MILNET: former KGB

Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti

Organized into five numbered "Chief" directorates, several large un-numbered directorates, and a number of directly reporting deparments. According to Viktor Suvorov in "Soviet Military Intelligence", the mission of the KGB is "...not to allow the collapse of the Soviet Union from the inside...".

The KGB is thought to have had more power than the GRU, its sister organization tasked with military intelligence.

The following are notes on the KGB, taken from Richelson's Sword and Shield and verified by research in a number of titles listed in the MILNET Bibliography. In fact you haven't read any of Richelson's works yet, and you have in interest in the details of world intelligence organizations, consult the bibliography and go check them out of your library.

The notes below are dated...since the breakup of the former Soviet Union, who knows what is the structure of the replacement for the KGB. The naive person might expect that there was no replacement. However recent events have shown that the Russian Intelligence apparatus still exists, at least for the purposes of espionage and external security.

The Committee for State Security (KGB)

The KGB is an extremely large organization, taking a far greater number of tasks that any Western counterpart, simply because in the strictly controlled society, there are far more things to investigate and just about every person will be watched. The Chief Directorates and other groups at that same level are:

• INU - Innostrannoye Upravleniey (First Chief Directorate - Foreign) - responsible for foreign intelligence collection, analysis, offensive counterintelligence, and active measures. Within this major Directorate are three minor directorates, three services and at least sixteen departments, some of which are:
• Directorate T - Scientific and Technical Directorate, collection of scientific and technical intelligence including theft of high technology items. Targets are data on nuclear, missile, space research, strategic sciences, cybernetics, and industrial processes. Also coordinates all scientific, industrial, and technical espionage of all KGB units. Works with the Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT) and the Soviet Academy of Sciences to define national scientific collection needs and undertakes to fulfill these needs in accordance with a master collection plan.
• Directorate S - Illegals Directorate, selects, trains, and deploys the KGB officers who live in foreign countries under false identities and with no admitted connection to the Soviet Union, with four Divisions:
  1. Recruiting and Training
  2. Cover and Documentation
  3. Managment of Illegals - illegals already deployed
  4. Illegal Support Offices - "Good Services Assistance" to these offices which are stationed in foreign countries.
• Department Eight - Executive Action Department, planning assasinations and sabotage in support of war or crisis activities. Normally does not maintain personnel abroad.
• Directorate K - Counterintelligence, penetrations of foreign intelligence and security services by recruiting members.
• Service A - Sluzhba Aktivnykh Meropriyatiyl (Active Measures Service) - Disinformation
• Service I - Information Service, analyzing and disseminating all intelligence collected by the INU
• Service R - Planning and Analysis Unit, recording and analyzing details of illegals meetings with their controls, and report to the head of the INU on the network and quality of its penetration.
• Geographic Departments, for major geographical areas, each department has desks for major centers of populations, i.e. a Washington Desk, a San Francisco Desk, etc.
  1. First Department - United States and Canada
  2. Second Department - Latin America
  3. Third Department - United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandanavia
  4. Fourth Department - West Germany, Austria
  5. Fifth Department - France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Ireland
  6. Sixth Department - China, Vietnam, Korea, and Kampuchea
  7. Seventh Department - Japan, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore
  8. Eighth Department - Arab Nations, Turkey, Greece, Iran, Afghanistan, Albania
  9. Ninth Department - African nations where French is the predominant language
  10. Tenth Department - African nations where English is the predominant language
  11. Seventeenth Department - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
• Second Chief Directorate - Internal Security, divided into twelve geographical departments plus a Political Security Service, a Technical Support Group, and the Industrial Security Directorate. The first six are responsible for monitoring and comprimising foreign diplomats. Several of the twelve departments are:
  • First Department - U.S. and Latin America - Consists of a chief, two deputies, fifty staff officers, recruiters, agent handlers, reservists, and 300 professional survillants on permanent loan from the Surveillance Directorate. The Department has a number of sections responsible for:
    1. First Section - Recruitment of U.S. embassy personnel
    2. Second Section - neutralizing embassy intelligence operations
    3. Third Section - Identifies, investigates, interrogates, and maintains a dossier on each Soviet citizen detected in contact(s) with Americans in the Soviet Union.
    4. Fourth Section - attempts to prearrange and stage-manage contacts that Americans may have with Russians while traveling outside of Moscow.
    5. Fifth Section - responsible for Latin American diplomats with regard to surveillance and possible recruitment.
  • Second Department - Nations of the British Commonwealth
  • Third Department - West Germany, Austria, Scandinavia
  • Fourth Department - All other West European nations
  • Fifth Department - non-European nations the KGB considers developed
  • Sixth Department - non-European nations the KGB considers underdeveloped
  • Seventh Department - Same functions as departments one thru six but for tourists rather than diplomats.
    1. First Section - American, British, and Canadian Tourists
    2. Second Section - Other Nationalities
    3. Third Section - Overseeing hotels where foreigners are registered and the restaurants to which they are guided.
    4. Fourth Section - Intourist and Sputnik tourist travel agencies (Sputnik offers foreign youth economy trips to the Soviet Union)
    5. Fifth Section - Arranges contacts between tourists and Soviet citizens and investigates contacts that were not preplanned.
    6. Sixth Section - Maintains observation posts at motels, campsites, gasoline stations, and garages along highways traveled by tourists and watches foreigners crossing the Soviet Union by plane or train.
  • Eighth Department - Operates the computers used in the Second Chief Directorate.
  • Ninth Department - Handles surveillance and recruitment of foreign students, which includes infiltration of the student bodies in the Universities in the Soviet Union
  • Tenth Department - Watches and attempts to influence or recruit foreign journalists, and staffs the Directorate for Servicing the Diplomatic Corps (UPDK) in the Foreign Ministry.
  • Eleventh Department - Approves and regulates the travel abroad of all Soviet citizens, except senior Party members and persons in sensitive positions.
  • Twelfth Department - Investigates major cases of corruption, graft, and waste in government enterprises
  • Political Security Service, known simply as Sluzhba (The Service), in of itself containing seven minor directorates. The First through Fourth supervise general investigations and work with local KGB offices in the four geographical sections in which the Soviet Union is secretly partitioned for administrative convenience. Some of the other Directions duties are:
    1. Tenth Direction - (five thru nine were transferred in 1969 to the Fifth Chief Directorate, so the remaining sections kept their designations); Economic Crime such as Black Marketeering, Currency Speculation, and Proscribed private enterprise.
    2. Eleventh Direction - Publishes secret manuals and journals for the Service reporting on discontent and dissent.
    3. Twelfth Direction - Operates against PRC diplomats, seeking to subvert them and to penetrate the PRC embassy.
  • Technical Support Group - Service's professional burglary unit, responsible for the penetration of foreign embassies as well as Soviet homes and offices.
  • Industrial Security Directorate - Conducts surveillance of critical production and research centers through its own network of informants. The responsiblity areas for the departments within this directorate are:
    1. First Department - Heavy Industry
    2. Second Department - Arms Factories
    3. Third Department - Nuclear Research
    4. Fourth Department - Major Production Centers
    5. Fifth Department - Ministry of Foreign Trade; officers who supervise commercial exhibitions, monitor foreign exhibitions in the Soviet Union, and spot potential recruits among foreign businessmen, as well as runs various Soviet trade organizations

• Fifth Chief Directorate - Dissidents consisting of five directions (numbered five thru nine from their numbers previously used when these directions were part of the Second Chief Directorate) and the Jewish Department. The directions are:
  • Fifth Direction - Responsible for the control of religion, by seeking to identify all religious believers and to insure that all churches (especially the Russian Orthodox Church) serve as instruments of Soviet Policy, usually through the infiltration of KGB agents into church heirarchy.
  • Sixth Direction - Suppression of nationalism amongst the many different ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union.
  • Seventh Direction - Watches Soviet citizens who have relatives living abroad as well as foreigners who come to the Soviet Union to visit relatives.
  • Eighth Direction - Responsible for attempting to negate the influence of Russian emigre groups who slip literature and agents into the Soviet Union.
  • Ninth Direction - suppresses all un- authorized literature, seeks to intimidate heretical writers, and hunts down authors of anonymous books.
  • Jewish Department, created in 1971 - Responsible for stopping public protests by Soviet Jews and curbing, if not eliminating, the trends toward increased Jewish emigration.

• Seventh Chief Directorate - (Sixth Chief Directorate absorbed by the Second Chief Directorate) Surveillance Directorate, with 3,000 employees, is responsible to initiate on its own, if necessary, surveillance and analysis.

• Eighth Chief Directorate - Communications, COMSEC and radio-technical (signals) intelligence (SIGINT).

• Ninth Chief Directorate - Guards Directorate, responsible both for the personal security of the Party leadership as well as the physical security of important installations.

• Technical Operations Directorate

• Administration Directorate

• Personnel Directorate -Six independent Departments:
  1. Special Investigation Department - Performs sensitive investigations in cases involving suspected treason or espionage, penertations of the KGB or GRU by foreign intelligence services, criminality or gross dereliction by important Party members or government officials, and fixes and assesses the damage of defectors.
  2. Department for Collation of Operational Experience - Studies and analyzes intelligence operations (both Soviet and other nations), with an eye to learning valuable lessons from others, and reports their findings in a top secret journal.
  3. Department of State Communications - Provides signal troops that maintaiin the telephone and radio systems used by all Soviet government agencies. Most likely crisis communications (nuclear war, etc.) are handled in this department as well.
  4. Department of Physical Security - Provides guards who patrol KGB offices day and night. They examine every employee every time the enter or leave a headquarters building. The also inspect each office at the end of the workday to make sure all safes and windows are locked and that all classified papers are locked up.
  5. Finance Department - Manages the payrolll and disbursement of and accounting for operational funds and arranges conversion of Soviet currency into foreign currency.
  6. Registry and Archives Department - maintains a master index of each file held by the various KGB divisions, these files typically consisting of current operational files. Historically, the files date back to the CHEKA days.