In our last installment, we looked at the CIA, America's foreign intelligence service. We will now discuss the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security). The KGB is considered the Soviet counterpart to the CIA, but there are at least two key differences. First, the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on its own citizens, but the KGB was both a foreign intelligence service and a domestic security force. Secondly, the CIA is a relatively new agency, created after the Second World War. The United States had no foreign intelligence service at all prior to the OSS of WWII. The KGB changed its name several times, but was established just six weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as the Cheka. Soviet Leader Vladimir Lenin appointed Felix Dzerzhinsky (pictured above, with Stalin), a Polish-born member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, to create a domestic secret police force to suppress counterrevolutionary activities and internal threats. Dzerzhinsky was both enthusiastic and ruthless with his considerable authority and resources, organizing security troops during the Russian Civil War and conducting mass executions without trials during the Red Terror (about 12,000 people were executed between 1918 and 1920). He also perfected espionage and infiltration techniques, drawing heavily on the tactics of the old Czarist secret police force, the Okhrana. The Cheka expanded quickly, with various branches running gulags, policing labor camps, and quashing rebellions. It also dabbled in foreign intelligence for the first time, sending a spy to newly independent Finland.
At the end of the Russian Civil War, the Cheka was dissolved and reorganized as the State Political Directorate (GPU) under the NKVD (Interior Ministry of Russia), with Dzerzhinsky still at the helm. The GPU was expected to afford class enemies and counterrevolutionaries a trial before execution (unlike the old Cheka), and now had a Foreign Department in charge of surveillance and elimination of enemies abroad. After the USSR was formed, the GPU was transferred from the NKVD to the Joint State Political Directorate, expanding its control to all of the Soviet Republics. The new agency was named the OGPU. Felix Dzerzhinsky stayed on until his death in 1926. The OGPU's powers increased under Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin, who encouraged the agency to persecute anyone with opposing views. Show trials of suspected dissidents increased during Stalin's purges, while the harassment of various religious groups became another job for the OGPU. The agency was reintegrated into the now all-union NKVD in 1934, becoming the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB). In 1941, it was again removed from the NKVD and renamed the People's Commissariat of State Security (NKGB), and later the Ministry for State Security (MGB), then the Ministry for Internal Affairs (MVD), and finally, in 1954, the KGB.
The KGB was organized under new Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev in the wake of Stalin's death, and kept its name until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (For simplicity, we will refer to the agency in all of its incarnations as "KGB" for the remainder of this post). The previous director, Lavrenti Beria, was convicted of treason and executed. He was replaced by Chairman Ivan Serov.
During the 1930's and 1940's, the KGB increased its focus on foreign spying. Two of its most successful projects were the recruitment of the Cambridge Five and the infiltration of the Manhattan Project. The Cambridge Five were graduates of Cambridge University that were recruited in the 1930's by communist spymaster Arnold Deutsch before entering their respective careers in different branches of the British government, including MI6 (the British foreign intelligence unit). They transferred massive amounts of British intelligence to the KGB over the next two decades. The Manhattan Project, America's top secret atomic bomb program, was compromised from the beginning. Several American and British scientists working at Los Alamos leaked some of the technology to the Soviet Union, accelerating their atomic bomb project by several years.
The KGB also made good use of the Communist Party in the United States (CPUSA) to assist in talent spotting, recruiting, and the creation of front organizations for propaganda purposes. Using funds directly from the Soviet Union, the CPUSA also built a secret infrastructure for espionage. Under the supervision of CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder, spy handler J. Peters organized the infiltration of several departments in the Roosevelt administration by party operatives. The most notable of these (Alger Hiss, Julian Wadleigh, Laurence Duggan, and Noel Field) landed positions in the State Department and delivered sensitive intelligence to the Soviets on a regular basis. The CPUSA also assisted in the many attempts to assassinate Stalin's rival communist Leon Trotsky, who was living in exile in Mexico in the late 1930's. The espionage work of the CPUSA was finally thwarted by the Second Red Scare (1947-1957), which exposed the Browder spy ring and greatly diminished membership in the party itself. The negative publicity, not to mention the close scrutiny by multiple government agencies, severely restricted the ability of the CPUSA to perform any of its previous functions.
The KGB assisted the Red Army in crushing the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968. They also orchestrated or assisted in many political assassinations, including Czar Nicholas, Leon Trotsky, Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, and many more. They also tried to intimidate some of their more famous dissidents, like author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, and even ballet dancer and choreographer Rudolph Nureyev.
From the end of WWII onward, the KGB sought to exert influence in the world through a tactic called "active measures." These ranged from simple disinformation campaigns to real acts of violence, all meant to influence public opinion against the West in general, and the United States in particular. Some of the disinformation plots included the support of numerous conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, the distribution of fake racist pamphlets meant to inflame racial tensions in the 1960's, and starting the rumor that the AIDS virus was created by U.S. scientists.
KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchov helped to bring the KGB's long and bloody history to an end by leading a failed coup attempt on Soviet Leader and reformer Mikhail Gorbachev on August 19, 1991. Although Gorbachev was restored to power two days later, the coup attempt helped to destabilize an already fragile government. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, 1991, and the Soviet Union was voted out of existence the next day.
The KGB was a a critical piece of the Cold War, and we will revisit many of its operations in detail in future installments of the Cold War History Blog.
*inspired by "The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive" by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin; 1999, Basic Books (Perseus Books), NY