The World : In the Know: The Loss of Deniability on Intelligence Operations

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin marched to the brink of war with a breakaway region of the Caucasus Mountains recently, then backed off at the last minute when friends and enemies alike raised a clamor of protest. Then late last week, he authorized the use of force against unspecified militias in the region. This back-and-forth approach reveals much about the operating style of Russian intelligence organizations since the dissolution of the old KGB in 1991.

As always with intelligence operations, the story is complicated. Indeed, complexity is the first guarantee of secrecy for intelligence operations the world over. But the case of the mountainous homeland of the Chechen people, once sorted out, proves covert operations in the classic style are increasingly difficult to conceal in a world where even ordinary citizens have caught on to the unmistakable signs of hidden manipulation.

Readers will recall that the numerous republics trapped in the old Soviet Union separated quickly after a failed coup attempt in Moscow by hard-liners back in 1991, but it may have been forgotten that many regions of what has been called Russia since the time of the czars were also eager to go their own way. One, the autonomous region (not republic) of Chechnya, declared independence under the leadership of a former Soviet air force general, Dzhokar Dudayev.

The Chechen people were never reconciled to their conquest in the 19th Century; and their expulsion from their homeland by Josef Stalin during World War II is still bitterly resented by survivors who returned. Dudayev was widely supported, but ethnic Russians living in the region did not want to sever ties with Moscow.

In desperate need of Western aid and fearful of alarming potential donors in the West, Yeltsin let the republics go--but did what he could to hold on to the restive regions in Russia itself, short of sending in the army. He refused to recognize Dudayev’s declaration of independence and offered quiet support--many details are still lacking--for Chechnya groups who wanted to remain part of Russia.

Recently, the struggle turned military in nature and fighting began to escalate. Chechen rebels supporting Dudayev charged that the opposition was financed and controlled by Russia. Moscow denied it. The Chechens claimed the opposition forces were commanded by Russians and included Russian soldiers. Moscow denied it. The Chechens protested that an air raid on the Chechen capital of Grozny, killing nine civilians Dec. 1, was conducted by Russian planes flown by Russian pilots. Moscow denied it.

Then Yeltsin issued an ultimatum: If a cease-fire was not reached in the region of Chechnya, Russia would formally intervene with its army to restore order.

Does all this sound familiar? Detail by detail, the unfolding events in Chechnya mirrored the U.S. plan of nearly 35 years ago to invade Cuba and topple Fidel Castro’s government--plans formed and half-carried out not once, but twice. The initial attempt was too big to hide. First, U.S. bombers raided Castro’s airfields. The State Department, backed up by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai E. Stevenson, insisted the pilots were Cuban defectors, the planes belonged to Castro, the government of John F. Kennedy had nothing to do with it.

Then a flotilla of ships landed a thousand armed men on a beach along a stretch of Cuba’s southern coast called the Bay of Pigs. The U.S. State Department again insisted the fighters were simply Cuban patriots, the force had armed and trained itself, the United States had nothing to do with it.

If Castro had taken longer to crush the invading force, the plan would have called for the invaders to declare a new provisional government. Then, according to the scenario worked out by the CIA officers behind the operation, Washington would have recognized the rebel government and intervened with U.S. troops “to restore order,” if necessary--or so it was hoped by the principal puppet-masters, CIA director Allen W. Dulles and his deputy, Richard M. Bissell Jr.

Kennedy manfully shouldered the blame--but was furious at the failure. Less well-known is the fact that the President charged his brother, then Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, with overseeing a second attempt. Brought in to run the show was Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, the psychological-warfare expert who had helped the government of the Philippines defeat a communist insurgency.

Lansdale’s master plan, often derided as unrealistic, called for an aggressive campaign of covert operations culminating in a victory parade through the streets of Havana before the congressional elections in November, 1962. What actually happened in November, 1962, it will be remembered, was a collective worldwide sigh of relief at the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis.

Lansdale’s program and his paramilitary raids on Cuban sugar refineries and the like were overshadowed by the Soviet-U.S. confrontation that appeared to threaten the outbreak of nuclear war. Castro knew what was going on, of course, but the U.S. public did not begin to see through the veil of secrecy until the mid-1970s--when a Senate committee investigated the Central Intelligence Agency, including the efforts to assassinate Castro that had been a central feature of Lansdale’s plan.

The comic side of these plots--which involved poisoned cigars, the Mafia, a fountain pen rigged to inject a deadly toxin and even exploding sea shells--convinced many observers that Lansdale’s whole program promised nothing more than an embarrassing sideshow dominated by keystone cops.

But whenever an intelligence operation looks like a joke, look again. In this case, as is so often, there is a missing piece in the Lansdale timetable between blowing up sugar refineries and the victory parade. CIA officers who worked with Lansdale point out that major U.S. military exercises were carried out in the Caribbean in August, 1962, and insist Lansdale had the agreement of the White House to provide in 1962 what had been refused at the Bay of Pigs--open U.S. military intervention.

This has always been denied by those in the Kennedy Administration, but a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who must remain nameless, once told me that there were plenty of people I might ask for the details of the anti-Castro operation in 1962--that it was discussed in detail at regular meetings of high officials from the Pentagon.

For example, most Cuban planning meetings were attended by the secretary of the Army at the time--Cyrus R. Vance. If he couldn’t make it, the Army’s chief lawyer might attend in his place, Joseph A. Califano Jr.; or perhaps his military aide would sit in, a bright young Army major named Alexander M. Haig Jr. More recently, one of Lansdale’s assistants at the CIA said his boss was no fool; he had no illusions that paramilitary “boom and bang” would topple Castro, or that propaganda leaflets dropped by the CIA would trigger a popular uprising. All that was just window-dressing. The victory parade would follow direct U.S. military intervention--”to restore order.”

The Kennedy-Lansdale plan never worked out--and neither did Yeltsin’s. In his case, the problem was that everyone caught on to the “secret” plan from the start. Dudayev’s forces captured a score of Russian military men who said they had been recruited and paid well by the Federal Counterintelligence Service, a remnant of the old KGB now known by its Cyrillic initials, FSK. Political opponents ridiculed the Yeltsin government’s feeble claim that the soldiers were “volunteers”--an excuse that worked better for President Dwight D. Eisenhower back in the more-innocent 1950s, when U.S. pilots involved in a CIA operation were captured in Indonesia.

The story about the “volunteers” was the first to go, exploded by detailed reports of dealing with the FSK. Next was the Yeltsin threat to send in Russian troops to “restore” order--fighting had been started by the Russians in the first place, and everyone knew it. Instead, Yeltsin sent his defense minister, Pavel S. Grachev, to meet with Dudayev and call a truce. They met in Ordzhonikidzevskaya, a small town named after Sergo Ordzhonikize, one of the founders of the Soviet Union’s first intelligence service.

In Ordzhonikidzevskaya, Grachev took back all of Yeltsin’s threats of war, and then conceded, almost as an afterthought, that yes, it was true, the planes and pilots who raided Grozny were Russian. There was no secret to give away--the Chechens and everybody else knew an old trick when they saw one.*