KGB

The decree that created the KGB is one sentence long. On 13 March 1954 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet resolved: "Form a Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers of the USSR." It was signed by Kliment Voroshilov.¹ Behind that sentence lay a year of upheaval after Stalin's death and the fall of the security chief Lavrenty Beria, which ended with state security split from the police ministry and placed under tighter Communist Party control.⁷

The KGB was the last in a line of Soviet political police and intelligence services that began with the Cheka in 1917. For the period from 1917 to 1954, including the OGPU, the NKVD and the MGB, see Cheka–NKVD.⁷

What it did

Unlike Western services, the KGB combined almost every security function. Its First Chief Directorate ran foreign intelligence, including the Illegals and legends of Directorate S, officers living abroad under false identities. The Second Chief Directorate handled counter-intelligence at home; other directorates covered military counter-intelligence, the border troops, codes and ciphers, and the guarding of the leadership.^7,9 A Fifth Directorate, created on 25 July 1967 to combat "ideological subversion," policed dissent among writers, scientists, religious believers and national minorities.^7,9 According to Vadim Bakatin, its last chairman, the KGB employed about 480,000 people in August 1991.⁸

It was not the Soviet Union's only intelligence service. Military intelligence remained with the separate GRU.⁷

Chairmen

Ivan Serov led the KGB from 1954 to 1958, followed by Aleksandr Shelepin (1958–1961), Vladimir Semichastny (1961–1967), Yuri Andropov (1967–1982), Vitaly Fedorchuk (1982), Viktor Chebrikov (1982–1988), Vladimir Kryuchkov (1988–1991) and Bakatin (August–December 1991).⁸ Andropov's fifteen years made the KGB more professional and more powerful, and in 1982 he became party leader. In July 1978 the agency was renamed the KGB of the USSR and given the status of a state committee.⁸

Operations abroad

The KGB inherited the networks built by its predecessors, including the surviving members of the The Cambridge Five, and continued to run illegals in the West. The The Portland spy ring in Britain was run by one, Konon Molody, and Rudolf Abel was arrested in New York in 1957 (see The Hollow Nickel case). Later American cases such as the The Walker spy ring and the agents exposed in the 1985, the Year of the Spy involved Americans who volunteered for money.⁷

It also killed. A CIA memorandum prepared in February 1964 for the Warren Commission, and published in 1975, described the KGB's "executive action" capability and the case of Bogdan Stashinsky, a KGB officer who surrendered to the West German police in November 1961 and said he had killed the Ukrainian émigré leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera on official orders.⁴ The memorandum is careful about the limits of its knowledge, noting that Soviet intelligence was "undoubtedly credited with successes it actually has not achieved."⁴

Disinformation, or "active measures," was a third strand (see Operation INFEKTION).⁷ From 1981, fearing a surprise Western nuclear attack, the KGB and GRU ran Operation RYAN, the background to the war scare around Able Archer 83 and the war scare.⁸

At home and in the bloc

Serov personally supervised the "normalization" of Hungary after the Soviet army crushed the 1956 uprising, and KGB officers posing as Western tourists helped prepare the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.⁷ At home it pursued dissidents, from writers to human-rights activists. It worked closely with Eastern European services such as the Stasi (Ministry for State Security) and the StB.

Western services pushed back. In 1971 Britain expelled 105 Soviet intelligence officers in Operation FOOT, which MI5 regards as the turning point of its Cold War counter-espionage.⁵ The KGB was penetrated in turn. MI5 credits Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer in the London residency working for British intelligence, with the information that caught the MI5 officer Michael Bettaney, who had offered secrets to the KGB in 1983.⁵ French intelligence had its own source inside the KGB; see Vladimir Vetrov (FAREWELL) and the The Farewell Dossier.

The end

Kryuchkov was among the leaders of the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 and was arrested when it collapsed.⁸ The KGB was then broken up. On 26 November 1991 Boris Yeltsin turned the Russian republic's KGB into a Federal Security Agency.³ On 3 December 1991 a USSR law abolished the KGB and created in its place, for a transitional period, an Inter-Republican Security Service, a Central Intelligence Service and a border-guard committee, with republican security bodies passing to the republics.² The intelligence service became Russia's SVR and the domestic service, after several changes, the FSB.⁷

Operations in these files

OPERATION · 1934 1934 – 23 January 1963 The Cambridge Five Five Cambridge graduates recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s reached MI6, MI5, the Foreign Office and Bletchley Park, and were exposed one by one between 1951 and 1990. 1951 – 22 March 1961 The Portland spy ring A Soviet network that took naval secrets from the Admiralty's underwater research establishment at Portland, run by the KGB illegal 'Gordon Lonsdale' and broken up by MI5 in January 1961. May – November 1962 Operation Anadyr The Soviet General Staff's 1962 plan to move nuclear missiles and some 42,000 troops to Cuba in secret, and the deception that hid it from US intelligence until a U-2 flight on 14 October. 5 May 1964 – March 1965 Operation Neptune (1964) In 1964 Czechoslovak intelligence sank chests of blank paper in a Bohemian lake, staged their discovery for television, then filled the story with Nazi files from Moscow to press West Germany over war crimes. December 1967 – 20 May 1985 The Walker spy ring For seventeen years US Navy communications specialist John Walker sold cipher keys and secret messages to the KGB, later recruiting a friend, his brother and his son. The FBI arrested him in May 1985. November 1979 – 18 February 2001 The Hanssen case FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without revealing his name. Caught at a Virginia dead drop in 2001, he was the most damaging spy in FBI history. May 1981 – April 1989 Operation RYAN The KGB–GRU intelligence alert launched in May 1981 to detect a feared American nuclear first strike, its indicator lists, and the long argument over whether Moscow's fear was real. OPERATION · 1983 17 July 1983 – 1989 Operation INFEKTION The 1980s KGB and Stasi campaign to persuade the world that the US military had created AIDS at Fort Detrick: how the story was planted, spread and disowned, and what its codename really was. 2–11 November 1983 Able Archer 83 and the war scare A routine NATO nuclear-release exercise in November 1983 met an unusual Soviet military alert. What the declassified record shows about the reaction, and why historians still disagree on the danger. 16 April – 25 November 1985 1985, the Year of the Spy In 1985 the FBI arrested a string of Americans spying for Moscow, Beijing and Israel, a KGB officer defected and re-defected, and the CIA lost almost every agent it had inside Soviet intelligence.

Operations against the KGB

1 February 1943 – 1 October 1980 The Venona project The US Army codebreaking program that, from 1943 to 1980, read parts of some 2,900 wartime Soviet intelligence cables and exposed Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and Donald Maclean. OPERATION · 1949 1949 – 1954 Operation Redsox REDSOX was the CIA's early Cold War program for parachuting and smuggling émigré agents into the Soviet Union. It produced little intelligence and cost many agents their lives. 22 June 1953 – 15 November 1957 The Hollow Nickel case A Brooklyn newsboy's trick nickel held a coded message the FBI could not read for four years, until a drunken KGB defector explained it and led agents to the illegal known as Rudolf Abel. December 1953 – 22 April 1956 Operation Gold (the Berlin Tunnel) From 1955 to 1956 the CIA and British SIS tapped Soviet military phone and teleprinter cables in East Berlin from a 1,476-foot tunnel, unaware that a KGB mole had betrayed the plan before digging began. 20 April 1961 – 22 October 1962 IRONBARK: the Penkovsky case How a disaffected GRU colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, fed the CIA and MI6 Soviet missile manuals in 1961–62, and how his IRONBARK material shaped US judgments in the Cuban Missile Crisis. 3 July 1979 – 1992 Operation Cyclone The CIA's covert program to arm the Afghan resistance, from a $695,000 non-lethal finding in July 1979 through Soviet-made rifles via Pakistan to Stinger missiles, and what the record says about bin Laden. OPERATION · 1981 February 1981 – 23 January 1985 The Farewell Dossier In 1981–82 a disaffected KGB officer, Vladimir Vetrov, gave French counterintelligence thousands of documents on Soviet technology theft. The West expelled scores of Soviet officers and fed Moscow doctored technology.