KGB
The Committee for State Security, abbreviated as KGB was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, OGPU, and NKVD. Attached to the Council of Ministers, it was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, where the KGB was headquartered, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
The agency was a military service governed by army laws and regulations, in the same fashion as the Soviet Army or the MVD Internal Troops. While most of the KGB archives remain classified, two online documentary sources are available. Its main functions were foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence, operative-investigative activities, guarding the state border of the USSR, guarding the Soviet leadership, preserving the security of government communications as well as combating dissent and separatism within Soviet society.
On the 3rd of December 1991, the KGB was officially dissolved. It was succeeded in Russia by the Foreign Intelligence Service and what would later become the Federal Security Service. Following the 1991–1992 South Ossetia War, the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia established its own KGB, keeping the unreformed name. In addition, Belarus established its successor to the KGB of the Byelorussian SSR in 1991, the Belarusian KGB, also keeping the unreformed name.
History
in the MVD following the fall of Beria in June 1953 resulted in the formation of the KGB under Ivan Serov in March 1954.Secretary Leonid Brezhnev overthrew Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Brezhnev was concerned about ambitious spy-chiefs – the communist party had managed Serov's successor, the ambitious KGB Chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin, but Shelepin carried out Brezhnev's palace coup d'état against Khrushchev in 1964. Brezhnev sacked Shelepin's successor and protégé, Vladimir Semichastny as KGB Chairman and reassigned him to a sinecure in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Shelepin found himself demoted from the chairman of the Committee of Party and State Control in 1965 to Trade Union Council chairman.
In the 1980s, the Soviet Union glasnost provoked KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov to lead the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état in an attempt to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev. The failed coup d'état and the collapse of the USSR heralded the end of the KGB on 3 December 1991. The KGB's modern day successors are the FSB and the SVR.
In the US
Between the World Wars
The GRU recruited the ideological agent Julian Wadleigh, who became a State Department diplomat in 1936. The NKVD's first US operation was establishing the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov in 1934. Throughout, the Communist Party USA and its General Secretary Earl Browder, helped NKVD recruit Americans, working in government, business, and industry.Other important, low-level and high-level ideological agents were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department, the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, the economist Lauchlin Currie, and the "Silvermaster Group", headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster, in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare. Moreover, when Whittaker Chambers, formerly Alger Hiss's courier, approached the Roosevelt Government—to identify the Soviet spies Duggan, White, and others—he was ignored. Hence, during the Second World War —at the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences—Big Three Ally Joseph Stalin of the USSR, was better informed about the war affairs of his US and UK allies than they were about his.
Soviet espionage was at its most successful in collecting scientific and technological intelligence about advances in jet propulsion, radar and encryption, which impressed Moscow, but stealing atomic secrets was the capstone of NKVD espionage against Anglo–American science and technology. To wit, British Manhattan Project team physicist Klaus Fuchs was the main agent of the Rosenberg spy ring. In 1944, the New York City residency infiltrated top secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico by recruiting Theodore Hall, a 19-year-old Harvard physicist.
During the Cold War
The KGB failed to rebuild most of its US illegal resident networks. The aftermath of the Second Red Scare and the crisis in the CPUSA hampered recruitment. The last major illegal resident, Rudolf Abel, was betrayed by his assistant, Reino Häyhänen, in 1957.Recruitment then emphasised mercenary agents, an approach especially successful in scientific and technical espionage, since private industry practised lax internal security, unlike the US Government. One notable KGB success occurred in 1967, with the walk-in recruitment of US Navy Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker. Over eighteen years, Walker enabled Soviet Intelligence to decipher some one million US Navy messages, and track the US Navy.
In the late Cold War, the KGB was successful with intelligence coups in the cases of the mercenary walk-in recruits FBI counterspy Robert Hanssen and CIA Soviet Division officer Aldrich Ames.
In the Soviet Bloc
It was Cold War policy for the KGB of the Soviet Union and the secret services of the satellite states to extensively monitor public and private opinion, internal subversion and possible revolutionary plots in the Soviet Bloc. In supporting those Communist governments, the KGB was instrumental in crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of "Socialism with a Human Face" in Czechoslovakia, 1968.During the Hungarian revolt the founding member KGB chairman Ivan Serov personally supervised the post-invasion "normalization" of the country. Consequently, the KGB monitored the satellite state populations for occurrences of "harmful attitudes" and "hostile acts"; yet, stopping the Prague Spring, deposing a nationalist Communist government, was its greatest achievement.
The KGB prepared the Red Army's route by infiltrating Czechoslovakia with many illegal residents disguised as Western tourists. They were to gain the trust of and spy upon the most outspoken proponents of Alexander Dubček's new government. They were to plant subversive evidence, justifying the USSR's invasion, that right-wing groups—aided by Western intelligence agencies—were going to depose the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. Finally, the KGB prepared hardline, pro-USSR members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, such as Alois Indra and Vasiľ Škultéty, to assume power after the Red Army's invasion.
The KGB's Czech success in the 1960s was matched with the failed suppression of the Solidarity labour movement in 1980s Poland. The KGB had forecast political instability consequent to the election of Archbishop of Kraków Karol Wojtyla as the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, whom they had categorised as "subversive" because of his anti-Communist sermons against the one-party régime of the Polish United Workers' Party. Despite its accurate forecast of crisis, the PZPR hindered the KGB's destroying the nascent Solidarity-backed political movement, fearing explosive civil violence if they imposed the KGB-recommended martial law. Aided by their Polish counterpart, the Security Service, the KGB successfully infiltrated spies to Solidarity and the Catholic Church, and in Operation X co-ordinated the declaration of martial law with Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski and the Polish Communist Party; however, the vacillating, conciliatory Polish approach blunted KGB effectiveness—and Solidarity then fatally weakened the Communist Polish government in 1989.
Nadezhin saw that China threatened the USSR by claiming a historic right to regions under the USSR's control. China also wanted to displace the USSR as the leader of the international socialist movement. The KGB wanted to infiltrate the Chinese security services with "a sufficient number of agents". Top agents also believed that the KGB needed to do more to ensure the protection of the USSR from Chinese spies.
Notable operations
- With the Trust Operation, the OGPU successfully deceived some leaders of the right-wing, counter-revolutionary White Guards back to the USSR for execution.
- NKVD infiltrated and destroyed Trotskyist groups; in 1940, the Spanish agent Ramón Mercader assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico City.
- KGB favoured active measures, in discrediting the USSR's enemies.
- For war-time, KGB had ready sabotage operations arms caches in target countries.
In the 1960s, acting upon the information of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, the CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton believed KGB had moles in two key places—the counter-intelligence section of CIA and the FBI's counter-intelligence department—through whom they would know of, and control, US counter-espionage to protect the moles and hamper the detection and capture of other Communist spies. Moreover, KGB counter-intelligence vetted foreign intelligence sources, so that the moles might "officially" approve an anti-CIA double agent as trustworthy. In retrospect, the captures of the moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen proved that Angleton, though ignored as over-aggressive, was correct, despite the fact that it cost him his job at CIA, which he left in 1975.
In the mid-1970s, the KGB tried to secretly buy three banks in northern California to gain access to high-technology secrets. Their efforts were thwarted by the CIA. The banks were Peninsula National Bank in Burlingame, the First National Bank of Fresno, and the Tahoe National Bank in South Lake Tahoe. These banks had made numerous loans to advanced technology companies and had many of their officers and directors as clients. The KGB used the Moscow Narodny Bank to finance the acquisition, and an intermediary, Singaporean businessman Amos Dawe, as the frontman.