#KGB
20 entries tagged KGB.
People (11)
- Aldrich Ames Aldrich Ames was a CIA officer in the Soviet division who beginning in April 1985 provided the KGB with the identities of CIA sources inside the Soviet Union, causing the execution of at least ten agents and receiving over $2.7 million in payment, until his arrest on February 21, 1994 - making him the most damaging mole in CIA history and confirming, years after his death, that James Angleton's foundational premise about Soviet penetration of American intelligence had been correct.
- Anatoli Golitsyn Anatoli Golitsyn was a KGB major who defected to the CIA in Helsinki in December 1961, provided intelligence that led to several confirmed Western penetrations, convinced James Angleton that a high-level Soviet mole existed in the CIA, and argued that subsequent defectors including Yuri Nosenko were KGB plants - a framework that paralyzed CIA Soviet operations for a decade without producing a confirmed mole.
- Erich Mielke Erich Mielke (1907-2000) served as East Germany's Minister for State Security from 1957 to 1989, building the Stasi into one of history's most comprehensive surveillance systems with 91,000 employees and 189,000 informants, before being convicted after reunification for a 1931 double murder rather than for Stasi crimes.
- George Blake George Blake was a British MI6 officer and KGB double agent, recruited during Korean War captivity, who betrayed approximately 40 agents and revealed Operation Gold before construction began, escaped a 42-year sentence from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966, and died in Moscow in December 2020 at age 98.
- Heinz Felfe Heinz Felfe was a former SS officer and KGB double agent who joined the CIA-funded Gehlen Organization in 1951, rose to chief of counterintelligence for the BND, and was exposed in November 1961 after a decade compromising CIA-BND joint operations.
- Kim Philby Kim Philby was the most damaging member of the Cambridge Five, a KGB agent who penetrated MI6 to its anti-Soviet section chief and CIA liaison in Washington, directly causing the death or capture of hundreds of Western agents and precipitating James Angleton's decade-long mole hunt paranoia before defecting to Moscow in January 1963.
- Lee Harvey Oswald Lee Harvey Oswald was the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas - a former U.S. Marine stationed at the CIA's U-2 base at Atsugi who defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, returned to the United States in 1962, distributed Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets in New Orleans in summer 1963, visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City that September, and was shot by Jack Ruby two days after arrest; the CIA's counterintelligence division (CI/SIG) had maintained a 201 file on him since December 9, 1960, and a senior CIA officer who signed a key pre-assassination cable later stated she was 'signing off on something that I know isn't true.'
- Markus Wolf Markus Wolf (1923-2006), known as 'the man without a face,' directed the Stasi's foreign intelligence directorate (HVA) from 1952 to 1986, building one of the Cold War's most effective intelligence services through penetrations of West German government including the Guillaume operation that brought down Chancellor Willy Brandt.
- Robert Hanssen Robert Philip Hanssen (1944-2023) was an FBI supervisory agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence from 1979 to 2001, betraying approximately 50 human assets and thousands of pages of classified material before pleading guilty to 15 espionage counts in 2001.
- Robert Maxwell Robert Maxwell was a British publishing magnate, Labour MP, and alleged simultaneous asset of Mossad, British, and Soviet intelligence whose empire collapsed after he looted the Mirror Group pension funds, who was alleged to be the international distributor of backdoored PROMIS software, and who died at sea off the Canary Islands in 1991 amid contested allegations of foul play.
- Yuri Nosenko Yuri Nosenko was a KGB officer who defected to the CIA on February 4, 1964 and claimed to have reviewed the KGB's file on Lee Harvey Oswald and found no KGB connection to the Kennedy assassination - a claim that led James Angleton and Anatoli Golitsyn to insist he was a Soviet plant, resulting in Nosenko's illegal imprisonment in a specially built CIA cell for three and a half years before the agency concluded he was genuine.
Organizations (2)
- Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung The Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) was East Germany's foreign intelligence directorate, directed by Markus Wolf from 1952 to 1986, renowned for penetrating West German government including placing Günter Guillaume as Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal aide, and dissolved following German reunification in 1990.
- Stasi The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) was East Germany's combined domestic security and foreign intelligence agency (1950-1990), maintaining approximately 91,000 employees and 189,000 informants and operating the HVA foreign intelligence directorate that penetrated West German government through agents including Günter Guillaume in Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal staff.
Programs (1)
- Operation Gold Operation Gold was a 1955-1956 CIA-MI6 joint operation that tunneled beneath the Berlin sector boundary to tap Soviet military cables, producing eleven months of signals intelligence before a staged Soviet discovery - the tunnel having been betrayed before construction by MI6 officer and KGB agent George Blake.
Concepts (1)
- Cold War The Cold War (1947-1991) was the period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union that is the overarching context for most of the intelligence operations, covert programs, and clandestine financial networks documented throughout this vault.
Places (5)
- Berlin Berlin was the central geographic front of the Cold War intelligence war: divided by the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989, it hosted the CIA's Berlin Base (one of the most significant Cold War stations), the KGB's Karlshorst headquarters in East Berlin, and was the site of numerous defections, intelligence operations, and the 1986 nightclub bombing that triggered the U.S. strike on Libya.
- East Germany The German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany, 1949-1990) was the Soviet-aligned German state defined by the Stasi's pervasive surveillance, the Berlin Wall's 1961 construction to halt emigration, and the HVA's penetration of West German government including placing Günter Guillaume in Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal staff.
- Moscow Moscow is the capital of Russia and was the capital of the Soviet Union; as the seat of the KGB (and its successors) and the Communist Party Central Committee throughout the Cold War, it is the ultimate target or origin point for the majority of the intelligence operations documented in this vault.
- Russia Russia is the successor state to the Soviet Union and home to the KGB's successor agencies (FSB, SVR, GRU); it appears in this vault primarily as the origin of the Cold War intelligence apparatus that generated the American intelligence programs, parapsychology research, and covert operations documented throughout.
- Soviet Union The Soviet Union (USSR, 1922-1991) was the primary U.S. Cold War adversary whose reported psi research program directly drove U.S. intelligence investment in remote viewing and whose intelligence services ran the KGB operations documented throughout this vault.