Russia May Aid ‘Comrade Tourists’ Who Were Really Soldiers

International New York Times | 19 December 2015

The doctrine of maskirovka, he wrote, is “one of the main virtues of the Soviet-Russian intelligence and military art — a repertoire of denial, deception, propaganda, camouflage, and concealment,” as useful today as it was decades ago. 

Valery S. Anisimov, one of the soldiers sent secretly to help Syria during the Lebanon civil war, is trying to have the men recognized as combat veterans. Credit James Hill for The New York Times

MOSCOW — The soldiers were told to grow their hair long and were given civilian clothes. From then on, their superiors said, they would be addressed — and were to address one another — as “comrade tourist” as they sailed aboard a cruise liner to Syria.

With this simple trick, the Soviet Union managed to sneak thousands of soldiers into Syria in 1983 during the Lebanese civil war, in which Syria, Moscow’s close ally, was deeply involved.

Valery S. Anisimov, then a 19-year-old draftee, recalled that his boxy Defense Ministry-issued gray suit was several sizes too large. “It was not something I would have bought myself,” he said. But the cruise ship, Ukraina, which left from a Black Sea port, slipped unmolested through the strait in Turkey, a NATO member, and on to Syria.

But the story did not end there. Today, Mr. Anisimov, the head of a veterans’ group representing these one-time tourists, is leading a campaign in Russia to gain formal recognition from Parliament for this secret wartime service.

The soldiers in tourist guise. Credit From the collection of Valery S. Anisimov

It is an effort with clear implications for the veterans of Russia’s more recent secret deployments, to Ukraine and Syria under various guises — as so-called green men in uniforms without insignia, “vacationers” in eastern Ukraine or humanitarian aid workers in Syria.

Mr. Anisimov is lobbying for a bill granting the status of combat veterans to the covert soldiers, about 800 of whom are alive today, according to a draft of the law. Parliament on Dec. 4 delayed a planned first reading of the bill, which would entitle them to additional pension payments for combat service. “It is important that the government recognize our service to the motherland,” Mr. Anisimov said in an interview. The Defense Ministry never declassified the “comrade tourist” deployment, so the veterans never received the extra benefits.

“Our documents are all secret,” Mr. Anisimov said. “They are so secret nobody can find them.”

In the war in eastern Ukraine, thousands of Russian soldiers served on the pro-Russian rebel side, but their status is disputed. Western governments say they were on active duty; Russia says they were volunteers.

A leader of the pro-Russian separatists, Aleksandr V. Zakharchenko, said in 2014, at the height of the war, that between 3,000 to 4,000 Russian soldiers were fighting on the rebel side, but all the while on their vacations. “There are active soldiers fighting among us who preferred to spend their vacation not on the beach but among their brothers, who are fighting for freedom,” he said.

Such unacknowledged deployments form one element of the broad doctrine of maskirovka, or masking, which encompasses a range of ideas about misdirection and misinformation that military analysts say is integral to Russian operations and has been for some time. “The Russian approach demonstrates remarkable historical continuity,” wrote Dmitry Adamsky, a professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel, in a research paper about Russian psychological warfare published last month.

The doctrine of maskirovka, he wrote, is “one of the main virtues of the Soviet-Russian intelligence and military art — a repertoire of denial, deception, propaganda, camouflage, and concealment,” as useful today as it was decades ago. Soviet maps, for example, often included inaccuracies that frustrated drivers but served a national security purpose: If taken by a spy, they would confuse an invading army as apparently useful roads, for example, led into swamps.

In another example, the Russian military makes and exports bulky, rubber inflatable versions of most of its tanks and rocket launchers, to trick spotter planes.

Last summer, as the United States said Russia was shipping military equipment to an air base at Latakia, in Syria, Moscow said it was humanitarian aid, before shifting gears and publicly announcing a deployment. The men in green who appeared on Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula in February 2014 were said to be a local militia or members of motorcycle gangs. President Vladimir V. Putin has since acknowledged that they were soldiers.

The bill Mr. Anisimov helped write tries to correct what he sees as an injustice imposed on soldiers who served such an operation decades ago.

President Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current embattled Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, had intervened in the Lebanese civil war but quickly suffered setbacks in fighting with Israel’s superior military, which had invaded southern Lebanon in clashes with the Palestine Liberation Organization. In a secret visit to Moscow, he convinced the Soviet leadership that its support was crucial to maintaining a balance of powers in the Middle East, and soon enough a sightseeing trip was being planned.

“In cooperation with the Syrian air defense forces, on a war footing and in lethal danger, the regiments took active part in rebuffing Israeli airstrikes,” the Russian draft law says of the soldier-tourists in Syria in the 1980s. In short, they were not merely taking in the sights.

Yet this service was whitewashed from the historical record. “In the files of the officers, it was written that ‘from 1983 to 1984 they served in air defenses in the Moscow region,’ ” the draft law notes. “Not one legal act has been taken to create conditions to support a dignified life, gainful activities, honor and respect in society,” for the tourists, it says. “Passing this law will restore historical justice.”

If designated as combat veterans, participants would be entitled to additional pension payments of 2,500 rubles, or about $36, per month, priority consideration for state-provided apartments and access to veterans hospitals. But that designation would raise delicate questions.

Mikhail V. Degtyaryov, a lawmaker with the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia who sponsored the bill, said it should not be read as a sign that Russia would eventually own up to the deployment of “vacationers” in eastern Ukraine. “So many years went by, it’s just history now,” he said of the Syrian operation.

In total, according to the draft law in Parliament, about 6,000 soldiers in two air defense units served in Syria in 1983 and 1984. These units left from the port of Nikolayev, now known as Mykolaiv, in Ukraine on cruise ships.

Commanders ordered soldiers to grow their hair long and paint their equipment, sent separately in civilian cargo ships, in desert camouflage colors. The suits, Mr. Anisimov said, were issued in three colors: gray, black and blue. Once in Syria, the soldiers wore Syrian military uniforms.

On the day of the departure, a local newspaper reported this large group of lithe and healthy young men, mostly all the same age of about 20, were setting out on a cruise they had won in a socialist competition. Aleksei S. Diyakov, then a captain in the air defense forces, said the men gleefully played along. “The Russians know dramaturgy,” he said. “We used the Stanislavsky method.”

Passing through the Dardanelles in Turkey, they were ordered to sit quietly in their cabins below deck, lest an American warship sailing nearby and bristling with listening equipment pick up their conversations.

Waitresses in the ship’s restaurant kept up the ruse, flirtatiously calling the young men “comrade tourists,” Mr. Anisimov said. “We joked with them, saying ‘You see we are not tourists,’ ” he said. “And they would say, ‘Shush, oh, no, please don’t joke with us that way.’ ”