KGB
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
(Committee for State Security)
(This is not the true story, only some parts are true)
Soviet Intelligence Service (1917 - )
The world's most dreaded intelligence service, Soviet Russia's KGB, has been known by many names since its inception following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time,Communist leader Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov Lenin reorganized the old czarist secret police, the Okhrana, changing its name to Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Espionage), which lasted until 1922. The Cheka, as a Bureau, however, continued on for many years inside the ever-expanding intelligence service that later became known as the KGB.
The Cheka was renamed the GPU (State Political Administration, 1922 - 1923). When the USSR was formally adopted as a country, the GPU was renamed the OGPU (United States Political Administration, 1923 -1934). The organization known as Cheka, GPU and OGPU was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a ruthless, murderous Bolshevik. Following Dzerzhinsky's death in 1926, the organization expanded quickly to possess total power in enforcing Joseph Stalin's merciless edicts, including the forced collectivization of all lands. In this process, millions of Russians were displaced and millions more were simply killed by OGPU murder squads.
In 1934, the organization's name was again changed to the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, 1934 -1946), headed by a sadist named Genrikh Yagoda, Stalin's hand-picked hatchet man. Under Yagoda, the NKVD assumed total control over all industry, professional occupations, unskilled workers, farmers, all media, all police forces. It controlled the everyday lives of all living in Soviet Russia.
Yagoda, next to Stalin, was the most powerful and most feared man in Russia. He murdered those whom Stalin wanted eliminated, until the ever paranoid Stalin had Yagoda shot in 1936 as a subversive, replacing him with the equally barbarous Nicolai Yezhov, called "The Bloody Dwarf," whom Stalin had shot in 1938. Stalin's close associate, a murderer and rapist, Lavrenti Beria, then assumed command of the NKVD, remaining in power after Stalin's death.
During Beria's reign, the NKVD became the MD (Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1946 - 1954), and, a year after Stalin's death in 1953, became the KGB. Its headquarters is located at The Center, and it is the most important division of Russia's intelligence core, supplemented by the GRU (Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army), which handles military intelligence but is under the overall supervision of the KGB.
The KGB is all powerful in that its operations include all foreign and domestic espionage. It acts without legal restrictions or regulations against the Russian people. Its SMERSH division is a strong-arm branch that metes out punishment and assassination to any Russian branded a traitor or any informer, defector, or Communist not following the Party credo, irrespective of whether or not these hapless victims reside in Russia.
Entrapment of foreign diplomats is a favorite KGB ploy, and it invariably involves sex. This was the manner in which the KGB compromised British Ambassador to Moscow Sir Geoffrey Harrison in 1968, The Ambassador became enamored of a sultry, statuesque Russian woman named Galya who worked as a maid in the British Embassy. She was, of course a KGB plant. Shortly after the pair trysted in a Leningrad apartment, Harrison was shown photos taken of him and Galya having sex.
Harrison was informed that unless he provided the KGB with information they were seeking, the photos and the affair would be made public. Instead of cooperation, Harrison returned to London and confessed his affair to MI5 officers. He retired with full pension. Though this entrapment attempt failed, many before and after were successful.
One such was the compromising of the French Ambassador, Maurice Dejean. The Dejeans arrived in Moscow from Paris in 1955, eager to make friends with any high-ranking Soviets. They were greeted by many who claimed to be stellar Russian leaders but these were either KGB officers or KGB spies. One of them was Lieutenant General Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, who took the name of Gorbunov.
Dejean confided to Gribanov/Gorbunov that he appreciated attractive women and the Ambassador's path was suddenly lined with sultry, bosomy females. The women, called "Swallows" by their KGB bosses, were provided by KGB agent Yuri Vasilevich Krotkov. Krotkov introduced Dejean to a number of Russian film actresses, one of whom was named "Lora." While Dejean was making love to "Lora" her supposed husband burst through the bedroom door to threaten public court action, a scenario that was nothing more than the age-old badger game.
Later that night a nervous Dejean confided his dilemma to Gribanov/Gorbunov who warmly assured his friend that he would use his considerable influence to hush up the husband. He informed Dejean a short time later that he had taken care of the matter and that the French Ambassador had no worries. The grateful Dejean then began giving information to Gribanov, unwittingly or not. The KGB pimp of this affair, Krotkov, then attempted to seduce Dejean's wife and failing this compromised another French diplomat with one of his KGB whores.
Colonel Louis Guibaud, the French air attaché, however, did not cooperate. Instead of providing information to the KGB to have his affair suppressed, he blew out his brains. Krotkov later visited London in 1963 and, while attending a reception for Soviet authors and artists, he slipped away to British intelligence where he said that he was defecting because of his remorse in the Guibaud affair. In that same year, Gribanov was informed that a KGB spy had been caught in New York. Desperate to have an American spy to exchange for the Russian, he ordered his men to find an American espionage agent.
All the KGB agents could come up with was an American teacher, Frederick C. Barghoon, a professor from Yale University who was a tourist in Moscow. Gribanov was told that Barghoon, unfortunately, was not a spy. "Make him a spy!" barked Gribanov. Barghoon was arrested but it turned out that he was a personal friend of President John F. Kennedy, who lodged a formal protest with Nikita Khrushchev. Who, embarrassed and full of red-faced anger, upbraided Gribanov and ordered him to release Barghoon immediately.
Diplomats the KGB could not sexually compromise into providing information were the subject of constant surveillance, beginning with sophisticated listening devices that were cleverly concealed in foreign embassies. In 1975, the American Embassy in Moscow, always the top target for Soviet bugging, was implanted with a new and highly sophisticated communications system that could be activated only by high intensity rays beamed through the Embassy windows. In shooting these rays into the Embassy, KGB technicians inadvertently (or so it was later assumed) caused Ambassador Walter Stoessel to be infected with radiation poisoning.
Stoessel returned to Washington where he recovered from the overdose of radiation, a condition that became hazardous to all diplomats serving on Soviet territory as KGB eavesdropping and counter-eavesdropping devices became more and more complicated. Sometimes, the reasons for branding Americans as spies was simply to show continued espionage activities against Russia in order to prove the Revolution was in constant danger of being undone. Such was the case of Martha Petersen, who was part of the American diplomatic corps in Moscow. KGB agents reported that she was caught retrieving a secret message from a dead-letter box. She was expelled.
The same fate befell Richard Osborn, First Secretary from the economics section of the U.S. Embassy. The KGB announced Osborn's arrest in May 1983, saying that he was caught red-handed while transmitting messages from a radio to a Marisat communications satellite. When the Embassy demanded proof, that the KGB show the copies of the secret messages, the Soviets smirked and reported that Osborn's notes had been destroyed when he quickly dissolved them in water. Osborn, his wife Mary Osborn, and their two children, were expelled from Russia.
Many of the ranking KGB officials who summarily ordered the compromising of diplomats or their arrests were far less sophisticated than those who developed KGB spy technology. They were, for the most part, brutes, thugs, and murderers who had done Stalin's bidding from the time of the Revolution until the dictator found no more use for them. Such was Boris Nicholaevich Ponomarev, who had been a KGB functionary since the days of the Cheka and who arranged for the betrayal of President Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Ponomarev headed the international department of the KGB but was passed over for Yuri Andropov, a younger man. By that time Stalin was long entombed in the Kremlin.
Not dissimilar to Ponomarev was Sergei Kruglov, one of Stalin's most trusted assassins and a one-time member of SMERSH. Kruglov had been a constable in the Red Militia during and after the Revolution. He rose to the rank of colonel and was made commander of the Kremlin Guard. In the 1920's and 1930's Kruglov was known as Stalin's "triggerman," executing or assassinating anyone Stalin selected. He was a ranking member of the Cheka and yet he survived five of he chiefs. It was claimed he had personally shot Cheka bosses Yagoda and Yezhov on Stalin's orders and that he may have caused the mysterious deaths of three other Cheka chiefs.
It is known that Kruglov personally shot Marshal Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, who was part of the great army purge of 1937. For this bloody service, Kruglov was made and "honorary" lieutenant general and Deputy Commissar for Internal Affairs. He also had a hand in directing the widespread SMERSH operations that led to the assassination of Leon Trotsky who, more than any other person, was the guiding light of the Communist Revolution of 1917, and whom Joseph Stalin hated more than any other person on earth.
During World War II, Kruglov was so trusted by Stalin that the Russian dictator insisted that he alone make all security arrangements for the Yalta, Teheran, and Potsdam conferences. At the time, the Western Powers rewarded Kruglov with the Legion of Merit from the U.S. government and an honorary knighthood from the British Empire. Upon Stalin's death Kruglov was made Minister of the Interior and that Ministry was combined with the Ministry of State Security.
KGB boss Lavrenti Beria, one of Kruglov's old friends, continued to openly support him but he distrusted the old killer and he suggested that Kruglov might have accumulated too much power. In April 1954, the Committee for State Security was detached from Kruglov'sMinistry of the Interior and placed under the command of General A. Ivan Serov, who would later head the KGB. Thus, Kruglov was outmaneuvered from taking over Beria's position. He was quietly dismissed in 1956 and faded from view.
KGB agents have been the best trained spies in the world and, despite the number of them who defect, proved to be utterly dedicated to their nefarious tasks. Next to the Soviet military, the KGB has commanded a staggering budget, billions of dollars each year to maintain its enormous headquarters staff, tens of thousands of field agents, and staggering technical support staffs. The CIA's John McMahon reported to Congress in 1982 that the KGB was then spending between three and four billion dollars a year to create disinformation, propaganda, and outright forgeries such as the fake letters between President Ronald Reagan and King Juan Carlos of Spain in which Reagan reported that his own advisers were opposed to Spain's inclusion in NATO, a KGB fabrication.
One KGB victim was Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, who was found drunk and dripping wet by aides in a Moscow police station in 1990. Yeltsin said the KGB tried to drown him.
(If you want the true story you must be in the KGB)
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