KARLA'S CROWD: THE KGB IN PEACE AND WAR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00587R000100310002-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 11, 2011
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: August 4, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/05/11: CIA-RDP91-00587R000100310002-7
A?TICIE APP ED
ON PAGE l
WWor
Karla's Crowd:
The KGB in
Peace and War
AND YET the CIA, the reader should keep in mind,
has permitted only what it wants to be published
about the KGB to appear in the book. As a former
CIA officer, Crowley was obligated to submit the
book to the agency for clearance. TheCIA says he did so. It
THE NEW KOBi Engine of Soviet rower also says that Corson did not submit the book and was not so
By William R. Corson and Robert T. Crowley obligated.
Morrow. 560 pp. $19.95 The New KGB is mistitled, since the bulk of this study
By David Wier
VIGNETTE NO. 1: On a recent trip to the Soviet
Union, I dined with Victor Louis, the most famous
reputed agent of the KGB in the world. Louis, who
says he is a journalist, is an engaging and articulate
man, Westernized in manner, and he spent the time at dinner
in spirited defense of the. Soviet system. At the end of the
evening, he climbed into a gleaming silver Bentley amd drove
off into the night.
Vignette No. 2: A few years ago, I dropped off my car (not
a Bentley, not gleaming) to be serviced at a garage in my
neighborhood. Another customer, a tall, white-haired and ex-
tremely courtly gentleman, realizing I was without wheels,
offered me a ride home, and I accepted. It was only later that
I realized my benefactor was Robert T. Crowley, who had
been the assistant deputy director for operations of the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency, and as such the number-two clan-
destine agent of the CIA.
Crowley, now retired, and William R. Corson, another for-
mer intelligence man, have written a detailed and revealing
book about the KGB. I doubt that Crowley and Victor Louis
(whose real name according to The New KGB is Vitali Levin)
have met, but if they could, it would make for a fascinating
evening. They would go at it like two old sparring partners.
The relative merits of the CIA and the KGB, and the two
contrasting systems that bred them, would be discussed with
considerable wit and erudition. At the end of the evening,
neither man would have. changed the other's mind. But the
conversation would have been right interesting.
Intelligence agents live in a world that is rather different
from that in which the rest of us reside, and they tend to
think differently, too. Nothing is what it seems.
As only one example of the complexities of this subterra-
nean world, Corson and Crowley recount the strange case of
Yuri Logutov, who was a rested in South Africa in 1967 as a
Soviet "illegal," that is, a spy without official (usually diplo-
matic) cover. The authors find his arrest by the "relatively
inexperienced South Africans" to be odd, since illegals are
the slipperiest of intelligence eels and the hardest to catch.
So the implication, although the authors do not say so di-
rectly, is that Loginov was a "dispatched agent," a KGB offi-
cer sent out, in this instance, in order to be caught. But for
what purpose?
The authors cite a report that Loginov supported the story
of another defector, Yuri Nosenko, who had turned up in
Geneva three years earlier. Nosenko discounted the allega-
tions of a previous KGB defector, Anatoli Golitsin, who had
warned the CIA that it harbored a high-level mole. The argu-
ment over Nosenko's bona fides tore the CIA apart, leading
deals, not with the modem KGB, but with the history of the
"organs" of Soviet state security. One must plough through
pages of detailed examination of the evolution of the Cheka,
the OGPU, the NKVD, the MVD and so on, as well as de-
scriptions of ancient shenanigans by Amtorg and other com-
mercial arms of the Soviet government, to find the nuggets
-but they are there to be mined if the reader is patient
enough.
For example, Corson and Crowley relate that Yuri Andro-
pov, the first head of the KGB to become leader of the Soviet
Union, and his protege, Victor Chebrikov, the present head
of the KGB, met years ago on a dull, bureaucratic assign-
ment, a KGB promotion panel on which the two men served
for only two weeks. But they stayed in touch. In 1955,. when
Andropov was KGB resident in Hungary and later ambassa-
dor, he sent for Chebrikov as his deputy. The two won their
spurs the following year when Soviet tanks and troops
crushed the revolt in Budapest. When Andropov succeeded
to power after Leonid Brezhnev's death in November 1982,
one of his first acts was to appoint Viktor Chebrikov head of
the KGB. -
There is tradecraft galore here, descriptions of how the
KGB goes about compiling lists of infant deaths, finding de-
funct businesses, schools and addresses to build uncheckable
legends for its illegals. There is an account of the spy school
at Bykovo, near Moscow, sometimes known as "Little Chi-
cago," where Soviet agents were allegedly taught to pass for
Americans. They were required to memorize batting aver-
ages, and taught by a faculty that "understood the impor-
tance (for legend purposes) of baseball, radio, hot dogs, and
apple pie." Bykovo, according to the authors, even had a
roller skating rink.
The New KGB spends a great deal of time telling us that
the Soviet secret police killed 40 million people, that Stalin
and Beria were responsible for mass terror, and that the
KGB is not the Rotary Club. But the denunciations of the
Soviet system, which permeate the book, are standard fare,
hardly necessary to establish the authors' anticommunist
credentials, and tend to detract from the narrative.
Despite the condemnatory tone, the authors, as profes-
sionals, cannot conceal their admiration for one Hans Gallen,
a Soviet agent who showed astonishing ingenuity in outwit-
ting the British secret service and tracking down "Scott," a
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/05/11: CIA-RDP91-00587R000100310002-7
WASHINGTON POST I
4 August 1985
to resignations, creating bitter enemies within the agency,
"Pleasing the KGB no end. Loginov, the authors suggest,
contributed to the confusion at the highest levels in Langley:
In the view of some experts, his 'failed' mission was in fact
a dramatic success."