Guerrillas Promotion of guerrilla and terrorist organizations worldwide Soviet secret services have been described as "the primary instructors of guerrillas worldwide". According to
Ion Mihai Pacepa, KGB General
Aleksandr Sakharovsky once said: "In today's world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon." He also claimed that "Airplane hijacking is my own invention". In 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the KGB-financed
PLO. Some of the active measures were undertaken by the Soviet secret services against their own governments or communist rulers. Russian historians
Anton Antonov-Ovseenko and
Edvard Radzinsky suggested that
Joseph Stalin was killed by associates of
NKVD chief
Lavrentiy Beria, based on the interviews of a former Stalin bodyguard and circumstantial evidence. According to
Yevgenia Albats' allegations,
Chief of the KGB Vladimir Semichastny was among the plotters against
Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, which led to the latter's downfall. KGB Chairman
Yuri Andropov reportedly struggled for power with
Leonid Brezhnev. The
Soviet coup attempt of 1991 against
Mikhail Gorbachev was organized by KGB Chairman
Vladimir Kryuchkov and other hardliners. and
Georgia. During the
2006 Georgian-Russian espionage controversy, several Russian GRU case officers were accused by Georgian authorities of preparations to commit sabotage and terrorist acts.
Political assassinations The highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen.
Ion Mihai Pacepa claimed to have had a conversation with
Nicolae Ceaușescu, who told him about "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill":
László Rajk and
Imre Nagy from Hungary;
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej from Romania;
Rudolf Slánský and
Jan Masaryk from
Czechoslovakia; the
Shah of Iran;
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, President of
Pakistan;
Palmiro Togliatti from Italy;
John F. Kennedy; and
Mao Zedong. Pacepa also discussed a KGB plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of
Lin Biao organized by the Soviet intelligence agencies and alleged that "among the leaders of Moscow's satellite intelligence services there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy." The second President of
Afghanistan,
Hafizullah Amin, was killed by the KGB's
Alpha Group in
Operation Storm-333 before the full-scale
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Presidents of the unrecognized
Chechen Republic of Ichkeria organized by Chechen separatists, including
Dzhokhar Dudaev,
Zelimkhan Yandarbiev,
Aslan Maskhadov, and
Abdul-Khalim Saidullaev, were killed by the
FSB and affiliated forces. Other widely publicized cases are murders of Russian communist
Leon Trotsky and Bulgarian writer
Georgi Markov by
NKVD. There were also allegations that the KGB was behind the
assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981. The Italian
Mitrokhin Commission, headed by senator
Paolo Guzzanti (
Forza Italia), worked on the Mitrokhin Archives from 2003 to March 2006. The Mitrokhin Commission received criticism during and after its existence. It was closed in March 2006 without any proof brought to its various controversial allegations, including the claim that
Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and former
President of the European Commission, was the "KGB's man in Europe." One of Guzzanti's informers,
Mario Scaramella, was arrested for defamation and arms trading at the end of 2006.
Puppet rebel forces Operation Trust In "
Operation Trust" (1921–1926), the
State Political Directorate (OGPU) set up a fake anti-
Bolshevik underground organization, "Monarchist Union of Central Russia". The main success of this operation was luring
Boris Savinkov and
Sidney Reilly into the Soviet Union, where they were arrested and executed.
Basmachi Revolt The
Islamic anti-Soviet
Basmachi movement in
Central Asia posed an early threat to the Bolshevik movement. The movement's roots lay in the
anti-conscription violence of 1916 that erupted when the Russian Empire began to draft Muslims for army service in
World War I. In the months following the
October Revolution of 1917, the
Bolsheviks seized power in many parts of the Russian Empire and the
Russian Civil War began.
Turkestani Muslim political movements attempted to form an autonomous government in the city of
Kokand, in the
Fergana Valley. The Bolsheviks launched an assault on Kokand in February 1918 and carried out a general massacre of up to 25,000 people. The massacre rallied support to the Basmachi who waged a
guerrilla and conventional war that seized control of large parts of the Fergana Valley and much of
Turkestan. The group's notable leaders were
Enver Pasha and, later,
Ibrahim Bek. Soviet Russia responded by deploying special Soviet military detachments masqueraded as
Basmachi forces and received support from British and Turkish intelligence services. The operations of these detachments facilitated the collapse of the Basmachi movement and the assassination of Pasha.
Post World War II counter-insurgency operations Following World War II, various partisan organizations in the Baltic states, Poland and Western Ukraine fought for independence of their countries, which were under
Soviet occupation, against Soviet forces. Many
NKVD agents were sent to join and penetrate the independence movements. Puppet rebel forces were also created by the NKVD and permitted to attack local Soviet authorities to gain credibility and exfiltrate senior NKVD agents to the West.
Supporting political movements According to
Stanislav Lunev,
GRU alone spent more than $1 billion for the
peace movements against the
Vietnam War, which was a "hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost". However, the KGB's widespread attempts at influence in the United States,
Switzerland, and
Denmark targeting the peace movement were known, and the World Peace Council was categorized as a
communist front organization by the CIA. and that they used the
Soviet Peace Committee to organize and finance anti-American demonstrations in western Europe. The Soviet Union first deployed the
RSD-10 Pioneer (called
SS-20 Saber in the West) in its European territories in March 1976, a mobile, concealable
intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) with a
multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) containing three nuclear 150-kiloton
warheads. The SS-20's range of was great enough to reach Western Europe from well within Soviet territory; the range was just below the
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II (SALT II) Treaty minimum range for an
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM):. Tretyakov further stated that "[t]he KGB was responsible for creating the entire
nuclear winter story to stop the
Pershing II missiles," According to intelligence historian
Christopher Andrew, the KGB in Britain was unable to infiltrate major figures in the
CND, and the Soviets relied on influencing "less influential contacts" which were more receptive to the Moscow line. Andrew wrote that
MI5 "found no evidence that KGB funding to the British peace movement went beyond occasional payment of fares and expenses to individuals."
United States Some of the active measures by the USSR against the
United States were exposed in the
Mitrokhin Archive: • Stirring up racial tensions in the United States by mailing bogus letters from the
Ku Klux Klan, placing an explosive package in "the Negro section of New York" (
Operation PANDORA) • Planting claims that both
John F. Kennedy and
Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated by the CIA • In the Middle East in 1975, the KGB claimed to identify 45 statesmen from around the world who had been the victims of successful or unsuccessful CIA assassination attempts over the past decade In a secondary role to the KGB during the operation, former East German spymaster
Markus Wolf admitted, during a visit to Italy in 1998, the role of the
HVA in spreading AIDS conspiracy theories In 1974, according to KGB statistics, over 250 active measures were targeted against the CIA alone, leading to denunciations of Agency abuses, both real and (more frequently) imaginary, in media, parliamentary debates, demonstrations and speeches by leading politicians around the world.
Lawrence Bittman also addressed Soviet intelligence blowback in
The KGB and Soviet Disinformation, stating that "There are, of course, instances in which the operator is partially or completely exposed and subjected to countermeasures taken by the government of the target country." == Russian Federation active measures, 1991 to present ==