"Patriarch" Alexey

DIscussion and News concerning Orthodox Churches in communion with those who have fallen into the heresies of Ecumenism, Renovationism, Sergianism, and Modernism, or those Traditional Orthodox Churches who are now involved with Name-Worshiping, or vagante jurisdictions. All Forum Rules apply. No polemics. No heated discussions. No name-calling.


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Julianna
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"Patriarch" Alexey

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I don't know where this goes so I'll try here. Today we heard from a reliable source that "Patriarch" Alexey is nearing death and below the surface a rather large war is being waged for the Patriarchy.

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"Patriarch" Alexis II as a "Church figure&quo

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by Hierodeacon Theophan.

PATRIARCH ALEXIS II AS A CHURCH FIGURE

In our time many ordinary believers of the MP, when coming across criticism of their hierarchy, and in particular the patriarch of Moscow and all Rus' Alexis (Ridiger), and notably in connection with the accusation that he has betrayed Orthodoxy and has openly confessed the heresy of ecumenism, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with "His Holiness" and demand that they be given concrete facts proving his apostasy from the faith. In actual fact, it is not difficult to prove this; it is sufficient merely to take into one's hands a selection of issues of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate during the last two or three decades, and also to acquaint oneself with the interview the patriarch gave to SMI, with the decisions of the synod and the resolutions of the Hierarchical councils of the MP in the years 1994-97, and compare them with Orthodox ecclesiology and patristic teaching.

The Servant of the Ecumene

While he was metropolitan of Tallin and Estonia, and then Leningrad and Novgorod, Alexis II headed one of the most important ecumenical organizations of our age - the Conference of European Churches (CEC), into which the majority of the Christian denominations of Europe entered on equal terms. In this post Alexis worked hard to unite and coordinate the activity of all the member churches of the CEC in "the Church's peace-making service to the world". This was expressed in the conducting of ecumenical conferences, in joint declarations and inter-confessional prayers. However, Alexis was not the first comer here: the MP had been taking part in "peace-making activity" for a long time already, since the 1940s (the true "first comer" in this filed may be considered to have been the Stalinist metropolitan, Nicholas (Yarushevich)). It is not surprising that this ecclesiastical "struggle for peace" should have required a theoretical underpinning, which appeared shortly in the distorted form of a "theology of peace", that is, a theological doctrine justifying and interpreting the necessity for the preservation of peace on the planet. It became the aim of this struggle to unite the whole of humanity, all "men of good will" and all Christian confessions (and even non-Christian religions) in a single impulse towards a peaceful future for humanity. Ideologically, this movement was characterized by two elements - humanism and ecumenism.

Already in 1966, in his speech before the delegation of the German Evangelical church at a conference in Moscow, the future head of the MP in the name of Christ Himself declared that "Jesus Christ considers His own, that is, as Christians, all those who believe in Him and obey Him, and this is more than the Orthodox Church." If we remember that, according to Orthodox teaching, Christ adopted people to Himself only in His Hypostasis, that is, in His Body which is the Orthodox Church, then it is obvious that the metropolitan is here confessing a christological heresy, considering as Christians those who are outside the Church - calling them "God's", that is, the Church's.

Alexis still more clearly confesses that all the non-Orthodox Christians are the Church of Christ in his report to the 8th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches, published in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1980 (nos. 1-3). Here, blasphemously mixing up and identifying the concepts of the presence of God in the world and His energies and presence in the Church, the metropolitan very distinctly reveals his heretical teaching on the "all-embracing and unconditional" Incarnation of Christ, which automatically turns the whole of humanity, all Christians, Muslims, pagans, and in general all "men of good will" into members of the Body of Christ, that is, the Church! Metropolitan Alexis openly teaches that the same grace of the Holy Spirit acts in the non-Orthodox churches - the participants in the WCC - as in the Orthodox Church: We (the CEC) have learned to pray together, to understand the spirit and depth of prayer for each other, to feel the breath of the grace of the Holy Spirit in joint prayer to the Lord ? we must thank God for the joy of our communion in Christ, for the joy of the ever-increasing experience of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ in our work." Thus it was precisely in joint prayers with heretics that the archpastor felt the breath of "the grace of the Holy Spirit"! We should note that "ecumenical prayer" is a very important moment in the ecumenical dialogue, it not only witnesses to the presence among the ecumenists of some common "god" to whom this prayer is raised, but it is also a practical recognition of the action of the Holy Spirit in heterodoxy, thereby aiding the aggiornamento of the churches. This is what the future head of the MP says on this subject: "The aggiornamento of the churches is attained in the first place by prayer and brotherly love; joint prayers create a special atmosphere, a spiritual mood; (he goes on to cite A.S. Khomyakov) prayer is the life of the Church and the voice of her love, the eternal breathing of the Spirit of God. We believe that through joint prayers the breathing of the Spirit of God jointly enriches us all."

According to Orthodox teaching, it is precisely the Holy Spirit that makes a man a member of the Church of Christ, a Christian. But Metropolitan Alexis recognises that the Holy Spirit works in heretics just as in the Orthodox Church, and therefore heretics, like Orthodox Christians, are the Church of Christ: "We believe that the Holy Spirit - visibly or invisibly - continues until now His saving activity in the world. You and I, dear brothers and sisters, representing various Churches and the human race, live by the same real and grace-filled power of Pentecost". From this there follows an open admittance on the part of the metropolitan that the heretical communities are the Church and the Body of Christ: "We, the Orthodox, are lovingly disposed to our non-Orthodox brothers, for we have all been baptized in one Spirit , and we have all been made to drink into one Spirit " ( I Cor. 12.13). Here the Apostle Paul's eucharistic (even liturgical) terminology has not been used in vain, so as once more to emphasise: Orthodox and heretics are not simply a divided Church, but the Body of Christ, organically one in the Holy Spirit.

The source of this teaching of Metropolitan Alexis on the Holy Spirit is a heretical Christology, whose essence consists in the assertion that "we all have been received into the nature of Jesus Christ the God-man as an integral nature. And this truth forces us to believe that every person striving towards goodness and righteousness does the work of Christ on earth, even if he intellectually has not known Christ or has even rejected Him. From the Godmanhood of Christ it follows that the path into the Kingdom of God has been opened to all men. Consequently, with the Incarnation of the Son of God the whole of humanity becomes His potential Church, and in this sense the boundaries of the Christian Ecumene (or the pan-human family) are far wider than the boundaries of the Christian world." Hence Metropolitan Alexis' teaching becomes understandable: insofar as Christ has received into His Hypostasis the common nature of man, all people, that is, all human hypostases of all generations are saved and remain in Christ, that is, in the Church. In other words, Christ has saved the whole nature of man, and consequently, according to the thought of Metropolitan Alexis, all people.

However, according to the Orthodox teaching, "God the Word, on becoming incarnate, did not take on the nature viewed as an abstraction in pure thought," nor the nature contemplated in species (that is, viewed in all the hypostases of the human race - H. Th.), for He did not take on all the hypostases, but He took on that which received its existence in His Hypostasis". That is, it is impossible to say that since God the Word became Man, all people are saved by virtue of being men. But Metropolitan Alexis affirms that in the humanity of Christ is contained all men's hypostases. Such a teaching was confessed in the 11 th century by the Monk Nilus of Calabria, who taught that all human hypostases are present or are contained in the humanity taken on by the Lord and are "co-deified" together with Him. The Orthodox Church anathematized Nilus and his heresy: "If anyone dogmatises that all human hypostases are in the flesh taken on by the Lord and are co-deified with it, let him be anathema, for this is empty chatter, or, rather, manifest impiety." And although the metropolitan makes the qualification that humanity for him is only "the potential church", nevertheless he later on unambiguously speaks of the whole of humanity as of the Church - the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit: "Christ redeemed, cleansed and recreated a common human nature for all, while the Holy Spirit morally transfigures each human personality, gives the Christian the fullness of grace, makes him a temple of God and dwells in him, raises the growth of spirituality in the mind and the heart, leads him to every truth and gives him spiritual gifts to his benefit: to one - the word of wisdom, to another - the word of knowledge, by the same Spirit? and other gifts ( I Cor. 12.7-11), so that human talents should be revealed more fully." In this way, insofar as God the Word has been incarnate in a common human nature, His Body is the divided Christian Church in the combination of all its separate parts. However, the saving action of the Holy Spirit is poured out even beyond the bounds of the Body of Christ, penetrating into and deifying the body of the whole of humanity: "The all-embracing and most powerful force of the Holy Spirit is spread out onto the whole life of our world, transforming it in the course of the historical process of the struggle between good and evil."

And so, thanks to a clever substitution of concepts, the real difference between the grace of the Holy Spirit, by which God providentially preserves the world in existence and leads people to the Church, and the deifying mystical presence of the Holy Spirit in the Body of Christ, the Church, is destroyed, which completely abolishes the difference between the Church and the world: now "the culture efflorescence of European and world Christianity" is declared to be an action of the Holy Spirit, and even the Salt-2 treaty between Brezhnev and Carter concerning the limiting of strategic offensive weapons is also "a manifestation of the invisible power of the Holy Spirit acting in the world for the good of the whole of humanity."

The consequences of this "pan-human Pentecost" are expressed by the metropolitan mainly in the terms of humanism and peace-making: "Christian concern for questions of social justice", "the elements of the movement for peace", Christians? service to people and their "involvement in all the complexity of the real life of the world". In this way the life of grace in the Body of Christ is substituted by a humanistic "serving the affairs of the world".

It is understandable that this "theology of peace" should be very convenient for the dialogue not only with any heretical Christian communities, but also with any religions, even with utopian teachings like communism.

But how is such a faith compatible with the Orthodox teaching on the uniqueness and singleness of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church? Yes, admits Metropolitan Alexis, "the oneness and unity of the Church is an ecclesiological axiom", but in actual fact "an invisible unity as the unity of Christ and the Holy Spirit lives in the visible multitude of Churches, each of which has its particular face", affirms the metropolitan, citing his brother in ecumenism, Professor Archbishop Vladimir (Sabodan). Before us here is the classical ecumenist ecclesiology - "the branch theory", which was invented by Archbishop Stylianos of Australia (Constantinopolitan patriarchate), or, using the language of Soviet theological thought, the ecclesiology of "the traumatized Body of Christ", a fruit of the refined minds of the "ecumenist theologians" of the MP - the main teacher and implanter of the ecumenist heresy in the MP was Metropolitan Nicodemus (Rotov).

Teacher and Pupil

We shall now see that it was precisely Metropolitan Nicodemus who initiated Metropolitan Alexis into the wisdom of ecumenism. We can learn how the latter believed in God and the Church from his numerous articles, reports and speeches.

Metropolitan Nicodemus begins his exposition of his ecumenist faith with an Orthodox thesis on the unity of the whole human race in Adam: "Mankind, the whole Adam (in the expression of St. Macarius the Great) is united by means of the Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection of the last Adam ( I Cor. 14.45), the second Man, the Lord Who "for us men" came down from the heavens ( I Cor. 15.47), and, having tasted "death for us all by the grace of God" ( Heb. 2.9), "is the Saviour of all men" ( I Tim. 4.10)? We all, in accordance with the ineffable wisdom of God, have been bound from the beginning with the bonds of unity and brotherhood". But further on Metropolitan Nicodemus reveals his understanding of this unity: "Christ died for all men, and, as the new Adam, he laid the beginning for a new humanity? The fullness of the grace-filled gifts are communicated to people by the Holy Spirit in the Church of Christ. However, it would be a dangerous error to consider that Christ, the Redeemer of the whole world, does not extend His saving influence on the whole of humanity." This saving influence consists, according to Metropolitan Nicodemus, "in faith in Christ Jesus, acting through love in each separate person, as in the whole of humanity, with which we are united by our common human nature. God redeemed us into an undivided, indivisible, unchanging and unconfused union with this nature through the incarnation of the Only-Begotten Son." "By taking on and deifying our nature in the Divine Incarnation the Chief and Accomplisher of our faith ( Heb. 12.2) and of eternal salvation ( Heb. 5.9), our Lord Jesus Christ reconciled, united and related the whole of humanity with God, and all people with each other ". "The Church as the Kingdom of God is likened to leaven which penetrates into all the parts of the whole that is humanity, into the whole world, and acts with that measure of power which corresponds to the moral level of the bearers of Christ's truth. And although far from all people actively and consciously abide in the Church, the Church abides in all through the love of Christ , for this love is not limited by any part of humanity, but is distributed to all people." Hence "the activity of the Spirit of God is not limited by confessional limits. His manifestation is completely and, above all, unconditionally revealed in the Church, but the traces of His presence are evident everywhere where there are the fruits of spiritual life: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness?" Therefore all people, the whole Body of humanity (Adam), is invisibly united with God and is a certain "invisible Church". The organization of the Church is understood by Nicodemus as "the visible Church", in which "baptism defines the visible belonging to Christ". Metropolitan Nicodemus consciously confesses the "baptism" of Protestants to be true, turning to his "brothers in Christ", the Protestants, the members of the WCC: "Through the mystery of holy Baptism we are engrafted onto the saving Divine Vine?" But the visible Church "is called to realize the fruits of the Incarnation and Redemption in the life of her immediate members."

And so, according to Metropolitan Nicodemus, all people are "Christians", it is true that the Church of Christ, the Body of Christ, the New Adam, is one, but it is not yet united into one ecclesiastical organization under one leader. The aim of the ecumenists is to create this mediation , that is, one single visible ecclesiastical organization for all. In this way the ecumenical Church and the world become indistinguishable from each other. It is not difficult to find the primary source of this faith. It is sergianism - a heretical teaching that the Church, the Body of Christ, is a simple ecclesiastical organization, just like ordinary secular organizations, political parties, communities, commercial structures, etc.

As we see, Metropolitan Alexis Ridiger repeats his teacher in everything, and now nobody can object to the statement that even before his appointment to the patriarchal throne (1990) Metropolitan Alexis openly confessed the ecumenical heresy - like all the leading hierarchs of the MP of that time, including Patriarchs Alexis I and Pimen.

Later we shall see whether Alexis (Ridiger), on becoming patriarch, renounced this open confession of heresy or not.

In the post of Patriarch of the Moscow Patriarchate

After Metropolitan Alexis was "elected" patriarch of the MP at the dawn of perestroika at the Local Council of 1990, his ecumenist convictions did not change at all.

Patriarch Alexis II continues to carry out his ecumenical functions as fervently as did his predecessors. Thus at the beginning of 1990 the head of the MP together with the synod again confessed the "branch theory", declaring that "the Evangelical and Orthodox Churches have been called in an equal way by Jesus Christ, their Lord, to witness and serve." The patriarch recognizes the Buddhists as his "brothers", and prays together with heretics: the Armenian catholicos and the Syrian, Ethiopian and Coptic Monophysite hierarchs, thereby falling under the anathemas of the 4 th , 5 th and 6 th Ecumenical Councils.

But the most scandalous of all was the patriarch's famous speech before the rabbis of New York (U.S.A.) on 13 November, 1991. The patriarch openly, in the name of the Orthodox Church, confessed that "we are one with the Jews, without renouncing Christianity and not in spite of Christianity, but in the name of and by dint of Christianity, while the Jews are one with us not in spite of Judaism, but in the name of and by dint of true Judaism. We are separated from the Jews because we are not yet completely Christian, while the Jews are separated from us because they are not yet completely Jews. For the fullness of Christianity embraces both itself and Judaism, while the fullness of Judaism is Christianity? The Jewish people are near to us in faith. Your law is our law, your prophets are our prophets." The patriarch called on the Jews to work together to build "the new world order": "by our joint efforts we shall build a new society - a democratic, free, open, just society? where Jews would live with in security and peace, in an atmosphere of friendship, creative brotherhood and the brotherhood of the children of the one God, the Father of all, the God of your fathers and of ours." And the rabbis did not forget the reverence paid in their honour by the patriarch of Moscow: during the visit of Alexis II to the U.S.A. in 1993 the chief rabbi of New York, Schneier, presented him with the prize "The Call of Conscience". And both in 1991 and in 1993 the patriarch was a guest of a Zionist organization of the same name; he visited synagogues and met Jewish religious leaders.

The MP's involvement in world ecumenism is so strong that the MP's hierarchy always replies with refusals to all the protests and demands of the patriarchal conservatives to leave the WCC and renounce the practice of ecumenical prayers. Moreover, the Hierarchical Council of 1994, which was headed by Patriarch Alexis, publicly recognized its participation in ecumenism "to be dictated by considerations of benefit for the Church" and synodically legalized the carrying out of joint prayers with the heterodox both in "the general external activity of the Church" and at the diocesan level, "which is defined by the canonical order of the Orthodox Church."

In 1997, at the Hierarchical Council that took place in Moscow, it was resolved "to reject the persistent suggestion of some pastors to stop all relations with Ecumenism". Apparently, Patriarch Alexis and his brothers in ecumenism, the hierarchs of the MP, decided come what may to accomplish that which Metropolitan Nicodemus insistently strove towards: "It is necessary to instill an ecumenical consciousness ever more deeply and broadly in the consciousness of our believers, to strive to attain ecumenical enlightenment in the mass of the Christians."

During Patriarch Alexis? visit to Armenia in May, 1996, he together with the hierarchs accompanying him took part in a session of the synod of the Armenian church at which questions of "the further merging together of the two sister churches" were discussed. Speaking in front of the hierarchy of the Armenian church, Patriarch Alexis highly valued "the striving for union of the ancient Eastern Orthodox Churches", and called the existing division "an unhealed wound on the body of the church" and promised to apply "special effort for the speed overcoming? of the division". In the course of the visit Patriarch Alexis together with the head of the Armenian Monophysites, Patriarch-Catholicos Garegin, twice carried out joint prayer services and blessed the people from the altars of the Armenian churches.

On 22 June, 1997 Patriarch Alexis, together with Cardinal Martini of Milan, opened the 2 nd European ecumenical assembly in Graz. There he prayed with Catholics in the Lower-Austrian Benedictine monastery of Melk, and then took part in a service in the cathedral church of St. Stefan together with the papal nuncio in Austria, Archbishop Skvicharini, and Archbishop Schenborn of Vienna.

Finally, on 21 April, 2000, while speaking about the perspectives for mutual relations between the MP and the Catholic Church during a meeting with the president of the Palace of Representatives of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Belgium, Herman de Kru, the patriarch once more assured his foreign guests that the church led by him "will not begin to isolate itself from the western world and western Christianity". In the course of a discussion taking place in the Danilov monastery, Patriarch Alexis noted that "ecumenical contacts on a bilateral basis will be continued".

One could cite many such examples. However, the fact remains: Patriarch Alexis, having prayed for the whole of his life with heretics, has never renounced and is not renouncing his ecumenist heresy, continuing openly, ex cathedra , to confess heretics and non-Christians to be "the Church of Christ", that Church of which he himself considers himself to be a member and to which, consequently, his followers belong.

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Justin Kissel

Post by Justin Kissel »

Any further news on his health?

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Natasha
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RE:

Post by Natasha »

I believe he is doing better. On the Russian news the other night they showed him at a service at Christ the Savior Cathedral.

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Agent Drozdov

Post by Lounger »

Metropolitan Anastasy's Testament still
forbids contact with the Stalin-created Moscow Patriarchate, because,
currently we have a Russian administration dominated by former KGB agents
and a patriarchate also headed by a former KGB agent, both of whom "openly
confesses" their ecumenism and "strive to implant" the heresy of ecumenism
"in the entire Russian nation." The Patriarchate is currently "found in
close, active, and benevolent cooperation" with the government that is
pressuring it to further betray Orthodoxy in the ecumenical movement.

The Patriarchate confesses its desire for further ecumenism, but only after
it gets more respect will it agree to Putin's invitation to the Pope. This
is not a rejection of Putin's ecumenism and unrepentant collaboration in
persecutions, just a slightly different tactic by Aleksy.

The denial of the archival evidence is silly. All anyone needs to do is read
a couple of issues of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. The
Patriarchate openly supported the domestic and foreign policy of the
genocidal Soviet regime and of the successor Russian government. The
evidence is out in the open for everyone to see, if people choose to accept
reality.

On the archival evidence: Christopher Andrew, the author (with Mitrokhin) of
The Sword and the Shield, is one of the world's leading scholars of the
KGB. He has written a number of books on the subject. He wrote this book
based on the KGB documents Mitrokhin secretly copied as well as on hundreds
of archival and scholarly sources. The book has been well reviewed by
numerous scholars.

Everyone should read the entire chapter on the KGB infiltration of the
Moscow Patriarchate. Here is a small fraction of the eidence:

The 1974 Furov report by the USSR's Council for Religious Affairs placed
Aleksy Ridiger in the most cooperative category of bishops who "affirm both
in words and deed not only loyalty but also patriotism towards the socialist
society; strictly observe the laws on cults, and educate the parish clergy
and believers in the same spirit; realistically understand that our state is
not interested in proclaiming the role of religion and the church in
society; and, realizing this, do not display any particular activeness in
extending the influence of Orthodoxy among the population" (Christopher
Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin
Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
[New York: Basic Books, 1999],
page 490, citing Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary
History
[London: Routledge, 1988], page 215-216; Andrew and Mitrokhin
affirm the authenticity of the report and cite Raymond Oppenheim, "Are the
Furov Reports Authentic?," in Geoffrey Hosking, editor, Church, Nation, and
State in Russia and Ukraine
[London: Macmillan, 1991]).

"According to a KGB document of 1988, 'An order was drafted by the USSR KGB
chairman to award an honorary citation to agent DROZDOV' for unspecified
services to state security" (Andrew and Mitrokhin, page 499, citing also
Yevgenia Albats, State within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on
Russia---Past Present and Future
[New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1994], page 46).

"Confirmation of DROZDOV's identity [as Aleksy Ridiger] was provided by the
release early in 1999 of a 1958 report on his recruitment, allegedly on
'patriotic' grounds, by the Estonian KGB. Though the report refers to the
agent only by his codename, his year of birth and career details [emphasis
added] are identical [emphasis added] with those of Aleksi" (Christopher
Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin
Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
[New York: Basic Books, 1999],
page 661-662 note 68, citing also James Meek, "Russian Patriarch 'was KGB
Spy,'" Guardian, February 12, 1999; for background see also Yevgenia
Albats, State within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia---Past Present
and Future
[New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994], page 46).

"After the failure of the August coup in 1991, the Russian government's
Committee on Freedom of Conscience, which included Father Gleb Yakunin, was
given access to a section of the KGB archives which showed that some of the
members of the Orthodox hierarchy had been KGB agents. After Yakunin
published a selection of the documents, the archives were closed once more;
he was accused of having betrayed state secrets to the United States and
threatened with a private prosecution. Father Gleb remained defiant. He
wrote to the Patriarch in January 1994: 'The most prominent agents of the
past include DROZDOV---the only one of the churchmen to be officially
honored with an award by the KGB of the USSR, in 1988, for outstanding
intelligence services---ADAMANT, OSTROVSKY, MIKHAILOV, TOPAZ, and ABBAT....
[A]rticles have appeared in the church press justifying the role of the
informer as essential for the survival of the Church in an anti-religious
state. The codenames I discovered in the archives of the KGB belong to the
top hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate.' The letter to Aleksi II was
unprecedented in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church---for, as the
Patriarch must surely have been aware, DROZDOV, the most important of the
KGB agents discovered by Father Gleb in the KGB archives, was in fact
himself" (Andrew and Mitrokhin, page 507, citing also Gleb Yakunin, "First
Open Letter to Patriarch Aleksi II," Religion, State, and Society 22.3
[1994]).

This is only a small fraction of the large number of sources that prove the
KGB's infiltration of the Moscow Patriarchate.

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Post by Lounger »

Many people had a KGB codename, but DROZDOV was clearly a loyal
agent/operative. He has for decades defended the genocidal Soviet regime saying
that no one was persecuted for reasons of conscience and that those in prison
or psychiatric hospitals all belonged there, because they were all guilty. He
was complicit in mass murder. As Harvey Klehr writes in the last (very long)
article on Mitrokhin included below: "KGB agents in the Russian Orthodox
Church, including Patriarch Aleksi II, were persuading the World Council of
Churches to condemn Western imperialism while remaining silent about the
repression of believers in the Soviet Union." It is still the same today.
DROZDOV still persecutes the True Orthodox Christians and is a slave of the
corrupt system.

Several articles on the KGB's bishops follow:

Lawrence A. Uzzell [vice president of the Jamestown Foundation in Washington],
"The KGB's Agents in Cassocks" Christian Science Monitor, 04/28/92, Dow Jones
Interactive Online : "OF all the KGB's secret agents, perhaps the most cynical
are those who pretended to be simple clergymen. On their ecumenical trips from
Moscow to New York to Geneva, they used the authority of two millennia of
Christian witness to support an atheist tyranny. Groups like the World Council
of Churches believed them; Russian peasants knew better. Moscow's top authority
on these agents in cassocks, a human-rights activist since 1965, just spent a
week in Washington. Father Gleb Yakunin did not tell all, but enough to make a
damning case against the top echelon of the Russian Orthodox Church. An elected
member of the Russian Parliament, Mr. Yakunin was appointed last September to a
special parliamentary commission investigating the August coup attempt. He
gained unprecedented access to the KGB's files. What he found, he told me, was
worse than his worst suspicions. The parliamentary investigators worked from a
special room in Moscow's Lubyanka building - the KGB headquarters used to
direct arrests of millions of Russians, including Yakunin in 1979. He found
proof of extensive KGB penetration not just of Yakunin's Russian Orthodox
Church but of every major faith in the former Soviet Union: Baptists and other
Protestants, Roman Catholics in Ukraine and the Baltic republics, Buddhists,
Jews, Muslims. The investigators unearthed documents whose authors presumed no
one but Party loyalists would ever read. They studied reports from the agency
that specialized in manipulating religious groups, the Fourth Department of the
KGB's Directorate Z. They read the code names of 30 of the KGB's top
collaborators among the Russian Orthodox Church's bishops - including nearly
every member of the church's ruling Patriarchal Synod. How did such agents
serve their KGB handlers? Secret reports on the Russian church's participation
in the 1983 assembly of the World Council of Churches in Canada reveal 47 of
the Russian delegates to be KGB agents who blocked resolutions on Soviet
religious persecution and on the invasion of Afghanistan. A 1988 report says
how "our agents were active at a church conference in Moscow in which 72 church
leaders took part, of whom four were foreigners.... Our 10 agents were able to
control the situation in the conference; a positive press release was adopted
giving the principled evaluation by the Russian Orthodox Church of the activity
of religious extremists in our country." THE agents in cassocks collaborated
with the foreign and domestic policies of a regime set on destroying religion
as a social force. They demoted clergy who preached on unwelcome topics,
suppressed institutions such as sunday schools, censored honest religious
writers such as Deacon Vladimir Rusak. As one dissident observed, they chose
"voluntary internal enslavement." Just who are these agents? By comparing the
KGB reports with old press bulletins of the Orthodox Church, one can often
deduce which code name belongs to which bishop. Only one bishop took part in
all meetings with foreigners and other activities specifically ascribed to KGB
agent "Abbat"; that bishop is Pitirim of Volokolamsk, head of the church's
Publications Department. Agent "Adamant" must be Yuvenaly of Krutitsy, the
Russian church's second-highest leader and long-time oppressor of dissident
clergy in the Moscow area. Agent "Antonov" is Filaret of Kiev, head of the
Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Yakunin and his colleagues know the identities of
dozens of other such agents but are reluctant to reveal that information
unilaterally. They would prefer to see the church leadership cleanse itself
through public confession, repentance, and replacement of the most notorious
collaborators. Instead, the head of the church, Patriarch Aleksy of Moscow, and
most of his fellow bishops have been stonewalling. Only Archbishop Khrisostom
of Vilnius has publicly said he once served the KGB. He stopped doing so two
years ago and boldly condemned last year's KGB crackdown against Lithuania. A
recent church council in Moscow produced only one ambiguous concession: Agent
"Antonov" of Kiev ostensibly offered to resign. But his resignation may be
rejected. The continued dominance of the church hierarchy by veteran KGB agents
is a direct threat to Russia's fragile democracy. The coming hard-line reaction
will probably invoke not communism but the symbols of Russia's national
culture, including Orthodoxy. Bishops such as agent "Abbat," who openly
endorsed last August's coup, may hold the balance of power. But Patriarch
Aleksy has actively tried to cover up the evidence against "Abbat," "Drozdov,"
and other KGB agents in senior church positions. Until recently he denied that
any bishops had ever served the KGB. He has opposed Yakunin's probe,
encouraging antireformist parliamentary leader Ruslan Khasbulatov to suspend
the work of the special investigative commission. Last fall, dissident priest
Georgi Edelshtein told me he considers the Patriarchate of Moscow to be
Russia's last surviving Soviet institution. I see why."

JAMES MEEK "Russian Patriarch 'was KGB spy'" The Guardian (London) February 12,
1999 SECTION: Foreign Page; Pg. 18, Lexis-Nexis : James Meek in Tallinn on a
secret document that may prove Alexy II's role as a Soviet agent: A SECRET
Soviet-era document uncovered in Estonia suggests that Patriarch Alexy II, the
head of the Russian Orthodox Church and spiritual leader of tens of millions of
Christians, was a fully fledged KGB agent. Accusations that Alexy, elected
Patriarch in 1990, co-operated closely with the KGB under the code name
'Drozdov' (Thrush), have circulated since a parliamentary commission was
allowed a brief peek at secret police files in Moscow in 1991. But the Estonian
text is the first publicly available document to support the theory that Alexy
was more than a mere collaborator and that from 1958 he was an active agent,
using the KGB as a career ladder at a time when the secret police persecuted
organised religion. The Russian Orthodox Church claims the document is a
forgery but has made no attempt to disprove its authenticity. The Patriarch has
made no comment. 'As far as I understand, what's being said is that someone,
somewhere, brought out into the open some kind of paper carrying neither the
Patriarch's signature nor reliable information that he had any kind of
involvement in this sort of activity,' said a Church spokesman, Father Vsevolod
Chaplin. Yet the evidence, in the 1958 annual report of the Estonian branch of
the KGB, which was left behind in Tallinn when the Soviet authorities pulled
out of the newly independent country in 1991, is compelling. The report, seen
by the Guardian, consists of a stack of yellowing typewritten pages bound
together as a book, which carries the legend 'Top Secret - Ekz. No. 2 - Series
K' and the title 'Summary of operational intelligence work by the 4th
department of the KGB in the Council of Ministers of the Estonian SSR in 1958'.
On page 125 is a short account of the recruitment, in that year, of a young
Orthodox priest given the codename 'Drozdov'. The agent is not named, but key
characteristics coincide with Alexy's life. Like the Patriarch, Drozdov was
born in Tallinn in 1929, spoke fluent Russian and Estonian, was a doctor of
theology and was serving as an Orthodox priest in Estonia in 1958. Drozdov, who
impressed the KGB with his eagerness, discretion and lively, forthcoming
manner, began his career as an agent by providing information on a corrupt
priest at a church in the small town of Jyhvi. The Patriarch was the rector of
the Church of the Epiphany in Jyhvi from 1950 until 1957. By 1961 he had become
the bishop of Tallinn and Estonia aged only 32. The 1958 KGB report on Drozdov
said his promotion to this post was 'considered' during his recruitment. In the
same year that he became a bishop, Alexy's rapid rise within the World Council
of Churches began - the very course the KGB planned for Drozdov. Indrek Jurjo,
the Estonian historian who investigated the KGB report, said: 'It must be him.
It's very close. There were very few priests of the Orthodox Church here at
that time. The description, the age, the plan for him to become a bishop - it
fits. The report describes Drozdov as agreeing to work for the KGB on patriotic
grounds. 'He's described here as an agent,' said Mr Jurjo. 'That means he had a
KGB officer who he met with regularly in clandestine locations and who
interrogated him. He would also have written reports.' Drozdov's reports, along
with the KGB annual summaries after 1958, were taken to Moscow in 1991. After
the 1991 putsch, President Boris Yeltsin gave a Russian parliamentary
commission carte blanche to probe into some of the darkest secrets of the KGB,
only to withdraw it a few months later under pressure from the secret police
and other powerful figures. Father Gleb Yakunin, an Orthodox priest and former
MP who searched through KGB files, said he found several references to Drozdov.
To his regret, he made no copies, and never found the card-index in which the
codenames of agents were matched with their true identities. One reference in
the report from October 1969 reads: 'Agents Drozdov and Peresvyet travelled to
England as part of the delegation to the Conference of European Churches.'
Father Gleb, who was imprisoned in Soviet times for his opposition to state
interference in the Church, said the Patriarch must lead the clergy in mass
repentance. 'To co-operate with a state which sets as its aim the destruction
of religion is a great sin, and a betrayal of Christianity,' he said. The
Patriarch is highly influential: the Kremlin values his support, and Alexy is
close to at least one of Boris Yeltsin's likely successors, Moscow's mayor,
Yuri Luzhkov. In Russia only one small newspaper, the weekly Novaya Gazeta, has
reported the Estonian find. A freelance television journalist, Boris Sobolyev,
who travelled to Tallinn to film the story, has been unable to find a Russian
news programme willing to air it. Father Chaplin said: 'In recent times many
anonymous photocopies of all sorts of pieces of paper have been circulated. In
none of them is there the slightest evidence that the individuals we are
talking about knew that these documents were being drawn up, or gave their
consent. So I don't think any reasonably authoritative clerical or secular
commission could see these papers as proof of anything.'

FEN MONTAIGNE, " ORTHODOX PATRIARCH SAID TO BE KGB AGENT" , PHILADELPHIA
INQUIRER, May 3, 1992, Section A; Page 1, Column 1, Information Bank Abstracts,
Dow-Jones: "Opening of Soviet secret police KGB files allegedly reveals
evidence that shows Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia and head of Russian
Orthodox Church Aleksii II is actually infamous secret KGB agent known as
'Drozdov'; further indicates church hierarchy contains many bishops and priests
who worked with KGB.

"MITROKHIN ARCHIVES NAME RUSSIAN CHURCH LEADER AS TOP KGB AGENT", Baltic News
Service ,World Reporter: TALLINN, Nov 09, 1999 BNS - The patriarch of the
Russian Orthodox Church, Aleksi II, who went to high school and rose to the top
ranks of the church in Estonia, served as an agent of the KGB under the alias
Drozdov, a recently published book based on KGB documents smuggled out of
Russia says. The book, 'The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the
Secret History of the KGB,' by Cambridge history professor Christopher Andrew
and Vasili Mitrokhin, among its revelations describes the KGB past of several
Russian religious figures including Aleksi II, who in 1990 succeeded Patriarch
Pimen as Patriarch Aleksi II. As the KGB's top archivist, Mitrokhin spent 12
years secretly copying the KGB's most highly classified documents before
defecting to Britain in 1992. Aleksi II, Metropolitan of Tallinn and Estonia in
1968, is described in the documents as a reliable agent of the KGB codenamed
Drozdov. The Russian Orthodox Church took a prominent part in the Rodina
("Motherland") society founded as a front organization of the KGB in 1975 to
"promote cultural relations with compatriots abroad," and thus provide new
opportunities for agent recruitment among emigre communities. Aleksi told its
opening conference, "We are all united by our love for our Socialist
motherland." Through its exarchates, dioceses and parishes in Europe, America,
Asia and Africa, the Orthodox Church "continued to maintain spiritual ties with
our compatriots and was doing its best to keep these contacts alive and
active," he was quoted as saying. Metropolitan Aleksi was unlikely to have been
unaware that these contacts were used by the KGB, the book says. According to a
KGB document of 1988, "An order was drafted by the USSR KGB chairman to award
an honorary citation to agent Drozdov for unspecified services to state
security" The book says Drozdov was the only one of the churchmen in the KGB's
service to be officially honored with an award by the KGB of the USSR for
outstanding intelligence services. Drozdov was also named in the documents as
one of the KGB's best men with contacts to the Vatican, whose subversion was
one of the KGB's obsessions at the time. In 1991, a year after succeeding Pimen
as patriarch, Aleksi II finally dissociated himself and the Russian Orthodox
Church from a "declaration of loyalty" to the Soviet system issued by
Metropolitan Sergi in 1927. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in the
final months of 1991, Aleksi II declared that "Russia has suffered a severe
illness in the form of Communism." In an interview with Estonia's Eesti
Paevaleht daily in May this year, Aleksi II said the Russian Orthodox Church
did not wish to become a state church but would participate in politics as a
mediator of dialogue and adviser, and that it won't remain indifferent to the
political life in Russia. A few months later the Russian church leader visited
fellow Orthodox nation Serbia, then target of NATO air strikes. Aleksi II, who
speaks fluent Estonian, was born in Tallinn as Aleksei Ridiger in 1929. He
graduated from a high school in Estonia and later attended a religious seminar
and religious academy in Leningrad (the present-day St Petersburg)."

Harvey Klehr [Professor of Politics at Emory University and co-author of
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America] "A Whirlpool of Filth, Review of
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the
KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (Basic Books, 720 pp., $32.50),
The New Republic, OCTOBER 25, 1999, Pg. 41, Lexis-Nexis : " The end of the Cold
War may have forced John LeCarre to focus his novels on sleazy businessmen and
Russian mafiosos, but it has done nothing to diminish Western fascination with
the non-fictional exploits of Soviet spies. As more and more archival sources
in the former Soviet Union disgorge their secrets, a steady stream of books has
garnered headlines, ended long-standing debates about bitterly contested spy
cases, and provoked fresh arguments about the McCarthy era. The Mitrokhin
archive is certainly filled with stories that seem stranger than fiction. There
are "Romeo" agents sent out to seduce lonely women working in sensitive
government bureaucracies; an illegal agent from Lithuania specializing in
assassination who became a Costa Rican diplomat; and disinformation specialists
forging documents to prove that American families were buying third-world
children on the black market in order to harvest their body parts to save their
own ill children. From 1972 until his retirement from the KGB in 1984, Vasili
Nikitch Mitrokhin painstakingly copied by hand documents under his supervision
in the KGB archives. Each night he smuggled out his work in his shoes, on his
body and, after he became more confident, in his briefcase. Hiding the material
during the week in his flat, he took it on the weekend to his dacha, made typed
copies, and buried them in milk urns. After he retired from the KGB, Mitrokhin
bided his time. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he
approached American embassies in Latvia and Lithuania, but he was rebuffed. The
British were more interested, and in 1992 they arranged to have his archive dug
up, and spirited Mitrokhin and his family to Great Britain, and gave him
citizenship. After extracting anything of operational value from his treasure
trove, they put Mitrokhin in touch with Christopher Andrew, a prominent British
historian and intelligence expert from Cambridge University. The volume that
they have produced is both more and less than an account of what is in
Mitrokhin's archive. No single book, not even a book as dense and detailed as
this one, can hope to cover comprehensively tens of thousands of pages from the
bowels of Soviet intelligence. Yet Andrew has managed skillfully to put
Mitrokhin's documents, or at least a large chunk of them, into the broader
context of the history of Soviet intelligence. And Andrew's goal is even
broader: he wishes to demonstrate the central role played by intelligence,
particularly by the Soviet Cheka and its successors, in the history of this
century. He achieves his goal, but unwittingly he also demonstrates the limits
of intelligence. Why did mitrokhin risk his life for so many years to create
this secret archive of material from the KGB? His motive appears to have been a
combination of opportunism and ideological revenge. Appointed to supervise the
transfer of archival material of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate from the
Lubyanka headquarters of the KGB in central Moscow to a new building in the
suburbs at Yasenevo, he had access to top-secret and sensitive files that were
off-limits to virtually everyone else, even high-ranking KGB administrators.
And for years Mitrokhin had been a secret dissident. Already a veteran KGB
officer in 1956, he had been disappointed by the failure of the
de-Stalinization campaign, and pegged his hopes to a reform of the political
system that never came. Angered by the repression of such cultural figures as
Boris Pasternak, he finally lost his faith in communism after the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was determined to ensure that the truth
about the regime that he had served be finally known. The first question, the
most obvious question, is whether the material is genuine. Mitrokhin made
copies; he did not smuggle out original documents. Sometimes he copied entire
documents, but more often he wrote excerpts, and most commonly he seems to have
simply made notes about what was in the documents. How accurately and
thoroughly did he mine the KGB archives? His 25, 000 pages of notes span nearly
seventy years of the KGB's sordid history; and while there is no way to know
what significant operational files he missed, the material in this book--and in
a promised second volume--cover almost every imaginable topic and period in
Soviet history. For legal reasons, Andrew has deleted the real names of a
number of KGB sources and agents, and even the mention of a handful of cases
that are under active investigation; and Andrew is the only academic or
journalist thus far given access to the material. There is no indication if or
when it will be open to public inspection, so that other scholars may check
Andrew's interpretations of Mitrokhin's evidence. Still, with these limitations
in mind, Mitrokhin's information is consistent with other revelations that have
emerged recently from Russian intelligence archives, decrypted Venona files,
and Comintern files. Several British spies whom Mitrokhin identified have
acknowledged the accuracy of his information, such as the 87-year-old
great-grandmother Melita Norwood, who for fifty years avoided detection by
British counter- intelligence and provided atomic secrets from her position as
a secretary; and John Symonds, a crooked cop who enlisted in the KGB after
fleeing indictment for taking bribes, and specialized in seducing Western
tourists at Black Sea resorts and embassy personnel in Europe and Africa.
Robert Lipka, a former National Security Agency clerk who had spied for the
Soviets in the 1960s, pled guilty to espionage in 1997 on the basis of
Mitrokhin's information, complaining that he felt like "Rip Van Spy." Complete
confirmation of all Mitrokhin's stories can only come from original KGB files,
of course; but many of those files may no longer exist--there is evidence that
many sensitive documents were shredded as the Soviet Union collapsed--or will
never see the light of day because of their potential for embarrassment or
worse. The first part of Andrew's book goes over ground that has been
extensively cultivated by dozens of scholars and journalists. The tales of Kim
Philby and Anthony Blunt, of Elizabeth Bentley's spy rings that infiltrated the
Roosevelt administration, of the penetration of the Manhattan Project, and
other byways in the history of Soviet espionage against the West have been told
and retold as new archival material has become available. Mitrokhin's archive
adds a number of fascinating details to these stories, and corrects a number of
minor errors, and clarifies a few disputed points; but it does not change the
broad contours of what has been known about Soviet espionage, particularly
since the availability of the Venona documents. (The Venona documents were
themselves part of the KGB archives, though they were intercepted and
deciphered by Western intelligence agencies rather than read in their Russian
versions.) Even if it is familiar, the story still has not lost its power to
shock and dismay. The awful truth is that hundreds of Americans and Britons
betrayed their countries by handing over its most cherished political,
intelligence, diplomatic, and scientific secrets to a foreign power with which
they were intellectually besotted. Their treachery played a significant role in
enabling the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons, and it deserves at least
some of the responsibility for the triumph of communist regimes in Eastern
Europe and China. Andrew claims to have solved several hotly contested issues
that have long been debated within the intelligence community and by conspiracy
buffs. Thus he notes that Mitrokhin's archive contains no evidence of any other
long-time mole within British intelligence, including former MI5 director Roger
Hollis; and no evidence to support James Angleton's theory that Yuri Nosenko
was a KGB plant; and no indication that the KGB played a role in the attempted
assassination of Pope John Paul II. Some of the most interesting new material
concerns several of the "great illegals," that small band of idealistic and
cosmopolitan communists, operating without benefit of diplomatic immunity, who
were responsible for many of the successes of Soviet intelligence in the 1930s;
and this material suggests that it was only the folly and the paranoia of
Stalin that saved the West from even greater damage to its security than did
occur. One of the most successful of the illegals was Arnold Deutsch, an
Austrian Jew who moved into Soviet intelligence after a stint working for the
Comintern. Deutsch was a Ph. D. in chemistry who became an adept of Wilhelm
Reich's "sex-pol" movement, which sought to marry Freudianism with Marxism and
preached class revolution through sexual liberation. He recruited twenty agents
after his posting to London in 1934, and they included Kim Philby, Donald
MacLean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, the most productive
group of agents that Soviet intelligence ever obtained. Deutsch developed a new
strategy for Soviet intelligence, looking for recruits not in high positions in
government or among clerks with access to important documents, but among
promising young university students. He argued presciently to Moscow that
"given that the Communist movement in these universities is on a mass scale and
that there is a constant turnover of students, it follows that individual
Communists whom we pluck out of the Party will pass unnoticed, both by the
Party itself and by the outside world. People forget about them. And if at some
time they do remember that they were once Communists, this will be put down to
a passing fancy of youth, especially as those concerned are scions of the
bourgeoisie. It is up to us to give the individual recruit a new political
personality." Deutsch's insight into the psychological quirks of his British
recruits, including their rejection of conventional bourgeois sexual morality,
produced the greatest intelligence coup of the century. One of the hitherto
obscure "illegals" whose remarkable exploits are detailed by Andrew is Joseph
Grigulevich, a Lithuanian Jew, whose lengthy KGB career included stints at
assassinating Trotskyists during the Spanish Civil War, organizing a failed
effort to kill Trotsky, heading the KGB's illegal residency in Argentina during
World War II under the code-name ARTURO, and serving as a Costa Rican diplomat
in Rome and at the United Nations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, under the
name Teodoro Castro. In 1953, Grigulevich managed to get appointed as Costa
Rica's non-resident envoy to Yugoslavia. His mission was to assassinate Tito;
in a memo copied by Mitrokhin, he proposed a variety of methods, including
spraying Tito with pneumonic plague. Stalin died before the plan could be
carried out, and Grigulevich fled to Moscow for fear that he was about to be
exposed. The puzzled Costa Rican diplomatic mission never learned what had
happened to its envoy. In fact, he completed a doctoral dissertation in Moscow
and became an authority on Latin America and an officer in Soviet friendship
societies directed to Cuba and Venezuela. Grigulevich was one of the few of the
illegals of the heroic age to survive into the 1950s. Deutsch died when the
ship taking him to the United States to supervise a spy network was torpedoed
by German submarines in 1940. Most of his fellow officers were recalled to
Moscow and executed during the Great Terror as agents of Trotskyism, British
imperialism, or Nazism. Not content with decimating the professional ranks of
Soviet intelligence, Stalin also was skeptical and suspicious of the
intelligence provided by their sources, imagining that the agents whom these
traitors had recruited must themselves be tainted and plants. During World War
II, Moscow Center concluded that its five chief British spies were double
agents. Philby came under suspicion because the material he provided on British
overseas espionage operations contained nothing about spying on the Soviet
Union. Since Stalin was spying on his allies, he refused to believe that the
British were not doing the same. When provided with information contrary to his
deeply held suspicions, Stalin ignored it, dismissing reports of the
forthcoming German invasion as a British effort to embroil him in a war with
Hitler, and denouncing Richard Sorge's warnings from Japan in scatological
terms. Not surprisingly, Mitrokhin's archive indicates that intelligence
reports usually omitted any analysis of such information or slanted the
material to fit Stalin's preconceptions. The foreign intelligence chiefs were
afraid to anger him. Nor did the blindness end with Stalin. Soviet leaders and
intelligence chiefs were so convinced that Ronald Reagan planned a nuclear
first strike that all KGB officers spent inordinate amounts of time searching
for non- existent evidence of the plan, afraid to inform their superiors that
it was a myth. Still, the consequences of Soviet paranoia must not be
exaggerated. Just because the Soviets did not take full advantage of their
spies does not mean they did not derive enormous benefit from the intelligence
they provided. Soviet intelligence directed against Nazi Germany was largely
unsuccessful-- the Red Orchestra, its major ring headed by another formidable
illegal named Leopold Trepper, was largely neutralized by the Gestapo by
1942--but it did far better against its allies. The illegal Soviet residency in
the United States sent 211 rolls of microfilm to the Center in 1943, 600 rolls
in 1944, and 1,896 rolls in 1945, with information from every branch of the
federal government and from virtually every secret American scientific
laboratory of any significance. Moreover, some of its spies, such as Harry
Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Lauchlin Currie, a White
House aide, Lawrence Duggan and Alger Hiss, high-ranking figures in the State
Department, and Duncan Lee of the OSS, were themselves policymakers, or in a
position to pass along very sensitive material. After the war, at least in the
United States and Great Britain, Soviet intelligence was forced to change its
recruitment patterns. For years, its most reliable and effective agents had
been communists who spied for love of the Soviet Union, not for money or
because they were being blackmailed. As mountains of evidence now make clear,
many of them had been recruited with the conscious assistance of the CPUSA and
the CPGB. By 1950, however, that well had all but dried up. The beginning of
the Cold War stoked public anti- communism and led to stepped-up surveillance
of party members, to the defections of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley, and
the testimony of Whittaker Chambers. All this disrupted existing spy networks,
even as the post-1956 revelations about Soviet anti-Semitism and Stalin's
crimes crushed many communists' faith in the Soviet Union. The KGB found itself
forced to rely increasingly on "walk-in" sources who, more often than not,
spied because of grudges against the United States government or some other
psychological problem, or because they were desperate for money to pay debts or
to finance elaborate styles of living. Thus the KGB found it increasingly
difficult to provide high-level political intelligence. Few of its sources in
the English-speaking world were significant, leading to a corresponding rise in
wildly implausible plans to recruit new sources. In 1973, Yuri Andropov, the
head of the KGB, encouraged his Washington officers to try to recruit
disaffected Nixon loyalists, including William Safire and Pat Buchanan. Georgi
Arbatov, a KGB agent who headed the Moscow Institute of the United States and
Canada, attempted without success to recruit American policy-makers; one of his
targets was Cyrus Vance. According to Mitrokhin, the KGB did recruit a
Democratic activist in California during a trip that he made to the Soviet
Union in the 1970s. During the presidential campaign in 1976, this individual,
whose name was not included in the files seen by Mitrokhin, provided
information from within the Carter camp, including a detailed report on a
three-hour meeting with Jimmy Carter, Jerry Brown, and Senator Alan Cranston,
in a California hotel. Andropov sent the report to the Politburo. While
political intelligence was often poorly analyzed or difficult to obtain, the
Soviets were able to do better with technical and scientific intelligence. KGB
files credit technological espionage from Britain and the United States during
World War II with major contributions to the development of Soviet "radar,
radio technology, submarines, jet engines, aircraft and synthetic rubber, as
well as nuclear weapons." Technical and scientific intelligence continued to
prosper in the post-war years. By the mid 1970s, there were, according to
Mitrokhin, seventy-seven agents and forty-two trusted contacts, working for
leading defense contractors, in university or government laboratories
(including MIKE, a senior physicist at MIT recruited in 1973) or the armed
services in the United States alone, and dozens more in every other NATO
country. According to one report that Mitrokhin cites, more than half of the
projects of the Soviet defense industry in 1979 were based on information from
the West. All countries spy on their adversaries, and even on their friends.
What distinguished Soviet intelligence from its counterparts in the West was
that it managed, virtually to the end, to rely on the assistance of legal
communist parties, which were themselves being financed by the Soviet Union.
Mitrokhin's archive includes numerous examples from the 1970s and 1980s of
high-ranking Western communists in Canada, Italy, France, Ireland, Portugal,
and elsewhere who agreed to assist the KGB in its operations or its
recruitments. Ostensibly independent, and treated by many scholars and
journalists as legitimate participants in a democratic system, these communist
parties remained a security threat, particularly in France and Italy. The
Soviets were not averse to intervening in those parties to protect their
assets. After the advent of Eurocommunism in the 1970s, the KGB undertook
campaigns to discredit and to smear Santiago Carillo in Spain and Enrico
Berlinguer in Italy. George Marchais, the leader of the French CP, abandoned
his flirtation with Eurocommunism soon after the KGB prepared a report
indicating that, contrary to his public claims about resistance activities
during World War II, he had willingly gone to work in Nazi Germany. The most
astounding revelations in The Sword and the Shield deal with the KGB's active
measures and disinformation campaigns. Even Americans raised on tales of FBI
and CIA perfidy--which pale in comparison--will be amazed by the brazenness,
the scope, the stupidity, and the nastiness of Soviet intelligence. Some of the
stories are reminders that the Soviet Union was indeed preparing for more than
a cold war. The KGB prepared a number of arms caches in Europe and the United
States for sabotage operations in case of war. A KGB sabotage group was
established near the Mexican border in 1966 that targeted military bases,
electrical grids, radar installations, and oil pipelines; using migrant workers
as cover, they transferred agents and munitions across the border. Another
unit, based in Canada, was supposed to target dams in the western United
States. Many of the KGB's arms caches are still buried around the world.
Mitrokhin's notes include chillingly detailed locations and instructions about
how to disarm their booby-traps. (One of them notes that if "there is no
'click,' it is forbidden to take the container out of the cache.") One such
package identified by Mitrokhin's notes in Switzerland exploded in 1998 when it
was uncovered. Although the KGB largely abandoned "wet affairs," or
assassinations, by the 1950s--not out of moral scruple, but out of fear of
exposure--everything else seems to have been tried. The New York residency
provided a subsidy to Mark Lane, the author of the first successful conspiracy
book about the Kennedy assassination. (Andrew notes that Lane may not have
known who provided the money.) It assisted the renegade CIA agent Philip Agee
and helped with the founding of the supposedly independent Covert Action
Information Bulletin, which exposed American intelligence efforts and agents.
The KGB also provided material for Agee's publication. The KGB attempted to
smear J. Edgar Hoover as a homosexual who had turned the FBI into a "den of
faggots," although the tall tales about Hoover as a cross-dresser were
apparently produced by a convicted perjurer without assistance from the KGB.
Many of the KGB's disinformation projects were aided and abetted by
journalistic contacts. In 1977, seven of the thirteen most highly paid KGB
agents in Italy were journalists, and KGB officers had little trouble getting
credulous newspapers and magazines to print its concocted stories designed to
denigrate the United States. Enormous energies were focused also on dissidents
in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Andrei Sakharov was the target of
thirty-two active operations in 1977 alone, ranging from slandering him to
threatening his wife. The KGB was quick to infiltrate Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
entourage when he was living in Switzerland, and Andrew suggests that this
contributed to the writer's obsessive isolation from all outsiders once he
moved to Vermont. The KGB also worked up plans to deal with defectors; one
project, never successfully carried out, was to punish Rudolph Nureyev by
breaking his legs. Meanwhile, KGB agents in the Russian Orthodox Church,
including Patriarch Aleksi II, were persuading the World Council of Churches to
condemn Western imperialism while remaining silent about the repression of
believers in the Soviet Union. On one of his reports, Mitrokhin interposed his
own view that the files reveal "a whirlpool of filth." The full extent of KGB
support for terrorism is still not clear--Andrew promises this information in
the second volume--but under Yuri Andropov, the KGB sent arms to the IRA; and
assassinated President Amin of Afghanistan, and replaced him with the KGB's man
Babrak Karmal; and recruited Wadi Haddad of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine--code-named NATSIONALIST-- in 1970. In a memo to
Brezhnev that was copied by Mitrokhin, Andropov noted that this latter
relationship with a major figure in international terrorism " enables us to
control the external operations of the PFLP to a certain degree ... and also to
carry out active measures in support of our interests through the
organization's assets while observing the necessary conspiratorial secrecy." As
Andrew himself notes, many of the plans and the plots concocted by the KGB were
not implemented, and many others failed. It is hard to gauge the level of
success even for those operations that the KGB did carry out. Much of the
political intelligence generated by Soviet spies was poorly deployed by Soviet
political leaders. All its vaunted scientific espionage did not prevent the
Soviet Union from falling woefully behind the West in technological prowess.
And the enormous energy deployed against dissidents ultimately failed to
preserve a rotten political system. Aficionados of espionage will be rummaging
through this enormously detailed book for years. Hundreds of the agents
identified by Andrew only by code-name are still alive, but enough details are
given about their activities or their positions that enterprising journalists
will be able to uncover their real names. The British press, transfixed by
espionage, has already bagged two university professors and a former advisor to
Labor leader Neil Kinnock. These haunted and hunted figures from a bygone era
still excite emotions. Some of these traitors may be quite old, but it is worth
remembering that the age of Nazi war criminals has not deterred us from
demanding their exposure. And while virtually none of the Westerners who served
the KGB took a direct and active role in murders--the most notorious exception
is Aldrich Ames, who bears direct responsibility for the deaths of dozens of
CIA assets in the Soviet Union--they aided and abetted a repressive and
dictatorial regime, cost their nations untold tens of millions of dollars,
betrayed their friends, their colleagues, and their fellow citizens, and
contributed to the misery and the persecution of dissidents throughout the
Soviet bloc. Vasili Mitrokhin has guaranteed that what they did will not remain
hidden forever in the archives. And he was right: it is a whirlpool of filth. "

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Seraphim Reeves
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Alexy II and JP II

Post by Seraphim Reeves »

One thing that has become very apparent to me, is that the supposed "friction" between JP II and Alexy II is a lot of smoke and mirrors.

The truth is, their thought realm is very similar - what Alexy says regarding not simply heretics, but also outright infidels, pagans, and Jews (that they all have some sort of relation to the Church of Christ) sounds exactly like a page out of Vatican II (the budding manifesto for the "church of the anti-Christ"), and more pointedly, JP II, whose unrelenting humanism has made him THE most vocal supporter of the Second Vatican Council, and one of it's chief implimentors.

If there is any friction between Alexy and John Paul in reality, it is posutring on the MP's part to secure as "best a place" as it can at the papal table when the time for hashing out a unia does come - Alexy knows that JP II is willing to "re-negotiate" the Papacy, while keeping the threadbare of RC heresy in this regard in tact. Perhaps he doesn't want to be "out-Byzantine-Poped" by the EP? Some may object to this speculation, but I cannot se it being otherwise, since on theological grounds, Alexy is just as wishy washy in his ecclessiology as JP II is (to the extent that no one's salvation is jeopardized by being in one "communion" or the other.) Thus, it comes down in JP II's case, to a effusive humanism - perhaps in Alexy's case, securing control of the "Russian part" of the "church of the future" firmly in the hands of the MP.

Seraphim

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