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The CIA and the KGB, two cold war juggernauts who jockeyed for advantage against each other
for decades throughout the Cold War.
Launching countless campaigns against each other that resulted in proxy wars, assassinations,
and even entire cultural revolutions, the rivalry between these two great spy agencies
nonetheless very often helped prevent all-out nuclear war.
But which agency was truly the greatest spy agency in the world, and which was ultimately
more successful than the other during the forty five frigid years of Cold War?
During World War II American President Franklin Roosevelt was concerned about the lack of
American intelligence capabilities.
American isolationism, which had dictated so much of the USA's foreign policy before
and after World War I, had given rise to a wholly insular attitude towards the rest of
the world amongst American leadership.
Thus while the great powers of Europe frequently made use of covert intelligence agents against
each other, and even America, the US found itself with no such capabilities at the start
of World War II.
The British needed their American allies properly in the fight, and thus dispatched one of their
intelligence chiefs to the US in order to teach their rebellious colonists how to undertake
the dastardly acts of ungentlemanly warfare.
From this initial training program the Office of Strategic Services was born, and American
commandos would undertake many daring missions throughout the war.
After the war, the United States realized it could no longer afford to ignore the rest
of the world, especially since Europe had developed the nasty habit of kicking off world
wars every twenty years or so.
To this end the National Security Act of 1947 established both the National Security Council,
which would advise the President on defense and intelligence matters, and the Central
Intelligence Agency- a bonafide spy agency tasked with both peacetime and wartime intelligence
gathering.
While the Americans were dipping their feet into foreign intrigue, the Russians were already
old hands in the arts of intelligence gathering.
The KGB, or the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti- Committee for State Security- was formed in
1954 and formally gathered together Soviet intelligence operatives under one umbrella.
Even before its start though the men that formed the KGB were seasoned masters of spycraft,
themselves descendants of the early Communist spies who helped topple the Czars and establish
the Soviet Union.
Thanks to rising income inequality and disillusionment with capitalism throughout Europe, Soviet
intelligence agents found many allies throughout the world, and by the time World War II started
they had so many agents operating inside France, Great Britain, and America that Stalin knew
about his allies' military developments almost at the same time that they did.
The KGB would itself become one of the most legendary spy agencies of all time, and develop
a reputation for ruthless efficiency that made its agents feared around the world.
Yet the truth is that KGB agents were masters of their craft, and could play any role they
needed to masterfully- from deadly assassin to charming confidant- coaxing, manipulating,
or forcing their targets to divulge their deepest secrets.
Two of the world's most powerful intelligence agencies, but which is truly superior?
To find out we'll look at some of each agency's greatest successes.
Americans may have been new to the spy game when the CIA was first established, but what
they lacked in experience and technique they more than made up for in sheer guts.
In May 1962, CIA agents got wind that the Soviets were abandoning a research facility
deep in the Arctic.
While the Arctic may be significantly warmer now than it was back then, in 1962 the icy
conditions were so bad that shifting ice made the base's sole runway unusable.
With supplies dependent on delivery via aircraft, the decision was made to pull the researchers
out while a transport aircraft could still land.
With the base completely abandoned, the CIA leapt on the opportunity to gather intelligence
on Soviet research.
The freezing conditions had made the runway unusable once more though, and with no sign
of the weather letting up, and fearing that the Soviets may return when it did, the CIA
decided that there was only one way to get men into that facility- they would have to
parachute in despite freezing cold Arctic winds gusting at high speed.
What would be a suicide mission for most turned out to be one of the greatest intelligence
coups of the Cold War.
Successfully parachuting down to the station in near white-out conditions, the two CIA
men immediately plundered the facility of all useful intelligence, and a few days later
their pick-up plane arrived.
Yet there was no way the big B-17 could land on the frozen runway, which is why the CIA
had developed a unique extraction technique pioneered in the second world war but never
used in the extreme conditions of the far north Arctic.
The men on the ground filled three balloons with helium and floated them into the sky.
The Skyhook System as it came to be known, was nothing more than a hook at the end of
a winch which was itself attached to the interior storage bay of an aircraft.
The plane would fly the hook into a line hoisted up by the balloon and then the entire line
would be winched up to the plane.
Attached to the first balloon was 150 pounds (70 kg) of secret Soviet equipment and documents,
the two agents on the ground knowing that the Skyhook System was extremely dangerous
and thus deciding that it was more important the secret equipment and documents be rescued
than them.
Despite very low visibility and strong winds, the B-17 managed to snag the first balloon
and hoist it up into its cargo well, and two passes later the agents on the ground were
themselves winched to safety.
Dangling beneath a plane moving at over 150 mph (241 kph) through Arctic weather, the
CIA had just proven that any lack of experience and technique on its part was more than made
up for in sheer courage and ingenuity.
The data recovered showed that the Soviets had been working on techniques to detect American
subs under the Arctic ice and to attack them, and helped keep US subs hidden from prying
Soviet eyes.
The United States may have led the way in computer technology, but the KGB was happy
to exploit America's use of its advanced computer networks for its own benefit.
In the late 1960s the US created ARPANET, or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.
This fledgling internet was used by US research labs to share data nationally on secret defense
projects.
When the Space Shuttle was announced shortly after the successes of the Apollo program,
the Soviets initially believed that the shuttle was secretly a space-based bomber- something
which could threaten the entire Soviet Union.
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev immediately tasked the KGB with plundering the secrets
of the shuttle, and demanded that the Soviet Union's Military-Industrial Commission create
their own.
As work on the shuttle progressed throughout various labs across the US, the cooperating
research teams made use of ARPANET to swap data back and forth.
Aware of ARPANET's existence, Soviet spies in the US soon infiltrated the computer network
and teased out troves of data about the shuttle, learning that it was indeed a peace-time reusable
space vehicle and not a secret space-borne bomber.
Not wanting to be outdone by the US once more in the realm of space exploration, Premier
Brezhnev ordered Soviet scientists to make full use of the stolen information, resulting
in the Buran- the Soviet copy of the Space Shuttle.
In many ways the Buran was actually superior to the American shuttle, despite using stolen
information from which to base their copy and the fact that it only ever flew once.
This is because the American shuttle program was beset by outside pressures exerted by
various politicians, and shifting priorities constantly changed what the core mission of
the shuttle should be.
Forced to compromise in order to achieve a wider range of capabilities rather than a
specific set of objectives, the shuttle was a fundamentally flawed design.
The Soviet Buran on the other hand benefited from the single vision that drove its development,
and the fact that Soviet lawmakers left its design almost solely in the hands of its chief
architect, Valentin Glushko.
While the Soviet Union was training and arming North Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam
War, and had provided great amounts of aid to the North Koreans and Chinese during the
Korean War a decade before that, the CIA go ta chance to take its revenge when the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Even before a single Soviet tank rolled into Afghanistan though, American agents had already
uncovered intelligence that showed the Soviets were about to invade.
For six full months before the invasion CIA agents were already busily training Soviet
Mujaheddin and arming them with modern anti-tank and anti-air equipment.
Much to the surprise of Soviet commanders, the moment their troops stepped foot into
Afghanistan they came under fire from advanced precision weapons such as Stinger missiles
which downed nearly three hundred helicopters and a hundred airplanes.
Grooming contacts in the Pakistani government, CIA operatives ensured that shipments of weapons,
medicines, and other vital supplies made their way to Afghan warriors, who put up such a
stiff resistance that the Soviet Union was forced to withdraw a decade later.
While many factors played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and America's triumph
in the Cold War, the quagmire of manpower and capital that the CIA had turned Afghanistan
into for the Soviets was a key factor in bankrupting the Soviet Union.
Even before the KGB's official start though, the men who would later birth the legendary
spy agency had already achieved the greatest intelligence coup of the 20th century.
In the years before World War II, modern physics hinted at a bomb with a potential for explosive
power that could only be described as 'apocalyptic'.
Dubbed the 'atomic bomb', various nations around the world launched research programs
in a frantic race to be the first to develop these doomsday weapons.
At the time many of the world's top physicists lived in Germany or territories which quickly
fell under German influence, and thus they fled their homelands seeking safety in the
Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the US.
As World War II began, the British undertook a great effort to gather up as many of these
brilliant physicists as they could in order to keep them from falling into Nazi hands.
The Soviet Union lacked the scientific expertise of Great Britain or the US however, and in
a bid to ensure it was not left out of the race to develop a nuclear weapon, it very
quickly got to work infiltrating the nuclear programs of Great Britain and the United States.
If the Soviets could not develop their own bomb, they would steal the knowledge to build
one from their allies.
German refugee theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs was one of the many scientists scooped
up by the British, who fully vetted the young scientist and quickly shipped him to the United
States, where the world's greatest concentration of scientific genius was gathered with a single
goal: beat the Nazis to a working atomic bomb.
Fuchs proved an invaluable addition to the Manhattan Project, and his work sped along
the development of a working bomb.
Unfortunately for the US and Great Britain though, Fuchs was also a Soviet agent.
Recruited by Soviet intelligence and groomed to spy on their behalf, Fuchs was just one
of many Soviet spies who had penetrated the Manhattan Project so deeply that Soviet intelligence
knew of its existence even before the American FBI did.
The stolen work would ensure that just four years after the end of World War II, the Soviet
Union had its own nuclear weapon.
Both the CIA and the KGB are legendary agencies in their own rights, and both sides scored
incredible victories against each other throughout the forty five years of the Cold War.
Yet in the end, the KGB is widely acknowledged by intelligence officials around the world
as being the superior spy agency, with capabilities so extensive that for almost ten years the
CIA feared recruiting any Soviet agents for fear of being penetrated by moles.
While the US enjoyed the security of two oceans for the first half of the twentieth century,
Russian agents were fighting a covert war against their own Czars, and eventually the
other great powers of Europe.
This vast experience helped produce one of the most sophisticated and capable spy agencies
that the world has ever known, and despite its eventual end with the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991, its capabilities have been passed on to a new generation of intelligence
agents who now work for the Russian Federal Security Bureau.
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Which do you think is the superior spy agency- the KGB or the CIA?
Why or why not?
Let us know in the comments!
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