Foreign Intelligence Service (Russia)

• 1. A Visitor Named Blake

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  Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, known as the SVR, held its 80th anniversary celebration in Moscow. The venue was the agency's own headquarters in the Yasenevo District. Vladimir Putin attended to meet former KGB and SVR chiefs: Vladimir Kryuchkov, Leonid Shebarshin, Yevgeny Primakov, and Vyacheslav Trubnikov. Also present was George Blake, a British double agent and former Soviet spy. Blake's attendance at Yasenevo captures something essential about the SVR's self-image. The service does not see itself as a post-Soviet creation. It presents itself as the living continuation of a century of Russian and Soviet intelligence work. Russia's civilian foreign intelligence arm has its director reporting directly to the president. It operates apart from the Federal Security Service, which handles security within Russian borders. The SVR is tasked with intelligence and espionage exclusively beyond those borders. As of 1997, its military counterpart, the Main Intelligence Directorate known as the GRU, reportedly deployed six times as many spies in foreign countries. What makes the SVR distinctive if not its size? What kind of authority has it accumulated, and over whom does it really answer?

• 2. From Cheka to SVR

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  Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, created the Foreign Department on the 20th of December 1920. The SVR traces its own institutional origins to this moment. The department's Russian name was Inostranny Otdel, abbreviated INO. Its mandate covered collecting foreign intelligence and, from the beginning, liquidating defectors, emigres, and declared enemies of the Soviet state. On the 6th of February 1922, the Foreign Department moved into a renamed organization called the State Political Directorate, or GPU. By December 1923, foreign intelligence had shifted again to the Foreign Department of the Joint State Political Administration, known as the OGPU. The OGPU was reincorporated into the NKVD in July 1934. The NKVD became the KGB in 1954. The KGB split in 1991, producing both the SVR and the FSB. To mark this lineage, the SVR published a CD-ROM in 1996 titled "Russian Foreign Intelligence: VChK-KGB-SVR." The publication presented all these successive organizations as a single continuous institution. The CD-ROM claimed to offer "a professional view on the history and development of one of the most powerful secret services in the world." Former SVR Director Sergei Lebedev once summarized this history in a blunter phrase. "There has not been any place on the planet," Lebedev said, "where a KGB officer has not been."

• 3. Written by Its Own Hand

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  The law governing the SVR was written by SVR leadership itself and adopted in August 1992. That arrangement allowed the service to include a notable provision. Career personnel could occupy positions in government ministries, departments, establishments, enterprises, and organizations without disclosing their affiliation with foreign intelligence. A second, more comprehensive law followed. Passed by the State Duma and the Federation Council in late 1995, it awaited the president's signature. Boris Yeltsin signed it into effect on the 10th of January 1996. The 1996 law gave formal shape to what the SVR was permitted to do. Its authorized activities included conducting military, strategic, economic, scientific, and technological espionage. The service could carry out electronic surveillance in foreign countries and conduct joint operations with foreign security services. The SVR was also empowered to protect Russian government officials and their families stationed abroad. The service sends the Russian president daily intelligence digests, comparable to the President's Daily Brief produced by the United States Intelligence Community. One provision sets the SVR's role apart: unlike American intelligence agencies, the SVR recommends to the president which policy options are preferable. Since 2012, the president has been able to issue secret orders directly to the SVR without consulting the Federal Assembly. Any information pertaining to the specific identities of SVR staff officers is a state secret. Since September 2018, that protection has extended to non-staff personnel as well, covering agents, informants, and cooptees.

• 4. Outmaneuvering the Foreign Ministry

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  Yevgeni Primakov served as director of the SVR during Boris Yeltsin's presidency. From that position, he published public warnings to the West not to interfere in Russia's efforts to unify with former Soviet republics. He also attacked NATO enlargement, calling it a threat to Russian security. These were not positions taken by the foreign ministry. They contradicted what the foreign minister, Andrey Kozyrev, was arguing at the time. The rivalry ended decisively in January 1996. Primakov replaced Kozyrev as foreign minister and brought a number of SVR officers with him into that ministry. In September 1999, Boris Yeltsin made a public admission. The SVR, he conceded, played a greater role in shaping Russian foreign policy than the Foreign Ministry itself. The SVR reportedly defined Russia's position on transferring nuclear technologies to Iran. It also shaped the Russian stance on NATO enlargement and on modifying the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The SVR additionally used selectively declassified documents to attempt to justify the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states during World War II.

• 5. Illegals and the Emigre Net

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  From the end of the 1980s, the KGB and later the SVR developed what former officer Kouzminov called "a second echelon" of agents. These were not operatives running deep-cover identities. They were legal immigrants working openly in foreign countries, among them scientists and other professionals. An SVR officer who defected to Britain in 1996 put the total at several thousand agents and intelligence officers deployed abroad. Some lived under deep cover as illegals.

  Analyst Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy described a fundamental shift in how the SVR recruits. Communist ideology was once what he called "the first pillar" of KGB recruitment. It no longer functions as a reliable draw. "The second pillar of recruitment is love for Russia," Preobrazhenskiy said. Russian immigrants in Western countries retain a particular emotional connection to their homeland, and the SVR built a specific division to exploit it. That division regularly holds conferences for Russian immigrants abroad. Vladimir Putin has been known to attend these gatherings personally.

  Former FSB officer Aleksander Litvinenko described the recruitment approach. Officers contact the target, usually at their place of residence, and "make an effort to reach an understanding." The SVR's official website states that only Russian citizens without dual citizenship may formally become agents. In June 2010, the scale of the illegals program became visible. The FBI arrested ten individuals allegedly running long-term deep-cover operations aimed at penetrating policy circles in the United States government. An eleventh was caught in Cyprus. A twelfth, Alexey Karetnikov, was later deported. Among those arrested on the 28th of June 2010 were Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko. The entire group had been betrayed by Colonel Alexander Poteyev, an SVR defector who served as deputy head of the illegal spies directorate. An agent named Christopher Metsos, charged with supporting the network, was never captured.

• 6. Americans as Sources

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  Between 1994 and 2001, five high-profile Americans were exposed as sources for Russian intelligence agencies. Aldrich Hazen Ames began passing classified material to the Soviet Union in April 1985. When charged in February 1994, it emerged his information had led to the execution of at least nine United States agents working in Russia. He and his wife pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit espionage and to evading taxes. Ames was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Harold James Nicholson, a senior CIA officer, was arrested in November 1996 while attempting to take top secret documents out of the United States. He had begun spying for Russia in 1994. Nicholson pleaded guilty in 1997 and was sentenced to more than 23 years. Earl Edwin Pitts was charged in December 1996 with providing top secret documents to Russia from 1987 to 1992. He pleaded guilty to two counts of espionage in 1997 and was sentenced to 27 years. Robert Philip Hanssen spent 27 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was arrested in February 2001 for conducting more than 15 years of espionage. Hanssen passed thousands of pages of classified documents on nuclear war defenses. He also exposed three Russian agents working for the United States; two of those agents were tried and executed. He pleaded guilty and received a life sentence. George Trofimoff was arrested in June 2000 for spying since about 1969. A naturalized American of Russian parentage, he had retired as a colonel in the United States Army Reserve. He was the highest-ranking military officer ever accused of espionage and was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2003, it was reported that the SVR had trained Iraqi spies when Russia collaborated with Saddam Hussein.

• 7. Active Measures and False Narratives

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  Sergei Tretyakov served as a senior SVR officer under cover at Russia's UN mission in New York. In that role, he often dispatched intelligence officers to branches of the New York Public Library. Working there without revealing their identities, they placed propaganda and disinformation on educational websites and sent material to American broadcasters. The articles and studies they distributed were generated by Russian experts employed by the SVR. Tretyakov named the goals explicitly: building a positive image of Russia and whitewashing its foreign policy. A secondary aim was to promote anti-American sentiment and cause dissension inside the United States. Tretyakov defected to the United States with his family in October 2000.

  The 2025 Moldovan parliamentary election became the occasion for a notable SVR false claim. The SVR announced that the European Union was planning to use NATO forces to occupy Moldova. It stated that NATO forces were already positioned in Romania near the Moldovan border, with plans for a military landing near Odesa in Ukraine. No such intervention followed. The SVR characterized Serbia's anti-corruption protests as a EU plot for a "Maidan" in Serbia. Regarding the 2024-2025 Georgian protests, the SVR alleged the United States was plotting a coup ahead of the 2024 parliamentary election. The SVR also claimed the EU was funding student protesters in Georgia. In May 2023, the United States Treasury sanctioned the SVR under Executive Order 14024. The designation cited the SVR as a political subdivision of the Russian government.

• 8. Zaslon and Covert Violence

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  A secret decree dated the 23rd of March 1997 established Zaslon, a special forces unit within the SVR. By 1998, Zaslon had reached full operational readiness. Units were sent to Russian embassies in Baghdad, in Iran, and in Damascus, where their duties included protecting diplomats. The unit drew criticism after the 19th of December 2016, when Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, was shot and killed in Ankara.

  In September 2003, British authorities speedily granted asylum to Boris Berezovsky. Reports had emerged of an SVR agent in London preparing to assassinate him with a binary weapon. The 2004 killing of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar was carried out by GRU officers. Those officers reportedly claimed that SVR agents failed to evacuate them in time. As a result, they were arrested by Qatari authorities. The poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 brought denials from the SVR. An SVR spokesperson, asked about Litvinenko's fate, offered a brief response: "May God give him health."