Most of the books in this series argue about the dead. This one accuses the living.
CIA Target: The USSR is a study of American covert operations in which roughly a quarter of the text is given over to the personal histories, prison records, finances and alleged criminal associations of about a dozen named Soviet citizens. When Progress Publishers issued it in English in 1982, Yuri Orlov was serving seven years in a labour camp and Anatoly Shcharansky thirteen; Alexander Ginzburg had been expelled to the United States in a prisoner exchange and deprived of his citizenship; Tatyana Velikanova had been sentenced in August 1980; Andrei Sakharov had been seized in January 1980 and deposited without trial in Gorky, a city closed to foreigners. Of these people the book says, in its own words, that "Soviet courts exposed them as paid agents of the CIA, and thus justice prevailed." It is not a work of interpretation that a later generation may weigh against other interpretations. It is an exhibit in a prosecution, translated for export, and it has to be read as one.
The date on the spine is the translation's. Yakovlev says in his own Afterword what the book is: "That was why I wrote CIA Target—U.S.S.R., published in the Soviet Union in 1979." The Russian text came first, and the English one was then carried forward: its latest datable material is all from 1980 — Solzhenitsyn in Foreign Affairs in April, the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Bulletin of July–August, a letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta of 20 August, and the Moscow court's verdict on Tatyana Velikanova of 23 August. In 101,692 words the strings 1981 and 1982 do not occur once. This matters for what follows, because a silence is only a silence about something the author could have written. Nothing here can be argued from the absence of Reagan, of Solidarity or of the Polish martial law of December 1981; the manuscript closed before any of them. What can be argued from is everything that had already happened by the autumn of 1980.
Say first what is true in it, because a good deal is, and because the book's method depends on it.
The first four chapters are a survey of American covert action assembled almost entirely from American public sources, and the survey is broadly sound. Yakovlev quotes NSC 20/1 of August 1948 — the Policy Planning Staff paper drafted under George Kennan — on the aim of "keeping the Soviet Union politically, militarily, psychologically weak in comparison with the international forces outside of its control," and he quotes it accurately; his own reference note points the reader to Etzold and Gaddis's Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950, published by Columbia University Press in 1978, where anyone can check it. He is right that the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter were covertly financed by the CIA, a fact that broke in 1966–67 and that he takes from Godfrey Hodgson rather than from any Soviet source: he quotes several pages of Hodgson's America in Our Time (1976), including the parenthesis "Both the congress and Encounter were later found to have been in receipt of secret funds from the Central Intelligence Agency" — and then adds a parenthesis of his own, initialled N.Y., to note that Daniel Bell's international seminars for the Congress were "naturally paid by the CIA". The companion volume in this series fails exactly there. Yelena Modrzhinskaya's Leninism and the Battle of Ideas (Progress, 1972), a book whose whole authority rests on following the money — the Hoover Institution's funding traced to Standard Oil of New Jersey, Republic Steel and T. Mellon and Sons, the Ostforschung institutes worked through one by one — cites Encounter, 1963 no. 6, without comment, five years after the CIA subsidy was public. Yakovlev, working the same seam ten years later, does not make that mistake. He is right that Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were CIA-funded until the arrangement was exposed in 1971 and unwound over the following two years. He is right that the Agency subsidised the publication of upwards of a thousand books before 1967, and he quotes the Chief of its Covert Action Staff on why: "one single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium." He is right that Richard Helms, having assured the public that "we too are honorable men," was convicted in November 1977 of failing to testify fully to Congress and fined two thousand dollars. He devotes several pages, and his best pages, to the case of Yuri Nosenko, the KGB officer who defected in 1964 and whom the CIA then held in a cell near Washington until October 1967 — "confined to a concrete cell, on a meager diet, without any contact with the outside world, and subjected to physical and chemical pressure to make him 'crack'". Yakovlev has no sympathy for the man — Nosenko is "the traitor", and "one might say that it served the traitor right" — but he presses on, and the question he asks is the right one: "The important point here is not his plight but the methods U.S. intelligence services use on their victims, even though the case cited was a mistake. How does procedure like that square with the vaunted 'rule of law' in the United States?" The officials "entrusted with upholding rule of law", he adds, "consider it their duty to overlook obvious legal violations when the intelligence services, above all the CIA, insist on it". Every element of that account is documented and true. And he is right that the Church and Pike inquiries were bounded exercises whose records were, as The Progressive put it in a passage he reproduces, "excessively censored."
None of this was secret knowledge in 1980 and none of it has been overturned since. A reader who expects the CIA's operations against the Soviet Union to be a Soviet invention will be corrected, and correctly. The general case — that the United States ran a sustained, well-funded, deniable campaign of political and psychological warfare against the USSR from 1947 onward, that it subsidised émigré organisations including the NTS, that it financed broadcasting and publishing while denying it, and that the American press and academy were more entangled with the enterprise than they cared to admit — is not a falsification. It is the reason the book was worth writing and is worth reading.
The falsification is what the general case is used to do.
Watch where the sourcing changes. Through the first four chapters Yakovlev cites Colby, Prouty, Rositzke, David Wise, Philip Agee, Gaddis, the Church Committee, The Nation — all checkable, all footnoted. In the long chapter called "The CIA in Psychological Warfare" the apparatus quietly falls away and is replaced by something else. The authorities become "witness I.", "witness F.", "witness G.", "witness H.", "witness S."; "a certain K., born in 1956, an ex-convict"; "a certain M., a truck driver"; and, most remarkably, an anonymous memoirist introduced as "One of the people who at that time got caught in the web of the dissidents — let us call him X (he suffered greatly and is no longer among the living)." Several pages of character assassination are then quoted from X, who cannot be identified, questioned, or contradicted. Interspersed with these are documents that exist in exactly one place: investigation files and closed trial records. Yakovlev is a professional historian citing evidence no historian could obtain. The book does not explain how he got it. It does not need to.
What the evidence is made to prove is that the people the West called dissidents were criminals and mercenaries. The claim is stated as a general law near the middle of the book — "It is a law of Soviet history that anyone opposing the Soviet government inevitably turns to foreign anticommunists for help" — and then applied name by name.
Alexander Ginzburg receives the longest treatment. Yakovlev is correct that Ginzburg was sentenced in 1960 for taking a school examination under another man's name; he calls him "the swindler" and uses the episode to establish that everything afterwards was fraud. Ginzburg's five-year sentence in 1968, for compiling the White Book on the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial, is recast as punishment "for crimes committed on the instructions of the NTS." His administration of the Russian Social Fund, set up with Solzhenitsyn's royalties to support prisoners' families, becomes embezzlement: "The benefactor no doubt embezzled most of the 360,000 dollars." The words no doubt are the whole of the evidence offered. The witnesses, all initials, describe him distributing Parker pens, jeans and pornographic postcards to former Nazi auxiliaries and murderers in the camps. And Yuri Galanskov, who died in the Mordovian camps in November 1972 after an operation for a perforated ulcer, is turned against him: "an unbalanced and frail man, he followed Ginzburg's advice and refused medical assistance." A man dead in Soviet custody is thus made an argument against the man who was in custody with him.
Yuri Orlov is "a certain Orlov," appointed "champion of human rights number one" by Western intelligence. Of the Public Group to Promote Observance of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR, which Orlov founded in May 1976 and which the book elsewhere names correctly, Yakovlev writes: "Actually, the group as such never existed, but the letterhead was invented to lend more weight to various expressly anti-Soviet statements." Its reports were "slanderous fabrications," a finding attributed to the court that convicted him.
Shcharansky, whose 1978 conviction for treason rested on an accusation of espionage for the United States that the Carter administration publicly denied, is never given a section of his own. He appears three times, always in a list, always as one of the "pawns" who "were caught red-handed." Vladimir Bukovsky recurs throughout as a criminal record rather than a person: "a hardened criminal", "the new star of anti-Sovietism", who behaved "like a true professional criminal", and whose name the émigré journal Posev is quoted linking to Vlasov's — a chain Yakovlev then takes over in his own voice. The one specific charge against him is a single unsourced clause: he "tried to set up terrorist 'teams of five'" and failed for want of five followers. Andrei Amalrik's name appears once, in a plural, inside X's account of literary salons — "all those Bukovskys, Osipovs, Khaustovs, Amalriks; putting it bluntly they were dropouts, conceited and pretentious idlers." The anthologies Ginzburg circulated with Andrei Sinyavsky in the 1950s (the book spells him Siniavsky) are dismissed for a "pornographic content—both literary and political smut" that, the reader is told, makes "it impossible to quote them." Tatyana Velikanova's private correspondence, seized and read into a verdict, is quoted at length. Mykola Rudenko and Oleksa Tykhy, tried together in 1977, are staged as comedy: the court, Yakovlev writes, was "amused" and "the audience burst out laughing" at Rudenko's denials. Tykhy died in custody in 1984. Elena Bonner, in a book that names her husband eighty-three times, is never named at all.
Above all there is Sakharov, to whom the final section is given. Here the book's technique is at its most instructive, because much of what it quotes is genuine. Sakharov did argue in My Country and the World that the West should apply "the strongest pressure"; he did oppose most-favoured- nation status for the USSR; he did write the passage regretting that the United States had not acted "more resolutely in the military and, especially, the political fields" in Vietnam; he did appeal on behalf of the elderly Rudolf Hess and against the extradition of the Brazinskas hijackers, and those positions were controversial among his own supporters. Yakovlev quotes them more or less fairly and could have built a hard political criticism on them. He does not. He builds an indictment. Sakharov is "the ambitious arranger of human affairs," a would-be "universal Caesar," a man who took foreign money — "he wanted foreign currency. And it was handed to him in 1975 under a 'respectable' cover — the Nobel Prize" — and who protected thieves and killers. "His 'humanism' isn't simply false. It is pathologically inhuman." "A spiritual outcast, provocateur Sakharov has long since put himself in the position of a traitor of his people and country."
One sentence in that section carries no footnote, no quotation and no source, and it is the one that matters: "He was delighted when the blood-stained Pinochet clique grabbed power in Chile." Everywhere else in this book, where Sakharov's views are objectionable to the author, they are reproduced in his own words at length. Here they are not, because there were none to reproduce. The unsourced sentence is the tell, and it recurs: on the same page Sakharov is said to have "defended Zatikyan and his accomplices," the men convicted of the 1977 Moscow metro bombing. What Sakharov actually did was question the conduct of that trial and appeal for it to be held in the open. The book converts a demand for due process into complicity in murder — and it generalises the move, concluding that "It is only a small step from participation in Operation Human Rights to terrorism," and that the human rights campaign "tends to provide fertile breeding ground for terrorists."
That Pinochet sentence is also, and this is the striking part, the only place in the book where Chile occurs at all. Salvador Allende is not named in these 101,692 words; neither is Lumumba, nor Mossadegh. Guatemala occurs twice, both times inside quotations from William Colby; Iran occurs four times, as a name in a list — of Dropshot belligerents, of countries with CIA training camps, and in Colby's and Fletcher Prouty's enumerations of covert operations — and the 1953 coup is nowhere discussed. A Soviet study of the Central Intelligence Agency that has no chapter on Santiago, Tehran, Guatemala City or Léopoldville — that reaches Chile once, and then only to slander a physicist with it — has told the reader what it is about.
The distinction on which this volume turns is between the general claim and the particular accusation. The general claim — the CIA ran covert political warfare against the Soviet Union, on a large scale, with deniable funding, and lied about it — is true, and not every intermediate link is invented either: dissidents did give interviews to Western correspondents, manuscripts did reach the West and return by radio, and Radio Liberty was for two decades an American intelligence operation, as the book's own quotation from Harry Rositzke shows. The specific accusations built on top of all this — that these named individuals took the Agency's money and acted on its instructions — are supported by nothing a reader can check, and where they can be checked they fail. The general truth is the load-bearing structure; the individual accusations are what it was built to carry. Yakovlev's own euphemism for what happened to Sakharov is worth preserving: "The administrative action taken against him is designed to stop his subversive activities." He means an unsentenced man held under guard in a closed city for what turned out to be nearly seven years. Two paragraphs later: "Western propaganda is trying to concoct a 'Sakharov problem'. But there is no such problem."
Put that sentence next to the Nosenko chapter and the book comes apart in the reader's hands. There Yakovlev has a man confined without charge, without trial, without contact with the outside world, by a security service acting on an authorisation that the official said to have granted it flatly denied ever granting; and he asks, correctly, how such a procedure squares with the rule of law. Here he has a man confined without charge, without trial, in a city closed to foreigners, by a security service, and it is "administrative action" that "has been approved by the Soviet public" and "may benefit Sakharov, too". The cases are not identical — Nosenko was tortured and Sakharov was not — but the principle invoked against the Americans is the one suspended at home, within the covers of one book. That is the test worth applying to a volume like this, and it is not a test about vocabulary: can the category the author uses ever be turned on the side he is writing for? The USSR had an intelligence service, a Criminal Code with an Article 70, closed trials and men in camps. The book supplies all of those facts itself and never once lets them fall under a description it applies freely to Washington.
What the book is not doing while it does this is also worth a moment, because it is unusual for the series. The Progress catalogue's characteristic instrument is the deviation label — opportunism, revisionism, dogmatism, sectarianism — fixed to an opponent as an essence. Yakovlev barely reaches for it. Opportunist occurs once, inside a quotation from an American writer on brainwashing; sectarian once, and applied to the CIA. Revisionism occurs twenty times, and every one of them means the Cold War revisionist historians of the United States, William Appleman Williams above all — whom Yakovlev names, cites and praises, writing that they "have made a major contribution to the analysis of U.S. foreign policy motives". The catalogue's sharpest term of abuse is here a term of approval. What has taken its place is not a political vocabulary at all: criminal occurs forty-five times and traitor twenty-four, while working class does not occur once in 101,692 words, alongside three uses of "class struggle", three of "proletarian" and ten of Lenin's name. This is not a Marxist analysis of imperialism with a police annexe. It is a police argument with a scholarly frontispiece.
The silences are as exact as the accusations. This is a book devoted to explaining why Western opinion had turned against the Soviet Union, revised through 1980, and the word Afghanistan does not occur in it. That is not chronology: Yakovlev was working on the text through the year the invasion dominated East–West relations, he writes that "the West abruptly stepped up the anti-Soviet campaign in early 1980", and he relays, from an émigré report of his own newspaper article, the charge that Sakharov had called on "the Western countries to boycott the U.S.S.R. and keep up the arms race". He gives the boycott and withholds its cause. It does not mention Czechoslovakia in 1968 at all; the single appearance of Prague in the book is in the title of a wartime Vlasovite manifesto. Hungary in 1956 it does treat, as "The 1956 counterrevolutionary putsch" whose insurgents were "bandits" who "would never have dared take up arms" without Radio Free Europe. It nowhere disputes a single factual claim in The Gulag Archipelago: Solzhenitsyn is attacked for plagiarism, for admiring German militarism, for authoritarianism, for taking his title from a 1947 American magazine map — never for having got the camps wrong. On psychiatric confinement, the charge the Helsinki groups pressed hardest, the book has nothing to say. Pyotr Grigorenko does not appear in it; neither does Leonid Plyushch, released to the West in 1976 after the international campaign this book never mentions. Where the vocabulary of psychiatry does occur it belongs to the CIA: the OSS profile of Hitler, the "psychiatric profile" of Daniel Ellsberg, the burglary of his psychiatrist's office. The single exception is one clause about Velikanova's seized letters, which "highlight both her inner thoughts (possibly of interest to psychiatrists) and her practical work (clearly criminal in nature and therefore of interest to the court)." The book knows the association is available. It uses it as an aside against a defendant and never once as a subject. And one falsification about the West is worth noting because it is so easily checked: the deaths at Jonestown in November 1978 are ascribed to Americans who fled to Guyana seeking freedom and who, sensing "the tentacles of the secret services reaching out to them in the jungle," chose suicide over repatriation. More than nine hundred died there, a third of them children, and many were killed rather than self-killed. The book calls the cult's leader Jeff Jones.
Something should be said about the man who wrote it. Nikolai Nikolayevich Yakovlev (1927–1996) was a real historian, with some twenty books behind him including studies of Roosevelt and of Pearl Harbor, and co-author with Nikolai Sivachev of Moscow State University of Russia and the United States, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1979. The Afterword here is largely a defence of that earlier book against American reviewers who assumed it had been written to order. Yakovlev's reply is unambiguous: "These quotations point to the Western belief, shared even in academic circles, that Soviet scholars are merely puppets whose strings are pulled by some mysterious higher authorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are no strings." He wrote that in a volume whose central chapter reproduces closed investigation files. On his own article attacking Sakharov he is equally firm: reprinting it here, he asks, "Gross slander? No, every word in it is true."
It was not, and the strings are visible in the book itself. No historian obtains a defendant's seized private correspondence, the transcript of a closed hearing, or an anonymous informant's character sketch of his neighbours by going to an archive; there is exactly one institution in the Soviet Union that held those papers, and it is the one that had arrested the people they concern. Yakovlev did not deny this afterwards. In the perestroika years he acknowledged that the KGB had supplied his material, and he withdrew what he had written about several of the people he named. That acknowledgement changes the standing of the volume without making the chapters on the CIA false. It makes the book something other than a book: a work of scholarship at the front and an organ of the security service at the back, with the credibility of the first part underwriting the second. That was the design.
The reply this book needed was never a defence of the CIA, and the tradition from which this introduction is written never offered one. It answered on both counts at once, and the record is easy to consult. Intercontinental Press, the weekly associated with the Fourth International, covered every one of these trials as they happened. Marilyn Vogt reported Orlov's sentence on 29 May 1978 under the headline "Yuri Orlov Sentenced to Twelve-Year Term", noting that although TASS called the trial open, "the courtroom was closed to the public, as it had been filled in advance each day with fifty spectators handpicked by the authorities." On 24 July 1978 it ran her "Free Shcharansky, Ginzburg, Pyatkus!", recording that Shcharansky "was framed up by the Stalinist rulers on a charge of 'high treason in the form of espionage'", that Ginzburg had been given eight years in a strict-regime camp at Kaluga — the same sentence Yakovlev reports, described very differently — and that all three were tried "in courtrooms closed to the public, packed in advance with spectators handpicked by the Kremlin's police." That is not a difference of emphasis but a flat contradiction, and it can be adjudicated. Yakovlev's account turns on the openness of these proceedings — "the 1977 open trial of Rudenko and Tikhy in Druzhkovka", Ginzburg's "1978 open trial in Kaluga" — and the courtroom laughter he reports is evidence only if there was a public to laugh. One of the two accounts carries a named reporter's dateline from outside the courtroom door; the other rests on the same closed files as everything else in the chapter. The same issue carried the other half of the argument, reporting the storm that broke over Andrew Young when the American ambassador to the UN observed that there were political prisoners in United States jails too, and noting that it was Cyrus Vance, "architect of the Pentagon's saturation-bombing program in Vietnam", who reprimanded him. Yakovlev cites that same Young episode, in a letter he reproduces, to prove Sakharov a hypocrite. Two papers reached one incident from opposite directions in the same season, and only one concluded that both sets of prisons were real.
Nor was this an uncritical solidarity. In the issue of 30 June 1980, six months after Sakharov was taken to Gorky, David Frankel devoted three pages to demolishing Sakharov's politics under the title "A Dead End for Soviet Dissidents: Andrei Sakharov Offers Advice on World Politics", not least his description of the United States as "the historically determined leader of the movement toward a pluralist and free society". Having said it, Frankel set out why the persecution was still indefensible: "The real target of the Stalinist bureaucracy is not the precapitalist views of a Sakharov. Their target is the Soviet workers and peasants, who might get the idea that if Sakharov can speak freely, perhaps they should have the right to speak out too." Repression, he added, "would merely help the imperialists to discredit the Soviet Union" — which is, among other things, an accurate forecast of the reception of the book you are holding. Earlier, on 22 November 1976, the same paper had translated a Le Monde editorial by the mathematician Michel Broué, secretary of the Mathematicians Committee that had won Leonid Plyushch's release, and the psychiatrist Gaston Ferdière, of the Committee against the Special Psychiatric Hospitals in the USSR and chairman of the Health Workers Committee on Chile. It was written for a Paris rally that paired three prisoners in the Soviet bloc, Bukovsky among them, with three victims of the Latin American dictatorships: "Six Political Prisoners East and West". Every element Yakovlev's book leaves out is in that one byline — Plyushch, the psychiatric hospitals, Chile — and they are in it because the people who signed it were campaigning on all of them at once. That is the symmetry this book exists to prevent anyone from drawing.
Read that way the book remains valuable, and not only negatively: the chapters on the OSS, on NSC 20/1 and 20/4, and on the CIA's relations with the American universities and the émigré right are competent work on real documents. But its subject is finally not the CIA. Its subject is a small number of Soviet citizens whom the state had decided to destroy, and wished, for reasons of foreign policy, to have destroyed in English as well as Russian. The evidence against them was supplied by the organisation that had arrested them. The historian who arranged it said afterwards that he had defamed them. Nothing since has given anyone a reason to doubt him.