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Committee for State Security Комитет государственной безопасности Komitjet Gosudarstvjennoj Bjezopasnosti
The sword-and-shield emblem of the KGB.
Agency overview
Formed	1954
Preceding agency	Ministry for State Security
Dissolved	1991 (Officially 1995)
Superseding agency	Federal Security Service (FSS)
Jurisdiction	Council of Ministers of the USSR
Headquarters	Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union 55°45′31.2″N 37°37′32.16″E

KGB (transliteration of “КГБ”) is the Russian abbreviation of Committee for State Security (Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности?·i; Komitjet Gosudarstvjennoj Bjezopasnosti), which was the official name of the umbrella organization serving as the Soviet Union’s premier security agency, secret police, and intelligence agency, from 1954 to 1991.

The name of the largest of the Russian successors to the KGB is the FSB (ФСБ, Федеральная служба безопасности; Fjedjeral’naja Sluzhba Bjezopasnosti; English: Federal Security Service).

The KGB’s function was illustrated by its official emblem: bearing both shield and sword, the KGB was an organization with a military hierarchy aimed at providing national defense, and the defense of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

On December 21, 1995, the President of Russia Boris Yeltsin signed the decree that disbanded the KGB^{[contradiction]}, which was then replaced by the FSB, the current domestic state security agency of the Russian Federation.^{[citation needed]}

In Belarus, a former Soviet republic, the official Russian name of the State Security Agency remains “KGB”.

The term is also sometimes used figuratively in the Western press to refer to the current FSB committee after the 1991 renaming due to its recognition and public perception.^[1]

Most of the information about the KGB remains secret, although there are two sources of documents of KGB available online.^[2][3]

Origin of the KGB

The first of the forerunners of the KGB, the Cheka T, was established on December 19, 1917. It replaced the Tsarist Okhrana. The Cheka underwent several name and organizational changes over the years, becoming in succession the State Political Directorate (OGPU) (1923), People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) (1941), and Ministry for State Security(MGB) (1946), among others. In March 1953, Lavrentiy Beria consolidated the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the MGB into one body—the MVD; within a year, Beria was executed and MVD was split. The reformed MVD retained its police and law enforcement powers, while the second, new agency, the KGB, assumed internal and external security and intelligence functions, and was subordinate to the Council of Ministers. On July 5, 1978 the KGB was re-christened as the “KGB of the Soviet Union,” with its chairman holding a ministerial council seat.

The KGB was dissolved when its chief, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov, used the KGB’s resources to aid the August 1991 coup attempt to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On August 23, 1991 Colonel-General Kryuchkov was arrested, and General Vadim Bakatin was appointed KGB Chairman—and mandated to dissolve the KGB of the Soviet Union. On November 6, 1991, the KGB officially ceased to exist.^{[contradiction][citation needed]} Its services were divided into two separate organizations; the FSB for Internal Security and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) for Foreign Intelligence Gathering. The Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) is functionally much like the Soviet KGB. Vladimir Kryuchkov died in 2007 from an unspecified illness in Moscow.

From its inception, the KGB was envisioned as the “sword and shield” of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The KGB achieved a remarkable string of successes in the early stages of its history. The then-comparatively lax security of foreign powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom allowed the KGB unprecedented opportunities to penetrate the foreign intelligence agencies and governments with its own ideologically-motivated agents such as the Cambridge Five. Arguably, the Soviet Union’s most important intelligence coup, the Cambridge Five, detailed information concerning the building of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project), which occurred due to well-placed KGB agents within that project such as Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. The KGB also pursued enemies of the Soviet Union and of Joseph Stalin. These include people such as Leon Trotsky and groups like the counter-revolutionary White Guards, eventually achieving Trotsky’s assassination.

During the Cold War, the KGB played a critical role in the survival of the Soviet one-party state through its suppression of political dissent (termed “ideological subversion”) and hounding of notable public figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. It also achieved notable successes in the foreign intelligence arena, including continued gathering of Western science and technology (including much of the technical information used in the design of the Tupolev Tu-144, which was copied from the Anglo-French Concorde) from agents like Melita Norwood and the infiltration of West Germany’s government under Willy Brandt, alongside the East German Stasi. However, the double blow of the compromise of existing KGB operations through high-profile defections like those of Elizabeth Bentley in the United States and Oleg Gordievsky in Britain, as well as the drying up of ideological recruitment after the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, resulted in a major decline in the extent of the KGB’s capabilities. However, the KGB was assisted by some mercenary Western defectors such as the CIA mole Aldrich Ames and the FBI mole Robert Hanssen, helping to partly counteract its own hemorrhage of skilled agents.

Modus operandi

Many experts agree that the KGB then was the world’s most effective intelligence agency.^[4] Like most such agencies, the KGB operated legal and illegal residencies in its target countries. The legal residencies operated from the Soviet embassy via diplomatic immunity, thus, if caught or discovered spying, legal residents were free from prosecution. At best, the legal resident’s intelligence gathering would be compromised; either the KGB recalled the legal resident to home or the host country would expel him or her. Whereas, illegal residents spied without diplomatic immunity from prosecution (like the CIA’s non-official cover). Especially in its early years, the KGB often valued illegal residencies more than legal residencies, primarily because the illegals operate undercover more readily to infiltrate the targets.

Using the ideological attraction of the first worker-peasant state, and later fighting fascism and the Great Patriotic War, the Soviets successfully recruited high-level spies, however, the 1939 signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the defeat of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and the 1968 Prague Spring mostly exhausted ideological recruitment; young radicals were repelled by the Red Army’s violations of sovereignty and the geriatric Brezhnev’s leadership. Instead, the KGB turned to blackmail and bribery to recruit Western agents.

At legal residencies, operations were divided into four major sectors: political, economic, military strategic intelligence, and disinformation, called active measures in espionage parlance (PR Line), counter-intelligence and security (KR Line), and scientific and technological intelligence (X Line), which took on increasing importance throughout the Cold War. Other major operations included the collection of SIGINT (RP Line), illegal support (N Line). Illegal residencies tended to be more decentralized and lacked official organizational structures.

The KGB, like its Western counterparts, divided its intelligence personnel into agents, who provided the information, and controllers, who relayed the information to the Kremlin and were responsible for keeping track of and paying the agents. Some of the most important agents, like the Cambridge Five, had multiple controllers over their espionage careers. Ironically,Kim Philby, who had thought of himself as a KGB officer, was rudely informed of this distinction when he defected to the Soviet Union; as a foreign agent, he was not even allowed to enter KGB headquarters.^{[citation needed]}

To give cover for its illegals who were often born in Russia, the KGB constructed elaborate legends for them, involving them assuming the identity of a “live double,” who handed over his or her identity to assist in the fabrication, or a “dead double,” whose identity was based on a real (though deceased) person but was heavily altered by the KGB itself. These legends were usually supplemented by the agent living out the role given to him by the KGB in a foreign country before arriving at his final destination; one of the KGB’s favorite tactics was to send agents bound for the United States through its Ottawa residency in Canada.

KGB agents practiced standard espionage craft such as the retrieval and photographing of classified documents using concealed cameras and microfilm, code-names in communication to disguise agents, contacts, targets, and the use of dead letter boxes to relay intelligence. In addition, the KGB made skillful use of agents provocateur, who infiltrated a target’s entourage by posing as sympathizers to the target’s cause or group. These agents provocateur were then used to sow dissent, influence policy, or help arrange kidnapping orassassination operations.

History of the KGB

The start of the KGB originates with the establishment of the Cheka six weeks after the 1917 October Revolution in order to defend the nascent Bolshevik state from its powerful, “bourgeois” enemies, chief among them the White Army. The Cheka set out to brutally suppress dissent by interrogating and torturing suspected counter-revolutionists and was credited by Lenin as playing a key role in the new regime’s survival. With Lenin’s approval, a new foreign intelligence department of the Cheka, the INO (Innostranyi Otdel) was established on December 20, 1920; it was the precursor to the First Chief Directorate (FCD) of the KGB. The Cheka itself was renamed the State Political Directorate (OGPU), a name it would retain throughout much of Stalin’s early reign (1920s-30s).

The OGPU continued to expand its operations at home and abroad; however, the growing paranoia of Stalin, which would foreshadow the later period of the purges, strongly influenced the performance and direction of the intelligence agency. Under Stalin, the pursuit of imaginary conspiracies against the state like that of the Trotskyists became a central focus of intelligence. As Stalin acted as his own intelligence analyst, the role of intelligence processing was subordinated to that of collection, and often reports submitted to Stalin were designed to reflect only what he wanted to hear. Of the many agents OGPU offered, only Nikolai Vlasik was chosen as Stalin’s longtime bodyguard. This was only a slight nod to the organization as a whole. This period in the KGB’s history culminated in the eventual liquidation of many intelligence officers and chaos within the organization’s internal and external operations during the Great Purge, such as the conviction of former KGB chairman Genrikh Yagoda of treason and conspiring with Trotskyists, and of former KGB chairman Nikolai Yezhov, on similar charges, who ironically had denounced Yagoda and carried out the Terror under Stalin’s orders from 1936 to 1938.

The agency, now called the NKGB and later part of the NKVD, sought to rebuild itself after the disaster of Stalin’s purges. Under Lavrentiy Beria, it continued its sycophantic role of producing intelligence to corroborate Stalin’s own conspiracy theories while simultaneously achieving some of the deepest penetration of Western powers ever achieved by any intelligence agency. The next major organizational shuffle was to come in the form of the KI (Komitet Informatsii), the brainchild of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, which would centralize the intelligence system by combining the foreign intelligence services of the agency, renamed the MGB, and the GRU, and place the ambassador in an embassy at the head of the both the MGB’s and the GRU’s legal residency. The KI unraveled after Molotov fell out of favor with Stalin.

Meanwhile, Beria, now the head of the MVD, had been consolidating his power with the ambition to succeed Stalin as leader of the Soviet Union. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Beria merged the MGB into the MVD. Fearing an attempt at a coup d’état, Beria’s colleagues in the Presidium united against him and he was charged with “criminal anti-Party and anti-state activities” and executed him for treason. The MGB was split off from the MVD and underwent its final renaming to become the KGB.

The next KGB chairman to possess high ambitions was the relatively youthful Aleksandr Shelepin (chairman from 1958–61), who helped in the coup against Khrushchev in 1964. His protégé at the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny (1961–67), was sacked, and Shelepin himself was sidelined from the powerful post of chairman of the Committee of Party and State Controlinto the unimportant chairmanship of the Trade Union Council by Brezhnev and the Communist Party, whose memories of Beria were still fresh in their minds.

In 1967, Yuri Andropov, the longest serving and most influential KGB chairman in its history, began his tenure at the head of the KGB. Andropov would go on to make himself heir-apparent to Brezhnev, helped by the general secretary’s growing feeble-mindedness, and succeeded him in 1982. Andropov’s legacy at the KGB was an increased focus on combating ideological subversion in all its forms, no matter how apparently minor or trivial.

Vladimir Kryuchkov, grew dismayed at Gorbachev’s efforts to open up Soviet society (glasnost) and was one of the principal organizers of the 1991 coup. However, declining respect for the KGB and other factors had fatally weakened the Soviet regime, and following the coup’s failure, the KGB was disbanded, officially on November 6, 1991. Its successor agency, the FSB, now performs most of the functions of the former KGB, though the largest, most important directorate of the KGB, the FCD, was broken off to become the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki).

Former Russian President and current prime minister Vladimir Putin started out his career in the KGB working in the Fifth Directorate, monitoring the activities of the students of theLeningrad University. He later worked for the KGB in East Germany.

KGB operations within the United States

First efforts

During the 1920s Soviet intelligence focused on military and industrial espionage in the United States, specifically in the aircraft and munitions industries, and penetrating the mainline federal government bureaucracies, such as the Department of State and War Department.^{[citation needed]} These efforts had mixed results. A front organization was created by a NKVDagent in 1928 for the infiltration and placement of scientists into industry and government: the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians (FAECT). “The FAECT never attracted enough followers to make an impact in labor conditions, but it served the progressive cause in other ways.” ^[4]

Browder and Golos networks

One chief aim was the infiltration, placement, and subversion of American political life at all levels of society. Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), served as an agent recruiter himself on behalf of Soviet intelligence.^[5] [1]

Browder later stated that “by the mid-thirties, the Party was not putting its principal emphasis on recruiting members.” Left unstated was his intent to use party members for espionage work, where suitable. Browder advocated the use of a United Front involving other members of the left, both to strengthen advocacy of pro-Soviet policy and to enlarge the pool of potential recruits for espionage work. The illegal residency of NKVD in the US was established in 1934 by the former Berlin resident Boris Bazarov ^[6]. In 1935, NKVD agent Iskhak Akhmerov entered the US with false identity papers to assist Bazarov in the collection of useful intelligence, and operated without interruption until 1939, when he left the US. Akhmerov’s wife, an American who worked for Soviet intelligence, was Helen Lowry (Elza Akhmerova), the niece of CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder. Recent information from Soviet archives have revealed that Browder’s younger sister Marguerite worked until 1938 as an NKVD operative in Europe. She discontinued this work only when Browder himself requested her release from duty, fearful that her work would compromise his position as General Secretary.^[1]

One early Soviet spy ring was headed by Jacob Golos. Jake Golos (birth name Jacob Rasin or Raisen) was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police (NKVD) operative in the USSR. He was also a longtime senior official of the CPUSA involved in covert work and cooperation with Soviet intelligence agencies. He took over an existing network of agents and intelligence sources from Earl Browder. Golos’ controller was the head of the NKVD’s American desk, Gaik Ovakimian, also known as “The Puppetmaster”, who would later serve a key role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.^[7] Golos was the “main pillar” of the NKVD intelligence network. He had worked with Soviet intelligence from the mid 1930s, and probably earlier. He was not merely a CPUSA official assisting the NKVD (an agent or “probationer” in Soviet intelligence parlance) but held official rank in the NKVD, and claimed to be an oldtime Chekist. Golos headed the Central Control Commission which planned the kidnapping and execution of Juliet Poyntz, an American GRU agent who after a recent trip to Moscow had expressed revulsion upon viewing the effects of Stalinist policies.^[8]

Golos established a company called World Tourists with money from Earl Browder, the General Secretary. The firm, which posed as a travel agency, was used to facilitate international travel to and from the United States by Soviet agents and CPUSA members. World Tourists was also involved in manufacturing fake passports, as Browder used such a false passport on covert trips to the Soviet Union in 1936. ^[2] At World Tourist, Golos frequently met Bernard Schuster, an NKVD agent (code name ECHO and DICK) and Communist Party functionary who carried out background investigations for Golos as part of the vetting process of agent candidates.^[9] In March 1940, Golos pled guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent, paid a $500 fine, and served probation in lieu of a four-month prison sentence.

Soviet intelligence did not like Golos’ refusal to allow Soviet contact with his sources (a measure implemented by Golos to protect himself and to ensure his continued retention by the NKVD). The NKVD suspected Golos of Trotskyism and tried to lure him to Moscow, where he could be arrested, but the US government got to him first. But even then, he did not reveal his agent network. After Browder went to prison in 1940, Golos took over running Browder’s agents. In 1941, Golos set up a commercial forwarding enterprise, called the US Shipping and Service Corporation, with Elizabeth Bentley, his lover, as one of its officers. ^[1] [2]

Sometime in November 1943, Golos met in New York City with key figures of the Perlo group, a group working in several government departments and agencies in Washington, D.C.The group was already in the service of Browder. Later that same month, after a series of heart attacks over the previous two years, Golos died in bed in Bentley’s arms. Bentley then took over his operations (thus the reference in the decrypts to him as a “former” colleague).^{[citation needed]}

Secret apparatus

By the end of 1936 at least four mid-level State Department officials were delivering information to Soviet intelligence: Alger Hiss, assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre; Julian Wadleigh, economist in the Trade Agreements Section; Laurence Duggan, Latin American division; and Noel Field, West European division. Whittaker Chambers later testified that the plans for a tank design with a revolutionary new suspension invented by J. Walter Christie (then being tested in the U.S.A.) were procured and put into production in the Soviet Union as the Mark BT, later developed into the famous Soviet T-34 tank.^[10][11]

In 1993, experts from the Library of Congress traveled to Moscow to copy previously secret archives of Communist Party USA (CPUSA) records, sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping by party organizers. The records provide an irrefutable record of Soviet intelligence and cooperation provided by those in the radical left in the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s. Some documents revealed that the CPUSA was actively involved in secretly recruiting party members from African-American groups and rural farm workers. The records contained further evidence that Soviet sympathizers had indeed infiltrated the State Department, beginning in the 1930s. Included were letters from two U.S. ambassadors in Europe to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a senior State Department official. Thanks to an official in the State department sympathetic to the Party, the confidential correspondence, concerning political and economic matters in Europe, ended up in the hands of Soviet intelligence.^[12]

In the late 1930s and 1940 the OGPU, known as the Political Directorate, used the U.S. as one of several staging areas for multiple OGPU plots to murder exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, then living in Mexico City. It was American Communists who infiltrated Trotsky’s killer, Ramón Mercader, into his own household . They were also central to the NKVD’s unsuccessful efforts to free the killer from a Mexican prison.^{[citation needed]}

Soble spy ring

Jacob Albam and the Sobles were indicted on espionage charges by the FBI in 1957, all three were later convicted and served prison terms. The Zlatovskis remained in Paris, France, where the laws did not allow their extradition to the United States for espionage. Robert Soblen was sentenced to life in prison for his espionage work at Sandia National Laboratories, but jumped bail and escaped to Israel. After being expelled from that country, he later committed suicide in Great Britain while awaiting extradition back to the United States.^[13][1]

Wartime espionage

During the war, Soviet espionage agents obtained classified reports on electronic advances in radio-beacon artillery fuses by Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuse (reportedly the same fuse design that was later installed on Soviet anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 in 1960).^{[citation needed]} Thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) were photocopied or stolen, including a complete set of design and production drawings for Lockheed Aircraft’s new P-80 Shooting Star fighter jet.^[14]

Atomic bomb secrets

Joseph Stalin directed Soviet intelligence officers to collect information in four main areas. Pavel Fitin, the 34-year-old chief of the KGB First Directorate, was directed to seek American intelligence concerning Hitler’s plans for the war in Russia; secret war aims of London and Washington, particularly with regard to planning for Operation Overlord, the second front in Europe; any indications the Western Allies might be willing to make a separate peace with Hitler; and American scientific and technological progress, particularly in the development of an atomic weapon.

The Silvermaster spy ring

The United States Treasury Department was successfully penetrated by nearly a dozen Soviet agents or information sources, including Harold Glasser and his superior, Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the treasury and the second most influential official in the department.^[1][2] In Late May 1941 Vitaly Pavlov, a 25 year-old NKVD officer, approached White and attempted to secure his assistance to influence U.S. policy towards Japan. White agreed to assist Soviet intelligence in any way he could. The principal function of White was to aid in the infiltration and placement of Soviet operatives within the government, and protecting sources.^{[citation needed]} When security concerns arose around Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, White protected him in his sensitive position at the Board of Economic Warfare. White likewise was a purveyor of information and resources to assist Soviet aims, and agreed to press for release of German occupation currency plates to the Soviet Union. The Soviets later used the plates to print unrestricted sums of money to exchange for U.S. and Allied hard goods.^[15]

In August 1945 Elizabeth Bentley, fearful of assassination by the Soviet KGB, turned herself in to the government.^{[citation needed]} She implicated many agents and sources in the Golosand Silvermaster spy networks, and was the first to accuse Harry Dexter White of acting on behalf of Soviet interests in releasing occupation plates to Moscow, later confirmed by Soviet archives and former KGB officers.^[5][15]

Aftermath

President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9835 of 22 March 1947 tightened protections against subversive infiltration of the US Government, defining disloyalty as membership on a list of subversive organizations maintained by the Attorney General.

Soviet successes in obtaining information on U.S. defense readiness and atomic bomb stockpiles are thought to have led directly to Stalin’s decision to blockade Berlin in 1948-1949 and to acquiesce in Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea in 1950.^{[citation needed]}

Post-Soviet period

“SVR and GRU (Russia’s political and military intelligence agencies, respectively) are operating against the U.S. in a much more active manner than they were during even the hottest days of the Cold War” according to former GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev^[16]. From the end of 1980s, KGB and later SVR began to create “a second echelon” of “auxiliary agents in addition to our main weapons, Illegals and special agents”, according to former SVR officer Kouzminov ^[17]. These agents are legal immigrants , including scientists and other professionals. Another SVR officer who defected to Britain in 1996 described details about several thousand of Russian agents and intelligence officers, some of them “illegals” who live under deep cover abroad ^[18] Recently caught Russian high-profile agents in US are Aldrich Hazen Ames, Harold James Nicholson, Earl Edwin Pitts, Robert Philip Hanssen and George Trofimoff.

According to Yuri Shvets, a former KGB agent “In the days of the Soviet Union, the number of spies was limited because they had to be based at the foreign ministry, the trade mission or the news agencies like Tass. Right now, virtually every successful private company in Russia is being used as a cover for Russian intelligence operations.” ^[19] For example, close connections of SVR with Russian gas company Gazprom and oil company LUKoil have been reported ^[20]

Although every Russian company abroad may be a front organization of SVR or GRU (and in fact some of them have been organized by SVR ^[17]), the most famous of them is Russianaviation company Aeroflot. In the past, this company conducted forcible “evacuations” of Soviet citizens from foreign countries back to the USSR. People whose loyalty was questioned were drugged and delivered unconsciousness by Aeroflot planes, assisted by the company KGB personnel, according to former GRU officer Victor Suvorov ^[21]. In 1980s and 1990s, specimens of deadly bacteria and viruses stolen from Western laboratories were delivered by Aeroflot to support Russian program of biological weapons. This delivery channel encoded VOLNA (”wave”) meant “delivering the material via an international flight of the Aeroflot airline in the pilots’ cabin, where one of the pilots was a KGB officer” ^[17]. At least two SVR agents died, presumably from the transported pathogens ^[17].

When businessman Nikolai Glushkov was appointed as a top manager of Aeroflot in 1996, he found that the airline company worked as a “cash cow to support international spying operations”^[22]: 3,000 people out of the total workforce of 14,000 in Aeroflot were FSB, SVR, or GRU officers. All proceeds from ticket sales were distributed to 352 foreign bank accounts that could not be controlled by the Aeroflot administration. Glushkov closed all these accounts and channeled the money to an accounting center called Andava in Switzerland^[22] . He also sent a bill and wrote a letter to SVR director Yevgeni Primakov and FSB director Mikhail Barsukov asking them to pay salaries of their intelligence officers in Aeroflot in 1996. ^[22] Glushkov has been imprisoned since 2000 on charges of illegally channeling money through Andava. Since 2004 the company is controlled by Viktor Ivanov, a high-rankingFSB official who is a close associate of Vladimir Putin.

According to some, another front organization of SVR is the Russian Orthodox Church headed by Patriarch Alexius II who is allegedly a former KGB agent DROZDOV [2] [3] ^[6] [23]. Several priests of Russian Orthodox Church recruited spies in the US according to Director of National Intelligence^[24].

Pre-Cold War

As the Soviet Union had viewed the United States as a lower priority target than Britain and other European countries, the KGB had been slow to establish an agent network there. Responsibilities for infiltration thus fell to the GRU, which recruited Julian Wadleigh and possibly Alger Hiss, who began providing documents from the State Department.

The KGB, at that time called the NKVD, first made its presence known in 1935 with the establishment of a legal residency under Boris Bazarov and an illegal residency under Iskhak Akhmerov. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its general secretary Earl Browder assisted with recruitment efforts, and soon the KGB’s network was providing high-grade intelligence from within the United States government and defense and technology firms.

Among the most important agents gathering political intelligence recruited during this time period were Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight, who passed classified State Department documents, Harry Dexter White, who performed a similar role in the Treasury Department, and Lauchlin Currie, an economic adviser to President Roosevelt. A notorious spy ring, the Silvermaster Group, run by Greg Silvermaster, also operated at this time, though it was somewhat detached from the KGB itself. The KGB thus succeeded in penetrating major branches of the United States government at a time when the US had no significant countervailing espionage operations in the Soviet Union. When Whittaker Chambers, a former courier for Hiss and others, approached Roosevelt with information fingering Duggan, White, and others as Soviet spies, his claims were dismissed as nonsense. At the Tehran, Yalta, andPotsdam Conferences during World War II, Stalin was vastly more knowledgeable about what cards the United States held in its bargaining deck than Roosevelt, or his successorTruman, were about Stalin and Soviet intelligence.

In scientific intelligence, the KGB achieved an even more spectacular success. British physicist Klaus Fuchs, recruited by the GRU in 1941, was part of the British team collaborating with the United States in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. Fuchs was the most prominent agent involved in Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s spy ring. TheNew York City residency also infiltrated Los Alamos National Laboratory (where much of the work on the atomic bomb program was done) with its recruitment of then nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist Theodore Hall in 1944; Lona Cohen served as his courier. The stealing of the secrets to the atomic bomb was only the capstone of the Soviet espionage effort in the American scientific community. Soviet agents reported back information on advancements in the fields of jet propulsion, radar, and encryption, among other concepts.

The unraveling of the KGB’s network came about as a result of some key defections, like that of Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko, and the Venona project decrypts. Bentley, a courier to the Silvermaster group, had fallen out with Akhmerov and started informing on her former spy colleagues to the FBI in 1945. Her efforts, and the resulting “spy mania” in the United States, led to the recall of most of the senior KGB staff, leaving the spy network temporarily headless in the US. Information on VENONA, which threatened to compromise the entire spy network, caused shock and panic within KGB headquarters. However, damage was minimized as KGB agent Bill Weisband and then-SIS Washington Kim Philby passed on information about VENONA and agents it identified from 1947 onwards, five years before the CIA was informed. Still, the KGB had to rebuild most of its operations from scratch, and never again would achieve such thorough penetration of a foreign power.

Cold War

 

Former Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev was the first Muslim member of the KGB and is credited with bringing stability to Azerbaijan after its uneasy independence.

The KGB attempted, largely without success, to rebuild its illegal residencies in the United States during the Cold War. The residual effects of theRed Scare and McCarthyism and the evisceration of the CPUSA severely damaged KGB recruitment efforts. The last major illegal, “Willie” Vilyam Fisher, better known as Rudolf Abel, was betrayed by his assistant Reino Häyhänen in 1957, in all likelihood leaving the KGB without a single illegal residency in the United States, at least for a major span of time.

Legal residencies became more successful in the absence of illegals. The KGB’s recruitment efforts turned towards mercenary agents recruited because of monetary, not ideological, reasons. It was particularly successful in gathering scientific intelligence, as firms such as IBM retained lax security while security within the government tightened. The one notable and significant exception was the highly successful Walker spy ring, which enabled the Soviets to decipher over one million classified US messages, and directly led to the development of the Akula class submarine, which addressed a significant advantage over what the US had in submarine technology. As the Walkers were taken offline in 1985, the KGB scored its most important intelligence coup of the Cold War with the walk-ins of Aldrich Ames (that same year) and Robert Hanssen(who started spying in 1979), who compromised dozens of undercover Soviet agents, including Gordievsky, who was now on the verge of being appointed as head of the British legal residency. Walker and Ames began their careers by simply walking into the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, and volunteering their positions in exchange for money while Hannsen contacted the KGB secretly under the alias “Ramon”. They were paid millions of dollars each for their efforts.

KGB operations in the Soviet Bloc

 

KGB prison doors on display in the Museum of Occupations, Tallinn, Estonia.

The KGB, along with its satellite state intelligence agency allies, monitored extensively public and private opinion, subversion, and possible revolutionary plots in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. It played an instrumental role in the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the destruction of the 1968 Prague Spring and “socialism with a human face,” and general operations to prop up Soviet-friendly puppet states in the Bloc.

During the Hungarian uprising, KGB chairman Ivan Serov personally visited Hungary in order to supervise the “normalization” of Hungary following the invasion of the Red Army. The KGB monitored incidences of “harmful attitudes” and “hostile acts” in the satellite states as minute as listening topop music. But it was during the Prague Spring that the KGB was to have the greatest role in bringing down a regime.

The KGB began preparing the way for the Red Army by infiltrating Czechoslovakia with a large number of illegals posing as Western tourists. In classic KGB fashion, they attempted to gain the confidence of some of the most outspoken proponents of the new Alexander Dubček government in order to pass on information about their activities. Additionally, the illegals were tasked with planting evidence, in order to justify a Soviet invasion, that rightist groups with the help of Western intelligence agencies were planning to overthrow the government. Finally, the KGB prepared hardline, pro-Soviet members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), such as Alois Indra and Vasil Biľak, to assume power following the invasion. The betrayal of the often courageous leaders of the Prague Spring did not leave untouched the KGB’s own agents, however; the famous defectorOleg Gordievsky would later remark “It was that dreadful event, that awful day, which determined the course of my own life” (The Sword and the Shield, 261).

The KGB’s success in Czechoslovakia would be matched by a relatively unsuccessful suppression of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland in the 1980s. The KGB had forecast future instability in Poland with the election of the first Polish Pope, Karol Wojtyla, known better as Pope John Paul II, who had been categorized as subversive through his sermons criticizing the Polish regime. Though it accurately foresaw the coming crisis in the Polish government, the KGB was hindered in its attempts to crush the nascent Solidarity-backed movement against the one-party state by the Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP) itself, who feared an explosion of bloodshed if they imposed martial law like the KGB suggested. The KGB, with the help of their Polish counterparts in the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB), succeeded in installing spies in Solidarity and the Catholic Church, and coordinated the declaration of martial law along with Wojciech Jaruzelski and the PUWP (Operation X). However, the PUWP’s vacillating, conciliatory approach had blunted the KGB’s effectiveness, and the movement would fatally weaken the PUWP government later on in 1989.

Suppression of dissent

 

Monument to the victims of KGB terror in Vilnius, Lithuania.

One of the KGB’s chief preoccupations during the Cold War was the suppression of unorthodox beliefs, the persecution of the Soviet dissidents, and the containment of their opinions. Indeed, this obsession with “ideological subversion” only increased throughout the Cold War, primarily due to the rise of Yuri Andropov in the KGB and his appointment as chairman in 1967. Andropov declared that every instance of dissent, including for example religious movements that rejected the Communist Party, were a threat to the Soviet state that must be challenged. He mobilized the resources of the KGB to achieve this goal. Soon after Yuri Andropov’s appointment one of the KGB departments was assigned to deal with religious leaders, churches and its members. Most dissidents were apprehended by the KGB and sent to gulags for indefinite periods, where their dissent would lack the strength it might have had in public. Documents from the archive of Yale University ^[2] indicate the principal role of the heads of KGB, Yuri Andropov and then Vitali Fedorchuk, was the repression of dissidents.

Under Khrushchev, the tight controls over subversive beliefs had been partially relaxed following his denunciation of Stalinist-era terror in a secret speech. This resulted in the reemergence of critical literary works, most notably the publication in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 byAleksandr Solzhenitsyn. However, following Khrushchev’s fall from power, the Soviet state and the KGB quickly moved to crack down on all forms of dissent. The KGB routinely searched the homes and monitored the movements of prominent dissidents in an attempt to find incriminating documents. For example, a search in 1965 of Moscow dissidents turned up manuscripts given by Solzhenitsyn (codenamed PAUK, or spider, by the KGB) to a friend that contained allegedly “slanderous fabrications.”

The KGB also tracked down writers who published their work anonymously abroad. The infamous case of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who were put on trial in 1965 for their writing of subversive texts, illustrates the reach and obsession of the KGB in its ideological war. Sinyavsky, going by the pseudonym of “Abram Tertz,” and Daniel, using the alias of “Nikolai Arzhak,” were caught by Soviet surveillance of their apartment flats in Moscow after a tip-off from a KGB agent planted within the Moscow literary world.

Soon after the Prague Spring, Andropov set up a Fifth Directorate whose express purpose was to monitor and crack down on dissent. Andropov was especially concerned with the activities of the two leading Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, both declared to be “Public Enemy Number One” (The Sword and the Shield, 325) by Andropov. Andropov was unsuccessful in expelling Solzhenitsyn until 1974, while Sakharov was exiled to the closed Soviet city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in 1980. The prevention of theNobel Peace Prize being awarded to Sakharov in 1975 (which failed) and the same award being given to Yuri Orlov in 1978 (which succeeded, but probably not due to the KGB’s efforts) were missions of the highest importance and personally overseen by Andropov himself.

The KGB employed multiple methods to infiltrate the dissident community. It planted agents who appeared to sympathize with the dissidents’ cause, employed smear campaigns to discredit the more public figures like Sakharov, and prosecuted dissidents in show trials or harassed the more prominent ones. In prison, Soviet interrogators attempted to wear down their charges while sympathetic KGB informants tried to gain their confidence.

Eventually, with the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev and his policy of glasnost, persecution of dissidents was given relaxed priority in the KGB, as Gorbachev himself began to implement some of the policy changes first demanded by the dissidents.

Other notable operations

 

NKVD Headquarters onLubyanka Square was designed byAleksey Schusev.

• The OGPU scored a number of successes against counter-revolutionary elements like the White Guards by luring prominent leaders into the Soviet Union to be executed with skillful, imaginative use of agents provocateurs (Trust Operation).
• The KGB’s predecessor, the NKVD, was used by Stalin to infiltrate and undermine Trotskyists’ movements. Trotsky himself was assassinated by an NKVD agent, Ramón Mercader, in Mexico in 1940.
• The KGB favored the spread of disinformation to discredit its enemies. Disinformation efforts, termed active measures, were headed by Service A of the FCD.
• The KGB planned elaborate sabotage operations in the event of the outbreak of war behind enemy lines, planting arms caches in strategic locations.

James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief from the 1950s to the 1970s, acting on information provided by KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, feared that the KGB had moles in two key places: (i) the CIA’s counter-intelligence section, and (ii) the FBI’s counter-intelligence department. With those moles in place, the KGB would be aware of and therefore could control US counter-spy efforts to detect, capture, and arrest their spies; it could protect their moles by safely redirecting investigations that might uncover them, or provide them sufficient advance warning to allow their escape. Moreover, KGB counter-intelligence vetted foreign sources of intelligence, so that moles in that area were positioned to stamp their approval of double agents sent against the CIA.

In retrospect, in the context of the capture of the Soviet moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, it appears Angleton’s fears—then deemed excessively paranoid—were well-grounded, although both Ames and Hanssen operated and were exposed long after Angleton left the CIA in 1974. Still, his officially disbelieved assertions cost him his counter-intelligence post in the CIA.

Occasionally, the KGB conducted assassinations abroad, mainly of Soviet Bloc defectors, and often helped other Communist country security services with their assassinations. An infamous example is the September 1978 killing of Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov in London, where Bulgarian secret agents used a KGB-designed umbrella gun to shoot Markov dead with a ricin-poisoned pellet.

There are also disputed allegations that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981 and the death of Dag Hammarskjöld in an air crash in 1961.^[5]

The highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, described his conversation with the head of the Romanian Communist Party Nicolae Ceauşescu who told him about “ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill”: “Laszlo Rajk and Imre Nagy of Hungary; Lucretiu Patrascanu and Gheorghiu-Dej in Romania; Rudolf Slansky, the head of Czechoslovakia, and Jan Masaryk, that country’s chief diplomat; the shah of Iran; Palmiro Togliatti of Italy; American President John F. Kennedy; and China’s Mao Zedong.” Pacepa provided some additional details, such as a plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of Lin Biao organized by KGB and noted that “among the leaders of Moscow’s satellite intelligence services there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”^[6]

Organization

The KGB was a national intelligence and security agency for the Soviet Union, and directly controlled the republic-level KGB organizations; however, as Russia was the core republic of the Soviet Union, the KGB itself was also Russia’s republic-level KGB. As everything in the Soviet Union, the KGB was controlled by the CPSU.

Senior staff

The Senior staff consisted of a Chairman, one or two First Deputy Chairmen, and four to six Deputy Chairmen.

Collegium—a Chairman, deputy chairmen, Directorate chiefs, and one or two republic-level KGB organization chairmen—affected key policy decisions.

The Directorates

The KGB was organized into several directorates, with certain directorates assigned a “chief” status due to their importance. Some were:

• The First Chief Directorate (Foreign Operations) responsible for foreign operations and intelligence-gathering. This chief directorate had many sub-directorates of its own.
• The Second Chief Directorate responsible for counter-intelligence and internal political control of citizens and foreigners in the Soviet Union.
• The Third Chief Directorate (Armed Forces) controlled military counter-intelligence and the political surveillance of the Soviet armed forces.
• The Fourth Directorate (Transportation Security)
• The Fifth Chief Directorate also responsible for internal security; originally combated political dissent; later assumed tasks of the Second Chief Directorate, such as controlling religious dissent, monitoring artists, and the censorship of media; it was renamed Directorate Z (to Protect the Constitutional Order) in 1989.
• The Sixth Directorate (Economic Counterintelligence and Industrial Security)
• The Seventh Directorate (Surveillance) handled surveillance, providing equipment to follow and monitor activities of both foreigners and Soviet citizens.
• The Eighth Chief Directorate responsible for communications, monitoring foreign communications, and the cryptologic systems used by KGB divisions, KGB transmissions to overseas stations, and the development of communications technology.
• The Ninth Directorate (Guards) (later the KGB Protection Service) 40,000-man uniformed guard force providing bodyguard services to the principal CPSU leaders (and families) and major Soviet government facilities (including nuclear-weapons stocks). It operated the Moscow VIP subway system, and the secure government telephone system linking high-level government and CPSU officers; it became the Federal Protective Service (FPS) under Boris Yeltsin.
• The Fifteenth Directorate (Security of Government Installations)
• The Sixteenth Directorate (Communications Interception and SIGINT) upgraded from Department to Directorate, operated the Soviet Union’s government telephone and telegraph systems, thus ensuring successful interception of all communications of interest to the KGB.
• The Border Guards Directorate 245,000-man border security force dealt with smuggling along the Soviet Union’s borders with land, naval, and air contingents.
• The Operations and Technology Directorate encompasses all the laboratories and scientific research centers for creating bugging, taping, and shooting devices (includingLaboratory 12 which developed poisons and manufactured psychotropic substances).

Other sections

The KGB also contained these independent sections and detachments:

• KGB Personnel Department
• Secretariat of the KGB
• KGB Technical Support Staff
• KGB Finance Department
• KGB Archives
• Administration Department of the KGB, and
• The CPSU Committee.
• KGB OSNAZ, (Spetsnaz or Special Operations) detachments such as:
  • The Alpha Group
  • The Vympel, etc.; missions and command-control structures remain unknown.
• Kremlin Guard Force beyond control of the Ninth Guards Directorate. The uniformed Kremlin Guard Force were the bodyguard of the Presidium, et al.; it later became the Federal Protective Service (FPS).

The evolution of the KGB

(as depicted in The Sword and the Shield, page xv)

(as depicted in The Sword and the Shield, Appendix A)

See also

• Active measures
• Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies
• History of Soviet espionage
• Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), the post-Soviet successor organization to the KGB
• Foreign Intelligence Service Formerly the First Chief Directorate, now an independent agency.
• FAPSI Created from the Eighth and Sixteenth Chief Directorates of the KGB, now an independent agency.
• Federal Protective Service (FPS) Formerly the Ninth (Guards) Directorate
• Mitrokhin Archive (smuggled records of KGB naming spies, agents and plans)
• Numbers station
• Presidential Security Service Formerly the Kremlin Guard Force.
• SMERSH
• World Peace Council
• MVD
• KGB victim memorials
• Eastern Bloc politics

References

Sources

• Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, Gardners Books (2000), ISBN 0-14-028487-7 Basic Books (1999), hardcover,ISBN 0-465-00310-9; trade paperback (September, 2000), ISBN 0-465-00312-5
• John Barron, “KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents”,Reader’s Digest Press (1974), ISBN 0-88349-009-9
• Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, Basic Books (2005) hardcover, 677 pages ISBN 0465003117

Further reading

• Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia – Past, Present, and Future. Farrar Straus Giroux (1994) ISBN 0-374-52738-5.
• John Barron. KGB: The Secret Works Of Soviet Secret Agents. Bantam Books (1981) ISBN 0-553-23275-4
• Vadim J. Birstein. The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science. Westview Press (2004) ISBN 0-8133-4280-5 (describes a secret KGB lab engaged in development and testing of poisons)
• John Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB, Lexington Books (1988) ISBN 978-0669102581
• Sheymov, Victor (1993). Tower of Secrets. Naval Institute Press. pp. 420. ISBN 1-55750-764-3.
• Бережков, Василий Иванович (2004). Руководители Ленинградского управления КГБ : 1954-1991. Санкт-Петербург: Выбор, 2004. ISBN 5-93518-035-9 (in Russian)

External links

• KGB Information Center from FAS.org
• Chebrikov, Viktor M., et al, eds. Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti. (1977) [1]
• Slaves of KGB. 20th Century. The religion of betrayal (Russian) - book by Yuri Shchekochikhin