This short article is included in the 2021 Newsletter of the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH).
The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania has digitized many volumes of top secret KGB in-house journals and published them on the Internet.[1] The aim of the journals was to inform the KGB officers about the latest developments in several fields related to state security, and they remain classified in Putin’s Russia to this day. In one of the journals, more precisely, in the volume No. 23 of the Proceedings of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB published in 1981, I came across an article about Yugoslavia.
The article with a long and cumbersome title - “The Use of the Territory and Citizens of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [SFRY] by the Intelligence Services of the Imperialist States to Conduct Subversive Activities Against the Soviet Union” – is signed by Major V. A. Tikhonenkov.[2]
The title already gives a sense of the KGB’s attitude towards Yugoslavia. In other words, though political and economic relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia seemed to be on an upward trajectory at the time (in the late 1970s), the KGB approached Yugoslavia with a high degree of suspicion.
Tikhonenkov begins his article by claiming that, in comparative perspective, the U.S. intelligence service was the best positioned and most influential in Yugoslavia, though both the British and West German intelligence services were also very active. He asserts that the main priority of these services was to create roadblocks and tensions in the relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
According to Tikhonenkov, one of the ways that the Western intelligence services attempted to do so was to spread rumors that the Soviet Union would invade and occupy Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. In contrast, Tikhonenkov alleges that the exact opposite was the case: it was the West that worked on the disintegration of Yugoslavia by prodding Yugoslav republics to pull away from federal policies and institutions. In the case of Slovenia, for instance, Tikhonenkov claims that the Western intelligence services encouraged the development of strong economic ties with Western companies and banks. On the other hand, the strategy in Serbia was to advocate the need for a “broad democracy,” implicitly hinting that the ethnic rights of the Serbs living outside Serbia needed to be enhanced.
In addition, Tikhonenkov rejects the allegations of Western media directed at Yugoslavia at that time about the Soviet covert assistance of the nationalist émigré circles, the Croat émigré organizations in particular, in their explicit anti-Yugoslav political efforts. However, he does admit to his KGB audience that certain members of these organizations did contact Soviet embassies in Western Europe with offers of collaboration. But, according to him, all such offers were turned down.
Furthermore, Tikhonenkov claims that Western intelligence services regularly used the territory of Yugoslavia to recruit Soviet citizens who came from the Soviet Union, either on official business or as tourists. For example, he describes how some Yugoslav hosts, in collusion with their Western intelligence “mentors,” often invited Soviet diplomatic officials and Soviet scientists to private parties where “in the company of young women” they tried to persuade them to defect to the West. According to Tikhonenkov, in addition to the big cities, the coastline of Montenegro was also used as a setting for similar recruitment attempts. For instance, he cites the case of a Soviet military ship’s visit to the Montenegrin port of Tivat in 1976 and claims that three Soviet sailors and one officer stated to the KGB counterintelligence after their visit that their Yugoslav hosts tried to convince them not to return to the ship and offered them assistance in emigrating to the West.
Tikhonenkov seems particularly vehement in his criticism of the alleged behavior of some Yugoslavs who had lived and worked in the Soviet Union and for whom, according to him, Soviet citizens had felt “sincere sympathy and friendship,” which they betrayed by secretly collecting valuable political, economic, military and other information for the Western, primarily U.S., intelligence services. In this context, he refers to the case of a former Yugoslav ambassador to Moscow, though he does not reveal his name.
At the same time, however, considering the type and nature of the information Tikhonenkov appears to have accessed for his article, one gets a clear impression that the KGB also had its own sympathizers and sources high up in the Yugoslav government circles. Tikhonenkov might have provided a subtle hint about who they were when he cited positive statements made about the Soviet Union by Tito’s national security adviser Ivan Mišković and the Yugoslav federal secretary (minister) for internal affairs Franjo Herlević.
Interestingly, at the end of the article, Tikhonenkov also warns that after the visit of the Chinese Communist leader Hu Guofeng to Yugoslavia in 1978, it was to be expected that China too would become an active intelligence player in Yugoslavia and seek political allies for its anti-Soviet foreign policy goals.
In conclusion, the key takeaway from the article is that while the KGB counterintelligence did not discount the possibility of the Soviet Union improving political and economic relations with Yugoslavia in the near future, they still considered Yugoslavia an untrustworthy, “Trojan horse” of the West.
[1] See “KGB Journals and Books,” The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, https://www.kgbdocuments.eu/kgb-journals-and-books/.
[2] Майор В. А. Тихоненков, “Использование спецлужбами империалистических государств територии и граждан СФРЮ для ведения подрывной деятельности против Советского Союза,“ Труды Висшей Школы КГБ 23, 1981: 351-364.
This is the revised English version of my article published in Monitor, an independent political weekly in Montenegro, in March 2021.
