Year: 1994
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The Centre and Foreign IntelligenceThe top secret documents in this volume cover the main priorities of Soviet foreign intelligence operations during the decade which culminated in the rise to power of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev.The KGB, when Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, ran a vast security and intelligence empire with over 400,000 officers inside the Soviet Union, over 200,000 border troops and a huge network of informers.Its most prestigious ann was the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate (FCD).Though comparatively small by KGB standards, the FCD had undergone a major expansion during the previous twenty years.In 1985 a twenty-two-storey annexe and a new eleven-storey building were added to its headquarters at Yasenevo, near the outer Moscow ring road.FCD officers multiplied from about 3,000 in the mid-1960s to 12,000 in the mid-1980s.The fall in oil prices and the growing economic crisis in the Soviet Union denied the KGB the further hard currency it required to continue expanding its foreign operations on more than a modest scale.The prestige of the FCD, however, remained unimpaired.Gorbachev's unprecedented range of foreign policy initiatives made it vital, in his view, to have the fullest possible intelligence on Western responses to them.For the first time in Soviet history, the men who ran foreign intelligence were promoted to run the KGB.In October 1988 General Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, head of the FCD throughout the period covered by these documents, was made KGB Chairman.Kryuchkov was born in 1924.He remains proud of his humble origins.'I had nobody to prop me up,' he told an interviewer in 1991.'My father was an ordinary worker and my mother was a housewife.''Kryuchkov too began his adult life as a factory worker but took correspondence courses in the evening which enabled him to graduate from the USSR Institute of Law.According to a later television profile, 'During the postwar years of rampant crime he was employed in a provincial procurator's office.' 2 Then came what Kryuchkov calls a 'change in life': training at the Foreign Ministry's Higher Diplomatic School, followed by five years at the Soviet Embassy
Source: Stanford University Press eBooks
Authors: Christopher Andrew, Oleg Gordievsky
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4299813382