KGB

:For other meanings, see KGB (disambiguation).

Notable KGB operations

During the 1945-1989 Cold War, the KGB of the USSR effected these operations against the West, some under its previous names (NKVD, MGB, etc.):

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• Robert Hanssen informed the KGB of U.S. counter-intelligence operations, from his FBI job.
• Aldrich Ames was a KGB mole in the CIA.
• Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were NKVD spies executed by the United States upon their conviction for conspiring to steal technical secrets from the US's atomic programs.
• Melita Norwood betrayed secrets to the KGB for forty (40) years.

James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's counter-intelligence chief, feared that the KGB had moles in two, key places: (i) CIA's counter-intelligence section, and (ii) the FBI's counter-intelligence department. With said moles emplaced, the KGB would have awareness of and so could control U.S. counter-spy efforts to detect, capture, and arrest their spies; it could protect their moles by safely re-directing investigations that might uncover them, or to provide them sufficient advance warning to allow their escape. Moreover, KGB counter-intelligence vetted foreign sources of intelligence, so that moles in that area were positioned to stamp their approval of double agents sent against the CIA.

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In retrospect, the capture of the soviet moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, it appears Angleton's fears--then deemed paranoid--were well-grounded, still, his officially disbelieved assertions cost him his counter-intelligence post in CIA.

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Occasionally, the KGB conducted assassinations abroad--mainly of Soviet Bloc defectors, and often helped other Communist country security services with their assassinations. An infamous example is the September 1978 killing of Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov, in London, England, UK, wherein Bulgarian secret agents used a KGB-designed umbrella gun to shoot Markov dead with a ricin-poisoned pellet.

Related Topics:
Assassination - Defector - Security service - Georgi Markov - Bulgaria - Umbrella - Ricin

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