emissary to Joseph Stalin. Following the war, Cot served again
as minister of aviation and remained a staunch supporter of strong
Soviet–French relations. In 1953 he received the Stalin Peace prize.
He was never prosecuted for espionage.COUNTERINTELLIGENCE. The principal raison d’etre of the So-
viet intelligence services was counterintelligence. From the forma-
tion of the Cheka, the services sought to deceive, penetrate, and de-
stroy all enemy services and émigrémovements, which were seen as
a threat to Moscow. In the first days of the regime, the Cheka copied
much of the tradecraftof the tsarist Okhrana: double agents were
run to penetrate émigré movements, and agents provocateurs were
used to entrap enemy agents. These operations were run by the
Cheka’s counterintelligence arm, the KRU (Counterintelligence Di-
rectorate), which identified the enemy apparatus inside the Soviet
Union and abroad and took steps to end the threat. One of the steps
used was assassination, but more often enemy agents were the target
of recruitment efforts.
From the 1950s on, the KGBhad several components dedicated to
counterintelligence. The Second Chief Directorate (SCD) was re-
sponsible for counterintelligence operations inside the Soviet Union.
To defeat enemy intelligence operations, the KGB ran operational
games to engage intelligence officers. These games usually involved
double agents. The SCD was seen as the single most important com-
ponent of the service and had offices in every republic and oblast in
the Soviet Union. Its also trained allied services in counterintelli-
gence tradecraft.
The Third Chief Directorate, inheriting many of the responsibili-
ties once held by Smersh, was responsible for counterintelligence
within the military as well as the GRUand the police. During the
Russian civil war, the Cheka had created a component to ensure the
loyalty of the military, which included tsarist officers. (The military
counterintelligence directorate was established in December 1919, a
year before the formation of the Cheka’s foreign intelligence compo-
nent.) These Osobiy otdel(Special Sections) had broad power of ar-
rest, prosecution, and execution. Until the collapse of the regime in
1991, the Third Chief Directorate had agents in every battalion and
ran agents within the police and the GRU.COUNTERINTELLIGENCE •5706-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 57