Opinions The Lubyanka Files

29 KGB Training Manuals (1965-1989)

Title	Название	Lang	Year	File
“Counsellor”: Review on the topic of “Recruitment under a false flag”	“Советник”: обзор по теме “Вербовка под чужим флагом”	RU	1965	(100 MB)
Identification of assets: drawing from experience	Из опыта проведения оперативных установок	RU	1965	(58 MB)
“Albert”: Review on the topic of “Revealing the Fraud”	“Альберт”: Обзор по теме “Разоблачение подставы”	RU	1966	(37 MB)
Intelligence agent’s operational dictionary	Агентурно-оперативный словарь разведчика	RU	1967	(57 MB)
Identifying disinformation in intelligence materials	Выявление дезинформации в разведывательных материалах	RU	1968	(9 MB)
Using delegations and tourism for intelligence purposes	Использование делегаций и туризма в разведывательных целях	RU	1968	(40 MB)
Using the capabilities of the Soviet Committee for Cultural Relations with Compatriots Abroad in intelligence work	Использование возможностей советского Комитета по культурным связям с соотечественниками за рубежом в разведывательной работе	RU	1968	(44 MB)
Agency Recruiting	Вербовка агентуры	RU	1969	(315 MB)
Agent Communication	Связь с агентурой	RU	1970	(41 MB)
Agents and operational situation, key elements, and sources of study	Агентурно-оперативная обстановка, её основные элементы и источники её изучения	RU	1970	(38 MB)
The main directions and objects of intelligence work abroad	Основные направления и объекты разведывательной работы за границей	RU	1970	(51 MB)
Visual intelligence	Визуальная разведка	RU	1970	(17 MB)
Working with agents	Работа с агентурой	RU	1970	(18 MB)
Exposing the enemy’s frame-ups in the process of cultivating persons of interest for the intelligence work	Разоблачение подстав противника в процессе разработки лиц, представляющих разведывательный интерес	RU	1971	(35 MB)
Methods for identifying the enemy’s agents-provocateurs and fighting them. Lecture	Методы выявления агентов-провокаторов противника и борьба с ними. Лекция	RU	1971	(3 MB)
Working with agents	Работа с агентурой	RU	1970	(60 MB)
Using delegations and tourism for intelligence purposes	Использование делегаций и туризма в разведывательных целях	RU	1971	(23 MB)
Engaged persons in the foreign intelligence of the Soviet Union’s state security agencies	Привлечённые лица во внешней разведке органов государственной безопасности Советского Союза	RU	1972	(12 MB)
Confidential relations in the KGB’s foreign intelligence and working with them	Доверительные связи во внешней разведке КГБ и работа с ними	RU	1977	(8 MB)
Using international scientific events and exhibitions held in the Soviet Union in the interest of scientific and technical intelligence	Использование в интересах научно-технической разведки международных научных мероприятий и выставок, проводимых на территории СССР	RU	1981	(9 MB)
The intensification of the fight of police services of capitalist states against organized crime and its influence on foreign intelligence measures		RU	1982	(241 MB)
Aspects of training an operative to exert psychological influence on foreigners in the process of asset cultivation. Scientific report	Некоторые аспекты подготовки оперработника к оказанию психологического воздействия на иностранцев в процессе его разработки. Научный отчет	RU	1985	(7 MB)
Conspiracy in intelligence work in the Soviet Union from the position of cover agencies. Analytical review	Конспирация в разведывательной работе на территории Советского Союза с позиции ведомств прикрытия. Аналитический обзор	RU	1988	(5 MB)
Possibilities of using psychological methods to study personality in operational practice. Analytical review	Возможности использования психологических методов изучения личности в условиях оперативной практики. Аналитический обзор	RU	1988	(6 MB)
Recruitment and training of recruiting agents for the purpose of infiltrating the U.S. institutions: drawing on North Africa’s experience. Analytical review	Приобретение и подготовка агентов-вербовщиков в целях разведывательнoгo проникновения в учреждения США (на примере ряда североафриканских стран) Аналитический обзор	RU	1988	(39 MB)
Political intelligence from the Soviet Union’s territory	Политическая разведка с территории СССР	RU	1989	(54 MB)
Working with information in intelligence	Информационная работа в разведке	RU		(58 MB)
Psychological types of recruitment assets: general characteristics and methods of identification in operational practice. Analytical review	Психологические типы объектов вербовочной разработки: общая характеристика и методы выявления в оперативной практике Аналитический обзор	RU		(7 MB)
Some Aspects of Training the Operative for Psychological Influence of Foreigners During Cultivation		EN		(78 KB)

You Don’t Have to Be Recruited to Work for Russian Intelligence

A classified KGB training manual on “confidential contacts” explores the gray area between informant and agent.

This essay originally appeared in Newlines Magazine. The KGB training manual it refers to was translated into English by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick.

It may be the world’s second oldest profession but unlike prostitution it’s still woefully misunderstood. Is it because espionage is equal parts science and artistry — and therefore too marbled a discipline — that it usually requires years of study and practice to even begin to comprehend? Or is it because literature and popular culture have given us the enticing but mythologized image of the windswept figure in the homburg and trench coat crossing a bridge to meet his legended contact, or chalking the coded signal on a designated lamppost to indicate the dead drop has been made. Perhaps this kind of thing does happen, but 99% of intelligence work is still tedium and repetition, “like taking out the trash,” as one former spook once put it. And, contrary to the self-aggrandizing memoirists and their adaptive screenwriters, there are always rules, especially those governing the blurred lines of human interaction. Those rules were never more codified than by Soviet theoreticians of spycraft, whose job it was to train the agents of History.

Consider the following (fictional) case study.

Lucy McGrath is a political correspondent with a midlevel online news website. As part of her job, Lucy meets with all sorts: administration insiders who talk to her on deep background, representatives and senators from both parties, their legislative staffers, as well as a host of foreign diplomats whose job it is to relay the latest Beltway scuttlebutt and press clippings back to their capitals. Over the past six months, Lucy has developed a two-martini relationship with one such foreign diplomat, Viktor Sudoplatov.

Viktor’s business card describes him as the Head of the Economic Section at the Russian Embassy. He is witty, charming, and a lot of fun to talk to, a set of characteristics he’s spent years honing as an officer of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. In the past, Viktor has given Lucy what she believes were incredibly shrewd insights into the details of everything from the START treaty to Russia’s military interventions in Syria and Libya. On one lazy Thursday afternoon, over an uncharacteristic third martini at the Tabard Inn, Lucy felt comfortable enough to dispense information rather than receive it. She shared with Viktor the draft of the story she was about to file on the sexual improprieties of a high-level cabinet official. The story is airtight, backed up by a host of on-the-record comments, and will inevitably lead to the official’s resignation. And while her editor certainly wouldn’t take too kindly to Lucy’s ethical slip, she’s hardly doing anything illegal. Moreover, the sex pest in the White House is especially hawkish on Russia and Lucy is genuinely worried that America and its former Cold War adversary are sleepwalking into “World War III” (an impression subtly encouraged by Viktor over the last six months). In her mind, divulging her newspaper’s as-yet-unpublished scoop is actually in the interest of advancing world peace and fostering bilateral comity. Or maybe that’s the vermouth talking. Viktor reassures Lucy she’s a tribute to her profession and country upon scanning the jaw-dropping revelations on her iPhone.

Lucy is what’s known in parlance of Russian intelligence as a “confidential contact.” She’s not quite an agent, but she’s no longer a mere civilian. What she doesn’t realize is that she’s been vetted and cultivated for this special category of accomplice for far longer than she’s known Viktor, who, in both his official and unofficial capacities, gets to know American journalists because they’re walking storehouses of useful information and they know other people who might prove even more valuable to him. Lucy didn’t receive any special training as an asset of a foreign government, nor will she, provided she remains a reporter. She might have even convinced herself that her interlocutor is “only” a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, a delusion Viktor will continue to abet by his failure to ever come clean about who and what he really is.

In 1977, the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, published 220 copies of a training manual devoted to confidential contacts — how to target them, how to run them, and how they differ from full-blown agents of Moscow. Written by Colonel V.M. Maksimov, the manual was released in the original Russian along with an English translation for the first time by the Free Russia Foundation as part of their ongoing Lubyanka Files project.

English translation of the Confidential Contacts manual. Download PDF

The original Confidential Contacts (Доверительные связи) manual in Russian. Download PDF

Confidential contacts can be virtually anyone: politicians, diplomats, scientists, businessmen, engineers, and reporters like Lucy. They have no classified intelligence or state secrets to pass on, and sometimes the safest way of engaging them is in plain sight, under the guise of their everyday work: What’s so unusual or eyebrow-raising about a journalist meeting with an embassy official in a public place?

Occasionally, the confidential contact may be solicited to perform “active measures,” or try to influence or inveigle their own governments or societies into doing Moscow’s bidding. It is here that the line between unwitting informant and agent becomes blurred. Thus, we learn from Maksimov that there was once a member of parliament in a liberal democracy who “spoke out for developing friendly relations with the Soviet Union and resolutely rejected the foreign policy line of the new government of his country.” “Deputy,” as the MP was code-named in the manual, was asked by the KGB rezidentura to instigate the resignation of his government, which had taken on an anti-Soviet foreign policy. Deputy raised “an inquiry in parliament using points prompted by us, and (raised) the issue of no confidence. Deputy went through the necessary preparation for the intended event, bringing over to his side several undecided members of parliament, and correctly determining the most advantageous moment to raise the inquiry. As a result, the government received a vote of no confidence and was forced to step down. Normal relations were reestablished with Deputy’s country of citizenship.”

Under these circumstances, Deputy has become something more than a relay of useful information; he’s become an agent of influence, albeit one almost certainly not informed by his handlers that they’re actually KGB officers. This is the crucial, abiding difference between a confidential contact and agent: The latter is always eventually made aware of his true role. Deputy is acting (or so he thinks) out of conviction and self-interest, even if both have been massaged by a friendly “representative” of a foreign government to which he’s already sympathetic.

By dint of their access to privileged information, confidential contacts can be elevated to agents, particularly if they advance in their careers to the extent that the information they are privy to is guarded by national security laws.

Consider two paths Lucy might take. Path one: Burnt out and fed up with journalism, she decides to parlay her vast contacts in the U.S. government into a U.S. government job, one requiring security clearance. Viktor might decide to target her for full recruitment. She’d be given training in the rules of tradecraft — the art of clandestinity — and she’d likely even be assigned a new handler, someone she hasn’t spent months being spotted by friends and colleagues in the company of since her new role is bound to draw the unwanted scrutiny of domestic counterintelligence.

Path two: Lucy might stay in her reporting job but in the course of better getting to know Viktor, introduce him to Josh Heller, a low-level enforcement officer at the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the U.S. Treasury Department. Owing to the unending headache of American sanctions on Russian officials and institutions, having such a person in one’s pocket has been deemed a high priority by Moscow Center and so Viktor might determine that Josh is ripe for recruitment and has all the personality traits that make him susceptible to it. In that scenario, Lucy as confidential contact has now graduated into becoming an unwitting (or half-witting) talent spotter or recruiter-agent for the SVR, even if she’s still technically designated by that service a confidential contact. Here’s the manual:

“(O)ne of the foreign KGB rezidenturas was cultivating ‘Vir’ and ‘Gek,’ two officers of a political party’s headquarters staff, to establish confidential contacts with them. Vir, however, soon went to work for a government agency whose employees do not have the right to meet with foreign representatives. Under these conditions, materials on Vir were reviewed and the decision was made to deepen the relations with him for the purpose of his recruitment, since meetings with Vir at a confidential level had become impossible. Meanwhile, contact by the party figure Gek with a Soviet representative could not be viewed as a violation of the law, and information coming from him did not go beyond internal party problems. Therefore, work with him at the level of confidential relations quite ensured both the security of the collaboration and addressing information tasks.”

For Gek, politics wasn’t even a factor, meaning he needn’t have even a flickering interest in socialism to become or stay a confidential contact, whereas Vir, as part of his development and recruitment as an agent, will have been worked over with Marxist-Leninist indoctrination. Because confidential contacts were more a grab-bag assortment of Soviet intelligence assets during the Cold War, it follows that there were very many more of them than there were proper agents, who required far more investment and resources to manufacture and maintain. Some confidential contacts, in fact, were committed anti-Communists whose motives aligned tactically or strategically with those of the Soviet Union:

“For example, a KGB rezidentura enlisted ‘Lan,’ a major political figure who advocated anti-communist positions in confidential collaboration on an ideological and political basis. His enlistment in collaboration was facilitated by the circumstance that in relations between his country and a neighboring country, the Soviet Union supported Lan’s country, whereas the Americans defended the interests of the other country. An intelligence officer persuaded Lan that by passing on information to us about the position of the government of his country, about the content of negotiations with the Americans, about their plans and intentions, he would be acting in keeping with his own political views.

“Lan began confidential collaboration with the intelligence officer and continued it after the settlement of the conflict on the basis of his remaining lack of trust in U.S. policy regarding his homeland, and understanding that the Soviet Union not only did not threaten its independence, but in accordance with its foreign policy principles, advocated support of this independence. Even so, Lan did not change his bourgeois views and openly told the intelligence agent of his disagreement with the ideas of socialism. Under these conditions, the intelligence officer did not try to change Lan’s worldview, avoided arguments about ideological issues, but continued to reinforce his anti-American positions, which had served as the basis for confidential collaboration.”

Like all the KGB training manuals in the Lubyanka Files series, Colonel Maksimov’s 44-year-old text is still in curricular use at the FSB (Russia’s successor to the KGB) and SVR Academies in Moscow, meaning the theory it articulates continues to guide Russian intelligence officers well into the 21st century. One of the merits of reading how Moscow defines confidential contacts and distinguishes them from controlled agents is that it demystifies the foggy landscape in which recent debates about Russian human intelligence has taken place.

Over the last five years, Americans have been bombarded with news stories, opinion pieces, and broadcast pundit lectures about this important subject: how professional operatives or billionaire oligarchs connived to sway the country’s political and social trajectories, not least by seconding a colorful assortment of chancers, grifters, and useful idiots associated with the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency to do their dirty work. Stories have varied between the rigorously investigated and well-documented and the crudely sensationalized and inevitably underwhelming. The latter genre has no doubt contributed to the almost palpable sense of national anticlimax that attended the publication and Talmudic exegesis of the Mueller Report, itself no serious exercise in counterintelligence but an attempt to uncover criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Le Carré and Ludlum fans will have searched in vain through that doorstop document for the microfiche, dead drop, and bug. But they’ll have also missed the point.

One doesn’t have to be Alger Hiss or Robert Hanssen to have a dangerous liaison with a man or woman from Moscow Center. And there is an entire category of Westerner upon whom that Center has relied for decades to provide credible and valuable information, the provision of which depends only on moral resolve and discretion. The confidential contact takes relatively few risks, can never be brought to book for his actions (only for lying about them after the fact to the authorities), and may not even know or allow themself to believe they’ve been seduced into dancing with the devil.

How the KGB Compensated for Perestroika

By Andrei Soldatov

In the third year of Perestroika, in 1988, the intelligence branch of the KGB was deep in a crisis – the headquarters in Yasenevo woods a few miles southwest of Moscow found the officers at KGB rezidenturas in Western countries increasingly reluctant to approach foreigners. They effectively turned off the aggressive recruiting mode the Soviet intelligence was once so famous.

In the United States, Soviet intelligence scored some spectacular successes in penetration, namely Aldrich Ames at CIA and Robert Hannssen at FBI, but the recruited Americans were the walk-ins – i.e. they themselves initiated the contact with Soviet spies, they were not approached by the Russians.

The Soviet Union was losing the Cold War and that certainly contributed to the confusion in KGB intelligence stations all over the world, but most importantly, the officers themselves didn’t want to risk their postings in the West. Being kicked out of a Western country if caught red-handed was not a particularly attractive idea at time when all kinds of shortages back home were already palpable.

Finally, the big shots at Yasenevo came up with a solution. It was a bold and witty idea, and the translated Analytical overview was part of it. Yasenevo suggested to exploit the natural advantages the KGB still enjoyed back home.

In addition to its espionage abroad, the KGB was always busy collecting “intelligence from the territory,” a euphemism for recruiting foreign nationals in the Soviet Union, with an eye to subsequently running them as agents in their home countries. This system worked because the Soviet Union, as a police state, had an opportunity to watch literally every foreign national in the country. Each regional KGB department had what was called a First Section in charge of recruiting foreigners.

This activity was coordinated by the Directorate RT (Razvedka s Territorii: intelligence from territory) of the First Chief Directorate in Yasenevo.

The problem was that no so many foreigners wanted to come the Soviet Union. Now that was changing, thanks to Gorbachev, who was busy opening up the country.

But the Soviet Union was still a totalitarian state, meaning that there was no media, a trade union, or a nascent private enterprise (not to mention a government agency) in position to say no to the KGB if approached and asked to plant a spy in the organization under disguise.

These spies planted by the KGB were known as DR officers, Destvuyushego Rezerva: of the active reserve. The term had a long history; it was used since the 1920s.

The KGB’s “Tradecraft in Intelligence Work from Cover Organizations on Soviet Territory,” an analytical overview presented here for the first time in both its original Russian and in English translation, suggested boosting the activities of the Directorate RT as a way to compensate the passivity of hibernated intelligence stations abroad.

Tradecraft in Intelligence Work on Soviet Territory from Cover Organizations (ENG)

Конспирация в разведывательной работе (RUS)

The beauty of the report was that it suggested combining two things, already at KGB disposal – the capabilities of planting KGB spies in almost any Soviet organization; and the activities of the Directorate RT in approaching foreigners now coming in big numbers to the Soviet Union.

The Directorate RT was thus encouraged to plant more spies in Soviet organizations with an eye to recruiting foreigners in the Soviet Union.

The report even suggested to send officers of the Directorate RT abroad to run its assets, and not to handle them to the intelligence stations in respective countries, probably acknowledging the reluctance of the intelligence stations to taking risks.

The Soviet regime was facing its collapse, but the KGB intelligence branch once again proved its resourcefulness and ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Andrei Soldatov, The coathor of “The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad”

The Lubyanka Files. Here’s How the KGB Knew You’d Be a Traitor: an Exclusive Look at Its Recruitment Manual

The bottom line for spy recruitment comes down to this: look for the losers, especially the ones who want to think they are winners because they hang on to important positions.

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