Gone (Mostly) But Not Forgotten!
Perspectives On The KGB

Robert W. Pringle
Patterson School
University of Kentucky

International Studies Association

March 18-21, 1998

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

--Orwell, 1984

In every medium in the new Russia, the KGB is back. Bookstores are filled with memoirs and reminiscences by former KGB officers, bragging about their Cold War exploits. A glorified version of the KGB's history has been released on CD-ROM. And a group of enterprising former spies has published a KGB guidebook to cities around the world.

This post-Cold-War propaganda offensive is more than an effort by KGB veterans to re-fight the Cold War one more time. It seems designed to provide the service with political legitimacy in the post-Soviet, post-Cold War world, and to distance the new Russian intelligence service and security services from their Soviet heritage. Some Russian journalists have suggested that the new Russian Foreign Intelligence Service's (SVR) distortion of its KGB past honestly is designed to pave the way for a return to the Soviet intelligence system.

 

Evaluating the Past

Every 20th of December, the SVR--like its predecessor, the KGB First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate--gathers to celebrate its birthday. SVR directors and KGB veterans use the day as an occasion to celebrate Moscow's successes against White Russian counterrevolutionaries, Hitler's Gestapo, and Western intelligence. SVR chiefs have used the day to publicize the role of Russian intelligence past and present. In 1996, for example, SVR chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov told a reporter that 80 of his officers had been decorated in 1996. He also said that several Soviet-era intelligence officers had been decorated for their role in stealing American nuclear secrets in the late 1940s. ₁

The SVR's museum, which highlights the exploits of some 150 heroes--nearly a third of whom were murdered at Stalin's orders--is another good place to begin studying the new myth. Nuclear intelligence, the infiltration of Hitler's inner-circle, as well as Kim Philby and the other members of the "Ring of Five" are all represented here. The museum exhibits commemorate years of the Intelligence service as the sword and shield of the Russian people against foreign enemies.

"Intelligence Glasnost" has taken off in the past few years. In 1996, the SVR began publishing of six-volume history of Russian foreign intelligence from Ivan the Terrible to Mikhail Gorbachev. The service has also sponsored hundreds of semi-official book and the publication of journals on intelligence and counterintelligence. ₂ The new in-house histories provide the equivalent of a PG film version of KGB foreign intelligence, rarely addressing its more nefarious operations such as Trotsky's murder in Mexico; the kidnapping of Soviet dissenters in Paris in the 1920s and Berlin in the 1950s; and connivance with the Bulgarian government in the murder of a noted Bulgarian dissenter in 1978. Nor do they address how the KGB contributed to Moscow's defeat in the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Top-secret Party and KGB documents from the Soviet period, as well as the memoirs of leaders of the former USSR, suggest that despite some stunningly successful operations and brilliant tradecraft, the KGB repeatedly failed to provide the Kremlin leadership with accurate intelligence on issues affecting the very survival of the Soviet state. A KGB history, which could be based on such documents and memoirs, would discuss a number of critical intelligence failures or miscalculations: intervention in Afghanistan; resurgent nationalism in Central Asia and the Baltic; and the impact of Moscow's handling of human rights issues in the West, to name but a few. In addition, the information suggests that the other reasons for the KGB's failing was the service's hidebound Marxist ideology, over dependence on covert action, lack of analytical competence; and internal corruption. ₃

 

The Dead Hand of Ideology

The KGB of the Cold War was an ideological service. Its last chairman, Vadim Bakatin, remembered in his memoirs that the only books in the bombshelter built by the KGB 300 feet under the Kremlin in the 1980s for the Soviet leadership were the collected works of Lenin. Gorbachev observed in his memoirs that the foreign intelligence service was "at least as conservative and ideologically 'drilled' as most of the bureaucrats in our domestic administration." ₄

KGB documents repeatedly emphasized the role of the Communist Party. For example, the KGB's top-secret annual report for 1985 asserted in the lead paragraph that the service "carried out all its activities under the direct control of the Central Committee and invariably acted in strict accord with the political line worked out by the Party. Chekists [intelligence and security officers] rigorously observed socialist legality and continually relied on the assistance of the broad masses of toilers," ₅

The ideological straitjacket distorted realities of developments both outside and within the crumbling Soviet Union.

• The head of the First Chief Directorate told his senior officers in 1983 that the threat of nuclear war was a result of "deepening economic and social crisis in the capitalist world....American monopolies would like to recover the positions they have lost in recent decades and conquer fresh ones."
• KGB Chairman Viktor Chebrikov stated in 1987 that Western intelligence services had crafted covert action concepts used against the Soviet Union "from the arsenal of Trotskyism and other opportunist currents." Chebrikov went on to assert that the CIA and other services had introduced the "virus of nationalism" into the Baltic where, he said, it was producing anti-Soviet sedition. A former KGB colonel commented dryly that "it was quite likely that Chebrikov believed much of this nonsense." ₆

At times the KGB's concern with the ideological threat reached ludicrous. For example, then KGB Chairman Fedorchuk warned the Politburo in 1982 that Russian artists were increasingly drawn into marriages with foreigners, and that at the July 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, British pianists had received greater ovations --"that at times clearly were meant to be provocative"--than Soviet artists. ₇

 

The Never-Ending Search for Enemies

Domestic security and counterintelligence, not foreign intelligence, were the priorities of the fathers of the Soviet state. For the first three years of its existence (1917-1920), the Cheka had no foreign intelligence component. Its Foreign Section was primarily targeted against Russian counter-revolutionaries and their foreign supporters. In the first 20 years of the Soviet state, the Foreign Sections biggest accomplishments included: Trotsky's murder, the penetration of the White Russian movement in Europe and Asia, and kidnappings and murders of leaders of the White movement in Paris. ₈

Driven by a militant ideology and counterintelligence imperatives, KGB residencies abroad during the Cold War expended almost as much effort thwarting imaginary perceived threats as they did chasing Western secrets. For example:

• Soviet intelligence messages from the New York residency in the 1940s indicated the services collected intelligence on Aleksandr Kerensky, the last head of the Provisional Government, who fled Russia in 1917. Other messages show that the residency directed kidnappings of Soviet seamen who jumped ship in American ports and their forcibly repatriation to the Soviet Union. ₉
• According to a former KGB general, the service in 1945 conducted a massive investigation in Germany and Austria aimed at proving wartime military leader, Marshall Zhukov, guilty of corruption and treason. Afterwards, Stalin "only" banished Zhukov to the Odessa Military district. Several other senior generals--and their wives--were shot following the investigation. ₁₀

Even after Stalin's death, the KGB refused to remove a critical mote from its eye--that dissent was not treason.

• In 1967, the top-secret annual KGB report to General Secretary Brezhnev emphasized in the lead paragraph that the KGB had created a "Fifth Directorate" to conduct ideological counterintelligence operations. The "Fifth", under its redoubtable chief, General Bobkov, designed operations against a generation of dissenters and activists, including Nobel-laureates Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. These operations, according to KGB documents, included the placement of hundreds of articles in the world press denouncing Solzhenitsyn as an anti-Semite and Sakharov as insane. ₁₁
• In the early 1980s, then KGB boss Andropov told an East German colleague that Jewish activist Anatoly Shcharanskiy could not be released from a forced labor camp because "He will carry the flag for all the Jews. Stalin's anti-Semitic excess have left these people with a big grievance against the Soviet state and they have powerful friends abroad. We cannot allow this at the moment." ₁₂
• According to a noted British journalist, the KGB never stopped labeling Muslim religious activists in Central Asia as Saudi or American agents. As late as 1989, the KGB was trying to portray the Islamic Renaissance Party in Uzbekistan as an arm of Saudi intelligence. ₁₃

 

Covert Action, Collection, and Analysis

"The most that ever came from the KGB were the cryptic reports about the exile of a spy or connections between dissidents and some 'imperialist intelligence service'."

--Gorbachev, Memoirs.

While the KGB had a far larger presence overseas than other countries' intelligence services, its analytical component was far smaller and weaker than other major services. According to Soviet defectors, the Directorate of Intelligence Analysis (RI) had a staff of fewer than 250 people, and was primarily responsible for completing and editing intelligence reports from the field, rather than producing finished analysis. Important intelligence information was passed by KGB residencies directly to the Central Committee staff. These Instantsiya--Russian for "authority"--cables from the field were analyzed and consumed by the leadership without any input from intelligence professionals.

The KGB came by this institutional deformity historically. Stalin read agents' reports and told the GRU and KGB chiefs not to bother him with analysis. According to one such report, Stalin said the price of wool in Germany would be the key indicator of Hitler's preparations for an invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin argued that the German Army would begin buying wool in the year before an invasion for winter coats. Unfortunately for Stalin and millions of Red Army soldiers, Hitler believed Russia would be defeated before winter fell! ₁₄

In the Gorbachev era, the KGB sent most of its sensitive intelligence reports directly to the Central Committee, without any leavening by analysts. According to the 1985 annual KGB Report, 8,000 items of special political information (reports) were sent to higher authorities, including only 186 analytical estimates of "special importance". The Annual Report noted that in the same period, the KGB provided the Soviet scientific establishment with 40,000 pieces of information and 12,000 model types for technical analysis. KGB Reports for the following years indicate a similar pattern. ₁₅

Some senior KGB analysts tended to Leninist positions, and flavored their finished intelligence analysis with paranoid comments on Western policies. Lieutenant General Nikolai Leonov, head of assessments for several years, described the West in the spring of 1991 as "vultures circling over the Soviet Union". America's avowed policy, the KGB general insisted, was to generate racial hatred and destroy the Soviet Union. ₁₆

Senior KGB officers valued active measures (covert action) over intelligence collection and analysis. According to a former KGB officer, the service's political intelligence officers were expected to spend 25 percent of their time on active measures. ₁₇ Moreover, in the last years of the Cold War, covert actions were aimed at supporting fraternal Communist parties and slowing the democratization in Eastern Europe:

• The KGB continued to play "postman" for the Soviet Communist Party into the 1990s, transmitting millions of dollars to foreign communists. During the Gorbachev years, the service sent more than $10 million to the Communist Party of the United States.
• In 1988, KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov traveled to Budapest to craft forgeries designed to destroy the posthumous reputation of Imre Nagy, who had briefly led the rebel Hungarian republic in 1956 and whose cause had later become a critical issue for democratic reformers.
• In 1990, Kryuchkov gave Gorbachev KGB forgeries "proving" that Aleksandr Yakovlev, the Soviet president's closest confidant, was a CIA asset. Kryuchkov's plan was to break the authority of reformers in the Gorbachev inner-circle as a precursor to the establishment of a "state of emergency". ₁₈

The most notorious Soviet active measure of the Cold War was the effort to blame the United States for the development and spread of AIDS. This campaign, directed by Service A of the First Chief Directorate, received major coverage in some 40 Third World countries in 1987 alone. The AIDS covert action, however, boomeranged to some extent against Moscow and Gorbachev in the West: for example, it triggered a Congressional investigation into Soviet intelligence activities against the United States. In 1992, SVR Chief (now foreign minister) Yevgeniy Primakov apologized for the KGB's role in the campaign.

 

Treason and Corruption

The KGB First Chief Directorate was more immune than other Soviet institutions to corruption. A former KGB general noted in the last year of Soviet power, however, that the "moral sleaziness that is typical of our higher circles is reflected in the activities of the KGB as in a mirror." While bribe taking was not typical of the KGB, in the 1980s the KGB -- in the general's words -- produced "a whole constellation of traitors." Indeed, the KGB officer who ran Aldrich Ames admitted in 1996 in his first interview by the Russian press, that the CIA "had dozens of agents inside the KGB and the GRU" and that the services were "shaken by periodic betrayals". ₁₉

An even better witness of KGB corruption was a former deputy director Filip Bobkov. Bobkov, who completed 46 years of service in the KGB with the rank of Army General, admitted in his memoirs that the CIA had agents within the KGB's intelligence, counterintelligence, and communications directorates in the 1980s. In his memoirs, Bobkov cited the case of a KGB counterintelligence officer working the CIA station in Moscow who volunteered to work in place for the CIA despite the risk. It was, said Bobkov "a bolt of lightening from the clear sky that one of our majors in counterintelligence was an agent of the CIA."(Major Vorontsov was betrayed by Ames and later executed.) ₂₀

One of the First Chief Directorate's final operations was not that of an intelligence service but as bank robbers: this directorate was one of the main looters of the Communist Party's treasury . According to Central Committee documents published immediately after the abortive August 1991 putsch, the KGB helped the Central Committee export billions of dollars to the West to preclude possible seizure by a post-Communist Government. These documents show that in 1990 and 1991 the KGB established businesses in the West to hide money abroad for the party elite. ₂₁

 

Implications

"The greatest threat to the KGB is its own past",

--Christopher Andrews, Inside the KGB

"The KGB is not a service but a real underground empire, which has not yielded its secrets except for opening up some graves."

--Yuri Vlasov, Congress of People's Deputies, 1989

Russian reformers are haunted by the failure of the post-Stalinist reformers to the liquidate the secret police. Following Stalin's death in 1953, less than a dozen KGB generals were shot for treason--not for maintaining the brutal system--while 38 other general officers were stripped of their rank. Russian historian Yevgeniya Albats, a specialist on the KGB noted that "a Soviet Nuremberg was unthinkable, for like the German Nuremberg, it would have revealed the criminality of the ideology, the system in whose name these actions had been committed." ₂₂

Former components of the KGB--especially the SVR--have sought to preempt objective analyses of its history. A few KGB veterans have been selectively given access to relevant files from the 1930s and 1940s, but other scholars' efforts to obtain such access have been largely frustrated. The result has been--to quote a former KGB officer who was fired in 1990 for suggesting that his service be downsized--the prevalence of official histories in which "even the minutest successes used to become cast in solemn bronze." ₂₃

 

Back to the Future?

"As God is my witness, we left worse Chekists in place."

--Yevgeniya Albats, The State within A State

Some Russian reformers are concerned that Russia has missed yet another opportunity for a "Soviet Nuremberg". They note that although the Yel'tsin administration has divided the Soviet KGB into several services (see Table), it has not reformed the component parts of this intelligence community.

Reformers such as Albats emphasize that leadership of the SVR has remained in the hands of KGB veterans--men molded in a "KGB mindset." Albats quotes a 1991 poll that found 77.6 percent of KGB were convinced that "saboteurs" were responsible for the collapse of the Soviet economy; 75 percent believed the CIA was responsible for ethnic unrest. ₂₄ These men, she argued, are unlikely to initiate or welcome change in the structure of Russian intelligence. A number of factors support this assessment.

• The services report to the President-and his entourage-- with little parliamentary oversight.
• The intelligence and counterintelligence services are approximately the same size as in 1991.
• The KGB archives remain largely uninspected by historians; moreover, there has been no effort to reveal the names of informers.
• Not one former KGB officer has been convicted for crimes committed during the Soviet period. KGB officers who resigned in protest in the last years of the Gorbachev era have not been rehire and are still widely considered traitors. ₂₅

The reformers argue that without an accounting for the past, the security and intelligence establishment will recast itself in the model of Soviet intelligence. Actions by the new counterintelligence organization, the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the SVR seem to support this pessimistic assessment. For example:

• In December 1995, the FSB arrested a former Soviet naval officer on charges of treason and espionage for writing a history of military pollution in the Arctic. The officer was held for 13 months, and was only released following an international media campaign by and Western ecological organizations.
• On several occasions over the past year, the FSB has detained and expelled American scientists accused of espionage against Russia. In every case the US scientist had been invited by a Russian institution.
• SVR Chief Trubnikov admitted that his service continues to use journalist cover for its case officers despite promises to cease doing so.
• SVR residencies in the West remain large, according to FBI information.
• The SVR, according to a variety of sources, continues to conduct covert action operations in former Soviet republics and ex-Warsaw Pact countries. ₂₆

 

For Students of Russian Intelligence

Since 1990, reliable primary and memoir material on Soviet intelligence available to scholars has grown from a trickle to a flood. This information enables intelligence professionals to do more than make scholarly judgment about the quality of Soviet intelligence. It allows them to understand the political and intellectual--as well as the operational--baggage of the men who will conduct Russian intelligence operations and train intelligence professionals well into the next millennium. In a country where intelligence and counterintelligence are far more a part of statecraft than in the West, this is critical. Five centuries before Russian intelligence plotted the assassination of Lev Trotsky and created an intelligence aparat to steal Western nuclear secrets, a Russian official told the first British ambassador to the court of Ivan the Terrible: "Only spies come to Russia.

Plus ca change: The New Russian Intelligence Community
In 1991, the KGB had a staff of 488,000, 220,000 of whom served in the Border Guards. The new Russian intelligence community was formed from KGB components:

Foreign Intelligence:	The First Chief Directorate was transformed into the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
Counterintelligence:	The Second and Third Chief Directorates (counterintelligence and military counterintelligence), along with surveillance and other anti-criminal elements of the KGB, became the Federal Security Service (FSB). In early 1998, they received authority to take control of the Chief Directorate of Border Guards.
Signals Intelligence:	The Eighth and Sixteenth Chief Directorates (Government Communications and SIGINT) were folded into the new Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information (FAPSI)
Leadership Protection:	The Ninth (Guards) Directorate became the Service for the Protection of the President (SBP) and the Government Protection Administration (GUO).

 

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Note 1: "Interview with SVR Director". Nezavisimaya gazeta, 20 December 1996, p.2. Back.

Note 2: Two volumes of the history (Ocherki Istorii Rossiskoi Vneshei Razvedki) have been published, covering the period to 1931. Back.

Note 3: Yevgenia Albats, The State within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia Past, Present and Future (New York: Farrar, 1994). Back.

Note 4: Vadim Bakatin, (Farewell to the KGB); Interview with Vadim Bakatin Izvestiya, 2 January 1992; Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), pp. 401-2. Back.

Note 5: Top Secret KGB Annual Report for 1985, doc No. 321-Ch/Ov dated 19 February 1986. Back.

Note 6: KGB World-wide Circular Cable 156/54, dated February 1, 1984, quoted in Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordiyevsky Comrade Kryuchkov's Instructions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 6; Andrews and Gordiyevsky, Inside the KGB (New York Harpers, 1990), p. 625; Pravda, September 11, 1987, p.1. Back.

Note 7: KGB Memorandum 2278-f, 22 November 1982, and 1479-f, 19 July 1982, quoted in Albats, op. cit., pp. 180-181. Back.

Note 8: "Pervii rukovoditel Chekistskoi razvedki", ("First Leaders of Cheka Intelligence) Novosti Razvedki i Kontrrazvedki 23 (1995), p.3. Back.

Note 9: San Francisco 65 to Moscow, 10 February 1944 and 568 to Moscow, 7 November 1945 in VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957 (Washington: GPO, 1996). Back.

Note 10: Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks (New York: Little Brown, 1994), p 314. Back.

Note 11: Filip Bobkov, KGB i Vlast (The KGB and the Power) (Moscow: Veteran MP, 1995), passim; Michael Scammel, ed., The Solzhenitsyn Files (Chicago: Editions q, inc, 1995); KGB Annual Report of 1967. Back.

Note 12: Markus Wolf, Man Without a Face (New York: Random House, 1997) , p. 219; Politburo Meeting of 22 June 1978, Cold War International History Project (Hereafter CWIHP) Vol VIII, p. 119.Documents from the Communist Party archives indicate that Andropov in 1978 recommended to the Politburo that Shcheranskiy receive a "stern sentence". A Soviet court gave the dissenter 15 years. Back.

Note 13: Dilip Hiro, Between Marx and Mohammed (London: Harper Collins, 1994), p.173. Back.

Note 14: John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), p.59. According to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, Stalin had George Kennan's "X" article in Foreign Affairs translated into Russian so that he could read it. CWIHP, Vol. VI-VII (Winter 1995-96), p. 272. Back.

Note 15: KGB Annual Report for 1985, No. 321-Ch/OV, dated 19 February 1986. Back.

Note 16: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 26 April, 1991, quoted in Comrade Kryuchkov's Instructions, op. cit., p. 219. Back.

Note 17: Inside the KGB, op. cit., p. 629. Back.

Note 18: Letter by Charles Gati citing Hungarian and Soviet documents in the CWIHP, Volume VI-VII (Winter 95/96), pp. 284-85. Back.

Note 19: Oleg Kalugin, "Confessions of a General Fallen from Grace", Vechernaya Moskva, 3 November 1990, pp.3-4; Viktor Cherkashin, "Life Sentences and Executions", Nezavisimoye Voennoye Obrozreniye. Back.

Note 20: Bobkov, op. cit., p. 246. Back.

Note 21: "Partiya kommunistov na Puti Rynku" (The Party of Communists on the Path to the Market" Istoricheskii Arkhiv No. 1 (1992), pp. 6-8; Komsomolskya pravda, 7 September 1991, p.1. See also reporting by Jennifer Gould in the Toronto Star, November 13, 1993. Back.

Note 22: Albats, op. cit., pp 114 and 119. Back.

Note 23: Mikail Lubimov, formerly KGB resident in Denmark, in Moscow News, No. 9. Back.

Note 24: Albats, op. cit., pp. 220-221. The survey was published following the August 1991 putsch in Moskovskoi novosti, November 3, 1991. Back.

Note 25: Alexander Rahr, "The Revival of a Strong KGB", RFE/RL Research Report, Vol II (14 May 1993), pp. 74-79. Back.

Note 26: "Cold Wind Blow Through Arctic Climate Project", Science, Vol. 276 (27 June 1997), p.1965; Nezavisimaya gazeta, 18 December 1996, p.2; "FBI says KGB Hasn't Come In Fram the Cold", My (WE) 18-31 May 1992; Amy Knight, Spies without Cloaks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 134-137. Back.