Soviet/Russia

The Cheka was founded by Felix Dzerzhinsky in December 1917 as the emergency commission for combating counterrevolution and sabota...

The KGB operated from 1954 until the dissolution of the USSR as the umbrella of Soviet intelligence. Its First Chief Directorate r...

The FSB took over KGB domestic functions after 1991 and received its current form by 1995. Headquartered in the Lubyanka, it runs ...

The SVR inherited the KGB First Chief Directorate when the Soviet Union ended, operating from the Yasenevo complex in Moscow. It r...

The GRU, the main intelligence directorate of the general staff, has gathered military intelligence since the Russian civil war. I...

Oleg Penkovsky volunteered to the United States and Britain in 1960 and passed thousands of pages on Soviet rockets and missiles t...

Oleg Gordievsky worked secretly for British intelligence from 1974 and rose to head the KGB residency in London. His reporting exp...

Adolf Tolkachev spied for the CIA in Moscow from 1979 to 1985, passing research on radar and missile guidance worth billions in in...

Richard Sorge ran a celebrated Soviet ring in Tokyo from the 1930s under cover of a German journalist, working inside the German e...

Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard, strayed off course into Soviet airspace over Kamchatka and Sakha...

In the early hours of September 26, 1983, the Soviet Oko satellite system falsely reported inbound American missiles, the system c...

The NKVD absorbed the political police, the OGPU, in 1934 and became the instrument of the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, carrying ...

Formed in April 1943 under Viktor Abakumov, SMERSH, an acronym of the Russian phrase for Death to Spies, hunted German agents, des...

The Okhrana, the security department of the Russian imperial police, was built up after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in ...