KGB MAJOR GENERAL OLEG KALUGIN:’RED HERRING’ ACROSS THE ‘P.O.W.-GATE’ TRAIL?

(Washington, D.C.): In testimony this
week before the Senate Select Committee
on POW/MIA Affairs, the KGB’s former head
of counter-intelligence, Major General
Oleg Kalugin, delivered extraordinary
testimony. He reaffirmed under oath
statements made earlier to the effect
that, at his direction, a KGB officer
travelled to Hanoi to interview several
American POWs well after all
U.S. prisoners of war were supposed to
have been repatriated.

It is impossible at present to
establish the truth of this claim. The
man General Kalugin purports to have sent
on this mission, a Mr. Nechiporenko,
denies having undertaken it. There is
reason to believe he said so under orders
from his present employer — the Russian
successor to the KGB. The government in
Hanoi has denounced Kalugin as a liar and
the Bush Administration maintains it has
no reason to believe that there were U.S.
POWs in Vietnam when the general says his
operative interrogated them.

The Whole Truth?

Even so, General Kalugin may well be
telling the truth. Indeed, he made a
number of revelations in his testimony
that confirm what has long been believed
(e.g., subversive Soviet covert
activities, assassinations, the power of
the KGB and the important role of the GRU
— the USSR’s military intelligence
organization) but what has heretofore
generally been steadfastly denied by
officials of the former Soviet Union.
Interestingly, at one point in his
testimony, Gen. Kalugin explicitly
pointed to the truth of several
statements he had made to lend authority
to his contention about the POW
interviews in Vietnam.

On the other hand, it is quite
possible that the General is merely
engaging in one of the oldest
tricks in counter-intelligence tradecraft:
liberally salting disinformation with
truth so as to encourage acceptance of
what is not true. To paraphrase Whittaker
Chambers — a man who knew Soviet
communists and their practices intimately
— it is a matter of protecting a central
lie with a bodyguard of truth.

This is not to say that the Soviets
held no interrogations of U.S.
POWs in Vietnam after 1973; certainly it
is not to suggest that there were no such
Americans incarcerated in Vietnamese
prisons after the Paris peace accords
went into effect. Rather, it is
to say that General Kalugin’s
testimony was calculated to divert
attention from the far more important
story — that of U.S. POWs and MIAs who
were reportedly taken to the Soviet Union
and held there long after the war ended.
Certainly, the central (if implicit)
thrust of the general’s contention that KGB
operatives went to Hanoi to extract
information from American prisoners was
that they had to do so because Moscow
lacked any other access to them.

The “Moscow
Bound” Testimony

In that respect, Gen. Kalugin’s
testimony runs counter to recent
statements from other sources — sources
whose motivations are substantially less
suspect. For example, two former U.S.
intelligence analysts, Jerry Mooney and
Terrell Minarcin, appeared before the
Select Committee the day after Kalugin
did. They painted a very different
picture: Not only were Americans
still held by communist Vietnam after all
such prisoners were supposed to have been
returned. There were also, according to
some radio intercepts, an undetermined
(but seemingly significant) number of
U.S. POW/MIAs spirited away to the former
USSR, where their captivity continued.
There are reportedly a number of other
American intelligence officials who are
prepared to confirm these assertions.

Although Gen. Kalugin’s testimony in
effect confirms the validity of
the first of Messers. Mooney and
Minarcin’s charges, his denial of the
second — far more explosive —
allegation should be viewed with some
skepticism. After all, the successors to
the KGB and the old Soviet guard would
presumably still have a powerful interest
in concealing the existence of a program
which, according to Mr. Mooney was well
known by U.S. intelligence under the code
name “Moscow-bound.”

For one thing, its revelation would
complicate present relations between
Moscow and Washington. Perhaps more
importantly, it might even oblige the
United States to insist on a wholesale
dismantling of the KGB apparatus as
a quid pro quo for desperately
needed aid. Interestingly, a number of
American officials who were allegedly
aware of the Soviets’ transfer of U.S.
POW/MIAs, but kept it secret, may have a
similar interest in seeing the truth
suppressed.

Flaws in Kalugin’s
Testimony

The Center for Security Policy
believes that before General Kalugin’s
testimony is accorded sufficient weight
to impeach that provided by Messers.
Mooney and Minarcin on the
“Moscow-bound” program, the
self-serving and/or implausible quality
of some other aspects of his
representations before the Select
Committee should be carefully assessed.
For example:

• Extolling Primakov’s
  Virtues: Yevgeny
  Primakov is one of the most
  prominent of the Soviet Union’s
  unreconstructed communist thugs
  to retain a powerful position in
  the Russian government. (Before
  he became head of the former
  KGB’s foreign intelligence
  organization, he was a senior
  Middle East specialist to whom
  Mikhail Gorbachev entrusted the
  job of saving Saddam Hussein. Due
  to Primakov’s eleventh hour
  machinations, the U.S.-led ground
  war was very nearly derailed.)

It speaks volumes about where
Kalugin believes his bread is
buttered that he gushed before
the Select Committee about
Primakov’s sophistication and
openness. “Mr. Primakov is
an intelligent, flexible, easily
adjustable gentleman who could
survive in various
circumstances….Mr. Primakov
would be more willing to talk and
disclose things which are of
public interest.”

• Extolling Gorbachev’s
  Virtues: Gen. Kalugin
  actually made with a straight
  face the preposterous contention
  that nothing like a
  “Moscow-bound” program
  could have occurred in Mikhail
  Gorbachev’s Soviet Union —
  thanks to glasnost and perestroika.
  As he put it: “There are no
  secrets today in the USSR.
  Anything that happens,
  particularly when it concerns a
  foreign person, would be known
  all over the world….Can you
  imagine an American, or a British
  or a French citizen kept in the
  Soviet Union with

  (Washington, D.C.): In testimony this
  week before the Senate Select Committee
  on POW/MIA Affairs, the KGB’s former head
  of counter-intelligence, Major General
  Oleg Kalugin, delivered extraordinary
  testimony. He reaffirmed under oath
  statements made earlier to the effect
  that, at his direction, a KGB officer
  travelled to Hanoi to interview several
  American POWs well after all
  U.S. prisoners of war were supposed to
  have been repatriated.

  It is impossible at present to
  establish the truth of this claim. The
  man General Kalugin purports to have sent
  on this mission, a Mr. Nechiporenko,
  denies having undertaken it. There is
  reason to believe he said so under orders
  from his present employer — the Russian
  successor to the KGB. The government in
  Hanoi has denounced Kalugin as a liar and
  the Bush Administration maintains it has
  no reason to believe that there were U.S.
  POWs in Vietnam when the general says his
  operative interrogated them.

  The Whole Truth?

  Even so, General Kalugin may well be
  telling the truth. Indeed, he made a
  number of revelations in his testimony
  that confirm what has long been believed
  (e.g., subversive Soviet covert
  activities, assassinations, the power of
  the KGB and the important role of the GRU
  — the USSR’s military intelligence
  organization) but what has heretofore
  generally been steadfastly denied by
  officials of the former Soviet Union.
  Interestingly, at one point in his
  testimony, Gen. Kalugin explicitly
  pointed to the truth of several
  statements he had made to lend authority
  to his contention about the POW
  interviews in Vietnam.

  On the other hand, it is quite
  possible that the General is merely
  engaging in one of the oldest
  tricks in counter-intelligence tradecraft:
  liberally salting disinformation with
  truth so as to encourage acceptance of
  what is not true. To paraphrase Whittaker
  Chambers — a man who knew Soviet
  communists and their practices intimately
  — it is a matter of protecting a central
  lie with a bodyguard of truth.

  This is not to say that the Soviets
  held no interrogations of U.S.
  POWs in Vietnam after 1973; certainly it
  is not to suggest that there were no such
  Americans incarcerated in Vietnamese
  prisons after the Paris peace accords
  went into effect. Rather, it is
  to say that General Kalugin’s
  testimony was calculated to divert
  attention from the far more important
  story — that of U.S. POWs and MIAs who
  were reportedly taken to the Soviet Union
  and held there long after the war ended.
  Certainly, the central (if implicit)
  thrust of the general’s contention that KGB
  operatives went to Hanoi to extract
  information from American prisoners was
  that they had to do so because Moscow
  lacked any other access to them.

  The “Moscow
  Bound” Testimony

  In that respect, Gen. Kalugin’s
  testimony runs counter to recent
  statements from other sources — sources
  whose motivations are substantially less
  suspect. For example, two former U.S.
  intelligence analysts, Jerry Mooney and
  Terrell Minarcin, appeared before the
  Select Committee the day after Kalugin
  did. They painted a very different
  picture: Not only were Americans
  still held by communist Vietnam after all
  such prisoners were supposed to have been
  returned. There were also, according to
  some radio intercepts, an undetermined
  (but seemingly significant) number of
  U.S. POW/MIAs spirited away to the former
  USSR, where their captivity continued.
  There are reportedly a number of other
  American intelligence officials who are
  prepared to confirm these assertions.

  Although Gen. Kalugin’s testimony in
  effect confirms the validity of
  the first of Messers. Mooney and
  Minarcin’s charges, his denial of the
  second — far more explosive —
  allegation should be viewed with some
  skepticism. After all, the successors to
  the KGB and the old Soviet guard would
  presumably still have a powerful interest
  in concealing the existence of a program
  which, according to Mr. Mooney was well
  known by U.S. intelligence under the code
  name “Moscow-bound.”

  For one thing, its revelation would
  complicate present relations between
  Moscow and Washington. Perhaps more
  importantly, it might even oblige the
  United States to insist on a wholesale
  dismantling of the KGB apparatus as
  a quid pro quo for desperately
  needed aid. Interestingly, a number of
  American officials who were allegedly
  aware of the Soviets’ transfer of U.S.
  POW/MIAs, but kept it secret, may have a
  similar interest in seeing the truth
  suppressed.

  Flaws in Kalugin’s
  Testimony

  The Center for Security Policy
  believes that before General Kalugin’s
  testimony is accorded sufficient weight
  to impeach that provided by Messers.
  Mooney and Minarcin on the
  “Moscow-bound” program, the
  self-serving and/or implausible quality
  of some other aspects of his
  representations before the Select
  Committee should be carefully assessed.
  For example:

  • Extolling Primakov’s
    Virtues: Yevgeny
    Primakov is one of the most
    prominent of the Soviet Union’s
    unreconstructed communist thugs
    to retain a powerful position in
    the Russian government. (Before
    he became head of the former
    KGB’s foreign intelligence
    organization, he was a senior
    Middle East specialist to whom
    Mikhail Gorbachev entrusted the
    job of saving Saddam Hussein. Due
    to Primakov’s eleventh hour
    machinations, the U.S.-led ground
    war was very nearly derailed.)

  It speaks volumes about where
  Kalugin believes his bread is
  buttered that he gushed before
  the Select Committee about
  Primakov’s sophistication and
  openness. “Mr. Primakov is
  an intelligent, flexible, easily
  adjustable gentleman who could
  survive in various
  circumstances….Mr. Primakov
  would be more willing to talk and
  disclose things which are of
  public interest.”

  • Extolling Gorbachev’s
    Virtues: Gen. Kalugin
    actually made with a straight
    face the preposterous contention
    that nothing like a
    “Moscow-bound” program
    could have occurred in Mikhail
    Gorbachev’s Soviet Union —
    thanks to glasnost and perestroika.
    As he put it: “There are no
    secrets today in the USSR.
    Anything that happens,
    particularly when it concerns a
    foreign person, would be known
    all over the world….Can you
    imagine an Ameriout that
    [becoming] public knowledge?
    That’s impossible today. It was
    possible in Stalin’s times,
    yes…but not in the past ten
    years, at least, or probably not
    ten, seven years, let’s put it
    more correctly…the perestroika
    period, so to speak.”

  It strains credulity that a man
  with his self-proclaimed
  knowledge of the KGB’s power as a
  “state within a state”
  would maintain that it could not
  have covertly run a sensitive,
  compartmentalized operation — even
  if the Soviet Union had been
  perfectly transparent. In
  fact, of course, Gorbachev’s USSR
  was no such thing.

  Indeed, in Gorbachev’s USSR many
  things that were not supposed to
  happen routinely did. To name but
  a few: It is now a matter of
  record that illegal biological
  warfare production occurred;
  billions in Western aid and
  credits were diverted to
  Communist Party accounts and
  subversion overseas; militarily
  relevant high technology was
  stolen from the West; and police
  state surveillance and harassment
  of innocent citizens persisted.
  “Moscow-bound” could
  just as easily have been
  undertaken, glasnost —
  such as it was —
  notwithstanding.

  • Laos: Gen.
    Kalugin’s categorical denials
    that American prisoners could
    have been brought to the Soviet
    Union from Vietnam without his
    knowledge stands in peculiar
    contrast to his position with
    respect to the possibility that
    U.S. POW/MIAs might have been
    relocated from Laos, unbeknownst
    to him. When asked by Senator
    Kerry whether “It is
    possible that Soviet military
    intelligence could have conducted
    interrogations of downed pilots
    in Laos without you knowing
    it,” Kalugin responded
    “Oh yes, I would not know
    about it.”
  • Current Status of the KGB:
    While on several occasions,
    General Kalugin painted a picture
    of a new reformed KGB, which had
    withdrawn all of its agents from
    the United States, he
    contradicted himself by stating
    that “Soviet intelligence,
    unfortunately — despite the new
    chief, Mr. Primakov appointed
    recently — has not changed in
    substance. It’s just the
    organization, which for years and
    years lied, and if necessary,
    destroyed documents.”
  • The GRU’s Autonomy:
    Similarly, the general conceded
    that the GRU was the lead agency
    for handling the interrogations
    of prisoners of war for
    military-related information. He
    also acknowledged under
    cross-examination that the GRU
    could have undertaken certain
    activities through compartmented
    channels to which he did not have
    access. These remarks, too, would
    appear to belie the categorical
    assurance Kalugin gave the
    committee that
    “Moscow-bound” never
    happened.

  In fact, when challenged by Sen.
  Hank Brown (R-CO), Kalugin
  admitted that Americans with
  technical knowledge were far more
  valuable to the GRU than the KGB
  and that he did not know the
  extent of GRU involvement with
  U.S. POWs. After the hearing,
  Minarcin pressed Kalugin “As
  one professional to another, tell
  me the truth: The GRU took our
  prisoners to the USSR, didn’t
  they?” According to
  Minarcin, Gen. Kalugin lowered
  his head and replied,
  “Yes.”

  Establish Gen. Kalugin’s Bona
  Fides

  In the absence
  of such an admission by Gen. Kalugin on
  the public record, however, an effort
  must be made to shed additional light on
  General Kalugin’s reliability as a
  witness — and the completeness of his
  break with his previous employer. Toward
  these ends, the Select Committee should
  ask him a straightforward question: Will
  he reveal the names of those Americans
  recruited by him or his subordinates
  during his tenure with the KGB? In
  particular, he should be willing
  to disclose those enlisted during his
  first operational assignment when he
  posed as a student in the Columbia School
  of Journalism during the late 1950s.

  Should he refuse to do so, it will be
  clear that his professions of affection
  for this country and his commitment to
  the truth being told are insincere; it
  would be reasonable to conclude that his
  loyalties remain with a hostile
  intelligence service that still operates
  from the old Soviet Union. Should he say
  he maintain that he recruited no one
  during his time at Columbia, the Senate
  would be well advised to be suspicious of
  other aspects of his testimony. After
  all, it seems most unlikely that a man
  with his successful career in Soviet
  intelligence href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
  could have utterly failed in the
  principal task of his first mission. If,
  on the other hand, he did choose
  to come clean, it would be most
  interesting to discover exactly who among
  his contemporaries at Columbia have taken
  up positions in the Fourth Estate while
  being in the service of the KGB.

  What About the U.S.
  Government’s Role?

  In addition, the Select Committee
  would do well to examine as part of its
  inquiry just what the U.S.
  government knew and when it knew it
  about a “Moscow-bound” program.
  Clearly, some committee members are
  unsettled by what appears to be a
  chronically shifting party line.

  Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH), for example,
  expressed his frustration after the
  Kalugin hearing noting that “For
  seven years, [the U.S. intelligence
  agencies] said that no Americans
  were ever interrogated by Soviets in
  Vietnam. On the eve of Kalugin’s
  testimony, they changed their
  story.” Apparently, they did so only
  after the Vietnamese changed theirs. The
  CIA now acknowledges that two of its
  employees were interrogated by Soviet
  personnel in Vietnam, one in 1973 and one
  in 1975.

  The Center for Security Policy has
  found that even these reluctant
  admissions are hiding the full truth.
  By way of evidence, the Center has
  obtained a recently declassified 1971 CIA
  document offering detailed descriptions
  of a Soviet-Chinese interrogation team
  assigned to extract information from
  captured U.S. pilots in the Lam Thao
  district in North Vietnam in 1965, 1966
  and 1967.

  As Senator David Boren (D-OK),
  chairman of the Senate Intelligence
  Committee recently stated, “The
  truth [about American POW/MIAs left in
  prison in 1973 and U.S. government
  efforts to conceal their continued
  detention] has to come out — and
  it will.” The Select
  Committee on POW/MIA Affairs must see to
  it that the truth does come out.

  – 30 –

  1. By
  his own description, General Kalugin rose
  to direct the KGB’s “worldwide
  operations…trying to penetrate hostile
  intelligence and security services — the
  United States being the primary
  target.”