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Guide to Soviet and Russian Intelligence Services from AFIO's From AFIO's The Intelligencer Association of Former Intelligence Officers Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies 6723 Whittier Avenue, Suite 200 Volume 18 • Number 2 • $15 single copy price Winter/Spring 2011 McLean, Virginia 22101 © 2011 AFIO - Association of Former Intelligence Officers, All Rights Reserved. Web: www.afio.com, E-mail: [email protected] Yet, despite successes, the Okhrana was as feck- less an organization as the empire it served. Many Okhrana agents continued to work as terrorists. One agent masterminded the killing of tsarist min- isters, another assassinated a prime minister. Most infamously, an Okhrana agent, Father Gapon led a march on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1905 Guide to that was met with gunfire. More than 100 once loyal workers and their families died. Widely feared inside Soviet and Russian and outside Russia, the Okhrana could not prevent Intelligence Services the collapse of the monarchy in the revolution of 1917. Robert W. Pringle FROM THE CHEKA TO THE KGB Intelligence and security services have played a critical role in Russian domestic and foreign policy Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, believed for more than a century. The tsars, general secretar- that a revolution without a firing squad was doomed ies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and to failure. He asked Polish revolutionary Feliks Dzer- post-Soviet leaders have viewed the services as crucial zhinsky to head the Extraordinary Commission for in coping with dissenters, punishing enemies at home Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage (CHEKA) and abroad, gathering intelligence, and serving as a in 1918. The CHEKA crushed all opposition to the new signaling channel with foreign governments and ter- regime, executing more than 143,000 men and women, rorist organizations. intellectuals, capitalists, and priests between 1918 and 1921 (compared to less than 12,000 executions between 1881 and 1917). Dzerzhinsky grew the CHEKA into a THE TSARIST LEGACY security empire with more than 250,000 employees (Chekists) with responsibility for foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, domestic security, and border The Okhrana was created in 1882 after the assas- control. The CHEKA oversaw the Gulag system of sination of Tsar Aleksandr II to penetrate opposition forced labor camps. One of his great achievements political movements at home and abroad, and con- was the creation of The Trust, a fabricated anti-Bol- duct pogroms shevik under- against the Evolution of Soviet and post-Soviet Intelligence and Security Services ground used e m p i r e ’ s 1917 Cheka All-Russian Extraordinary Committee to Combat as a deception Jewish Counterrevolution and Sabotage against White minority. 1922 NKVD – GPU People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs Russian émi- The Okhrana – State Political Directorate grés and for- recruited 1923 OGPU All Union State Political Directorate eign intel- hundreds of ligence ser- i n f or me r s, 1934 GUGB Main Directorate for State Security vices, which p ene t r at e d 1941 NKGB People’s Commissariat for State Security operated revolutionary 1946 MGB Ministry for State Security f r om 1921 movements, 1953 MVD Ministry of Internal Affairs until 1926. including the 1954 KGB Committee for State Security Lenin’s Social Revolu- successor tionaries and 1991 SVR Foreign Intelligence Service FSB Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and disciple, the Bolshe- FSO Federal Protective Service Joseph Stalin, viks. The Bol- g r a d u a l l y shevik leader took over the security services between 1924 and 1937. of the Russian Duma, Roman Malinovskiy, was an Its leaders, Henry Yagoda and later Nikolai Yezhov, Okhrana agent who fooled the Bolshevik leader Vladi- used the services against insurgents in Central Asia, mir Lenin for more than a decade. Winter/Spring 2011 Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies Page 51 peasants resisting collectivization, political oppo- disintegrated when a key agent confessed to the FBI nents, and ultimately some of Stalin’s comrades within and a GRU code clerk defected in Canada. Western the Communist Party. Stalin had most of Lenin’s counterintelligence got better. By the late 1940s the remaining deputies executed. In mass show trials United Stated has decrypted and analyzed more than some confessed to treason and even the attempted 2,400 coded NKGB messages (codenamed VENONA), assassination of Lenin. At the same time, the police leading to the arrest of spies such as Julius and Ethel purged the Red Army, arresting and executing over 650 Rosenberg. general officers and more than 30,000 others. During In his last years Stalin was increasingly paranoid. the Yezhovshchina, the time of Yezhov, more than By early 1953, there were more than 5,000,000 people 1,500,000 were arrested and at least 750,000 were shot, in the gulag or internal exile. In 1950, several of the died under interrogation, or perished in the Gulag. In Party’s young stars were purged, and in 1952-53, Stalin late 1938, Stalin restored some order, replacing Yezhov turned against the country’s Jews. The “Doctors’ Plot” with Lavrenty Beria, a competent and cruel Georgian was concocted by the MVD to implicate thousands of Chekist. Yezhov was executed in 1940. leading Jews as Anglo-American spies. Stalin’s death Both the NKVD and the GRU (the military intel- on March 1, 1953, saved many of these people. ligence service of the Soviet General Staff) provided Stalin’s successors faced a vexing question, how foreign intelligence for the Soviet leadership. Case to disengage from the Stalinist system without losing officers from both services, many serving under power. They agreed that Beria had to go. He was non-official cover (“illegals”) ran spies in the British, arrested in July 1953 and shot with some of his clos- French, German, American and Japanese government. est associates five months later. Nikita Khrushchev, Most spied for ideological reasons. Spies provided the new General Secretary of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union with critical military, scientific, and attempted to cut the Gordian knot. More than a mil- industrial technologies and targeted enemies of the lion were released from the camps and exile; Stalin’s regime. In 1940, an NKVD assassin murdered Leon crimes were denounced; and the security police were Trotsky, Stalin’s last living rival in Mexico. renamed the KGB (Committee of State Security) and Before Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, placed under Party control. Soviet spies penetrated both the German military and Nazi political bureaucracy. Stalin received more than 100 warnings from these agents of German plans THE KGB AND THE LAST YEARS OF to invade the motherland—information he largely THE SOVIET UNION rejected. However, following this spectacular error, Stalin became a sophisticated consumer of intel- The KGB evolved into an extensive intelligence ligence. Soviet spy rings such as the Rote Kapelle community, which incorporated the functions of the (Red Orchestra) operating in France, Belgium, and American CIA, FBI, NSA, and U.S. military intelli- Germany provided detailed information on German gence. By 1989, the KGB was the largest intelligence/ strategy and weapons. Spies in London and Wash- security service in the world with a staff of more ington also provided detailed information about the than 480,000. This included approximately 250,000 allies’ plans. Border Guards, which had armor fighting vehicles In one of the greatest successes in history, the and helicopters. The other important components of NKGB and GRU stole critical information about the the KGB were: first atom bomb, accelerating the Soviets nuclear capa- The First Chief Directorate, responsible for bilities by years. Soviet spies in London, Washington, foreign intelligence. Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge provided details about The Second Chief Directorate, responsible many aspects of the bomb. According to declassified for internal security and counterintelligence. U.S. intelligence reports, the Soviets had six agents in The Fifth Directorate, responsible for surveil- Los Alamos—only three of whom were ever identified. lance of churches and dissidents. By the end of World War II, Stalin had more than The Eighth and Sixteenth Chief Directorates, 600 agents in the United States, London and Ottawa. responsible for communications security and They had penetrated the White House, State and War codebreaking. Departments, and both the British and American intel- ligence services. (By contrast the West had no agents During the last decades of the Soviet Union, the inside the Soviet Union.) Yet, much of this apparatus KGB became infamous for spying on foreign govern- Page 52 Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies Winter/Spring 2011 ments, stealing Western technology, propaganda arm and remains a proud veteran of it. operations (“active measures”), and the suppression Western counterintelligence services indicate of dissent. While the KGB recruited sources in the that the level of Russian spying has returned to the 1930s and 1940s based on ideological sympathies, levels seen during the Cold War. Since 2006 Russian- following World War II, recruits were well paid for British relations have been hurt seriously by the poi- their treachery. For example: soning in London of Alexandr Litvinenko, a former • John Walker, a U.S. Navy petty officer, provided KGB/FSB defector. The suspected assassin is a member the Soviets the keys to decrypt U.S. military of Russia’s Federal Protective Service (FSO). codes over more than 10 years. He was paid over Russian intelligence has an older pedigree than one million dollars. that of the United States or the United Kingdom. • Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer, who betrayed a America’s first civilian intelligence service, the Central number of American agents within the KGB (10 Intelligence Agency, was only formed in 1947. The of whom were executed), was paid more than British internal and external services date from the two million dollars.
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