Intelligence Studies Review

Dr Kevin Riehle

With the death of Oleg Gordievsky, it is appropriate to look back to recap what the West learned about the KGB and the Soviet Union from his revelations. His eleven years as an UK Secret Intelligence Service penetration of the KGB, followed by years of debriefings as a defector yielded huge amounts of operational details. While the mass of information Gordievsky passed may not equal that of Vasiliy Mitrokhin who defected seven years later, Gordievsky’s flow of current, real-time intelligence from inside the KGB while operations were still unfolding overshadows Mitrokhin’s more historical data.

One of the important things Gordievsky revealed was the KGB’s tendency to mirror image. Collection requirements the KGB sent to its rezidenturas show that the KGB attributed to the Soviet Union’s Western adversaries, especially to the “main adversary,” the same operational mindset, tools, and intentions as the KGB had. While Western intelligence services were, in fact, conducting operations against the Soviet Union, their access to targets, especially inside the Soviet Union, did not reach the level of Soviet access inside Western countries.

Gordievsky revealed that the KGB took great pains to warn Soviet personnel going abroad to be on the alert for provocations and recruitment attempts, even suspecting shopkeepers and gardeners of fitting into of an elaborate plot to surveil Soviet personnel. That is how the KGB would operate inside the Soviet Union, so it expected other states’ counterintelligence services to act the same.

The KGB was particularly worried about cipher clerks, assuming that foreign counterintelligence services were relentlessly pursuing them. There were, in fact occasions when Soviet cipher clerks defected, such as the Igor Gouzenko in 1945 and Yevdokiya Petrova in 1954; however, those were few. To at least some extent, the KGB’s suspicion reflected its own priority for targeting personnel with access to encryption information. Much of the KGB’s success in processing SIGINT collection came from its recruitment of foreign cipher personnel, like Francesco and Secondo Costantini in the 1920s and 1930s, Ernest Oldham and John King in the 1930s, James MacMillan in the 1940s, and John Walker in the 1960s to 1980s. The KGB gained much from those recruitments, so it closely guarded its code clerks, knowing from its own operational successes how vulnerable communications could be.

Gordievsky revealed a March 1985 KGB operational plan that envisioned dangling the personal belongings of Soviet cipher clerks in front of foreign counterintelligence services by leaving items like shoe heels, watches, and jackets at repair shops. The KGB expected that an adversary would take advantage of the items being out of a Soviet employee’s control and implant a listening or tracking device in them. The devices were to be sent to Moscow for analysis as soon as the employee picked them up from the shop.[1]

A similar assumption applied to Soviet cargo lorries traveling into European countries. The KGB ordered in April 1985 that special measures should be taken to identify and neutralize foreign counterintelligence efforts to recruit Soviet drivers and plant collection devices on Soviet vehicles. The Soviets did that themselves, so foreign services must be doing the same.[2]

The KGB was not always wrong: foreign counterintelligence services were trying to penetrate the KGB and had some successes during the Cold War. As Joseph Heller wrote, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”. However, the KGB’s expectation of dirty trick at every turn reflected its own well-practiced methodology in Moscow.

The KGB’s fear about Western militarization of space, which Gordievsky revealed in a 1985 memo disseminated to KGB rezidenturas, was partially based on mirror imaging. The Strategic Defence Initiative was an obvious point of concern. However, a KGB collection emphasis also ordered rezidenturas to focus on U.S. development of anti-satellite weapons.[3] The Soviet Union had been studying anti-satellite weapons for two decades by 1985. Tthe GRU’s “Zvezda” system, established in 1965, was specifically designed to intercept satellite telemetry to characterise satellite missions and support the development of countermeasures against them. By the 1980s, the GRU operated a series of space-looking radio-intercept stations around the Soviet Union and on the territory of Soviet allies for the purpose of monitoring foreign satellites. The KGB’s emphasis on U.S. anti-satellite development reflected its knowledge of Soviet planning.

The even more sinister side of the Soviet Union’s mirror imaging came with the Soviet ideologicalbelief that anti-Soviet powers, especially the United States, were planning a sudden nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. The now famous RYaN (Nuclear Missile Attack) collection emphasis, which Gordievsky revealed in the early 1980s, is the most visible manifestation of that assumption. That fear was not new in the 1980s—Soviet intelligence services had been searching for indicators of an imminent attack for decades. Gordievsky, however, revealed several KGB circulars that ordered rezidents abroad to increase their alertness for signs of sudden nuclear attack.[4]

KGB collection priorities were invariably founded on an interpretation of America’s “militarist attitude.” Ronald Reagan’s strong public rhetoric directed toward the Soviet Union served as proof of this axiom, although the belief did not start with Reagan. In all areas of intelligence, especially political and science and technology, intelligence requirements were founded on the notion of a belligerent United States planning to strike at any moment.[5] This expectation can partially be based on a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist belief in eternal conflict between capitalism and communism. But it may also be based on Soviet mirror imaging of US offensive intentions, which led to the deployment of SS-20 missiles in the 1970s and 1980s, giving the Soviet Union the capability of reaching anywhere in Western Europe with a first-strike nuclear attack.

This same mirror imaging seems to be happening today. Russia leaders have attempted to justify a war in Ukraine—begun by Russia—with the allegation that the West was planning a war against Russia. Russian allegations about an aggressive campaign by the West, especially the United States, to spark “colour revolutions” and conduct “gibridnaya voyna” (the Russian translation of the phrase “hybrid warfare”) against Russia reflect Russian leaders’ plans to do the same against the West. Similarly, because the Russian government manipulates elections inside Russia, Russian leaders believe elections abroad are equally subject to manipulation. Russian leaders’ inability to understand the West leads to dogmatic assumptions that Western powers are hatching diabolical plans that directly mirror Russian operations. Gordievsky’s revelations helped to highlight the Soviet origins of this mindset.

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[1] Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, More Instructions from the Centre: Top Secret Files on KGB Global Operations, 1975-1985 (London: Routledge, 2016), 99-103.

[2] Andrew and Gordievsky, More Instructions from the Centre, 118-121.

[3] Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975-1985 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 109-115.

[4] Andrew and Gordievsky, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions, 67-90; More Instructions from the Centre, 16-17.

[5] Andrew and Gordievsky, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions, 16-19.