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RED TERROR
Stolen Soviet documents reveal the KGB's secret plan to destroy our
national infrastructure.
BY JIM WILSON
Photos by Michel Tcherevkoff, International Stock/Chuck Szymanski,
International Stock/John Zoiner, International Stock/Andre Jenny,
International Stock/Scott Barrow
It seems too much like a Cold War spy novel to be real. Vasili
Mitrokhin, a minor cog in the vast apparatus of the Soviet secret
police, begins reading the sensitive field reports his KGB spymasters
have ordered him to file. Startled by accounts of atrocities in
Afghanistan and a secret crackdown on dissidents, he crosses the line
between patriot and traitor. By day Mitrokhin hand-copies sensitive
documents that pass through the KGB's foreign intelligence archive.
At night he smuggles them past guards and hides them in the mattress
in his Moscow apartment. Years pass as he patiently waits for his
opportunity to flee. That moment arrives in the chaos follo
wing the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Taking advantage of to flee. That moment arrives
in the chaos following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Taking advantage of crumbling
border security, Mitrokhin makes his way to the
breakaway Baltic states. Clutching his KGB pension book as proof of his identity and a
sample of his wares, he walks into a British embassy and asks to make a deal. In
exchange for a new identity and British citizenship,
he will turn over thousands of pages of the Soviet Union's most closely guarded
secrets.
Targets and locations of weapons stores identified in stolen KGB documents.
"It is the largest haul of classified KGB records ever obtained by the West," says
U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania. The chairman of the House Military Research
Subcommittee, Weldon called congressional hearings on K
GB activities in the United States when the content of the Mitrokhin archives first
became public last fall. As intelligence analysts began to digest the files they
discovered a secret more shocking than the accounts of t
he KGB death squads that motivated Mitrokhin to defect. In reprisal for the failed Bay
of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev had ordered the KGB to place
America in the crosshairs of a sabotage campaign. Ove
r the next 20 years, KGB agents would take advantage of the thousands of miles of
unguarded Canadian and Mexican borders to bury caches of high explosives throughout
the United States. On Moscow's command, agents could us
e them to blow up ports, dams, power stations and pipelines.
"It all rings very true," Col. Oleg Gordievsky, the former chief of the KGB's station
in London who defected to the West in the mid-1980s, told congressmen participating in
Weldon's hearings. "I personally participated in
digging ground in [Stockholm] and putting radio equipment into the ground."
In The Crosshairs
Christopher Andrew, a historian who specializes in Soviet intelligence and who
collaborated with Mitrokhin to produce The Sword And The Shield, a history of the KGB,
expands upon the extent of the operation. "Among the ch
ief sabotage targets across the U.S. border were military bases, missile sites, radar
installations and the oil pipeline which ran from El Paso, Texas, to Costa Mesa,
Calif.," he says.
The KGB also had plans to put America in the dark. Operating from a safe house in Big
Spring Park, near Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, KGB terrorists planned to
attack powerline interconnection points serving th
e Northeast. Montana was the focus of what Andrew believes would have been a two-stage
attack against Flathead and Hungry Horse dams. "[The documents] identified a point,
code-named Doris, on the South Fork River about 3
kilometers below the dam where [they] could bring down a series of pylons on a steep
mountain slope that would take a lengthy period to repair," says Andrew. "The KGB also
planned a probably simultaneous operation in whic
h commandos would descend on the Hungry Horse Dam at night, take control of it for a
few hours and sabotage its sluices. In 1967, a number of frontier crossings were
reconnoitered, among them areas near the Lake of the Wo
ods and the International Falls in Minnesota, and in the regions of the Glacier
National Park in Montana."
To ensure that oil and hydroelectric power could not be routed from Canada, the KGB
planned a simultaneous attack on "target Kedar," the code name for oil pipelines
between British Columbia and Montreal. The documents tha
t Mitrokhin copied reveal that attempts at breaching America's borders were organized
from the Soviet Union's Ottawa embassy. They began as early as 1959 and continued as
late as 1972. "Each target was photographed from s
everal angles and its vulnerable point identified," says Andrew. "The most suitable
approach roads for sabotage operations, together with the best getaway routes, were
carefully plotted on small-scale maps."
The purpose of the attacks on powerlines and pipelines was not simply to make
Americans shiver in the dark. The blackout in the East and Midwest and massive
pipeline fires in Texas and California would be followed by a st
rike against the world's most visible symbol of capitalism, the New York City skyline,
which the KGB identified as "Target Granit." Under cover of darkness, agents who had
infiltrated the United States, most likely from C
anada, would recover high explosives and attack the network of piers and warehouses
that line the Port of New York.
Laughable though it may now seem, the Soviet leadership expected the average American
to react to power blackouts, energy disruptions and news of an assault on New York by
overthrowing the federal government.
Unaccounted Caches
"On present evidence, it is impossible to estimate the total number of KGB arms and
radio caches in the United States," Andrew told Weldon's committee. "It's possible
that some of the caches selected near U.S. targets may
never have been filled. Others may have been emptied." The KGB records do, however,
identify seven caches in this country. Three are mentioned as being buried in Southern
California. Two, identified by Andrew as Aquarium
1 and Aquarium 2, are in Minnesota. Two more, Park and Kamy, are in northwestern
Montana.
The uncertainty about the locations of all of the explosives stems from how the
records themselves were stolen. In June 1972 the KGB's Foreign Intelligence
Directorate moved from its offices in the Lubyanka in Moscow to a
new building in Yasenevo, southeast of the city. "All batches of files had to be
signed out at one place, and they had to be signed in at another place," says Andrew.
"And Mitrokhin was the man who had to sign them out f
rom the old headquarters, the Lubyanka, and sign them in at the new headquarters. Only
the most senior officers shared [Mitrokhin's] unrestricted access. And none had the
time to read more than a fraction of the material.
"
The job took 10 years. Mitrokhin did his most important work on Wednesdays, when he
worked on the Directorate S files in the Lubyanka. "For a few weeks he tried to commit
names, code names and key facts from the files to
memory and transcribe them each evening when he returned home," says Andrew. When this
proved too slow, he began taking notes, which he discarded in a wastebasket. Then,
just before leaving to go home he would retrieve th
e notes and tuck them in his shoe. His confidence grew. "After a few months he started
taking notes on ordinary sheets of office papers, which he took out of his office in
his jacket and trouser pockets. Not once in the y
ears Mitrokhin spent noting the archives was he stopped and searched," says Andrew.
While the locations of the caches buried across the United States may not be known
with precision, their contents are. During his testimony before Weldon's committee
last fall, Andrew entered into the hearing record a det
ailed inventory of a typical cache. It included explosives for blowing up railway
track, and specialized explosives designed to destroy the main supports of
high-voltage power transmission towers. Detonators were timed fo
r a 2-hour delay. Target files in the archives included photos and maps, as well as an
explanation of the target's function in peacetime and use in wartime. Vulnerable
points were identified along with a description of th
e technical expertise needed to exploit them. A schedule recommended the best time of
day to strike.
Mitrokhin traded his knowledge of secret KGB operations around the world for freedom.
While none of the U.S. caches have been found, intelligence experts are convinced they
exist because similar supplies have been found in Europe and Canada. The sabotage
attacks in the United States were part of a larger e
ffort to target Western nations. Investigations of a Toronto location yielded about
400 pounds of dynamite. Three caches turned up in Belgium. Archive documents warned
that a cache near Bern, Switzerland, was booby-trappe
d. When police hit it with a water cannon, an antitampering device set off an
explosion. Its code name, "3," prompted police to issue a warning against moving any
other suspicious buried containers.
Mission Canceled
The order to begin the sabotage program was never issued. Andrew believes that when
Yuri Andropov came to power he was unwilling to accept the many and complicated
political risks of having KGB agents discovered as the pe
rpetrators of attacks. Andropov directed that the KGB instead recruit disgruntled
groups within the United States and Canada. And in time even this modified plan would
be abandoned. "[Leonid] Brezhnev died, Andropov died,
all the leaders were very, very old-fashioned, and easily influenced by Communist
dogmas," said Gordievsky, the former KGB London station chief, at the congressional
hearings. "[Mikhail] Gorbachev wanted to change, he wan
ted reforms. So they started to work out a new political thinking, which was a new
concept of the Soviet foreign policy." The plan and the explosive archives were simply
forgotten.
The FBI has told Weldon it is conducting an ongoing investigation to locate KGB arms
caches in the United States. Mitrokhin, now 78, lives in Britain under an assumed
name. And so another dangerous chapter of Cold War his
tory comes to a close.
Or does it?
The Soviet Union had two intelligence services. The well- known KGB
had a shadowy military counterpart, the GRU. It is so secret, former
agents say, that any Soviet citizen who inquired about joining was
arrested as a potential spy. The punishment for defectors was said to
be cremation while still alive. "Everything that belongs to the area
of sabotage, caches, radio communication, weapons, explosives and so
on, is mainly the domain of the GRU," said Gordievsky. "The Mitrokhin
archive is a small part. We still don't know the most important
thing, what is actually happening on the military side."
End<{{{
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