Welcome to Spy Wars

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

16 July 14

ajor Vasili Mitrokhin cut a strange figure in his time, and continues to do so, much like the living dead. A long-time Soviet spook in the Middle East, he went on to work as a senior archivist of foreign intelligence at the KGB. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service – SIS or, more popularly, MI-6, their CIA – “exfiltrated” him and his family from Russia in 1992, along with 6 large containers of handwritten notes he claimed he had copied from the most highly classified secrets of Soviet espionage. Last week, the Brits announced they had declassified the first batch of the now typewritten pages, giving media around the world yet another opportunity to repeat Mitrokhin’s still unproven allegations. As The Guardian reported it, the documents target many people and institutions as Soviet agents, including two much too close for my personal comfort.

“They claim that Philip Agee, the former CIA officer who publicly named a list of US agents, had used material offered to him by the KGB, and that Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB in the 1960s and 1970s, infiltrated Ramparts, the radical US magazine which consistently opposed the Vietnam war and also published Che Guevara’s diaries.”

So that readers will know, I worked as an editor at Ramparts, apparently after the events the documents describe, and I named names and wrote articles with Agee in London. I was his friend, though we never agreed politically, as I wrote at the time. Readers should also know that I don’t give a damn whether Phil worked for, with, or against the Soviets and their Cuban allies. The test for me then and now cuts closer to the bone. Did he tell the truth about the CIA? Or was he, as his die-hard detractors never stop saying, spreading disinformation – in bastardized Russian, disinformatzya?

Even Agee’s harshest critics, many of them former CIA colleagues, have had to admit that his revelations were true. In the case of Mitrokhin and his notes, telling the difference between truth-telling and purposeful disinformation poses a tougher challenge, and I will restrict my efforts for now to what they say about Agee. Since the notes are publicly available only at Cambridge University in England and since my graduate-school Russian has faded away, I turned to a more convenient source that journalists since 1999 have foolishly taken at face value. This is a book called “The Mitrokhin Archive,” which became a best-seller in the US under the title “The Sword and the Shield.” The Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew, who wrote it, went on to produce three subsequent volumes (here, here, and here).

For most of the mass media, these books have become “The Mitrokhin Archives,” which the Brits have brilliantly sold as a stand-in for the KGB’s own archives. As Home Secretary Jack Straw told the House of Commons when the first volume appeared in 1999, “Mitrokhin brought out no KGB documents,” nor any evidence that could be presented to a court of law. He brought only his notes, which the British were not yet willing to make public. So, to spread the word as the government wanted it spread, Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind in 1996 authorized Britain’s Intelligence and Security services – SIS (MI-6) and MI-5, their FBI – to pick Professor Andrew to write the books, giving him privileged access to the highly classified material.

No one can deny that Andrew had a cozy relationship with the British Intelligence and Security services, and Mitrokhin was only part of it. The professor had earlier written “KGB: The Inside Story,” on which he collaborated with Soviet defector Oleg Godievsky. And he later wrote the authorized history of MI-5, taking “the Queen’s shilling” and becoming, as his critics contended, even more of “a Court historian.”

His writing shows how he sacrificed his scholarly responsibility to those in government who made his work and so much of his career possible. As a historian, he acknowledged the obvious – that the authors of the original documents Mitrokhin claimed to have copied were KGB officers anxious to exaggerate their influence to impress their superiors and political bosses. So, at best, we would have only their word for how much they actually controlled the people to whom the KGB gave code names and whom it considered its agents and assets.

But as a purveyor of official truth, Chris Andrew failed to dig into the material he was given. Did Mitrokhin doctor his notes to please his new employers? Or did SIS and MI-5 doctor them to promote their own disinformatzya? The professor never raised or answered such obvious questions. He also failed to look at available evidence, misrepresented it, and made assertions that are provably wrong.

“The KGB’s most valuable asset in its active measures to discredit the Agency,” he wrote, “was an embittered former CIA operations officer in Latin America, Philip Agee (codenamed Pont), who had been forced to resign after complaints at his heavy drinking, poor financial management and attempts to proposition wives of American diplomats.”

Andrew footnoted the personal innuendo as coming from John Barron’s “KGB Today,” which simply repeated the CIA’s standard line of attack on Agee when he published his best-selling “Inside the Company: CIA Diary.” Andrew offered no independent evidence, not even from the KGB. Phil consistently denied the story, and his behavior when I knew him makes me doubt what Barron and Andrew wrote.

Former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin. (photo: Guardian UK/PA)

Andrew also repeated a story from Oleg Kalugin, a high-ranking KGB official who moved to the United States in the 1990s and wrote a book called “Spymaster.” As Andrew quoted Kalugin, Agee had approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered them “reams of information” about CIA operations. Suspecting he was part of a CIA plot, the Soviet spies turned him away. “Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms,” wrote Kalugin. “The Cubans shared Agee’s information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing list of revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize.”

Kalugin’s tale flatly contradicts the picture Andrew tried to paint of Agee as a major KGB asset. Mitrokhin’s notes, as Andrew presented them, similarly described Agee as an agent of the Cuban Dirección de Inteligencia (DGI), not of the KGB. Andrew admitted this, but only in a footnote. Neither Kalugin nor Andrew offered any supporting evidence for either version, which is par for the course.

Mitrokhin’s notes also diminish the importance of Phil’s Russian contact, Edgar Cheporov, the London correspondent of Moscow’s Novosti press agency and the Literaturnaya Gazeta. According to Mitrokhin, Cheporov was not a regular KGB officer. The KGB had merely co-opted him to keep tabs on Phil while he was writing his book. Andrew adds in a footnote that the London residency became dissatisfied with Cheporov, claiming that he “used his cooperation with the KGB for his own benefit,” and “expressed improper criticism of the system in the USSR.”

This fits perfectly with the Edgar Cheporov with whom my wife Anna and I regularly visited London jazz clubs, always splitting the check. We loved his company, in part because he was no hero of the Soviet Union. The first time he and his wife Inge invited us to dinner, he tried his best to get me drunk, and then invited me to take a free trip to wherever in his country I wanted to go. I suppose that was part of his job. When I turned him down, Edgar launched into a spirited defense of Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Another time, while the musicians were taking a break, Anna asked about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Edgar’s eyes lit up. “Oh no,” he said, “we do not call it an invasion. As Comrade Leonid [Brezhnev] said, ‘Friendship knows no frontiers.’”

“But Edgar,” Anna protested. “What do YOU call it?”

“Oh,” he said, “I call it the invasion of Czechoslovakia.”

Delightful as he was, Edgar Cheporov was not the man the KGB would have put in charge of anything close to a major operation.

According to Mitrokhin’s notes, the KGB files took credit for Phil’s book, claiming that it was “prepared by Service A, together with the Cubans.” Service A was the KGB’s active measures branch, responsible for covert action and disinformatzya. Andrews, still part historian, acknowledged that the Soviet spooks had doubtlessly exaggerated their self-congratulatory claim. He also admitted in a footnote that Mitrokhin’s notes “do not indicate exactly what the KGB and its Cuban ally, the DGI, contributed to Agee’s text.”

But Andrew, an agent of the British state, quickly countered that Agee himself had acknowledged that “Representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba (the DGI] … gave important encouragement at a time when I doubted that I would be able to find the additional information I needed.” If I remember correctly, Phil was talking about how discouraged he had become about finding library resources to fill out his diary entries.

Mitrokhin’s notes identify one piece of information that Phil used which the KGB might well have provided. This was a copy of 69 “Key Intelligence Questions” that the CIA wanted US diplomats and intelligence people to investigate in the mid-1970s. Phil had given me a copy of these KIQs, which he said had shown up in the mail with a letter from an anonymous source. The American Embassy subsequently accused me of circulating a forgery, but inquiries from The Sunday Times forced the embassy to admit the document’s authenticity. Neither Andrew nor the Mitrokhin notes suggest that Phil knew who had sent him the KIQs.

In a much more damning indictment, Andrew cited Mitrokhin’s notes to accuse Phil of shaping his book to the KGB’s demands. “At Service A’s insistence, Agee removed all references to the CIA penetration of Latin American Communist parties from his typescript before publication.” Most of us who worked with Agee would have taken such a move as completely out of order. But, as Andrew could have read for himself, Phil’s “CIA Diary” clearly described how he and his CIA colleagues had their people working in the Communist parties.

Starting with the premise that the KGB ran Agee, Andrew assumed that Agee ran the effort by journalists in London to expose CIA officers. Phil inspired us, no doubt. But as Andrew completely failed to mention, we learned how to identify CIA agents from an article by former State Department official John Marks in the Washington Monthly called “How to Spot a Spook.” I’ve written about this extensively. (For example, see here and here.) Leads that helped us expose covert operations came from censored passages in “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” which Marks wrote with former CIA official Victor Marchetti.

Chris Andrews never wanted to know any of this. What he wrote about Agee was disinformation, whether by his own choice or because that was the job SIS and MI-5 gave him to do. The rest of his “Mitrokhin Archive” appears no more scholarly, but the professor and his masters pulled off a superb bit of skullduggery in getting the world to accept their work as an authoritative replica of the KGB archives.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.