Near and Distant Neighbors by Jonathan Haslam

Author:Jonathan Haslam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710408
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

8. THE GERMAN THEATRE

From the end of 1944, Stalin had highlighted the United States as the next main enemy.1 Germany, where the Russians held the advantage, remained the chief theatre of potential conflict where this rivalry was played out. “Our main enemy is America,” Stalin said only a few months before he died. “But the main emphasis should be directed not at America itself. The starting point, where we need to have our own people, is Western Germany.”2

Much hinged upon selecting leaders of the best calibre, in particular to head the First Main Directorate of what became the KGB, and the GRU. The former, however, predictably went to a bureaucrat with limited experience of foreign operations: Aleksandr Sakharovskii.

The son of a paper hanger, Sakharovskii was born on September 3, 1909. He had limited secondary education, augmented by experience building up the Romanian security services, but no knowledge of foreign languages. Sakharovskii became deputy head of the First Main Directorate on March 18, 1954. On June 23, 1955, he was appointed acting head of the directorate until full promotion on May 12, 1956, recommended by his sick and inept predecessor, Aleksandr Panyushkin.3 Good-looking and demanding without being petty, Sakharovskii was cautious, made friends only very slowly, and was staunchly independent. His contacts abroad were limited to his counterparts in the Warsaw Pact. His fundamental problem was a lack of any systematic education or serious experience abroad. This in part explains his reluctance to innovate, a feature worsened by his health, which deteriorated as the requirements for foreign intelligence expanded exponentially. He breathed a sigh of relief nonetheless when, on December 8, 1958, Ivan Serov was transferred out of the KGB to head the GRU. Yet, as the years rolled by and the remit of the First Main Directorate grew with expansion of the formerly colonial Third World, Sakharovskii’s poor health, notably continual headaches, prevented him from keeping pace.4

Korotkov, now raised to the rank of general, was passed over despite the fact that he was vastly more qualified and had been entrusted with illegal operations since May 22, 1946. It could not have helped matters that, as an experienced and hardworking professional, he was notoriously direct. Now he was also too closely identified with Beria. The fact that he had survived even the ill-fated Yagoda and the hated Yezhov did not help.5

Striking continuities persisted, even following the spring cleaning after Stalin’s death. On September 3, 1953, for example, proposals put forward by First Deputy Minister of the MVD Sergei Kruglov and by Panyushkin, “to recognise the value of engaging in acts of terrorism”—a term later euphemistically changed to aktivka, or “active measures”—were turned into a decree providing for the organisation of a twelfth (special) department within the MVD’s foreign directorate.6 These were plans carried over from Beria by the head of the MVD’s First Directorate, Pyotr Fyodotov, and his deputy, Oleg Gribanov.7 Yet the men of the greatest experience most capable of leading the campaign, Pavel Sudoplatov and Naum Eitingon, remained incarcerated under special interrogation for having been closely associated with Beria.

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