The KGB was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD AND MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of “union-republican jurisdiction”, carrying our internal security, intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
One of the original documents from the KGB archive in Lithuania shows that there were significant espionage operations in the West conducted by the GPU’s counterintelligence counterpart, the Second Chief Directorate. One such massive, but still unknown counterintelligence operation planned and carried out by the regional branches of the VGU in the republics of the Soviet Union was operation Horizon in 1967 and 1968.
Restructuring in the MVD following the fall of Beria in June 1953 resulted in the formation of the KGB under Ivan Serov in March 1954. Scecetry Leonid Brezhnev overthrew Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Brezhnev was concerned about ambitious spy-chiefs- the communist party had managed Serov’s successor, the ambitious KGB Chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin. Brezhnev sacked Shelepin’s successor and protege, Vladimir Semichastny as KGB chairman and re-assigned him to a sinecure in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The year 1967 was very significant for both the Soviet Union in general and the KGB in particular. In November 1967, the Soviet Union celebrated the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Several months earlier, in May 1967, a new chairman of the KGB was appointed. Nikita Khrushchev’s one time protege who later turned against him Vladimir Semichastny was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev’s favourite, Yuri Andropov. Though nobody could have known it at the time, Andropov turned out to be the longest-serving chairman of the Soviet state security service and one of the very few whose career did not end in disgrace or death. Andropov’s policies left a lasting impact on many spheres of both Soviet and post-Soviet political and social life in Russia. For instance, most of the present Russian leadership, including the president Vladimir Putin, entered the KGB while Andropov was at the helm.
Notable operations
- With the Trust Operation (1921–1926), 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 Spanish agent Ramón Mercader assassinated Leon 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.
According to declassified documents, the KGB aggressively recruited former German (mostly Abwehr) intelligence officers after the war. The KGB used them to penetrate the West German intelligence service. In the 1960s, acting upon the information of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, 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 that Angleton, though ignored as over-aggressive, was correct, despite the fact that it cost him his job at CIA, which he left in 1975.
In the mid-1970s, the KGB tried to secretly buy three banks in northern California to gain access to high-technology secrets. Their efforts were thwarted by the CIA. The banks were Peninsula National Bank in Burlingame, the First National Bank of Fresno, and the Tahoe National Bank in South Lake Tahoe. These banks had made numerous loans to advanced technology companies and had many of their officers and directors as clients. The KGB used the Moscow Narodny Bank Limited to finance the acquisition, and an intermediary, Singaporean businessman Amos Dawe, as the frontman.
On 2 February 1973, the Politburo, which was led by Yuri Andropov at the time, demanded that KGB members influence Bangladesh (which was then newly formed) where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was scheduled to win parliamentary elections. During that time, the Soviet secret service tried very hard to ensure support for his party and his allies and even predicted an easy victory for him. In June 1975, Mujib formed a new party called BAKSAL and created a one-party state. Three years later, the KGB in that region increased from 90 to 200, and by 1979 printed more than 100 newspaper articles. In these articles, the KGB officials accused Ziaur Rahman, popularly known as “Zia”, and his regime of having ties with the United States.
In August 1979, the KGB accused some officers who were arrested in Dhaka in an overthrow attempt, and by October, Andropov approved the fabrication of a letter in which he stated that Muhammad Ghulam Tawab, an Air Vice-Marshal at the time, was the main plotter, which led Bangladesh, Indian and Sri Lankan press to believe that he was an American spy. Under Andropov’s command, Service A, a KGB division, falsified the information in a letter to Moudud Ahmed in which it said that he was supported by the American government and by 1981 even sent a letter accusing the Reagan administration of plotting to overthrow President Zia and his regime. The letter also mentioned that after Mujib was assassinated the United States contacted Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad to replace him as a short-term President. When the election happened at the end of 1979, the KGB made sure that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party would win. The party received 207 out of 300 seats, but the Zia regime did not last long, falling on 29 May 1981 when after numerous escapes, Zia was assassinated in Chittagong.
The two documents were provided with a fascinating inside view into the functioning of the KGB counterintelligence in Lithuania in the context of the Second Chief Directorate (VGU) Operation HORIZON. They describe both the general policy approach and the ground-level implementation. They show that, in addition to the PGU, the VGU was also an important player in KGB operations outside of the Soviet Union and that the regional KGB branches were actively involved in those efforts. They had their own home-grown agent networks engaged in counterintelligence activities against the Western targets abroad.
The records show in particular that the Lithuanian KGB had a very strong and well-developed agent network in the Federal Republic of Germany and was actively instructed by the Moscow Center to expand it even further. The recruitment efforts of these agents as well as the classified information supplied by them provided an important contribution to the overall Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence strategy against the West.
