The Basis of the Story

rom the moment the Soviet state was created out of the ashes of war and revolution, its leaders believed that they were engaged in a life-and-death battle with capitalism. They were convinced that the triumph of communism over capitalism was inevitable--in the long term, but in the short term they feared that the Capitalist West might succeed in temporarily snuffing out communism in its Soviet birthplace.

In this struggle for survival, espionage was assigned a critical role. Just weeks after taking power, the Bolsheviks founded the first Soviet intelligence agency, the Cheka (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage). Its emblems--later adopted by the KGB--were the shield and the sword: the shield to defend the Revolution, the sword to smite its foes. And from the beginning, Soviet intelligence directed its efforts not just outward but inward as well, for the dangers of capitalism required eternal vigilance at home as well as abroad. Thus was Soviet intelligence entrusted not only with spying on foreign powers, but with spying on its own people.

What eventually became known in 1954 as the KGB went through various institutional guises before then, but mention to a Russian any of the acronyms it was known by--Cheka, GPU, OGPU, or NKVD--and it will immediately call up terrifying visions of surveillance, of networks of informants, of the Gulag, of purges and executions. To the rest of the world, though, the KGB was known primarily for the successes of its foreign agents.

The most impressive of these successes is the recruitment of the British spies who became known in KGB lore as the "Magnificent Five." These were five British students with Communist sympathies recruited at Cambridge University in the 1930s, all of whom later rose to high positions in British intelligence or in the Foreign Office. Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and Kim Philby, like many others, worked for the KGB not because they were blackmailed or bribed, but because they believed its cause was just. In the 1930s, with Nazism spreading across the European continent almost unopposed by the liberal democracies, Communism seemed to many the best way to fight the fascist danger. Far and away the most important of the five was Kim Philby. During his extraordinarily successful career, he was considered likely to someday head the British Secret Service. In the 1950s, however, he came under suspicion, and in 1963 he finally defected to Moscow, but not before he had become one of the most celebrated and vilified double agents in the history of espionage.

Lesser known is Richard Sorge, a half-German, half-Russian agent for Soviet intelligence, who gathered information on Japanese military intentions by posing as a German journalist in Tokyo. Handsome and charming, he was able to gain the confidence of Japanese and Germans in Japan by pretending to be an ardent Nazi. In one of his most important intelligence coups, he obtained definite information about the planned Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, even giving the date: June 22, 1941. Intelligence, however, is useless unless translated into policy, and in this case, Sorge's intelligence was ignored. Stalin, who had signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, obstinately refused to heed the signs that the Nazi dictator was planning an attack. He forbade the Red Army to authorize any defensive measures until the attack was underway--a terrible mistake that cost the Soviet Union dearly in lives, territory, and resources.

Although the Soviet Union and the United States were allies during the war, the Soviets continued to engage in active scientific and technical espionage in the U.S., ferreting out the latest American developments in fields like radio engineering and aviation. Their biggest coup, though, was in stealing secrets from the Manhattan Project, America's covert program to develop an atomic weapon. Again, most of the scientists who agreed to pass information to the Soviets did so out of ideological conviction, not for personal financial gain. Klaus Fuchs, for example, was a devout Communist who gave the Soviets staggeringly valuable information; his only tangible reward consisted of a few small gifts. Morris and Lona Cohen, the key couriers on the American end, were also ardent Communists, as were Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. All four believed that Soviet possession of nuclear weapons would guarantee world peace far better than an American monopoly. The executions of the Rosenbergs for treason became a cause celebre for many on the Left, who were convinced of their innocence. In fact the evidence against them was not presented in court for reasons of national security, but it has now been declassified and shows that they did deliver military (though not atomic) technology to the Soviets.

American efforts to recruit Soviet spies were less successful: in a closed society with high levels of surveillance and a profound suspicion of contacts with foreigners, recruitment was obviously far more difficult. When Oleg Penkovsky, an officer in the Soviet military's intelligence agency (the GRU) who gave valuable information to the West during the Cuban missile crisis, came under suspicion for having an unauthorized meeting with a foreigner, he was put under 24-hour surveillance. The family living in the apartment above his was sent on vacation to the Black Sea, and Soviet intelligence drilled a hole in their floor, placing a pinhead camera in Penkovsky's ceiling. With clear evidence of his espionage, Penkovsky was arrested, tortured, and shot.

Soviet agents who defected to the West posed the risk of retaliation to family members left at home. And the KGB did not suffer lightly the loss of its own: it went to great lengths to track down and assassinate defectors, like Ignace Reiss, who tried to escape the purges of the late 1930s by escaping to Switzerland, only to be hunted down and killed. Even those who did succeed in defecting sometimes had a hard time convincing CIA agents, schooled in a profession where distrust and deceit become second nature, that they were genuine defectors and not "provocations," deliberately sent by the KGB to feed false information to the West. In one remarkable case, a valuable defector named Yuri Golitsyn was imprisoned by the CIA for over three years, while counterintelligence officers tried to induce him to confess to being a Soviet mole. He wasn't, and he was eventually freed, but it was too late to act on the most valuable information he had tried to pass along.

The perception that excessive vigilance was more harmful than helpful in the CIA's battle against the KGB may go some way toward explaining what was perhaps the most embarrassing failure for American intelligence: the CIA's refusal to heed the many signs that Aldrich Ames was a double agent. With the help of lists provided by Ames, the KGB was able to identify and murder dozens of American agents. The Ames case was the last major triumph for the KGB, which--at least in name--died when the Soviet empire collapsed. Its successor, the Russian FSB, lives on. How much the new organization resembles the old remains a mystery: like the KGB itself, the FSB is shrouded in secrecy.