Billion-Dollar Brain (27 page)

There are twenty-three military districts. The most important are: Moscow, Leningrad, Baltic, Belorussia, Kiev and Maritime (which includes Far Eastern). As well as these there are Army Groups, Germany, and also the Polish Army which is still largely officered by Russians, some of whom don’t speak Polish.

A Military Council commands each military district under the direct orders of the Ministry of Defence. The military district is remarkably selfsufficient, commanding even tactical air forces.

Naval units and long-range air force units have their own systems of districts and are under Moscow’s orders but, like Stok’s KGB, their food, lodging, vehicles, fuel, etc. are supplied by the local military district.

Soviet units are not only very complex and overlapping but constantly change their names and their relative power. For instance, the MVD (formerly the NKVD) was at one time the most powerful of all such organizations, and a visit from a sergeant could intimidate an ordinary army colonel. It had its own air force, tank force, supply service and communications. Nowadays the MVD sergeant will be the man looking under your seat for stowaways when you cross the Soviet border, and even then he is likely to have an officer watching him to see that he does it right. Among the many other intelligence units in the USSR there are those of the Foreign Ministry, the Party, the Air Force, Army and Rocket Forces. The major units, however, can be divided into three.

1. The MVD. It has been called the Cheka, GPU, OGPU and NKVD, but after Stalin’s death the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) became mostly concerned with intelligence only at a tacti
cal level. Its present duties include highway patrols, traffic services, fire services and militiamen. It also handles all registration, e.g. marriage, birth, driving licence, visa and passport, including those of foreigners. Each Border District HQ has an Intelligence Unit to report about the foreign territory facing them. At present its most important unit—GUVV—is responsible for internal security units.

2. All military intelligence of the General Staff comes under the Chief Intelligence Administration (Directorate) and this is the GRU. Each army division has a GRU unit commanded via its military council GRU. At the top of the GRU tree there are GRU networks in Western countries. Famous old boys include Colonel Zabotin of the Gouzenko affair in Ottawa, Alexander Foote (author of the famous
Handbook For Spies)
and Richard Sorge of Tokyo. The GRU also control the specialized ‘Study Department’ which studies documents published in the West which will provide information—especially technical information—of use to Russia. Over the past decade this particular department—in spite of its lack of glamour—has provided more and better information than all the other departments put together.

3. The most important unit of intelligence is the KGB. Under Beria this was the Ministry of State Security—MGB—but was reformed as a mere committee of State Security KGB and had certain devices built into the chain of command to
prevent another Beria—or even a Hoover—taking it over as a personal force. The top-ranking foreign section—INU—is calculated to operate about seventy-five per cent of all Soviet espionage overseas. Rosenberg and Colonel Abel were employees of the INU section of KGB, so were Petrov, Khokhlov, Rastvorov, etc. There are many sections of the KGB: the KRU—counter-intelligence—and SPU (Special Political) are next in order of importance after INU. There is a special part of the KGB which is devoted to watching the army. This is called the GUKR, which is often translated as Senior Counter-intelligence and its duties are thereby confused with the KRU mentioned earlier. The GUKR, however,
watches the Soviet Army.
Before 1946 GUKR was sometimes called SMERSH and was a part of the Defence Ministry.

The function and power of each of these organizations is subject to change. Although there is just as much back-biting among Soviet Intelligence as among Western Intelligence there is one difference: it is not unusual for one department to relinquish its network to a rival command. A man this week working for the GRU might next week be working for the KGB, whether he knows it or not. In any case, as I have pointed out, he probably thinks he is working for America or France. So if you are indulging in a little extra-curricular espionage remember that you might be working for your ideological enemies. Take a tip from the professionals: do it just for the money.

There are quite a few, of all shapes and sizes. Most of them are émigré formations like the Ukrainian Socialist Party which is an anti-Communist Russian group based in Munich. There also is the Natsionalno Trudovi Soyuz (NTS) or National Labour Alliance which has been going since the early thirties. It has Whites and all sorts of Soviet Army deserters mixed up with ex-Vlassov men (a Nazi puppet army). It is especially interested in putting men into the USSR to spread propaganda because it feels that the USSR is on the verge of revolt. It is said to have links with the Gehlen Bureau and the CIA. NTS men were parachuted into Soviet territory in April 1953, but their trial didn’t come until much later because Soviet Intelligence didn’t want to endanger a man named Georg Müller who had penetrated the NTS in 1948. The trial said the men were trained at Starnberg school in shooting, radio, forging, sabotage and parachuting. They publish newsheets:
Za
Rossiou
(For Russia) and
Nashy Dni
(Our Days). NTS also controls International Research on Communist Techniques.

The most famous private organization is the Crusade for Freedom headed by Eugene Holman (Standard Oil Esso, New Jersey) which ran Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Europe Press. The RFE has twenty-eight transmitters and employs well over one thousand persons. Some people think that RFE was too provocative in its broadcasts to Hungary during the revolt.

Another organization is the International Service of Information Foundation Inc. which is run by Air Force Reserve Colonel Amoss on a grant from a millionaire businessman. Information Bureau West is a private news agency which concentrates upon building a minutely detailed picture of the DDR (East Germany) from press, radio, visitors and Government sources.

The radical right gets quite a lot of support from business; one insurance company alone has distributed thirty million anti-Communist pamphlets. Savings banks and oil companies are especially generous, and large companies have bought TV time for anti-Communist rallies.

Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school—first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery—a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the
Observer
and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book,
The Ipcress File.
Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.

Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made
Bomber
into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two,
Blood, Tears and Folly
, was published to wide acclaim—Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.

As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood—‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’—and his books have now deservedly become classics.

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