Russian espionage in the United States
According to former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, who was head of the KGB's operations in the United States, the "heart and soul" of Soviet intelligence was "not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.
[4][5] The Soviet Union formed two other well known agencies: The GRU (The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation) and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service).
The Venona project, declassified in 1995 by the Moynihan Commission, contained extensive evidence of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America,[10] as did the Mitrokhin Archive revealed from 1992-1999.
[2][12] Active measures, as first formulated in the Soviet KGB, were a form of political warfare, offensive programs such as disinformation, propaganda, deception, sabotage, destabilization and espionage.
[2] According to the Mitrokhin Archives, active measures were taught in the Andropov Institute of the KGB situated at SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) headquarters in Yasenevo District of Moscow.
Posing as ordinary American citizens, the Russian agents tried to build contacts with academics, industrialists, and policymakers to gain access to intelligence.
They were the target of a multi-year FBI investigation called Operation Ghost Stories, which culminated at the end of June 2010 with the arrest of ten people in the U.S. and an eleventh in Cyprus.
"[20][21][22][23][18] Former CIA officer Harold James Nicholson was twice convicted[clarification needed] as a spy for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
[26][27] Butina tried to infiltrate conservative groups in the US, including the National Rifle Association of America, as part of an effort to promote Russian interests in the 2016 United States presidential election.
[28][29][30] The Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded that she attempted to persuade the Trump campaign to establish a secret communications back channel with Russia.
[31] In February 2020, U.S. officials charged Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, a Mexican citizen, in Miami for allegedly acting on behalf of a Russian agent who recruited him to collect information about the US government.
[32][33] In May 2021, the U.S. sentenced former Army Green Beret Peter Debbins to 188 months in jail for conspiring with Russian intelligence operatives to illegally provide them with U.S. national defense information.
Like the Illegals, both had assumed the identities of deceased U.S. children (Fort and Montague), though the couple appeared to have genuinely been born in and resided in the United States as Primrose and Morrison.
They’re doing it as we sit here.”[38] Ex-spy Yuri Shvets, who was a partner of the assassinated Alexander Litvinenko, believes that the KGB cultivated Trump as an asset for over 40 years.
Yuri Shvets claims that at the chief KGB directorate in Yasenevo, he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful "active measure".
[46][47][48] The cyberattack and data breach were reported to be among the worst cyber-espionage incidents ever suffered by the U.S., due to the sensitivity and high profile of the targets and the long duration (eight to nine months) in which the hackers had access.
[57] According to a declassified DNI report released on March 16, 2021, there was evidence of broad efforts by Russia (and Iran) to shape the 2020 U.S. presidential election's outcome.
Russia's efforts had been aimed at "denigrating President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US", central to Moscow's interference effort having been reliance on Russian intelligence agencies′ proxies “to launder influence narratives” by using media organizations, U.S. officials and people close to Trump to push “misleading or unsubstantiated” allegations against Biden.
[58][59][60][61] The report specifically identified individuals controlled by the Russian government as having been involved in Russia's interference efforts, such as Konstantin Kilimnik and Andrii Derkach.
"[64] According to a report by Oxford Internet Institute researchers including sociologist Philip N. Howard, social media played a major role in political polarization in the United States, due to computational propaganda -- "the use of automation, algorithms, and big-data analytics to manipulate public life"—such as the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories.
