KGB


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This article is about the USSR KGB. For the Belarussian intelligence service, see State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus. For other uses, see KGB (disambiguation).
Committee for State Security
Комитет государственной безопасности
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
The KGB Sword-and-Shield emblem.
The KGB Sword-and-Shield emblem.
Agency overview
Formed 1954
Preceding agency MGB - Ministry for State Security
Dissolved 1995 (disputed)
Jurisdiction Council of Ministers of the USSR
Headquarters Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
55°45′31.2″N 37°37′32.16″E / 55.758667°N 37.6256°E / 55.758667; 37.6256

The KGB (КГБ, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) was the national security agency of the USSR. From 1954 until 1991, the Committee for State Security was Communist state’s the premier secret police, internal security, and espionage organisation, whose coat of arms — the Shield and the Sword — illustrate a national military hierarchy. The Russian pronunciation of KGB is (Russian: ru-KGB.ogg Комитет государственной безопасности​ (help·info);

The contemporary State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus uses the Russian name KGB. Linguistically, among the Western press, KGB denotes “secret service” in referring to the the FSB.[1] Most information remains classified, yet two on-line documentary sources are available.[2][3]

Contents

Origins

The KGB originated as the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolutions and Sabotage) established 20 December 1917, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky and based upon the Okhrana — the Tsarist intelligence and security agency. [4] To meet it national security duties, the Cheka (1917–22) changed name and structure — becoming the State Political Directorate (OGPU) in 1923; the People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) in 1941; and and the Ministry for State Security (MGB) in 1946; and others. In 1953, Lavrentiy Beria consolidated the the MVD (Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs) and the MGB into an enlarged MVD. In 1954, a year after his execution, his enlarged MVD was divided in two — the MVD secret police and the KGB spy agency, which answered to the Council of Ministers about intelligence and national security matters. In 1978, the KGB was re-named the KGB of the Soviet Union, and its Chairman was a council minister.

Established as the Sword and Shield protecting the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic against imperialism and counter-revolution, the Cheka also pursued revenge against the enemies of the State and of Joseph Stalin — among them, the monarchist White movement, Ukrainian Nationalists, and Leon Trotsky [5] Besides Chekist cunning, early success is partly owed to the lax national security of Western countries that allowed easy NKVD penetration of government and intelligence agencies — thus how Melita Norwood betrayed the British nuclear programme, and the Cambridge Five delivered nuclear weapon and Manhattan Project secrets stolen by the scientist–spies, Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall.

During the Cold War (1945–91), the KGB successfully ensured the survival of the one-party Soviet State by suppressing “ideological subversion” (political dissent) and harassing anti-Soviet public figures (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, et al.). It kept Russia technologically-abreast of the West, for example, by collecting the British and French industrial intelligence that made feasible the Tupolev Tu-144 SST aeroplane, the Russian Concorde. It shared the infiltration of Willy Brandt’s West German government with the East German Stasi. Yet, among its failures are the spy networks compromised by defectors Elizabeth Bentley in the US, and Oleg Gordievsky in the UK, and the loss of ideological-agents, because Soviet suppression of Hungary and Czechoslovak nationalism. Still, mercenary Western moles Aldrich Ames (at CIA) and Robert Hanssen (at FBI) aided the KGB.

The KGB’s thirty-seven year history ended with Chairman Col.-Gen. Vladimir Kryuchkov leading the 19–21 August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt to depose USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev. [6] On 23 August, Kryuchkov was arrested and replaced by Gen. Vadim Bakatin, who disbanded the KGB on 6 November 1991.[contradiction][citation needed] On 21 December 1995, President Boris Yeltsin replaced the KGB with the FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti-Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) handling internal security, and SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki-Foreign Intelligence Service) handling espionage.[citation needed]

Modus operandi

In its time, the KGB was the world’s most effective intelligence agency.[7] It operated legal and illegal residencies in target countries where the legal resident spied from the Soviet embassy, and, if caught, was protected with diplomatic immunity from prosecution. At best, the compromised spy either was recalled to Russia or was expelled by the target country. The illegal resident spied without diplomatic immunity and worked without central authority and formal organisation, (like the non-official cover CIA agent). In its early history, the KGB valued illegal residents more than legal residents, because illegals more easily penetrated their targets. The residencies executed four types of espionage: (i) political, (ii) economic, (iii) military-strategic, and (iv) disinformation, effected with “active measures” (PR Line), counter-intelligence and security (KR Line), and scientific–technologic intelligence (X Line); major operations included collecting SIGINT (RP Line) and illegal support (N Line).

At first, the Soviets recruited high-level ideological agents in the West with the romantic, ideologic, and intellectual allure of Russia, “The First Worker–Peasant State”, and later of “The Fight against Fascism”, and then of the anti-Nazi Great Patriotic War (1941–45) — but the Russo–German Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the crushed Hungarian Uprising in 1956, and the suffocated Prague Spring in 1968, mostly ended ideological recruitment. The Red Army’s invasions and the infirm Brezhnev’s poor leadership repelled young, left-wing radicals from the Soviet Socialist cause, so, KGB used blackmail and bribery to recruit Westerners as Soviet agents.

KGB classed espionage personnel as agents (intelligence providers) and controllers (intelligence relayers). The legend (false identity) for a Russian-born illegal resident was elaborate — either the assumed life of a “live double” (who lent his or her identity) or a “dead double” (whose identity is tailored to the spy). Legends usually were substantiated by the agent living it in a foreign country, before emigrating to penetrate the target country; thus the sending US-bound spies through the Soviet residency in Ottawa, Canada. Tradecraft included stealing and photographing documents, code-names, contacts, targets, and dead letter boxes, and being agents provocateur infiltrating the target’s group as a “friend of the cause”, to sow dissent and influence policy, and to arrange kidnaps and assassinations.

History

The Cheka was established in 1917 to defend the October Revolution and the nascent Bolshevik state from its enemies — principally the monarchist White Army. To ensure the régime’s survival, it suppressed counter-revolution with terror. On 20 December 1920, Lenin authorised the Cheka’s creation of the INO (Innostranyi Otdel, Foreign-intelligence Department), the precursor to the First Chief Directorate (FCD) of the KGB. In 1922, Stalin’s régime re-named the Cheka as the State Political Directorate (OGPU), which it retained for most of his early early reign. [8]

The OGPU expanded Soviet espionage, nationally and internationally, and provided Stalin with agent Nikolai Vlasik as his bodyguard. Stalin’s paranoia (foreshadowing the purges) strongly influenced the OGPU’s performance and direction — pursuing imaginary conspiracies by the Trotskyists, et al. Acting as his own intelligence analyst, Stalin unwisely subordinated analysis to collection — eventually, reports submitted to him pandered to his conspiracy theory fantasies. The middle history of the KGB culminated in the Great Purge (1936–38) killings of civil, military, and political people deemed politically unreliable — among them, KGB chairmen Genrikh Yagoda (1938) and Nikolai Yezhov (1940), and Lavrentiy Beria (1953), accused of real and imaginary crimes. Ironically, Yezhov denounced Yagoda in executing the Great Terror, which from 1937 to 1938 is called Yezhovshchina, the especially cruel “Yezhov era”. [9]

In 1941, OGPU became NKGB (People's Commissariat for State Security, integral to the NKVD), and recovered from the Great Purge. Under Lavrentiy Beria, it unwisely continued pandering to Stalin’s conspiracy fantasies — whilst simultaneously achieving its deepest penetrations of the West. Next, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov centralised the intelligence agencies, re-organising the NKGB as the KI (Komitet Informatsii, Committee of Information), comprising, from 1947 to 1951, the MGB (Ministry for State Security) and the GRU (Foreign military Intelligence Directorate); hence, at an embassy, the ambassador headed the MGB and the GRU legal residencies; however, the KI ended when Molotov incurred Stalin’s disfavour.

Meanwhile, the ambitious MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) head, Lavrenty Beria — expecting to succeed Stalin as leader of the USSR — merged the MGB and the MVD on Stalin’s death in 1953. Anticipating a coup d'état, the Presidium swiftly eliminated Beria with treasonous charges of “criminal anti-Party and anti-state activities” and executed him. In the event, the MGB was renamed KGB and detached from the MVD.

Mindful of ambitious spy chiefs, Leonid Brezhnev and the CPSU knew to manage the next over-ambitious KGB Chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin (1958–61), who aided the Stalinist anti-Khrushchev coup d’état in 1964 — despite not then being in KGB. That thwarted, Shelepin’s protégé, Vladimir Semichastny (1961–67), was sacked from KGB, and Shelepin, himself, demoted from Chairman of the Committee of Party and State Control to Chairman of the unimportant Trade Union Council.

In 1967, Yuri Andropov assumed KGB command, proving the most-influential and long-tenured chairman. He manœuvered sick Brezhnev’s, became his heir, and then leader of the USSR in 1982. Andropov’s KGB legacy was relentless inquisitorial combating of all ideological subversion.

In the 1980s, Glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s socio-political opening of Soviet society, dismayed KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov to becoming a principal organiser of the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt. By then, however, Soviet society’s disrespect of the KGB, among other reasons, had removed popular support for the régime of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The thwarted coup d’état ended the KGB on 6 November 1991. The KGB’s successors — the FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti) assumed its secret police functions, and the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki), the Foreign Intelligence Service, assumed the espionage functions of the First Chief Directorate.

KGB in the USA

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Main article: History of Soviet espionage in the United States

Between the world wars

During the inter-war years (1918–39) the INO considered the USA a lesser target than the UK and Continental Europe — thus the slowness in establishing espionage. That responsibility fell to military intelligence, the GRU, who recruited the ideological agents Julian Wadleigh and Alger Hiss, who became State Department diplomats in 1936. The NKVD’s first US operation was the 1934 establishment of the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov. [10] Throughout, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and its General Secretary Earl Browder, helped NKVD by recruiting American spies who soon delivered high-grade government and defence-industry intelligence.

Other important spies were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department, the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, and the economist Lauchlin Currie, an FDR advisor.[11] Simultaneously, the “Silvermaster Group”, headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster spied in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare.[12] When Whittaker Chambers, a former courier for Alger Hiss and others, approached the Roosevelt government — to identify Duggan, White, and others, as Soviet spies — he was ignored. Hence, during the Second World War (1939–45) — at the Teheran (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945) conferences — the USSR leader, Joseph Stalin, was better-informed about the war affairs of his US and UK allies, than they about his. [13] These NKVD penetrations succeeded because the US had no spies in Russia.

Soviet espionage was most successful in collecting scientific intelligence. British Manhattan Project team physicist Klaus Fuchs (a 1941 GRU recruit) was the prominent agent in the spy ring of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In 1944, the New York City residency infiltrated the Los Alamos National Laboratory by recruiting Theodore Hall, a nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist; Lona Cohen was his courier. NKVD thefts of intelligence about jet propulsion, radar, and encryption advances impressed Moscow, but stealing atomic secrets was the capstone of Soviet espionage against US science.

In the event, defectors — Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko — and Venona project decryptions betrayed and unravelled NKVD espionage in the US and Canada. [14] Bentley, a Silvermaster Group courier, had fallen out with Akhmerov, and betrayed them to the FBI in 1945; the consequent spy panic, provoked the recalling of most NKVD senior staff — temporarily decapitating its US espionage. The extent of the network-threatening VENONA decryptions frightened Moscow Centre in the 1950s, because they ignored which telegrams had been decrypted — yet there was a respite. Since 1947, Bill Weisband, a US cryptanalyst, and Kim Philby, an SIS liaison officer in Washington, DC, thwarted the betraying decryptions with advance-copy VENONA information identifying Soviet agents — five years before CIA was informed of VENONA’s existence.[15] Despite rebuilt networks, the NKVD never regained the edge against US intelligence.

During the Cold War

Heydar Aliyev, ex-Azerbaijani President, was the first Muslim in the KGB; he is credited with stabilising Azerbaijan after its difficult independence.

The KGB failed in rebuilding most of its US illegal resident networks during the Cold War. The aftermath of the Red Scare (1947–57), McCarthyism, and the evisceration of the CPUSA severely hampered recruitment. The last, major illegal resident, Rudolf Abel ("Willie" Vilyam Fisher) was betrayed by his assistant, Reino Häyhänen, in 1957.

Without illegal residents, the legal residents became more successful. The KGB turned to recruiting mercenary agents, an approach especially successful in scientific espionage — because private industry, such as IBM, practiced lax internal security, whereas, the wary US government had tightened its internal security. The notable government-espionage success was the Walker Spy Ring, who enabled the KGB to decipher some one million encrypted messages, leading to the development of the Soviet Navy’s Akula class submarine, an advantage against the US Navy. The KGB relieved the Walkers of spy duty; taken “off-line”.

In 1985, the KGB struck its greatest military intelligence coups in the Cold War, in the cases of the “walk-in” recruitments of Aldrich Ames (spying since 1985) and Robert Hanssen (spying since 1979), who betrayed many Soviet secret agents — including Gordievsky, then just about appointed head of the British legal residency. Walker and Ames began their careers by volunteering to KGB in the Soviet embassy, in Washington, DC, and offering, for money, access to the intelligence available to a man in his job. Alias “Ramon”, Hannsen secretly communicated with KGB.

KGB in the Soviet Bloc

KGB prison doors displayed in the Museum of Occupations, Tallinn, Estonia.

It was Cold War policy for the KGB of the Soviet Union and the satellite-state KGBs 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 1968 Czechoslovakia.

During the Hungarian revolt, KGB chairman Ivan Serov, personally supervised the post-invasion “normalization” of the country. In consequence, 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 to Czechoslovakia 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 (CPC), such as Alois Indra and Vasil Biľak, to assume power after the Red Army’s invasion. The courage of the betrayed Prague Spring leaders did not escape KGB notice; the defector Oleg Gordievsky later remarked, “It was that dreadful event, that awful day, which determined the course of my own life” (The Sword and the Shield, p.261).

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 the priest 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 PUWP régime. Despite its accurate forecast of crisis, the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP) 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 Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB), 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.

Suppressing ideological subversion

Monument to KGB victims, Vilnius, Lithuania.

During the Cold War, the KGB actively suppressed “ideological subversion” — unorthodox political and religious ideas and the espousing dissidents. In 1967, the suppression increased under new KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, who said all dissent threatened the Soviet state — including anti-Communist religious movements. Most arrested dissidents were sentenced to indefinite terms in Gulag-adminstered forced labour camps — where their dissension lacked the strength it might have had in public. Moreover, Yale University archive documents record that suppressing “ideological subversion” was the principal preoccupation of Yuri Andropov and Vitali Fedorchuk when each was KGB Chairman. [2]

After denouncing Stalinism in his secret speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences (1956), Nikita Khrushchev lessened suppression of “ideological subversion”. Resultantly, critical literature re-emerged, notably the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; however, after Khrushchev’s deposition in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev reverted the State and KGB to actively harsh suppression — routine house searches to seize documents and the continual monitoring of dissidents. To wit, in 1965, such a search-and-seizure operation yielded Solzhenitsyn (code-name PAUK, “spider”) manuscripts of “slanderous fabrications”, and the subversion trial of the novelists Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel; Sinyavsky (alias “Abram Tertz”), and Daniel (alias “Nikolai Arzhak”), were captured after a Moscow literary-world informant told KGB when to find them at home.

After suppressing the Prague Spring, KGB Chairman Andropov established the Fifth Directorate to monitor dissension and eliminate dissenters. He was especially concerned with the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, “Public Enemy Number One”. [16] Andropov failed to expel Solzhenitsyn before 1974; but did internally-exile Sakharov to Gorky city [Nizhny Novgorod] in 1980. KGB failed to prevent Sakharov’s collecting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, but did prevent Yuri Orlov collecting his Nobel Prize in 1978; Chairman Andropov supervised both operations.

KGB dissident-group infiltration featured agents provocateur pretending “sympathy to the cause”, smear campaigns against prominent dissidents, and show trials; once imprisoned, the dissident endured KGB interrogators and sympathetic informant-cell mates. In the event, Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policies lessened persecution of dissidents; he was effecting some of the policy changes they had been demanding since the 1970s. [17]

Notable operations

KGB Headquarters on Lubyanka Square, designed by Aleksey Schusev.
  • 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 Mexican agent Ramón Mercader assassinated Trotsky in Mexico City.
  • KGB favoured active measures (e.g. disinformation), 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 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 Angleton — ignored as over-cautious — was correct, despite costing him his job at CIA, which he left in 1975.

Occasionally, the KGB assassinated the enemies of the USSR — principally Soviet Bloc defectors, either directly or by aiding Communist country secret services — the (alleged) air-crash assassination of Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961; the surreptitious ricin poisoning of the Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov, shot with an umbrella-gun of KGB design, in 1978; and the (alleged) attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981. [18]

The highest-ranking Communist intelligence officer to defect, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, said the Romanian Communist party leader Nicolae Ceauşescu told him about the “ten international leaders the Kremlin killed, or tried to kill”: Laszlo Rajk and Imre Nagy of Hungary; Lucretiu Patrascanu and Gheorghiu-Dej of Romania; Rudolf Slansky, the head of Czechoslovakia, and chief diplomat Jan Masaryk; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran; Palmiro Togliatti of Italy; US President John F. Kennedy; and Mao Zedong of China via Lin Biao; and noted that “among the leaders of Moscow’s satellite intelligence services, there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.” [19]

Organisation

The KGB was the secret police, espionage, and national security agency of the USSR; it controlled the republican KGBs, all were controlled by the CPSU.

Senior staff

The Senior staff comprised a Chairman of the KGB, one or two First Deputy Chairmen, and four-to-six Deputy Chairmen. The Collegium comprised a chairman, deputy chairmen, directorate chiefs, and one or two republic KGB chairmen, who made policy.

The Directorates

The KGB was composed of directorates and chief directorates:

  • Second Chief Directorate managed counter-intelligence and internal political control in the USSR.
  • Third Chief Directorate (Armed Forces) managed military counter-intelligence and political surveillance of the armed forces.
  • Fourth Directorate (Transportation security)
  • Fifth Chief Directorate managed internal security; originally combated political dissension; later assumed Second Chief Directorate tasks of combating religious dissension, monitoring artists, and censorship. In 1989, it was renamed “Directorate Z”, to protect the Constitutional order.
  • Sixth Directorate (Economic Counter-intelligence, Industrial security)
  • Seventh Directorate (Surveillance) managed the equipment and personnel spying on Soviet citizens and foreigners.
  • Eighth Chief Directorate monitored communications; managed foreign communications, cryptologic equipment, transmissions to overseas stations, and communications technology research and development.
  • Ninth Directorate (Guards and KGB Protection Service) 40,000-man uniformed force supplying bodyguards to the CPSU leaders (and families), guarded government facilities (nuclear weapons, etc.), operated the Moscow VIP subway system, and the secure telephony between the government and Party officers. President Boris Yeltsin transformed it to the Federal Protective Service.
  • Fifteenth Directorate (Security of Government Installations)
  • Sixteenth Directorate (Communications Interception and SIGINT) promoted from “Department” to ”Directorate”, operated the country’s government telephone and telegraph systems.

Other sections

KGB also contained these units:

  • KGB Personnel Department
  • Secretariat of the KGB
  • KGB Technical Support Staff
  • KGB Finance Department
  • KGB Archives
  • Administration Department of the KGB, and
  • The CPSU Committee.

The evolution of the KGB

(as depicted in The Sword and the Shield, page xv)

Dates Organization
December 1917 Cheka
February 1922 Incorporated into NKVD (as GPU)
July 1923 OGPU
July 1934 Reincorporated in NKVD (as GUGB)
February 1941 NKGB
July 1941 Reincorporated in NKVD (as GUGB)
April 1943 NKGB
March 1946 MGB
October 1947 – November 1951 Foreign Intelligence transferred to KI
March 1953 Combined with MVD to form enlarged MVD
March 1954 KGB
November 1991 FSK

(as depicted in The Sword and the Shield, Appendix A)

Organization Chairman Dates
Cheka/GPU/OGPU Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky 1917–1926
OGPU Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky 1926–1934
NKVD Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda 1934–1936
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov 1936–1938
Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 1938–1941
NKGB Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov 1941 (February–July)
NKVD Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 1941–1943
NKGB/MGB Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov 1943–1946
MGB Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov 1946–1951
Semyon Denisovich Ignatyev 1951–1953
Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 1953 (March–June)
Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov 1953–1954
KGB Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov 1954–1958
Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin 1958–1961
Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny 1961–1967
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov 1967–1982
Vitali Vasilyevich Fedorchuk 1982 (May–December)
Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov 1982–1988
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov 1988–1991
Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin 1991 (August–November)

See also

References

  1. ^ Safe as houses: the KGB-proof mansion - Times Online
  2. ^ a b http://www.yale.edu/annals/sakharov/sakharov_list.htm, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov; Russian and English versions are available
  3. ^ http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/buk.html archive of documents about KPSS and KGB, collected by Vladimir Bukovsky.
  4. ^ Mark Lloyd The Guiness Book of Espionage (1994) Guinness Publishing Ltd:London pp.91–2
  5. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.31
  6. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.550
  7. ^ Eyes of the Kremlin
  8. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.28
  9. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.23
  10. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.104
  11. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.105
  12. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.104
  13. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.111
  14. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.137
  15. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999), p.145
  16. ^ Andrew Christoper and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999) Basic Books: New York, p.325
  17. ^ Andrew Christoper and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (1999) Basic Books: New York, p.561
  18. ^ Italian Panel: Soviets Behind Pope Attack
  19. ^ The Kremlin’s Killing Ways - by Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online, November 28, 2006

Sources

  • Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, Gardners Books (2000), ISBN 0-14-028487-7 Basic Books (1999), hardcover, ISBN 0-465-00310-9; trade paperback (September, 2000), ISBN 0-465-00312-5
  • John Barron, "KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents",Reader's Digest Press (1974), ISBN 0-88349-009-9
  • Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, Basic Books (2005) hardcover, 677 pages ISBN 0465003117

Further reading

  • Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia – Past, Present, and Future. Farrar Straus Giroux (1994) ISBN 0-374-52738-5.
  • John Barron. KGB: The Secret Works Of Soviet Secret Agents. Bantam Books (1981) ISBN 0-553-23275-4
  • Vadim J. Birstein. The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science. Westview Press (2004) ISBN 0-8133-4280-5 (describes a secret KGB lab engaged in development and testing of poisons)
  • John Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB, Lexington Books (1988) ISBN 978-0669102581
  • Sheymov, Victor (1993). Tower of Secrets. Naval Institute Press. pp. 420. ISBN 1-55750-764-3. 
  • Бережков, Василий Иванович (2004). Руководители Ленинградского управления КГБ : 1954-1991. Санкт-Петербург: Выбор, 2004. ISBN 5-93518-035-9 (in Russian)
  • Кротков, Юрий (1973). «КГБ в действии». Published in «Новый журнал» №111, 1973 (in Russian)

External links

Coordinates: 55°45′31″N 37°37′32″E / 55.7587°N 37.6256°E / 55.7587; 37.6256







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