Kgb how does it work

Lithuanian Special Archives, f. K, ap. Konoplenko on April 21, Several months earlier, in May , a new chairman of the KGB was appointed. Though nobody could have known it at the time, Andropov turned out to be the longest serving chairman of the Soviet state security service and one of the very few whose career did not end in disgrace or death. For instance, most of the present Russian leadership, including the president Vladimir Putin, entered the KGB while Andropov was at the helm.

Remarkably, Document 1 included a list of the specific organizations, companies, and institutions chosen as targets. Casimir in Rome. Document 1 also assigned specific counterintelligence tasks to the particular Lithuanian KGB regional and city counterintelligence units.

For instance, the KGB counterintelligence unit in the port city of Klaipeda was to focus on the recruitment of foreign sailors and to use the opportunities provided by the Soviet fishing industry. This aspect of Document 1 highlighted one of the key aims of Operation HORIZON: the specialization on the objects of interests located outside of the Soviet Union and their more precise and intensive targeting. The first operation had to do with the perlustration of foreign mail correspondence going in and out of the Soviet Union, [vii] while the second seems to have involved the counterintelligence activities against suspected foreign intelligence officers and agents in the country itself.

This is an annual report of the work of the 4 th Department of the Lithuanian KGB counterintelligence directorate tasked with counterintelligence activities in the Federal Republic of Germany. It provides a detailed discussion of the activities of the Lithuanian KGB agents in Germany at the time and, from the point of view of intelligence studies research, it is particularly revealing of KGB sources and methods. Document 2 is divided into four sections:. The training of agents set up for recruitment of adversaries the so-called plants or dangles ; and.

It's this modern-day digital disinformation playbook that US intelligence agencies will almost certainly be watching out for ahead of November's presidential election -- especially after Russia's efforts to interfere in the election caught the country off guard. But to fully understand Russia's use of tactics like false news stories and leaked materials, it's useful to examine the country's long history of painstaking influence operations dating back to an analog era.

A lesson in Russian disinformation from the pages of a TV Guide. The KGB would take great care to furnish a convincing forgery of a US government document, often with the goal of implicating the US in something tawdry and designed to appear to confirm an existing conspiracy theory.

That forgery would then be given to a sympathetic, unwitting reporter, sometimes from an obscure outlet in a far-flung corner of the world. It would be printed as news, and if the Soviets were lucky, it might eventually get picked up by more established outlets.

Read More. This tactic had the potential to inflame tensions in the US and give the Soviet-controlled press a negative story to tell Russians back home about their capitalist foe. In the decades since, our lives have largely moved online — and so have Russia's attempts at disinformation and meddling in US affairs.

In groundbreaking work from the Atlantic Council and the online investigations company Graphika , researchers showed how a suspected Russian group has been distributing forged documents online over the past few years. These efforts included a fake letter purporting to be from a US senator and another letter designed to look like it came from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

The same Russian group is believed to have been behind a fake tweet from Sen. Marco Rubio claiming that a purported British spy agency planned to derail the campaigns of Republican candidates in the midterm elections. The fake tweet was picked up and falsely reported as real by RT, a Russian state-controlled news outlet. There's no evidence of coordination between RT and the Russian group that promoted the fake tweet but RT did not issue a correction.

I always said that to understand the Russian services, it's really a matter of Freudian projection. They always are guilty of doing that which they accuse their opponent of doing. So, there's a manual in here which talks about spotting American acts and campaigns of disinformation.

In other words, if the US government says X, well they're lying and they're lying for a particular reason, they want us to be duped into thinking that X is the reality — when in fact, it's Y. There's a phrase in Russian "working with people" — which is really all KGB case officers. Remember, Putin himself was a KGB case officer, and so when people try to understand his psychology, the way he thinks about geopolitics, he's always looking to manipulate the human side of things.

It's about reading people, understanding what their weaknesses are, learning how to recruit them, how to get them to do things they otherwise would not be willing to do. The continuity between the past and the present, I think, is very starkly demonstrated with these manuals. The first batch that I did two years ago, there were things like how to run American agents in the third world, meaning recruiting secretaries from American embassies and consulates; how to recruit Middle Eastern officials who are working for regimes that might be neutral or pro-American; how to penetrate Russian diaspora organizations.

Related: How to avoid accidentally becoming a Russian agent. Yeah, here's where it gets kind of amusing and perhaps we're trapped in a s or '70s framework — or maybe not. Although U. Soviet spy services under any name struggled to get a foothold in the United States in the early postwar period. This was due in part to the investigations spurred by the so-called Red Scare of the late s and s, during which time U. The Red Scare led to the Congressional hearings spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy , who attempted to identify, and thwart, Communist influence in American society.

These events are credited with bringing down much of the U. Despite this resistance, the Soviets were not easily deterred, and they would ultimately succeed in recruiting U. He would later be accused, and convicted, of providing information to the Soviets, including classified naval communications, which allowed them to track ship movements and other activities.

Walker allegedly worked for the KGB until well in the s, when he was arrested. The KGB also recruited CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who divulged the locations and activities of multiple CIA officers stationed all over the world before he was arrested and convicted of espionage in Ames remains in prison to this day.

To perform this task, KGB agents often used extremely violent means. The KGB famously crushed the Hungarian Revolution of , by first arresting the leaders of the movement prior to scheduled negotiations with Soviet officials in Budapest.

Twelve years later, the KGB took a lead role in crushing similar reform movements in the country then known as Czechoslovakia. These latter events, known as the Prague Spring , which occurred in , initially resulted in changes in how Czechoslovakia was governed.