Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Former Deputy Head of KGB’s Notorious Administration K Talks about Moscow’s Priorities


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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