Everything about Kgb totally explained
KGB (
transliteration of "КГБ") is the
Russian abbreviation for
Committee for State Security (;
Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), 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. Then, the official name of this organization was changed to
FSB (ФСБ, Федеральная служба безопасности), although the word KGB may apply to the secret police of various epochs.
The KGB's operational domain encompassed functions and powers like those exercised by the
United States'
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the
counter-intelligence (internal security) division of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the
National Security Agency, the
Federal Protective Service, and the
Secret Service in the United States, or by the twin organizations
MI5 and
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in the
United Kingdom.
On
December 21 1995, the
President of Russia Boris Yeltsin signed the decree that disbanded the KGB, which was then substituted by the
FSB, the current domestic state security agency of the Russian Federation.
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.
Most of the information about the KGB remains secret, although there are two sources of documents of KGB available online
.
Origin of the KGB
The first of the forerunners of the KGB, the
Cheka, was established on
December 20,
1917. It replaced the
Tsarist Okhranka. 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. 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.
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 regarding the
Concorde, which the USSR copied for the
Tupolev Tu-144) 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 consider the KGB as the then world's most effective information-gathering organization. Like most other intelligence agencies, the KGB operated both
legal and illegal residencies in its target countries. Legal residencies operated out of the local Soviet embassy under the cover of
diplomatic immunity, and legal residents were thus free from prosecution if discovered to be spying. At best, the legal resident’s position to gather information would be compromised, and either the KGB would have to recall the resident or the resident would be expelled by the host country. In contrast, illegal residents operated without the benefit of immunity from prosecution (similar to the CIA's
non-official cover). The KGB, especially in its early years, often placed more worth in its illegal residencies than its legal ones, primarily due to the ability of illegals to more easily operate undercover and thus infiltrate KGB targets.
Using the ideological attraction of the first worker-peasant state and later on the fight against
fascism and the
Great Patriotic War, the Soviets successfully recruited many high-level spies. However, events such as the 1939 signing of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and the 1968 Prague Spring mostly dried up ideological recruitment; young radicals were repelled by the
Red Army’s violations of sovereignty and
Brezhnev’s geriatric 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), and a section dealing with émigrés (EM 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 wasn't even allowed to enter KGB headquarters.
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 or
assassination operations.
History of the KGB
The evolution 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 1947 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 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 Control into 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, the last of the KGB chairmen, 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 the Leningrad University. He later worked for the KGB in East Germany.
KGB operations within the United States
Pre-Cold War
As the Soviet regime 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, and
Potsdam Conferences during
World War II, Stalin was vastly more knowledgable about what cards the United States held in its bargaining deck than Roosevelt, or his successor
Truman, 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. The
New 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
The KGB attempted, largely without success, to rebuild its illegal residencies in the United States during the Cold War. The residual effects of the
Red 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, Ames, and Hanssen began their careers by simply walking into the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, and volunteering their positions in exchange for money. They were paid millions of dollars each for their efforts.
When Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963, some observers suspected that he was acting at the behest of the KGB. But investigators were never able to find evidence to support this. However, a 2007 analysis of the 1964 murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Kennedy's main girlfriend and confidante during his White House years, indicated that it had been arranged by the KGB. A statement by her ex-husband, former senior CIA official Cord Meyer, then was reinterpreted to mean that the KGB had also organized the assassination of Kennedy, the motive being revenge for the humiliation of the USSR in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
KGB operations in the Soviet Bloc
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 to
pop 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 didn't leave untouched the KGB's own agents, however; the famous defector
Oleg 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
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 all and every religious movements which rejected the Communist Party and didn't worship the Secretary General were a threat to the
Soviet state that must be challenged and 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
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 by
Aleksandr 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 the
Nobel 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
- 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 .
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."
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 terrestrial, naval, and air force contingents.
The Operations and Technology Directorate encompasses all the laboratories and scientific research centers for creating bugging, taping, and shooting devices (including Laboratory 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)
| Dates |
Organization |
| December 1917 |
Cheka |
| February 1922 |
Incorporated into NKVD (as GPU) |
| July 1923 |
OGPU |
| July 1934 |
Reincorporated in NKVD (as GUGB) |
| February 1941 |
NKGB |
| July 1941 |
Reincorporated in NKVD (as GUGB) |
| April 1943 |
NKGB |
| March 1946 |
MGB |
| October 1947 – November 1951 |
Foreign Intelligence transferred to KI |
| March 1953 |
Combined with MVD to form enlarged MVD |
| March 1954 |
KGB |
| November 1991 |
FSK |
| April 1995 |
FSB |
(as depicted in The Sword and the Shield, Appendix A)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Kgb'.
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