The Ultimate Goal

In The Ultimate Goal, Vikram Sood, former chief of India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), explains the narrative' and how a country's ability to construct, sustain and control narratives, at home and abroad, enhances its strength and position. Intelligence agencies invariably play a critical role in this, an often-indispensable tool of statecraft.

A 'narrative' may not necessarily be based on truth, but it does need to be plausible, have a meaning and create a desired perception. During most of the twentieth century, intelligence agencies helped shape narratives favourable to their countries' agendas through literature, history, drama, art, music and cinema. Today, social media has become crucial to manipulating, countering or disrupting narratives, with its ability to spread fake news and disinformation, and provoke reactions.

IT WAS ON A late morning in October 1948 that a man in his late forties, dressed rather inconspicuously but appropriately for Moscow's autumn, boarded a train for Warsaw from the nearly hundred-year-old Leningradsky station. He was a man on a mission eminently suitable for his talents — he was fluent in five languages and a talented painter and musician. Warsaw was not his destination. Upon arrival, he discarded his identity papers and took on the identity of Andrew Kayotis, a Lithuanian-born US citizen with an American passport. Kayotis then travelled to Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Paris before boarding the RMS Scythia from Le Havre, destined for Quebec. Once there, Kayotis moved to Montreal before turning up in New York in November 1948.

A Soviet 'illegal' met Kayotis and handed him some start-up cash, a genuine birth certificate and a forged draft card and tax certificate, all in the name of an Emil Robert Goldfus. The real Goldfus had died a few months after his birth on 2 August 1902 in New York, and the Soviets had acquired his birth certificate. The false Goldfus's credentials as an artist and photographer enabled him the facility of movement and freedom not bound by regular hours, so he could work to revive the Soviet intelligence communication network, the Volunteers, as they were called.

There was an urgency about Goldfus's mission. After US President Harry S. Truman announced on 6 August 1945 that the US Air Force had dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, adding unapologetically that the US would continue to target the enemy with greater power if need be, the message to Joseph Stalin was clear. The former ally and then adversary were told that the post-Second World War narrative of parity had changed. From that moment on, the United States was asserting that it was the paramount global power.

This drastically altered power equations and global perceptions. Stalin's prestige was at stake, as was that of the Great Soviet Proletariat that should have been conquering the globe under his command. The thought that the US would become the sole superpower was not an acceptable narrative. Balance had to be restored, and quickly.

In the summer of 1945, Stalin went into a huddle in his secret dacha in Kuntsevo with some of his closest advisers, including his intelligence chief, Lavrentiy Beria. Although Soviet spies, like Klaus Fuchs and others, had already infiltrated the Los Alamos Laboratory and the Manhattan Project that had developed the nuclear weapons in the US, the gathering of intelligence had slowed down because of heavy American surveillance. We can assume that Stalin, driven by rage and fear, ordered that the network be revived. And soon, the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) was in frenzied pursuit of atomic secrets.

Goldfus set himself up in a studio apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Soon enough, he succeeded in reviving the communication system. He was able to collect and deliver vital intelligence from the extensive ring of the Soviet Union's atomic spies — like Zhorzh Koval and Klaus Fuchs — with an elaborate support network formed by Lona and Morris Cohen, Morton Sobell, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Soviets tested their bomb in Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949. They had caught up with the archenemy, parity had been restored and Stalin was pleased. The narrative was freezing into the Cold War.

In the epilogue to this story, Koval slipped away, Fuchs got imprisoned in England in 1950, Stalin died in 1953 and Beria was executed soon after. Goldfus was betrayed by his deputy and arrested in New York in 1957. The American press went ballistic when Goldfus declared that his name was Col. Rudolf Ivanovich Abel. In reality, there was no Colonel Abel; it was a name the Soviets had given him as a cover. Goldfus used it to convey to his masters that it was really him that the Americans had arrested and that he had not revealed his actual identity.

In 1962, he was exchanged at the Glienicke Bridge that linked West Berlin with Potsdam for the American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down and was in Soviet custody. He died in 1971 and his tombstone read, 'Col. Rudolf Abel', along with his real name, Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher. Fisher was the son of Russian émigré parents, and was born in England in 1903. Purist spymasters say that Abel was not really much of a success in New York, but it suited the Soviets to exchange him for Powers as a grand gesture to the Americans. After fourteen years in America, Abel was the spy who had come in from the cold.

Facts are not always what they appear to be but are often what they are perceived to be. Thus, the truth is not supreme in affairs of state, and is often hidden within a bundle of lies, half-truths and innuendo. Instead, perceptions built on narratives become the accepted truth. Over time, we become the embodiment of our perceptions, prejudices, hates and dislikes, as well as our own nationalisms that often border on narcissistic beliefs.

Unlike scientific facts or mathematical equations, which are sacrosanct until proven otherwise, political facts, historical facts and ideas are malleable and can be changed as per geopolitical convenience. Scientific proof is rarely required, but archaeological facts for history are an exception. This conviction is determined by the narratives created.

VIKRANI SOOD, a career intelligence officer for thirty-one years who retired in March 2003 after heading the REAM is currently adviser at the Observer Research Foundation, an independent public-policy think tank based in New Delhi. He writes regularly on security, foreign relations and strategic issues in journals and newspapers and has contributed chapters related to security, China, intelligence and India's neighborhood to books published in the last few years. His book, The Unending Game: A Former RSAW Chief's Insights into Espionage, was published in 2018.