transmitted by satellites. The KGB reportedly forwarded 100,000 in-
tercepted diplomatic and military messages to the Communist Party
Central Committee every year between 1960 and 1991.
The GRU’s sigint program was immense, and it targeted potential
adversaries’ military communications. By the end of the 1980s the
GRU had 40 sigint regiments and 170 sigint battalions. The GRU
also had 130 sigint satellites and made use of 20 different types of air-
craft and more than 60 surface ships to collect information from the
air, according to a study by an Australian academic.
Russia continues to collect sigint. The station at Lourdes appar-
ently has been closed, but the GRU’s signals intelligence component
and FAPSIhave their own sites on the World Wide Web, which ad-
vertise historic successes and present missions. See alsoCONSTAN-
TINI, FRANCESCO; HALL, JAMES; KING, JOHN.SILVERMASTER GROUP. One of the earliest and most effective es-
pionage rings in the United States was established in the early 1930s
by Nathan Gregory Silvermaster. Born in imperial Russia in 1898, he
came to the United States in 1914 and earned a Ph.D. in economics
at the University of California. In 1935 he moved to Washington to
take part in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program. He
also began his work as a Soviet recruiter and agent handler at about
the same time.
Silvermaster acted as one of Joseph Golos and later Ishak
Akhmerov’s principal agents. Among the agents he helped the
NKVD rezidenturarun were Harry Dexter Whitein the Treasury
and Lauchlin Currie, a White House aid to President Franklin Roo-
sevelt. Silvermaster, his wife Helen Witte Silvermaster, and her son
Anatole Volkov worked as agent handlers and as couriers moving be-
tween agents in the federal bureaucracies and Soviet intelligence of-
ficers. Silvermaster personally handled a number of agents in the War
Department. He used these agents to manipulate War Department
policies on security to allow other communist agents greater access
to information. According to unclassified U.S. government docu-
ments, Silvermaster handled 27 different agents in seven departments
in Washington.
The Silvermaster ring was undone in the 1940s by a series of
events. Elizabeth Bentley, who had served the ring as a courier,SILVERMASTER GROUP• 24106-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 241