KGB (Committee for State Security)

Soviet Union · founded 1954 · The USSR's main security and intelligence agency until 1991; its foreign arm's successor is the SVR.

Episode: CLASSIFIED — COMING SOON

Section: Russia and the USSR

Case files (4): The Cambridge spies: confessions in MI5 files · Katyn: the 1940 killings of Polish prisoners · Operation RYaN: the KGB’s nuclear-attack early warning effort · The Mitrokhin Archive: a KGB archivist’s notes leave Russia

Documented items (2)

VERIFIED Opened to researchers 2014

The Mitrokhin Archive

The Churchill Archives Centre holds files noted by KGB archivist Vasiliy Mitrokhin between 1972 and 1984; it quotes the FBI describing them as 'the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source'.

Sources (opened in a new tab):

Churchill Archives Centre: The Papers of Vasiliy Mitrokhin ↗ https://archives.chu.cam.ac.uk/collections/mitrokhin/

VERIFIED From 1995

VENONA (KGB and GRU traffic)

Translations of 1940s KGB and GRU messages with agents were released by US agencies; see the NSA entry.

Sources (opened in a new tab):

CIA press release, 11 July 1995 (via FAS) ↗ https://irp.fas.org/cia/news/pr71195.html