Staunton, April 8 -- As important as it is
to recruit foreign journalists to write articles discrediting candidates in
Western elections so that someone more favorable to Moscow will win, Viktor
Budanov says, it is far more important to recruit agents within the
intelligence services of Western countries.
That is because, the former deputy head of
the KGB administration for Foreign Counter-Intelligence says, recruiting such
people “kills not one but three birds” at once: it gives Moscow information on
Western plans, it allows it to check on the reports of other agents, and it
helps Moscow identify traitors (versia.ru/veteran-kgb-o-slezhke-za-perebezhchikami-nravax-v-posolstvax-i-mezhdunarodnom-terrorizme).
Budanov’s administration was of necessity so
secretive that other KGB officers referred to it as SMERSH, Igor Latunsky of Versiya says in introducing his
interview with Budanov, and focused on its role in going after traitors to the motherland
rather than its broader tasks. The former KGB official says that his group had
two such tasks.
On the one hand, he reports, it sought to
obtain information “on the security of the operations of Soviet intelligence
and of Soviet institutions abroad.” And on the other, it worked to “acquire
sources in the special services” of Western countries which opposed the Soviet
Union.
Budanov says that those who say that his administration
tracked all Soviet officials abroad all of the time are wrong. “This of course
is a stupidity,” he says. There were never enough resources to do that. It was “technically impossible” even to
monitor all the telephone calls of foreign ministry officials.
Such monitoring was done selectively when
there was information that there might be a problem. One such problem arose, Budanov says, when Soviet
ambassadors abroad acted like little princes who thought they could do anything
with their embassies, including stealing Soviet property or talking at large
without consequences.
The recruitment of Aldridge Ames, the KGB officer
continues, was “the most important agent in history.” He was exposed, it
appears, not by his own actions but rather by careful analytic work at the CIA
and also likely by leaks of information by American agents in Russian
intelligence services including the SVR.
He says that he fully supports the death
sentence that was handed down against Oleg Gordievsky but that the political
leadership of the Soviet Union blocked taking revenge against him abroad out of
concerns that the failure of such efforts would work against the interests of the
USSR.
Budanov adds that his administration proposed
infiltrating terrorist groups in order to keep track of their operations, but
Soviet leaders from Yury Andropov on opposed that for the same reason:
embarrassment in the case that such agents might be exposed and the Soviet
leadership compromised.
He says he was one of the KGB officers who
pressed for expelling the terrorist known as the Jackal from socialist
countries and eventually succeeded in doing so, but “I want to note that our initiative
was supported not immediately and not everywhere,” Budanov continues.
He also addresses the issue of possible
Soviet involvement in the 1979 Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The first didn’t happen, he argues, because Moscow was not prepared to
sacrifice the local communist party. The second was a mistake because no one
can subdue the Afghans.
Budanov’s comments are intriguing not
because they are necessarily true but because they are part of a settling of
scores about events long ago in the Soviet intelligence community that is now
surfacing in the Russian media, a likely indication of intensified competition
and conflict among them now.
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