The KGB’s Ghosts Never Left

October 6, 2026, Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen, Bavaria.

Early morning. A special police unit stopped in front of a private residence. The person taken away was August Hanning, 80, who served as president of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1998 to 2005 and later as state secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The arrest warrant issued by the Office of the Federal Public Prosecutor General stated: suspected treason, espionage, and disclosure of state secrets.

The core facts of the accusation are not complicated. After Hanning left office, he reached an agreement with Manfred D., his former office manager at the BND. The latter, using his position at the BND, continued to provide Hanning with internal materials. As of June 2022, the total was about 2,000 items, including classified documents and intelligence briefings prepared by senior BND officials for the German Chancellery. Hanning used this information at least once to prepare an analytical report for a foreign intelligence and security agency official. The investigation points toward Azerbaijan.

After the news broke, a version quickly spread on the Chinese internet: that Hanning was a “mole left over from the Soviet era” who had sold more than 2,000 documents to Russia. This version has not been confirmed by mainstream German media. Reports by WDR, NDR, and Süddeutsche Zeitung explicitly state that the current investigation does not involve any Russian connection.

But the reason this version could spread is that it touched a nerve long buried in the Western world. To understand where that nerve comes from, one must return to the KGB itself.

Becoming someone else

The thing Western intelligence agencies feared most about the KGB was its “illegals” program.

This was fundamentally different from “resident agents” who used diplomatic cover. The latter enjoyed diplomatic immunity if arrested; illegals did not. They were “ghosts” living in enemy countries under false identities. Arrest meant the end of everything.

Training began with selection. Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate was responsible for identifying promising young recruits, usually from within the Soviet Union, with language talent, psychological stability, and a clean background. Once selected, they entered a training cycle lasting several years. Language was the foundation, but it was far from everything. They had to learn the target country’s social etiquette, eating habits, popular culture, and slang changes. They even trained until they would not expose their native language in their sleep.

An illegal agent sent to the United States later recalled that he estimated there were “10 to 12” other agents receiving training at the same time. After training ended, they were sent to target countries, where a mission could last for decades. The KGB’s investment in this area was unique: no other intelligence agency spent so much time and energy training spies in language and social etiquette.

This system had a cruel paradox. Successful concealment meant living inside an “enemy society,” day after day feeling the kindness of ordinary people and the warmth of daily life. An illegal agent codenamed “Barsky,” after living in the United States for many years, said one sentence: “What ultimately changed my attitude was the ordinary and kind people I met in daily life. I felt my enemy was not really evil. So I always hoped to finally find the evil enemy, but later, at the insurance company, I still couldn’t find one.”

The man of a thousand faces and the Cambridge Five

Rudolf Abel’s real name was William Fisher. Born in Moscow in 1904, he was fluent in six languages and was called the “Man of a Thousand Faces.” He could convincingly play any role. In 1948 he was sent to the United States, living in New York as an artist and photographer while actually coordinating the Soviet nuclear intelligence spy network in America. His network included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953.

Abel was eventually exposed by a colleague’s defection and arrested by the FBI in 1957. After his arrest, he did one thing: under the noses of American agents, he destroyed or discarded his codebooks, telegram drafts, and microfilm one by one. In 1962, the Soviet Union exchanged him for Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot shot down over the USSR. Spielberg later adapted the story into the film Bridge of Spies.

If Abel represented the KGB’s capability in depth, the “Cambridge Five” represented its achievement in height.

The five members, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Harold “Kim” Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, all came from Cambridge University and were committed communists. After leaving Cambridge, they occupied important positions in the British Foreign Office, MI5, and MI6. The most destructive was Philby. He once became head of the counter-Soviet department of the British Secret Intelligence Service. A Soviet spy sat at the core of British counterintelligence.

In the first six months of 1945 alone, Burgess personally submitted 389 top-secret British government documents to the KGB. In December 1949, he submitted another 168.

But the Mitrokhin Archive revealed a less grand side. The KGB was not entirely at ease with Burgess and Maclean. The archive described Burgess as “constantly in a state of drunkenness.” Once, as he walked out of a pub, he dropped a folder he had taken from the Foreign Office on the sidewalk. Maclean was described as “constantly drunk,” “not very good at keeping secrets,” and even revealed his identity as a spy to his lover and brother while drunk.

These human weaknesses illustrate one thing: the KGB’s success did not depend on flawless super-spies. It depended on a systematic engineering project capable of exploiting human complexity, ideological conviction, and social relationships.

Swallows and crows

The KGB had a system specifically for training male and female sexual spies. Female spies were called “swallows”; male spies were called “crows.”

They did not need to steal intelligence or build spy networks. They “simply used their physical assets to trap prey in the most effective way.” Training began with psychological breakdown: new trainees were required to watch pornographic films and then take an “exam.” After that came a more systematic training phase, including recording trainees’ simulated sexual acts with wide-angle lenses for instructors and other trainees to observe, comment on, and improve.

A “swallow” who defected to the West, Kalinina, revealed through her own experience that the purpose of this training was to turn “formerly innocent and pure girls into cynical prostitutes who could sleep with any man without a shred of shame.”

At the operational level, the KGB formed the “Vympel” special forces unit specifically for covert operations abroad. On August 19, 1981, the Soviet Council of Ministers and the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held a secret meeting and approved the formation of this “top-secret detachment” within the KGB system, listing it under Directorate S of the KGB, the foreign covert intelligence directorate.

Vympel’s predecessor was the temporary “Zenith-2” detachment formed for Operation Storm-333. On December 27, 1979, about 700 Soviet elite special forces, including Alpha Group, the predecessor units of Vympel, and the GRU’s Muslim Battalion, launched a raid on Afghan President Amin’s residence. Dressed in Afghan khaki robes, they stormed the Darul Aman Palace in the cold winter night. Veterans of Alpha Group called the operation one of the most successful in the unit’s history.

The Mitrokhin archive: the part of the iceberg above water

Vasili Mitrokhin worked in the KGB for 12 years. Starting in 1972, he used his position to secretly copy and organize the classified documents that passed through his hands in the form of notes. In 1992, he defected to Britain with six aluminum suitcases full of notes. The FBI described it as the most thorough intelligence ever obtained through any channel.

The scale of penetration revealed by the archive is astonishing. In France alone, the KGB’s Paris station employed more spies than any other station in a Western country, no fewer than 50, with sources throughout government agencies, intelligence services, business, and the press, including journalists at Agence France-Presse and Le Monde. In the United States, the Soviet Union planted about 1,000 agents over several decades, occupying a full 40 pages of Mitrokhin’s notes. The archive also recorded multiple secret KGB plans against Europe and America: placing bombs near strategic targets, sending agents into the U.S. Capitol to install listening devices, repeatedly stealing classified documents from the U.S. Department of Defense, and attempting to buy off high-level political figures in the United States and Europe.

The other side of this archive is its limitations. Mitrokhin’s records were documents he personally handled or came into contact with. They were not the full picture of KGB activity. What they reveal is the part of the iceberg above water.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union planted nearly 200 spies in Britain. After the Cold War ended, the Russian Federal Security Service inherited most of the KGB’s domestic security functions. The Foreign Intelligence Service inherited the foreign intelligence functions of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. A 2025 book on Russian deep-cover spies traced this system from its Bolshevik origins to the Putin era, pointing out that Soviet and Russian spy managers invested enormous resources in training and deploying “illegals.”

Two photographs

The photograph of Hanning being taken from his home is placed side by side with a photograph of him in the Bundestag twenty years earlier.

In the 2006 photo, he wears a dark suit, stands behind the podium in the Bundestag, one hand on his speech, eyes level ahead. In the 2026 photo, he wears a casual jacket, his arms held by police, his hair completely white, his expression somewhere between confusion and exhaustion.

The twenty years between the two photographs are exactly the twenty years after the end of the Cold War. Why did the BND’s internal classified management mechanism fail? How did a former senior official, through a former subordinate still holding an important post at the BND, continue to obtain about 2,000 sensitive documents over more than a decade? These questions have no answers.

German media reports deliberately avoid linking the case to Russia. This caution may precisely reflect the complex nature of the KGB’s legacy: what it left behind is not just an organization that has been dissolved, but an entire operating logic. That logic includes long-term cultivation of elite strata in target countries, precise exploitation of personal relationships and chains of interest, and continuous exploration of the gray zone between “legal identity” and “illegal identity.”

The Hanning case is not a traditional espionage case. There was no direct command from a foreign intelligence agency, no interception of secret communication devices, no surveillance of meeting places. It is more like a former senior intelligence official using the professional networks and personal relationships formed during the Cold War to continue the “intelligence work” he was familiar with after retirement.

This pattern blurs the boundary between state espionage and private commercial activity. It also blurs the boundary between the Cold War and the post-Cold War era.