KGB

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The KGB, or Committee for State Security, was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. Its name in Russian, Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, carries a weight that still echoes through intelligence services worldwide. A Time magazine article in 1983 called it the world's most effective information-gathering organisation. What made it so formidable? How did a single agency combine foreign espionage, counter-intelligence, border security, political surveillance, and secret police functions under one roof? And when the Soviet empire finally collapsed, what became of the organisation that had protected and enforced it for nearly four decades?

• 2. Born from the Secret Police

  ›

  Ivan Serov stood at the head of a new institution in March 1954, formed from the wreckage of Soviet security that had come before. The KGB was the direct successor to earlier Soviet secret police organs, including the Cheka, the OGPU, and the NKVD, each notorious in its own era for internal repression and political terror. The new agency attached itself to the Council of Ministers, giving it the status of a chief government agency with reach across all fifteen Soviet republics. Each republic maintained its own KGB affiliate, almost completely mirroring the structure of the central organisation in Moscow. Serov's tenure would not last long. His successor, Alexander Shelepin, proved dangerously ambitious, helping Leonid Brezhnev overthrow Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, despite Shelepin no longer holding the chairmanship by that point.

• 3. A Machine with Many Directorates

  ›

  The 9th Chief Directorate alone maintained a 40,000-man uniformed bodyguard force to protect party leaders and their families. That single unit also guarded critical government installations, including nuclear weapons facilities, operated the Moscow VIP subway, and ran secure government and party telephony. The overall structure of the KGB was vast. Its organs covered foreign espionage, counter-intelligence, military counter-intelligence, transportation security, political censorship, economic intelligence, surveillance of Soviet nationals and foreigners, and cryptography. Its troops were entirely separate from the Soviet armed forces, comprising Border Troops, Governmental Signals Troops, Special Service Troops handling SIGINT and cryptography, and elite Spetsnaz units including Alpha Group, Vympel, and the Zenith Group. The 5th Directorate handled censorship and internal suppression of artistic, religious, and political dissent. It was renamed Directorate Z in 1989, rebranded as protecting the constitutional order.

• 4. Tradecraft and the Spy's Double Life

  ›

  A KGB illegal resident arriving in the United States might enter the country via the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, using a false identity built around either a living participant to the deception or the stolen identity of a dead person. The agency called these the "live double" and the "dead double" techniques. In its early years, the KGB valued illegal spies above legal ones, because illegal residents could infiltrate targets without the protective barrier of a diplomatic posting. Legal spies, based at Soviet embassies and consulates, enjoyed diplomatic immunity; if caught, the worst outcome was expulsion from the country. Illegal spies had no such protection. The KGB organised its espionage work into four types: political, economic, military-strategic, and disinformation effected through what it called active measures. Tradecraft involved photographing documents, maintaining code-names, using dead letter boxes, and planting agents provocateurs inside target groups to sow internal division.

• 5. American Networks and Stolen Secrets

  ›

  In 1934, the NKVD established both a legal residency under Boris Bazarov and an illegal residency under Iskhak Akhmerov in the United States. The Communist Party USA and its General Secretary Earl Browder helped recruit Americans across government, business, and industry. Among the most valuable were the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, the economist Lauchlin Currie, who served as an advisor to President Roosevelt, and the Silvermaster Group, headed by Greg Silvermaster, operating inside the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare. The capstone of this effort was the theft of atomic secrets. British Manhattan Project physicist Klaus Fuchs, who was recruited by GRU in 1941, became a key figure in the Rosenberg spy ring. In 1944, the KGB's New York City residency recruited Theodore Hall, a 19-year-old Harvard physicist, and placed him inside Los Alamos National Laboratory. When Whittaker Chambers, a courier for Alger Hiss, approached the Roosevelt administration to name the Soviet spies, he was ignored. The result was that Joseph Stalin arrived at the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences better informed about American and British war plans than either ally was about his.

• 6. Cold War Coups and Failures

  ›

  In 1967, US Navy Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker walked in and offered his services to the KGB. Over the following eighteen years, Walker enabled Soviet intelligence to decipher approximately one million US Navy messages and track the movement of the fleet. He was among the most damaging spies in American military history. Two other walk-in recruits caused comparable damage. FBI counterspy Robert Hanssen began working for the KGB in 1979 and continued until 2001. CIA Soviet Division officer Aldrich Ames was recruited in 1985 and was active until 1994. Both confirmed what KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had told CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton in the 1960s: that the KGB had moles inside both the CIA's counter-intelligence section and the FBI's counter-intelligence department. Angleton was dismissed as overaggressive and left his post at the CIA in 1975. The later captures of Ames and Hanssen proved he had been right. In the mid-1970s, the KGB attempted a different kind of penetration. It tried to secretly purchase three banks in Northern California, including the Peninsula National Bank in Burlingame, the First National Bank of Fresno, and the Tahoe National Bank in South Lake Tahoe, using the Moscow Narodny Bank and a Singaporean businessman named Amos Dawe as a frontman. The CIA thwarted the scheme before any acquisition was completed.

• 7. Crushing Dissent in the Bloc

  ›

  KGB Chairman Ivan Serov personally supervised the post-invasion normalisation of Hungary following the 1956 revolt, travelling to Budapest to oversee the restoration of Soviet control. More elaborate was the operation against Czechoslovakia in 1968. Before the Red Army moved, the KGB flooded the country with illegal residents disguised as Western tourists. Their tasks were threefold: win the confidence of figures close to Alexander Dubcek's reform government; plant fabricated evidence suggesting Western intelligence agencies were sponsoring right-wing groups to overthrow Communist rule; and prepare hardline loyalists inside the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, including Alois Indra and Vasil Skultety, to assume power after the invasion. Poland in the 1980s proved harder. The KGB had accurately forecast political instability following the election of Archbishop of Krakow Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II, categorising him as subversive because of his anti-Communist sermons. Its recommended remedy, the imposition of martial law, was resisted by the Polish United Workers' Party, which feared explosive civil violence. When martial law was eventually declared under General Wojciech Jaruzelski through Operation X, the Polish Communist government's conciliatory approach blunted the crackdown, and the Solidarity movement went on to fatally weaken Communist rule in 1989.

• 8. The Fall

  ›

  KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, in office since 1988, led the August 1991 coup attempt against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, convinced that the era of glasnost was destroying the state his organisation existed to protect. The coup collapsed. On the 3rd of December 1991, the KGB was officially dissolved. Its immediate successors included the Federal Security Agency of the RSFSR, the Inter-Republican Security Service, the Central Intelligence Service, and the Committee for the Protection of the State Border. By 1993, those bodies consolidated into the Federal Counterintelligence Service, which itself became the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the FSB, in a direct line of institutional descent from the KGB. Two former Soviet republics chose a different path. Belarus established its own successor to the KGB of the Byelorussian SSR and kept the original name unchanged. The self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia did the same, establishing a body that still carries the name KGB today.