decades of the 20th century thought of themselves as more than police
officers or civil servants. Many saw themselves as forging a social and
political policy, finding support within the new urban working class that
could guarantee the survival of the regime. One finds it hard—if not im-
possible—to imagine a minor bureaucrat in the British Home Office
trying to create a policy to guarantee the survival of King George V.
Thanks to the opening of the Russian archives and some recent mem-
oirs, we have a far better idea about the leadership of the Soviet secu-
rity services. Lavrenty Beria, once discussed only as a psychopathic
“sexaholic” in historical literature, now can be seen as a competent,
albeit ruthless, manager of a complex security empire.^7 The archives
also indicate to what extent the leaders lived in fear and isolation be-
cause of the counterintelligence state they had created. Beria told Stalin
on 21 June 1941 that the intelligence service had heeded the dictator’s
wise words that war would not come in 1941. A day later, 3 million Ger-
man troops invaded the Soviet Union. And when Mikhail Gorbachev,
newly raised to the Central Committee secretariat, sought to invite KGB
Chair Yuri Andropov to dinner, he was rebuffed. “People will talk,” said
the master of the security service.^8
The cadre of Soviet intelligence and security professionals changed
radically in type during the Soviet era. The first leaders of the Cheka
were heavily drawn from non-Russian peoples—Poles, Latvians, Jews,
and Germans—who were committed to an international revolution.
Those first-generation Chekists who survived the civil war were mur-
dered by Stalin in the 1930s and replaced by Slavs. The Soviet non-
official cover operatives, dubbed illegals, who recruited important
sources from London to Tokyo, also largely failed to survive Stalin.
Their success was never replicated, despite crash campaigns to send
new generations of officers abroad.
The publication of more than 2,000 deciphered Soviet intelligence
telegrams from the 1930s and 1940s has also expanded our under-
standing of the foreign agents who spied for the Soviet Union. These
messages, which have the American code name Venona, have given us
a better—but not complete—account of the cases of Alger Hiss and
the Rosenbergs. These messages confirm memoir accounts in Russian
and English that Stalin’s greatest spies were volunteers who rarely ac-
cepted money for their work for Moscow. The messages also show the
professionalism Soviet case officers demonstrated in monitoring theirINTRODUCTION • xxxi06-313 (00) FM.qxd 7/27/06 7:53 AM Page xxxi