Andropov and Counterintelligence
The period when Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov headed the state security agencies was the most successful and fruitful in terms of preventing and suppressing the subversive activities of foreign intelligence services in the postwar years. For 15 years, which he held in the chair of the chairman of the KGB (1967-1982), he managed to significantly increase the authority of his department in society. In those years, the State Security Committee carried out a number of successful counterintelligence operations with respect to the intelligence services of the United States, France, Great Britain, West Germany and other countries. The professional level of the Chekists, the operational potential of the cadre staff was significantly upgraded, much was done to educate the employees on the best traditions of the domestic special services. There were numerous publications in magazines, books and movies about the activities of security agencies, based on previously closed documentary materials. Much attention was paid to preventive work and, most importantly, the fight against corruption in the highest echelons of power began.
From the first days of his tenure as chairman of the KGB of the USSR Yu.V. Andropov defined as a major direction of the work of the security services preventive work, "when a person who fell under the influence of harmfulness has not yet entered the path of hostile actions. Practical measures of state security agencies to curb hostile influence must be outstripping, preventive in nature." Therefore, he considered the issue of attitudes toward citizens, including those on the brink of violating the law or crossing this line, to be an important issue in vocational training and education of cadres. In numerous appeals Yu.V. Andropov to the Chekist collectives, we can find many indications on this score. While decisively suppressing hostile activity, he stressed in a report at a meeting of the party activist of the KGB of the USSR on April 26, 1971, "we must at the same time avoid one-sidedness, be able to separate those who accidentally fell into hostile environments, are politically mistaken or used by the enemy."
Yu.V. Andropov focused the attention of the operational staff on the careful and skilled use of such an important and very delicate means of operational-investigative activity as the agency and demanded not to repeat the mistakes of the past in its use. Speaking at a meeting of the counterintelligence chiefs on March 23, 1978, he noted: "... as you know, there was a period when some aspects of the agency activity cast a shadow over all this work.I mean what people called" stitching " that is, when the agency was largely focused on collecting small, unrelated information ... Such attitudes for agents contradicted the moral and ethical norms that are laid in the family, in the school, in the work collectives. it follows omnit, to avoid new mistakes. We are doing the right thing when we are targeting agents not to look in the cracks or count empty bottles, but to fulfill those big, important tasks to ensure the security of our state that are entrusted to our bodies. "
The Chekists, as they said at that time, the "Andropov schools", caught the special interest of the Western special services for Soviet diplomats, personnel of military and foreign policy intelligence abroad, workers of party and Soviet bodies, specialists in scientific centers and enterprises of the military-industrial complex, staff structures of the Armed Forces. They carried out a whole complex of administrative and operational measures to prevent and suppress the aspirations of foreign intelligence services in relation to these facilities.
A serious failure for US intelligence was the exposure of the agents of the KGB in the seventies and early eighties by their agents Alexander Nilov, Vladimir Kalinin, Alexander Ogorodnik, Anatoly Filatov, Alexander Ivanov and others. And in the mid-eighties, already after the death of Yu.V. Andropov, his students, essentially enriching the practice of Russian operational art, supplemented this list with the names of major American agents, such as Vladimir Vasiliev, Adolp Tolkachev, Dmitry Polyakov and others.
In the initial period of his leadership, the State Security Committee Yu.V. Andropov paid special attention to improving the analytical service of counterintelligence. An independent management was established to protect the constitutional system (the 5th KGB Directorate of the USSR). One of his first leaders F.D. Bobkov in his book "KGB and Power" notes that the initiator of the creation of the new unit was himself Yuri Vladimirovich. To this step, it seems, was pushed Hungarian events in 1956, as well as a certain concern about the "growing pressure of the West."
He formulated the arguments of the chairman of the KGB on the role assigned to the Fifth Department as follows: "It seems to me that the main task of the newly created department is a deep political analysis of the situation and, if possible, the most accurate forecast.The new administration must resist ideological expansion directed from to become a reliable shield against it, and here the role of the Chekist methods of work is very important ... The main function of state security bodies is to protect the constitutional system - not people standing in power, namely, the state foundations. "
As if foreseeing the historical analogy of the revival of the function of the police political investigation or the secret-political department known since the OGPU-NKVD, Yu.V. Andropov reasoned: "It's hard to imagine how the FBI could find out what is happening in the Communist Party of the United States without having agents there." How could the US intelligence services fight extremist black organizations if they did not know the situation from the inside. only with the help of established and proven methods used by special services all over the world.Who should do this, of course, counterintelligence.It is a well-known, legally existing in all states political organ.It is political, ib about the main purpose of the work of counterintelligence in political control over the situation.Therefore, the phrase "political investigation"
The units of the "fifth line", thanks to the care of the chairman of the KGB and higher authorities, were soon staffed not only by representatives of party and Komsomol sets, but also by experienced counterintelligence agents-intellectuals. Their efforts prevented the actions of extremist organizations and groups that existed in the USSR and abroad, and in some cases also terrorist actions. In this regard, the large-scale operational-search measures against terrorists from the Armenian SSR Zatikyan and his accomplices, which in January 1977 carried out three explosions in Moscow and prepared new ones, are very indicative. Along with this, under the pressure of the party bodies, which demonstrated their inability to defend their leading positions in society in an open intellectual competition, the KGB system often focused on performing functions that were not peculiar to it,
In this connection, Andropov's view is also of interest to such a complex socio-political phenomenon as a dissident movement. In the mid-seventies, speaking at a meeting of the senior management of the KGB, he assessed his origins in such a way: "... we need to disclose the brackets around the very concept of" dissidents ", analyze the reasons for their appearance in Soviet society, the possibility of their activities.When you try to answer these questions , you come to the conclusion that most of them are people who are flawed, personally offended, and in some cases just sick. In spite of this, for want of anything better, the West is ready to raise the shield and this "wretched army", covering it with support society ennogo opinions and struggle "for human rights."
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