The Secret History of the KGB

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1999 | by J. Michael Waller

The history admits that the Chekists made mistakes, but apart from the discussion of the Stalin period does not state what those mistakes were. It calls on KGB officers to learn from their mistakes yet gives no examples of how this was done in the past.

A notable feature of the secret document is its paranoid tone. The entire document portrays the KGB as fending off endless enemies, Russian and foreign. Eight of the 12 chapters begin with an introduction about "subversive activity of external and internal counterrevolutions" or of foreign-intelligence organizations as the main justifications of the Chekists' actions. Interestingly, the chapters covering the Nazi-Soviet alliance of 1939 to June 1941, and the Soviet wartime secret services of 1941-45, do not term Nazi operations "subversive."

The KGB does express alarm about the Communist Chinese secret services and those of Japan and Israel as well as of "international Zionist centers." But during the entire six-and-one-half decades surveyed, the main "subversive" forces -- a term Putin used in his Chekist Day TV address -- are the British and the Americans.

U.S. technological innovations and dominance in outer space with orbiting reconnaissance satellites "fundamentally influenced the strategy and tactics of subversive activity against the Soviet Union and the other countries of the socialist camp," according to the secret history. U.S. dominance in space, the KGB maintained, allowed the United States to assert itself more strongly against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The KGB also noted how, starting in the 1960s, the United States integrated its "ideological diversions against the socialist countries" and received unprecedented access to Soviet strategic military developments. Increased U.S. reliance on technology for intelligence collection, as opposed to old-fashioned human intelligence with agent networks, presented a huge dilemma for the KGB.

Another U.S. innovation that frustrated KGB plans abroad was the Peace Corps, created in 1961, which the history sees as having undermined Soviet planning to promote communist or otherwise anti-Western movements and regimes in the Third World by engaging in "active propagandistic activity among the developing nations in the interests of imperialism."

The KGB document also complains about Radio Liberty and the U.S. Information Agency as having "developed special programs and tactical precepts of subversive acts against the U.S.S.R." These acts encouraged internal dissidents within the Soviet Union, prompting the KGB to take a more sophisticated approach to dealing with dissent both at home and abroad.

By the mid-1960s, "there were substantial shortcomings in the activity of state-security organs for combating enemy ideological diversions," but "active measures for exposing and disrupting anti-Soviet acts, for undercover-agent penetration into enemy intelligence organs and propaganda centers, into anti-Soviet foreign organizations that were planning and carrying out acts of psychological warfare, were not sufficiently conducted."