Tag Archives: Cold War

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Deep Cover in South Africa

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Colonel Aleksei Mikhailovich Kozlov (1934-2015) was a deep-cover intelligence officer in the KGB’s elite Directorate S, the Illegals, during the height of the Cold War. Posing as a traveling German businessman, he was captured by South African counterintelligence in 1980, but not before passing onto Moscow Center shocking information on joint South African-Israeli nuclear weapons tests. This December 20th, 2009 interview with the newspaper Izvestia provides another fascinating inside look at the global-scale operations of KGB Directorate S.

Izvestia: How did you get into Illegal Intelligence?

Kozlov: In 1953 I arrived in Moscow from Vologda to go to the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO). My character brought me to humanities, and I very much loved the German language. I had wonderful teacher in school – Zelman Shmulevich Pertsovsky. He was a Polish Jew who in 1939, when the Germans entered Poland, crossed the Bug River and turned up on our side. He was simply in love with the German language and quoted Schiller and Goethe by heart. He called me a “slacker” and helped a lot with preparing for higher education. Continue reading Deep Cover in South Africa →

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The Kremlin’s Psychic Spies

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Retired KGB Major General Boris Ratnikov has a story to tell – about the Soviet and Russian intelligence services’ use of psychic espionage in the Great Game. While Ratnikov’s story may sound fantastic, the details on Cold War-era remote viewing programs in both the United States and Soviet Union are very real. With that in mind, perhaps the general’s claims aren’t so far-fetched after all. In this 2006 interview with state newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta (RG), Ratnikov (BR) reveals some aspects of his mysterious work that no less than mirror the popular film Inception.

Dossier

Major General Boris Ratnikov, 62 years old. Worked in the UKGB [Upravlenie – Directorate] for Moscow and Moscow Oblast. From 1991 he was the first deputy chief of the Russian Federation Main Protection Directorate (GUO). From 1994 to 1997 he was the main consultant to the Russian Federation Presidential Security Service (SBP) and Advisor to the chief of the Federal Protection Service (FSO). Today he is Advisor to the Chairman of the Moscow Oblast Duma.  Continue reading The Kremlin’s Psychic Spies →

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Oswald & the KGB in Mexico

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Before the murder of John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald – or even possibly a double – visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. Retired KGB Lt. Gen. Nikolai Leonov, then on assignment in Mexico’s capital as an intelligence officer, met Oswald that day, and he has little doubt the young American was just a pawn in a much wider plot. 

An intelligence officer’s workdays were full of work with active agent networks, with those who had been brought into partnership with Soviet intelligence by previous shifts of our colleagues, and with agents arriving from other countries, etc.

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Treachery at Lubyanka

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Former KGB General Filipp Bobkov was a veteran counterintelligence officer and chosen by Yuri Andropov to head the Fifth Chief Directorate (Ideological Counter-Subversion), which he led from 1969 to 1983. Bobkov recounts the twilight war of counterespionage waged between the CIA and KGB – a contest with deadly consequences. 

In the Cold War, as in any other war, there were successes and defeats – failures and miscalculations that at times led to inescapable consequences. Any intelligence service will suffer the blows of the enemy with difficulty, and the KGB also had to undergo not a few such blows. Betrayals by apparatus officers – those with whom you spend all day, whom you see in the elevator and at meetings, with whom you’re connected by constant engagement in shared matters – these were taken especially painfully.

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Malta, Masonry & the CIA

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The dark arts of espionage share more in common with historically-rooted secret societies than the media would care to admit. Using decades of experience and observation, KGB First Chief Directorate Col. Stanislav Lekarev (1935-2010) takes us into the murky netherworld of globalist powerplayers, occult orders, and state intelligence services.

In the “Masonic-intelligence” complex, it’s difficult to say who’s more central – who’s the real “leader,” and who’s being “led.” This has taken shape in various ways. It’s well-known that through its men in the Masonic lodges, the CIA is able to channel the work of the international business community into directions needed by the United States. But Masons who work in the CIA are also capable of setting the tone they require.

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Putin in East Germany

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Retired KGB Colonel Vladimir Usoltsev shares his psychological portrait of “Volodya” – his one-time subordinate and current Russian President Vladimir Putin, from their time serving together in a KGB intelligence group in Dresden, East Germany, during the 1980s. 

The supply of episodes I remember, ones which I could expound without the risk of fabrication, is gradually being exhausted. I could still recount much, resting on foggy glimpses, but I’d fear to be accused of lying. And the goal itself of my story is not only to tell of our life in Dresden and fill in the gap in the biography of an extraordinary Russian politician, but also to clear up any fantasies and lies. Continue reading Putin in East Germany →

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Operation Scorpion

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From the memoirs of legendary Soviet intelligence officer Maj. Gen. Yuri Ivanovich Drozdov comes the incredible story of a false-flag recruitment operation by the KGB’s Directorate S (Illegals) against West Germany’s own intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) during the height of the Cold War. The following 1995 article from German Focus magazine tells the tale:

Former KGB General Yuri Drozdov admits: “Our valued agent in the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has still not been uncovered.” 

Firm handshakes, pats on the shoulder – the old guard in its narrow circle.

The men, in a predominant majority over 70 years old, are dressed strictly according to protocol. On this hot summer day they’re wearing austere coats and shirts with ties. Guests are received by Yuri Drozdov, general of the KGB, the former Soviet secret service, who just a short time later, over a glass of vodka, would allow himself to loosen his tie.

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The KGB in Africa

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Africa has long been a geopolitical battleground among the great powers, with the Cold War representing an especially intense round of this struggle. From the archives of Russia’s SVR comes an overview of the KGB First Chief Directorate’s intelligence, covert action, and political influence operations in Africa during the 1960s and 1970s.  

In the postwar period, Soviet foreign intelligence had to work on an African continent almost unknown to it up to that time. In the 1950s, Soviet intelligence’s interest in Africa was conditioned mainly by the acquisition of information on the plans and intentions of Western countries. At that time many air and naval bases of NATO member nations were situated in Africa. Their interest in the continent was rooted not only in strategic reasoning: Africa was rich in food and mineral resources, and her depths preserved deposits of materials necessary for modern industry, such as uranium, cobalt, wolfram, copper, nickel, oil, and many others.

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Articles

Moscow’s Master Spy in Japan

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In August 2008 the Japanese security service revealed details of a remarkable spy saga with all the makings of a Le Carre novel, if a bit further east. A deep-cover Russian intelligence officer of unspecified “Asian origin” masqueraded as a Japanese man and ran an espionage network in Tokyo over the span of three decades. Japan’s government kept the case under wraps for a number of years, so why did it choose to shed light on this extraordinary intelligence operation only recently?

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The Downfall of Agent Sphere

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Lt. Col. Vladimir Nikolaevich Zaitsev, an officer of the KGB’s elite spetsnaz Group A (Alpha), commanded the operation to arrest CIA agent Adolph Tolkachev in 1985. Zaitsev recounts the affair and its strategic significance in the Cold War.

Group A’s very first snatch operation against a “werewolf” was the summer 1985 arrest of Adolph Tolkachev (agent code name [CK] SPHERE), an engineer at a USSR Ministry of Radio Industry scientific research institute – one of the leading specialists in aero-navigational systems.  Continue reading The Downfall of Agent Sphere →