The KGB ran four large, distinct operations. The First Chief Directorate (PGU) ran foreign intelligence from “legal” rezidenturas in Soviet embassies and from “illegal” lines of officers operating under deep cover with no Soviet connection. The Second Chief Directorate ran internal security, including the surveillance of dissidents and the management of a vast informer network inside the Soviet Union. The Fifth Service ran disinformation and active measures, including the planting of forged documents and the operation of front organizations. Directorate S ran the illegals program; the Eighth Chief Directorate ran communications and signals intelligence. For more on the KGB article; the Cambridge network it ran is detailed in the famous-spies article.
The KGB’s operations in the West were organized by geographic rezidenturas, each headed by a rezident who was nominally a diplomat in the Soviet embassy. The rezidentura’s “lines” handled political, scientific, military, and counterintelligence targets. The officers worked under official cover and were constrained by the diplomatic rules of the host country; if expelled, they could be “persona non grata”-ed in the usual way. The illegals — the officers of Directorate S and the related “S” lines in PGU — were different. They operated under false identities, with no official connection to Moscow, and were supported by forged documents, established cover stories, occasional deep-cover marriage to a Russian-speaker from outside the USSR.
Human intelligence: the art of recruitment
The recruitment of a foreign agent followed a pattern that the KGB’s own training literature described in detail. The first stage was the identification of a target with access to information the agency needed. The second was the cultivation of the target, often through social or professional contact, sometimes through blackmail, almost always through the development of a personal relationship with a “case officer.” The third was the approach — the explicit invitation to spy — and the fourth was the formalization of the relationship, usually at the first dead drop or first live meeting.
The motivators were usually a combination of money, ideology, coercion, and ego. The Cambridge Five, in the 1930s, were ideological recruits. The Aldrich Ames case in 1985 was a money case. The Robert Hanssen case combined money and resentment. The cases in between, as Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin note in The Sword and the Shield (1999), are difficult to summarize in any single motivation. The agency was, however, deeply serious about the tradecraft of recruitment and ran its own training school in Moscow and, for illegals, a school in the Belorussian SSR.
Signals intelligence and surveillance
The KGB’s signals intelligence arm was separate from the PGU and was run, from 1954, by the Eighth Chief Directorate. The agency had a substantial network of listening stations in the USSR and a smaller set of bases abroad, including a major facility at Lourdes, Cuba, that was used to intercept American civilian and military communications. The KGB also had its own technical-surveillance capability; the “rebuilt” Studied book-bugging device, planted in the American embassy in Moscow in 1978, was one of the agency’s most effective operations of the 1970s.
Internal surveillance was the Second Chief Directorate’s job. The directorate managed the system of “confidential contacts” (informers) inside the Soviet Union — the number has been estimated at between 4 million and 7 million by the early 1980s, in a country of about 270 million. The informers provided reports on their colleagues, neighbors, and friends. The directorate also ran the surveillance operations against known dissidents, including the round-the-clock watch on Andrei Sakharov’s Moscow apartment from 1980 to 1986.
Disinformation and active measures
The Fifth Service (formerly Service A of the PGU) ran disinformation and active measures. The two were related but distinct. Active measures included the support of foreign communist parties, the funding of front organizations abroad, and the placement of unattributed propaganda. Disinformation was the planting of forged documents and false stories designed to look as though they had originated in the West or in hostile intelligence services.
Operation INFEKTION, the false-flag campaign to spread the claim that AIDS had been manufactured at Fort Detrick, is the most-cited example. The campaign began in 1983 with a planted story in an Indian newspaper and was maintained through the 1980s. The Soviet — and, after 1991, Russian — services have continued the practice; the 2014 disinformation campaign that blamed the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Ukraine and the 2016–2017 active-measures operations in the U.S. presidential election are the most-cited recent examples.
The KGB was, in sum, an organization of considerable operational range. The PGU’s penetration of Western governments and scientific institutions was a major contributor to the Soviet weapons program. The Second Chief Directorate’s informer network was, by any measure, the largest surveillance apparatus ever built in peacetime. The Fifth Service’s disinformation campaigns, while not always successful, established a model for Russian information warfare that survives in the twenty-first century.