Day 206: Deception: The Untold Story of East West Espionage

Harder evidence comes from an operation involving the Estonian Voldemar Kiik, one of the most successful British agents of the post-war era. His story is almost entirely unknown outside Estonia, where he was buried with military honours in the national cemetery, next to Rebane, after his death in 2002. His mission was to reconnoitre the airfield at Tartu, Estonia’s second city. Details of his mission remain classified to this day, but it would have been of huge interest to British and American intelligence to know about any hardened hangars, the quality and quantity of air defences, and signs of nuclear weapons storage and transport. Kiik was a medical student in London when Rebane approached him, probably in 1950. He was the ideal recruit – brainy, determined and a cut above the other Estonian young men in London, whose patriotism often outweighed their other talents (they, in turn, found his successful womanising tiresome). He was already battle-hardened. Mobilised by the Red Army in 1940, he jumped off a troop train and hid in a forest before being conscripted by the Germans. Wounded in the head in the battle of Velikaya Luka near Leningrad, he was left for dead during a German retreat, only to be rescued during a counterattack. He detested both occupying powers equally. Rather than exchange the mandatory ‘Heil Hitler!’ greeting, he and the other Estonians in his unit would shout ‘Ei Ütle!’ (Don’t Say!). The pronunciation was close enough to fool the Germans, and gave a pleasant tingle of resistance.

As well as the usual tradecraft, he was schooled intensively in Russian (which he did not speak) and in Pelmanism – the knack of remembering large quantities of data. But in a notable difference from the carelessness that surrounded Operation Jungle, he does not seem to have been trained with the other Estonians. With a cyanide pill sewn into his lip he parachuted into Estonia in the summer of 1952. Though tempted to visit his mother – it would have been his only chance to see her before she died – he concentrated on his mission, perhaps using the remnants of a pre-war British network for support. His route back involved a perilous crossing of the Norwegian–Soviet frontier where disaster nearly struck. Another British agent making the same crossing shortly beforehand had come across some border guards asleep at their post and had shot them, perhaps unaware that he was complicating things for anyone else. The result was a frenzy of border-guard activity. Starving, sodden and fearing capture, Kiik waited in a swamp for two weeks, living off berries. He then took a Benzedrine pill he had been saving for emergencies and crossed the border where his reception party was still waiting, as this previously unpublished picture depicts (Kiik is on the right).bh His name did not appear on a list of Estonians wanted by the KGB, and his family was not harassed, showing that the Soviet authorities never got wind of his mission (they believed he had emigrated to Canada). Prematurely grey after his ordeal, he then worked for the British government as an instructor in covert operations (among his pupils, he once said, was the future King of Norway).

Kiik’s successful mission, the mysterious agent who crossed the border before him, Captain Nelberg’s letter and some other evidence of separate, successful missions all support the theory that SIS, perhaps as early as 1950 and certainly by 1952, had reason to continue Operation Jungle as a bluff. If so, the human calculations are chilling. Were the agents still inside the Soviet Union counted as good as dead? What of the men being sent to join them? The verdict of sheer incompetence might be moderated by the steel nerves and stunning cynicism that such decisions would involve.

Meanwhile a conflict between intelligence and political objectives was plaguing the other side too. The Soviet authorities wanted to lure a senior Estonian émigré figure – ideally Rebane – across the border for a humiliating show trial. The KGB was more interested in further penetration of SIS and the CIA. But with Rebane belatedly aware of the deception, the hunters had become the hunted. It is unclear how far Rebane and SIS were at cross-purposes in the final years of the operation. The wily Estonian claimed later that even after the closure of the Latvian and Lithuanian operations, he fought to maintain the radio games with the KGB-controlled partisans, in the hope of getting his own agents back. He succeeded in at least one instance, but his career with SIS was over. The once-dashing officer ended up working as a night watchman before moving to Germany and a job in that country’s intelligence service. Having dodged repeated attempts by the KGB to entrap him, he died in 1976, having burned his papers; his devoted secretary Liis Dillie Lindre lived to see her country regain independence in 1991, yet continued to sleep with a loaded revolver by her bed (in a suburb of Brussels) even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Rebane’s Latvian and Lithuanian colleagues moved to the United States. Carr was shunted first sideways and then out of the service; until his death in 1988 he blamed Philby, not his own incompetence, for the fiasco. Viktor van Jung, a cerebral and charismatic Estonian émigré who had trained two CIA agents who went on a doomed mission in 1954, went on to a high-flying career in the agency. Strong indications are that he was the CIA officer who ran Ryszard Kukilński, a senior Polish officer who passed on invaluable Warsaw Pact secrets to NATO.

According to Rositzke, none of the CIA operatives returned from their missions. But a sprinkling of former agents who survived inside the Soviet Union did crop up after 1991, with embarrassing consequences for their spymasters. One of the most conspicuous cases involved Sweden, a country that had maintained a stony silence over its espionage efforts in the Baltics, which seem to have been every bit as disastrous as those of SIS and the CIA. The activities of the C-byrån (C-Agency), renamed in 1946 as T-kontoret (T-Office), began during the war and were stepped up in 1948 when a Soviet attack on Sweden seemed all too likely. Using Baltic émigrés and run in close cooperation with SIS, they finished in 1957, after the humiliating public exposure of a Swedish spy ring and a formal Soviet diplomatic protest.

~~Deception: The Untold Story of East West Espionage Today -by- Edward Lucas

Day 200: Molecular Red

It is hard to imagine a landscape more remote from Russia in the early twentieth century than the West Coast of the United States in the late twentieth century. In place of scarcity, a bright abundance. Some central nodes to the military industrial complex were born and grew there, particularly in the aerospace industry, not to mention the Air Force’s own private think-tank, the RAND corporation. And as California prospered, so did its finest universities, such as Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley, not to mention Berkeley’s rivals at the peak of the public University of California system. Pump enough Pentagon money into this cluster of institutions and the result is Silicon Valley.

It is hard to imagine an organization of knowledge and labor more remote from what Bogdanov was proposing at the Socialist University after the Bolsheviks came to power, or even from that extensive and effective apparatus that the Soviet Union actually constructed after Stalin died. But in its own terms, the Californian military-industrial complex worked. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the dominant forms of power, economy, even of human life, owe their existence to what Donna Haraway calls the techno-science that issued from a handful of research universities in the Cold War years. It was not pure serendipity that brought Paul Feyerabend to Berkeley to teach the philosophy of science in the midst of an astonishing flowering of both pure and applied science. The term techno-science highlights how implicated science is and was in particular moments in the history of technology.

Feyerabend’s grasp of this part of the picture was never strong. Perhaps he was fatally hampered by his endemic hatred of all things Marxist. Perhaps the new world would not reveal its workings to someone so touched by the old. More useful in this regard is the work of Donna Haraway. Born in the 1940s, trained as a biologist, radicalized during the Vietnam War years, and lodging at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980, Haraway is, on her own admission, a product of both Cold War techno-science and the struggle in and against its imperial consequences. Haraway: “I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements.”

If for Bogdanov the catalyst that diverted him from the life sciences was the labor movement, for Haraway it was feminism. Haraway: “Feminists re-appropriate science in order to discover and to define what is ‘natural’ for ourselves. A human past and future would be placed in our hands. This avowedly interested approach to science promises to take seriously the rules of scientific discourse without worshipping the fetish of scientific objectivity.”

There is an interesting tension here, even a productive one. With some startling exceptions such as Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, most strands of Western Marxism taken up by critical thinkers in the United States in the postwar period were allergic to techno-science. Even among radical social scientists of this period, knowledge of, and commitment to, some version of natural science as a mode of inquiry was rare, and where it existed it was not often combined with such a strong commitment to a thoroughgoing critique of the existing form of science.

Haraway’s is a very different intellectual formation to the one that grew out of the influence of Herbert Marcuse, who taught at the other end of California to Haraway, in San Diego, from 1965 until he was forced to retire in 1970. While there are détournements of Lukács and Marcuse in Haraway, they are very much applied to understanding two immediate phenomena: new kinds of techno-science, and the rising social movement of feminism. What formed at the juncture was feminist science studies.

Science? Technology? Goddess preserve us! There are plenty of feminisms that try to take their stand against techno-science from without, as if it had some prior and given claim to speak for nature. Haraway: “Feminist theory has repeatedly replicated this ‘naturalizing’ structure of discourse in its own oppositional constructions.” A useful attribute of feminist science studies is that it tends not to make the assumption that there is something inherently radical about philosophy, or culture, or play or poetry over and against the scientific and technical. It does not take sides in advance within the existing intellectual division of labor. It is, among other things, a practical critique of that division of intellectual labor. “Destabilizing the positions in a discursive field and disrupting categories for identification might be a more powerful feminist strategy than ‘speaking as a woman.’”

It retains a sort of double discomfort, asking critical questions in a scientific zone, and speaking knowledgeably about actual sciences in a humanities zone. This is irritating, and usefully so. Feminist science studies persistently recasts the objectivity claims of the sciences, and does so, to make it worse, without dismissing the scientific endeavor. It is so much harder to dismiss a critic who takes a knowledge practice seriously, who wants not to abandon objectivity, but wants a stronger one, grounded in making a more extensive series of mediating links in the production of knowledge available for scrutiny.

This is irritating in another way as well. Haraway: “Marx insisted that one must not leap too fast, or one will end up in a fantastic utopia, impotent and ignorant. Abundance … is essential to the full discovery and historical possibility of human nature. It matters whether we make ourselves in plenty or unfulfilled need, including need for genuine knowledge and meaning.” This is what Platonov knew from daily experience. Surplus feeds the body which feeds the soul. There can be no retreat into the superstructures when there is no food, shelter or safety. The production and reproduction of our species-being, whatever it may be, has to be a central concern of any critical knowledge. Given the rising inequality, poverty, and hunger in twenty-first-century California, to which the state has responded by mirroring its great universities with a series of equally great prisons, questions of material need that were so palpable to Platonov return at the heart of the empire.

~~Molecular Red: Theory For the Anthropocene -by- McKenzie Wark

Day 61 : Book Excerpt : Stalin's General

Of all the Moments of triumph in the life of Marshall Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov nothing equaled that day in June 1945 when he took the salute at the great Victory Parade in Red Square. Zhukov, mounted on a magnificent white Arabian called Tspeki, rode into the square through the Spassky Gate, the Kremlin on his right and the famous onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral directly ahead. As he did so a 1,400-strong orchestra struck up Glinka’s Glory (to the Russian Motherland). Awaiting him were columns of combined regiments representing all the branches of the Soviet armed forces. In the middle of the square Zhukov met Marshal K. K. Rokossovsky, who called the parade to attention and then escorted Zhukov as he rode to each regiment and saluted them.
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Stalin’s choice of Zhukov to lead the parade evoked no comment. He was, after all, Stalin’s deputy supreme commander and widely regarded as the main architect of the Soviet victory over Adolf Hitler’s Germany, a victory that had saved Europe as well as Russia from Nazi enslavement. Newsreel film of the parade that flashed across the world only reinforced Zhukov’s status as the greatest Soviet general of the Second World War.

When the German armies invaded Soviet Russia in summer 1941 it was Zhukov who led the Red Army’s first successful counteroffensive, forcing the Wehrmacht to retreat and demonstrating to the whole world that Hitler’s war machine was not invincible. When Leningrad was surrounded by the Germans in September 1941 Stalin sent Zhukov to save the city from imminent capture. A month later, Stalin recalled Zhukov to Moscow and put him in command of the defense of the Soviet capital. Not only did Zhukov stop the German advance on Moscow, but in December 1941 he launched a counteroffensive that drove the Wehrmacht away from the city and ended Hitler’s hope of subduing the Red Army and conquering Russia in a single Blitzkrieg campaign.

 At the height of the German advance south Zhukov played a central role in masterminding the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad in November 1942—an encirclement operation that trapped 300,000 German troops in the city. In July 1943 he followed that dazzling success with a stunning victory in the great armored clash at Kursk—a battle that saw the destruction of the last remaining reserves of Germany’s panzer power. In November 1943 cheering crowds welcomed Zhukov as he and the future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev drove into the recaptured Ukrainian capital of Kiev. In June 1944 Zhukov coordinated Operation Bagration—the campaign to liberate Belorussia from German occupation. Bagration brought the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw and the capture of the Polish capital in January 1945 and marked the beginning of the Vistula-Oder operation—an offensive that took Zhukov’s armies through Poland, into eastern Germany, and to within striking distance of Berlin. In April 1945 Zhukov led the final Soviet assault on Berlin. The ferocious battle for the German capital cost the lives of 80,000 Soviet soldiers but by the end of April Hitler was dead and the Soviet flag flew over the ruins of the Reichstag. It was Zhukov who formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 9, 1945.

Following Zhukov’s triumphant parade before the assembled legions of the Red Army, Navy, and Air Force in June 1945 he seemed destined for an equally glorious postwar career as the Soviet Union’s top soldier and in March 1946 he was appointed commander-in-chief of all Soviet ground forces. However, within three months Zhukov had been sacked by Stalin and banished to the command of the Odessa Military District.

The ostensible reason for Zhukov’s dismissal was that he had been disloyal and disrespectful toward Stalin and claimed too much personal credit for victory in the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets called it. In truth, Zhukov’s loyalty to Stalin was beyond question.
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In February 1947 he was expelled from the Communist Party Central Committee on grounds that he had an “antiparty attitude.” Zhukov was horrified and he pleaded with Stalin for a private meeting with the dictator to clear his name. Stalin ignored him and the anti-Zhukov campaign continued. In June 1947 Zhukov was censured for giving the singer Lidiya Ruslanova a military medal when she had visited Berlin in August 1945. Shortly after, Ruslanova and her husband, General V. V. Krukov, were arrested and imprisoned. “In 1947 I feared arrest every day,” recalled Zhukov later, “and I had a bag ready with my underwear in it.”
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In October 1957 Zhukov was accused of plotting to undermine the role of the Communist Party in the armed forces. Among Zhukov’s most active accusers were many of the same generals and marshals he had served with during the war. Khrushchev sacked Zhukov as minister of defense and in March 1958 he was retired from the armed forces at the relatively young age of sixty-one.

During the remainder of the Khrushchev era Zhukov suffered the same fate of excision from the history books he had experienced during his years of exile under Stalin. In 1960, for example, the party began to publish a massive multivolume history of the Great Patriotic War that barely mentioned Zhukov while greatly exaggerating Khrushchev’s role. Another expression of Zhukov’s disgrace was his isolation from the outside world. When American author Cornelius Ryan visited the USSR in 1963 to research his book on the battle of Berlin, Zhukov was the only Soviet marshal he was prohibited from seeing.
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In October 1964, however, Khrushchev was ousted from power and there began a process of rehabilitating Zhukov as a significant military figure. Most notably, the Soviet press began to publish Zhukov’s articles again, including his accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.
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When Zhukov’s memoirs were published in April 1969 it was in a handsome edition with colored maps and hundreds of photographs, including some from Zhukov’s personal archive. The Soviet public was wildly enthusiastic about the memoirs. The initial print run of 300,000 soon sold out and millions more sales followed, including hundreds of thousands in numerous translations. The memoirs quickly became—and remain—the single most influential personal account of the Great Patriotic War.

Zhukov’s triumph in the battle for the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War was not one that he lived to savor. By the time a revised edition of his memoirs was issued in 1974 he was dead. In 1968 Zhukov had suffered a severe stroke from which he never really recovered. His health problems were exacerbated by the stress of his second wife, Galina, suffering from cancer. When she died in November 1973 at the age of forty-seven, Zhukov’s own health deteriorated rapidly and he passed away aged seventy-seven in the Kremlin hospital in June 1974.

Zhukov’s funeral was the biggest such occasion in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin. As Zhukov lay in state in the Central House of the Soviet army in Moscow thousands came to pay their respects. When his ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall on June 21 the chief pallbearer was party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev and at the memorial service that followed the main speaker was Minister of Defense Marshal A. A. Grechko.

~~Stalin's General- The Life of Georgy Zhukov -by- Geoffrey Roberts