This short article is included in the Fall 2020 Newsletter of the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH).
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The counting goes back to December 20, 1920 and the establishment of the International Department (INO) of the VChK-a. Interestingly, it does not take into account the fact that the Russian tsarist regime had a well-established network of foreign intelligence agents decades earlier. It is a clear demonstration of the Soviet-oriented mindset still prevailing within the service.
This
mindset, however, has little to do with the Soviet communist ideology. Instead,
it is grounded in the desire to emphasize the Soviet Union’s Cold War geopolitical position as one of the
two global superpowers. Accordingly, the SVR has framed its centenary as the occasion to play out the self-proclaimed Soviet intelligence successes in front of the domestic and international audiences. It has narrated the history of the Soviet Union in the manner that greatly magnifies the contributions of Soviet foreign intelligence to attaining and
maintaining Soviet superpower status. This strategy has met relatively little
opposition from the Russian mainstream academic historians because
the SVR director Sergey Naryshkin is also the president of the
Russian Historical Society, the major provider of the state funds and academic privileges in contemporary Russia.
The key historical event that seems to have been chosen for extensive media promotion by the SVR is the first summit of the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) held in Tehran in late November 1943. According to the SVR interpretation, this summit was a big victory for Stalin because he convinced Roosevelt and Churchill to open the second front in Europe and acquiesce in the Soviet Union’s playing the kingmaker role in post-war Eastern European affairs. Importantly, the SVR seeks to present this outcome as the result of the hard work of Soviet intelligence operatives, especially those operating under no official cover, the so-called illegals. In this respect, the pride of place is assigned to two Soviet illegal operatives, ethnic Armenians, husband and wife Gevork and Goar Vartanyan (1924-2012; 1926-2019). Their claim to fame is that they took part in the Soviet intelligence operation that allegedly saved the lives of the Big Three.
The Vartanyan couple first became known to the Russian public in 2000 in an article by Nikolay Dolgopolov, a long-time Soviet and Russian journalist. Dolgopolov has since become one of the most popular Soviet intelligence historians whose books are published in thousands of copies and going through several editions. In 2013, Dolgopolov published a book-length biography of Gevork Vartanyan. It is a slim volume as most operations in which Vartanyan and his wife took part remain classified. The only thing known is that they spent almost thirty years as Soviet illegals in several dozen countries around the world, mostly in Europe and the Middle East. Vartanyan was the recipient of the Hero of the Soviet Union medal in 1984 as one of the very few Soviet intelligence operatives to be awarded the highest Soviet decoration. Another recipient, for instance, was Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Leon Trotsky. Vartanyan famously claimed that only one point of the five-pointed gold star medal was earned by him, the other one by the Moscow Center, and the remaining three by his wife, Goar. A hotbed of machismo, the KGB had a different view and Goar Vartanyan had to settle for a less prestigious decoration, the Order of the Red Banner. After retirement, in the early 1990s, the Vartanyans were hired as consultants by the newly-established SVR to teach new generations of Russian intelligence officers the basics of illegals’ spycraft.
In order to rekindle the spirit of Teheran-43 as the key aspect of its centenary celebration, the SVR decided to introduce the exploits of the Vartanyans into Russian popular culture. The SVR Press Bureau director, Sergey Ivanov, contracted an Armenian-Russian detective stories writer Khachik Khutlubyan to write a documentary spy fiction (“faction”) novel about the events in Tehran. In addition to having been given access to the SVR archives, Khutlubyan knew Vartanyan personally. His novel The Agent who Outplayed the Abwehr was published by Eksmo, one of the largest Russian publishing companies, which controls close to 40 percent of the Russian book market and annually publishes 120 million books. The plot depicts the 17-year-old Vartanyan and his associates in the main role of derailing the alleged German plans to sabotage Churchill’s birthday celebration at the British diplomatic compound in Tehran on November 30, 1943. Curiously, the title refers to the Abwehr, even though the main spymaster of German intelligence in Iran at the time was Franz Mayer, an SS/SD man, a fact acknowledged by the novel’s blurb as well as by Dolgopolov’s biography of Vartanyan which Khutlubyan extensively relied on. One can only speculate why the SVR preferred to have the Abwehr rather than the SS in the title.
The
SVR made the presentation of the novel in February 2020 into the kick-off event
for the start of its centenary media campaign. One of
the speakers was Yury Shevchenko*, another highly-decorated Soviet illegal whose
name was declassified in January 2020 and who never appeared in public before.
Shevchenko knew Vartanyan personally and claimed that he successfully completed an intelligence mission considered impossible and unlikely to be declassified
for another 50 years. Nothing is known about this operation except that it involved
Soviet illegals, but chances are that it took place much later than the 1940s.
Perhaps bringing up the name of Vartanyan in public is meant to be a signal to
those in the adversary camp who might know the secret details of the operation that something along
similar lines could happen again. In any case, there is no doubt that the SVR will
continue to glorify the Soviet successes in inserting illegal intelligence officers in the countries of
importance to Russia's current foreign policy agenda. This is the aspect of Soviet intelligence inheritance that it is the most proud of. And the one that, according to Naryshkin's recent public proclamations, it continues to find very effective.
* Yury Shevchenko passed away on November 6, 2020 at the age of 81.
