Death to traitors? The pursuit of intelligence defectors from the Soviet Union to the Putin era

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Russia’s use of lethal violence against intelligence defectors has to be understood as a public spectacle in which Russian leaders and intelligence officials never intended to hide their role. This “theatrical murder” functions primarily as a political signaling tool for a reasserting Russia to communicate to distinct domestic and foreign audiences. We historicize the phenomenon by outlining and explaining the KGB’s approach towards defectors during the Cold War and show that “theatrical murder” is a unique feature of Russia under Putin’s rule. The empirical findings are used to significantly advance theorizing on signaling through covert action.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The investigations of the UK-based journalism platform Bellingcat played a crucial role in the public exposure of the GRU team ostensibly responsible for the poisoning of Skripal. See especially “Skripal Poisoning Suspect Dr. Alexander Mishkin”; and Rakuszitzky, “Third Suspect in Skripal Poisoning Identified.”

2. Chughtai and Petkova, “Skripal Case Diplomatic Expulsions.”

3. The subject has been addressed in some case studies and biographies, especially in the work of the British intelligence historian Boris Volodarsky (see The KGB’s Poison Factory; Nikolai Khokhlov; Stalin’s Agent).

4. See Tilly, Big Structures, 97–115.

5. For a detailed account of Skripal’s intelligence career and poisoning see Urban, The Skripal Files. Skripal had been working as a double agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) since the mid-1990s. He was arrested in Moscow in 2004 and had been serving a lengthy prison sentence when he was expelled from Russia as part of a spy swap in 2010.

6. Gioe, Goodman, and Frey, “Unforgiven,” 1f.

7. Ibid., 4f.

8. Ibid., 5.

9. Ibid., 6.

10. See Tucker, War of Nerves, 252–322; Pitschmann, ‘Chemical and Biochemical Weapons’.

11. The Litvinenko Inquiry, 23, with reference the Alexander Litvinenko’s wife Marina Litvinenko.

12. Ibid., 73.

13. A more recent account by the American scholar John Dunlop (The Moscow Bombings of September 1999) adds further evidence that Russian state actors were complicit in these terrorist attacks.

14. The Litvinenko Inquiry, 63.

15. The Litvinenko Inquiry. On the other hand it remains, for good reasons, a contentious issue whether Putin himself was involved in the assassination and if so, in which form.

16. Nekrasov, ‘Promise me you won’t go back to Russia’.

17. Morris and Rawlinson, ‘Novichok Victim Found Substance Disguised as Perfume’; Tobin, ‘Novichok Poisoning Probe’.

18. The Litvinenko Inquiry, 81.

19. Ibid., 82.

20. Ibid., 83.

21. Ibid., 187. Polonium-210 is one of the most radiotoxic substances to humans. Only one gram of Polonium-210 is estimated to kill 50 million people and sicken another 50 million. See McFee and Leikin, ‘Death by Polonium-210’.

22. The Litvinenko Inquiry, 237.

23. Harding, ‘Russian Honour for Andrei Lugovoi’.

24. ‘Evening with Vladimir Soloviev’, 13 March 2018.

25. Carson and Yarhi-Milo, ‘Covert Communication’.

26. Ibid., 126. The empirical assessment is based primarily on the study of Soviet and U.S. covert action in Angola (1970–76) and Afghanistan (1979–89). Carson and Yarhi-Milo show that the two superpowers used covert aid and other secret actions to signal resolve to each other, local allies and third parties.

27. Ibid., 125.

28. Ibid., 126.

29. Ibid., 128.

30. Gioe, Goodman, and Frey, ‘Unforgiven’, 4.

31. Ibid., 7.

32. For a most recent manifestation see the transcript of an interview with Putin published by the Financial Times on 27 June 2019, in which the Russian President maintained that ‘treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it. Not at all. But traitors must be punished.’ See “Transcript.”

33. Serhan, “U.S. Sanctions Russia”; and Axelrod, “New US Sanctions.”

34. Carson and Yarhi-Milo, “Covert Communication,” 128.

35. E.g. Christian Ostermann and Odd Arne Westad in their introduction to Mitrokhin, The KGB in Afghanistan, 7–11. A decade after Mitrokhin’s defection to Britain, his trove of documents was summarized by Christopher Andrew in two books. See Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive; and Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II. In 2014, transcripts of Mitrokhin’s full notes were released for researchers at The Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, UK. This enabled additional scrutiny of the documents and further buttressed their veracity.

36. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 505.

37. Ibid., 477.

38. Ibid., 505. On Kalugin’s career in the KGB see his autobiography Spymaster.

39. Volodarsky, The KGB’s Poison Factory, 175.

40. A contrasting account was provided decades later by Pavel Sudoplatov, who had been Khokhlov’s superior as the Soviet foreign intelligence special operations chief. According to Sudoplatov, Khokhlov did not deliberately abandon his mission to kill Okolovich but was caught and turned by the CIA. See Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 247. Besides of the sources cited here, Khokhlov is discussed in Volodarsky, Nikolai Khokhlov; and very recently by Tromly, Cold War Exiles and the CIA, 169–91.

41. See note 39 above.

42. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 467.

43. “Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping,” 3.

44. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 470; See also Tromly, “Making of a Myth,” 103.

45. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 480.

46. Ibid., 470.

47. Ibid, 471.

48. Ibid.

49. Service, A History of Modern Russia, 351.

50. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 471.

51. Various documents in Folder 39 in the NTS archive in Frankfurt (Main), Germany; including correspondence between the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation (Bayerisches Landeskriminalamt) and the NTS from 1963/64 and the ostensible NTS letter of confession forged by the KGB.

52. The former KGB colonel turned SIS agent Oleg Gordievsky also stated that ‘Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and later Yuri Andropov all avoided political killings when they led the Soviet Union.’ See Gordievsky, “Russia’s Killing Ways.”

53. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 477.

54. Ibid., 478.

55. Ibid., 480. In addition to the Mitrokhin archive, the Runge case is also described by Murphy, Kondrashev, and Bailey, Battleground Berlin, 441–6; Bagley, Spy Wars, 104; and Shackley and Finney, Spymaster, 98.

56. Bergman, Rise and Kill First, 196.

57. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 490.

58. Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, 403. The spectacular and well-known murder of Georgi Markov with an umbrella injecting a ricin pellet in London in 1978 is sometimes cited as evidence that targeted killings in the West continued in the late Cold War (also by Gioe et al., ‘Unforgiven’, 6). However, Markov was not a Soviet intelligence defector but a Bulgarian dissident, who was killed by an agent of Bulgarian State Security. Upon a personal request of the General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party Todor Zhivkov, the KGB decided to provide the Bulgarian partner service with the technical equipment and know-how but did not get directly involved in the assassination, which was disguised as a heart attack. See Nehring, Zusammenarbeit der DDR-Auslandsaufklärung mit der Aufklärung der Volksrepublik Bulgarien, 300–2.

59. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 477.

60. Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, 403.

61. Volodarsky, Stalins’s Agent, 442.

62. “The Inducement of Soviet Defections,” 13–5. Soviet law authorized authorities to take reprisals against the immediate relatives of any ‘traitor’, a category that included defectors. The punishment could take the form of incarceration, forced labor, or exile to a remote area of the country. (Ibid., 14f).

63. Gordiewski and Andrew, KGB, 9.

64. Ibid., 28.

65. The name of the defector and the country where he defected are still treated as classified information by the CIA. The context only allows the conclusion that the defection took place in a Western country but not in the United States. See “Defector Kidnappings.”

66. Tromly, “Ambivalent Heroes” 649.

67. Ibid.

68. Tromly, “Ambivalent Heroes”. Tromly forcefully describes the isolation and loneliness of non-intelligence defectors but there is no reason to assume that these findings do not pertain to intelligence defectors in secluded safe houses. If anything, the high level of distrust that defectors generally experienced in the West was probably even much higher in the case of turncoats from the intelligence and security services.

69. There is no work on re-defection of Soviet intelligence officials beyond individual case studies. The subject of re-defection more broadly is touched on in Mikkonen, “Mass Communications,” who describes a rather unsuccessful Soviet campaign inaugurated in the mid-1950s to lure Soviet citizens displaced in World War II and former émigrés to migrate back. The campaign also targeted Soviet exiles who played an active role in political émigré organizations, who were contacted directly by KGB agents.

70. “CBS Evening News,” 18 September 1984.

71. Ibid.

72. Fagone, “The Amazing Story of the Russian Defector.”

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid.

75. The following outline of the Shadrin case is based primarily on Of Moles and Molehunters, 30–2; as well as on Hurt, Shadrin; Volodarsky, The KGB’s Poison Factory, 123–36; Riegler, Österreichs geheime Dienste, 211–5; and “Soviet Defector Killed by KGB.”

76. Whitney, “Death of Soviet Defector and Spy”; “Soviet Defector Killed by KGB.”

77. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 478–9, 461–3; Bagley, Spy Wars; Ashley, CIA Spymaster; Heuer, “Nosenko”; and Arboit, “In His Defector He Trusted.”

78. According to Bergman, Rise and Kill First, 214, the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad has been using this phrase since the 1970s to describe ‘an assassination in which the death appears to be natural or by chance’.

79. Under Nikita Khrushchev the Soviet leadership even got itself somewhat imprudently into a propagandistic competition on the material living standard. See Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One.

80. Cited in Tromly, “Ambivalent Heroes,” 644. According to Tromly, defections and the mass publicity generated around them also served a domestic purpose, ‘providing the American public with eagerly sought evidence of the magnetic pull of American freedom and wealth for Soviet citizens, prima facae [sic!] evidence of the moral high ground in the Cold War’ (Ibid., 642).

81. The CIA started the first concrete U.S. program for local inducement of Soviet defections as early as 1950 under Operation Cautery in Germany. See “Project Cautery.”

82. In the domain of sports, the U.S. government tried to encourage athletes from the Soviet bloc to defect. This resulted in secret wars in the shadows of the Olympic Games of the 1950s/1960s. At the Rome Olympics in 1960, for example, the CIA recruited the US sprinter David Sime to lure the young Soviet long jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesyan away from his team. However, Soviet secret agents managed to keep an eye on him and Ter-Ovanesyan would not defect. See Anderson, Politics and Culture of Modern Sports, 126. On the US efforts to encourage defections of Soviet bloc athletes at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics see Blutstein, Cold War Games.

83. The United States Information Agency (USIA) produced the comic books Voyage to Freedom (1953), a story of the heroic escape of three Lithuanian fishermen, and They Escaped to Freedom (1954), which tells twelve stories of people who defected to the West in the early 1950s from states under Communist rule. The USIA distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of each of the comics worldwide. Despite their significance for US Cold War propaganda, defectors have so far received little attention in the academic literature on this subject. On the publicity surrounding defection and cultural representations of defectors during the early Cold War period see Carruthers, Cold War Captives, 59–97. On the somewhat better explored role of Soviet military defectors in early British Cold War propaganda see Wark, “Coming in from the Cold.”

84. Keys and Burke, “Human Rights,” 492.

85. Some scholars have argued that these human rights groups have played a role in bringing the Cold War to its end ‘from the bottom-up’, especially by assisting the citizen mobilization against the Communist regimes in Europe that eventually brought about the revolutions of 1989. See Snyder, Human Rights Activism.

86. See Lee Myers, Putin, 413f.

87. Ibid., 417.

88. The Litvinenko Inquiry, 80. While it is certainly possible that Putin’s personality as well as his experience as a KGB officer from 1975–1990 and head of the FSB in 1998/99 have played a role in the choice of ‘theatrical murder’, this thesis remains purely speculative. Yuri Andropov had been the KGB Chairman for 15 years when he became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Yet, under his leadership, the Soviet Union did not kill intelligence defectors or even employ covert action for public signaling.

89. Berezovsky was found dead with ligature around his neck in the bathroom of his home near Ascot, UK, in March 2013. Lesin, Putin’s former Minister of the Press and media advisor, and the head of Gazprom-Media from 2013–2015, died of blunt-force trauma to his head in a Washington, D.C., hotel room in November 2015, in an incident that was first assumed a heart attack. The former deputy director of Aeroflot, Berezovsky associate, and critic of the Putin government Nikolai Glushkov was found dead in his London home in March 2018. After his death had first been treated as unexplained, the Metropolitan Police has been investigating it as a murder since marks indicating strangulation were found on his body. See Oleson, “Stalin’s Disciple,” 21–5; Townsend and Goodley, “Boris Berezovsky Found Dead”; and “Russian Nikolai Glushkov’s London Death”. For a broader journalistic account see Blake, From Russia with Blood, who analyzes 14 suspected Russian assassinations in Great Britain.

90. There was possibly also a ‘low-signature’ Russian assassination attempt of an intelligence defector during Putin’s rule. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB rezident in London who turned SIS agent in 1974 and defected in 1985, alleged that he was poisoned with thallium in a Russian-directed attack at home in Surrey, England, in November 2007. He was hospitalized unconsciously but forensic tests carried out at the UK biochemical warfare research laboratory at Porton Down could not identify any traces of poison in his body. The SIS considered Gordievsky’s claim without foundation and decided that there should be no investigation by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. See Thomas, Secret Wars, 256–9.

91. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 477.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian Hänni

Adrian Hänni is a political historian teaching at Distance Learning University Switzerland and the University of Zurich. His research interests include the history of propaganda, intelligence services, and terrorism with a focus on the Cold War era

Miguel Grossmann

Miguel Grossmann is a legal consultant in Switzerland. From 1996–2004 he worked first as an ICRC Delegate in Sukhumi (Abkhazia) and Tbilisi and then as a legal consultant in Moscow.