A Conversation with Former CIA Officer Benjamin Fischer

By Vasilis Petropoulos, MALD 2023 Candidate, The Fletcher School

Cold War stories never cease to fascinate both historians and the public. New aspects of key moments in the Cold War, such as the Berlin Airlift or the Cuban Missile Crisis, continue to come to light, providing answers to hitherto unresolved riddles. Perhaps the most fascinating Cold War topic, often on the borderline between truth and fiction, is the underground information warfare conducted by the intelligence services of the two Cold War adversaries. The Soviet KGB and the American CIA engaged in a “spy game” that played out under the radar, giving birth to romanticized tales, engrossing stories, and unverifiable legends.

To familiarize students with the Cold War “spy game” and how it impacted the development of broader American-Soviet antagonism, the Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School invited retired CIA officer Benjamin Fischer to give a lecture in Professor Chris Miller’s Russian Foreign Policy class on April 12, 2023. Fischer worked in the CIA for over 30 years, serving in the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, the Directorate of Operations in the United States and Abroad, and at the Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. 

The former CIA officer opened his lecture by laying out the political conditions in the Soviet Union of the 1970s that led to a strengthening of the KGB’s role in Soviet foreign policy. Mr Fischer specifically referred to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s insistence on prioritizing national security matters in coordination with the KGB, to which he afforded a great deal of power. 

The inclusion of former or active KGB high-ranking officials in the Politburo, especially KGB Director Yuri Andropov, secured the KGB a greater say in the decision-making process. 

“Brezhnev put Andropov in charge of negotiating treaties with West Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia after Foreign Minister Gromyko refused to deal with Bonn. Andropov’s role reflected the changing fortunes of the USSR. He voted to send troops to Afghanistan and a year later sent no forces to Poland even when Solidarity came to power,” Fischer explained. 

Subsequently, the KGB grew, and with it grew its budget and capabilities. Fischer maintained that this growth became obvious from the evident improvement in the KGB’s forgeries. To demonstrate the degree to which KGB had upped its game in the fabrication of documents, Fischer revealed that a KGB-devised presidential letter, supposedly written by President Carter himself, made it all the way to the office of the German Foreign Minister before its invalidity was exposed.

Fischer also spoke about the Polish crisis in the 1980s, stating categorically that the Soviet leadership at the time “never intended to undertake military action in order to deal with the unrest in Poland.” He attributed the new anti-violence stance of the Soviet leadership to the negative ramifications that the military interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 had on the Soviet Union’s global image. 

Fischer then talked about the CIA’s involvement in Poland’s Solidarity movement, which marked the first successful uprising against Soviet political control. The former CIA officer described in detail how the Agency funded the movement and used travelers to smuggle in books and equipment for underground publishing, which “allowed Solidarity to counter state-control media.” 

Next, Fischer discussed the Soviet Union’s fears that the United States was planning for an imminent first strike nuclear attack. He noted that in May 1981, then-KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov launched a military intelligence program, known as Operation RYaN, with the purpose of collecting intelligence on potential contingency plans of the Reagan Administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.

In 1983, Fischer continued, the United States inadvertently but incautiously fed Moscow’s security concerns by conducting the annual NATO Able Archer military exercise, which involved the simulation of a coordinated nuclear attack. He shared a 1990 report from the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that lamented the timing of the exercise and the way in which the United States handled the so-called Soviet “war scare.” The report revealed that in 1983, Washington’s leadership had placed the Soviet-American relations “on a hair trigger.” However, the U.S. intelligence and policy community were sharply divided over whether the Soviet fears were real. 

“Some said it was all propaganda and disinformation, others argued it reflected genuine fear of war. My view is that the Soviets were concerned about an arms race they could not win or keep up in, but were not shaking in their boots,” Fischer opined.

In his concluding remarks, Fischer labelled the assistance to the Solidarity movement as the most crucial contribution of the CIA in the Cold War. Comparing the impact of Solidarity to the impact of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, Mr Fischer said, “This [operation in Poland] was a ‘non-lethal’ covert action on the western periphery of the Soviet empire. The other one was paramilitary covert action in Afghanistan on the eastern periphery. My opinion is that the Polish operation and Solidarity’s victory was more important. I like to say that in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union lost a war. In Poland, it lost an empire.” 

Fischer closed by sharing personal stories from his time in office before he opened the floor for questions. Overall, few people could demystify Cold War espionage warfare in as well-informed and captivating a way as Fischer did.