By early spring 1944 the Soviet liaison mission headed by Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Graur was ready for departure to the United States when the visit was suddenly cancelled by Washington. Within days, Soviet intelligence learned that it was J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, who opposed the opening of another Soviet spy nest in the United States. Eventually, Hoover’s resistance was overruled by Roosevelt, and by June 1944 the exchanges, as defined by the agreement, had begun.

Both the KGB and Soviet military intelligence were generally satisfied with the level of cooperation, but the US-Soviet partnership lasted only a year and a half. With World War II over and the OSS disbanded in October 1945, the Cold War was looming on the horizon. The Venona documents (the US code-breaking project that deciphered Soviet intelligence messages in the 1940s) revealed that the period of US-Soviet amity turned out to be an opportune time for Soviet espionage against the United States. Soviet intelligence oversaw over 200 spies in the United States during the 1940s. Curiously, the number of KGB intelligence officers stationed in the United States in 1941 was only 18. By comparison, at the peak of the Cold War in the early 1980s the KGB had over 200 officers in the United States under various covers, while the number of assets was close to 20.

Controlling the Bloc

Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe posed new challenges to the Soviet security and intelligence apparatus. Keeping control of the internal situation in the “liberated” countries and weeding out anti-socialist and anti-party elements, Zionists, and “enemies of the people” were not easy tasks. The organized forms of KGB cooperation with its counterparts in Eastern Europe gradually began to take shape after 1948. By then, the Soviets had helped local communist party officials select the right people for their security services. Instead of being directly involved in running the national interior and security ministries, as before, Soviet advisors began to coordinate their activities, exchange information, and plan joint operations. But this new approach to mutual cooperation could be ended instantly if a Soviet partner from Eastern Europe had views different from those of Moscow. When the Yugoslav and Albanian leaders rejected Soviet interference in their domestic affairs, they were branded as traitors, and their “accomplices” were executed. In Hungary, for example, during the 1956 popular uprising against communist rule and Soviet domination, Prime Minister Imre Nagy, an NKVD agent since the 1930s, was arrested and subsequently executed for his refusal to obey Soviet orders.

The Hungarian lesson and public unrest in East Germany and Poland were not forgotten by the new Soviet leadership. Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and KGB brutality led to significant changes in the Soviet treatment of allies. Relations became more civilized, subtle, and orderly. The equality in partnership defined in the Warsaw Pact Treaty was proclaimed to be the crux of the new Soviet policy in Eastern Europe.

However, the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 jolted Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev out of complacency and unleashed the KGB’s wrath against a new breed of revisionists in the Socialist camp. Yuri Andropov, the KGB Chairman, insisted on military intervention in Czechoslovakia. He secured the support of other hardliners in the Politburo who overwhelmed Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin and the wavering Brezhnev and dispatched Soviet tanks to suppress the “Prague Spring.” The KGB’s trusted agents arrested the Czech Party leader Alexander Dulcek and installed a new pro-Moscow government. Secret caches of arms allegedly stashed by NATO spies were then “discovered” by the Czech Security Service. Anti-communist leaflets and similar tactics were also part of the KGB’s psychological warfare to influence the public opinion to support Soviet military “assistance” to “healthy” socialist forces in the country.

The Czech events had far-reaching consequences for KGB operations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Frustrated by the lack of objective and reliable reports from KGB liaison offices, Andropov ordered covert actions to obtain desired information. From 1968 onward the moods and views of governments in Eastern Europe were monitored by experienced Soviet illegals, who operated under the guise of Western businessmen, journalists, and tourists and pretended to sympathize with critics of the communist regimes. In 1969, the KGB started opening “legal” residences in Eastern European and other friendly capitals in addition to its liaison missions. Operating under diplomatic, journalistic, and other official covers, KGB officers were now allowed to recruit agents among local citizens, with an emphasis on government officials, party functionaries, and security service personnel.

With Czech discontent ruthlessly suppressed and other satellite nationals left in fear, the KGB tightened its grip on its allies. Only Romania did not comply and left the alliance in 1971 when Romanian State Security terminated its ties with the KGB. Other Eastern European secret services became even more subservient to the Soviets. From assistance in preparing assassinations of political dissidents in Bulgaria to approving East German Stasi involvement with foreign terrorist groups to joint operations in double agentry to stealing Western technologies, the pattern was always the same: the KGB stood behind and directed its allies.

Development and Defeat

Despite greater Soviet involvement, the KGB could stop the growing discontent and disillusionment of neither Eastern Europeans nor of its own people. The Polish crisis of the 1980s proved to be insoluble for Soviet leaders, as the old, tested ways did not work. KGB reports from Warsaw left no doubt that the Czech account of the events would be vigorously opposed not only by the Polish people but also the Polish Communists. The elevation of a Polish cardinal to the papacy made it practically impossible to resort to force. The Soviet retreat in the face of potentially unacceptable consequences compounded by new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reluctance to be drawn into further intelligence enterprises led eventually to the demise of the Warsaw Pact.

The KGB accepted the collapse of the Soviet empire with great reluctance. Prior to the final fall of the Soviet Union, it devised a special program of active measures in a desperate attempt to stave off the downfall of the communist regime, but it was denied permission to implement them. Leonid Shebarshin, the last head of the KGB intelligence service, explains his opposition to the empire’s dissolution by pointing out that “the leaders of Eastern Europe were told to fend for themselves. But they were educated only to be friends of the Soviet Union; they were never prepared to stand on their own feet.”