28 February 2002

Vasiliy Mitrokhin, The KGB in Afghanistan, CWIHP Working Paper No. 40, February 2002, Note 100, pp. 93-95.

Directorate S was the most important branch of intelligence, namely the Illegal branch. It consisted of 13 departments:

1. Work with trainer-Illegals, work relating to the Socialist countries under the codename 'PROGRESS', one-time assignments abroad, and the selection of trained individuals as dangles under the auspices of the FCD, the SCD, the 3rd Directorate, and the KGB of individual republics.

2. Documentation of Illegals.

3. Training of the Special Reserve. [Osobyy Rezerv - O.R.]

4. Work from Illegal positions on the American continent.

5. European countries, Australia and New Zealand.

6. The Chinese People's Republic, Japan and Asia.

7. African countries and countries in the Near and Middle East.  

8. Conduct of special operations.

9. Security Department.

10. Training and deployment of Special Agents through the German, Jewish and Armenian emigration channel.

11. Strategic communications.

12. Department P - work under cover of the USSR Chamber of Commerce.

[In addition]

Group R - carried out analytical work for the leadership.

First Section - handled language training.

Second Section - handled photography and radio, SW, fabrication of documentation and seals.

Third Section - handled clandestine premises, villas, postal addresses within the USSR.

The 8th Department was integrated in the Directorate S structure in 1976. Before that it had been an autonomous section attached to the FAD (the 13th Department, or Department V). The defection of an officer of the Department, Lyalin, to the West and the British Government's subsequent expulsion of 105 KGB officers and agents in September 1971 placed the Department and the Residency in an exceptionally difficult situation. The London Residency was compelled to switch entirely to work from official positions. The process of re-establishing the agent network went on until the end of 1975.

The Department was engaged in what is known in the criminal jargon as wet jobs, i.e. murder, sabotage, arson, explosions, poisoning, mechanical breakdowns and terrorism. Its main base was located in the Moscow-region township of Balashikha, in the premises of the former Higher Intelligence School. The training grounds were dispersed throughout the country. Parachute training from aircraft took place at a training ground near Kaunas.

The Department trained sabotage and Intelligence groups. The daring lads and fly-by-nights selected for the purpose underwent basic sabotage training, according to the timetable, they were called up for 45 days for training, and were grouped in small detachments. From time to time, emergency call-outs were arranged, when in response to a given signal the members of the group were to gather with their essential kit at a prearranged place.

The sabotage and intelligence groups were trained for operations in a specific area of a country. The Department monitored practically all the most important enterprises, hydro-electric stations, nuclear stations, tunnels, depots, bridges, oil pipelines and cables. It studied suitable landing places -- the seashore, aircraft landing strips, the topography of the locality, the settlements within reach, climatic conditions at various times of the year, the direction of the wind in various seasons, characteristic landmarks, and routes from the landing place to the target of sabotage. The route to be taken by sabotage intelligence groups and the sabotage targets were photographed and located on the map.

In order to disguise sabotage and intelligence groups as local inhabitants, the necessary kit was acquired -- samples of military uniforms, badges of rank for officers and other ranks, in mountain rifle units, those of railway track men, forestry officials, police and gendarmerie officers, and articles of civilian clothing worn by the population in the landing areas were purchased.

The language and phonetic peculiarities of the given area were studied, as was the timing and nature of state and religious festivals and popular celebrations. Ahead of time storage places were sought and prepared, and weapons and radio transmitter-receivers were pre-positioned in them. Arms were acquired abroad by various means and were accumulated gradually for eventual use.

There were occasions when the KGB resorted to compromising a foreign state. Thus, on the eve of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces in 1968, the operational group V of the KGB plenipotentiary apparatus in the GDR consisting of G. T. Panasyuk, A. Botyan and V. P. Ryabov, built a cache on Czech territory and placed West German and American weapons within it. They led the Czechoslovak Security Service to this cache. The suggestion was that the BND and CIA were preparing their people for armed insurrection against the Socialist achievements of the people. The KGB drafted the text of an article for the press. To his credit, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Czechoslovakia, (codename 'Pavel'), doubted the plausibility of the version put forward.

The idea of setting up and discovering a cache of American arms in Afghanistan on the border with Iran was being developed by the Intelligence agencies in order to accuse the USA publicly of interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.

In 1982, a 'training center for Afghanistan' was set up at Balashikha; an officer of the 8th Department, Kikot, who had been recalled from Havana, was appointed to head it. The Department was fully engaged in developing methods of sabotage and terrorism in the Afghan theatre. Israeli experience against Palestinian camps in Lebanon and Palestinian methods against the Israelis were used in the Afghan refugee camps and in heavily populated areas of Pakistan.

At Balashikha, there were also courses for frontier guard officers and a 100-hour program designed to raise the combat qualifications of young KGB officers.

The Department painstakingly studied the organization and structure of guerrilla detachments, the development of a resistance movement, and methods and means ofarnied struggle abroad.

For the purpose of training foreigners, there were special 'Vystrel' courses for officers at Solnechnegorsk (near Moscow) on the theme of 'Military leadership personnel'. The participants became commanders of armed formations operating against their own government.

Agent groups of foreign nationality generally consisted of a Special Agent, a support point agent, an agent who was the keeper of a post-box, and agents who carried out the actual operations. The support point agents were intended to ensure the combat effectiveness, security and viability of intelligence and sabotage detachments on the territory of foreign countries. The keepers of post-boxes were used by the intelligence service for clandestine postal communication with the sabotage and intelligence groups.

All files on agents of foreign or Soviet nationality which for some reason were consigned to archives were examined by the 8th Department with a view to selecting people for its purposes.

Not less than 4-6 targets a year were processed by the Department for the F Line, i.e. sabotage.

The landing of a sabotage and intelligence group was arranged by night, or by day in foul weather or fog. Each group consisted of 15-25 individuals, but the sabotage network could also consist of individual intelligence officers, Illegals or agents. The activities of a sabotage or intelligence group were similar to guerrilla operations, but differed in that the guerrillas relied on contact with the population, with the masses, and were conducting permanent armed struggle. The sabotage people, on the other hand, were sent in from somewhere outside or were recruited individually on the spot and carried out specific sabotage assignments. Kutusov included guerrilla warfare in his strategic plan for a military campaign. The people of Afghanistan provided a unique example of the conduct of guerrilla warfare on a wide scale. Alone, without an army, without modern weapons, and almost without support, the Afghan people successfully waged war exclusively by guerrilla methods against the army of a superpower, which used inhumane methods of waging war, and with the government forces of its own country. Before the eyes of the whole world, the Soviet nomenklatura spent 7 years destroying a nation, while in its annual adverse resolutions the UN did not even name the bandits, feebly repeating calls for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan. The League of Nations was more decisive, as for its aggression against Finland the USSR was expelled from its ranks as an aggressor.

The term 'diversion' was introduced in Russia under Peter I. The 1716 military manual relating to the 'Corps Volant' -- mobile corps -- specified: "It is to go into [the enemy's] rear or enter his territory and cause a diversion."

The meaning of the term has evolved. At one time it was considered to be a maneuver on the enemy's flanks or rear o distract attention from the main operations. Later on it came to mean the activities of small secret detachments or groups designed to distract attention from the main operations. Later on it came to mean the activities of the small secret detachments or groups designated to weaken the enemy side whenever it could be reached in order to prepare the ground for major blown in another location.

On the eve of the Second World War, diversion came to mean subversive activities, wrecking designed to damage the enemy's economic and military might. Diversion is an extreme form of an intelligence service's subversive activity: it consists of wrecking or damaging enterprises, installations, transport and communications, or any other Property through explosions, arson or other means, causing mass poisoning, spreading epidemics and epizootics with the aim of wrecking and undermining a state and causing panic. Diversion causes casualties and has a negative effect on the population's morale.

The Cheka made skilful use of diversionary methods against the White Guards, the Russian emigration foreign organizations. Preparation for a large-scale diversionary warfare was begun in 1925. Thousands of diversion specialists were trained and new diversion devices were produced. In 1929 ajoint work-shop/laboratory was set up in Kiev under the diversion school to devise and test diversion devices. New types of explosives were invented, together with delayed-action mines and toxic chemical compounds; experiments were carried out on the long-term storage of these [devices] as well as weapons, ammunitions, foodstuffs and medicines in caches (in the ground and under water); compact mines for use against railways were produced, as well as mines camouflaged as ordinary everyday objects -- coal, flux, waste metal, logs, peat, coke -- and also delayed-action grenades with a charge consisting of 75% potassium chlorate and 20-25 powdered sugar.

All this was tested in combat conditions in the Spanish Civil War. Mines camouflaged as a load of coal were put on boar steamships in Latin-American and European countries. Two admittedly not very successful attempts were made to set fire to the Polish passenger liner "Stefan Batory."

Diversionary detachments operated within the republican Army. Towards the end of 1937 a number of diversion brigades were formed into the 14th Partisan Corps under the command of D. Ungri. H. D. Marnsurov was attached to him as a diversion specialist.

In 1938 the Cheka placed in caches over 2,000 tons of explosives, weapons and ammunition, using foreign markings and materials.

The term "ideological diversion" is now widely used to cover radio, press and television propaganda. The Cheka considers objective information from the West to be most dangerous as it acts as an instrument of political influence in all spheres of Soviet society; it deprives the nomenklatura of its monopoly right to interpret events; the struggle is waged on Soviet grounds; it gives the population the illusion that there is a growing understanding between the USSR and the West; it contains elements of incitement and it stimulates dissidence.

The nomenklatura will therefore not tolerate the free exchange of ideas, information and ordinary people. For its part, it exploits subversive forces, and the communist parties operate as a subversive fifth column in the rear of the democracies.