Soviet Espionage Research Articles

Navigating the World of The Stranger (1979) After the Cultural Revolution: Unveiling Hong Kong Leftist Science Fiction Film by Bao Fang

Abstract After the Cultural Revolution, a period marked by a global retreat from radical politics and increased compromises, filmmakers in the Hong Kong leftist film industry faced financial challenges stemming from the studio’s struggles during the Cultural Revolution. Despite these difficulties, they ingeniously incorporated generic elements to captivate audiences, using popular genres as conduits for social commentary. The Stranger by Feng Huang Motion Picture company stands out, as director Bao Fang adeptly appropriated science fiction elements to adapt a real story of espionage in Hong Kong. The film signifies Bao’s transition from opera film and historical pictures to negotiating realist and science-fictional elements to convey social innuendo. Drawing inspiration from recent works by Mingwei Song and Seo-young Chu, my argument extends to explore how sci-fi serves as a mode of expression for geopolitical commentary. The film not only expresses concern over Soviet espionage and also reflects the fear over the collapse of grand narratives such as Enlightenment and Revolution.

Henry Holdship Ware: a U.S. Military Interpreter, a Soviet Spy, and an Economist

This article looks at the life of Henry Holdship Ware (1908-1999), the grandson of the founder of Atlanta University. Captain Henry H. Ware was an aide and interpreter to Major General John Deane, Chief of the U.S. Military Mission to the Soviet Union during World War 2. In this capacity, he was an interpreter with the U.S. Army assigned to the Tripartite Conference in Moscow (1943) and Conferences at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), and a liaison officer and interpreter during Operation Frantic, a joint American-Soviet campaign of shuttle bombing missions in Poltava, Ukraine, in June–September 1944. He was also present at the official surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany at Karlshorst on May 8, 1945, and interpreted toasts at the banquet of celebration after the ceremony. Henry Ware learnt Russian during his five-year stay as a student at Plekhanov Institute in Moscow, where he studied economics and was recruited by the NKVD to report on the American community in Moscow. Back in the USA, he was independently recruited by the Golos-Bentley Soviet espionage network under the codename ‘Vick”. In 1975, probably inspired by his study of the Soviet economy, he founded the Useful Services Exchange (USE), a community-based organization in Reston, Virginia, enabling neighbors to help each other through the exchange of services. The discussion draws on available visuals, memoirs, newspaper sources, and declassified documents.

Soviet Espionage in Sweden: The Vasilii Sidorenko Case of 1942

This is a study of a Soviet espionage mission in Sweden in 1942 under the aegis of the intelligence officer Vasilii Sidorenko. Aside from trying to reconstruct, on the basis of material filed with the archive of the Swedish Security Police (Säpo), the history of the mission, the article also addresses methodological challenges following from the fact that we must, as Soviet material remains very scarce, approach Sidorenko’s mission indirectly, through material generated by the Swedish police. The article is therefore structured in terms of three separate fields of inquiry—a first that addresses the organization of Sweden’s counterespionage with regard the Sidorenko mission, a second that addresses the organization and institutional context within which Sidorenko operated, and a third that addresses the accounts of five Swedish citizens who were suspected and later sentenced for having assisted Sidorenko to collect military intelligence in Sweden. The article concludes that the suggested framework with three fields of inquiry might be helpful in the study of offensive espionage operations in a more general sense.

Rezidenţii O.G.P.U./N.K.V.D. din România anilor 1930 Studii de caz: Valeriu Bucicov, Ion Vidraşcu, Petre Goncearuc, Vasile Posteucă, Serghie Nicolau, IV

Based on a thorough research in different Romanian archives, leading to the discovery of previously unknown documents, this study presents the personal and professional biographies of five communists from Bessarabia acting as illegal residents for the Soviet intelligence, revealing the depth of the Soviet espionage penetration into the Eastern Romanian territory, military and civilian structures. The study covers both the data-gathering activity of the five, before the war, and their spectacular trajectories, as leaders of the new regime, in the first years after the war. Their extraordinary political evolution – but also very similar among the chosen group – is a model story about the human resources the Communists relied on before and during WWII and the troubled relationship between the „old guard” of the „Moscovites” and the thirst for power of the ethnically Romanian new leaders.

The Face of Soviet Espionage in the United States during the Stalin Era: Vladimir Pravdin, “Man of Truth”

The Face of Soviet Espionage in the United States during the Stalin Era: Vladimir Pravdin, “Man of Truth”

Soviet Union Spionage Arrest In Indonesia 1982

The purpose of this study is to analyze the events of the Soviet Union's espionage arrest in Indonesia in 1982. The formulation of the problem in this research is (1) The Soviet Union's Efforts to Steal Indonesian Maritime Data, (2) The Process of the Soviet Union's Intelligence Arrests for Espionage in Indonesia, and (3) the Settlement of the Soviet Union's Espionage Case in Indonesia in 1982. The method used is historical methodology which includes five selection steps including topics, heuristics, source criticism, interpretation and historiography. The Soviet Union's espionage arrest occurred in 1982 which was carried out by a task force codenamed Pantai, a joint effort between the State Intelligence Coordinating Agency (BAKIN) and a task force led by Brigadier General M.I Sutaryo. The cause of the Soviet Union's espionage arrest was an attempt to steal Indonesia's secret deep data regarding the condition, content and depth of the sea in the Lombok Strait and the Natuna Islands. The perpetrators of Soviet espionage who were caught by the Beach task force named Sergei Egorov and Alexander Finenko. The case settlement process was carried out by giving persona non-grata status and closing the Soviet Union's Aeroflot airline operating in Indonesia.
 Keywords: Espionage Arrest, Soviet Union Espionage, Data Theft

Forty Years of Soviet Spying in NATO: A Preliminary Study

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s security against Soviet espionage was devastating. Open sources reveal more than 60 spies unmasked, named, and accused of directly stealing NATO secrets on behalf of Soviet intelligence services, the State Committee for Security (KGB) and Main Intelligence Directorate, while NATO’s own secret report estimated 300 spies. These unmaskings attested to the efficacy of Western counterintelligence, but nevertheless evidenced deep and sustained infiltration by Soviet agents. This study, unfortunately, may only be considered preliminary because it is the first one to examine the totality of espionage within NATO during the Soviet years, even though the complete historical record remains inaccessible. Second, most of the information has been gleaned from journalistic sources. Third, the real damage of stolen classified materials remains elusive owing to laws that prevent disclosure. Absent a practical way to verify compromises, NATO officials had little recourse but to assume that Moscow possessed all classified information exposed to spies.

“An Active and Conscious Agent”? Ric Throssell and Soviet Espionage

“An Active and Conscious Agent”? Ric Throssell and Soviet Espionage

The First Counterspy: Larry Haas, Bell Aircraft, and the FBI’s Attempt to Capture a Soviet Mole by Kay Haas and Walter W. Pickut

<i>The First Counterspy: Larry Haas, Bell Aircraft, and the FBI’s Attempt to Capture a Soviet Mole</i> by Kay Haas and Walter W. Pickut

Interrogating the Gestapo: SS-Sturmbannführer Horst Kopkow, the Rote Kapelle and Post-war British Security Interests

ABSTRACT In 1945, the British arrested Horst Kopkow, a Gestapo Referent, or desk officer, tasked with countering British and Russian sabotage in Hitler’s empire. Despite being co-responsible for the demise of hundreds of Allied parachute agents, the British Secret Intelligence Service faked Kopkow’s death and gave him freedom in exchange for his unrivalled understanding of Soviet espionage in Western Europe, particularly the famed Red Orchestra. The value of Kopkow’s information is still being debated, but it was sufficiently important for SIS to protect Kopkow from war crimes investigators. Western intelligence agencies have, since the 1980s, been censured for utilising ex-Nazis in the initial Cold War, precisely because their wartime roles were still unclear. With the partial release of MI5 records on Kopkow in 2000, some attempt to gauge the value and degree of his collaboration is possible.

Soviet Espionage in France during the Cold War: An Overview

During the Cold War, France remained a soft touch for Soviet intelligence. Among the large communist population—war veterans and about 25% of the postwar electorate—Soviets found fertile ground for recruiting agents and collaborators who would betray their country, although it is fair to say most philosophical and political communists did not engage in espionage. Spy rings led by the State Committee for Security (KGB) and Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) controllers in the Russian embassy’s rezidence overwhelmed French security precautions. In addition, the Soviet espionage apparatus maintained an extensive infrastructure in the Moscow Center that supported quantitative intelligence collected in France on a massive scale. The addition of agents from satellite countries stretched French counterintelligence beyond its limits. All this is not to say that French security was completely ineffective. Security agencies unmasked spies and arrested hundreds for espionage; so too, hundreds of Soviets with diplomatic immunity were expelled. French security also benefited from consequential defections of Soviet agents and the crowning but fortuitous achievement of a mole inside the KGB itself. But poor French security exacerbated deteriorating relations with the United States and compromised North Atlantic Treaty Organization secrets. Regardless of the détente between East and West, Soviet espionage continued unabated.

Real and Imagined Encounters in the Social History of Surveillance: Soviet Migrants and the Petrov Affair

Abstract Soviet intelligence officer Vladimir Petrov’s defection to the West in 1954 was Australia’s first Cold War spy scandal, quickly dubbed the “Petrov Affair.” It was followed by a Royal Commission investigating Soviet espionage, during which the cover of Michael Bialoguski, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s main agent in the Petrov operation, was blown. Bialoguski, a Polish refugee, had been targeting not just Petrov but the pro-Soviet migrant community, infiltrating their lives over a period of six years. This article uses the Petrov Affair as a vantage point to examine pro-Soviet migrants’ experiences of Cold War surveillance in Australia. Soviet migrants arrived in the West with prior experience of ubiquitous security states and anticipated that they would be monitored. But for those involved with pro-Soviet groups like Sydney’s Russian Social Club, brushes with intelligence were not only expected but often desired. They had both real and imagined encounters with surveillance, and imagined encounters shaped their experiences and perceptions of the security state just as actual ones did. A social history of the surveillance of pro-Soviet migrants complicates our understanding of the effects of surveillance and of its panoptic qualities. It also reveals the Australian security state as mutually constituted—not just by the state itself, but by the personalities, perceptions, transnational experiences, and social worlds of its subjects.

Teaching Anticommunism: Fred Schwarz and American Postwar Conservatism

Teaching Anticommunism: Fred Schwarz and American Postwar Conservatism

Soviet Espionage in France between the Wars

After the Bolsheviks consolidated their newly won power, they looked toward the Western democracies to achieve additional victories. Under cover of diplomatic recognition, trade agreements, and local communist parties, Soviets sent numerous clandestine agents abroad to pursue national security objectives, including theft of military and industrial secrets on a large scale. France, Britain, and the United States were the main targets in which, organizationally, Soviet intelligence used a consistent pattern. As an existential threat, France was the first priority until displaced by the fear of German rearmament. France represented a rich resource for advanced military and industrial technology that the Soviets needed to transform Russia’s infrastructure. In 1935, France and Russia signed a mutual defense pact that effectively ended Soviet espionage in France.

First Decade of Soviet Espionage in America: 1924 to 1933

The first ten years of Soviet espionage in the United States may be defined as the period from 1924 to 1933, a decade bookended by two milestones: namely, the establishment of Amtorg in 1924 and U....

The Dentist Chair: Dr. Gessel Schkolnikoff and the mysteries of Soviet espionage

ABSTRACT The history of Soviet espionage is largely the story of failures and defections. This article considers the possibility that a low-key dentist, who had a surgery in London in the middle of the last century, was one of the exceptions and successfully avoided detection. While I was researching in the files of several well-known Soviet agents, the name of Dr. Gessel Schkolnikoff often appeared, and then in early 2018 a Home Office file was released to the National Archives of the UK that has provided some of the missing background to this Russian immigrant. There are precedents for Soviet intelligence agencies using a dental surgery as a conduit for passing on information and there are persuasive indications that Dr. Schkolnikoff’s surgery can be added to their list.

Protecting secrets: British diplomatic cipher machines in the early Cold War, 1945–1970

ABSTRACT This article examines how effectively Britain secured its diplomatic communications against hostile decryption during the early Cold War. It shows that between 1945 and 1970 the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office introduced and operated four advanced cipher machines, Typex, Rockex, Noreen and Alvis, which produced very strong ciphers. However, Britain did suffer physical compromises of Rockex through Soviet espionage and an attack on the British embassy in Beijing. Rockex was also vulnerable to technical surveillance of its acoustic and Tempest emissions, and the Soviets exploited this to read the encrypted communications of the British embassy in Moscow.

Joseph Grigulevich: A Tale of Identity, Soviet Espionage, and Storytelling

This paper explores the life of Joseph Grigulevich (1913–1988), a famous early Soviet illegal intelligence operative, who conducted various “special tasks” on behalf of Stalin’s foreign espionage network. These included the murder of dissident Spanish communist Andreas Nin (1938), a participation in the assassination of Leon Trotsky (1940), posing as a Costa Rican ambassador (1949–1952), and an abortive project to assassinate Joseph Bros Tito (1952). In contrast to conventional espionage studies that are usually informed by diplomatic, political, and military history approaches, I employ a cultural history angle. First, the paper examines the formation of Grigulevich’s communist and espionage identity against his background as a cosmopolitan Jewish “other” from the interwar Polish-Lithuanian realm. Second, it explores his role in the production and invention of intelligence knowledge, which he later used to jump start his second career as a prominent Soviet humanities scholar and a bestselling writer of revolutionary non-fiction.

This Film is Restricted: Training Films of The British Security Service

In 1962, following a series of spy scandals, the Security Service and the Central Office of Information (COI) created a security education campaign to raise awareness of the Soviet espionage threat to state and industrial secrets, and to provide security training for military and civilian personnel handling classified material. Several instructional films were commissioned, using fictional scenarios to dramatise the cold war threat to security personnel. This paper will examine four of these declassified and highly inventive films – It Can’t Happen to Me (1962), Persona Non Grata (1964) and The Lecture (1968), produced by James Carr’s World Wide Pictures; and Any One of Us (1970), directed by Seafield Head for Verity Films. Drawing on COI production files at the National Archives and the films themselves, I explore the making and underlying message of these long-neglected and highly stylised pieces of cold war propaganda; how they anticipate key texts of the 1960s spy genre like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965); and how they compare to American security education films from the same period.

Father, Son, and the Bomb

This essay discusses the memoir of Boria Sax, the son of Saville Sax, a U.S. citizen who was a Communist and Soviet spy during World War II. Saville Sax failed at most things he attempted, but he proved to be a valuable asset for Soviet espionage agencies because he was the roommate of the gifted physicist Theodore Hall, who was recruited to work for the Manhattan Project. Sax convinced Hall, who shared Sax's admiration of the Soviet Union, to supply highly sensitive information to the Soviet foreign intelligence service. The memoir offers a poignant view of the terrible impact that Saville Sax's actions had on his family as well as on the country he betrayed.