How were the agents of the ancestor of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, trained? The novelist Iegor Gran examines the question in The KGB job interview (Bayard). A funny story, this book. While he was immersed in writing another work, The competent services, which recounts the chaotic hunt for his father, a dissident from the Brezhnev USSR, the Russian writer wanted to know more about the training of the “KGBists” and the techniques taught at the spy school. He then came across a 1969 recruitment manual intended for KGB agents operating “in capitalist countries”, distributed on the Internet by an independent journalist, Michael Weiss. Surprised by the similarities between the espionage techniques of that time and those of today, the writer decides to translate and annotate it.
The source of the manual remains unknown: “It came from a KGB school, but these institutions were scattered across Soviet territory, including the Baltics and Ukraine. It is entirely possible that the Estonian secret services seized these documents in 1991 and leaked them,” thinks Iegor Gran. This booklet nonetheless represents a valuable source. It takes us into the mind of a student just out of one of these top secret schools, which today trains FSB agents.
Multidisciplinary schools
What did they look like? “At the time of the Cheka – the political police, born in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution – these schools were multidisciplinary, a bit like the engineering schools in France. They taught both the art of spinning and the making of false documents or shooting with a pistol,” says Iegor Gran. Today, we know a few of them, such as the Academy of Foreign Intelligence (formerly School No. 101 or Andropov Institute) or the School of Advanced Studies in Economic Sciences, nicknamed “Vyshka” – the equivalent of the ‘ENA. The teachers had the task of explaining the simple mission to their students sent abroad: to recruit local sources on a massive scale and make them agents committed to the cause of communism. The targets” ? Members of Western state bureaucracies, diplomats and political parties. “Lift the stone of an embassy, a KGB agent must be there. Split the tree of a political party, another agent is huddled there.” This was the ideal towards which the Soviet intelligence services tended, notes the novelist. So much so that, in 1973, three-quarters of Soviet diplomats were foreign intelligence agents, according to the American think tank Institute for the Study of War.
In the manual, recruitment methods in enemy countries are detailed in dull writing, phase by phase, almost gesture by gesture. One chapter even goes so far as to detail the time and place of meeting to give to the “target” to extract information from them.
Extract from “Recruitment of agents”, translated into French in “The KGB job interview” by Iegor Gran (Bayard Editions), page 19.
“You have two main methods: the direct proposal or the progressive implication,” summarizes Iegor Gran. The first consists of openly suggesting to the “target” to offer their services to the KGB, while the second is more delicate and sneaky: spending a long time with the person to extract as much information as possible. Among their probable recruits: Sami Sharaf, founder of Egyptian intelligence, approached by the Soviet delegation during a trip to the UN, or Charles Hernu, French Minister of Defense from 1981 to 1985, under François Mitterrand, recruited by the Bulgarian services in 1953, then taken over by the KGB, as revealed by L’Express in 1996.
Vladimir Putin, this mediocre spy
“When the showcase of communism shines brightly, recruitment is easier,” writes Iegor Gran. He cites the year 1959 as an era, with the Soviet Exhibition organized in New York, where Sputnik and Tupolev aroused a certain admiration from the Americans. The most effective agents were then deployed in the West; the weakest, in the Warsaw Pact countries, in Eastern Europe. “Vladimir Putin, then a KGB officer, was assigned to Dresden, in the GDR,” recalls Iegor Gran. “His abilities were certainly judged to be mediocre!”
But the life of a Russian spy abroad was not very attractive. His mission on site was to identify a new target, do a complete analysis of his biography, and check his contacts to ensure that he was not dealing with an agent from the opposite camp. Then he had to put together a file, send it to the central authority of the KGB and wait for the green light from those in charge to begin implementing recruitment methods. “It was incredibly long, rigid and rigorous,” marvels Iegor Gran. It was these ultracentralized and controlled methods of operation – the agents on duty constantly sent reports to their superiors, who scrutinized them and dismissed the spies when they noticed a decline in their performance – which made the author want to “de-romanticize the ‘KGB espionage’. And also to show the underlying cynicism. “In the manual, we talk about manipulation, crushing others, and all this is explained with detachment.”
Methods dating back to the Tsarist Empire
“The supremacy of the KGB and then the FSB rests on the way they compromise you. You make your own kompromat [“dossier compromettant”] by providing seemingly innocuous information to the agent without your knowledge. It’s terrible, because, in the end, your reputation is toast,” explains Iegor Gran. But, be careful, there is a golden rule: never offer money. In the manual, the instructor clearly warns : “Even the most corrupt American capitalist risks not following you if you directly offer him money.” At the KGB, we are subtle. Example, this courier from the British embassy in Italy, approached in 1924 by a communist who asks him for small services in return for payment. The two men become close, until the agent asks the courier to show him the documents he must deliver. “It’s just another service, says the courier, who does not receive money in exchange for the information he provides. And hop ! A hundred secret documents ended up in the hands of the Soviets in this way.”
In reality, these methods date back to Tsarist times. In Imperial Russia, the spies of the Okhrana (the secret political police) already used them. “What has changed is the ideology: we no longer feed agents Marxism-Leninism, as was the case in the KGB schools, where ideological training took up more than a quarter of the program,” specifies Iegor Gran. Taking advantage of a person’s anti-American or anti-colonial sentiment, pacifist spirit or attraction to Russian culture to convince them to provide information, whether without their knowledge or not, and use it as a relay for communication. influence, was a method well known to the KGB services… which Vladimir Putin’s Russia knows how to use perfectly.
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