The Russians Are Coming | 227

The Russians Are Coming | 227 history dating back to the era of the czars, Russian intelligence had perfected the technique of false flag recruitment, through which it assumes an identity to fit the ideological bent of a potential recruit. Russian intelligence was well experienced with false flags. It first used this technique following the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 to control dissidents both at home and abroad. The centerpiece, as later analyzed by the CIA, was known as the “Trust” deception. It began in August 1921 when a high-ranking official of the Communist regime in Russia named Aleksandr Yakushev slipped away from a Soviet trade delegation in Estonia and sought out a leading anti- Communist exile he had known before the revolution in Russia. He then told him that he represented a group of disillusioned officials in Russia that included key members of the secret police, the army, and the Interior Ministry. Yakushev said that they all had come to the same conclusion: the Communist experiment in Russia had totally failed and needed to be replaced. To effect this regime change, they had formed an underground organization code-named the Trust, because the cover for their conspiratorial activities was the Moscow © headquarters of the Municipal Credit Association, which was a trust © company. According to Yakushev’s account, it had become the equiv- alent of a de facto government by 1921. The exiled leader in Estonia reported this astonishing news to British intelligence, which, along with French and American intel- ligence, helped fund this newly emerged anti-Communist group. Initially, British intelligence had doubts about the bona fides of the Trust, as did other Western intelligence services sponsoring exile groups. But they gradually accepted it after they received intelli- gence reports confirming its operations from many other sources, including Russian officials, diplomats, and military officers who claimed to have defected from the Soviet government. Because these reports all dovetailed, they recognized the Trust as a legitimately underground organization. Once the Trust had been established in the minds of the West- ern intelligence services, it offered them as well as exile groups the services of its network of collaborators. These services included smuggling out dissidents, stealing secret documents, and disbursing money inside Russia to sympathizers. Within a year, exile groups in | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 227 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019715