OT: Former Spy Says Russia Buried Explosives In U.S.

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This guy is supposed to be on 60 Minutes tomorrow - should be interesting. If you live near the Hungry Horse Dam in Montana or the southwest oil pipeline you might want to move, among other places yet to be discovered.

Saturday September 11 1:40 PM ET

Former Spy Says Russia Buried Explosives In U.S.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Soviet spies buried explosives across the United States and Europe as part of a Cold War sabotage campaign that identified power stations, fuel pipelines and other infrastructure sites, a former KGB official says.

The revelations are included in a new book co-authored by ex-Soviet spymaster Vasili Mitrokhin and discussed in an interview he gave to the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), excerpts of which will be broadcast Sunday by the CBS News program ``60 Minutes.''

Mitrokhin, whose disclosure about Briton Melita Norwood's nuclear espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union made headlines Saturday, says that for years he copied top-secret documents by hand and smuggled them from Russian intelligence headquarters, sometimes in his shoes, and hid some of them in a mattress.

He wrote ``Sword and the Shield: Secret History of the KGB'' with British academic Christopher Andrew, who spoke with ``60 Minutes'' about Mitrokhin's note-taking and smuggling activities over a 12-year period that began in the early 1970s when he was put in charge of moving the KGB archives to a new site.

Mitrokhin, now 77 and living as a British citizen under an assumed name, was motivated by apparent disillusionment over Soviet crackdowns on dissidents.

``I wanted to show the efforts, the tremendous efforts of this machine of evil,'' Mitrokhin told the BBC. ``And I wanted to demonstrate what happens when the foundations of conscience are trampled over and when other moral principles are forgotten. I regarded this as my duty as a Russian patriot.''

Mitrokhin divulges a trove of information about KGB efforts in the United States, including an aggressive disinformation attempt to pin the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on the Central Intelligence Agency.

But a major disclosure involves Mitrokhin's claim that Soviet spies surveyed hundreds of potential sabotage sites in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. ''As part of that,'' according to ``60 Minutes'' ``they buried booby trapped arms caches near some of the targets.'' The explosives presumably are still there.

In the United States, the KGB sabotage plan covered areas across the country. One of the first targets identified by the KGB was an oil pipeline running from El Paso, Texas, to Costa Mesa, California. The Hungry Horse Dam in Montana also was on the list as was a ``tremendously elaborate system'' for knocking out electrical power to New York state, ``60 Minutes'' reports.

Mitrokhin's files, said ``60 Minutes,'' did not ``spell out'' how many explosives were buried in the United States or their exact locations, but Andrew says in his U.S. TV interview that the Kremlin knows where they are.

In Europe, Andrew said one of the sabotage sites was ''checked out'' in Switzerland. Mitrokhin's directions were followed ``precisely'' and when investigators began to dig, they uncovered something dangerous. ``They turned a fire hose (on the site) and it exploded,'' he said.

-- @ (@@@.@), September 11, 1999

Answers

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Many thanks, what I'm more concerened about are the 100 or so missing suitcase nukes, together with the rumoured suitcase-nuke manufacturing agenda of Bin Laden and his buddies...

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), September 11, 1999.


Andy,

I sure hear that. With our military receiving flunking grades I don't feel too damn optimistic about our national security. I bet the National Guard will set up road blocks around the perimeter of all major cities (say 500,000+ ?) to search anyone who wants to go in. That would suck, take you 4 hours to get to work. Then of course they'll also have to block out access to areas where our power utilities and those kinds of targets are to all but the most essential personell.

-- @ (@@@.@), September 11, 1999.


The CIA Didn't Want Him

So the defecting Vasili Mitrokhin was stuck with MI6.

WHEN Vasili Mitrokhin first approached MI6 saying he had material that would interest them, they had no idea how important his information would be.

CIA officials in the American Embassy in Latvia, had turned away the Russian on the grounds that they were already overwhelmed by would-be defectors. The consensus was that Mitrokhin was a time-waster. So he went down the street to the British Embassy, where MI6 officers listened to him, and decided that they should do everything to help him. In December 1992, they smuggled Mitrokhin, his family, and six large crates of documents out of Russia and into Britain.

Paul Redmond, then the head of CIA counter-intelligence, still rues the day when his colleagues decided to turn Mitrokhin away. He had tried to argue that the organisation should at least listen to what he had to say. The rejection "was, in my view, a breathtakingly stupid thing".

"Breathtakingly stupid" sums it up. For Col Mitrokhin was one of the most senior officials in the archives of the KGB's Moscow Centre. He had worked there all his career. Those archives contained a detailed record of every operation the KGB mounted from its inception in 1917 to Mitrokhin's retirement in 1984: who did what, to whom, when, and why. No other individual was in a position to see such a wealth of material.

Senior case officers - of whom the most illustrious is Oleg Gordievsky, the acting head of the KGB's British section who spied for MI6 for 10 years before making an escape to the West - could pass on detailed information about specific operations as they happened, allowing MI6 to ensure they failed or at least were rendered harmless. But even Gordievsky was not in a position to see the range of material which was at Mitrokhin's fingertips every day of his working life.

Mitrokhin spent 10 years secretly copying out every document. He smuggled these out past KGB security by hiding them in his clothes. He then worked on them over the weekend at his country dacha, hiding them under the floorboards. He amassed an astonishing amount of detail.

As one expert on intelligence said: "Even if the head of the KGB had defected, he would not have had as much information as Mitrokhin. The head of the KGB would not have spent 10 years in the archives copying out material. What any human being can remember is necessarily limited. But MI6 managed to get Mitrokhin and his six crates of documents out of Russia."

The result was 25,000 pages of material on KGB operations. Those pages constitute a unique insight into the organisation's world spy network. The archive discloses that, according to the KGB's own estimates, more than half of Soviet weapons were based on designs stolen from America.

They show that the KGB tapped the telephones of officials such as Henry Kissinger, and had spies in almost all the big defence contractors, such as General Electric and IBM. They show that the KGB planted stories in the United States press with the aim of discrediting Martin Luther King, the black civil rights leader. The KGB disliked King because he believed in constitutional change rather than violent revolution. There was even a plan to break the legs of Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet dancer, after he defected to the West in 1961.

Robert Lipka, an employee of the National Security Agency, who spied for the KGB and did immense damage to America as a consequence, has just been convicted and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment as a result of Mitrokhin's material. But it is not only in America that the gradual dispersal of information from Mitrokhin's archive has led to investigations. There have been resignations, arrests, prosecutions and expulsions all over the world.

In France, at least 35 senior politicians were shown to have worked for the KGB at the height of the Cold War. In Germany, Mitrokhin's documents showed that the KGB had infiltrated all the main political parties, the judiciary and the police, and that the vast network had been left in place after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The KGB had targeted Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister who resigned last spring - although it is unclear whether it succeeded in recruiting him. In Japan, his material led to the unmasking of one of the KGB's most successful spies. And there is more, much more, still to come.

Mitrokhin's motive for first collecting the information, then handing it over to MI6, seems to have been purely ideological. He decided that Soviet communism was evil, and had to be opposed. He thought the best way to oppose it was to ensure that the world knew the truth about the way it worked: the lies, deception, and cruelty on which it depended.

That was why he devoted 10 years of his life copying KGB documents. He is apparently a difficult man: distrustful and quarrelsome. But he has performed an extraordinary service.

The London Telegraph, Sept. 12, 1999

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), September 12, 1999.


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