Gavrilov channel
| Type | Clandestine liaison channel between intelligence services |
|---|---|
| Parties | Central Intelligence Agency (United States) KGB (Soviet Union) |
| Established | 1983 |
| Ended | 1991–1992 (became an open liaison relationship) |
| Named after | A Russian poet named Gavrilov (accounts differ) |
The Gavrilov channel was a secret line of communication between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Soviet KGB, used from 1983 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union to arrange discreet meetings between senior officers of the two services. It consisted of a secure telephone link between KGB headquarters in Moscow and the office of the chief of the CIA's Soviet division at Langley, through which either side could request a meeting on short notice in a neutral city, usually Vienna or Helsinki.[1][2]
The channel's existence was first disclosed publicly in a December 1997 Los Angeles Times series based on interviews with former CIA and KGB officers.[1] It took its name from a Russian poet; published accounts differ on which one, with the Los Angeles Times describing an 18th-century poet, later accounts a 19th-century one, and Russian reporting mentioning a version that traces the name to Gavriil Derzhavin.[1][2][3]
Origins
The KGB proposed a professional contact channel in mid-1983, a period of high tension between the two governments. Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, initially suspicious of a provocation, authorized a meeting to hear the Soviet side out, and CIA officers including Gardner "Gus" Hathaway, later chief of counterintelligence, met KGB counterintelligence officers including Rem Krassilnikov of the Second Chief Directorate in Vienna, where the two services agreed on a communications plan.[4] On the American side the first participants included Burton Gerber, then chief of the Soviet division, and counterintelligence chief David Blee; knowledge of the channel was restricted to a handful of senior officials, in part because the meetings sat awkwardly with the public line of the Reagan years.[1]
Both services took precautions against misuse. Officers never attended alone, since each side feared the channel could otherwise serve as cover for a mole to meet his handlers.[1]
Use
One of the first American requests, in 1984, concerned William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut kidnapped by Islamic Jihad. The KGB provided little help, and the channel lapsed for several years. The case was awkward for Moscow: the KGB had itself planned to kidnap a CIA officer in Beirut in the late 1970s through local intermediaries before Yuri Andropov cancelled the scheme, and the former KGB general Oleg Kalugin later said he believed transcripts of Buckley's interrogations had been sold to Soviet intelligence.[1] A further interruption followed in 1987, when the National Security Council directed the CIA to pass a diplomatic message through the channel; the KGB objected that Gavrilov existed for communication between professional services rather than for intergovernmental business, and contact halted for about two years.[4]
Krassilnikov raised reopening the channel with Jack Downing, the CIA station chief in Moscow, in 1988, and a new round of meetings began in 1989 with a session at the Soviet embassy in Helsinki.[5] That session ended with Hathaway leaving his wallet behind, and a car of KGB officers chased through the city to return it.[1][3] Topics over the years ranged from the security of the new American embassy building in Moscow to terrorism, narcotics trafficking and the fate of defectors. A recurring ritual concerned KGB officers who had vanished: when asked, the CIA side would answer that the officer in question was well, had freedom of movement and was in another country, a formula understood to mean that he had defected and was living in the United States.[1][4]
In August 1990 the CIA used the channel to seek Soviet cooperation as the United States assembled the coalition against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, while the KGB asked for help in establishing the fate of a Soviet diplomat who had disappeared in India.[5] In October 1990, on the eve of German unification, Milt Bearden, chief of the CIA's Soviet division, and counterintelligence chief Hugh "Ted" Price met Krassilnikov and Leonid Nikitenko at a KGB safe house in the Karlshorst district of East Berlin, where the Soviet side pressed for explanations of the accelerating defections from its ranks.[1] When Nikitenko died suddenly in Brazil in 1991, the KGB asked the CIA to help determine whether there had been foul play; through contacts in the Brazilian government the agency established that he had died of a heart attack, a finding for which the KGB foreign intelligence chief Leonid Shebarshin later expressed gratitude.[1] By the late 1980s, retired veterans of both services had also begun holding informal reunions, which participants recalled as friendly.[3]
Aftermath
After the failed August 1991 coup, the channel ceased to be secret and became the foundation of a formal liaison relationship between the CIA and the SVR, the KGB's foreign intelligence successor. Teams of experts from both services began meeting on narcotics trafficking and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the reformist KGB chairman Vadim Bakatin handed over the plans of the listening devices embedded in the new US embassy building in Moscow.[1] In October 1992 Robert Gates travelled to Moscow, met Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, and concluded a visit after which the US embassy announced that "the possibility of contact and joint activity between the Russian and American intelligence services was discussed".[6] The FBI subsequently opened an office in Moscow, and the post-Cold War CIA-SVR relationship was described in 2001 as a considerable expansion of the Gavrilov-style meetings.[2]
Bearden later said that his exposure to the KGB leadership through the channel convinced him earlier than most CIA officials that the service was beaten, leading him to instruct stations that the Soviet division had little interest in recruiting further KGB officers, a decision some colleagues criticized.[1] Russian veterans gave similar assessments of the channel's value; Shebarshin called the exchanges, particularly on terrorist threats, "quite effective".[1][3]
Sources
Public knowledge of the channel rests largely on the accounts of participants. James Risen's 1997 Los Angeles Times series drew on interviews with Bearden, Krassilnikov and Shebarshin, and Risen returned to the subject with Bearden in their 2003 book The Main Enemy, written with extensive cooperation from Krassilnikov, who died before publication.[1][7][8]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 Risen, James (31 December 1997). "An Extraordinary Link for Archenemies in Spying". Los Angeles Times.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Risen, James (23 March 2001). "Rules of Espionage: Got Caught? You Lose Players". The New York Times.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "КГБ — ЦРУ: заклятые друзья и лучшие враги". Gazeta.ru (in русский). 20 December 2017.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Bearden, Milt; Risen, James (2003). The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-46309-7. Search this book on
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Establishing the Top-Secret Hotline". Los Angeles Times. 31 December 1997.
- ↑ Shapiro, Margaret (19 October 1992). "Ex-KGB, CIA Talk of Sharing". The Washington Post.
- ↑ Peake, Hayden (2004). "The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf" (PDF). Studies in Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency. 48 (4).
- ↑ Wise, David (1 June 2003). "Of moles and men". Los Angeles Times.
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