Introduction
To date, the most revealing account
of the origins and functioning of the Department D [disinformation] of the
First Chief Directorate [foreign intelligence] of the KGB is provided in
Tennent ‘Pete’ Bagley’s book Spymaster:
Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief.[1] Bagley’s book came to be
thanks to his post-Cold War friendship with KGB General Sergey Kondrashev, a
veteran of Soviet intelligence whose career spanned from the late 1940s to the
early 1990s. It is essentially Kondrashev’s autobiography which his former
employer, now called the SVR [Russia’s foreign intelligence service], forbade
him to publish in Russia due to its alleged exposure of KGB secrets. Bagley
waited until after Kondrashev’s death to publish it in the United States,
sparing Kondrashev from getting into trouble with the Putin regime. He also
added his commentary in those places where his own intelligence expertise and
experiences as a CIA veteran could provide further clarification and insight,
or throw a shadow of doubt on Kondrashev’s claims. Since there were many
occasions where he had done so, the book represents a quite remarkable and
probably unrepeatable contribution to the understanding of Cold War
intelligence history.
Department D
In Chapters 12 and 13, Bagley
presented the operational history and major operations of the KGB First Chief
Directorate’s Department D (later expanded and renamed the Service A) as
related to him by Kondrashev who was the Department’s principal deputy chief
from 1962 to 1964 and then its head from 1966 to 1967.[2] Bagley prefaced this
important segment of the book with a very short chapter (only 11 pages long) on
the involvement of the Department D in resurrecting the public memory of
Richard Sorge, the head of a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) agent network
in China and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s. In this brief chapter, Bagley
reported Kondrashev’s claims of playing a crucial role in rehabilitating Sorge.
However, neither Kondrashev nor Bagley offered any documentary evidence to back
up Kondrashev’s account.
Given that the Central Archive of
the FSB in Moscow, which holds the files of the Department D, has remained
forever closed to the non-FSB affiliated researchers, many independent scholars
have despaired of ever being able to document any of Kondrashev’s claims
regarding Sorge. However, I have discovered a way of doing so.
While researching the papers of
Soviet/Russian General Dmitry Volkogonov, originally deposited in the Library
of Congress in Washington DC but accessible on microfilm in the Hoover
Institution (my place of research), I came across a thin folder titled “Sorge,
Richard (Zorge, Richard (“Ramzai”) and Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Maksimova.”[3] In
this folder, I found copies of several original KGB documents signed by Sergey
Kondrashev, which dispel any doubts that he was lying to Bagley about his
involvement with Sorge’s rehabilitation. However, when I read the documents, it
turned out that there were certain interesting differences with what Kondrashev
had told Bagley.
Kondrashev’s Mystification
The most significant document
included in the Sorge folder of the Volkogonov Collection is the Department D
file titled “Operational Correspondence ‘Asakhi’ on Sorge Ika Richardovich.”
The cover page of the file reveals that the file had 388 pages and that it was
started on September 24, 1964 and closed on March 2, 1965. In other words, the
rehabilitation of Sorge did not take a lot of time. Perhaps one of the reasons
for that is that, as some statements in the file indicate, the Soviet Ministry
of Defense (most likely, at the initiative of the GRU) had begun looking into
the Sorge case already in the mid-1950s and therefore a lot of groundwork
investigation had already been completed. Kondrashev told Bagley that during
his work on the Sorge case, he had a counterpart from the GRU whom he named
Igor Chistyakov.[4] However, as I discovered, there is a reason to suspect that Kondrashev provided
a false (invented) name to Bagley and that there was no GRU officer named
Colonel Igor Chistyakov, but that the real name of the person involved was
Colonel E. Dryakhlov.
Unfortunately,
for some reason, perhaps due to Volkogonov’s lack of interest or loss of
access, the Sorge folder contains no more than 35 pages from the original
Department D file (less than 10 percent). The most significant document among
those included is a 16-page report titled “The Conclusion Regarding the
Archival Materials on Richard Sorge.” The report is dated November 2, 1964 and
signed by Sergey Kondrashev (his rank at the time was that of a Lieutenant
Colonel) and Colonel E. Dryakhlov.[5] Their signatures are followed by the approval of the deputy head of the KGB,
Lieutenant General Nikolay Zakharov. The analysis of this report and its
comparison with the report described to Bagley by Kondrashev shows that they
are one and the same.
In his conversations with Bagley,
Kondrashev claimed that the report had 20 pages, was co-signed by GRU Colonel Chistyakov,
and then approved by “their chiefs [the heads of the KGB and the GRU]” who sent
it on to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Politburo for
final approval.[6] What
I found tells a different story, however. The only co-signatory of the report
is Dryakhlov, not Chistyakov, and there were no approvals by the KGB chairman
Vladimir Semichastny or the GRU chief Pyotr Ivashutin, just the approval of
Semichastny’s deputy, Zakharov. In other words, it seems that Kondrashev
crafted his account to Bagley to exaggerate his importance in Bagley’s eyes and
the eyes of Bagley’s future readers. Though at the time when Kondrashev
co-wrote the report, he was just a lowly Lieutenant Colonel, a mid-level
employee in the vast KGB hierarchy, he wanted to impress Bagley that his work
influenced the decision-making of top Soviet state security leadership (who
supposedly signed his report) and even the Politburo. This, as Kondrashev’s
report itself shows, was a fiction, although it is true that Sorge was fully
rehabilitated by the Soviet Communist Party in late 1964 just as Kondrashev’s
report advocated. After his rehabilitation, Sorge was turned into a heroic
Soviet intelligence celebrity and a recruiting tool by KGB public relations
branch, which formed the basis for the KGB Press Bureau established in the late
1960s under Yuri Andropov, and its affiliated writers and journalists.
This
proven instance of Kondrashev’s fudging the truth makes it imperative to be
careful when assessing the rest of his “revelations” to Bagley. Former spies
like to aggrandize themselves but sometimes, as in this case, their
ego-boosting myths get busted by archival records.
[1] Tennent H. Bagley. Spymaster:
Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief. New York: Skyhorse
Publishing, 2015.
[2] Ibid., pp. 165-193. Chapter 12 is titled “Organizing to
Disinform” and Chapter 13, “Active Measures.”
[3] The
Volkogonov Collection
(Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation),
Box 4, Folder 9. I gratefully acknowledge the Hoover Institution Library &
Archives as an essential resource in the development of these materials. The
views expressed in this publication are entirely my own and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the fellows, staff, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover
Institution.
[4] Bagley. Spymaster,
pp. 155, 160-161.
[5] “The Conclusion Regarding the Archival Materials on Richard
Sorge,” The Volkogonov Collection, Box
4, Folder 9, p. 16.
[6] Bagley.
Spymaster, p. 161.
