KGB Cold War Foreign Operations

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KGB Cold War Foreign Operations

• CHST 540
• May 26, 2005

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The Main Adversary

• First Chief Directorate KGB foreign
  intelligence 16 departments
• After WWII, US considered the main threat then
  UK and France
• Atomic espionage a high priority
• Soviet intelligence managed atomic bomb project
• Chief scientist Igor Kurchatov

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Illegals

• Renewed emphasis on illegals in 1950s
• Illegals run by the Fourth Directorate
• Canada used as staging post to the US
• Vilyam (Willie) Fisher (codename MARK) rebuilt
  Soviet intelligence in New York

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Walk-ins and legal residencies

• Walk-in someone who approaches an intelligence
  agency and offers their services
• Ted Hall (Manhattan Project) William Martin and
  Bernon Mitchell (National Security Agency) John
  Walker (US Department of Defense)
• Legal residencies KGB stations run under legal
  cover (i.e. staff worked in Soviet embassies and
  also gathering intelligence, etc.)

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Defections from Soviet intelligence

• To defect to forsake one cause, party, or
  nation for another
• 1945 Igor Gouzenko, cipher clerk in Ottawa
• 5 major defections in early 1954 (Khokhlov,
  Deryabin, Rastvorov, and the Petrovs)
• 1985 Oleg Gordievsky 1992 Vasili Mitrokhin

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Moles

• Definition A spy who operates from within an
  organization, especially a double agent operating
  against his or her own government from within its
  intelligence establishment.
• Soviet moles in Britain the Cambridge Five,
  George Blake, Melita Norwood (the spy who came
  in from the Co-op)
• Soviet moles in US Harry Dexter White, Alger
  Hiss, Aldrich Ames (CIA)

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Wet affairs

• Euphemism for sabotage, kidnapping, assassination
• Targeted defectors and dissidents
• - Stalins political opponents (until 1953)
• - Ukrainian nationalists and Russian émigrés
• - former military officers who defected,
  especially from the KGB
• Assassination of Georgi Markov in London (died
  Sept. 11, 1978)
• Many failures in wet affairs

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Wet affairs (contd)

• Also targeted other defectors, especially
  cultural icons

Some famous targets Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia
Makarova
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Technical intelligence

• Technology used narrowly to monitor and keep
  people under control
• Less able to report on major developments in
  politics, etc.
• Technical gap between US and USSR

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Support for freedom fighters and terrorist
groups

• Convenient proxies less immediate political risk
• Provided funding and weapons to IRA, Sandinistas
  (Nicaragua), Popular Front for the Liberation of
  Palestine (PFLP), etc.
• Very cautious at outset
• Upstaged by Cuban intelligence (DGI)

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• I think if we compare Hitler to Stalin, and the
  Gestapo to the KGB, the KGB was far more ruthless
  -- not because they killed far more people, but
  because they were indiscriminate in the selection
  of victims. The Nazis concentrated on Jews the
  Soviet KGB under Stalins directions was an
  internationalist organization it would kill
  anyone who would stand in the way of Stalin and
  his leadership.
• Oleg Kalugin, retired head of KGB foreign
  counterintelligence

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• After Stalins death, the KGB underwent serious
  reforms, but not serious enough to declare it a
  legitimate organization abiding by the laws of
  the state the Soviet system was a lawless
  system, and the KGB was a tool of lawlessness.
• Oleg Kalugin, retired head of KGB foreign
  counterintelligence

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For further info

• http//www.cwihp.si.edu (Cold War International
  History Project)
• Christopher Andrew and Julie Elkner, Stalin and
  Foreign Intelligence pp. 84-9 in Harold Shukman,
  ed. Redefining Stalinism (Frank Cass, 2003)
• Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The
  Sword and the Shield The Mitrokhin Archive and
  the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999)