Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

Shpigelglas, who studied law at the university in Warsaw prior to

the BolshevikRevolution. He was drafted out of the university in

his final year by the tsarist army and found his way into the Red

Army and the Cheka. Originally, Shpigelglas worked in the mili-

tary counterintelligencesection of the Cheka, but he entered for-

eign intelligence in the 1920s.

A natural recruit for foreign intelligence officer, Shpigelglas, who

spoke French, German, and Polish, served as an illegalin Mongolia,

China, and Western Europe. In 1936 he was made deputy chief of for-

eign intelligence and undertook missions in Germany, France, and

Spain. In February 1938, Joseph Stalinpromoted him to head the

component. One of his most important achievements was the estab-

lishment of a school to train foreign intelligence officers. Shpigelglas

did not surviveLavrenty Beria’s purge of the NKVD. He was ar-

rested in late 1938 and shot in 1941. He was posthumously rehabili-

tated in 1988. See alsoANDROPOV INSTITUTE.

SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE (SIGINT).The tsarist regime main-

tained a sophisticated signals intelligence capability. Both the

Okhranaand the Foreign Ministry worked to break the codes of rad-

ical groups and foreign powers. A British diplomat was warned by a

Russian colleague in the late 19th century that all his diplomatic dis-

patches were read in the Black Chamberof the Russian Foreign

Ministry long before they reached London, and he was politely ad-

vised to send his messages by surface mail rather than telegraph. The

British had a Black Chamber of their own and had been reading Rus-

sian diplomatic communications since the Napoleonic Wars.

In the early years of the Bolshevikregime, the Chekaworked dili-

gently but with mixed success to rebuild sigint capability. Cheka

code making was so poor during the Polish–Soviet War of 1920–

1921 that the Poles read all the Soviet military messages they inter-

cepted. The defectionof many tsarist sigint professionals following

the Revolution made it difficult initially for the Bolshevik regime to

maintain the security of its communications and to develop a signal

intercept capacity. The British, to name one hostile country, read

much of the Soviet diplomatic traffic into the early 1920s.

In the early 1930s the signals intelligence sections of the NKVD

and the GRUwere combined and operated under the direction of

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