Did "fake news" originate with the KGB?
Have any rumors started by the KGB persisted to this day?
And what’s all this talk about a special nickel?
The KGB was born from many previous secret service organizations within 20th century
Soviet history.
The Bolshevik Revolution completely transformed a global powerhouse country once ruled by
czars.
After the revolution, the young Soviet leader Joseph Stalin rose to power.
Stalin expanded the use of "secret police," and in 1934, he officially became the People's
Commissariat for Internal Affairs, otherwise known as the NKVD.
Stalin used the organization to both build and sustain his power and to ensure the maintenance
of a strong industrialized communist regime.
The NKVD was used to instill mass fear throughout the country, and its citizens referred to
the organization as the Great Terror.
He orchestrated mass famine and work camps, allowing his own people to suffer greatly.
Stalin was also known for his "purges" where he habitually used the NKVD freely as a way
to eliminate anyone who showed any hint of disloyalty, or whom he considered a threat.
Once Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev took power, the days of the NKVD died alongside
him.
Unfortunately, his organization still had many fans, and the Main Directorate for State
Security, or GUGB, was formed in its place.
The KGB replaced the GUGB in 1954.
Per the KGB Espionage Museum, the organization's mission was to act as the "sword and shield
of the Communist Party."
Stalin's Great Terror lived on, simply under many different acronyms.
By the 1980s, the KGB, which translates into Committee for State Security, was arguably
the most powerful secret governmental operation on the planet.
The organization's crusade to silence anti-communist sentiment stretched across multiple occupations,
including technology and the military, and employed thousands of Soviets.
The KGB even recruited officers in the west in order to divulge location and activity
intel.
They also set up camp in the United States, as depicted in the popular FX TV drama "The
Americans."
In the 1970s, an antenna went undetected in the U.S. embassy's chimney.
It was later divulged that a listening device had been successfully incorporated inside
the embassy's typewriters.
This went undetected for a whole eight years.
Imagine how much intel the KGB gathered within that span of time.
But the KGB's espionage monopoly wouldn't last long.
The Central Intelligence Agency quickly became a formidable rival to the KGB, particularly
during the Cold War.
Their weapon of choice was a silent-but-deadly cyanide capsule, otherwise known as the L-pill,
that would kill an enemy instantly.
The poison was sometimes hidden inside pens.
It's very possible that the CIA prevented a nuclear attack on Americans with intel they
gathered from Moscow.
Author David E. Hoffman writes in his book, "The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold
War Espionage and Betrayal," that intelligence discovered an R-12 medium range missile.
Hoffman wrote:
"[It became the] key ingredient in decision making as President Kennedy stood up to Khrushchev
during the Cuban missile crisis."
If a citizen had a business, position of power, or personal attributes that the state found
desirable, the KGB would try a variety of methods to determine whether they could be
recruited to carry out undercover tasks.
They would then promise the individual special favors for service.
For example, Vladimir Putin spent his career recruiting KGB members in the 1980s.
According to a report by David Hoffman for The Washington Post,
"[Putin would seek out] East Germans who had a plausible reason to travel abroad."
Basically, if you had a cover story, you were in.
Putin would reportedly recruit technicians to go on so-called "business trips" to the
west in order to steal their technology.
The KGB also recruited journalists to sow seeds of disinformation within certain countries.
Many well-known figures were approached to become KGB operatives in order to uncover
sensitive information the general public wouldn't be aware of.
The KGB would also place sleeper recruits in foreign countries as illegals who didn't
have traceable pasts.
These agents would possess fabricated backstories, known as "legends," to explain their lack
of government identification.
The KGB assisted in orchestrating "puppet" Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe
and Afghanistan, enabling the Soviets to repress countries, while also establishing their own
police within the occupied territories.
During the Prague Spring, the KGB instilled fear into the Czech people that they would
fall victim to a coup.
During a short lived reform in the late '60s, Czechoslovakia was under new management, and
the KGB wasn't pleased.
Alexander Dubcek, a liberal-leaning politician who championed freedom of speech, replaced
fascist Antonin Novotny as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to overthrow Dubcheck.
He was eventually replaced with more of an ally figure, Gustav Husak, who promised to
restore communist ideals and cooperate with the Soviets.
Dezinformatsia, a word invented by Joseph Stalin, boiled down to spreading false reports
that were specifically intended to mislead the public.
These disinformation campaigns were intended to control a mass group.
Once the group believed the lie, they could be easily controlled.
The KGB took great advantage of the tactic, and unfortunately it worked well.
The method was part of the KGB's active measures doctrine, which included media manipulation,
counterfeiting documents, and murdering dissenters.
These measures were utilized to create distrust between western alliances, and NATO in particular.
This tactic continued well into the Cold War, where it was referred to as "black propaganda."
Operation NEPTUN, for example, was carried out in 1964 to insinuate that the United States
and other western power players supported the Nazi regime.
One of the most shocking and widely circulated disinformation campaigns by the KGB, however,
was concocted in the year 1983.
On July 17, 1983, a campaign officially titled Operation INFEKTION used a pro-Soviet Indian
newspaper to spread shocking content, namely that the U.S. would soon be held responsible
for purposefully infecting the world with the AIDS virus.
According to these fabricated sources, AIDS was the product of a lab experiment intended
for biological warfare by the Pentagon.
The publication cited an anonymous letter from a whistleblower of sorts who claimed
they were a well-known American scientist and anthropologist.
Per The Washington Post, pro-Soviet Indian newspaper Patriot alleged,
"Now that these menacing experiments seem to have gone out of control, plans are being
hatched to hastily transfer them from the U.S. to other countries, primarily developing
nations where governments are pliable to Washington's pressure and persuasion."
Not only was the report published in India, but it appeared in a Soviet weekly paper and
a British tabloid too.
Within four years, it had circulated within reputable sources of more than 50 countries.
Many credible people attempted to debunk the blatantly untrue accusation, but the rumor
was difficult to contain, and continues to persist to this day.
In 1953, a nickel was found in Brooklyn that came apart.
Inside was an encrypted message along with a microphotograph.
A newsboy had collected it while delivering papers when he noticed something different
about it.
When he rested the nickel on the middle finger of his hand, it appeared lighter than usual.
When the boy dropped the coin on the floor, a tiny photograph fell out that possessed
a series of numbers.
The coin would soon be collected by the FBI, who launched an investigation into the origins
of the coin and traced it back to the KGB with the help of a former spy who wanted asylum
in America.
But it would take years to solve the case.
The culprit was a Russian citizen who had been living illegally in the U.S. for over
a decade.
"Apparently you're not an American citizen."
"That's true."
He had many false names, but his real name was discovered to be Rudolf Ivanovich Abel,
who was of course, working for the KGB.
Abel was found guilty of espionage in a New York City court.
He was ultimately exchanged for pilot Francis Gary Powers, an American prisoner who was
being held in the Soviet Union.
"They got our spy pilot, with a head full of classified information."
The KGB had long dabbled in biological weaponry, including creating strains of anthrax-causing
bacterium and placing poison in places of mass transport, buildings, or residences.
The practice was at its most dangerous during the Cold War.
Soviet biological warfare agency Biopreparat relied on the KGB as their main supplier of
raw material and was known within the agency by the code name "Capturing Agency One."
Agents across the globe would collect powders, cultures, and fluids to reconstruct them in
their lab and decipher how to overcome their toxic formulas.
In 1979, spores of anthrax mysteriously disappeared from a Soviet lab in central Russia, killing
more than 66 people, as well as an unknown number of animals.
Investigators discovered this strain of anthrax had been modified by the Soviet Union.
The lab it was stored in was marked as Compound 19.
It was later revealed that the modified bacterium had escaped through air filters that had been
replaced and not installed correctly.
The event became known as "biological Chernobyl" and is still one of the largest inhalation
anthrax outbreaks in history.
Many more people could have been fatally exposed if the wind had been stronger at the time
of initial exposure.
There is no reason to believe Compound 19 ceased their experiments, even after the tragedy.
The Cold War bred many unique and creative espionage techniques, some of which involved
using radiation in a variety of ways.
People warn against radiation poisoning from microwaves, but try mind control and behavior
modification.
From 1953 to 1979, the USSR infiltrated the United States embassy in Moscow by releasing
low level non-ionizing radiation through microwaves.
What is known as the "Moscow signal" case was kept under wraps for nearly two decades
until embassy officials and staff were notified.
While some were concerned the microwaves had surveillance technology, others were more
concerned for their health.
The microwaving of the embassy didn't officially cease until 1988.
By that time, thousands of Americans had been exposed.
Many employees suffered from cancer and high white cell counts as a result.
Vladimir Putin was a mid-level KGB agent for 17 years before he became Boris Yeltsin's
prime minister in 1998.
He began his career as a KGB intelligence officer in 1975 and retired with the rank
of colonel in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
During his stint with the KGB, one of his biggest assignments was extracting technologies
from the west.
Putin has never actually campaigned for office, and has been Russia's president or prime minister
ever since the late 1990s.
Critics worry that his experience with the KGB has influenced the way he governs.
The intelligence he had gathered within his nearly two decades as an agent and colonel
had made him paranoid, and there has been hard evidence that he used KGB tactics to
infiltrate Ukraine in 2005.
And of course, he has been accused of using "dezinformatsia" to influence the results
of the 2016 United States presidential election.
A coup officially ended the KGB in November of 1991 when the USSR fell and was replaced
by the domestic Federal Security Service, the FSB.
But it was never fully dissolved, and only evolved, much like organizations before the
KGB.
The Cold War may have ended, but under Putin, Russian spies are still allegedly up to all
the old tricks of the KGB playbook.
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