For the duration of the Cold War until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the secret services of the Soviet Union aroused the admiration of their counterparts from the other side of the curtain, the businessmen who visited the USSR the British counter-intelligence directorate (MI6) distributed an information manual in which he defined the KGB "The biggest spy car that the world has ever seen".
In 1980 the CIA Deputy Director John McMahon admitted the Soviet superiority in this sector, recognizing the value of the adversaries was also a warning to the citizens of the West not to let their guard down; Having said that, the leadership of the men of the Kremlin in those years was considered by insiders to be the consequence of the communist ideals spread throughout the West where a large section of the proletarian world was enrolled in the communist party of the country they belong to, a huge mass of activists and sympathizers who formed the basis on which Soviet power was grafted.
This plethora of mulberry and hammer lovers influenced the political life of the whole West, allowing Russians to infiltrate their own men even in the high politics of the enemy countries.
Il Gosudarstvennoe Bezopasnosti Committee he was the big brother who controlled every aspect of Russian life and had eyes everywhere even in the West; without the KGB there would never have been a Soviet empire that stood on ideological conviction and fear.
An army of agents censored newspapers and magazines, headed science and medicine, controlled police and military, handled education and art in every degree and form, in every corner of Russia there was a handful of loyalists in Moscow .
Anyone who received a negative notation from the control bodies on the job book was fired and would hardly have found another job, after a month of poverty they were considered parasites and with a special law they could be exiled.
According to the CIA leaders in those years, Moscow financed practically every strategic sector operating underground: the Tass news agency, the Pravda official newspaper, New Times Moscow's Radio Foreign Service, Secret Service locations in every corner of the world, philosophical guerrillas all over the planet, special operations overseas, international departments, embassies, clandestine radio organizations; all these funds were hidden as money to support the communist party of every single nation.
In Italy, the Italian Communist Party benefited. The secretary of those days, Luigi Longo, wrote to then-Russian leader, complaining of the shortage of funds for that year; Brezhnev's answer was found in the Mitrochin archive following its publication in the West: "Dear Friend Longo, we have received your letter asking for additional assistance to face PCI participation in the election campaign ... the total contribution of this year is $ 5.700.000, in response to your request we have decided to grant the Italian Communist Party a additional contribution of 500.000 dollars. Unfortunately, at the moment there is nothing else we can do".
The same thing happened in every other country there was a Communist Party that in fact operated in the pay of Moscow, it was believed that at the time there were 250.000 KGB agents abroad who had to account for their work directly or indirectly to the Soviet capital, to these must be added the services of all the other satellite countries of Eastern Europe which operated under the Soviet aegis.
The KGB was divided into one first central direction further subdivided into three subsidiary directionsTwo special departments, eleven ordinary departments who planned infiltrations in all countries of the world.
The infiltration operations in Italy were overseen by the fifth department, the same as France and Spain, the selected agents were recruited, trained and sent to the countries with false documents; there were several schools of espionage but for the most important assignments specially prepared flats were used for specific education to the individual agent.
At the time of the first management there was a cell that had the task of carving the technological, scientific and military secrets of the West, with particular emphasis on the "executive action department" or taini otdel, the killers were trained here.
The selection was meticulous and took place at the end of the usual annual course; in the seventies and eighties the course for killer it took place on the corner of Via Metrostroevskaya and Turnaniski Pereulok in Moscow where aspiring assassins trained in shooting range with rifles and pistols, boxing and martial arts; the best completed the training in Kuchino in the Moscow suburbs where they specialized in the preparation and use of poisons, drugs and gases, in the sabotage of vehicles and communication systems, the forerunners of modern hacker.
In Warsaw, Sofia, Budapest, Prague and in every other operating center of the intelligence services, there was a KGB adviser who coordinated and managed the operations; this operating technique proved to be successful in Czechoslovakia when, after the uprising, two-thirds of local services Static Secret Immaculate, remained faithful to Moscow.
The task of these agents was to collect political, social, technological, military information from the country where they operated.
The second and fifth directives were concerned with the internal security of the USSR, among the tasks of these bodies being: to trap and bribe foreigners on Soviet land and to control their relations with other citizens of the place, to guard all foreign diplomats, to prepare compromising dossiers , infiltration into the US embassies around the world, tourists' monitors, accredited foreign journalists in Moscow, college students, trips that Soviet citizens do abroad, Soviet industries and their secrets, crush dissent, suffocate every independence of the Soviet republics.
One of the most chilling divisions was the one called "Yevsekzia”Specialized in everything related to the“ Jewish problem ”, nothing to do with Nazism but for the desire of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens of Jewish origin to leave Russia to reach the promised land by applying for a visa for Israel; in Moscow they were and probably still are reluctant to the idea that the wealth of knowledge of these citizens could be put at the service of the State of Israel which at the time of the existence of this division was considered an expanding unknown, a dangerous and highly armed neighbor with a pro-Western military and foreign policy, closely linked to Washington.
Of particular importance is the central direction of the border guards, also monitored by the KGB, which was more concerned about the possible escape of Soviet citizens from Russia than from the entry into Russia of foreign dangers.
The KGB in turn was controlled by the GRU (Glavnoe Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenie) better known as the Chief Information Directorate.
This was the KGB in the years of the Cold War, an organization that has significantly influenced life in all its aspects also in the West, to have a clear idea of it it would be enough to think of the statements of Sir Martin Furnival Jones, general manager of the MI5 the British counterintelligence service: "More than a hundred Members of the Parliament have contacts with Soviet or Soviet spy organizations, Russians have infiltrated spies in the British treasury or industry, they are even confident in environments close to the English royal family. "
This should not be surprising if we think of the ideological charge that communism, coupled with the collective imagination of Russia, has been able to infuse the world from its theorists to characters such as Che Guevara, able to convey a message that is still loaded with ever-present values.
In Italy, the dependence of a certain political party on the financing of overcapacity has been proven Beautiful country operated the most powerful of the Western European communist parties, so powerful to claim a role in the international chessboard by disengaging its ideological position from the mosque of Moscow; the reaction of the Kremlin was immediate, at first, some Soviet agents tried to assassinate Enrico Berlinguer while visiting Sofia in the 1973, while the role of the Russian services that longed for Aldo Moro in the six months before the seizure and subsequent assassination; what was attributed to the president of DC was the historic compromise with relative openness and dialogue with the Communists.
It is reasonable to ask a question, how many of the politicians of the Italian left from the post-war period to the end of communism were in the hands of the KGB? How did politics affect our country?
Officially the KGB ceased to exist on November 6, 1991, two years and three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so many answers remained under those rubble that no one will ever be able to give; however from the ashes of the old organization were born the FSB and the SVR currently in the service of the Russian government led by an old member of the secret services: Vladimir Putin.
(photo: web)
