Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

Ames had crossed the Rubicon, and it was time for him to provide the

KGB with all the information he had. The result was the “Big

Dump”: Ames turned over the names of 10 important agents.

Another factor was the service’s willingness to spend money when

necessary. The OGPUpaid Italian agents well to burgle the British

ambassador’s safe in Rome in the 1930s. The KGB provided Aldrich

Ames with more than $2 million. Soviet intelligence officers paid

Clyde Conradand James Hallhundreds of thousands of dollars.

Willingness to take a risk was also important. All the major KGB

successes in the 1980s came out of a willingness to risk meeting and

running agents who could have been double agents. The decisions to

run John Walker and Aldrich Ames took no small amount of physical

and bureaucratic courage.

Moscow closely vetted KGB and GRU operations. The Venona

cables show how carefully operations were managed from Moscow.

Agents were investigated and reinvestigated; in 1943 when the

Ring of Fivemembers were providing thousands of reports on the

German army, Moscow carefully considered whether they were

controlled by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). The in-

telligence managers were too aware of the consequences of having

SIS manage Soviet policy through its agents. The corollary to this

carefulness was a willingness to act on intelligence. Scientific and

technical information allowed the Soviet Union to build weapons

and develop industries. Information from Ames led to the arrest of

CIA and SIS agents-in-place.

KGB defectorssince the 1980s have claimed that the KGB’s First

Chief Directorate became more and more risk averse. They claim that

the leadership of the KGB gave only lip service to the principles that

had made the service so successful in previous decades. While some

of this criticism is true, the KGB was able to run important agents

like James Hall and Clyde Conrad in West Germany, as well as

Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssenin the United States.

TREPPER, LEOPOLD (1904–1982). A Polish Jewish communist,

Trepper served successfully as a GRU illegal for two decades. In the

1920s and 1930s he operated in British-occupied Palestine and

France. Beginning in 1938, Trepper built and managed a network of

agents in Western Europe, which the Nazis referred to as the Red

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