As far back as the reign of Ivan IV, foreign intelligence was directed
against Russian opponents of the tsar living abroad. The Third Section
and the Okhranatargeted enemies of the regime, and the Paris office of
the Okhranacoordinated efforts across Europe against revolutionary
parties. Russian intelligence also targeted the regime’s potential foreign
enemies. In the final years of the tsarist regime, military intelligence
produced reliable information about the German and Austro-Hungarian
military. In the years before World War I, a senior officer of the Austro-
Hungarian army was blackmailed into providing information about Vi-
enna’s war plans. Russian intelligence was also tasked with providing
the Russian military with plans for modern weapons. As far back as the
18th century, Russian students and diplomats sought Austrian technol-
ogy in building good artillery pieces.
In the Soviet era, foreign intelligence was the province of two com-
peting organizations: the foreign intelligence directorate of the security
service, and military intelligence—usually referred to as the GRU. Of-
ten referred to as the “near and far neighbors,” from the distance of their
headquarters from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they attracted the
best and brightest in the Soviet bureaucracy. The effectiveness of the
foreign intelligence services was high, and the achievements were im-
pressive. In the early years of the Soviet regime, the Cheka’s foreign in-
telligence component penetrated and neutralized émigré groups that
threatened the Bolshevik state. Leaders of the Russian and Ukrainian
émigré community were kidnapped and murdered in Western Europe
and the Americas. Stalin’s bête noire, Leon Trotsky, was murdered at
Stalin’s command in 1940.
In the field of technical intelligence, the service provided quality in-
formation on nuclear weapons, strategic bombers, and literally thou-
sands of Western military and industrial programs. From one British
agent, Stalin received information about the atom bomb as early as
1941, before the United States had committed billions for the Manhat-
tan Project. Stalin knew more about the Anglo-American atom bomb in
1944 than did U.S. Vice President Harry Truman.
In the field of political intelligence, the services penetrated the
British and American political establishments in the 1930s and 1940s.
In Great Britain, the Soviet service recruited high-level penetration of
the Foreign Office and the Intelligence Service. In the United States in
1944–1945, approximately 350 agents were working for the Sovietxxviii •INTRODUCTION06-313 (00) FM.qxd 7/27/06 7:53 AM Page xxviii