From the Archives

Behind the Facade

(The New American, May 21, 1991)

For over 40 years following World War II, the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union lived behind what Winston Churchill called the “iron curtain,” trapped in conditions of poverty and fear. For 40 years, East and West stared each other in the eye, waging a Cold War of limited objectives while Communism slowly gained ground around the globe.

Then came 1989. Following an on-again, off-again campaign in the Soviet Union for glasnost and perestroika, the dam finally broke in Eastern Europe. The Polish Communists suddenly legalized their hated opposition, the Solidarity union, negotiating with them in March, holding multiparty democratic elections in June, and ultimately allowing Solidarity to lead a non-Communist coalition government.

By autumn, Hungary’s Communists had abandoned their name and allowed themselves to be voted out of power in subsequent democratic elections. East Germany began allowing its citizens to escape, followed by mass demonstrations in East Berlin, the opening of the Berlin Wall, democratic elections, and reunification with West Germany.

Faced with growing street protests, the Czechoslovak Communists simultaneously resigned their posts in November of 1989, with their opponents winning democratic elections the next month. A violent revolution in Romania ended with the execution of the Communist dictator, Ceausescu. The following April, the Bulgarian Communist Party also changed its name, and won continued power in multiparty elections.

Democratic revolution has also overturned Communist regimes in such countries as Mongolia and Nicaragua, and now Albania and Yugoslavia are facing dramatic change. Even the Soviet Union itself appears on the verge of disintegration.

The verdict is in: The Cold War is over; the winner could not be clearer. According to the highest-level Soviet official ever to escape to the West, the Communists are winning.

Prize Defector

Anatoliy Golitsyn, a Ukrainian born in 1926, joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1945 as he prepared to become a military officer. This launched him into several years of training in intelligence and a position in the KGB by 1948. By the early 1950s, he had become important enough to co-author a plan for restructuring Soviet intelligence, which brought him into direct contact with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and other top officials.

Four years of study at the KGB Institute in Moscow brought Golitsyn closer to the inner circle of Communist power during the late 1950s. He then worked until 1960 as a top analyst for the KGB in its Moscow headquarters. The secrets he encountered at his relatively young age disillusioned him so severely that he resolved to warn the West.

Having managed reassignment to Finland with his immediate family, Golitsyn suddenly presented himself at the US embassy a few days before Christmas of 1961 to announce his defection. Within 72 hours, the US Air Force flew the KGB major and his family to West Germany.

After passing all lie detector tests and having provided many bits of information that could be independently confirmed by the Central Intelligence Agency, Golitsyn was transferred to the United States for extensive debriefing. The message he brought was more powerful than anyone could have expected.

Unpopular Message

Since its creation in 1947, the intelligence wing of the CIA had operated under the assumption that the primary objectives of the KGB and other Communist bloc intelligence agencies centered around espionage. According to this view, the KGB was playing a cat-and-mouse game with Western intelligence, trying to steal our secrets while preventing us from stealing theirs. For the CIA, the game was therefore the same: KGB defectors would be recruited to stay on the other side and provide information secretly, while KGB personnel in Soviet diplomatic and trade missions to the West would be identified and monitored.

Into the middle of this comfortable game dropped Anatoliy Golitsyn, with a message that threw the CIA into turmoil for over a decade. As was the case with all defectors, Golitsyn was put under the authority of the Soviet Bloc Division of the CIA. For over a year after his defection, he was pumped only for information that would help identify KGB sources for stealing secrets. But he became impatient with this treatment, insisting he had much more important information to divulge.

Golitsyn wanted to warn American leaders that they were severely misguided in believing the KGB to be interested primarily in espionage. He desperately tried to tell his CIA handlers that the purpose of the KGB was to manipulate the political decisions of the West, using a process known as strategic deception, to achieve its surrender to a future world Communist government. The Soviets intended to allow the West to acquire carefully prepared disinformation about Communist goals and methods, including sending phony defectors to make the deceptions more believable. To complement this, Golitsyn warned that the Soviets had not only penetrated the leading intelligence services of the West, but had maneuvered their “moles” into top policy making positions, from where they could help convince the West of the authenticity of this disinformation.

The Golitsyn revelations shook the CIA to the core. If he was right, the apparent successes of the CIA in getting information about the Soviet bloc were actually victories for the Communists in deceiving the West. While many CIA personnel refused to listen to an increasingly frustrated Golitsyn, head of the Counterintelligence Division James Angleton recognized his importance, and had Golitsyn transferred to his authority in 1963.

Secrets Revealed

Golitsyn told the CIA officers that Soviet sources were highly placed KGB officers working in the French intelligence agency, the SDECE, as a spy ring code-named SAPPHIRE. Two top French intelligence officials came under strong suspicion and were removed from their posts, but no serious investigation was ever pursued by the French government.

According to Golitsyn, Soviet control over French intelligence was so complete that he predicted the KGB would use SDECE to spy on American nuclear capabilities. Within just a few months, such a secret order actually was issued inside French intelligence.

The information supplied by Golitsyn also revealed a powerful spy ring of five Soviet agents operating at the highest levels of the British Ministry of Intelligence. Three had already been exposed, and a fourth was revealed in subsequent years. Based on additional evidence provided by Golitsyn, some members of the British MI5 created an investigative committee which concluded that the “fifth man” of the Soviet ring was none other than Sir Roger Hollis, the director of MI5. One MI5 officer tried to warn the prime minister, but was fired. Hollis himself was never fully investigated.

Infiltration of CIA

Golitsyn brought evidence of extensive Soviet penetration of intelligence services throughout the Free World, ranging from Germany to Canada, and many others. But his most important spy revelations concerned infiltration of the CIA itself.

One lower-level Soviet mole in the CIA was uncovered with Golitsyn’s help, but his more important information pointed to at least one mole at the highest levels of the CIA. Indeed, the reports Golitsyn had seen while in Moscow could not have come from a single agent, leading him to conclude that many such agents permeated the CIA. Much of the evidence indicated that several of the moles were operating in the Soviet Division — the CIA branch entrusted with handling defectors. Investigations of several officers in the Soviet Division were conducted, and some reshuffling of positions followed, but the leaks continued.

In 1962 Soviet military officer Colonel Oleg Penkovsky secretly provided the CIA with information that helped President Kennedy confront the Soviets and demand the removal of their newly-placed missiles from Cuba. Golitsyn, however, demonstrated that Penkovsky had to have been under the control of the Soviets when he supplied the “secrets.” According to Golitsyn and Angleton, the Soviets gave the United States carefully selected information to convince us that we had won the Cuban missile crisis, while the Soviets had planned from the beginning to back down as part of a deal to win American acceptance of the Communist regime in Cuba.

The Soviet government sentenced Golitsyn to death after his defection, but given the difficulty of carrying out that order, other means of neutralizing him had to be found. Upon his arrival, Golitsyn predicted that the Soviets would send false defectors to contradict his information.

Early in 1962, two Soviets stationed at the United Nations suddenly offered to work as double agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which code-named them FEDORA and TOP HAT. One was from the KGB, the other from the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. Shortly after, a KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko contacted the CIA in Switzerland and also became a double agent for the agency.

Within months of Golitsyn’s prediction, US intelligence had suddenly received a flood of Soviet contacts. Considered victories by many intelligence officers, these three double agents all gave information that contradicted Golitsyn. Among other things, they tried to convince the Americans that the Soviets had directly stolen secrets, rather than receiving information from high-level moles, which they argued did not exist. They also consistently gave the impression that Soviet intelligence was only interested in espionage. Nosenko even claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin, had never worked with the KGB, despite Oswald’s many contacts with the KGB.

Intelligence data gathered by US agencies began to show many of Nosenko’s claims, about his position in the Soviet Union and other important details, to be false. Nosenko also turned out to be ignorant of information he should have known, and was caught many times contradicting information he had previously given. When confronted with these incongruities, Nosenko called them errors. However, some of his false claims were supported by his KGB documents, which meant he must have been acting under KGB orders.

CIA War

With the emergence of data showing these three Soviet contacts to be phony, several CIA officers in the Soviet Division maintained an ongoing investigation of Nosenko until 1966. During this entire time, a war was escalating between intelligence officers who supported Golitsyn and distrusted Nosenko on one hand, and officers who were angered by the search for Soviet moles on the other. Golitsyn’s supporters generally agreed that deception was a major goal of the KGB, whereas his opponents wanted to believe that the Soviets were merely interested in espionage. Changes in 1967 brought the first sign that Golitsyn’s opponents would soon win full control in the CIA. On orders from above, many personnel in the Soviet Division were replaced by officers from other CIA sections, many of them just returned from Vietnam. A report clearing Nosenko as genuine was immediately issued.

The exposures also created tensions between the CIA and FBI. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, infuriated by the allegations that his FEDORA and TOP HAT contacts were phony, even fired his own assistant director for participating in the investigations. By 1978, however, even the FBI had concluded that FEDORA was not genuine, and he suddenly returned to the Soviet Union to receive an official promotion.

The internal fighting reached a climax by the early 1970s. Late in 1972, the CIA was temporarily headed by William E. Colby, previously an agent of the Covert Action wing in Vietnam. A confidential investigation had revealed a secret contact in Vietnam between Colby and a suspected KGB agent, but this was ignored. Colby issued orders permanently changing the operational methods of the CIA. Any information provided by defectors was henceforth to be accepted, so long as it was basically consistent with other CIA sources. Thus Nosenko, FEDORA, TOP HAT, and others were legitimized. The new policy officially assumed that the Soviets do not send false defectors. Moreover, the new official position held that the Soviets mostly engage in espionage, not in strategic deception. Even the word “disinformation” was redefined as merely placing propaganda in mass media sources. And all searches for Soviet moles were ended.

Colby became CIA director several months later, and in 1974 fired Angleton. Dozens of staff members under Angleton were forced out within days. Golitsyn himself had already been effectively removed by 1969. Nosenko was then hired to train the new personnel replacing Angleton’s staff. The new CIA policy remains in effect today.

Communism Reorganized

This complete purge left Golitsyn in the futile position of trying to attract the attention of uninterested American policy makers. Unable to make any headway, and troubled by events unfolding during 1979 and 1980, he decided to revive and update a manuscript he had first developed during the 1960s, in the hope of alerting America to the imminent danger. Published in 1984 under the title New Lies For Old, the book was an overview of Communist bloc plans for a long-term deception strategy against the West.

The response to this landmark work was astonishingly silent. Those few reviews that did appear were often hostile. Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, brushed off the book and suggested that readers not consider it seriously. The Library Journal, which reviews new books for librarians, gave Golitsyn’s book an almost unprecedented “not recommended” rating. Even the conservative magazine National Review tried to poke fun at the book, without specifically answering its points.

In the first section of his book, Golitsyn recounts a series of important changes that occurred at the highest levels of the Communist Party during his rise in the KGB. According to Golitsyn, the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953 left a power vacuum, largely because he had managed to consolidate most power in his own hands by severe persecution of his Communist opponents. Facing an explosively unstable situation, his successors decided to reinstitute Lenin’s concept of “democratic centralism,” in which no single individual holds the fulcrum of power. The rebuilding of oligarchical rule by an all-powerful committee was hoped by the Communists to allow a renewed aggressiveness in their policy, which under Stalin had lapsed into espionage abroad and maintaining control at home.

Forces aligned with Nikita Khrushchev decisively beat opposing factions in 1957. Coordination between Communist governments was immediately reestablished, and various studies of deception methods were begun. During 1959, a secret team of KGB officers was formed to design a new long-term deception plan that would manipulate the West into helping the Communists achieve world domination. One of those officers was Golitsyn.

The period of 1958 to 1960 was marked by radical restructurings in the Soviet government. Because of the inevitable leaks that would occur from defections and espionage, the KGB was reorganized into an “outer” level composed of the personnel that might come into any contact with the West in their work, and an “inner” level, known as Department D. The members of this special department planned disinformation strategies, but all knowledge of these operations was denied to the rest of the KGB. This 1959 creation was subject to the direct authority of the Communist Party Central Committee, and was empowered to coordinate all other government agencies for disinformation purposes.

This new plan was secretly organized and set in motion in late 1960 at a Moscow Congress of 81 Communist Parties from around the world. Golitsyn states that all factions, splits, and power struggles within the Communist bloc were completely ended at that meeting. From that point forward, any such infighting between Communists, or any popular resistance against Communism, would be artificial and under the full control of the extensive secret police networks permeating societies under Communist rule.

Scissors Strategy

The purpose of this massive deception strategy was to trap the West in something the KGB terms the “scissors strategy.” The notion is rooted in Karl Marx’s strategy of the dialectic, which allows Communists to achieve victory by creating phony struggles in which they control both sides, so that the victim plays into their hands regardless of which side he allies himself with; the opponent is cut in half by two sides he thinks are opposed to one another.

The new strategy of the KGB in 1959 was largely based on the experience of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, which had been a spectacular application of dialectical strategy. Faced with a collapsing economy and growing opposition by 1921, the Communists began allowing private ownership of many businesses and some freedom of speech for dissidents. At the same time, a number of disaffected officials secretly informed the West that an extensive opposition group, know as the “Trust,” was organizing inside the Soviet Union and preparing to seize power from the Communists. The Trust was able to secure secret documents for the West, smuggle people out of the Soviet Union, and escort exiles into the country to witness attacks on government installations and police forces. Western nations began sending money to the Trust, allowed hundreds of companies to rebuild industries in the Soviet Union, and waited for the Communist regime to fall.

But several years later, the Trust was suddenly abolished. Many of its members were executed, the dissident press vanished, the secret documents were revealed as disinformation, all vestiges of the free market disappeared, and the Communist government emerged stronger than ever. The primary leader of the former Trust then defected to the West, demonstrating convincingly that he had organized the opposition group under orders from the secret police, and that his fellow leaders in the Trust were also agents of the Communists. The group had enticed genuine anti-Communists into the open, and had fooled the West into believing the Soviet Union had changed, all with the continuous help of the Communists.

The formula was repeated after World War II in Eastern Europe. The CIA learned in 1948 of a Polish underground organization, with the acronym “WIN,” fighting the Communists. The group provided evidence of serious fighting it was carrying out against Soviet troops, and stole secret documents for Western intelligence. The CIA provided WIN with money, weapons, equipment, and intelligence data. But by 1952, people entering Poland to help WIN were disappearing, and its information was becoming less reliable. Late that year, the underground was suddenly disbanded, and a radio broadcast by the Polish Communist government proved, by its detailed information, that WIN had been created by the secret police and had received police help in fooling the West. The documents given the CIA had been disinformation, the program had been paid for with money the CIA provided, and the episode had distracted efforts to undermine the Communist regime while it was consolidating power.

Three-Phase Plan

Because the New Economic Policy served as the model for the renewed deception plan begun in 1959, and based on some information to which he had access while in Moscow, Golitsyn has been able to analyze the modern plan in terms of three phases. The first involves creating false images for consumption by the outside world. The second uses these images to gain help from non-Communist nations, including diplomatic recognition and economic aid. The third phase would consist of a disinformation offensive aimed at maneuvering the non-Communist world into merger with the Communists under a world government.

The entire deception is based on creating an image of what Golitsyn calls “weakness and evolution.” Through the 1950s, the Communist bloc was clearly seen by the rest of the world as a dangerous monolithic entity. To remedy this, the disinformation program was designed to engineer dialectical factions among the Communists. Various Communist governments would coordinate “splits” between them, while “hard-line” and “reformist” factions would be created within certain Communist Parties. Limited freedom of speech would be allowed at selective times, especially for “dissidents” under the influence of the Communists. Treatment of individuals and movements dissenting against their Communist regimes would periodically include pretenses of persecution to convince the outside world of the dissidents’ authenticity. In the final phase, controlled “democratizations” could be implemented in Communist nations, persuading the West that the badly fractured Communist world was finally collapsing.

Golitsyn discusses in his book the major dialectical splits already existing between Communist countries. As he explains it, the genuine split between the Yugoslav Communists and Stalin since 1948 was dissolved in 1957, after Khrushchev’s consolidation of power, followed by a series of secret meetings in which the two countries agreed to coordinate disinformation. This led to the public, but phony, arguments between the two Communist governments from 1958 to 1960. This false renewal of a healed schism helped disguise the reconciliation between those countries, while it laid the foundation for Yugoslavia’s future alliances with Western European labor unions and various Third World nations, with Yugoslavia portraying itself as anti-Soviet and moderate.

The next major split was fabricated between Albania and the Soviet Union, with the two ending diplomatic relations in 1961. The image was generated of Albania remaining Stalinist, thereby painting Khrushchev as a genuine reformer who could more easily be worked with by the West. This deception also served as a test for whether the next one would also be believed.

Sino-Soviet Synthesis

Almost as soon as the Albanian dispute heated up, the first rounds of a split between the Soviet Union and Red China were displayed. Unlike with Albania, diplomatic relations were never broken. However, verbal threats and a tiny conflict at the border between the two countries have convinced outsiders of a genuine split. The Soviets have nevertheless continued providing Red China with intelligence and economic and military help. This major deception has, over the last three decades, created many successes for the Communists that were often perceived by the outside world as Communist failures. For example, Soviet alignment with India caused Pakistan, which fought India over disputed territory in 1962, to align itself more closely with Red China. Similarly, the Soviet-oriented Vietnamese Communists in 1980 invaded Thailand, causing that country and other Asian nations to adopt friendly relations with Red China, abandoning their previous opposition to the Chinese Communist threat. The Sino-Soviet split has also enabled both governments to alternately receive economic aid from the United States, depending on which is perceived as the more moderate at any given time.

Sakharov Scam

The other major type of disinformation, according to Golitsyn, is the appearance of liberalization within Communist countries. Part of this involves organizing controlled dissident movements inside and outside the Communist parties.

One clear example of a phony dissident exposed by Golitsyn is Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, supposedly subjected to internal exile for years. But Sakharov’s 1968 book, Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, reveals where he truly stood. Sakharov emphasized that he was not opposed to socialism, but rather to the worst aspects of the police state. Indeed, Sakharov called for a “convergence” between Communist and non-Communist nations into a socialist world government. Golitsyn notes that the steps and timing proposed by Sakharov closely match those of the Communist long-term plan. The apparent persecution of Sakharov not only reinforced the belief in the weakening of the Soviet political system, but also helped popularize the convergence idea. When Sakharov died in late 1989, the Soviet hierarchy honored him with spectacular tributes.

Golitsyn points to the liberalization of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as a trial run, to see if the West would actually believe that a totalitarian Communist nation could spontaneously turn to democracy. The transition itself was simple enough for the Communists, who had by that time developed thorough penetration of all sectors of society, and had created their own opposition. According to Golitsyn, this particular experiment was planned while he was still in Moscow, in the late 1950s. In order to end the experiment without revealing the falsehood of the democratization, the Soviets staged an “invasion” of Czechoslovakia, although no violence occurred and the Communists with the reformist image, such as Dubcek, were given comfortable jobs afterward.

By the early 1980s, Golitsyn’s long observation of activities in the Communist world led him to conclude that the bloc had by then completed its objectives for the first and second phases of the strategic deception, and was preparing to move into the third and final phase. The course of events prompted him to publish his book, in which the last section specifically forecasts the coming storm.

He laid out in detail the likeliest strategic options the Communists would implement. Beginning in the very near future, he warned, the Communists would implement a wave of “renewals,” or false democratizations, in Eastern Europe. These changes would not hurt the Communist power structures in those nations, since they would be implemented using the vast infrastructures of control that permeate Communist societies. They would, however, appear spontaneous and spectacular to the West, and would allow unification of Eastern and Western Europe into one socialist nation. With the Western Europeans caught off guard, the Communists would be able to use their strategic positions within the united European structure to convert the new nation into an overt Communist state.

Isolating the US

The threat of this Euro-Soviet bloc would be used to drive the United States into a closer alliance with Communist China, effectively dividing the world into two power blocs, both heavily influenced or dominated by Communists. This dialectic would allow the Communists to “compete” for domination over the Third World. The phony “split” between the Soviet Union and Red China would be widened, probably even into military hostilities secretly coordinated between the two governments. Finally, with the United States completely isolated and strategically compromised, the entire Communist bloc would suddenly unite, dropping all pretenses of splits and democracy, and would demand the surrender of the United States to the new world government. Part of this scenario was predicted by Andrei Sakharov as early as 1968, with Communist victory to be complete by the year 2000.

Golitsyn accurately foresaw many specific developments that have now occurred. He correctly predicted that Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov would be succeeded by “a younger leader with a more liberal image,” a perfect description of Mikhail Gorbachev. In amazing detail, Golitsyn described a political restructuring process that would be carried out. Under the name“perestroika,” virtually every expected point has materialized.

He correctly emphasized that Solidarity would be legalized in Poland and allowed to form a coalition government with the Communists after multiparty “elections.” He also foresaw, with astonishing precision, democratization in Czechoslovakia, with a revival of former Communist dictator Dubcek and close allies; the opening of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany as the core for a United Europe; the German friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, signed last November; the implementation of “democracy” in such countries as Romania and Hungary; the end of the Warsaw Pact and NATO; and the efforts of these Eastern European governments to join the European Community as a prelude to unification with the West. Golitsyn even stated that these changes would begin during the five years following his 1984 book — which actually happened, from Gorbachev’s appointment in 1985 to the renewal in Eastern Europe since early 1989.

Communist Europe

The evidence appears to support Golitsyn’s contention that the Communists have not lost any power in Eastern Europe, but are even beginning a new phase of aggressive expansion. The “elections” in Bulgaria and Albania brought victory to the Communist parties in those nations, although the Bulgarian Communist Party has changed its name. In both cases, the only significant opposition groups have been formed under the domination of students and intellectuals, the sectors of society most thoroughly intertwined with the Communist power structure. Thus, the Communists can bring about their own “defeat” at any time without losing control.

Democratic Forum, praised by the Hungarian Communists as early as 1988, was made the electoral victor in that nation last year. The Forum has received crucial help from various top Communists, including two powerful members of the Politburo, Imre Pozsgay and Miklos Nemeth. Democratic Forum’s spokesman, himself a prominent faculty member at Karl Marx University in Budapest, has admitted the presence of many “former” Communists, not only leading his group, but in the other opposition groups as well.

Poland is today dominated by the Solidarity labor union. Anna Walentynowicz, founder of the organization, has recounted in the December 4, 1989 issue of The New American how the Communist government gave their agent, Lech Walesa, control over Solidarity within days of its founding. By 1981, as Golitsyn has reviewed in his book, one million Communist Party members also belonged to Solidarity, including several dozen Central Committee members. Several of these Communists have been leaders in the group, and aides to Lech Walesa. Since Solidarity has been little more than a front organization for the Polish Communists, it was allowed amazing access to the state media and other resources needed to win popularity in the West. The deliberately unsuccessful “crackdown” on the group in 1981 further convinced the world of its legitimacy. Once that had been accomplished, the Communists were able to legalize it again and allow it to win elections.

Yet the new Solidarity government, until July of 1990, had appointed Communists to positions over the secret police, the military, the judicial system, and all other central posts. Since then, several of those Communists have been replaced, either with other Communists or with people carefully selected by the Communists. The “democratic” government of Poland has stated that even restrictions on freedom of speech will be lifted only slowly, and various anti-Communist organizations, including some under the Solidarity banner, remain illegal and have not been allowed on election ballots.

A startling documentary, shown by the British Broadcasting Corporation in May of 1990, made a compelling case that the street demonstrations and conflicts that led to the 1989 “democratization” of Czechoslovakia were carefully planned and staged by both the KGB and the StB, the Czech secret police. The new president is playwright Vaclav Havel, years ago a cofounder, along with several Communist Party members, of the “dissident” organization Charter 77. Although allegedly “persecuted” by the Communists in past years, Havel was given open access to the West of the sort given Soviet “dissident” Andrei Sakharov. The transition of government was accomplished in 1989 with the election of Havel by the Communist members of the parliament, who also gave former Communist dictator Aleksandr Dubcek an official position, precisely as predicted by Golitsyn. Since the change, Communists, “former” Communists, or agents of the StB have been put in such important positions as the Foreign Ministry, the military, and economic planning. Even the prime minister is a “former” Communist strongly supported by Vaclav Havel.

An article from a French magazine, appearing in the July 1990 issue of Soldier of Fortune, reviews evidence that the 1989 Romanian revolution was entirely coordinated by the KGB, with the help of the Romanian Securitate and military. The country is now dominated by the National Salvation Front, which was organized by the KGB and is almost entirely led by current or “former” Communists from the highest levels of the former Ceausescu regime. The new president of that nation is Ion Iliescu, previously a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, and the prime minister is longtime Communist Petre Roman.

The renewal in East Germany was officially prompted by New Forum, a “dissident” group formed in September of 1989 by “former” Communist Party members, along with academic and other officials with close ties to the party. The transition of government was begun by a transfer of power to secret police head Egon Krenz, who was subsequently replaced by Communist Party official Hans Modrow. The elections that followed made Lothar de Maiziere the prime minister of East Germany, until the recent unification. De Maiziere has been unable to shake allegations that he has been an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret police. His party, the East German Christian Democrats, was a part of the ruling Communist coalition for over 40 years, and de Maiziere has been active in this party since 1957.

The newer Social Democratic Party, formed in 1989, was headed by Ibrahim Boehme until he resigned over revelations that he was also a Stasi agent. Boehme had openly been a longtime Communist Party member. Among the other East German parties, three had been part of the Communist dictatorship for decades, alongside the Christian Democrats.

Haven for Communist Agents

Most of the world, including the West Germans themselves, now believes that German reunification has ended the Communist foothold in East Germany. But while a united Germany flies the West German flag, the Communists are actively expanding their control over the entire nation. Although the Stasi has been officially disbanded, the closing of its headquarters means little. Since the early 1950s the Stasi has built a vast network of operatives, both in East and West Germany, with up to two million agents and full- or part-time informants.

Before unification, the East German official in charge of ending the Stasi network appointed Stasi agents to supervise the process. Since unification, many of the Stasi files have disappeared, most of the rest are locked away, and the investigation is being closed without major results. Of the 5,000 Stasi agents thought by West German intelligence to have penetrated important West German offices before unification, only some 200 have surfaced.

The unification itself has undoubtedly brought tens of thousands of new Communist agents into the German government. Apparently in anticipation of the planned renewal in Eastern Europe, the Stasi in 1986 dispersed over 2,000 of its top agents throughout high offices in East Germany, and sent 500 additional agents to West Germany. Most of these still unidentified special agents have been incorporated into united German institutions, and are waiting for future orders from their controllers. The united German military is incorporating thousands of East German officers, virtually all of them “former” members of the Communist Party. The West German Social Democratic and Christian Democratic Parties are merging with their East German counterparts, thereby bringing in untold numbers of unknown Communists. De Maiziere, for example, has been named deputy chairman of the united Christian Democrats. And the “former” Communists from the East German parliament have been taken into the all-German parliament.

Altogether, the probable number of Communist agents permeating Germany may already be sufficient for a complete takeover. Evidence has recently surfaced that the Soviet KGB has taken operational control over these Stasi agents, and German intelligence has found a sudden reactivation of espionage, now coordinated from Soviet military bases in East Germany. Hundreds of millions of dollars have mysteriously disappeared from government accounts. A wave of assassinations has killed five prominent German leaders during the last eighteen months, with the Red Army Fraction, a Communist terrorist group coordinated by the Stasi, claiming responsibility in at least two cases. Golitsyn explained in his book that assassination is an important method used by the KGB for advancing its agents in Western governments, by eliminating their competitors. German intelligence also admits that Stasi has hidden vast stores of weapons for future use.

Changes in the Soviet Union are also completely under Communist control. The independence movements of the Baltic states are officially led by the Communist parties of those nations, and growing evidence shows that the Soviet Communists incited and armed the violent riots in Azerbaijan.

Renewals in other countries, including Mongolia and Nicaragua, are equally controlled. In Nicaragua, for example, President Violetta Chamorro was herself an original member of the dictatorial Sandinista junta. She has left virtually all economic, political, military, and police power in the hands of Sandinistas, and such Communist countries as the Soviet Union continue to send military aid. Golitsyn has also predicted a possible renewal in Cuba as part of the global deception.

The Coming Terror

The major objective of the renewals, as Golitsyn pointed out, is convergence with the West. Various leaders of both Western and Eastern Europe are now using the German example to call for the political unification of all Europe. But the Communists are masters of using dialectical strategy to win full power over nations in which they become coalition partners in the government. This is the method they now hope to use, assuming Western Europe will agree to the merger.

The Soviets are fully prepared to assist in the takeover. Tens of thousands of Soviet troops remain in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, while over 300,000 Soviet troops are being maintained in East Germany at German expense. Meanwhile, note Jane’s military Information Group and other sources, the Soviet Union is using the new economic aid it is receiving to carry out its largest military buildup in over two decades. The armies in Poland and Germany are not scheduled to leave until late in 1994, long after unification of Western — possibly with Eastern — Europe. If NATO troops largely withdraw by that time, the Communists may well be able to seize sufficient power in all of the United States of Europe to allow the Soviet divisions to stay permanently, and even to occupy the rest of that continent. Golitsyn has warned that if this is successful, all pretense of democracy will be rapidly abandoned. European citizens will no longer be allowed to leave, genuine anti-Communists and dissidents will be executed, large numbers of prisons and concentration camps similar to those still fully operating in the Soviet Union will augment campaigns of random mass murder, and a Communist state will be openly established — peacefully.

Anatoliy Golitsyn offers solutions to this imminent crisis. Most important, he argues, is a united effort by the West to end all aid to, and trade with, the Communist bloc, including “democratized” nations. Economic sanctions, he maintains, are the only way to strike directly at Communism’s eternal weakness and bring about an authentic collapse of Communist power. But will the West wake up in time?