“The crisis years” of 1960-1962 are remembered as a peak of the 
Cold War, an apogee of the bipolar confrontation.  Many consider 
them even more dangerous than the Korean War, when the military 
forces of West and East clashed and almost slipped into a global 
conflict.  The early 1960s were all the more frightening since the 
two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were 
engaged in a fierce nuclear arms race, and two more states, Great 
Britain and France, had developed small nuclear arsenals of their 
own.  By the end of the period the edge in this race clearly belonged 
to the United States such that, at the height of the Cuban Missile 
Crisis, Washington had at least nine times as many deliverable 
nuclear warheads as Moscow.1  After the summer of 1961 the 
Kennedy administration was perfectly aware of that fact, but, 
nevertheless, sweeping Soviet progress in ICBMs soon eliminated 
the impregnability of “fortress America” forever.

	The loss of strategic invulnerability weighed as heavily on the 
American psyche as had the loss of the atomic monopoly (and 
China) in 1949.  And, as before, this agitated state of mind offered 
fertile ground for spy-hysteria.  This time, however, it did not reach 
the proportions of McCarthyism, but remained localized in 
government offices where cold warriors, especially true believers 
among them, began to talk again about a “master plan” of the 
Kremlin and the KGB to delude and disrupt the Western alliance in 
preparation for a decisive showdown between the two Cold War 
blocs.  Some of them, most prominently James J. Angleton, head of 
the CIA’s counterintelligence department, tenaciously denied the 
reality of the Sino-Soviet split as a “hoax” designed to lull the West 
into complacency.  Angleton, along with a Soviet defector, KGB 
major Anatoly Golitsyn, also believed that there was a KGB mole 
inside the CIA’s Soviet Division, and that Soviet intelligence was 
assiduously planting its illegals and agents, primarily displaced 
persons from Eastern Europe and Russia, in various high-placed 
positions in the West.  They even claimed that former British 
Labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell had probably been murdered by 
the KGB, that his successor, Harold Wilson, was probably a KGB 
asset, and that the famous double agent Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU 
(Soviet military intelligence) colonel, was also a Soviet plant.2

	The seemingly wild surmises of an American counterintelligence 
officer become more understandable as we learn more about the 
strange “behind the mirror” world of spying, double-agents, and 
deliberate disinformation in which huge and well-funded rival 
intelligence services clashed with no holds barred.  Intelligence at 
any time is a necessary and valuable instrument of a state’s foreign 
policy.  But in the years of Cold War tension the intelligence 
services were more than just “eyes,” they were powerful weapons in 
propaganda warfare between the ideological blocs.  Furthermore, in 
a situation of mutual fear produced by the nuclear deadlock, when 
mammoth armies confronted each other in Europe and around the 
world, intelligence networks were the only mobile force in action, 
the “light infantry” of the Cold War: conducting reconnaissance, but 
also trying to influence the situation in the enemy’s rear by means 
sometimes just short of military ones.

	The plans and instructions related to operational work and 
intelligence sources, in particular involving planting agents abroad 
and using double-agents, justifiably belong to the most zealously 
guarded secrets of intelligence bureaucracies.  But recently, thanks 
to the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians have acquired a rare 
chance to peek into the mysteries of one of the two intelligence 
giants of the Cold War—documents of the Committee on State 
Security (KGB).  These are not papers of the First Main Directorate 
(PGU), which was responsible for foreign intelligence and which 
continues under the new regime in Russia and, of course, preserves 
its secrecy (although some of its former officers, Oleg Kalugin, 
Leonid Shebarshin, and Vadim Kirpichenko among them, have 
recently written memoirs3).  The documents in question were sent 
by the KGB to the Secretariat and the Politburo of the Central 
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC 
CPSU), whose archives, unlike those of the KGB, have in part at 
least become accessible to scholars and the public.4

	For all their fascination, the internal KGB documents cited in this 
article should also be treated with a good deal of caution.  They 
contain references to events, plans, individuals, and explicit or 
implicit relationships that are uncorroborated and should be 
carefully investigated and cross-checked with other evidence before 
their accuracy and significance can be confidently gauged.  Many of 
the assertions contained in the documents will require, in particular, 
collation with relevant materials in the archives of other 
governments and intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, and 
analysis by specialists in the history of intelligence.  Many names in 
the documents are transliterated from the Russian after being 
transliterated from other languages, and the spelling may not be 
accurate.  Moreover, in assessing reports by KGB leaders to 
Khrushchev, readers should recall the tendency of bureaucrats in 
any government to exaggerate capabilities or accomplishments to a 
superior, a provoclivity that may be accentuated when, as in this 
period, there is intense pressure to produce results.  Finally, in 
addition to remembering the lack of systematic access to KGB and 
CIA archives, those who evaluate the documents that do become 
available must keep in mind  that evidence on crucial matters may 
have been deliberately destroyed, distorted, fabricated, or simply 
never committed to paper.  All of these caveats should simply serve 
as reminders that however revealing these materials are, much 
additional research will be needed before a balanced and informed 
evaluation of the role of intelligence agencies and activities in the 
Cold War, on all sides, can be attained.



The KGB reports to Khrushchev

	On 14 February 1961, Nikita S. Khrushchev received an annual 
report of the KGB marked “Top Secret—Highly Sensitive.”5  Only 
Khrushchev could decide who among the top Soviet leadership 
might see the report, in which the Collegium of the KGB informed 
him as the First Secretary of the CC CPSU and as a Chairman of the 
Council of Ministers of the USSR about the achievements of Soviet 
foreign intelligence during 1960. 

	In this period, Khrushchev was told, 375 foreign agents were 
recruited, and 32 officers of the State Security were transferred 
abroad and legalized.  The stations abroad obtained, among others, 
position and background papers prepared by Western governments 
for the summit conference in Paris in May 1960, including materials 
on the German and Berlin questions, disarmament, and other issues.  
They also provided the Soviet leadership with “documentary 
evidence about military-political planning of some Western powers 
and the NATO alliance as whole; [...] on the plan of deployment of 
armed forces of these countries through 1960-63; evidence on 
preparation by the USA of an economic blockade of and military 
intervention against Cuba”—the last a possible allusion to 
preparations for the forthcoming April 1961 CIA-supported 
invasion by anti-Castro Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs.6

	The sheer numbers conveyed the vast extent of information with 
which the KGB flooded the tiny group of Soviet leaders.  During 
one year alone it prepared and presented 4,144 reports and 68 
weekly and monthly informational bulletins to the Party’s Central 
Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers; 4,370 documentary 
materials were sent to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; 3,470 
materials to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky and the Head of 
the General Staff Alexander Vassilevsky; and 790 materials to other 
ministries and agencies.7

	Soviet foreign intelligence appeared to have been particularly 
successful in “sigint” (signals intelligence) operations.  The 
sprawling Service of Radio Interception and Code-Breaking of 
Diplomatic and Agent-Operational Communications of the 
Capitalist Countries, the innermost part of the KGB empire 
(analogous to the U.S. National Security Agency), managed to break 
many diplomatic and intelligence codes.  During 1960 it reported 
deciphering 209,000 diplomatic cables sent by representatives of 51 
states, and the most important among them—133,200—were 
reported to the CPSU Central Committee.  The Kremlin therefore 
apparently eavesdropped on some of the West’s most classified 
communications.

	True, there were clouds on the horizon.  The enemy became 
increasingly sophisticated and difficult to penetrate.  The Directorate 
of Counterintelligence confronted, according to the annual report, 
“serious difficulties” in 1960.  “The adversary goes to great 
lengths,” the KGB complained.  “For instance, the Committee 
noticed cases when the enemy’s intelligence officers met their 
agents on a beach and secretly exchanged materials while 
swimming.  If it happens on a beach, they would lie close by, 
pretend they do not know each other and dig their materials in the 
sand, and then cautiously extract them.”  There were more serious 
challenges than the “beach” method.  U.S. intelligence, the KGB 
found, began to use a new type of heavily-protected codes.  They 
wrote on a very thin (papirosse-type) paper prepared specifically for 
this purpose.  Also a special plane was constructed in the USA to 
bring illegal agents to the USSR.  “Since this plane is made of 
rubber-layered tissue,” the report said, “and can conduct flights at 
low altitudes, it has practically no chance, according to our experts, 
of being located by existing radar stations.”8

	With the life of KGB officers and agents in the United States 
becoming increasingly rough due to the effectiveness of J. Edgar 
Hoover’s FBI and harsh restrictions on travel for Soviet journalists 
and diplomats, the Committee tried to exploit the increasing trickle 
of Soviet visitors to the United States to include its operatives and 
agents.  Another channel was sending younger KGB officers, Oleg 
Kalugin among them, as graduate and post-graduate students to 
Columbia, Harvard, and other American universities.

	Yet nobody could replace illegals.  The KGB in 1960 began to 
move its “sleepers” in other countries to the United States “with the 
aim of planting them in a job in American intelligence or 
intelligence schools.”  One priority was “to insert KGB agents as 
professors of Russian, Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian languages 
in the language school of USA military intelligence in Monterey,” 
California.9 

	The report distinguished between old and new priorities of Soviet 
foreign intelligence.  An old one was to ferret out, in competition 
with the GRU (Glavrazvedupr) or military intelligence, Western 
plans for rearmament and NATO’s level of combat readiness.  New 
efforts were targeted, first, at scientific-technical espionage and, 
second, at elaborate propaganda and disinformation campaigns.  
The former had proved to be a stupendous success in the 1940s, 
when the Soviets obtained detailed information on the wartime 
Anglo-American atomic bomb project, and it continued to be 
important as Cold War sanctions and barriers cut the Soviets off 
from Western technologies and industrial machinery. 

	During 1960, the KGB’s scientific-technical intelligence service 
reported that it stole, bought, and smuggled from the West 8,029 
classified technologies, blueprints, and schemas, as well as 1,311 
different samples of equipment.10  A special target in this regard 
was, of course, the United States.  On 7 April 1960, the Central 
Committee had directed the KGB to prepare a “prospective working 
plan of the intelligence service of the Committee of State Security at 
the Council of Ministers against the United States of America.”11  
The plan, presented on 10 March 1961, postulated a wide array of 
measures.12  Among them were efforts to insinuate agents into U.S. 
scientific-technical centers, universities, industrial corporations, and 
other institutions specializing in missile building, electronics, 
aircraft, and special chemistry.  The KGB planned to use “third 
countries” as a springboard for this penetration campaign.  Its agents 
in Great Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan were to worm 
their way into scientific, industrial, and military research and 
consulting institutions of these countries with access to American 
know-how or subcontracting to U.S. military agencies.  Agents 
residing in England, Austria, Belgium, West Germany, and Israel 
were instructed to move to the United States with the goal of finding 
jobs in the military-industrial sector.  

	It  also planned to organize “on the basis of a well-screened 
network of agents” several brokerage firms in order to obtain 
classified scientific-technical information and “to create conditions 
in a number of countries for buying samples of state-of-the-art 
American equipment.”  One such firm was to be opened in the 
United States, one in England, and two in France.  The KGB also 
prepared to open in a European country a copying center that would 
specialize copying blueprints and technical documentation in the 
fields of radioelectronics, chemistry, and robotics.13 

	Some orthodox anti-communists in the CIA, known as the 
fundamentalists, were tipped off by the Soviet defector Golitsyn 
about an alleged KGB “monster plot” to create a strategic web of 
deception.  According to Golitsyn, the KGB’s new chairman, 
Alexander Shelepin, the energetic and imaginative former leader of 
Young Communist League, revealed this plot in May of 1959 to the 
KGB establishment.  Golitsyn even maintained, contrary to all 
evidence and logic, that the political and military split between 
China and the USSR after 1959 was a fake, just a facet of 
Shelepin’s diabolical master plan.14

	There was no such “master plan” in the KGB.  But under 
Shelepin the Committee indeed hatched several schemes of strategic 
and tactical deception: to conceal Soviet intentions and weak spots 
from the West, as well as to disrupt consensus in Western societies 
and alliances on policies, means, and goals for waging the Cold 
War.  In the plan presented to the Central Committee on 10 March 
1961, mentioned above, for example, the KGB proposed “to carry 
out disinformation measures on the information that American 
intelligence obtains about the Soviet Union; to pass along the 
channels of American intelligence disinformation on economic, 
defense, and scientific-technical issues; to disinform the USA 
intelligence regarding real intentions of Soviet intelligence services, 
achieving thereby the dispersion of forces and means of the enemy’s 
intelligence services.”15  The deception went side by side with blunt 
slander campaigns and forgery.  In its 1960 report, the KGB took 
pride in operations carried out to compromise  “groupings and 
individuals from the imperialist camps most hostile towards the 
USSR.”  The Committee publicized in the West 10 documentary 
pieces of dis-information, prepared in the name of state institutions 
and government figures of capitalist countries, and 193 other 
disinformation materials.  The KGB took credit for staging a 
number of rallies, marches, and pickets in the United States, Japan, 
England, and other countries.  It claimed to be instrumental in 
engineering 86 inquiries of governments and presentations in 
parliaments and 105 interviews of leading figures in these countries.  
In addition it asserted that it had helped organize 442 mass petitions 
to governments,  distributed 3.221 million copies of various leaflets, 
and published abroad 126 books and brochures “unmasking 
aggressive policies of the USA” and its allies, as well as 3,097 
articles and pieces in the media.  The Committee reported that it had 
instigated all this through 15 newspapers and magazines on the 
KGB payroll.16 

	During the early Cold War and later, both U.S. and Soviet 
intelligence services used penetration, deception, and propaganda to 
groom potential allies and neutralize enemies on both sides of the 
Iron Curtain.  Each had a record of successes and failures during the 
1950s.  The KGB successfully played on French suspicions of West 
German militarism to frustrate ratification of the European Defense 
Community (EDC), the Western plan to create a “European army.”  
The CIA had its own triumph in Iran by overthrowing Prime 
Minister Mossadeq and opening the way for conversion of that 
country into a mainstay of Western defense structures in the Middle 
East for a generation. 

	But U.S. intelligence failed during the 1950s to establish a 
network of influence in Eastern Europe, not to mention the Soviet 
Union itself.  The KGB even in 1960 acted under the impression 
that it could do better in the United States, using the growing fatigue 
with the Dulles-Eisenhower hard line and growing public support 
for U.S.-Soviet rapprochement.  The Committee pledged, in accord 
with its April 1960 instruction, to establish closer contacts with 
liberal Democrats in the U.S. Congress and to encourage them “to 
step up their pressure for improvement of relations between the 
USA and the Soviet Union and for settlement of international 
problems through negotiations.”  The KGB concentrated its 
propaganda efforts, it reported, on “left-wing trade unions, Quakers, 
pacifist, youth and other social organizations,” and was even ready 
“to provide those organizations and some trusted individuals with 
the needed financial assistance in a clandestine way.”17

	According to the plan, the KGB proposed to subsidize the 
“American progressive publishing house ‘Liberty Book Club’ in 
order to publish and disseminate in the USA and other capitalist 
countries books prepared at our request.”18  The experiment seemed 
to promise further successes, since the KGB intended to 
internationalize it by opening club affiliates in England, Italy, and 
Japan.  In a spirit of innovation, demonstrated in those years, the 
Committee also “studied the possibility of using a major American 
public relations agency for the distribution in the USA of truthful 
information about the Soviet Union.”19  These and similar 
undertakings required a lot of money, and some KGB operatives like 
Konon Molody (Gordon Arnold Lonsdale) were encouraged to 
engage in lucrative businesses in the West and then funnel the 
profits into KGB foreign accounts.20

	A special division of the KGB was busy fabricating 
disinformation on the production in the United States of chemical 
and bacteriological weapons and the development of new means of 
mass destruction.  Faked documents, innuendo, and gossip were 
used to undercut U.S. positions and influence among delegations of 
Afro-Asian and Latin American countries in the United Nations and 
“to promote disorganization of the American voting machine in the 
structures  of the UN.”  There were even attempts to sidetrack tariff 
talks among Western countries and “to use financial difficulties of 
the United States for strengthening of mistrust in the dollar.”

	On the KGB’s list of targets in the propaganda warfare campaign 
were all the predictable suspects: U.S.-led regional alliances 
(NATO, SEATO, and CENTO) and U.S. military bases abroad, all 
denounced as tools for American meddling into the internal affairs 
of host countries.  The Committee also contemplated a terrorist 
strike at Radio Liberty and the Soviet Studies Institute in Munich 
“to put out of order their equipment and to destroy their card 
indexes.”  Inside the United States this warfare was to be 
spearheaded against the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), a 
counterpart of the KGB psychological warfare division, and “the 
reactionary militarist group in U.S. ruling circles - [Nelson] 
ROCKEFELLER, [Lauris] NORSTAD, A. DULLES, E. [J. Edgar] 
HOOVER, as well as their allies in pushing an aggressive course in 
other countries.”21

	One name on the hit list was that of Allen W. Dulles, 
experienced in the espionage trade since the late 1930s and since 
1953 presiding over the Central Intelligence Agency.22  In 1960-
1961, Dulles became the chief target of the KGB’s vendetta. 


The Hunt for Allen Dulles

	The Dulles brothers had long inspired complex feelings inside 
the Soviet leadership.  Time and again Vyacheslav Molotov and 
then Nikita Khrushchev betrayed an apprehension of them bordering 
on respectful awe.  Khrushchev, in his typical manner, even engaged 
personally in a semi-public feud with Allen Dulles boasting that he 
read his briefing papers prepared for President Eisenhower and 
found them “boring.”  The Soviet leaders had some reasons to 
believe that their sources of “humint”—“human intelligence” 
garnered from agents and illegals—were many times greater than 
those of their American adversary.  After a flurry of defectors 
following Stalin’s death, the political and military intelligence 
apparatus had been reorganized, and its discipline and morale 
seemed to be restored.  But the lull proved short-lived.  From the 
mid-fifties onward Khrushchev’s policies of reducing the KGB 
empire and curbing its operatives’ privileges produced a new spate 
of treason.  The response was ruthless: a new head of the First Main 
Directorate (PGU), Alexander Sakharovsky, reportedly took 
draconian measures to root out a plague of “defecting”; he 
personally pushed for operations designed to eliminate post-Stalin 
“traitors” Aleksandr Orlov, Vladimir Petrov, and Piotr Deriabin who 
had fled to the West and cooperated with Western 
counterintelligence.23  (Evidently all three operations failed or were 
abandoned, since none of the three defectors was assassinated.)

	Until the spring of 1960, Soviet foreign intelligence had reasons 
to believe it had a sound edge over its American counterpart.  
During 1960, Soviet operatives, together with “friends” from East 
European security forces, reportedly penetrated Western embassies 
in Eastern Europe on 52 occasions.  They succeeded in illegally 
smuggling to the USSR five U.S. intelligence officers.  They had a 
high-placed mole in the British counterintelligence MI5—George 
Blake—another one in NATO headquarters in Brussels, and many 
lesser ones.

	But Allen Dulles had struck back with a new technological 
breakthrough: U-2 planes and then reconnaissance satellites to 
overfly and photograph the USSR.  Shelepin sounded the alarm and 
in September 1959, during Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, 
he sent a memo to the Department of Defense Industry of the 
Central Committee proposing a program to monitor the U.S. satellite 
“Discoverer.”  He proposed to obtain “directly and by agents” the 
data on frequency ranges used by transmitters on these satellites.  
Ivan Serbin, head of the Department, agreed that the issue was grave 
enough and sent Shelepin’s memo for consideration to the 
Commission on military-industrial issues at the Council of 
Ministers.24

	In fact, the U.S. space reconnaissance program produced a minor 
panic among Soviet academics who consulted for the KGB.  Two of 
them, Academician L.I. Sedov and doctor of physics and 
mathematics G.S. Narimanov, warned in September 1959 that the 
“Discoverer” satellites could be successfully used by the Americans 
for military and intelligence purposes, “to put out of work our 
defense installations with electronic equipment over a large 
territory.”  With the help of satellite equipment, Shelepin reported, 
from a height of 200-300 km it would be possible efficiently to 
photograph stretches of the Earth of 50-90 km in width and 150,000 
km in length.25

	In other words, the KGB alerted the Soviet leaders in a timely 
fashion to the coming intelligence revolution.  Khrushchev’s 
reaction to the downing of an American U-2 seven months later, in 
May 1960, was, therefore, anything but surprise.  The political 
slight, and even humiliation, that Khrushchev saw in this affair to  
himself and his country provoked his furious response.  He 
disrupted the summit in Paris and irreparably ruined his relations 
with Eisenhower.26  But in his opinion the U.S. president, though 
he accepted responsibility for the intelligence flights, merely 
shielded the real culprit: Allen Dulles.  So Khrushchev, his 
considerable venom concentrated on the debonair socialite 
spymaster, evidently asked Shelepin to prepare a plan to discredit 
the CIA chief.  Three weeks after Khrushchev’s return from Paris, 
Shelepin’s plan was formally approved by the Secretariat of the 
Central Committee. 

	The document,27 printed below, offers an extraordinary window 
into the state of mind and the methods of Soviet intelligence at the 
height of the Cold War confrontation with the United States:

[Handwritten note across top: “To the Secretariat [for signatures] 
(round the clock28 among the secretaries) [—] M. Suslov, N. 
Mukhitdinov, O. Kuusinen”29]

USSR	Top Secret
Committee of State Security
Council of Ministers of the USSR
7 June 1960
CC CPSU30

	The failure of the intelligence action prepared by the Central 
Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the plane “Lockheed U-2” caused 
an aggravation of existing tensions between the CIA and other USA 
intelligence services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 
and also provoked protests by the American public and certain 
members of the Congress, who are demanding investigation of the 
CIA activities.

	The Committee of state security considers it advisable to make 
use of this newly complex situation and to carry out the following 
measures targeted at further discrediting CIA activity and 
compromising its leader Allen DULLES:

	1. In order to activate a campaign by DULLES’ political and 
personal opponents:

	a) to mail to them anonymous letters using the names of CIA 
officials criticizing its activity and the authoritarian leadership of 
DULLES;

	b) to prepare a dossier which will contain publications from the 
foreign press and declarations of officials who criticized the CIA 
and DULLES personally, and to send it, using the name of one of 
members of the Democratic Party, to the Fulbright Committee [the 
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations] which is conducting an 
investigation into CIA activities in relation to the failure of the 
summit; 

	c) to send to some members of Congress, to the Fulbright 
Committee, and to the FBI specially prepared memos from two or 
three officials of the State Department with attached private letters, 
received (allegedly) from now deceased American diplomats, which 
would demonstrate CIA involvement in domestic decision-making, 
the persecution of foreign diplomats who took an objective stand, 
and which also would point out that, for narrow bureaucratic 
purposes, the CIA puts deliberately false data into information for 
the State Department;

	d) to study the possibility and, if the opportunity presents itself, 
to prepare and disseminate through appropriate channels a document 
by former USA Secretary of State F. DULLES, which would make 
it clear that he exploited the resources of A. DULLES as leader of 
the CIA to fabricate compromising materials on his private and 
political adversaries;

	e) to prepare, publish and disseminate abroad a satirical 
pamphlet on A. DULLES, using the American writer Albert KAHN 
who currently stays in Moscow to write the pamphlet.31

	2. With the aim of further exposing the activities of American 
intelligence in the eyes of the public and to create preconditions with 
which the FBI and other USA intelligence services could 
substantiate their opinion about the CIA’s inability to conduct 
effective intelligence:

	a) to fabricate the failure of an American agent “Fyodorov,” 
dropped in the Soviet Union by plane in 1952 and used by organs of 
the KGB in an operational game with the adversary.
	To publish in the Soviet press an announcement about the arrest 
of “Fyodorov” as an American agent and, if necessary, to arrange a 
press-conference about this affair;

	b) to agree with Polish friends about the exposure of the 
operational game led by the organs of the KGB along with the MSS 
PPR [Ministry of State Security of the Polish People’s Republic] 
with a “conduit” on the payroll of American intelligence of the 
Organization of Ukrainian nationalists (OUN)- “Melnikovists.”  To 
this end to bring back to Poland the Polish MSS agent “Boleslav,” 
planted in the course of this game on the OUN “conduit,” and to 
arrange for him to speak to the press and radio about subversive 
activity by American intelligence against the USSR and PPR.  To 
arrange, in addition, for public appearances by six American 
intelligence agents dropped on USSR and PPR territory as couriers 
of the “conduit” in the course of the game;

	c) to suggest to the security bodies of the GDR that they arrange 
public trials for the recently arrested agents of American intelligence 
RAUE, KOLZENBURG, GLAND, USCH-INGER and others.
	To arrange for wide coverage of the trials’ materials in the media 
of the GDR and abroad;

	d) to disclose the operational game “Link” that the KGB 
conducts with the adversary and to organize public statements in the 
media aimed at foreign audiences by the agent “Maisky,” a former 
commander of the “security service” of the Foreign [Zakordonnikh 
chastei] OUN (ZCh OUN), who had been transferred to Ukrainian 
territory in 1951 and used by us for this game.
	Along with revelations about the anti-people activity of the ZCh 
OUN, “Maisky” will reveal American and British intelligence’s use 
of the anti-Soviet organizations of Ukrainian emigration in 
subversive work in the Soviet Union;

	e) Since about ten agents of the MSS of the GDR who “defected-
in-place” to American intelligence have accomplished their missions 
and currently there is no prospect of their being further utilized, it 
should be suggested to our German friends to stage their return on 
the basis of disagreement with USA aggressive policies.  In 
particular, this measure should be carried out with the participation 
of our friends’ agent “Edelhardt” who had been assigned by an 
affiliate of American intelligence in West Berlin to gather spy 
information during his tourist trip around the USSR.  To organize 
one or two press-conferences on these affairs with a demonstration 
of the spy equipment he received from American intelligence;

	f) to discuss with our Polish and Albanian friends the 
advisability of bringing to the attention of governmental circles and 
of the public of the United States the fact that the security agencies 
of Poland and Albania for a number of years had been deluding 
American intelligence in the operational games “Win” and “John” 
and had obtained millions of dollars, weapons, equipment, etc. from 
it.

	3. To utilize, provided our Hungarian friends agree, the 
American intelligence documents they obtained in the U.S. mission 
in Budapest [the underlined words were inserted by hand—ed.] to 
compromise the CIA and to aggravate the differences between the 
CIA and other intelligence services by publicizing some of the 
documents or by sending them to the FBI.
	If necessary, the necessary documents should be forged using the 
existing samples.

	4. In order to create mistrust in the USA government toward the 
CIA and to produce an atmosphere of mutual suspicion within the 
CIA staff, to work out and implement an operation creating the 
impression of the presence in the CIA system of KGB agents 
recruited from among rank-and-file American intelligence officers, 
who, following their recruitment, admit their guilt, allegedly on the 
order of Soviet intelligence.  To stage for this purpose a relevant 
conversation within range of a [CIA] listening device, as well as the 
loss of an address book by a Soviet intelligence officer with the 
telephone number of a CIA official; to convey specially prepared 
materials to the adversary’s attention through channels exposed to 
him, etc.

	5. To work out and implement measures on blowing the cover of 
several scientific, commercial and other institutions, used by the 
CIA for its spy activities.  In particular, to carry out such measures 
with regard to the “National Aeronautics and Space Administration” 
[NASA] and the “Informational Agency” of the USA [U.S. 
Information Agency (USIA)].

	6. In order to disclose the subversive activities of the CIA against 
some governments, political parties and public figures in capitalist 
countries, and to foment mistrust toward Americans in the 
government circles of these countries, to carry out the following:

	a) to stage in Indonesia the loss by American intelligence officer 
PALMER, who is personally acquainted with President SUKARNO 
and exerts a negative influence on him, a briefcase containing 
documents jointly prepared by the MFA [Ministry of Foreign 
Affairs] of the USSR which apparently belong to the CIA station in 
Jakarta and which provide evidence of USA plans to utilize 
American agents and rebel forces to overthrow the government of 
SUKARNO;32

	b) to carry out measures, with regard to the arrest in February of 
this year in the UAR [United Arab Republic] of a group of Israeli 
intelligence agents, to persuade the public in the UAR and Arab 
countries that American intelligence is linked to the activities of 
those agents and coordinates its work in the Arab East with Israeli 
intelligence.
	To compromise, to this end, American intelligence officers 
KEMP and CONNOLLY who work under cover of the UN 
commission observing the armistice in Palestine;

	c) to prepare and implement measures to make public the fact 
that American intelligence made use of the Iranian newspapers 
“Fahrman” and “Etelliat,” specifically mentioning the names of their 
agents (Abbas SHAHENDEH, Jalal NEMATOLLAKHI); 

	d) to publish articles in the foreign press showing the 
interference of American intelligence in the domestic affairs of other 
states, using as an example the illegal American police organization 
in Italy, found and liquidated at the end of 1959, that “worked on” 
Italian political parties under the direction of one of the diplomats at 
the American embassy;
	e) to prepare and publicize a document by an American 
intelligence officer in Japan Robert EMMENSE in the form of a 
report to the USA ambassador [to Japan Douglas] MACARTHUR 
[II] into which information will be inserted about a decision 
allegedly taken by American intelligence to relocate “Lockheed U-
2” planes temporarily to Japan, and then, in secrecy from the 
Japanese government, to return them to their old bases.

	7. To work out measures which, upon implementation, would 
demonstrate the failure of the CIA efforts to actively on a concrete 
factual basis use various йmigrй centers for subversive work against 
countries in the socialist camp.
	In particular, using the example of the anti-Soviet organization 
“The Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Peoples of 
Russia” (SBONR), to discredit in the eyes of American taxpayers 
the activities of American intelligence in funding йmigrй 
organizations.  To bring to light, along with other measures, real or 
forged American intelligence documents on its finances and 
guidance of subversive activities of the SBONR.

	8. With the means available of the KGB to promote inquiries in 
the parliaments of England, France and other countries of their 
governments about their attitude to the hostile actions of USA 
intelligence intended to aggravate international tension.

	9. To arrange public appearances by distinguished public and 
political figures of the East and West with appropriate declarations 
denouncing the aggressive activity of American intelligence.

	10. To prepare and publish in the bourgeois press, through 
available means, a number of articles on the activities of the CIA 
and its leaders on the following questions:

	a)  about how A. DULLES used his position to promote his own 
enrichment.  In particular, to demonstrate that DULLES gets big 
bribes from the “Lockheed” corporation for allocating contracts to 
produce reconnaissance planes.  To indicate that the source of this 
information is the wife of a vice-president of “Lockheed” 
corporation and well-known American pilot Jacqueline 
COCHRAN, who allegedly leaked it in France on her way to the 
USSR in 1959;

	b) about the CIA’s violation of traditional principles of non-
partisanship on the part of the USA intelligence service.  To 
demonstrate that in reality the CIA is the tool of reactionary circles 
in the Republican Party, that it ignores the Senate, the Congress and 
public opinion in the country;

	c) about the unjustifiably large expenditures of the CIA on its 
staff and its multitudinous agents and about the failure of its efforts 
to obtain information on the military-economic potential and 
scientific-technical achievements of the Soviet Union;

	d) about the unprecedented fact that the American embassy in 
Budapest is hosting Cardinal MINDSZENTY, furnishing evidence 
that the Americans are flouting the sovereign rights of the 
Hungarian People’s Republic and demonstrating the sloppy work of 
American intelligence that damages American prestige in the eyes of 
world public opinion;33

	e) about the CIA’s flawed methods of preparing spy cadres in the 
[training] schools at Fort Jersey (South Carolina) and in Monterey 
(California).  To draw special attention to futility of efforts by the 
CIA and by DULLES personally to build a reliable intelligence 
[network] with emigrants from the USSR and the countries of 
people’s democracies.  To present a list of names of American 
intelligence officers and agents who have refused to work for 
DULLES on political, moral and other grounds;

	f) about utilization by the CIA leadership of senior officials from 
the State Department, including ambassadors, for subversive and 
intelligence operations that cause great harm to USA prestige.  In 
particular, to cite the example of DULLES’ use of American 
ambassador [to South Korea Walter P.] MCCONAUGHY in 
subversive plans in Cambodia and then in South Korea;

	g) about the activities of American intelligence in West Berlin in 
covering officers of West German intelligence services with 
documents of American citizens.

	11. To approach the state security leadership in countries of 
people’s democracy requesting that they use available means to 
discredit the CIA and to compromise A. DULLES.
	Asking for your agreement to aforementioned measures,

	CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE

	[signature] (A. Shelepin)



	The signatures of Mikhail Suslov, Nikolai Mukhitdinov, and 
Otto Kuusinen showed that the responsible members of the 
Secretariat had approved the document—a process that could not 
have taken place without Khrushchev’s assent as well.  On 3 
November 1960, Shelepin reported to the Central Committee on the 
KGB’s progress in carrying out the plan.34  On 25 February 1961, 
after the Kennedy Administration came to power in Washington, the 
KGB again returned to the operation against Dulles, an Eisenhower 
holdover who for the time being remained in his post.  The KGB 
suggested measures “to foment mistrust towards the leadership of 
American intelligence on the part of the Kennedy administration and 
the intelligence services of the allies.”  Among other things, the 
KGB intended “to create among Americans an opinion that 
documentary information leaks directly from the staff of the CIA.”  
It also plotted “to arrange through a ‘double’ channel, known to the 
adversary, a transmittal from Washington of a real classified 
instruction signed by DULLES  and obtained by the KGB.”  Also 
proposed were measures “aimed at discrediting the activities of 
American intelligence directed at the removal from the political 
arena of politicians and governments, in particular in India and 
Turkey, who are not welcomed by the USA.”35

	It would be tempting to try to track down all the “incidents” 
produced by this elaborate planning.  It is obvious, however, that the 
Kennedy administration was looking for a pretext to replace the old 
cold warrior atop the CIA, and one presented itself after the April 
1961 failure of the CIA-trained expedition against the Castro regime 
at the Bay of Pigs.  Soviet intelligence had known about the 
preparation and evidently Castro’s border troops were all in 
readiness, tipped off by Moscow (and The New York Times, for that 
matter) and ready to teach Americans a bloody lesson.  Broadly 
speaking, the KGB in this case won a considerable victory over its 
overseas enemy.  In late September 1961 Dulles announced his 
retirement, which went into effect two months later.

	But the battle between the two intelligence giants continued, and 
between April 1961 and October 1962 Soviet intelligence suffered 
terrible blows from internal treason: senior GRU officer Oleg 
Penkovsky served a precious 18 months as a source for the Western 
intelligence community.  In May 1961, KGB officer Yuri Loginov 
became an agent for U.S. intelligence.  In December 1961, Anatoly 
Golitsyn defected from Helsinki.  In June 1962, Yuri Nosenko, 
deputy head of the KGB Second Chief Directorate, internal security 
and counterintelligence, began passing classified Soviet documents 
to the CIA (and in February 1964 he, too, would defect).  The scale 
tilted abruptly in the CIA’s favor.



The Crisis in Berlin...and in the KGB

	The disastrous wave of betrayal and defections in the KGB 
occurred at a moment of maximum international tension between 
the Moscow and the West, marked by the Berlin and the Cuban 
crises.  This was not simply a coincidence.  In the cases of some 
double-agents and defectors, among them Penkovsky and Nosenko, 
psychological and ideological, not material motives, prevailed.  As 
Khrushchev raised the ante, bluffing against Washington, some 
informed members of the Soviet post-Stalin elites felt acutely 
uncomfortable.  Khrushchev seemed unpredictable, mercurial, 
reckless, and just plain dangerous—not only to the West but to those 
Soviets growing accustomed to peaceful coexistence and the relative 
luxuries it allowed for the chosen members of the nomenklatura.  
The seemingly permanent state of nerve-wracking crisis, coinciding 
with a drastic expansion of cultural and human contacts across the 
Iron Curtain and the weakening of Stalinist fundamentalism in the 
East, strained loyalty to and belief in the regime and system, and in 
some cases pushed individuals to switch sides. 

	The KGB’s foreign intelligence and other divisions were heavily 
involved in various ways in the Berlin Crisis.  They tested the 
temperature of U.S. and NATO reactions to Khrushchev’s threat to 
sign a separate treaty with the German Democratic Republic which 
would give the GDR control over Western access routes to West 
Berlin.  One scoop came when Khrushchev decided to let the East 
German communists close the sectorial border between the East and 
West Berlin, a decision resulting in the infamous Wall.  On 4-7 
August 1961, the foreign ministers of four Western countries (the 
United States, Great Britain, France and West Germany) held secret 
consultations in Paris.  The only question on the agenda was: how to 
react to the Soviet provocations in Berlin?  In the course of these 
meetings Western representatives expressed an understanding of the 
defensive nature of Soviet campaign in Germany, and unwillingness 
to risk a war.36  In less than three weeks the KGB laid on 
Khrushchev’s desk quite accurate descriptions of the Paris talks, 
well ahead of its rival, the GRU.  The intelligence materials 
correctly noted that, in contrast to the West Germans, U.S. Secretary 
of State Dean Rusk supported talks with the Soviet Union aimed at 
preservation of the status quo ante.  However, the KGB and GRU 
warned that pressure in the alliance was forcing the Americans to 
consider economic sanctions against the GDR and other socialist 
countries, as well as to accelerate plans for conventional and nuclear 
armament of their West European allies, including the West German 
Bundeswehr.37

	Another line of KGB involvement in the crisis concerned 
strategic deception.  On 29 July 1961, KGB chief Shelepin sent a 
memorandum to Khrushchev containing a mind-boggling array of 
proposals to create “a situation in various areas of the world which 
would favor dispersion of attention and forces by the USA and their 
satellites, and would tie them down during the settlement of the 
question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin.”   The 
multifaceted deception campaign, Shelepin claimed, would “show to 
the ruling circles of Western powers that unleashing a military 
conflict over West Berlin can lead to the loss of their position not 
only in Europe, but also in a number of countries of Latin America, 
Asia and Africa.”38  Khrushchev sent the memo with his approval 
to his deputy Frol Kozlov39 and on August 1 it was, with minor 
revisions, passed as a Central Committee directive.  The KGB and 
the Ministry of Defense were instructed to work out more “specific 
measures and present them for consideration by the CC CPSU.”40

	The first part of the deception plan must have pleased 
Khrushchev, who in January 1961 had pledged, before the 
communists of the whole world, to assist “movements of national 
liberation.”  Shelepin advocated measures “to activate by the means 
available to the KGB armed uprisings against pro-Western 
reactionary governments.”  The destabilizing activities started in 
Nicaragua where the KGB plotted an armed mutiny through an 
“Internal revolutionary front of resistance” in coordination with 
Castro’s Cubans and with the “Revolutionary Front Sandino.”  
Shelepin proposed to “make appropriations from KGB funds in 
addition to the previous assistance 10,000 American dollars for 
purchase of arms.”  Shelepin planned also the instigation of an 
“armed uprising” in El Salvador, and a rebellion in Guatemala, 
where guerrilla forces would be given $15,000 to buy weapons.

	The campaign extended to Africa, to the colonial and semi-
colonial possessions of the British and the Portuguese.  The KGB 
promised to help organize anti-colonial mass uprisings of the 
African population in British Kenya and Rhodesia and Portuguese 
Guinea, by arming rebels and training military cadres.

	Nor did Shelepin forget the Far East.  An ardent supporter of 
Sino-Soviet reconciliation, he played this “Chinese card” once 
again.  He suggested “to bring to attention of the USA through KGB 
information channels information about existing agreement among 
the USSR, the PRC [People’s Republic of China], the KPDR 
[Korean People’s Democratic Republic; North Korea] and the DRV 
[Democratic Republic of Vietnam; North Vietnam] about joint 
military actions to liberate South Korea, South Vietnam, and Taiwan 
in case of the eruption of armed conflict in Germany.”  The Soviet 
General Staff, proposed Shelepin, together with the KGB, “should 
work out the relevant disinformation materials” and reach agreement 
“with Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese friends about 
demonstration of military preparations in those areas.”

	Next came the bubbling cauldron of the Middle East.  Shelepin 
planned “to cause uncertainty in government circles of the USA, 
England, Turkey, and Iran about the stability of their positions in the 
Middle and Near East.”  He offered to use old KGB connections 
with the chairman of Democratic party of Kurdistan, Mulla Mustafa 
Barzani, “to activate the movement of the Kurdish population of 
Iraq, Iran, and Turkey for creation of an independent Kurdistan that 
would include the provinces of aforementioned countries.”  Barzani 
was to be provided with necessary aid in arms and money.41  
“Given propitious developments,” noted Shelepin with foresight, “it 
would become advisable to express the solidarity of Soviet people 
with this movement of the Kurds.” 

	“The movement for the creation of Kurdistan,” he predicted, 
“will evoke serious concern among Western powers and first of all 
in England regarding [their access to] oil in Iraq and Iran, and in the 
United States regarding its military bases in Turkey.  All that will 
create also difficulties for [Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abdul Karim] 
KASSIM who has begun to conduct a pro-Western policy, 
especially in recent time.”42      

	The second component of the Shelepin grand plan was directed 
against NATO installations in Western Europe and aimed “to create 
doubts in the ruling circles of Western powers regarding the 
effectiveness of military bases located on the territory of the FRG 
and other NATO countries, as well as in the reliability of their 
personnel.”  To provoke the local population against foreign bases, 
Shelepin contemplated working with the GDR and Czechoslovakia 
secret services to carry out “active measures...to demoralize” 
military servicemen in the FRG (by agents, leaflets, and brochures), 
and even terrorist attacks on depot and logistics stations in West 
Germany and France.43

	One of the more imaginative strands in the web of Soviet 
strategic deception concerned the number and even existence of new 
types of arms and missiles.  Along with the General Staff, the KGB 
long practiced a dubious combination of super-secrecy and bluffing, 
thereby producing a series of panicky assessments in the West about 
a “bomber gap” and then a “missile gap.”  This time Shelepin asked 
Khrushchev to assign to his organization and the military the task of 
making the West believe that the Soviets were absolutely prepared to 
launch an attack in retaliation for Western armed provocations over 
West Berlin.  The disinformation package included the following 
tasks:

—  to convince the West that Soviet land forces were now armed 
with new types of tanks “equipped with tactical nuclear 
weapons”;

—  to create a conviction among the enemy “about a considerable 
increase of readiness of Rocket Forces and of the increased 
number of launching pads—produced by the supply of solid 
liquid ballistic missiles of medium range and by the transfer from 
stationary positions to mobile launching positions on highways 
and railroads which secure high maneuverability and 
survivability”;

—  to spread a false story about the considerable increase in the 
number of nuclear submarines with solid-fuel “Polaris” missiles;

—  to bring to Western attention “information about the 
strengthening of anti-aircraft defense”;

—  to disorient the enemy regarding the availability in the Soviet 
Air Forces of “new types of combat-tactical aircraft with ‘air-to-
air’ and ‘air-to-ground’ missiles with a large operational 
range.”44  

	It is not clear when Shelepin learned about Khrushchev’s 
decision to close the sectoral border between East and West Berlin, 
but the Wall went up just two weeks after his letter.  It seems that 
the Wall took some heat off the problem.  But in October-November 
1961, the KGB and the military leadership evidently still believed 
that the signing of a separate peace treaty with the GDR was 
possible and designed its “distraction” measures anticipating that 
this treaty would be a source of serious tension with the West.  
Indeed, sharp tension did arise in late October when U.S. tanks 
confronted two Soviet tank platoons in Berlin near Checkpoint 
Charlie.  

	On November 10, Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky 
and KGB Deputy Chief Peter Ivashutin asked the Central 
Committee Secretariat to approve, in addition to the crisis 
contingency planning by the military forces, deceptive steps 
“directed at producing in the adversary’s mind a profound 
conviction that the Soviet Union firmly intends to use force in 
response to military provocations of Western powers and has at its 
disposal all necessary combat means.”  The KGB took upon itself 
the task “to inform Western intelligence through unofficial channels 
that the Soviet Union has taken necessary measures to strengthen its 
troops in the GDR and to arm them with more modern tactical 
missiles, newer tanks, and other armaments sufficient for the 
delivery of a quick and crushing response strike on the adversary.”

	Through the same channels KGB intended “to increase the 
adversary’s belief in the high maneuverability and mobility of Soviet 
armed forces and their readiness, in case the West unleashes an 
armed conflict in Germany, to move within a minimal time up to the 
battle lines of the European theater.  To convey as a proof thereof 
that this summer, during the exercises in the Near-Carpathian and 
other military districts, some divisions demonstrated an average 
speed of advancement of about 110-130 km per day.”

	Along the lines of Shelepin’s proposal, the KGB’s military-
industrial consultants suggested other disinformation steps.  Perhaps 
echoing Khrushchev’s boast that his missiles could “hit a fly in the 
sky,” the Committee proposed to convey to U.S. intelligence the 
information that during its recent series of atomic tests—in Sept.-
Oct. 1961—the Soviet Union successfully “tested a superpowerful 
thermonuclear warhead, along with a system of detecting and 
eliminating the adversary’s missiles in the air.”

	The KGB laboratories fabricated “evidence” for U.S. intelligence 
about “the solution in the Soviet Union of the problem of 
constructing simple but powerful and user-convenient atomic 
engines for submarines which allow in the short run increasing 
considerably the number of atomic submarines up to fifteen.”  (The 
ever-vigilant Shelepin deleted the number from the text—the super-
secretive Soviets excised numbers even in disinformation!)

	Finally, the KGB received instructions “to promote a legend 
about the invention in the Soviet Union of an aircraft with a close-
circuited nuclear engine and its successful flight tests which 
demonstrated the engine’s high technical capacities and its safety in 
exploitation.”  “On the basis of the M-50 ‘Myasischev’ aircraft, 
with consideration of the results of those flight tests,” according to 
this disinformation, “a strategic bomber with nuclear engines and 
unlimited range has been designed.”45

	Even now, reading those documents gives one chills down the 
spine.  Determined to deal with their opponent from a position of 
strength, and possessing the intoxicating capacity to hide or invent 
information, to deceive and to bluff, Kremlin leaders went too far, to 
the very brink where the fine line between deterring an attack and 
preparing for one blurred altogether.  To make matters worse, 
Khrushchev often held his cards so close to his chest that even his 
closest subordinates could not guess his true intentions.  Inside the 
KGB there were many levels of knowledge, to be sure, but it seems, 
for instance, that the famous “Bolshakov channel” and the sensitive 
information that passed along it to the Kennedy administration 
during the Berlin crisis were sometimes not reported even to the 
KGB’s highest hierarchy, only to the CPSU General Secretary.46

	No wonder that a great number of junior and senior officials in 
the Soviet military and intelligence elites were scared to death.  
Some of them were convinced that Khrushchev was crazy and had 
become a victim of his own “hare-brained schemes.”  This scare still 
waits to be described by a creative quill.  But one of its most 
tangible traces was a stream of well-positioned defectors.

	In his June 1960 plan to discredit Allen Dulles and the CIA, 
quoted earlier, Shelepin had envisioned fostering “an atmosphere of 
mutual suspicion within the CIA staff” by fostering fears of KGB 
penetration within the agency.  In fact, as Shelepin hoped, a 
paranoid “mole-hunt” in the Western intelligence community did 
occur, but apparently as a by-product of authentic defections from 
Soviet intelligence rather than because of Shelepin’s deliberate 
deception campaign.  Major Anatoliy Golitsyn became a pivotal 
figure in this regard.  He was the least informed of the new crop of 
KGB defectors, but the echoes of Shelepin’s grandiose plans 
reached his ear.  It has been argued, with some justification, that the 
harm that this stocky Ukrainian defector caused to careers and 
environment in the CIA could have been done only by a Soviet 
double-agent.  The alliance between Golitsyn and CIA 
counterintelligence chief James Angleton was indeed more ruinous 
for American operatives who fell under suspicion in the frantic 
“mole-hunt” than for real KGB agents.47

	It is ironic that KGB leadership had no premonition about this at 
all.  There is, indeed, newly available evidence about how painful 
Golitsyn’s defection was to the KGB.  On 28 July 1962, a new KGB 
chief, Vladimir Semichastny, wrote to Shelepin, now promoted to 
the Party Secretariat:

	According to reliable evidence American intelligence is 
preparing a broad campaign of provocation against the Soviet 
Union that will involve a traitor of Motherland GOLITSYN and 
other traitors, along with double-agents and provocateurs. 

“The Americans count on this provocation,” continued Semichastny 
while ignoring the irony of his words, “to dispel to some extent the 
impression among the public that the USA is an organizer of world 
espionage, and to demonstrate that the Soviet Union is conducting 
active intelligence work in all countries.”

	The Committee proposed “measures to discredit GOLITSYN” in 
the eyes of his CIA debriefers by implicating him in a felony.  
According to the plan, the newspaper Soviet Russia was to publish 
an article about a trial that allegedly had been held in Leningrad on a 
case of hard currency smuggling.  The KGB would “let Americans 
know, without mentioning GOLITSYN’s name, that this article has 
something to so with him.”  In case Golitsyn came up “with 
slanderous declarations,” the KGB planned to arrange more 
publications about his invented criminal background and to demand, 
after that, from the U.S. government through official channels the 
“extradition of GOLITSYN as a criminal.”

	As a last resort, Semichastny asked for Party sanction “to carry 
out an operation on his [GOLITSYN’S] removal.”48



Scorpions in a bottle

	Glasnost on Soviet intelligence activities has yet to reach the 
level achieved by the American side during the congressional 
hearings of the Church and Pike committees in the mid-1970s.  But 
the documents found recently in the CC CPSU archives do shed 
considerable light on KGB operations and indicate, without mincing 
words, how ambitious, various and extensive were KGB activities, 
especially against the “number one enemy,” the United States.  
There is little doubt that almost any document on the Soviet side has 
its U.S. counterpart in Langley still hidden from public view.49  The 
process of mutual emulation started after the defection of Soviet 
cypher clerk Igor Gouzenko in Ottawa, Canada, in the summer of 
1945.  Ever since then the American intelligence agencies and the 
FBI, seconded by Soviet defectors, argued that they needed more 
discretionary resources and rights to match a well-prepared and 
ruthless enemy.

	The KGB documents prove that the enemy was, indeed, 
ingenious, resourceful, and prepared to go very far.  The emphasis 
on disinformation and on the use of various groups and movements 
in the “third world” had, of course, been a direct continuation of the 
OGPU-NKVD tradition in the 1920s-1940s.50  Back then, the 
Soviet intelligence leaned extensively on the networks of the 
Comintern and other individuals sympathetic to the Soviet 
“experiment.”  This network suffered from blows and defections as 
a result of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign and its 
spectacular unveiling at the February 1956 CPSU Twentieth Party 
Congress.  But the collapse of colonial empires and the surge of 
radicalism and nationalism in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the 
Middle East was a bonanza for Soviet intelligence, bent on 
expanding their contacts in those parts of the world.

	The KGB, no doubt, fulfilled orders from the top.  Khrushchev’s 
support of “wars of national liberation” was a big step toward the 
globalization of Soviet foreign policy, and therefore of the Cold 
War.  It is clear from the KGB documents, however, that even at 
that time of escalating covert superpower rivalry in the Third World, 
the Kremlin leadership retained clear Realpolitik priorities: with the 
exception of those posted in Cuba, Soviet intelligence agents in 
Third World countries were used by the Soviet leadership and its 
external arm, the KGB’s First Directorate, as pawns in a 
geostrategic game centered firmly on Berlin.

	Yet, the KGB had its own distinctive impact on the Cold War.  
The documents presented in this article challenge the myth that 
KGB officials (and some American counterparts as well) like to 
promulgate: that the intelligence services of both sides, by 
increasing “transparency” about the adversary’s intentions and 
capabilities, thereby contributed to stability and predictability in a 
dangerously polarized world.  Some intelligence efforts that were 
genuinely devoted to reconnaissance, and reduced fears of a surprise 
attack, may well have done so.

	But the games of deception, disinformation, and distraction 
designed by the KGB masterminds had a deleterious effect on global 
stability.  They certainly contributed to the perception in 
Washington of expansive Soviet ambitions.  In some cases they even 
exacerbated the danger of armed conflict.  And the elaborate plots to 
sow the seeds of mistrust between the U.S. leadership and 
intelligence agencies was dictated by anything but a clear 
comprehension of how dangerous this kind of conspiracy had 
become in the nuclear age.

	The legacy of the covert activities undertaken by the KGB and 
CIA at this key juncture of the Cold War was ambiguous: besides 
the function of obtaining and relaying objective information to their 
respective leaderships, the two rival intelligence organizations 
behaved, to borrow Oppenheimer’s classic description of the nuclear 
predicament, like two scorpions in a bottle, prepared to sting each 
other until death.

	The fact that the Cold War in the 1970s and the late 1980s 
looked more like a “long peace” appeared to have limited impact on 
the mentality of intelligence officials in Washington and Moscow.51  
By then, the KGB’s First Directorate concentrated even more on 
technical-scientific espionage, which reflected, on the one hand, a 
long-standing symbiosis between the Soviet intelligence services 
and the military-industrial nexus, and, on the other, a distancing 
from “cloak and dagger” covert activities.  Vladimir Kryuchkov, 
later a KGB chief and conspirator in the August 1991 hardline coup 
attempt, was to a large extent a product of this specialization in 
scientific-technical espionage.

	The paranoia of Kryuchkov, who to this day believes that the 
West was nurturing a “fifth column” to demoralize and subvert 
Soviet society, as well as that of his CIA counterpart Angleton, was 
underpinned and “substantiated” by the shady games and counter-
games in which the two intelligence services had engaged all during 
the Cold War.  The alleged existence of American “agents of 
influence” inside Soviet society and even government—a key tenet 
of Kryuchkov’s homilies for vigilance—had been, indeed, a matter 
of pride for the CIA since the 1970s and can now, to a very limited 
extent, even be documented from U.S. government sources.52    

	But the paranoia, even when it fed on realities, remained for the 
most part a self-deception.  The KGB’s methods and proclivity for 
Jesuitical twists of imagination distorted the minds of Kryuchkov 
and many others.  While the whole atmosphere of the Cold War 
existed, this mind-frame was contagious and spread like cancer.

	There was always a sound and pragmatic side to intelligence: the 
collection and analysis of information.  There were failures and 
errors in this work, but, in general, the record shows considerable 
accuracy and consistent objectivity, at least as far as the specific 
actions and motives were concerned.  But the darker side of 
intelligence activity, linked to the Cold War mentality and actions, 
always co-existed with the former, sometimes casting a long 
shadow.  The resources spent on intelligence operations related to 
psychological warfare and deception had a dynamic of diminishing 
returns: the disruption caused by them in the enemy’s camp rarely 
justified the money and efforts spent on them. 



1.  [Ed. note: It is clear that the United States enjoyed massive 
numerical superiority in strategic nuclear weapons over the USSR at 
the time of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, but the precise 
ratio of deliverable nuclear weapons has not been definitely 
ascertained.  Several accounts have used a ratio of 17-1, e.g., Robert 
S. McNamara, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First 
Century of the Nuclear Age (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 44-45.  A 
recent accounting of U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals during the 
Cold War, based in part on statistics recently declassified by the 
U.S. Department of Energy, implied a ratio of closer to nine-to-one 
at the time.  It showed that in 1962 the United States had a total 
stockpile of 27,100 warheads, including 3,451 mounted on strategic 
delivery vehicles, and the USSR possessed a total stockpile of 3,100 
warheads, including 481 strategic weapons.  (Robert S. Norris and 
William M. Arkin, “Nuclear Notebook: Estimated U.S. and 
Soviet/Russian Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945-94,” The Bulletin of the 
Atomic Scientists 50:6 (Nov-Dec. 1994), 58-59.)  However, the 
table did not reflect disparities in strategic delivery vehicles, such as 
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched 
ballistic missiles (SLBMs), which overwhelmingly favored the 
United States.]
2.  See Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The 
CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 
and David Wise, Mole-Hunt: How the Search for a Phantom 
Traitor Shattered the CIA (New York: Random House, 1992; Avon, 
1994).
3.  See Oleg Kalugin with Fen Montaigne, The First Directorate: 
My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (New 
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Leonid Shebarshin, Ruka Moskvy 
[Arm of Moscow] (Moscow: Center-100, 1992), and Iz Zhizni 
Nachalnika Razvedki [From the Life of the Head of Intelligence] 
(Moscow: International Relations, 1994); and Vadim Kirpichenko, 
Iz arkhiva razvedchika [From the Archive of an intelligence officer] 
(Moscow: International Relations, 1993). 
4.  The author encountered the KGB documents used in this article 
while conducting research in Moscow in late 1992, for a book on 
Soviet leaders and the Cold War, in the Center for the Storage of 
Contemporary Documentation (known by its Russian acronym, 
TsKhSD, for Tsentr Khraneniya Sovremennoi Dokumentatsii), 
located at Il’inka 12 in Staraya Ploschad’ (Old Square).  This is the 
archive containing the post-1952 records of the CPSU Central 
Committee.  The author was also, at the time, researching the 1960-
62 period for his paper on U.S.-Soviet crises for the Conference on 
New Evidence on Cold War History organized by the Cold War 
International History Project and held in Moscow in January 1993 
in cooperation with TsKhSD and the Russian Academy of Sciences’ 
Institute of Universal History.  At that conference, some of the KGB 
documents cited in this article were described in a paper (“The 
Mentality of Soviet Society and the Cold War”) by Russian historian 
Vitaly S. Lelchuk (Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy 
of Sciences), sparking a general discussion of the intelligence 
service’s role in the Kremlin’s handling of the U-2 affair.
	Although the KGB archives for this period remain closed to 
scholars, with the limited exception of an arrangement with Crown 
Publishers to publish a series of books on selected topics, scholars 
have been able to conduct research on an increasingly regular basis 
in the archives of the CPSU CC (TsKhSD and the Russian Center 
for the Storage and Study of Recent Documents (RTsKhIDNI)), the 
Russian Foreign Ministry (MID) archives, and the State Archive of 
the Russian Federation (GARF).  Moreover, the promulgation of 
several Russian laws and regulations mandating a 30-year-rule for 
most archival files, including Politburo records, inspires hope that a 
more thorough analysis of Khrushchev’s foreign and intelligence 
policies is becoming possible.  For details on the Russian archival 
scene, see Mark Kramer, “Archival Research in Moscow: Progress 
and Pitfalls,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 3 
(Fall 1993), 1, 18-39.  For more on the KGB archives, see the report 
by Arseny Roginski and Nikita Okhotin, circulated in 1992 and 
slated for publication as a CWIHP Working Paper; Amy Knight, 
“The Fate of the KGB Archives,” Slavic Review 52:3 (Fall 1993), 
582-6; and Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB 
and Its Hold on Russia—Past, Present and Future (New York: 
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1994).
5.  KGB to Nikita Khrushchev, “Report for 1960,” 14 February 
1961, in CC CPSU Secretariat’s “special dossier” [osobaya papka], 
hereafter abbreviated as “St.”, protocol no. 179/42c, 21 March 
1961, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 13, delo 74, ll. [pages] 144-58.
6.  Ibid., 1.147.
7.  Ibid.
8.  Ibid., l. 154.
9.  KGB to CC CPSU, 10 March 1961, in St.-199/10c, 3 October 
1961, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 13, delo 85, ll. 133-142, esp. 141-142.
10.  KGB to Khrushchev, “Report for 1960,” 14 February 1961, 
cited above.
11.  The 7 April 1960 directive was cited in KGB to CC CPSU, 10 
March 1961, St.-199/10c, 3 October 1961, TsKhSD, Fond 4, opis 
13, delo 85, l. 133.  The original directive was not located.
12.  KGB to CC CPSU, 10 March 1961, cited above.
13.  Ibid., ll. 136-137.
14.  Mangold, Cold Warrior, 107 ff.
15.  KGB to CC CPSU, 10 March 1961, cited above, 1. 140.
16.  KGB to Khrushchev, “Report for 1960,” 14 February 1961, St. 
179/42c, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 13, delo 74, 1.149.
17.  KGB to CC CPSU, 10 March 1961, in St.-199/10c, 3 October, 
TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 13, delo 85, 1.137.
18.  Ibid.
19.  Ibid.
20.  See Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The 
Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev 
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 440.
21.  The above two paragraphs are based on KGB to CC CPSU, 10 
March 1961, in St.-199/10c, 3 October 1961-TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 
13, delo 85, ll. 138-139.  [Ed. note: Nelson Rockefeller, a member 
of the country’s wealthiest families, Governor of New York State, 
and briefly a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination 
in 1960, had been a Special Assistant to Eisenhower on Cold War 
psychological warfare strategy; Gen. Lauris Norstad was the 
Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR); A. Dulles headed 
the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover was FBI director.]
22.  [Ed. note: On the career of Allen W. Dulles, see the profile in 
H.W. Brands, Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and 
American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 
1988), 48-68; the new biography by Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: 
The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) and a 
forthcoming biography by James L. Srodes; and a five-volume 
internal CIA history of his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence: 
Wayne G. Jackson, Allen Welsh Dulles As Director of Central 
Intelligence, 26 February 1953 - 29 November 1961, declassified 
with deletions in 1994, copy available from the CIA History Office 
and on file at the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.]
23.  Oleg Kalugin, “Vozhdi Razvedki” [“Chiefs of Intelligence”], 
Moscow News 2 (10 January 1993), 9; see also Kalugin, The First 
Directorate, 93-98.  [Ed. note: Orlov defected from the NKVD in 
1938 and in 1954 published an exposй that undoubtedly infuriated 
Moscow: The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes (London: Jarrolds, 
1954).  Petrov and Deriabin both defected in 1954.  Andrew and 
Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story, 164, 427, 675 n. 9.]
24.  Shelepin (KGB) to CC CPSU, 26 September 1959, and Serbin 
to Commission on Military-industrial issues, 6 October 1959, both 
in St. 122/7, 14 October 1959, fond 4, opis 13, delo 57, ll. 56-62.
25.  Shelepin to CC CPSU, 26 September 1959, in ibid., ll. 60-61.
26.  See Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, 
and the U-2 Affair (New York: Harper, 1986).
27.  Shelepin to CC CPSU, 7 June 1960, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 13, 
delo 65, ll. 12-37 in Special Dossier of the Secretariat of the Central 
Committee 153/30c from 14.VI.60 (14 June 1960).  The 7 June 
1960 KGB document’s existence first became public knowledge in 
January 1993 when it was described by Russian historian Vitaly S. 
Lelchuk to the CWIHP Conference on New Evidence on Cold War 
History; the document was also referred to in Vitaly S. Lelchuk and 
Yefim I. Pivovar, “Mentalitet Sovietskogo Obshchestva i 
Kholodnaya Voina” [“The Mentality of Soviet Society and the Cold 
War”], Otechestvennaya Istoria [Fatherland History] 6 (Nov.-Dec. 
1993), 70-71.
28.  That formula meant that the decision was already taken at the 
top and an agreement of the rest of the Central Committee 
Secretaries was just a mere formality. In other cases, when no clear 
consensus existed or a leader was not sure himself, he put it to a 
vote of the Politburo or the Secretariat.
29.  Mikhail Suslov, Nikolai Mukhitdinov, and Otto Kuusinen were 
three full members (Secretaries) of the CC CPSU Secretariat.
30.  This document was sent by the KGB to the Secretariat, the 
technical body of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which 
usually dealt with more routine issues than the Politburo.
31.  [Ed. note:  This evidently refers to the American writer Albert 
E. Kahn (1912-1979), a journalist and author sympathetic to 
socialism who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and 
who (after recovering his passport, which the government had taken 
from him for several years) spent the first half of 1960 in Moscow 
working on a book on the Bolshoi ballerina Galina Ulanova 
(subsequently published as Days With Ulanova (New York: Simon 
& Schuster, 1962).  Contacted by CWIHP in Helena, Montana, 
where he is the state director of the Montana Nature Conservancy, 
Kahn’s son Brian Kahn stated that to his knowledge his father was 
never approached to write a publication ridiculing Allen W. Dulles 
and never did so; and that, while sympathetic to socialism and the 
USSR, he would not have written anything at the direction of Soviet 
intelligence.  “[My father] would write a pamphlet on a political 
issue that he believed in; but he wouldn’t do it at the request of 
anybody,” said Brian Kahn.  “He would never do it if he were aware 
that he was being manipulated; that he would offend his sense of 
integrity as a writer.”  Brian Kahn said his father once met in the 
Kremlin with Nikita Khrushchev and proposed collaborating with 
him on an autobiography, but that the Soviet leader did not pursue 
the idea, which Kahn later implemented with Pablo Casals (Joys 
and Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, 1970)).  Albert Kahn also 
authored, among other books, Sabotage! The Secret War Against 
America (Little, Brown, 1942), an expose of pro-fascist activities in 
the United States; The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against 
the Soviet Union (Little, Brown, 1946), an account of Western 
actions against the USSR highly sympathetic to Moscow; High 
Treason (Lear, 1950); Smetana and the Beetles (Random House, 
1967), a satirical pamphlet about Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana 
Alliluyeva; and The Matusow Affair (Moyer Bell Ltd., 1987), a 
posthumously-published account of a McCarthy-era case.]
32.  The KGB in this case wanted to kill two birds with one stone. 
Fears that Americans could influence a “third world” communist 
leader were pervasive and not without foundation. In 1979 similar 
fears about Hafizullah Amin, leader of the Afghan “revolution,” 
probably helped convince Politburo member Yuri Andropov, former 
KGB chief, of the necessity of Soviet military intervention to “save” 
this country.
33.  Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, the Roman Catholic Primate, was 
arrested by the Hungarian communist regime in 1948 and sentenced 
to life imprisonment on treason and currency charges in 1949 
(reduced to house arrest in 1955).  During the Hungarian October 
revolution of 1956 he was freed, but, after the Soviet intervention, 
the U.S. embassy in Budapest gave him political asylum until his 
death in 1971.
34.  Shelepin to CC CPSU, 3 November 1960, in St.-199/10c, 3 
October 1961, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 13, delo 85, ll. 23-27.
35.  Shelepin to CC CPSU, 25 February 1961, in ibid., ll.28-29.
36.  See memorandum of conversation, “Tripartite Meeting on 
Berlin and Germany” (D. Rusk, Lord Home, M. Couve de 
Murville), 5 August 1961, Berlin Crisis collection, National Security 
Archive, Washington, DC.
37.  Lt.-Gen. A. Rogov to Marshal Malinovsky, 24 August 1961, 
TsKhSD, fond 5, opis 30, delo 365, ll. 142-153. The texts of 
preceding reports of the KGB with parallel intelligence were not 
available in the archives.
38.  Shelepin to Khrushchev, 29 July 1961, in St. - 191/75gc 1 
August 1961, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 13, delo 81, ll. 130-134, quoted 
passages on l. 130.
39.  Handwritten notation on cover letter from Shelepin to 
Khrushchev, 29 July 1961.
40.  CC CPSU directive, St.-191/75gc, 1 August 1961, TsKhSD, 
fond 4, opis 13, delo 81, ll. 128-129.
41.  [Ed. note: U.S. officials had noted with concern the possibility 
that Barzani might be useful to Moscow.  In an October 1958 cable 
to the State Department three months after a military coup brought 
Kassim to power, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Waldemar J. 
Gallman, stated that “Communists also have potential for attack [on 
Iraqi Prime Minister Kassim-ed.] on another point through returned 
Kurdish leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani.  He spent last eleven years 
in exile in Soviet Union.  His appeal to majority of Iraqi Kurds is 
strong and his ability [to] disrupt stability almost endless.  Thus we 
believe that today greatest potential threat to stability and even 
existence of Qassim’s [Kassim’s] regime lies in hands of 
Communists.”  See Gallman to Department of State, 14 October 
1958, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United 
States, 1958-1960, Vol. XII (Washington, DC: Government Printing 
Office, 1993), 344-46.  Barzani’s alleged ties to the KGB are 
discussed in Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatolii Sudoplatov with Jerrold 
L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of 
an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 
and Co., 1994), 259-64.]  
42.  Shelepin also proposed an initiative to entice Egyptian President 
Gamal Abdul Nasser, a Third World leader avidly courted by both 
East and West, into throwing his support behind the Kurds.  
Shelepin suggested informing Nasser “through unofficial channels” 
that, in the event of a Kurdish victory, Moscow “might take a 
benign look at the integration of the non-Kurdish part of Iraqi 
territory with the UAR”—the United Arab Republic, a short-lived 
union of Egypt and Syria reflecting Nasser’s pan-Arab 
nationalism—“on the condition of NASSER’s support for the 
creation of an independent Kurdistan.”  Shelepin to Khrushchev, 29 
July 1961, in St.-191/75gc, 1 August 1961, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 
13, delo 81, ll. 131-32.  When a Kurdish rebellion indeed broke out 
in northern Iraq in September 1961, the KGB quickly responded 
with additional proposals to exploit the situation.  KGB Deputy 
Chairman Peter Ivashutin proposed—“In accord with the decision of 
the CC CPSU...of 1 August 1961 on the implementation of 
measures favoring the distraction of the attention and forces of the 
USA and her allies from West Berlin, and in view of the armed 
uprisings of the Kurdish tribes that have begun in the North of 
Iraq”—to: 1) use the KGB to organize pro-Kurdish and anti-Kassim 
protests in India, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Guinea, and other 
countries; 2) have the KGB meet with Barzani to urge him to “seize 
the leadership of the Kurdish movements in his hands and to lead it 
along the democratic road,” and to advise him to “keep a low profile 
in the course of this activity so that the West did not have a pretext 
to blame the USSR in meddling into the internal affairs of Iraq”; 
and 3) assign the KGB to recruit and train a “special armed 
detachment (500-700 men)” drawn from Kurds living in the USSR 
in the event that Moscow might need to send Barzani “various 
military experts (Artillerymen, radio operators, demolition squads, 
etc.)” to support the Kurdish uprising.  P. Ivashutin to CC CPSU, 27 
September 1961, St.-199/10c, 3 October 1961, TsKhSD, fond 4, 
opis 13, delo 85, ll. 1-4.  The uprising continued until a group of 
Ba’athist military officers overthrew Kassim in spring 1963, and of 
course the Kurdish problem remains unresolved more than three 
decades later.  For an overview of Kremlin policy on the Kurdish 
issue, written before the opening of Soviet archives, see Oles M. 
Smolandsky with Bettie M. Smolandsky, The USSR and Iraq: The 
Soviet Quest for Influence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 
1991), 63-98.
43.  In particular, Shelepin envisioned operations to set ablaze a 
British Air Force fuel depot near Arzberg in West Germany, and to 
stage an explosion at a U.S. military-logistics base in Chinon, 
France.  Ibid., 1.133.
44.  Ibid., ll. 133-134.
45.  The above five paragraphs are based on Ivashutin and 
Malinovsky to CC CPSU, 10 November 1961, in St. 2/35c, 14 
November 1961, TsKhSD, fond 14, opis 14, delo 1, ll. 10-14.
46.  Georgi Bolshakov was a GRU officer who acted under the 
cover of a press secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington in 
1961-62.  He often met with Robert Kennedy, the President’s 
brother, delivering Khrushchev’s personal messages, mostly orally.  
See Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and 
Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
47.  See Mangold, Cold Warrior, and Wise, Mole-Hunt, passim.
48.  Semichastny to Shelepin, 28 July 1962, in St. 33/26c, 31 
August 1962, TsKhSD, fond 4, opis 14, delo 13, ll. 1-6.
49.  [Ed. note: Since 1991, CIA directors in the Bush and Clinton 
administrations have promised to declassify records pertaining to 
covert operations during the early Cold War, including those relating 
to the Italian elections (1948), coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala 
(1954), the Bay of Pigs (1961), and others.  To date, only one recent 
large-scale declassification of a U.S. covert operation has become 
known: the release of documents regarding operations in Indonesia 
against the Sukarno government, included in the Foreign Relations 
of the United States (FRUS) volume for Indonesia, 1958-1960, 
published by the Department of State in 1994.  (See Jim Mann, 
“CIA’s Covert Indonesian Operation in the 1950s Acknowledged by 
U.S.,” Los Angeles Times, 29 October 1994, 5.)  Press reports 
indicate that government officials have blocked the declassification 
(For publication in FRUS) of documents disclosing two other CIA 
covert operations from this period, one to finance pro-American 
Japanese politicians and the other, during the Kennedy 
administration, to overthrow a leftist government in British Guyana.  
See Tim Weiner, “C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right 
in 50’s and 60’s,” New York Times, 9 October 1994; Tim Weiner, 
“A Kennedy-C.I.A. Plot Returns to Haunt Clinton,” New York 
Times, 30 October 1994; and Tim Weiner, “Keeping the Secrets 
That Everyone Knows,” New York Times (Week-in-Review 
section), 30 October 1994.]
50.  The OGPU (Obyeddinenoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye 
Upravlenie, for Unified State Political Directorate), successor to the 
short-lived GPU, lasted from 1923 to 1934, when it was converted 
into the GUGB (Main Administration of State Security) and 
integrated into the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal 
Affairs).  The NVKD in 1946 became the Ministry of Internal 
Affairs (MVD).
51.  On the mentality of Soviet leaders in the Cold War, see 
Vladislav M. Zubok and Constantine V. Pleshakov, Inside the 
Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 
forthcoming in 1995).  For the “long peace” thesis, including the 
argument that intelligence activities contributed to stability during 
the Cold War, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries 
into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1987), 215-45.
52.  In a December 1976 briefing, CIA representatives informed the 
incoming Carter Administration National Security Council staff 
officials Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Aaron of “current Soviet 
agents and the nature of the materials they provide us with.  
Brzezinski and Aaron seemed quite impressed, though Brzezinski 
wondered whether such agents could not be used to pull off a rather 
massive disinformation operation against the U.S.  [Bill] Wells 
[from the CIA] explained why this is not likely.”
	Brzezinski, soon to become Carter’s national security advisor, 
“said he would like to be briefed in detail on ‘agents of influence’ 
that belong to us abroad.”  He explained that “he did not want to be 
surprised in meeting with or dealing with foreign VIPs, if in fact 
those VIPs were our agents of influence.”  CIA, Memorandum for 
the Record on a meeting with [prospective] National Security 
Adviser Brzezinski, 30 December 1976.  The document was 
declassified by the CIA in January 1994 and is available on file at 
the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.



Vladislav M. Zubok is a visiting scholar at the National Security 
Archive in Washington, D.C.  He has written numerous articles on 
Cold War and nuclear history, and his book Inside the Kremlin’s 
Cold War, co-authored with Constantine V. Pleshakov, will be 
published next year by Harvard University Press.

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