Studying the KGB and strategic confidence

The Sword and the Shield:
The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
NY: Basic Books, 1999, 700 pp. hb

reviewed by PIRAO chief

In another review, I explained some basic tactics of the KGB, CIA, 
and similar government agencies in the 20th century. Our readers 
need to know some of the "how-to" to understand all the fighting 
that goes on in the class war. In this review, I cover the 
political ground and how The Sword and Shield is relevant to 
communist strategic confidence in long-run victory.

Strategic confidence and ideology

"The retired British KGB agent George Blake wrote in 1990: 'Only a 
man who believes very strongly in an ideal and serves a great 
cause will agree to embark on such a career, though the word 
'calling' is perhaps appropriate here. Only an intelligence 
service which works for a great cause can ask for such a sacrifice 
from its officers. That is why, as far as I know, at any rate in 
peacetime, only the Soviet intelligence service has 'illegal 
residents.'"(p. 9)

The above is one reason that the communists can have strategic 
confidence in winning in the long run. Western officers had to be 
highly paid and would not endure the conditions of living 
illegally in other countries. Nor could they manage themselves 
over long periods of time, because they had no overarching vision.

Andrew discusses how the ideological advantage was lost over time 
as more and more people came to believe that the Soviet Union had 
left the revolutionary road. Squandering of this particular 
advantage of struggle can be blamed on Khruschev and his 
successors. An example would be one of the first things Khruschev 
did when coming to power--canceling plans to assassinate Tito and 
attempting to reconciliate with his ideology of capitalism in the 
name of socialism. In 1955 Khruschev visited Tito and buried the 
hatchet.(p. 355) It was only years later under pressure from Mao 
and Hoxha (two leaders that started to see they could not just 
rely on the Soviet Union to do the right thing anymore) that 
Khruschev briefly sided with polemics against Tito.

Mitrokhin's defection is an example of the price paid for 
Khruschevite thinking. Already in 1953 he remembers thinking 
Stalin was a "bandit." He even thought Khruschev was too involved 
with Stalin's "crimes."(p. 3)

Mitrokhin is individual proof of what happens when one drops "the 
sword of Stalin" as Mao would say. He admits to having been 
influenced by the imperialist media.(p. 6)

The question arises, that if the spy vs. spy stuff goes on and is 
even tolerated by both sides of a conflict up to a point, and the 
communists do not squander their ideological advantages, which 
side will prevail? If we believe the spin coming from Christopher 
Andrew and even computer strategy games like "Civilization," the 
communists are no good at running economies but they excel in 
spying. Andrew would have us think that Stalin in particular 
managed to bring the Soviet Union up to U.$. technical levels 
through spying--on the atomic bomb project, computers and all 
levels of ordinary technology as well.

According to Andrew, however, the Soviet strategy still would not 
work: "the distortion of Soviet intelligence analysis derived, at 
root, from the nature of the one-party state and its inherent 
distrust of all opposing views. The Soviet Union thus found it 
more difficult than its Western rivals to understand, and 
therefore to use, the political intelligence it collected. Though 
the Soviet leadership never really understood the West until the 
closing years of the Cold War, it would have been outraged to have 
its misunderstandings challenged by intelligence reports."(p. 555)

According to the Liberals, the communists fail because they 
restrict information flow by censorship and government 
intimidation. On the other hand, supposedly Liberal societies 
largely have to tolerate spying instead of creating an atmosphere 
where scientists are afraid to work or provide "information." An 
example of this quandary for the imperialists is Wen Ho Lee, a 
Taiwanese-born scientist who worked at Los Alamos labs. In 1996, 
the FBI started investigating him for supposedly transferring 
nuclear secrets to the social-imperialist regime in mainland 
China. Soon the Clinton administration was backtracking, perhaps 
because of the weak evidence, perhaps because nothing crucial was 
lost but also because the Asian community of scientists did not 
respond favorably. The imperialists started to ask themselves how 
much they were losing by cracking down on people like Wen Ho Lee. 
The government saw a dramatic cutback in Asian applications for 
jobs as a result of the FBI investigation.(1) This is the sort of 
quandary that Liberal society faces. The spying case has become 
wrapped up with inter-imperialist contention as ultra-reactionary 
forces seek to use the Wen Ho Lee case as justification for war-
mongering against China.

The issue also pops up in all current world trade discussions. The 
focus on "intellectual property" arises, because the United $tates 
and other imperialist countries tend to believe they will win all 
economic competitions as long as there is no industrial espionage 
or violation of copyright laws.

On the other hand, it is natural for communists not to respect 
world trade arrangements focussed on property in ideas. Laws 
against copying software slow down the advance of the global 
economy, for example. We applaud countries without laws that 
protect the property of the imperialists made possible by a 
history of slavery and super-exploitation of Third World workers.

We believe we will win the conflict with capitalism in the long 
run, not because of individual successes or failures, persynalized 
through Western stories about the Wen Ho Lees of the world. 
Instead, while both sides of conflict use the same tactics of 
conflict to some extent, it is the imperialist countries that 
suffer more from what the German bourgeois leader Willy Brandt 
called "political pornography."(p. 442)

Lewinsky and strategic confidence

There could be no better proof of who is damaged more by sex 
stories or lifestyle exposures than the Monica Lewinsky case. 
Unable to find anything of interest to examine in politics, the 
highly leisure-oriented Amerikan public readily gobbled up stories 
printed for profit about Monica Lewinsky.

Likewise, the FBI taped Martin Luther King having adulterous sex 
(pp. 236-8) and the KGB launched similar operations to put a tail 
on King and influence him. Yet in a real battle between the 
proletariat and the imperialists, if the proletariat takes up 
scientific Marxism, the imperialists lose more from lifestyle 
scandals, because the imperialists have more at stake in such 
individual matters.

True, pseudo-feminism, pseudo-environmentalism and other lifestyle 
movements have the potential for corroding the ranks of the 
proletarian organizations. Many a progressive organization has 
disappeared on their account. If both sides of the class war 
tolerate pseudo-feminism and pseudo-environmentalism, then the 
proletarian side will lose, because the bourgeoisie is better 
prepared for one-on-one fights. Clinton is still president, 
because he had individual advantages of power to bring to bear on 
his situation with Lewinsky.

It is also true that the FBI manufactured stories against Huey 
Newton saying he became gay in prison. Yes, the imperialists do 
all this and the KGB copied it, and not only because the KGB was 
revisionist. The proletariat should and will use some of the same 
tactics against the imperialists, thus taking advantage of the 
narrowness and other weaknesses of the imperialist camp. 

Even Andrew could see the pattern in his book; although he could 
make no recommendation on how to eradicate the weaknesses: "The 
KGB had specialized in the sexual entrapment of Western diplomats 
and visitors to Moscow since the 1930s. The entrapment followed a 
straightforward sequence: the use of attractive female or male 
swallows as sexual bait, the seduction of the target, the secret 
photography of the sexual encounter (and, on occasion, the 
interruption of the encounter by a supposedly outraged 'spouse' or 
'relative'), followed by blackmail. . . . Love, or a plausible 
semblance of it, was capable of generating more intelligence over 
a longer period than brief sexual encounters."(p. 445)

One might think it would now be easy for the CIA to issue 
guidelines on avoiding sexual blackmail with the publication of 
Andrew's book and public radio exposures of the Romeo spies. 
However, putting a cramp into normal romantic relations by 
introducing paranoia is the price that individualists of the 
imperialist countries do not pay lightly. It amounts to surrender 
of sexual privilege. The CIA could also tell its recruits not to 
like money to avoid bribery. Such advantages do not accrue to the 
capitalist side of conflict. They are going to lose more than we 
communists will when such sacrifices become necessary--both 
because communists are interested in money for fewer reasons than 
bourgeois tools and will do a better job weighing its uses versus 
its political costs and because we communists are not as easily 
scandalized by lifestyle problems.

When it comes down to it, it is the Christians that make lifestyle 
the be-all and end-all. It is the Liberals who see individual 
lifestyle as paramount. It is we communists who are strong through 
the unity of the oppressed and exploited. We on the proletarian 
side of the class war can opt out of letting individualism defeat 
us. The imperialists cannot opt out of the corrosion of 
individualism, because it is part of their system. MIM does not 
claim to live a lifestyle by the Ten Commandments. We are making 
it easier to live a non-criminal and non-oppressive lifestyle by 
changing the structure of society. That's how we go about making 
change. We are not relying on verbal persuasion to increase will-
power one individual at-a-time.

If we seize hold of the political line opposing lifestyle 
politics, we cannot be defeated by the imperialists who themselves 
face an unending saga of corrosive lifestyle politics. The MIM 
line against sub-reformism maximizes the advantages of the 
proletarian camp. It is not that comrades should live like 
Buddhist monks. The approach of comrade Gonzalo in Peru has its 
advantages. In his interview with comrade Luis Arce Borja he 
claimed to have no friends in particular and no mention is made of 
a wife. In its own way, MIM also minimizes persynality lifestyle 
struggles by its practice of being semi-underground. If we had 
famous individual leaders, the bourgeois media would focus on them 
for their lifestyles, not their politics. That is why we build our 
own media and spread our views that way with a focus on the kind 
of substance that won't sell in the mainstream entertainment 
media.

Psychological warfare

Religion, sexual mores, petty grievances at work--things that 
produce a sense of shame and divert people from their normal 
paths--these subjective motivations are all the province of 
psychology. Opposing individualism and lifestyle politics is 
simply a way of counteracting the psy-war the imperialists wage.

The KGB literally became involved in psychological warfare in 1975 
by infiltrating the psychiatry profession in the USSR. Dissidents 
were then accused of being mentally ill and then drugged. (p. 546) 
MIM has reported on similar practices in the United $tates, 
because contrary to Andrew, the use of psychiatry against 
political activists was not a Soviet state-capitalist innovation. 

We genuine communists seek to abolish psychiatry. It is fine to 
confuse the enemy with its own ideas, but we should not confuse 
ourselves about psychiatry.

Because the CIA agents have to examine the "credibility" of 
individual enemy agents that they catch or who defect, the CIA is 
at a considerable disadvantage in the class war. Deranged KGB 
agents often spread their own political subjectivism into the CIA 
in the process of interrogation--not always because of the 
intentional spread of disinformation but because of the CIA's 
process of "honest" determination of motives. In one case, the CIA 
imprisoned a friend for four years and eight months, because of 
the CIA's inability to assess the individual situation.(p. 368) In 
another case, the West German Foreign Minister (1966-1969) and 
Chancellor (1969-1974) Willy Brandt admitted that psychological 
warfare against him was successful because it stopped him from 
working days on end.(p. 442) We Maoists are going to win, because 
we know we are going to make individual mistakes, but we put 
ourselves into contexts where they will not matter. The 
imperialists will lose, because they cannot perceive the 
directions of history.

It is not surprising that tactics so focussed on the individual 
regularly backfire. For example, when a persyn is seen as 
discredited for being homosexual, much valuable scientific 
opportunity is lost. The CIA and other intelligence arms of 
imperialism will never be able to overcome this disadvantage, 
because doing so would mean taking up an ideology favorable to 
science and not just individual psychologies. Although the 
imperialists employ psychological warfare against the proletariat, 
it is the imperialists who lose more by enshrining psychology as a 
substitute for science. The more they employ psychological 
warfare, the more they guarantee our victory and as Mao said being 
attacked is a good thing.

Of note in this regard is an interesting half-way house between 
CIA ideology and communism--Amerikan Satanism. Satanism as 
professed by the Church of Satan (COS) stresses the naturalness of 
enjoying sex, food etc. Hence, Satanists are less prone to be 
easily sidetracked by exposures of people having sex--no guilt 
liable to land them in blackmail situations.

On the other hand, COS satanism is premised on the individual 
being his or her own god. People attracted to COS are liable to 
see themselves as Nietzchean supermen, demons or vampires, because 
they have yet to accept a fully scientific viewpoint. Science 
cannot be practiced at the individual level. Those who cannot 
perceive group level causation or the threads of connection 
amongst individuals are as yet pre-scientific dualists separating 
individual will from matter. That is why Satanists are prone to 
flights of fancy while admiring Hitler, rock stars, vampires and 
imaginary demons in some cases to the exclusion of real world 
forces of radical change. They see only the individual, not all of 
matter and its interrelationships.

Note: 1. 
http://cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/08/25/china.spying.ap