Talk:Operation Toucan (KGB)

Operation Toucan is a Canadian mission in East Timor.
Operation Toucan is a Canadian mission in East Timor. The only reference to a KGB plot by this name on google seems to be a Frontpage magazine article from January that is copied practically verbatim here. So there are copyright violation issues as well as notability issues. I also think it's all a bit strange; no doubt Pinochet's notorious human rights record had a lot more to do with the movement against him than this KGB plot. Finally, the comparison to Cuba seems completely unnecessary here and was only introduced to reflect a particular political bias. 69.234.178.114 00:03, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
 * The FPM article is based off the source given on the page, Andrew. Any similarities are purely coincidental. The article does not state that the anti Pinochet movement was a KGB creation, just that the KGB was organizing significant elements within it and producing forged documents to link DINA's activities to the CIA. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 01:20, 16 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I know I will be accused of "stalking" for noticing this page, but my regard for truth makes it impossible to say nothing, and it outweighs my fear of TDC's personal attacks. First, the anon is correct about the Canadian mission.  Most google hits point there, and all lexis/nexis hits point there rather than the alleged KGB plot.  This page should be renamed "Operation TOUCAN (alleged KGB plot)" and "Operation TOUCAN" should point to the Canadian mission as per wikipedia policy.  Second, it is clear that TDC is not telling the truth about "any similarities" being "purely coincidental"; this sentence is copied verbatim from the Frontpage review.  It's not a big deal, but of course it is bad form to "coincidentally" copy sentences word for word from articles you don't cite (were this a student paper, I'd include a stern warning about plagiarism in my comments).  Third, the article incorrectly characterizes the operation as "so successful" -- according to every review I've looked at of Mitrokhin's book, the Soviet operations in Latin America were dismal failures, and the KGB employees who carried them out are described as "laughably incompetent."  It is fine to include information that the book claims that there were only such-and-such as many NYT articles on the topic, but it is incorrect to directly attribute that to the operation the way the Frontpage magazine article implies (and, of course, the NYT stuff comes directly out of the frontpage article).  It's hardly a measure of "success" of the operation.  Finally, the article (and the one on Mitrokhin, which I will check soon) should have some indication that his work is not "gospel" (to quote TDC); while noticed a bit in the media, historians have raised serious questions about his claims, which are mostly unverifiable.  According to the American Historical Review, "Mitrokhin was a self-described loner with increasingly anti-Soviet views . . . Maybe such a potentially dubious type (in KGB terms) really was able freely to transcribe thousands of documents, smuggle them out of KGB premises, hide them under his bed, transfer them to his country house, bury them in milk cans, make multiple visits to British embassies abroad, escape to Britain, and then return to Russia, and carry the voluminous work to the west, all without detection by the KGB . . . It may all be true. But how do we know?"  Now, that said, I have not read that book, and Chile is not my expertise, so I don't expect to become a very active editor on this page, but it is now on my watchlist and I plan to press for the above relatively minor changes.--csloat 19:12, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

The Sword and the Shield by Vasili Mitrokhin quote
Maybe this will help you understand the life and work of Major Vasili Mitrokhin:

"By the beginning of the 1970s Mitrokhin's political views were deeply influenced by the dissident struggle, which he was able to follow both in KGB records and Western broadcasts. "I was a loner," he recalls, "but I now knew that I was not alone." Though Mitrokhin never had any thought of aligning himself openly with the human rights movement, the example of the Chronicle of Current Events and other samizdat productions helped to inspire him with the idea of producing a classified variant of the dissidents' attempts to document the iniquities of the Soviet system. Gradually the project began to form in his mind of compiling his own private record of the foreign operations of the KGB.

Mitrokhin's opportunity came in June 1972 when the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate left its overcrowded central Moscow offices in the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka (once the pre-Revolutionary home of the Rossiya Insurance Company) and moved to a new building south-east of Moscow at Yasenevo, half a mile beyond the outer ringroad. Designed by a Finnish architect, the main Y-shaped seven-story office building was flanked on one side by an assembly hall and library, on the other by a polyclinic, sports complex and swimming pool, with pleasant views over hills covered with birch trees, green pastures, and—in summer—fields of wheat and rye. To the other KGB directorates, most of which worked in cramped conditions in central Moscow, Yasenevo was known—with more envy than condescension—as "The Woods."

For the next ten years, working from private offices both in the Lubyanka and at Yasenevo, Mitrokhin was alone responsible for checking and sealing the approximately 300,000 files in the FCD archive prior to their transfer to the new headquarters. While supervising the checking of files, the compilation of inventories and the writing of index cards, Mitrokhin was able to inspect what files he wished in one or other of his offices. Few KGB officers apart from Mitrokhin have ever spent as much time reading, let alone noting, foreign intelligence files. Outside the FCD archives, only the most senior officers shared his unrestricted access, and none had the time to read more than a fraction of the material noted by him.

Mitrokhin's usual weekly routine was to spend each Monday, Tuesday and Friday in his Yasenevo office. On Wednesdays he went to the Lubyanka to work on the FCD's most secret files, those of Directorate S which ran illegals—KGB officers and agents, most of Soviet nationality, working under deep cover abroad disguised as foreign citizens. Once reviewed by Mitrokhin, each batch of files was placed in sealed containers which were transported to Yasenevo on Thursday mornings, accompanied by Mitrokhin who checked them on arrival. Unlike the other departments, who moved to the new FCD headquarters in 1972, Directorate S remained based in the Lubyanka for a further decade.

Mitrokhin thus found himself spending more time dealing with the files of Directorate S, the most secret in the FCD, than with those of any other section of Soviet foreign intelligence. The illegals retained a curious mystique within the KGB. Before being posted abroad, every illegal officer was required to swear a solemn, if somewhat melodramatic, oath:

Deeply valuing the trust placed upon me by the Party and the fatherland, and imbued with a sense of intense gratitude for the decision to send me to the sharp edge of the struggle for the interest of my people ... as a worthy son of the homeland, I would rather perish than betray the secrets entrusted to me or put into the hand of the adversary materials which could cause political harm to the interests of the State. With every heartbeat, with every day that passes, I swear to serve the Party, the homeland, and the Soviet people.

The files showed that before the Second World War the greatest foreign successes had been achieved by a legendary group of intelligence officers, often referred to as the "Great Illegals." After the Second World War, the KGB had tried to recreate its pre-war triumphs by establishing an elaborate network of "illegal residencies" alongside the "legal residencies" which operated under diplomatic or other official cover in foreign capitals.

The records of Directorate S revealed some remarkable individual achievements. KGB illegals successfully established bogus identities as foreign nationals in a great variety of professions ranging from Costa Rican ambassador to piano tuner to the Governor of New York. Even in the Gorbachev era, KGB propaganda continued to depict the Soviet illegal as the supreme embodiment of the chivalric ideal in the service of secret intelligence. The retired British KGB agent George Blake wrote in 1990:

Only a man who believes very strongly in an ideal and serves a great cause will agree to embark on such a career, though the word "calling" is perhaps appropriate here. Only an intelligence service which works for a great cause can ask for such a sacrifice from its officers. That is why, as far as I know, at any rate in peacetime, only the Soviet intelligence service has "illegal residents."The SVR continues the KGB tradition of illegal hagiography. In July 1995, a month after the death of the best-known American-born illegal, Morris Cohen, President Yeltsin conferred on him the posthumous title of Hero of the Russian Federation. The files of Directorate S noted by Mitrokhin reveal a quite different kind of illegal. Alongside the committed FCD officers who maintained their cover and professional discipline throughout their postings, there were others who could not cope when confronted by the contrast between the Soviet propaganda image of capitalist exploitation and the reality of life in the West. An even darker secret of the Directorate S records was that one of the principal uses of the illegals during the last quarter of a century of the Soviet Union was to search out and compromise dissidents in the other countries of the Warsaw Pact. The squalid struggle against "ideological subversion" was as much a responsibility of Directorate S as of the rest of the FCD.

MITROKHIN WAS UNDERSTANDABLY cautious as he set out in 1972 to compile his forbidden FCD archive. For a few weeks he tried to commit names, codenames and key facts from the files to memory and transcribe them each evening when he returned home. Abandoning that process as too slow and cumbersome, he began to take notes in minuscule handwriting on scraps of paper which he crumpled up and threw into his wastepaper basket. Each evening, he retrieved his notes from the wastepaper and smuggled them out of Yasenevo concealed in his shoes. Gradually Mitrokhin became more confident as he satisfied himself that the Yasenevo security guards confined themselves to occasional inspections of bags and briefcases without attempting body searches. After a few months he started taking notes on ordinary sheets of office paper which he took out of his office in his jacket and trouser pockets.

Not once in the twelve years which Mitrokhin spent noting the FCD archives was he stopped and searched. There were, however, some desperately anxious moments. From time to time he realized that, like other FCD officers, he was being tailed—probably by teams from the Seventh (Surveillance) or Second Chief (Counterintelligence) Directorates. On one occasion while he was being followed, he visited the Dynamo Football Club sports shop and, to his horror, found himself standing next to two English visitors whom his watchers might suspect were spies with whom he had arranged a rendezvous. If he was searched, his notes on top secret files would be instantly discovered. Mitrokhin quickly moved on to other sports shops, hoping to convince his watchers that he was on a genuine shopping expedition. As he approached his apartment block, however, he noticed two men standing near the door to his ninth-floor flat. By the time he arrived, they had disappeared. FCD officers had standing instructions to report suspicious incidents such as this, but Mitrokhin did not do so for fear of prompting an investigation which would draw attention to the fact that he had been seen standing next to English visitors.

Each night when he returned to his Moscow flat, Mitrokhin hid his notes beneath his mattress. On weekends he took them to a family dacha thirty-six kilometers from Moscow and typed up as many as possible, though the notes became so numerous that Mitrokhin was forced to leave some of them in handwritten form. He hid the first batches of typescripts and notes in a milk-churn which he buried below the floor. The dacha was built on raised foundations, leaving just enough room for Mitrokhin to crawl beneath the floorboards and dig a hole with a short-handled spade. He frequently found himself crawling through dog and cat feces and sometimes disturbed rats while he was digging, but he consoled himself with the thought that burglars were unlikely to follow him. When the milk-churn was full, he began concealing his notes and typescripts in a tin clothes-boiler. Eventually his archive also filled two tin trunks and two aluminum cases, all of them buried beneath the dacha.

Mitrokhin's most anxious moment came when he arrived at his weekend dacha to find a stranger hiding in the attic. He was instantly reminded of the incident a few years earlier, in August 1971, when a friend of the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had called unexpectedly at his dacha while Solzhenitsyn was away and surprised two KGB officers in the attic who were probably searching for subversive manuscripts. Other KGB men had quickly arrived on the scene and Solzhenitsyn's friend had been badly beaten. Andropov cynically ordered Solzhenitsyn to be "informed that the participation of the KGB in this incident is a figment of his imagination." The incident was still fresh in Mitrokhin's mind when he arrived at the dacha because he had recently noted files which recorded minutely detailed plans for the persecution of Solzhenitsyn and the "active measures" by which the KGB hoped to discredit him in the Western press. To his immense relief, however, the intruder in the attic turned out to be a homeless squatter.

During summer holidays Mitrokhin worked on batches of his notes at a second family dacha near Penza, carrying them in an old haversack and dressing in peasant clothes in order not to attract attention. In the summer of 1918 Penza, 630 kilometers southeast of Moscow, had been the site of one of the first peasant risings against Bolshevik rule. Lenin blamed the revolt on the kulaks (better-off peasants) and furiously instructed the local Party leaders to hang in public at least one hundred of them so that "for hundreds of kilometers around the people may see and tremble ..." By the 1970s, however, Penza's counter-revolutionary past was long forgotten, and Lenin's bloodthirsty orders for mass executions were kept from public view in the secret section of the Lenin archive.

One of the most striking characteristics of the best literature produced under the Soviet regime is how much of it was written in secret. "To plunge underground," wrote Solzhenitsyn, "to make it your concern not to win the world's recognition— Heaven forbid!—but on the contrary to shun it: this variant of the writer's lot is peculiarly our own, purely Russian, Russian and Soviet!" Between the wars Mikhail Bulgakov had spent twelve years writing The Master and Margarita, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, knowing that it could not be published in his lifetime and fearing that it might never appear at all. His widow later recalled how, just before his death in 1940, Bulgakov "made me get out of bed and then, leaning on my arm, he walked through all the rooms, barefoot and in his dressing gown, to make sure that the manuscript of The Master was still there" in its hiding place. Though Bulgakov's great work survived, it was not published until a quarter of a century after his death. As late as 1978, it was denounced in a KGB memorandum to Andropov as "a dangerous weapon in the hands of [Western] ideological centers engaged in ideological sabotage against the Soviet Union."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/andrew-sword.html -The Sword and the Shield by Vasili Mitrokhin.Agrofelipe (talk) 02:14, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * As stated to the Anon, the FPM info was taken from The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, pg 87-88, and is referenced in the article. Secondly, thank you for admitting to stalking me, it is what you are doing after all. Although I am sure you have read many reviews of Andrew’s book, but since you have not actually read the book itself, I doubt you are in much of a position to comment on it, now are you? Andrew work on his review of Mitrokhin's material has very few detractors, and none of them serious. The review you cited was taken completely out of context:


 * Christopher Andrew, a prolific writer on Soviet intelligence, collaborated with Mitrokhin to produce this massive 700-page volume. 1 … The book is a fascinating read. Separate chapters deal with Soviet espionage in individual countries, and the book provides both new detail on known events as well as a few sensational revelations. In correcting old stories, Mitrokhin's research shows, for example, that it was Arnold Deutsch who recruited the famous "Cambridge Five" in the 1930s, rather than Alexander Orlov.


 * I have asked you before politely to stop stalking me, please stop. Caio. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 20:50, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I have never stalked you; all I did was correctly predict that you would make such a personal attack. As you are well aware, the "stalking" charge has been dealt with already -- you should read Wikipedia policy regarding the matter. I could also point to the fact that your sudden appearance on the Shaw and Qaqaa pages amount to stalking, using your false rationale. If you read the book, why do you find it necessary to plagiarize your summary from Frontpage magazine, without even crediting the source? Finally, in what way was the review taken out of context?--csloat 21:26, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Your hedging was duly noted, but you were still stalking me. As I have said before, the material in the FPM article was taken in its form the book. The source was taken out of context because it is mostly supportive of Andrew’s work, not negative as you have attempted to portray it in the article. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 22:06, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm going to have to ask you again to stop the personal attacks, TDC; I never stalked you, as you are well aware. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with Wikipedia policy on this matter before hurling additional accusations.  The source was not taken out of context.  If you want to add context feel free to do so but do not delete claims that are accurately represented.  Your assertion that the article is "mostly supportive" does not mean the claim as quoted is incorrect.--csloat 23:42, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * First, the source was taken out of context, but by all means past the entire article here so everyone can make that determination and not just myself. Secondly, yes, you did stalk me, and yes you admitted to it, so lets no go there. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 23:56, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * No; I never stalked you, as you know. Again I must ask you to stop the personal attacks.  And I never admitted such a thing.  I'll ask you again to please review the Wikipedia policy regarding stalking.  As for the article context, the claim as quoted is correct; there is nothing that I am aware of in the article to suggest that claim is incorrect; if you know of something please feel free to cite it (in general, it is a good idea to cite such evidence when you make an accusation rather than waiting until you have been asked to produce the evidence three or four times).-csloat 07:08, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Criticism of Mitrokhin and praise for Christopher Andrew should more properly be placed within their respective articles. Here is what Christopher Andrew has to say about the "success" of Operation TOUCAN... "Pinochet’s military government was far more frequently denounced by Western media than other regimes with even more horrendous human-rights records. KGB active measures probably deserve some of the credit.  While operation TOUCAN was at the height of its success, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were in the midst of a reign of terror in Cambodia which in only three years killed 1.5 million of Cambodia’s 7.5 million people.  Yet in 1976, the New York Times published sixty-six articles on the abuse of human rights in Chile, as compared with only four on Cambodia.  The difficulty of obtaining information from Cambodia does not provide a remotely adequate explanation for this extraordinary discrepancy.”

This is a transcript of the rest of Professor Andrew's comments on Operation TOUCAN... "KGB active measures successfully blackened still further DINA’s deservedly dreadful reputation. Operation TOUCAN, approved by Andropov on 10 August 1976, was particularly successful in publicizing and exaggerating DINA’s foreign operations against left-wing Chilean exiles.  DINA was certainly implicated in the assassination of Allende’s former Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier, who was killed by a car bomb in the United States in 1976, and may also have been involved in the murder of other former Allende supporters living in exile.  Operation TOUCAN thus had a plausible basis in actual DINA operations.  TOUCAN was based on a forged letter from Contreras to Pinochet, dated 16 September 1975, which referred to expenditure involved in the expansion of DINA’s foreign operations, chief among them to ‘neutralize’ (assassinate) opponents of the Pinochet regime in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, the United States, France and Italy. Service A’s forgers carefully imitated authentic DINA documents in their possession and the signature of the Director. The letter was accepted as genuine by some major newspapers and broadcasters in western Europe as well as the Americas. The Western media comment which caused most pleasure in the Centre was probably speculation on links between DINA and the CIA. The leading American journalist Jack Anderson, who quoted from the KGB forgery, claimed that DINA operated freely in the United States with the full knowledge of the CIA. The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, he reported, was investigating DINA’s activities.”

Article is not about Condor
Relevant information belongs in that article. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 02:59, 15 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't think so, not if the precedent version of the article claims that the CIA had nothing to do in Operation Condor, which was the point of "Operation Toucan", wasn't it? Tazmaniacs 04:15, 15 May 2006 (UTC)


 * The article makes not determination whether the CIA was or was not invloved in CONDOR, only that this particular KGB operation was using forged documents to link the two. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 18:27, 15 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I do not contest that, but the article should clearly states that the CIA was indeed involved, because articles are supposed to be independent & not stating that is not straightforward. Tazmaniacs 10:27, 17 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Why, when the article is not about the CIA? Torturous Devastating Cudgel 15:10, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

removed sentence
I removed this unsourced sentence:
 * In 1976, at the start of TOUCAN, The New York Times published 66 articles on Chile's human rights record and four on Cambodia's Khmer Rouge and only 3 such articles on the human rights situation in Cuba.

Moscowdreams (talk) 13:03, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

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 * Yuri Andropov - Soviet Life, August 1983.jpg