Secreted in Fiction
I’ve written about the ways in which spy fiction can influence spy fact in The Spies We’ve Loved, but I came across another intriguing example of this when writing my non-fiction book on the Oleg Penkovsky operation, Dead Drop. My research involved interviewing surviving members of the operation, consulting all the available declassified material on it, including debrief transcripts, memoirs, articles and documentaries—and reading spy fiction.
Three novels were particularly helpful. The first was The Russia House by John le Carré, which was loosely based on the operation and which contains several details suggesting inside knowledge of it, perhaps as a result of le Carré’s long friendship with Dickie Franks, who recruited Greville Wynne for MI6 and would later become ‘C’. One snippet, for example, is that the operation in the novel is run from a CIA-funded command centre in London—I discovered in my research that the CIA did fund such a centre, in Pall Mall, but this hadn’t been revealed in any previous literature.
The second spy novel I read was Wages of Treason by Paul Garbler, who was the CIA station chief in Moscow during the operation (its first station chief in the city, in fact), but later came under suspicion of being a traitor in the feverish molehunts of James Jesus Angleton. His novel, self-published in 2004, was an attempt to explain how Angleton had been fooled by a Soviet deception operation into seeing moles where there were none, and also provided some insights into how Penkovsky was handled, and how the CIA worked in Moscow.
The third novel was a Russian one: Julian Semyonov’s TASS Upolnomochen Zaiavit (‘TASS Is Authorized To Announce’), published in 1979, which I had read a few years earlier but which my other research suggested contained incidents that closely echoed the Penkovsky operation. It’s hardly surprising that a Soviet spy novel would draw on one of the most famous operations of the Cold War, just as le Carré had done: in the Soviet Union, Penkovsky was as famous as Kim Philby was in Britain. However, as in The Russia House, some information in the novel wasn’t public knowledge at the time it was published. And one plot point suggested a way that the KGB could have realized the CIA and MI6 were running an agent in Moscow.
Semyonov—whose real surname was Landres—was one of the Soviet Union’s most popular spy novelists. His war-time thriller Semnadtsat mgnoveniy vesny (‘Seventeen Moments of Spring’), was made into the country’s most successful and best-loved television series. In his conversation with Graham Greene (see When Julian Met Graham), Semyonov discussed how Yuri Andropov called him out of the blue in the summer of 1967, shortly after he had been appointed head of the KGB, and asked if he would be interested in being given access to the organisation’s operational archives.
From then on, he told Greene, Andropov had ‘supported him a lot’, although he had occasionally objected to a passage, saying ‘Julian, it is impossible to publish this, because you have bitten us more than Mr Solzhenitsyn!’ On those occasions, instead of cutting his text, Andropov had suggested that Semyonov simply ‘add three lines’ presenting the opposing view: ‘thesis and antithesis’ was the best method. Semyonov told Greene he had never had any problems with censorship as a result, because he simply always added the proverbial three lines presenting the other side of the argument. In another account of this incident, Semyonov said of TASS Is Authorized To Announce: ‘If I asked Mr. Andropov to give me materials, of course he liked my books, and he will give me these materials.’ He also interviewed several KGB officers for the novel.[1]
Having been called by the head of the KGB in this way made for an entertaining anecdote, but the reality must have been at least a little problematic. On the one hand, he was being given an extraordinary opportunity—what spy novelist wouldn’t leap at the chance of being given access to a secret agency’s most classified operational files? On the other hand, even with Andropov’s three lines he would not be free to treat the material however he wished.
His solution was to push the three lines as far as he could. While much of the novel reads like crude propaganda to Western readers today, at times he appears to have been playing a double game. To the KGB and their censors it may have seemed as if he had done precisely what they had wanted him to do, which was to produce an exciting story in which heroic Soviet agents thwarted ruthless imperialist hyenas.
But between the lines, Semyonov smuggled through slivers of satire and criticism of the Soviet system. The wife of one of his protagonists, KGB officer Konstantinov, works as an editor at a publishing house, and he berates her over a manuscript she has asked him to read, calling it a collection of clichés: ‘the bad factory director and the good party organizer, the innovator whom they gagged at first and who in the end gets a medal, the one drunkard in the whole of the workshop… Why do people have to lie so? If there was only one drunkard in ever factory shop, I’d be placing lighted candles in the church! The desire to please—whoever you are trying to please—is a form of insincerity. And then public opinion suddenly realises what is going on, and everyone starts shouting: “Where have all the whitewashers sprung from?”’
It’s mild by modern comparisons, but in 1979, in a novel approved by the head of the KGB and using KGB materials, quite a remarkable thing to have written. He got away with it by balancing it with more obviously ingratiating material. At one point, KGB officer Vitaly Slavin teases undercover CIA officer John Glebb that he would like to make a film:
‘Or not so much make as finish one off. Take From Russia With Love—all I would add is just one more shot! I would put it in just after Bond carried off the coding girl in triumph to London. Just a single line on the screen: “Operation Implant successful. Over to you, Katya Ivanova…’’
This was a crowd-pleasing dig at one of the Soviet Union’s most loathed propaganda figures, James Bond, which also celebrates Russian intelligence’s fondness for maskirovka: deception operations. It is a clever piece of propaganda in itself: an apparent Soviet defeat turned to a cunning victory with a twist at the last moment, MI6’s great triumph revealed as the first stage in a plan to infiltrate a Soviet agent into Britain.
Having warmed the patriotic cockles of his readership, and hopefully had the KGB censors smiling benignly down on his manuscript, Semyonov then added another layer. Konstantinov and his wife visit a film director, Ukhov, who is making a spy thriller. Konstantinov is, on the surface, simply being asked his professional advice as a KGB officer about the authenticity of the film: in reality, there is a more sinister subtext. He is acting as its censor, in just the same way Semyonov’s books, and indeed the films adapted from them, were being overseen by Andropov. Ukhov shows a scene in which his lead actor plays a traitor to the Soviet Union:
‘In the next sequence, the actor tried the role of a spy. Konstantinov immediately reacted against his hunted look: from the very first shot, he conveyed terror and hatred.
“It would be no fun chasing him,’ he observed. “You could see him a mile off!’
“So what? Do you want us to make the enemy heroic?’ Ukhov exclaimed. “They’d have my head!’
“Who?’ Lida asked, placing her hand on her husband’s cold fingers. “Who would have your head?’
“I’m afraid it would be your husband, first and foremost.’
“Nonsense,’ Konstantinov’s face puckered. “If you remember, right through the film I’ve kept emphasizing that your enemies seem naive and stupid. Whereas they have intelligence and talent—that’s right, talent!’
“Can I quote you, when I speak to the Artistic Committee?’
“Don’t bother, I can say it myself. I feel sorry, not so much for the audience as for a talented actor. It’s humiliating to be forced to speak a lie, while making out it’s the truth.’’
Semyonov appears to have discovered an ingenious way of skirting his own Artistic Committee. On the one hand, by having his wise, cultured and noble KGB protagonist point out the foolhardiness of using crude stereotypes, he was laying down a good rule of propaganda: if you make your enemies caricatures, your audience will not be convinced by your arguments, and your efforts will backfire. He was hoping his own censors would see the sense in this and choose to adopt the same line—and in doing so, this would give him greater leeway to insert subtle criticisms of the system. If they objected, he could counter: ‘Do you really want to be like that fool Ukhov, pretending our enemies are all stupid? I thought you might be mature and sensitive enough to realize that such crude propaganda never persuades anyone…’ The tactic apparently worked, as the passage made it into print, although there is also a rather chilling self-awareness in the line that it is humiliating to be ‘forced to speak a lie’.
This novel, then, seems to be propaganda laced with disguised criticism. If so, it was itself a kind of miniature deception operation, carried out by Semyonov against the KGB. Given access to their files on the unspoken understanding that anything he wrote had to be sufficiently flattering, he smuggled a more critical view past Andropov and the censors.
It seems unlikely he was writing with any hope of being read or interpreted this way in the West, but with the benefit of hindsight several details about KGB operational methods in the novel that were let through because they were part of an overall picture painting the intelligence services in a heroic light now suggest a different story, and offer a glimpse into the KGB’s mindset and techniques during the Cold War, and specifically how it might have discovered, and reacted to, the Penkovsky operation.