Union, at a time when the United States and the United Kingdom had
not an agent within the Soviet Union.
The intelligence services often acted as a “back channel” between
Moscow and foreign governments. This channel served as an alterna-
tive to normal diplomatic ones, and was used effectively in Germany in
the 1960s and 1970s. Soviet intelligence also served as a crucial ele-
ment of Stalin’s strategy of projecting power, first into Spain in the
1930s and a decade later into Eastern Europe. The service arrested and
killed enemies of Soviet power and trained the newly minted intelli-
gence and security services of pro-Moscow regimes. In 1979 a KGB
paramilitary unit stormed the Afghan presidential palace, killing the
hapless president and his entourage.
KGB and GRU scientific and technical intelligence collection re-
mained a priority for their services through the history of the Soviet
Union. In an official U.S. government document, the Central Intelli-
gence Agency noted: “The Soviets estimate that by using documenta-
tion on the US F-18 fighter their aviation and radar industries saved
some five years of development time and 35 million rubles (the 1980
dollar cost of equivalent research activity would be $350 million) in
project manpower and development costs. The manpower of these sav-
ings probably represents over a thousand man-years of scientific re-
search effort and one of the most successful individual exploitations
ever of Western technology.”^6
Nevertheless, Soviet scientific intelligence collection may have actu-
ally hurt the country in the long run. Undoubtedly millions of hours and
billions of dollars were saved. But Soviet science was essentially like
skiing down a mountain in another skier’s tracks. It seems easy, but the
second skier never catches up with the first, and in fact is imprisoned by
the direction the first skier took.
The Soviet Union maintained robust signals intelligence programs
for intercepting messages and breaking codes. Both the KGB and the
GRU collected “Sigint.” The GRU maintained scores of Sigint units,
as well as aircraft and more than 60 ships dedicated to the interception
of adversaries’ communications. Sigint was strengthened by the
KGB’s recruitment of code clerks of opposing countries. The recruit-
ment of John Walker, a U.S. Navy warrant officer, gave the Soviet ser-
vices the ability to read American military communications for more
than a decade.INTRODUCTION • xxix06-313 (00) FM.qxd 7/27/06 7:53 AM Page xxix