Category Archives: Soviet Espionage

Soviet Covert Action

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I mentioned the funding of the international anti-nuclear movement by the Soviet Union in an earlier blog posting and mentioned that I intended to do additional research on the matter. I obtained a copy of a report titled, “Soviet Covert Action (The Forgery Offensive)” that was published by the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, ninety-sixth Congress. The report describes hearings held February 6 and 19, 1980.  The hearings were in closed sessions, and several of the documents listed in the Appendices were labeled “TOP SECRET.”  The report obviously had been declassified. The content made it clear the Soviets didn’t hesitate to use any action to further their cause and harm America. (As an aside, can you believe that some of my family members were surprised at my selection vacation reading material?)

A Deputy Director of the CIA made a prepared statement in the first session followed by questioning by the Congressmen.  The testimony confirms that the World Peace Council was the largest Soviet front group used in propaganda campaigns.  It had funding of over three billion dollars in that year, and one organization it supported was its American affiliate, the U.S. Peace Council. The CIA was prevented by law from doing any surveillance of that domestic organization.  The FBI was responsible for any intelligence gathering within the United States, and the CIA had to depend on them to pass along any intelligence involving foreign activities to them.  Examples of activities organized or influenced by the World Peace Council were numerous peace protests, demonstrations against NATO, and a campaign against the neutron bomb.

The second session, titled “Soviet Forgeries and Disinformation,” began with a statement by Ladislav Bittman, who was the Deputy Director of the Disinformation Department of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service before he defected to the United States. He testified that the “satellite countries” such as Czechoslovakia operated “huge intelligence apparatus that significantly contributes to spreading Soviet influence around the world.”  His department conducted “115 active measures… (consisting mostly of) forgeries leaked either to the press or foreign governments.”  He described how Soviet intelligence used journalists to spread their propaganda and warned, “The press should be more cautious with anonymous leaks.  Anonymity is a signal that the Big Russian Bear might be involved.” He also mentioned that Congressional investigations of the CIA in the 1970s effectively paralyzed that organization.  He observed that Watergate created such a toxic atmosphere in Washington that the Soviets were able to relax their disinformation efforts.  I found it quite interesting that a Congressman asked Bittman whether he had “…ever come across a man or information relative to a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, who was…in the Soviet Union?” Bittman responded, “No, never, no.  The answer is a clear no.”

Bittman also testified that the capture of the embassy and Americans in Tehran was a boon to the Soviet forgery campaign.  The Iranians gave them access to all manner of official State Department documents, letterhead, and the rubber stamps that were used to mark various classification and other designations. Numerous forgeries are described, to include a classified U.S. Army field manual, a faked speech by President Carter intended to strain relations with the Greek Government, several documents with negative information about Egyptian President Sadat and Indonesian President Sukarno, and a report denying that chemical and bacteriological agents stored in Italy had leaked and killed numerous infants. One forgery ties to current events.  It was a bogus CIA report that outlined how members of Islamic religious organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, could be bribed and set against others. One operation, code named Neptune, included planting several boxes of forged documents in Devil’s Lake and Black Lake where a dive team was to be filmed while investigating reports that the Nazis had disposed of information.  The planted documents listed numerous West German officials, including several in West German Intelligence, with faked Nazi backgrounds.

There is a current event that is a reminder of the danger of forged documents. Retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk is being tried for war crimes in Germany, and the FBI has released a report that the Soviet Union likely fabricated a Nazi photo identification card that is key to his prosecution.  Demjanjuk was tried in Israel before being deported from the U.S. to Munich where he is currently on trial again. No known witnesses have placed Demjanjuk at the Sobibor death camp in Poland where the identification card places him as a guard.  The FBI argues the Soviets used faked documents such as the forged identification card to smear anti-communists.

The Appendices include copies of several forged documents designed to incite anger about desegregation in America.  Appendix III is the agenda for the U.S. Peace Council Founding Conference held November 9-11, 1979 in Philadelphia.  Welcoming remarks were given by Representative John Conyers.  Presenters included several U.S. State legislators, U.N. representatives from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Nicaragua, and a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to name just a few.

Attendees at the first hearing were Representatives Aspin (presiding), Boland (chairman of the full committee), Ashbrook, Young, Whitehurst, and McClory.  The main presenter was John McMahon, Deputy Director for Operations, Central Intelligence Agency.  He was accompanied by five other CIA officials.  The second hearing had the same Representatives in attendance with the exception of McClory, who was absent.

FDR’s Personality

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This is the fourth and perhaps final posting of the review of Joseph E. Persico’s excellent book, “Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage.” The author gives significant insights into FDR’s personality, especially his fascination with learning the secrets of others. One person observed, “Few leaders were better adapted temperamentally to espionage than Franklin Roosevelt.” In keeping with that observation, FDR authorized wire taps of people judged to be suspicious despite a Supreme Court ruling that banned wire taps and the advice of his Attorney General. He justified that authorization on the grounds of national security, but he took the liberty to go further.  He had J. Edgar Hoover investigate former President Herbert Hoover and opponent Wendell Wilkie. He also had Vice President Henry Wallace under surveillance. I’ve read in other accounts that he expanded far beyond political opponents and associates. It was said that he reveled in learning about skeletons in people’s closets gathered by Hoover. Perhaps he did some of this as a reflective action to an event early in his adulthood when he and a friend began consorting with two beautiful women. He was warned by a friend of his family that the two women were the “best known pair of international blackmailers in Europe,” and he and his friend were able to escape. The lesson in the value of suspicion may have stayed with him.

Roosevelt had a recording system installed inside a drawer of his desk in August 1940.  One recorded conversation was about Wendell Wilkie. FDR was recorded talking about Wilkie’s mistress, and how Wilkie’s wife had in effect, “…been hired to return to Wendell to smile and make his campaign with him.”  The recorder was removed almost immediately after FDR won reelection. 

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Roosevelt’s Secret War–FDR, Stalin, and Churchill

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The interactions of the “Big Three” have inspired several books, but once again the book by Joseph E. Persico ties what I see as the complete story together nicely. FDR had a much stronger affinity for Stalin than to Churchill.  He confided to Joseph Kennedy, his ambassador to Great Britain, that he had never liked Churchill from the beginning.  Churchill was open in his desire to maintain the British Empire, and Roosevelt was strongly opposed to imperialism. I was startled to read a quote from him in the book that he told Admiral Godfrey, the U.S. is going “…to show the Brits, Portuguese, and Dutch how to take care of those West Indies Islands. Every n—-r will have his two acres and a sugar patch.” On the other hand Roosevelt was strangely able to overlook the atrocities committed under Stalin. He knew that large numbers of people Stalin decided he couldn’t trust were summarily executed and millions of Ukrainians were intentionally starved.  Both Roosevelt and Churchill knew that Stalin had ordered the execution of thousands of Polish officers, but covered it up. FDR was somehow persuaded that he could work with Stalin and trust him.

Roosevelt early and often acted according to Stalin’s wishes. He had established diplomatic relations with the Soviets, and apparently was willing to accept the large numbers of spies that action brought into the country and his administration. He released Earl Browder, the head of the U.S. Communist party who had been convicted of passport violations. He took that action to placate Stalin, and it restored a key link in Russia’s spy chain in America. One of the strangest actions he took involved 1500 pages of Soviet cryptographic material and a codebook that had been sold to the Office of Strategic Service by Finland. FDR ordered the information to be returned to the Soviets without copying it, and there is a dispute whether it was copied or not. There is no dispute the Soviets were absolutely baffled about why the Americans had returned the information.  Secretary of State Edward Stettinius was said to have explained that FDR ordered to action because he wanted to do nothing to arouse Stalin’s suspicions.  

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Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part II

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Part I of the review of this book by Joseph E. Persico was about how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This posting will focus on Roosevelt’s use of intelligence and intelligence services, and some of the impacts on the events of World War II.  Vincent Astor had become a friend and confidant of FDR after his crippling attack of polio. Astor and a group of wealthy friends had formed an organization to secretly collect gossip and informal intelligence that they called “The Room.”  One member was Kermit Roosevelt, the man who would engineer the CIA overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran in the early 1950’s.  Astor had done some amateur sleuthing in the Pacific for Roosevelt after FDR had become President, but the German attack of Poland brought Astor and The Room closer to FDR.  The group of adventure-seeking dilettantes reconstituted themselves as “The Club,” and began to increase their activities through various international banks.  This group appealed to FDR’s natural attraction to “cloak and dagger” intrigue.  FDR is characterized in the latter pages of the book as wanting to be like a secret agent who was “…a burglar with morals.”  He preferred to work with human sources over signals intelligence, or “humint” over “signit” in the shorthand of the trade.

Much of the book is about the various U.S. intelligence gathering services that seemed to spend almost as much effort trying to discredit the other organizations as they did trying to steal secrets from other countries.  Much of the in-fighting involved Bill “Wild Bill” Donovan. FDR had written a note in June 1941 authorizing a military central intelligence service with Donovan as the “coordinator of information,” or COI.  The organization was renamed Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.  It was the latest of 136 “emergency agencies” that FDR created.  However, this one began almost immediately to create friction with the other military intelligence agencies and J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Britain also wasn’t a fan of Donovan.  Continue reading →

Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part I

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I’ve read several books about FDR, and this book written by Joseph E. Persico is, in my opinion, the best one. My parents were avid supporters of FDR, and I have been skeptical about why they felt that way. This book made me reflect that there were positive aspects of the man and his leadership that I hadn’t considered previously.  There is so much information in the book that I intend to break the review into several parts.  This part will describe how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Isolationists, such as Charles Lindberg, had a majority of popular support to avoid another war with the memories of the dead and maimed from World War I fresh in minds of Americans.  Roosevelt agreed with Churchill’s priority of finding a way to get the U.S. into the war before the Germans overran Britain, but he had to deal with the political reality that the country was not convinced that was necessary and the practical reality of the state of preparedness.  In 1940 the U.S. army ranked eighteenth in the world behind Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Roosevelt strived to find ways to support the British while telling the American people that his intention was to remain neutral.  The depth of Roosevelt’s deception is illustrated by the “Tyler Kent” affair.  Kent was a code clerk attached to the U.S. embassy in London who was frustrated that his intellect wasn’t being used in his mundane job of decoding messages.  He was an anti-Communist Isolationist, and was reading exchanges between FDR and Churchill that clearly proved FDR was lying about how he was working to keep America out of the war.  Unfortunately for Kent and fortunately for FDR, Kent told some people he intended to provide documents he was copying to the press.  The British intelligence agency MI5 raided his apartment in May 1940 and found 1,929 documents. The content of the documents would likely have cost Roosevelt reelection if they had been revealed to the American public.  Roosevelt and Ambassador Kennedy denied Kent the diplomatic immunity to which he was entitled, and he was tried, convicted, and jailed. Continue reading →

Recent Russian Spy Case

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A posting on site dated February 25, 2011 described comments submitted after a DOE official read the book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” (available at Amazon and CreateSpace). One of the comments was about the funding and influence on the international anti-nuclear movement by the Soviet Union. I mentioned that I intended to do additional research on this subject, and had ordered some reference material listed in a Wikipedia article from my local library. I’m beginning to receive those books, and the first one lists ten references to the World Peace Council, which the Wikipedia article described as a Soviet front organization. Another book is by a Soviet agent who turned, and he talks about how the United States should not consider that the war with the Russians has ended.  That is reinforced with the reports of the FBI arresting ten “deep cover” Russian agents in 2010, and the interesting reports that followed that announcement.

The book, “Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union” written by Richard F. Starr in 1991, describes the World Peace Council, the organization founded in 1950 that funded anti-nuclear demonstrations, as supervising all Soviet-supporting front groups. Directives issued by the World Peace Council originated with the Communist Party.  People who participated in the activities organized by the council and other front organizations were called “useful idiots” by Lenin.  The effectiveness of the Council and Soviet propaganda is “perhaps reflected by the report that six U.S. congressmen facilitated establishment of a World Peace Council chapter in Washington, D.C.” (The congressmen are not named.)

But that is all ancient history, right?  Have the Russians become our friends?  Apparently the Russians haven’t backed off from their belief that the U.S. is their enemy, or at least that the U.S. has secrets worth stealing.  The FBI arrested 10 people who had “allegedly” spied for Russia for up to a decade.  They were posing as civilians while penetrating U.S. policymaking circles.  The 11th person accused of being the money person hadn’t been captured the last I heard.  Of course the U.S. media was more interested that one of the agents was a beautiful woman who had posed for Playboy.

I find the most interesting part of the story is that the ten agents were welcomed back in Russia as heroes and heroines after an exchange for four Americans held by the Russians, and there were threats made against the person the Russians believed was responsible for revealing the identities of their agents. The Russian newspaper Kommersant identified the guilty party as “Colonel Shcherbakov,” Shcherbakov had fled Russia for the U.S. in June, days before the arrest of the Russian agents.  His son and daughter aided in the betrayal.  Prime Minister Vladimir Putin denounced the collaborator as someone “who will wind up on booze, or drugs–under the fence.”  “We know where he is, a high-ranking Kremlin source told the…newspaper.  You can have no doubt–a Mercader has already been sent for after him.”  The Mecader reference is to Ramon Mercader, a KGB-hired Spanish communist who was sent to kill Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico in 1940.

As a closing comment, those of us who worked at Rocky Flats building components for nuclear weapons believed what we were doing was necessary for national defense against a dedicated enemy.  I hope that our current leaders don’t think that the intentions of our enemies have changed significantly.