First Chief Directorate

The First Main Directorate (Russian: Пе́рвое гла́вное управле́ние, tr. Pérvoye glávnoye upravléniye, IPA: [ˈpʲervəjə ˈɡɫavnəjə ʊprɐˈvlʲenʲɪje], lit. 'First Chief Directive') of the Committee for State Security under the USSR council of ministers (PGU KGB) was the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities by providing for the training and management of covert agents, intelligence collection administration, and the acquisition of foreign and domestic political, scientific and technical intelligence for the Soviet Union.

The First Chief Directorate was formed within the

The primary foreign intelligence service in Russia and the Soviet Union has been the GRU, a military intelligence organization and special operations force.

History of foreign intelligence in the Soviet Union

Chronology of Soviet security agencies
1917–22	Cheka under Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission)
1922–23	GPU under NKVD of the RSFSR (State Political Directorate)
1920–91	PGU KGB or INO under Cheka (later KGB) of the USSR (First Chief Directorate)
1923–34	OGPU under SNK of the USSR (Joint State Political Directorate)
1934–46	NKVD of the USSR (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
1934–41	GUGB of the NKVD of the USSR (Main Directorate of State Security of People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
1941	NKGB of the USSR (People's Commissariat of State Security)
1943–46	NKGB of the USSR (People's Commissariat for State Security)
1946–53	MGB of the USSR (Ministry of State Security)
1946–54	MVD of the USSR (Ministry of Internal Affairs)
1947–51	KI MID of the USSR (Committee of Information under Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
1954–78	KGB under the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (Committee for State Security)
1978–91	KGB of the USSR (Committee for State Security)
1991	MSB of the USSR (Interrepublican Security Service)
1991	TsSB of the USSR (Central Intelligence Service)
1991	KOGG of the USSR (Committee for the Protection of the State Border)
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From the beginning, foreign intelligence played an important role in Soviet foreign policy. In the Soviet Union, foreign intelligence was formally formed in 1920 as a foreign department of

The first chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, Cheka foreign department (Inostranny Otdel—INO), was Yakov Davydov. He headed the foreign department until late 1921, when he was replaced by longtime revolutionary Solomon Mogilevsky. He led INO only for few months, as in 1925 he died in a plane crash.

He was replaced by Mikhail Trilisser, also a revolutionary. Trilisser specialized in tracing secret enemy informers and political spies inside the Bolshevik party. Before becoming INO chief, he led its Section of Western and Eastern Europe. Under Trilisser's management, foreign intelligence had become big professionally and respected by their opponent's services. This period characterized the enlisting of foreign agents, wide use of emigrants for intelligence tasks and organization of a network of independent agents. Trilisser himself was very active, personally traveling to Berlin and Paris for meetings with important agents.

Trilisser left his position in 1930, and was replaced by

After Sudoplatov left his post, he was replaced by Vladimir Dekanozov, before becoming INO head, Dekanozov was Deputy Chairman of the Georgian Council of People's Commissars and after he left his post in 1939 and became the Soviet ambassador in Berlin.

For the next seven years, from 1939 to 1946, the chief of the foreign intelligence department (then 5th Department of the GUGB/NKVD) was a very young NKVD officer and graduate of the first official intelligence school (SHON), Major of State Security Pavel Fitin. Fitin graduated from a program in engineering studies at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in 1932 after which he served in the Red Army, then became an editor for the State Publishing House of Agricultural Literature. The All-Union Communist Party (CPSU) selected him for a special course in foreign intelligence.

Fitin became deputy chief of the NKVD's foreign intelligence in 1938, then a year later at the age of thirty-one became chief. The

In the first years of existence, Soviet Russia did not have many foreign missions that could provide official camouflage for legal outpost of intelligence called residentura, so, foreign department (INO) relied mainly on illegals, officers assigned to foreign countries under false identities. Later when official Soviet embassies, diplomatic offices and foreign missions had been created in major cities around the world, they were used to build legal intelligence post called residentura. It was led by a resident whose real identity was known only to the ambassador.

The first operations of the Soviet intelligence concentrated mainly on Russian military and political emigration organizations. According to

Among the successes of "Trust" was the luring of Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly into the Soviet Union to be arrested. In Soviet intelligence history, the 1930s proceeded as a so-called Era of the Great Illegals. Among others Arnold Deutsch, Theodore Maly and Yuri Modin were officers leading the Cambridge Five case.

One of the biggest successes of Soviet foreign intelligence was the penetration of the American Manhattan Project, which was the code name for the effort during World War II to develop the first nuclear weapons of the United States with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada. Information gathered in the United States, Great Britain and Canada, especially in USA, by NKVD and NKGB agents then supplied to Soviet physicists, allowed them to carry out the first Soviet nuclear explosion in 1949.

In March 1954, Soviet state security underwent its last major postwar reorganization. The MGB was once again removed from the MVD, but downgraded from a ministry to the Committee for State Security (KGB), and formally attached to the Council of Ministers in an attempt to keep it under political control. The body responsible for foreign operations and intelligence collection activities was First Chief Directorate (FCD).

The first head of FCD was Aleksandr Panyushkin, the former ambassador to the United States and China and former head of Second Chief Directorate in MVD responsible for foreign intelligence. Panyushkin's diplomatic background, however, did not imply any softening in MVD/KGB operational methods abroad. Indeed, one of the first foreign operations personally supervised by Panyushkin was Operation Rhine, the attempted assassination of a Ukrainian émigré leader in West Germany.

In 1956, Panyushkin was succeeded by his former deputy Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who was to remain head of FCD for record period of 15 years. He was remembered in the FCD chiefly as an efficient, energetic administrator. In 1971, Sakharovsky was succeeded by his 53-year-old former deputy Fyodor Mortin, a career KGB officer who had risen steadily through the ranks as a loyal protégé of Sakharovsky. Mortin was on top the FCD only for two years, when, in 1974, he was succeeded by the 50-year-old Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was almost to equal Sakharovsky's record term as head of the FCD. After 14 years in FCD Hq, he was to become chairman of the KGB in 1988. Kryuchkov joined the Soviet diplomatic service, stationed in Hungary until 1959. He then worked for the Communist Party headquarters in Ukraine for eight years before joining the KGB in 1967. In 1988 he was promoted to General of the Army rank and became KGB Chairman. In 1989–1990, he was a member of Politburo. The next and last head of FCD was born on March 24, 1935, in Moscow Leonid Shebarshin.

First Chief Directorate organization

According to published sources, the KGB included the following directorates and departments in 1980s: ^[1]

• Directorate R: Planning and Analyses
• Directorate S: Illegals
• Directorate T: Scientific and Technical Intelligence
• Directorate K: Counter-Intelligence
• Directorate OT: Operational and Technical Support
• Directorate I: Computers
• Service A: Active Measures
• Directorate RT: Operations in USSR

• First Department: North America
• Second Department: Latin America
• Third Department: United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Malta
• Fourth Department: East Germany, Austria, West Germany
• Fifth Department: France, Spain, Portugal, Benelux, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania
• Sixth Department: China, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea
• Seventh Department: Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines
• Eight Department: non-Arab Near Eastern countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Israel
• Ninth Department: English-speaking Africa
• Tenth Department: French-speaking Africa
• Eleventh Department: liaison with
  Socialist states
• Fifteenth Department: registry and archives
• Sixteenth Department: signals intelligence and code-breaking
• Seventeenth Department: India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma
• Eighteenth Department: Arab Near Eastern Countries and Egypt
• Nineteenth Department: Soviet Union Emigres
• Twentieth Department: liaison with Third World states

Active measures and assassinations

"Active measures" (Russian: Активные мероприятия) were a form of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services to influence the course of world events, "in addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessment of it".^[2] Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degree of violence". They included disinformation, propaganda, and forgery of official documents.^[2] The preparation of forged "CIA" documents which were then shown to third-world leaders was often successful in sowing suspicion.^[3]

Active measures included the establishment and support of international

KGB residents in the United States

Washington, DC

• Vasily Zarubin (alias Zubilin): 1942–1944
• Grigori Dolbin: 1946–1948 no refs
• Georgi Sokolov: 1948–1949 no refs
• Alexander Panyushkin
  (also Soviet ambassador): 1949–1950
• Nikolai Vladykin: 1950–1954 no refs
• Alexander Feklisov
  (alias Fomin): 1960–1964
• Pavel Lukyanov: 1964–1965
• Boris Aleksandrovich Solomatin: 1966–1968
• Mikhail Polonik: 1968–1975
• Dmitri Yakushkin: 1975–1982
• Stanislav Androsov [ru]: 1982–1986
• Yuri B. Shvets: 1985–1987
• Ivan Gromakov: 1987

FCD residency organization

The KGB First Chief Directorate residency was the equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station. The chief of residency (resident) was the equivalent of the CIA's Chief of Station.

A legal resident is a

The residency was divided into lines (sections). Each line was responsible for its assigned task of gathering intelligence. For instance, one of the lines was responsible for counterintelligence.

The Line KR (short for "kontrazvietka," counterintelligence) played a big role in the KGB residency, being responsible for counterintelligence and security of the residency and the consulate or embassy that housed the residency. Mainly it used so-called "defensive counterintelligence" tactics. This meant that Line KR attention and force was used for the internal security. Line KR had operational control over residency personnel, surveillance, establishment of any suspicious contacts of residency personnel with citizens of the country where they are staying that they had not reported, checking personal mail, etc. Line KR used such tactics to prevent or uncover anyone from the residency or embassy from being recruited by the enemy, such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

In 1985, the Line KR's role was increased considerably after CIA counterintelligence officer

After a quick and secret process, they were sentenced to death. The death sentences were carried out in the Lubyanka Prison. They were buried face down in unmarked graves. Only Oleg Gordievsky was able to escape from the USSR, with SIS help.

Line KR officers did not want to immediately arrest all the KGB personnel identified by Ames and Hanssen because they did not want to draw the attention of the CIA and FBI (which it did). They wanted to run a game of disinformation. But Washington Resident Stanislav Androsov wished to demonstrate his office's effectiveness to his superiors and ordered the immediate arrest of all who helped the CIA and FBI. After those incidents, the security of residencies was increased and the Line KR was assigned more security officers, especially in countries like the United States and Great Britain.

The KGB's FCD residency was divided in two parts – Operational Staff and Support Staff

• KGB Resident

Operational staff

• Line PR – collects information about political, economic, and military strategic intelligence, also active measures
• Line KR – counterintelligence and security
• Line X – scientific and technical intelligence, specifically, acquisition of Western technology
• Line N – support to illegals
• Line EM – intelligence on emigres
• Line SK – security and surveillance of the Soviet diplomatic community
• Special Reservists

Support staff

• Driver
• Line OT - operational technical support, including Impulse intercepting station monitoring communications of the local counterintelligence service
• Line RP - signals intelligence
• Line I - computers
• Cipher clerk radio operator
• Secretary/typist
• Accountant

Heads of Intelligence

See also

• GRU
• Mitrokhin Archive
• Vasili Mitrokhin
• Special Activities Division

References