Context and Setting

As an aftermath of World War II, an intense economic and military struggle wedged itself between two superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States. A political and ideological rivalry ensued for decades and marked a period that became known as the Cold War; a term coined by Truman’s political consultant, Bernard Barruch. It was a time was characterized by a series of proxy wars, competitions, atomic and scientific races between the Soviets and the Americans and no direct confrontation. Although it marked a period of fearfulness and economic crisis; it was one of most decisive period in the 20th century and served as an incubator for modern science. Without the context of the Cold War, many revolutionizing inventions wouldn’t have occurred. We owe it the internet, satellites, phone calls and modern computers. Due to it, the space race officially begun; most pointedly when the first satellite Sputnik 1 was launched by the USSR in 1957. While in the US, the ancestor of current internet ARPANET was first funded in 1966 and was the first network to introduce TCP/IP protocols on which modern internet is based. Technological warfare advances were also phenomenal in regard to bombers, lasers and nuclear programs.

The enmity between the USSR and Western powers like France, Britain and the US was first delineated in Russia’s hindrance of plans to rebuild Germany economically. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, head of the Soviet Union in the 40s, was convinced that the economic restoration plans of Europe served as means of snatching away Eastern bloc countries from Russia’s grip and weakening its economy. Many operatives and schemes were conducted to counter such plans. One of the most notorious Soviet operative is the 1948 Czech coup d’état in which communists led street brutality, took over the law enforcement sector and forced the president to resign or face civil war. Soon after it, the Berlin blockade was established in June 1948 was one of the first tipping points of the Cold War. West-Berlin was sieged by the Soviet Union and deprived from supplies and food while East-Berlin was controlled by it. The Berlin airlift initiative taken by many developed countries began to provide West-Berlin with approximately 8,800 tons of supplies daily (Nash, 2008).

As a result from the escalation of the tension, eleven countries along with the United States established NATO in 1949, short for North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose primary purpose was to unify and build up forces in the eventuality of an attack by USSR and its allies and a third world war. The United States worked towards disbanding communist influences by backing financially the nationalist countermovement to communism in China and Korea. Many proxy wars between the superpowers followed suit in China and Korea while alliances were formed in Japan, Australia and other countries. The rivalry of the Soviets and Americans was pointedly rooted to the USA’s use of nuclear weapons on Japan during World War II. The leaders of the USSR realized the threat of Atomic bombs and began developing their own. As soon as the Soviet Union detonated its first state-of-the-art Plutonium bomb RDS-1 august 1949 as a test; Western powers detected it and were aghast. Their intelligence had underestimated Russia’s Atomic programs (Aldrich, 1998).

On top of that, the strain between the US and Russia was heightened by their two different contradictory economic systems. The United States were and still are a capitalist nation basing itself on private ownership, uneven distribution of wealth and competitive markets. The Soviet Union was in its essence a communist regime that adopted a totalitarian government and equal distribution of wealth. Americans criticized the USSR because its communist system and ideology was considered a threat to liberty for its suppression of individual rights, censorship and totalitarianism.

Quoting President Truman “The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want” (The Truman Doctrine, delivered 12 March 1947 before a Joint Session of Congress).

The Soviets were also not keen America for its capitalistic system rendering it inherently unscrupulous and guilty of creating economic inequality. Both nation recurred to political expediency and criticism of each other to vindicate for military expenditures, and ferociously fought for influence all over the globe to gain allies.

1953 marked a major shift in the dynamics of the Cold War. Truman left office after finishing his term length, and Stalin, who was most likely murdered, passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage. Eisenhower was inaugurated as president of the US. All the while, the Soviet Union was in a state of jeopardy. Stalin’s death sparked off power struggles between political aspirants. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, an influential chief of secret police and deputy head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs under Stalin, was briefly elevated to First deputy Premier in 1953 before being overthrown and arrested during a coup d’état by his soviet political rivals.

The Formation of the KGB

The arrest and trial revealed Beria’s true horrid sadistic nature. He was found guilty of treason, terrorism, abuse of power and counter-revolutionary activity along with many accounts of sexual predation, sexual extortion and brutal rapes on young girls. Later evidence found several corpses of women buried in the garden of Beria’s Moscow villa (Sixsmith, 2011). Lavrentiy Beria rule was marked by him merging the Ministry of State security MGB into the Ministry of Internal Affairs MVD as one working body, and with much difficulty trying to lead a more liberalizing regime by signing decrees to end prison torture. Although he was not a bad ruler as Russia’s Premier, Beria’s legacy forever suffered from his gruesome crimes.

With his execution, the newly formed Ministry of internal affairs was dissolved. Soon thereafter a Soviet statesman, Nikita Khrushchev was assigned as Premier of the Soviet Union. The USSR entered a phase of secretive de-Stalinization. The MGB was re-formed to retain its previous powers and a new agency was formed: the KGB. The KGB stands for “Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti” which is Russian for the Committee of State security. It was founded on Marth 13th 1954 by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet with the symbolic emblem of the sword and the shield. Unlike any other intelligence of that time, the KGB worked as an independent government body with as minimal handling as possible by political leaders of the USSR and directed Russia’s secret police as well as domestic surveillance units. It excelled at information-gathering operatives to the extent that it was reported as the world’s most effective espionage intelligence in a Time’s article by John Kohan (Kohan, 1983).

The KGB was tasked with conducting political espionage, military infiltration, economic sabotage and technology acquisition missions in target countries by either legal or illegal spies. There were two classes of spies: agents and controllers. The legal agents were Soviet citizens permitted to reside in target countries by a way of working in consulates or embassies. They were protected from prosecution by political immunity if caught red-handed or repatriated if compromised. Although riskier, the illegal spies were more fruitful because they were able to integrate society without raising immediate suspicion. These spies led a double life by masking themselves under an assumed identity. The controllers are the ones who relay the instruction and work towards ensuring the success of the mission. The organization recruited civilians dedicated to the communist cause or forcefully by blackmailing them. These undercover contacts ranked from high placed intellectuals to common folk. Internally, the KGB inspired a sentiment of fear because of it imprisonment, torture and assassination of political dissidents. Soviet critics of the communist systems were confined in psychiatric institutions for indeterminate periods (British Medical Association, 1992). It had surveillance departments that monitored unauthorized media, religious activity and Soviet Jews. The spy agency investigated and sabotaged political leaders that threatened the stability of the Soviet Union. A rough estimate found that the KGB had approximately eleven million informers during its entire existence (Pringle, 2000).

The majority of the illegal undercover KGB agents were located in the United States and wrought to infiltrate, subvert and placate on all levels of American society. Some of their spies had already infiltrated America before the Cold War as part of other operations, while others were smuggled from the Soviet embassy in Canada and given fake identity and narratives. Although it is important to note that even if illegal infiltrations were preferred, legal infiltrations were more successful by a large margin.

Meanwhile, infiltrators in the Middle East outdid themselves in promoting dissent to destabilize allies of the US and most specifically: Israel. These agent provocateurs trained, strengthened and armed the Palestine Liberation Organization to conduct guerilla attacks and terroristic acts such as the Avivim school bus massacre which killed nine children and crippled nineteen others in 1970, multiple plane hijackings in the 60s and coastal road massacres in 1978. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, Soviet General and First Chief Directorate of the KGB in 1955, was quoted to have said: “Airplane hijacking is my own invention” and considered the hijacking of Israeli airplanes as an intelligence success. Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, a Soviet politician and KGB chairman, pressed that by hammering the idea that the United States and Israel were the embodiment of Zionist fascist imperialism financed by Jewish bankrolls terrorist violence would flow from Islamic fervor (Papeca, 2006).

The Soviet regime was publicly supporting and sponsoring the PLO (Spector, 1969). Controversially, the Palestine Liberation Organization was found in a 1993 report by Britain’s NCIS to be the wealthiest terrorist group with an annual income of two billion dollars and around 10 billion dollars in possessions (Baracskay, 2011). Starting the 60s, Russia was actively using the KGB to sear Nazi-style hatred against the United States and Israel throughout the Islamic world by manipulating ancestral abhorrence for Judaism. By 1978, the entire Soviet intelligences are estimated to have deployed four thousand influencers in the Arab world.

Allegedly, the KGB was said to have engaged in arming the terrorist Official Irish Republican Army to commit attacks that killed over thirty-six thousand people. The reason being to distend internal diplomatic affairs with England and to encourage the IRA into turning Ireland into a communist regime. Conspiracy theories and fake propaganda were commonly used to sabotage a nation. The most famous circulated piece of propaganda during the Cold War was that the American government had deliberately infected homosexual and African Americans with HIV and AIDS during vaccinations as a mean of racial genocide in 1980. It was published in pro-Soviet journals endorsing the medical opinion of a professor and theorizing that it was first tried on inmates in exchange of an early release. When the Cold War came to an end, former KGB agent Vasili Mitrokhin discredited the theory by declaring that it was part of an operative called “Operation INFEKTION” (Andrew & Mitrokhin, 1999).

The KGB was renowned for its lethal reputation. Testimonies of defected ex-KGB agents reveal the Soviet prowess for assassination techniques. Bohdan Stashynsky testified of Lev Rebet’s cunning assassination. Rebet was a Ukrainian nationalist and an outspoken anti-communist. Lev’s first autopsy showed that he had passed away from a heart attack while in truth he had been neutralized by a KGB agent with a vapor gun that puffed a cloud of odorless cyanide gas. Former citizens and defectors of the Soviet regime were a source of concern for the USSR and they sought out murdering them. The use of toxins or chemical compounds by Soviet intelligence is inconsistent to complicate diagnosis and tracking (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011). Oftentimes, KGB spies retorted to seduction techniques to set honey traps for their victims. Seductresses were called swallows, while seducers ravens (Payne, 1984). Victims were lured in apartments by attractive young women to be recorded and then blackmailed. Amusingly, even though the Soviet Union often recurs to blackmailing; it has no tolerance for it. In the case of a hostage situation of four Soviet diplomats by the Hezbollah in 1985, the KGB was not pleased and instead of engaging in careful negotiations: they tracked down a relative of the Hezbollah leader to castrate, torture and then send his dismembered body parts of the captors along with notes containing names of other family members of the terrorists. As a result, the Hezbollah let go of the diplomats unharmed immediately (The Guardian, 1986).

The efforts of the KGB and other intelligence services were fruitful into maintain the Iron Curtain between the allies of the Soviet Union and members of the NATO. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was crumpling mostly because of economic stagnation and incentives due to its lack of competitive free markets. Nationalism in republics of the USSR was accentuated by ethnic differences. Diplomacy between the Americans and the soviets had slowly improved over the years which led into a demotivation to sabotage them. Monocentric decision-making that barred discussions and incompetence of leaders. Prioritizing military and security forces above developing the economy. Heavy censorship that created brainwashed generations incapacitated of questioning authority. Committing crimes against humanity, especially in the Afghan war, and suffering from international diplomatic backlash. Army, secret police and KGB were weakened by multiple betrayals from defectors and denounced by ambitious local leaders of the republics of the USSR. Religion was settling in Russian society and adopted the Orthodox Church as the state religion. Yet, the primary reason the Soviet Union couldn’t be sustained is the ideology on which it was founded: its rendition of communism, which couldn’t be self-sustainable and led to economic failure.

Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the KGB was disbanded. A new domestic security service replaced it called the FSB and occupied its previous Moscow headquarters assuming partially some of the functions as its forerunner. The Cold War is said to have ended as diplomatic relations between the US and Russia have drastically improved in the late few years, even if the rumored involvement of the Russian government in Trump’s campaign has risen new allegations.

It was truly a fascinating period of history.

References

Aldrich, Richard J. (July 1998). “British Intelligence and the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ during the Cold War”. Review of International Studies. 24 (3): 331–351. doi: 10.1017/S0260210598003313. JSTOR 20097530.

Andrew, C. M., & Mitrokhin, V. (1999). The sword and the shield: The Mitrokhin archive and the secret history of the KGB. New York: Basic Books.

British Medical Association, Medicine betrayed: the participation of doctors in human rights abuses. Zed Books; 1992. ISBN 1-85649-104-8

Central Intelligence Agency, Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping. (2011, August 04). Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol19no3/html/v19i3a01p_0001.htm

John Kohan (14 February 1983). “Eyes of the Kremlin”. Retrieved n.d.

Nash, Gary B. “The Next Steps: The Marshall Plan, NATO, and NSC-68.” The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. P 828.

Pacepa, I. M. (2006, August 24). Russian Footprints. Retrieved July 6, 2018, from https://www.nationalreview.com/2006/08/russian-footprints-ion-mihai-pacepa/

Robert W. Pringle. Andropov’s Counterintelligence State, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 13:2, 193–203, page 196, 2000

Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson (1984). Who’s Who in Espionage? New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Spector, Ivan, The Soviet Union and the Muslim world, 1917–1958, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969, p. 172.

The Guardian (1986, January 07). KGB Reportedly Gave Arab Terrorists a Taste of Brutality to Free Diplomats. Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/1986-01-07/news/mn-13892_1_soviets

The Palestine Liberation Organization: Terrorism and Prospects for Peace in the Holy Land, Daniel Baracskay, 2011, page 83, Prager Security International, ISBN 9780313381515