KGB in America Cold War Russian Spies Agents and Operations Documentary Film

KGB КГБ is the commonly used acronym for the Russian Комитет государственной безопасности​ Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991 and was the premier internal security intelligence and secret police organization during that time The KGB has been considered a military service and was governed by army laws and regulations similar to the Soviet Army or MVD Internal Troops While most of the KGB archives remain classified two on-line documentary sources are available

Since breaking away from Georgia de facto in the early 1990s with Russian help South Ossetia established its own KGB keeping this unreformed name The State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus also uses the acronym KGB

The GRU military intelligence recruited the ideological agents Julian Wadleigh and Alger Hiss who became State Department diplomats in 1936 The NKVDs first US operation was establishing the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov in 1934 Throughout the Communist Party USA CPUSA and its General Secretary Earl Browder helped NKVD recruit Americans working in government business and industry

Other important high-level ideological agents were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department the economist Lauchlin Currie an FDR advisor and the Silvermaster Group headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare Moreover when Whittaker Chambers formerly Alger Hisss courier approached the Roosevelt Government—to identify the Soviet spies Duggan White and others—he was ignored Hence during the Second World War 1939--45—at the Teheran 1943 Yalta 1945 and Potsdam 1945 conferences—Big Three Ally Joseph Stalin of the USSR was better informed about the war affairs of his US and UK allies than they were about his

Soviet espionage succeeded most in collecting scientific and technologic intelligence about advances in jet propulsion radar and encryption which impressed Moscow but stealing atomic secrets was the capstone of NKVD espionage against Anglo--American science and technology To wit British Manhattan Project team physicist Klaus Fuchs GRU 1941 was the main agent of the Rosenberg spy ring In 1944 the New York City residency infiltrated the top secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico by recruiting Theodore Hall a nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist

The KGB failed to rebuild most of its US illegal resident networks The aftermath of the Second Red Scare 1947--57 McCarthyism and the destruction of the CPUSA hampered recruitment The last major illegal resident Rudolf Abel Willie Vilyam Fisher was betrayed by his assistant Reino Häyhänen in 1957

Recruitment then emphasised mercenary agents an approach especially successful in scientific and technical espionage—because private industry practiced lax internal security unlike the US Government In late 1967 the notable KGB success was the walk-in recruitment of US Navy Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker who individually and via the Walker Spy Ring for eighteen years enabled Soviet Intelligence to decipher some one million US Navy messages and track the US Navy

In the late Cold War the KGB was lucky with intelligence coups with the cases of the mercenary walk-in recruits FBI counterspy Robert Hanssen 1979--2001 and CIA Soviet Division officer Aldrich Ames