The Plot to Hack America

With the death of Lenin in 1924, Joseph Broz Stalin took over. During this time Stalin used the secret police forces to arrest and execute an estimated 50 million people in order to maintain order among citizens. In 1930 the NKVD appeared, and later established the Administration of Special Tasks. Their job was to infiltrate agents and convert socialist supporters of the revolution in Western and fascist countries, in addition to exterminating dissent among potential NKVD backsliders. During the 1930s some of the great successes would be to develop spies in British and American universities and recruit members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, including Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, an officer of the British Secret Service MI6, Guy Burgess, and Don McLean.

After more than a decade of tumultuous leadership, Lavrenti Beria expanded the NKVD, which was under the OGPU, to the point where a separate organization needed to be created. This became NKGB, in charge of internal security, espionage, and guerilla activities in World War II. When Stalin died in 1953, Beria tried to replace him, but the politburo arrested, tried, and executed Beria in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev would head the new soviet government and on March 13, 1954 formally established the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (“Committee for State Security”) or KGB. It would be responsible for all facets of state security including internal security, police, and border patrol, and for the next four decades would operate a ruthless campaign against the West—as well as the citizens of the Soviet Union.

Ivan Serov was named the first Chairman of the KGB. Its first task was to eradicate Beria supporters. With reorganization under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union relaxed censorship, reduced the size of prison camps, and became more active in foreign affairs. In 1958, Aleksandr Shelepin became KGB chairman. “Shelli” sought to enhance the USSR by destabilizing “enemy” nations including the U.S., Britain, and Japan. This led to almost three decades of Soviet-sponsored anticolonial terrorism in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

By 1967 Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving KGB chairman with fifteen years in the post, headed the KGB. Andropov headed the KGB’s “golden age,” continuing Khrushchev and Shelepin’s organizational restructuring, while stepping up intelligence gathering and foreign espionage. He helped build an organizational structure to fund and supervise technological advancements in Russian defense while actively suppressing any government dissidence. Andropov stepped down in 1982, to lead the Politburo.

After a short series of leaders, Vladimir Kryuchkov became the last chairman of the KGB in 1988, leading a failed coup August 18, 1991 to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev. The Communist party was effectively dissolved December 25, 1991, ending the bloody seventy-year legacy. What was left was a nascent post-Communist Russian state, and every state needs an intelligence agency; the KGB would survive after the Soviet Union expired.

Putin’s New Nobility

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the KGB became the FSK (Federalnaya Sluzhba Kontrrazvedki), Federal Counterintelligence Service. It was designed to be similar to Britain’s MI5. In 1995 FSK turned into the FSB—the Counterintelligence “K,” being replaced with the Security (Cyrillic “B”) Bezopasnost—effectively becoming the Federal Security Service.

In December 2000, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev, the successor to Vladimir Putin, spoke to the Russian daily tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda on the founding anniversary of the Cheka secret police. He described the role and stature of the new FSB:

I don’t want to give a fancy speech, but our best colleagues, the honor and pride of the FSB, don’t do their work for the money. When I give government awards to our people, I scrutinize their faces. There are the highbrow intellectual analysts, the broad-shouldered, weather-beaten Special Forces men, the taciturn explosives specialists, exacting investigators, and the discreet counter-espionage operational officers… They all look different, but there is one very special characteristic that unites all these people, and it is a very important quality: It is their sense of service. They are, if you like, our new “nobility.”⁸