A twofer. First up, from Euromaidan Press, November 5, the headliner:
Russian spies don’t innovate – they study and update decades-old KGB manuals, says Andriy Kohut, who oversees the world’s largest collection of declassified Soviet intelligence files that Moscow mistakenly abandoned in Ukraine.
Ukraine holds the world’s largest declassified KGB archive, a vast collection of unique materials stored by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). According to archive director Andriy Kohut, these documents fundamentally challenge Western perceptions of the USSR.
Kohut points to a striking paradox in Western academia: scholars often acknowledge the Soviet regime’s brutality while maintaining that Ukrainians and Russians “peacefully coexisted.” This peaceful coexistence, he argues, is a myth. Russians systematically eliminated Ukrainians through the NKVD and KGB – a pattern that continues today with FSB operations in occupied territories and missile strikes on unoccupied areas.
Instead of accepting Russian historical narratives, Kohut urges Western researchers to examine authentic period documents revealing the mindset of the system’s enforcers – the KGB and NKVD operatives. Understanding their patterns of thinking is crucial, he says, as their successors in the Russian FSB operate in similar ways today.
Yet a major obstacle remains: the archive lacks English translation, significantly limiting Western academic access. There’s hope for change, though, as the current SBU archive director speaks English and participates in Western academic programs.
In an interview with journalist Olha Aivazovska for Civil Network OPORA’s Power of Choice project, Kohut discusses what these archives contain and how researchers can access them.....
....MUCH MORE. highlighting in original.
And hoisted from the link-vault on its 5-year anniversary, via the Free Russia Foundation, Nov 05, 2019 (longtime readers will recognize the first paragraph, we are fans of le Carré's take on the spy biz):
The bottom line for spy recruitment comes down to this: look for the losers, especially the ones who want to think they are winners because they hang on to important positions.
“What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs?” the protagonist in John le Carré’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold barks at his sometime lover Liz as they drive toward the Berlin Wall and what they hope will be safety. “They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.”
Le Carré’s man Alec Leamas certainly knew whereof he spoke. A dyspeptic, penniless drunk, not to mention an over-the-hill divorcee with estranged children but no friends, Leamas had been a miserable MI6 station chief in Berlin. He thought ill of his superiors, failed to save his embattled network of agents and long ago began to doubt the rightness of his own side in the Cold War. As for the treachery—well, Leamas knew all about that, too.
He was tasked with playing the role of a disgruntled ex-spy ready to sell out his country to East Germany. And while he would certainly qualify as disgruntled, he wasn’t exactly ex. The entire operation that now has him and his lover Liz hurtling through the night on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain has been revealed as an elaborate ruse, one designed to protect MI6’s highest-ranking mole in East German intelligence.
Leamas was a plant, in other words, only now he’s more disgruntled than ever because he, too, has been double-crossed by his British handlers. Not only have they failed to tell him about the mole, they’ve led him to believe that the same man—his arch-nemesis, no less—is who they’d sent him to the East to compromise and destroy. Such is the paranoid nature of a double life; you often don’t know on whose team you’re actually playing.
The novel that made le Carré famous also popularized one of the most characteristic elements of espionage and counterespionage. Yes, there are spies who betray their country for what they consider to be noble motives of love or ideology. But quite a lot of them do it because they’re angry, desperate or broke. It is the loser, more often than not, who compromises his country.
And so le Carré sets in train a series of events to make Leamas just such a loser and irresistible to the opposition. Control, the mannered but calculating head of the Circus, understands what the other side looks for and instrumentalizes one of his own officers already on a natural downward spiral. Leamas’ actual decline is thus accelerated for effect, beginning with an ignominious job demotion, then proceeding by degrees to total career ruin. As le Carré writes:
“In the full view of his colleagues he was transformed from a man honourably put aside to a resentful, drunken wreck—and all within a few months. There is a kind of stupidity among drunks, particularly when they are sober, a kind of disconnection which the unobservant interpret as vagueness and which Leamas seemed to acquire with unnatural speed. He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them; but in the end his neglect, his brutal, unreasoning malice isolated him.”
The Reds reel in a fallen angel of the Circus, a man they believe to be in genuine disgrace and in need of the two things that only they can provide: money and revenge.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold drew from le Carré’s own real-world experiences in both MI6 and MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service. (He started writing the novel while still technically in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, working out of the British embassy in West Germany.) But the KGB never lost sight of what might be called the Leamas Archetype in scouting and selecting prospective Western agents for recruitment among what was, and no doubt remains, an ample pool of foreigners with security clearances.
THE MANUAL
“Some Aspects of Training the Operative for Psychological Influence of Foreigners During Cultivation” hardly approaches le Carré’s caliber of prose or storytelling, but it makes up for it as a primary source of KGB thinking.Created for internal consumption at the Lubyanka and the Andropov Red Banner Institute at the dawn of the Gorbachev era, this text is part of a series of 20 never-before-published KGB training manuals I’ve recently obtained and am in the process of having translated into English as part of a year-long research project.
All of the manuals, I’m reliably informed by my source (who would certainly know), are still classified in Russia owing to their continued curricular use at the FSB and SVR academies; that is, the schools where Vladimir Putin’s operatives learn fundamentals of tradecraft, the theory and practice of espionage; even if the theory in this case is a bit dated.
At its worst, “Some Aspects” struggles to define the ho-hum truths of human psychology through the fogged-up lens of Marxism-Leninism, arguing, for instance, that only in “bourgeois society” do people count on receiving rewards and avoiding losses. This fact will certainly come as a surprise to the Soviet diplomatic corps, which sought postings in capitalist countries for precisely such self-enriching reasons.
“In the West,” but evidently not in the enlightened East, we are told, a person’s motivations can be classed in a rising order of priority from the biological to the metaphysical. Karl Marx could have told us that, and did to a painstaking level of commitment. (One wonders where the writers of this thing thought the “materialism” in dialectical-materialism came from.)
At its best, however, “Some Aspects” functions as a kind of unintentional satire on work culture in liberal democracies—Pravda meets Office Space—as well as a how-to guide for exploiting the emotional vulnerabilities of people who feel they deserve more in life....
....MUCH MORE
