Homeland Security and the KGB

We were up very early on Saturday to pick up Billie at Highway 88 on the 400. Elizabeth her mom, and Al were off for a late winter/early spring weekend at his cottage somewhere in the wilds of the north and west. Sunday morning, once again at a ridiculously early hour, with Billie and Emily in tow, we left for Kalamazoo to dine with the Hall clan. Billie, 10, and Emily, 13, are the big draw for Nathan and Lauren, our niece Jennifer’s kids, now about 6 and 8. These four have been playing together twice a year for some time, so quickly fall into familiar spaces with one another. It’s always a lot of fun. We travelled in our considerably reduced “ride,” having recently gone from a Chevy Malibu Max to a Mini. No one was allowed any more baggage than they could sit on or carry at their feet! It made for an interesting trip.

For the past few days I’ve been shuffling my way through the first 150 pages of an approximately 1000 page tome about the Soviet security and foreign intelligence agency, latterly called the KGB. (Almost 250 of these pages are notes and references.) A British historian, Christopher Andrew, was given full access by Mi6, the British intelligence service, to an archive of notes secretly documented for two decades by Vasili Mitrokhin, a highly placed KGB bureaucrat. By the late 1960s Mitrokhin’s political views had been gradually affected by the developing dissident mood throughout the territories dominated by the Soviet Union. In 1972 a move of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate from the Lubyanka to new quarters, necessitated a thorough organization of files kept since the 1917 revolution of the various incarnations of the secret services. Mitrokhin’s role was to review all of these files before they were sealed and stored. For the next decade as he made his way through this storehouse of Soviet history, he kept notes about its contents. Aware of the dangers of discovery, Mitrokhin dug out an area below the floorboards of his dacha outside Moscow. Over the years he managed to bury an enormous repository of secret information.

After his retirement in 1984 Mitrokhin pulled together some of his material, focussing especially on the Afghan war. More and more, however, he began to consider ways that he could bring his information to the West. During that decade, Mitrokhin typed up and organized some of the voluminous materials that he had gathered. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 Russian border controls were considerably weakened. Mitrokhin travelled to Latvia and approached the British embassy with his story and with some samples of his work. A later visit allowed a lengthy debriefing session with the Mi6 and in 1992 Mitrokhin left Russia with his family, settling in London. His vast store of archival notes was unearthed and transported west by Mi6 operatives. For several years Mitrokhin in collaboration with the secret services of five countries, continued to mine the data contained in these six large packing cases of notes. In 1995 Christopher Andrew was contacted by Mi6 and invited to work with Mitrokhin to publish those parts of the archive that related particularly to the KGB’s activities in Europe and the West. Their book was published in 1999.

The material is absolutely the stuff of John Le Carre! Aside from the details of the early years of the Soviet Union, there is a fair amount about the recruitment, care, and feeding of the agents known as the Magnificent Five: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross – young men brought into espionage for the Soviets right from their days as students at Cambridge. The hundreds of agents in place in Britain and other European countries well before the outbreak of WWII testify to the seriously developed paranoia of Stalin. An example: he was entirely convinced that the many reports that Hitler was planning to invade Russia in the summer of 1941 was merely a plot hatched by the British to incite trouble with his new-found ally. Reports of the massing of German troops on his borders were dismissed by Stalin as lies and distortions. More than one officer lost not just his job but his life for pushing this idea too determinably. Once war did begin with Germany he believed that the British were trying to negotiate a separate peace with Hitler which would leave the Soviets alone against the Nazis. Considerable espionage resources were centred on his allies rather than the German’s themselves, both during and after the war.

But back to the more or less present: our trip to Michigan was accomplished in about 33 hours: Sunday AM off at 7; arrival 2PM at Kalamazoo, or, I ought to say, Portage, the Zoo’s sister city where Mark’s brother, Terry lives. Monday AM at 8, off to Toronto; arrival 4PM. The new(ish) car performed beautifully and the two girlies in the back were an unending source of interesting comment, interspersed with lots of laughing, general fooling around, and the odd nap. At the border a somewhat grouchy Homeland Security person grilled us: HS: How many in the car? Me: Four. HS: All Canadians? Me: Yes. HS: Where are you going? Me: To Kalamazoo. HS: What for? Me: To have dinner with my husband’s family. HS: That’s a long way to drive to have dinner. Me: We are used to it. HS: How often do you do that? Me: Two or three times a year; besides we are staying overnight. HS: It’s a long way to drive for such a short visit. Why wouldn’t you come earlier to have a longer visit with the family? Me: It works for us. HS: What are you bringing with you? Me: Some pies. HS: No alcohol or tobacco? Me: No. HS: How about fruit or vegetables? Me: No. HS: That girl in the back seat is eating an apple. Why did you say you were not bringing any fruit? Me: Oh, that’s part of her lunch. I didn’t think of that. HS: It’s a $1500 fine to not declare something. That’s a very expensive apple. Me: Yes. HS: (handing me back the four passports) Next time you’ll get the fine!

On the way home we had lunch at Wendy’s in Port Huron, the last stop before crossing the bridge to Sarnia. Emily asked for the word that meant marrying more than one person. Polygamy, I said. Right, she said, that’s the word I was looking for. Is that legal? No, I explained, except in some cultures and countries, for example, in Saudi Arabia and in some other Islamic countries men are allowed to have up to four wives. Only men can do that? She asked. Yes. Well then, if I wanted to marry all four of the guys in my band (meaning a band she follows on the internet and is mad for), I would have to have a sex change and they would all have to have sex changes as well. Yes, I said, of course, sometimes people have more than one partner but they just don’t marry them both because you could go to jail for that. It was then that I noticed that the lady who was sitting in a booth directly ahead of ours had been following our conversation. She turned her head to see what kind of people were talking about such things. We were amused but I’m not certain that she was.

In between these adventures we had visits with the Halls: Terry, his girls Dana and Natalie now in their early 20s but just babies when I first met them; Karen, their mother; Judi, his current partner; Bob, his boys Ben and David, with David’s wife, Kaela and their 7 month old baby; and Jennifer, Mike’s daughter with her husband Todd and their kids, Nathan and Lauren. We sat outside in the lovely spring sun and ate hamburgers and sausages hot off the barbie with salads and the pies that made it through customs without any ill will. We talked about a houseboat that Terry and Judi have engaged for a four night cruise on Lake Cumberland, Kentucky in late June. It has six bedrooms! Mark and I will be on board as will, most likely, Billie. We also had some time to talk about Mike, the second of the Hall brothers who died in February, just a week after visiting with us in Puerto Vallarta. We didn’t come early to spend a lot of time visiting with the family. But what we had was, as always, very fine.