KGB

The intelligence and state security service of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The CIA glossary describes the KGB (Committee for State Security) as the USSR's intelligence and state security service during the Cold War; the International Spy Museum calls it all-powerful. Its predecessors included the Cheka of 1917, and its Moscow headquarters was known in the jargon as “the Center”. After the collapse of the USSR, foreign intelligence passed to the SVR, established on 18 December 1991.^1,2

Documented KGB cases: according to the FBI, CIA officer Aldrich Ames offered his services to the KGB at the Soviet embassy in Washington on 16 April 1985; by 1989, according to a KGB letter, he had received 1.88 million dollars, and his treachery compromised more than 100 US operations and led to the deaths of 10 sources. Ames was arrested on 21 February 1994 and sentenced to life imprisonment. FBI agent Robert Hanssen also spied from 1985 for the KGB and later for the SVR.^3,4

The Mitrokhin Archive: between 1972 and 1984 Vasiliy Mitrokhin, an archivist of the KGB's foreign intelligence directorate, secretly copied files; after his defection in 1992 his notes went to Britain, and in 2014 the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge opened redacted Russian-language versions of them to the public.⁵