Attached to the Council of Ministers, it was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret police functions.

Brezhnev sacked Shelepin's successor and protégé, Vladimir Semichastny (in office: 1961–1967) as KGB Chairman and reassigned him to a sinecure in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The GRU (Foreign military intelligence service of the Soviet Union) recruited the ideological agent Julian Wadleigh, who became a State Department diplomat in 1936.

[5] Throughout, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its General Secretary Earl Browder, helped NKVD recruit Americans, working in government, business, and industry.

[citation needed][6] Other important, low-level and high-level ideological agents were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department, the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, the economist Lauchlin Currie (an FDR advisor), and the "Silvermaster Group", headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster, in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare.

To wit, British Manhattan Project team physicist Klaus Fuchs (GRU 1941) was the main agent of the Rosenberg spy ring.

[9] In 1944, the New York City residency infiltrated top secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico by recruiting Theodore Hall, a 19-year-old Harvard physicist.

[12] Recruitment then emphasised mercenary agents, an approach especially successful[citation needed][quantify] in scientific and technical espionage, since private industry practised lax internal security, unlike the US Government.

[13] In the late Cold War, the KGB was successful with intelligence coups in the cases of the mercenary walk-in recruits FBI counterspy Robert Hanssen (1979–2001) and CIA Soviet Division officer Aldrich Ames (1985–1994).

In supporting those Communist governments, the KGB was instrumental in crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of "Socialism with a Human Face" in Czechoslovakia, 1968.

[17] Consequently, the KGB monitored the satellite state populations for occurrences of "harmful attitudes" and "hostile acts"; yet, stopping the Prague Spring, deposing a nationalist Communist government, was its greatest achievement.

[citation needed] The KGB prepared the Red Army's route by infiltrating Czechoslovakia with many illegal residents disguised as Western tourists.

Finally, the KGB prepared hardline, pro-USSR members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), such as Alois Indra and Vasiľ Škultéty, to assume power after the Red Army's invasion.

Despite its accurate forecast of crisis, the PZPR hindered the KGB's destroying the nascent Solidarity-backed political movement, fearing explosive civil violence if they imposed the KGB-recommended martial law.

In retrospect, the captures of the moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen proved that Angleton, though ignored as over-aggressive, was correct, despite the fact that it cost him his job at CIA, which he left in 1975.

The KGB used the Moscow Narodny Bank Limited to finance the acquisition, and an intermediary, Singaporean businessman Amos Dawe, as the frontman.

[23] On 2 February 1973, the Politburo, which was led by Yuri Andropov at the time, demanded that KGB members influence Bangladesh (which was then newly formed) where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was scheduled to win parliamentary elections.

[24] In August 1979, the KGB accused some officers who were arrested in Dhaka in an overthrow attempt, and by October, Andropov approved the fabrication of a letter in which he stated that Muhammad Ghulam Tawab, an Air Vice-Marshal at the time, was the main plotter, which led the Bangladesh, Indian and Sri Lankan press to believe that he was an American spy.

The letter also mentioned that after Mujib was assassinated the United States contacted Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad to replace him as a short-term President.

Under the leadership of Major General Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoy and Muhammad Rafi – code named Mammad and Niruz respectively – the Soviet secret service learned of the imminent uprising.

[24][26] The centre then realized that it was better for them to deal with a more competent agent, which at the time was Babrak Karmal, who later accused Taraki of taking bribes and even of having secretly contacted the United States embassy in Kabul.

On the same day the KGB decided to imprison Sayed Gulabzoy as well as Mohammad Aslam Watanjar and Assadullah Sarwari but while in captivity and under an investigation all three denied the allegation that the current Minister of Defence was an American secret agent.

The denial of claims was passed on to Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev, who as the main chiefs of the KGB proposed operation Raduga to save the life of Gulabzoy and Watanjar and send them to Tashkent from Bagram Airfield by giving them fake passports.

After the two-hour meeting they began to worry that Amin would establish an Islamic republic in Afghanistan and decided to seek a way to put Karmal back in.

In June 1981, there were 370 members in the Afghan-controlled KGB intelligence service throughout the nation which were under the command of Ahmad Shah Paiya and had received all the training they need in the Soviet Union.

At worst, the compromised spy was either returned to the Soviet Union or was declared persona non grata and expelled by the government of the target country.