While the KGB sought to limit organized religion within the
USSR, it simultaneously tried to exploit religion to support Soviet
foreign policy. Clergy and laypeople were recruited to endorse Soviet
peace campaigns in the World Council of Churches and other inter-
national forums. Many Orthodox and Baptist clergy agreed to front
for the KGB in order to obtain permission to open churches and train
clergy. The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Aleksey II,
was once a KGB co-optee with the cover name “Drozdov.”
Through the 1980s, religious dissidentleaders were harassed, ar-
rested, and sometimes killed. In the 1980s, several Roman Catholic
priests died under mysterious circumstances in the western Ukraine.
In 1991 Aleksandr Men, an Orthodox priest, was murdered in Russia.
These crimes were attributed to the KGB by dissident and foreign ob-
servers of the Soviet religious scene. The martyrdom suffered by the
faithful did little to break the religious spirit of the people. Following
the collapse of the Soviet regime, the Russian Orthodox Church was
seen as the one credible institution, according to some polls. In
Lithuania, Roman Catholic clergy and laypeople were the heart of the
nationalist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. In Central Asia, Islam
has enjoyed a renaissance.ARMS CONTROL INTELLIGENCE. In no area of Cold Warintel-
ligence was there greater asymmetry between the United States and
the Soviet Union than in arms control. At the first Strategic Arms
Limitation Talks (SALT) held in 1968, U.S. delegates began to give
an account of the American and Soviet nuclear weapons programs
but were stopped by a senior Soviet military negotiator. Soviet civil-
ian members of his delegation, he stated, were not cleared for such
information, even if it was considered unclassified in the West.
Both the KGBand the GRUcollected a vast amount of informa-
tion about U.S. nuclear weapons from their open contacts with Amer-
icans. Political intelligence officers from the KGB rezidenturaswere
responsible for developing relationships with academics and journal-
ists who had contacts in the defense establishment, while GRU offi-
cers tended to concentrate on the uniformed military. Both the KGB
and the GRU had analytical departments that conducted weapons and
arms control intelligence analysis.16 •ARMS CONTROL INTELLIGENCE06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:54 AM Page 16