ior members of the political leadership and initiate a massive politi-
cal purge. Stalin repeatedly insisted that Ignatiev torture prisoners to
make them confess, threatening Ignatiev with death should he fail.
Immediately following Stalin’s death, Ignatiev ensured a rapid
transfer of power to Stalin’s successors. Within hours of the leader’s
death, he ended the counterintelligenceinvestigations of Stalin’s
subordinates and had some of the interrogators arrested. Ignatiev was
dismissed from his post as minister of state security on 2 June 1953
“for deception of the Party and Government, gross violations of So-
viet legality, and dishonest conduct.” However, for his decisions in
the last hours of Stalin’s life to end the witch hunt, his life was
spared. He was demoted and transferred to the party apparatus in the
provinces, where he worked for the next two decades. See alsoBE-
RIA, LAVRENTY; RYUMIN, MIKHAIL.ILLEGAL. The Soviet intelligence services, like their western coun-
terparts, placed intelligence officers under “official” cover as diplo-
mats or commercial attachés, or under “nonofficial” cover. The Sovi-
ets described an officer under nonofficial cover as an “illegal”
(Russian nelegal), and the Soviet services spent enormous time and
energy preparing men and women to live and operate abroad without
the protection afforded by diplomatic passports. In the early years,
the Soviet services used nonofficial covers because they had only a
few diplomatic missions. The United States did not establish diplo-
matic relations with the Soviet Union until 1933.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet intelligence services dispatched il-
legals to Europe and North America to gather intelligence and recruit
agents. Most of these were not Russians but were recruited from the
Polish, Hungarian, and German communist parties. Skilled in revo-
lutionary tradecraft, they recruited and ran agents inside the British
and American establishment, as well as in France, Germany, Japan,
and China. They were effective in collecting scientific and technical
intelligence and developing sources in Western governments. While
most of the human intelligence successes of Soviet intelligence in the
1920s and 1930s were a result of the work of illegals, they were
deeply distrusted by Joseph Stalinand the men he chose to run the
NKVD. Almost all were recalled to Moscow in 1937–1939, and more
than half were shot as Nazi agents. Use of illegals during this periodILLEGAL • 11906-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 119