhin and published in English as KGB Lexicon (London: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 261.
10) The History of Soviet State Security Organs; A Textbook. These quotes are from Chapter 10, parts 3 and 4 and conclusions.
11) As defined by the KGB itself, per the Internet:
www.soldat. ru (in Russian)
12) Milton Bearden, former head of CIA's Soviet Division (citing his predecessor Burton Gerber) and his co-author James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (London: Century, 2003), pp. 20–23.
13) David Major, cited by David Wise in “When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on its Staff,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2013.
14) Aleksandr Kouzminov , Biological Espionage: Special Operations in the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West (London: Greenhill Books, 2005), p. 59.
15) They picked him, said Kondrashev, at least partly because Polyakov had already had “a certain contact.” That might have been his contact with Popov when escorting a GRU Illegal operative named Margarita Tairova from Moscow to Berlin for Popov to dispatch onward to New York. At the time Popov expressed unease because he had never known Polyakov in illegal-support work. Another such pertinent contact would be Polyakov's contact with GRU Illegal Kaarlo Tuomi who came under FBI control but turned back later to Soviet control. (See my Spy Wars, pp. 171–172, and Spymaster, pp. 196, 216, and 291n7.)
16) As expressed by the Soviet Prosecutor at a press conference at the time of Penkovsky's trial in May 1963.
17) As Jim F. told a close colleague on the operation, who told me in 1970.
18) The circumstances of Kondrashev's revelation are described in Tennent H. Bagley, Spymaster, pp. 213–216.
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