Viktor Suvorov - Inside soviet military intelligence

In speaking about the undercover residency we must not forget to mention another category of people participating in espionage activities - co-opted personnel. These are Soviet citizens abroad who are not officers of the GRU or the KGB, but fulfil a number of tasks set them by these organisations. The co-opted person may be of any rank from doorman to ambassador and he carries out very different tasks, from studies of the foreigners surrounding him to clearing dead-letter boxes. The KGB has always been interested in the exploitation of co-opted persons; following the principle of 'don't stick your own neck out if you can get somebody else to stick it out for you'. The GRU is not so keen, using co-opted persons only in exceptional cases. Its guiding principle is: 'don't trust even your best friend with your motor car, girlfriend - or agent'. The rewards for a co-opted person are monetary ones which, unlike the basic salary, are not subject to tax. Usually in every embassy, consulate and trade representation, out of every ten 'clean' officials, seven are co-opted onto the KGB staff, one onto the GRU staff; only the remaining two are clean. Either they are complete idiots, or the sons of members of the Central Committee whom wild horses could not force to have anything to do with intelligence. In other words, in Soviet official institutions, it is a very, very tricky matter indeed to meet a man who has no connections with intelligence.

In present-day Soviet intelligence terminology the term 'agent' has only one meaning. An agent is a foreigner recruited by Soviet intelligence and carrying out secret tasks on its behalf. All agents, irrespective of the group or section of the GRU to which they belong, are divided into two groups: the basic agent and the supplementary agent. Basic agents fall into four categories: they are residents or group leaders; they are providers of information; they are executive agents whose main task is to kill; or they are recruiting agents. In the supplementary group are wireless operators, legalising agents, documentalists, the owners of safe houses, addresses, telephones and radio transmission points.

Head Agents

Head agents are the leaders of agent groups and agent residents. Head agents are selected from the most experienced agents available, men and women who have had long years of service and have given proof of their devotion to duty. They are invested with wide powers and possess significant financial independence. In cases where the organisation entrusted to them collapses, the head agent must take the decision to do away with unwanted people who pose a threat to it. In this and other emergencies he can always count on the full support of the GRU.

The difference between the group leader and the agent resident is that the group leader may take a whole range of important decisions concerning the group entrusted to him, but he may not recruit agents at all. The agent resident has a wider range of interests, the most important being recruitment. The group leader may be subordinate to the residency, to the illegal, undercover or agent residency or directly to the Centre, but the agent resident may only be subordinate to the Centre.

Sources

These are agents who directly obtain secret information, documents or samples of military technology and weaponry. In the recruitment of such people, it is first and foremost their access to political, military, technological and other secrets which is taken into account. It is clearly unnecessary to recruit an officer from the Ministry of Defence if one can recruit his secretary. In other words, the GRU has contact with people occupying relatively unimportant posts but with possibly greater knowledge than their superiors. With this in mind, apart from secretaries, the people of special interest to the GRU are workers in printing and typing offices which produce secret documents, cipher officers, diplomatic couriers, computer operators, communications clerks, draughtsmen and other technical personnel.

Executive Agents

These are agents recruited to carry out assassinations, diversions or sabotage. The recruitment of executive agents is not usually carried out by the central GRU, but by the local organs of the GRU the military district departments. Sometimes even strategic intelligence needs similar specialists, but in smaller number.

Executive agents are recruited from criminal elements and from that band of naturally brutish characters who, with passing time, become accustomed to executing any orders they are given. Frequently agents who have been acting as providers of information are transferred by both the strategic and operational branches of the GRU to the category of executive agent, in cases where they may have lost their access.

Agent Recruiters

These are the most devoted and thoroughly tested agents, people who either never had access or who have lost it. As their name suggests, the GRU uses them solely for the recruitment of new agents. The most successful will eventually become group leader or sometimes agent resident.

Agent Legalisers

These are subsidiary agents. They work in the interests of illegals and as a rule are recruited and run only by illegals. Candidate for this category of agents are sought among officials of the police land passport departments, consular clerks, customs and immigration officials, and small employers of labour. Agent legalisers are subjected to especially thorough vetting, because the fate of illegals is entrusted to them. When a Soviet illegal arrives in a country the task of the legalising agent is to ensure the issue of documents by making the necessary entries in the registration books and to ensure that the illegal is in possession of the necessary documentation.

In the history of the GRU quite a few priests carrying falsified documents and registers of baptism and death have given immense service to illegals who, on the basis of false entries, have been able to obtain the necessary documents. A similar role to that of the legalising agent is played by the documentation agents. These are recruited by the undercover residency and their job is to obtain passports, driving licences and samples of official police forms. In contradistinction to the legalising agents, documentation agents do not have any direct contact with illegals. Although they obtain tens and sometimes hundreds, even thousands of passports, they have no direct knowledge of how and when the GRU is going to use them. Frequently the GRU uses the passports obtained through the good offices of documentation agents only as a sample for the preparation of similar falsified copies. Documentation agents may be recruited from among criminal classes who are occupied with the forging and selling of documents on the black market and also from clerks concerned with the production, inventory, storage and issue of passports. Frequently documentation agents have successfully worked among poor students, persuading them, for a financial consideration, to lose their passports.

Couriers

These are supplementary agents engaged in transporting agent materials over state frontiers. Obviously it is not necessary to employ special couriers to transport the material into the Soviet Union or its satellites.

The basic flow of agent material which is not subject to particular suspicion goes from countries with hard regimes into countries with more soft regimes. In the opinion of the GRU, an opinion fortified by the experience of many years, the hardest country is Great Britain, followed by France, the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium and Holland. As soft countries the GRU includes Finland, Ireland and Austria among others.

The GRU also makes very wide use of countries of the Third World for this purpose, and couriers may sometimes make very long journeys before the material finally arrives in the hands of the GRU. Examples are known of material obtained in the United States going first to Latin America, then to Africa and only from Africa being conveyed to the Soviet Union. In recruiting couriers, the GRU pays particular attention to the drivers and guards of long-distance trains, commercial travellers and sailors of merchant fleets. When hi-jacking of aircraft became more frequent and controls at airports became stricter, the GRU virtually gave up recruiting the crews of airliners. If it uses these at all, it is only for transporting small-sized non-metallic objects.