Counterintelligence

   The principal raison d’etre of the Soviet intelligence services was counterintelligence. From the formation of the Cheka, the services sought to deceive, penetrate, and destroy all enemy services and émigré movements, which were seen as a threat to Moscow. In the first days of the regime, the Cheka copied much of the tradecraft of the tsarist Okhrana: double agents were run to penetrate émigré movements, and agents provocateurs were used to entrap enemy agents. These operations were run by the Cheka’s counterintelligence arm, the KRU (Counterintelligence Directorate), which identified the enemy apparatus inside the Soviet Union and abroad and took steps to end the threat. One of the steps used was assassination, but more often enemy agents were the target of recruitment efforts.

   From the 1950s on, the KGB had several components dedicated to counterintelligence. The Second Chief Directorate (SCD) was responsible for counterintelligence operations inside the Soviet Union. To defeat enemy intelligence operations, the KGB ran operational games to engage intelligence officers. These games usually involved double agents. The SCD was seen as the single most important component of the service and had offices in every republic and oblast in the Soviet Union. Its also trained allied services in counterintelligence tradecraft.

   The Third Chief Directorate, inheriting many of the responsibilities once held by Smersh, was responsible for counterintelligence within the military as well as the GRU and the police. During the Russian civil war, the Cheka had created a component to ensure the loyalty of the military, which included tsarist officers. (The military counterintelligence directorate was established in December 1919, a year before the formation of the Cheka’s foreign intelligence component.) These Osobiy otdel (Special Sections) had broad power of arrest, prosecution, and execution. Until the collapse of the regime in 1991, the Third Chief Directorate had agents in every battalion and ran agents within the police and the GRU.

   Directorate K of the First Chief Directorate was responsible for running counterintelligence operations abroad. Its target was the intelligence and security services of enemy states. Under General Oleg Kalugin, Directorate K had a number of major successes. This success continued into the 1980s and 1990s with the recruitment of Edward Howard, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hanssen. Directorate K was also responsible for the security of foreign missions abroad. Every KGB report from 1985 on had details of Directorate K work in thwarting the defection of Soviet citizens.

   The Seventh Directorate was responsible for the physical and technical surveillance of known and suspected intelligence officers and their Soviet contacts. Other directorates had responsibility for counterintelligence in the economy, the transportation bureaucracy, and the intelligentsia. In effect, these components of the KGB were more responsible for sniffing out corruption and dealing with anti-Soviet elements than for detecting foreign spies. Nevertheless, the KGB saw these “political” responsibilities as part of its broad counterintelligence mission of protecting the party from subversion and corruption. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian foreign intelligence and counterintelligence services continue to run operations against foreign intelligence services. Since 1991 the SVR, the new Russian foreign intelligence service, has run two officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and two special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It would seem from an examination of these cases that the foreign counterintelligence responsibilities of the KGB transferred seamlessly to the successor services.

   The FSB, the new security service, has been no less busy. The FSB’s official website reported the arrest and prosecution of 87 Russian civilian and military personnel for spying or revealing state secrets in 2002. The FSB also pursues political dissidents as part of its counterintelligence mission. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, convicted spies are no longer shot but receive jail terms.