Russia and the United States have long been two of the largest international powers in
the world. As a result, both countries have their own specialised and expansive security agencies,
the Central Intelligence Agency – or CIA – and the Federal Security
Service of the Russian Federation – or FSB. Established shortly after the Second World
War in 1947, the CIA has been responsible for the gathering and analysis of highly
sensitive information from all over the world on behalf of the United States’ federal government.
The FSB was formed more recently, in 1995, as a modern replacement for the Soviet Union’s KGB.
It’s tasked with various responsibilities such as counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism
operations, surveillance, border security, and investigating any
violations of Russia’s federal law. We previously covered how the CIA and
KGB fared against each other in ‘CIA vs KGB – Which Was Better During the Cold War?’,
but how do their modern, present-day equivalents hold up? We’re pitting the CIA and the FSB
against each other, to see if we can determine which of them is the superior spy agency.
So, what do each of these agencies actually do? The main role of the CIA is to serve as the
United States foreign intelligence service, meaning that they are designed to gather
intel internationally. The CIA, in theory, holds less jurisdiction to operate on home
soil. Any investigations and operations that take place within America itself are usually handled
by other agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, otherwise known as the FBI.
This is actually the first key difference between the CIA and the FSB.
While the CIA’s focus is on external threats and intelligence gathering, the FSB’s role
is to safeguard the Russian state from within. While the nature of the FSB is perhaps more akin
to the FBI, that doesn’t mean they haven’t been involved in some CIA-style secret and dangerous
operations., or that they don’t have some pretty gnarly skeletons in the closet. So, with that in
mind, how do the two spy agencies compare in terms of their dark and duplicitous deeds?
Let’s start with one of the many secrets that the CIA likes to keep under wraps.
Did you know that the Central Intelligence Agency has a top-secret assassination unit?
Conspiracy theorists and even official sources have linked the CIA to a number of infamous,
high-profile and historically significant assassination attempts, from Cuban revolutionary
Fidel Castro to Osama Bin-Laden. However, it was revealed that in response to the September 11th
attack on the World Trade Centre, US President George Bush authorised the Central Intelligence
Agency to use a covert assassination unit in order to track down and eliminate members of Al-Qaeda.
Journalist Evan Wright highlighted that this marked the “first time the U.S. government
outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise” as the CIA brought in
private contractors to carry out their secretive assassinations. The entire operation was even
hidden from Congress themselves, meaning that the CIA had the power to abduct or kill anyone
they believed to be associated with Al-Qaeda, without their actions being traced back to the
US government. That’s a scary level of power and freedom for an organisation to be granted,
made even more scary by the fact it was kept top secret for so long.
No information about these assassinations was known to the public until almost a decade after
President Bush had authorised the CIA to conduct them, and there’s even rumours that the CIA are
still using private security contractors to carry out assassinations to this very day.
The FSB has just as many dark secrets of their own, however. For example, did you know that
the FSB runs their own covert kill squad? No? Well, that’s probably because they don’t want
you knowing. Meet the Alpha Group. These guys are one of Russia’s toughest military squads,
an elite team run by the FSB themselves. Very little is known about the actual directive of
the Alpha Group, although many believe it’s their job to act under direct orders from Russia’s
political leaders, meaning these guys most likely answer to President Vladimir Putin himself – a
leader infamous for killing off critics. So, what exactly is the Alpha Group? Officially,
they’re a sub-group of Spetsnaz, Russia’s special forces. First established by the KGB in 1974,
control over the Alpha Group was assumed by the FSB when they were founded to replace the
KGB in 1995, and the Alpha Group has been in their back pocket ever since. Their main job
is to act as a counter-terrorism unit, responding directly to any violent attacks that may occur.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the FSB couldn’t find other uses for their private elite squad.
One of the Alpha Group’s most famous operations – the Nord-Ost siege – took place under the
newly-instated FSB only seven years after the Federal Security Service was established.
On October 23rd of 2002, a group of almost forty Chechen terrorists stormed a concert
hall in Moscow taking 916 people hostage during an in-progress performance of a musical called
‘Nord-Ost’. Several days of failed negotiations later, the FSB authorised a head-on assault,
deploying Alpha Group to eliminate the threat and rescue the hostages.
However, this wasn’t to be any small feat. The Alpha Group soon found that
the entire concert hall had been rigged with explosives that could be remotely triggered
by the terrorists at the slightest sign of anyone trying to get inside,
which would very likely have killed everybody inside. Given this tricky situation,
the FSB instructed the Alpha Group to pump a nerve gas through the ventilation system
as a way of incapacitating the terrorists while they gained access to the concert hall.
“With precise fire from the silenced weapons, all terrorists in the hall were eliminated.
We shot without fail - hitting the body could lead to the explosives’ detonation. That’s why we aimed
for their heads,” said one anonymous former officer of Alpha Group. Apparently, it took as
little as five minutes for the team to eliminate every single one of the terrorists inside the main
concert hall, and a further ten to track down and take out any stragglers in adjacent rooms.
The Nord-Ost siege was over in a quarter of an hour, and while challenging for the elite Alpha
Group, the FSB’s direction and coordination resulted in them saving hundreds of civilians.
However, sixty-seven were killed in the siege and a further sixty-three died in hospital shortly
after, supposedly as a result of the nerve gas that was pumped into the concert hall,
and ambulances being unprepared to treat any hostages that were exposed to it.
Naturally, the CIA has plenty of operatives of its own at its disposal, enough to rival
the FSB’s Alpha Group. What you probably didn’t know, is that some of them may even have psychic
powers. It sounds like something taken straight from David Cronenberg’s Scanners, or even
the MK-Ultra offshoot responsible for giving Eleven her powers in Netflix’s Stranger Things,
but the CIA are supposedly highly interested in the application of psychic abilities.
According to declassified documents released in 2017,
they tested the abilities of one Uri Geller. Geller is a British-Israeli TV illusionist,
best known for bending spoons supposedly with the raw power of his mind.
While this is a trick that has long been met with scepticism from the British public,
Uri Geller’s illusions allegedly managed to draw the attention of the CIA themselves. According
to Geller himself, the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to ascertain if the entertainer
was truly clairvoyant and telepathic. He even made the claim that “They wanted me to stand
outside the Russian embassy in Mexico, and erase floppy discs being flown out by Russian agents.”
This was all a part of a bizarre CIA programme known as ‘Stargate’ – yes,
exactly like the movie – which was focused on recruiting ‘psychic warriors’ to operate
on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. After all, gathering intelligence becomes a
much easier job when you’ve got an operative that can literally read an enemy’s mind.
The strangeness of the CIA’s activities doesn’t end with private assassins and psychic powers
though. In fact, in a classic, old-school spy fashion, the Central Intelligence Agency
may have perfected the recipe for invisible ink. Often synonymous with spies, invisible
ink is a great way to conceal top secret instructions for undercover operatives
or to keep highly-sensitive information classified and away from any prying eyes.
Featured within those same declassified documents from 2017, is the CIA’s own recipe for homemade
invisible ink; just like grandma used to make! The recipe goes as follows “Make a silver print,
fixed and bleached in mercury chloride. To make visible, dip in hypo.” Okay,
so maybe not the easiest concoction to recreate. The report featuring this recipe also includes
instructions on how to open sealed letters without the recipient knowing, as well as what to do with
messages that are printed with invisible ink on the human body. According to the report,
in order to destroy any secret messages written on a body, that body needs to be
thoroughly scrubbed down, and washed with lime or lemon juice to hide any traces of the message.
Russia’s own intelligence agency has their own preferred modus operandi, of course. During
March of 2018, in Wiltshire Cathedral City, UK, father and daughter Sergei and Yulia Skripal
were found on a bench with foam spilling from their mouths after being exposed to a deadly,
poisonous nerve agent known as ‘Novichok’. Skripal was an intelligence officer who’d been moved to
the UK in 2010 as part of a spy exchange. This assassination was eventually linked,
after an investigation conducted by the UK government, to agents working for the GRU,
another of Russia’s intelligence services. Far from the James Bond-style spy thriller
mystery of the CIA and their invisible ink, this incident was far more tragic. While the attack was
carried out by the GRU, it’s important to remember that the FSB could very easily conduct a similar
attack, after all, they’ve already proved their fondness for nerve agents in the Nord-Ost siege.
It’s fair to say that the nations of Russia and America haven’t always had the best relationship,
and trust between the two countries has never quite recovered since the Cold War.
This is something that can be seen mirrored in the interactions between the CIA and FSB. The
ever-present rivalry between the United States and the Russian Federation persists even today.
It is widely believed that the FSB was directly involved in the email leaks that undermined
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Additionally, they have also played a hand in
supporting a number extremist parties in Europe, murdered Chechen opposition leaders in both Turkey
and Austria, and perhaps most infamously of all, influenced the 2016 US presidential election.
On January the 10th 2017, a dossier published by Buzzfeed – albeit unverified and
uncorroborated – suggested that the FSB had been collecting compromising evidence on Donald Trump.
Many suspected that the goal of this was to blackmail the would-be president into acting
as Vladimir Putin’s puppet at the head of the US government. Whether this was true or not,
President Trump’s actions towards Russia have been seen by many as soft, and many military members
considered his defense of Russia even after learning of bounties put on US troop’s heads
by Russian agents, as tantamount to treason. The CIA aren’t above interfering in Russia’s
affairs either, though. Decades prior to the 2016 election, they recruited a Russian official who
gradually began to climb the ranks of the country’s government. This informant within
the Kremlin became one of the CIA’s most valuable and protected resources, feeding them information
that pointed to the potential involvement of Russia and the FSB in the 2016 election. However,
this informant, who served as the CIA’s only eyes into the inner workings of the Russian government,
was eventually extracted from the country for his own safety, with the CIA still protecting
his identity to this day; although some believe it may have been the ill-fated Sergei Skripal.
So, which is the better spy agency? In one corner, secret assassins, psychic powers and invisible
ink. In the other, highly-skilled elite spec ops team and a lot of nerve agents. It’s almost
took close to call, we’d like to think that CIA assassins with powerful telepathic abilities could
hold their own against the FSB, and who knows, maybe somewhere in the world, in the shadows
where civilians aren’t allowed to look, a fight like that is going on, and we’d never even know.
But if we’re keeping our feet firmly rooted in the realm of reality – meaning,
psychic warriors need to be discounted, and secret mind control projects like MK-Ultra
are just seen as expensive and unethical failures – we feel like we need to give
this one to Russia. While the CIA’s history as a spy agency is definitely illustrious and
influential – just ask the many countries and organisations they infiltrated – they
don’t quite match up to the calculated ruthlessness of the modern, Russian FSB.
Not to assassin shame you or anything, CIA, but at least the FSB doesn’t need to subcontract its
extra-judicial murders. Just saying. Better enjoy this show while you can,
in case some shadowy government agents come knocking at our door after this one.
Now be sure to check out “CIA vs KGB – Which Was Better During the Cold War?”
and “CIA Project Stargate & Other Declassified Secrets - How Successful Were They?”.