Dare to Read: Highly Classified Cold War Document

The CIA and the KGB have always been the masters of intrigue & secrecy in a world where these two monoliths would challenge each other in a world of intrigue, mysticism & secrecy. These Intelligence Agencies would dare each other in accomplishing covert missions in many different countries around the world. Their competing for global supremacy under the guise of national security would usually cost lives of the innocent & the not so innocent & many of those who simply got in the way. The KGB, which is the Russian branch of Intelligence would go on to continuously challenge the US branch of Intelligence known as The CIA for decades or long after the end of WWII.

This would bring about the Cold War in which two superpowers would challenge the rest of the world in who brings about its nation’s ideology. The CIA & the KGB would war against each other for decades throughout the Cold War, launching countless campaigns against each other that resulted in proxy wars, assassinations, and even entire cultural revolutions. The rivalry between these two monolithic spy agencies nonetheless very often helped prevent an all out nuclear war. Both agencies would infiltrate governments of the world & subvert at all levels. Successful campaigns would be launched countless times against each other for full control of the world through what we civilians understand to be CAPITALISM vs COMMUNISM or DEMOCRACY vs SOCIALISM. During the 45 frigid years of Cold War & during World War II, both intelligence agencies actually teamed up against the rise of the Nazis & to inevitably kidnap Nazi scientist with a promise of wealth & a new start at life as both the USSR & the United States to begin their race to the moon or the start of space travel after the Nazi inspired V2 rockets of war. However, though it was American president Franklin Roosevelt who was really concerned about the lack of American intelligence capabilities, American isolationism, which had dictated so much of the USA foreign policy before and after World War I, had given rise to a wholly insular attitude toward the rest of the world amongst American leadership.

Though most powers in Europe would frequently make use of covert intelligence & their own agents to misinform & rival each other and even against America, which found itself with no such capabilities at the start of World War II, the British needed their American allies properly in the fight and eventually dispatched one of their intelligence chiefs to the US in order to teach their rebellious colonists on how to undertake the dastardly acts of ungentlemanly warfare. From this initial training program, the office of strategic services (OSS) was born and American commandos would undertake many daring missions throughout the war. After the war, the United States realised it could no longer afford to ignore the rest of the world, especially since Europe had a bad record of giving rise to World Wars every couple of decades or so. The national security act of 1947 established both the national security council, which would advise the president on defence and intelligence matters, and the central intelligence agency would be powered with spying & monitoring in both peacetime and wartime intelligence gathering.

While the Americans were being forcefully introduced into foreign intrigue, the Russians were already experts in the art of intelligence gathering, known as the KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti or The Committee. The KGB or The Committee of First State Security was formed in 1954 and formally gathered together Soviet Intelligence Operatives under one umbrella but even before it was established, the men that formed the KGB were seasoned masters of spy craft themselves & were descendants of the early communist spies who helped to topple the Czars and establish the Soviet Union. With the rise of income inequality and disillusionment with capitalism, many throughout Europe & most Soviet Intelligence Agents found many allies with their already established network throughout the world, and by the time World War II started, they had so many agents operating inside France, great Britain and America that Stalin already knew about his allies & military developments almost at the same time they did. The KGB would itself become one of the most legendary spy agencies of all time and develop a reputation for ruthless efficiency that made its agents to be feared all around the world.

The truth is that KGB agents were masters of their craft and could play any role they needed to masterfully play from deadly assassin to charming, confidant, coaxing, manipulating & forcing their targets to divulge their deepest secrets. Two of the world's most powerful intelligence agencies, would spread their secret web of intrigue all over the continents. Americans may have been new to the spy game when the CIA was first established, but what they lacked in experience and technique, they more than made up for in daring missions & risky operations. In May, 1962 CIA agents discovered highly classified information on Russia’s Intelligence that their Soviet members were abandoning a research facility deep in the Arctic. You could only imagine the Arctic In 1962 & its extremely ice cold conditions. Temperatures were so cold that shifting ice made the Soviet built runway unusable with supplies dependent on delivery via aircraft.

The decision was made to pull the researchers out while a transport aircraft could still land with the base, completely abandoned. The CIA leaped on the opportunity to gather intelligence on Soviet research. The freezing conditions had made the runway unusable & the weather conditions & almost impossible to work in, fearing that the Soviets could return. The CIA decided that there was only one way to get men into the facility & that they would have to parachute in. Despite freezing cold Arctic winds gusting at high speed. What would be a suicide mission for most turned out to be one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War, successfully parachuting down to the station in near whiteout conditions. CIA agents immediately plundered the facility of all useful intelligence and a few days later their military aircraft pickup arrived. Yet there was no way any aircraft could land on the already frozen runway. Therefore, the CIA had developed a unique extraction technique pioneered in the second world war, but never used before in the extreme conditions of the Arctic.

The men on the ground filled three balloons with helium and floated them into the sky. The sky hook system as it was later known as & was nothing more than a hook at the end of a winch which was itself attached to the interior storage Bay of an aircraft. The aircraft would fly the hook into alignment, hoisted up by the balloon, and then the entire line would be winched up into the plane. Attached to the first balloon was 150 pounds of secret Soviet equipment in documents & the two agents on the ground, and knowing that the Skyhook system was extremely dangerous and thus deciding that it was more important the secret equipment and documents be rescued than them. Despite very low visibility and strong winds, the beast 17 managed to snag the first balloon and hoist it up into its cargo well and two passes later, the agents on the ground were themselves winched to safety, dangling beneath a plane, moving over 150 miles per hour through Arctic weather.

The CIA had just proven that any lack of experience in technique on its part was more than made up for in sheer courage and ingenuity. The data recovered showed that the Soviets had been working on techniques to detect American subs under the Arctic ice and to attack them, and it helped keep the US subs hidden from prying Soviet eyes. The United States may have led the way in computer technology, but the KGB was happy to exploit America's use of its advanced computer networks for its own benefit. In the late 1960s the US created ARPANET or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. This fledgling internet was used by US research labs to share data nationally on secret defence projects. Then the space shuttle & the space programme would soon be announced shortly after. After the successes of the Apollo program, the Soviets initially believed that the shuttle was secretly a space-based bomber mission project in which it was something that could threaten the entire Soviet Union, as though there was a new potential in warfare on the battlefield by dropping or unloading a mass detonation equipment from the realm of outer space.

The Premiere also known as the former General Secretary of The Central Committee of the Communist party Leonid Brezhnev immediately tasked the KGB with plundering all the secrets of the shuttle and demanded that the Soviet Union to instruct their Military Industrial Commission to create their own model of this peculiar looking aircraft. Work on the shuttle progressed throughout various labs across the US in the cooperating research teams as this accelerated the military’s interest in the making use of ARPANET for militarised use & dependancy to potential space exploration. A growing threat of espionage did increase through both Superpowers as Russian agents would successfully transfer or swap data back and forth if agents were discovered, as this was known as the double agent or the action of a triple agent if their lives were spared from imprisonment or execution. Being aware of ARPANET's existence would cause constant conspiracies, suspicion & paranoia to grow between both parties. However soon after the Soviet spies inside the US did eventually infiltrate this giant computer network, they tore down troves of data about the shuttle only to discover & by learning that it was only a peacetime reusable space vehicle and not a secret space weapon or bomber as most Soviets had suspected.

Not wanting to be outdone by the US once more in the realm of space exploration, Premiere Brezhnev ordered Soviet scientists to make full use of the stolen information resulting in the Buran, a Soviet copy of the space shuttle. In many ways, the Buran was actually superior to the American shuttle despite using stolen information from which to base their copy and the fact that it only ever flew once.

This is because the American shuttle program was stalled constantly by outside pressures & especially by various politicians and shifting priorities which would constantly change in what the core mission of the shuttle should be & its evolving process from creation to finish. For in creating a weapon then that could actually be a declaration of war at that intense time of paranoia & still getting over a world war. It was forced to compromise in order to achieve a wider range of capabilities rather than a specific set of objectives. The shuttle was a fundamentally flawed design, but who knows which agents foreign or national could have had some form of influence whether directly or indirectly for that type of information could be locked away inside a hidden bunker for the rest of time.

The Soviet version on the other hand, benefited from a single vision that drove its development and the fact that Soviet lawmakers left its design almost solely in the hands of its chief architect, Valentine Glushko. While the Soviet Union was training and arming North Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam war, it had provided great amounts of aid to the North Koreans and the Chinese during the Korean War a decade before that. The CIA however got their chance to take its revenge when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Even before a single Soviet tank rolled into Afghanistan, the American agents had already uncovered intelligence six months prior to the invasion that showed that the Soviets were about to invade.

CIA agents were already busy training Soviet Mujahideen (Islamist guerrilla fighters) and arming them with modern anti-tank & anti air-craft equipment. Much to the surprise of the Soviet commanders, the moment the Soviet troops stepped foot into Afghanistan, they came under immense fire from advanced precision weapons such as stinger missiles, which would take down nearly 300 helicopters and a hundred airplanes. Grooming contacts in the Pakistani government, CIA operatives ensured that shipments of weapons, medicines, and other vital supplies made their way to Afghan warriors, who put up such a stiff resistance that the Soviet Union was forced to withdraw a decade later. While many factors played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and America's triumph in the Cold War, the quagmire of manpower and capital that the CIA had turned Afghanistan into for the Soviets, would become a key factor in bankrupting the Soviet Union. Even well before the KGB would become an official organisation the men who established the legendary spy agency had already achieved the greatest intelligence coup, the 20th century would ever see.

In the years before World War II, modern physics hinted at a bomb with the potential for explosive power that could only be described as apocalyptic, dubbed the atomic bomb. Various nations around the world launched research programs in a frantic race to be the first to develop these doomsday weapons of mass destruction.

At the time, many of the world's top physicists lived in Germany or territories, which quickly fell under German influence and which they fled their Homeland seeking safety in the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain and the US. As World War II began, the British undertook a great effort to gather up as many of these brilliant physicists as they could, in order to keep them from falling into Nazi hands. The Soviet Union lacked the scientific expertise of Great Britain or the US however, and in a bid to ensure it was not left out of the race to develop a nuclear arms or weaponry, the Soviet Union would quickly get to work infiltrating the nuclear programs of Great Britain and the United States.

If the Soviets could not develop their own bomb, they would steal the knowledge on how to build one from their allies & by putting their agents out in the field to work.

German refugee theoretical physicists, Klaus Fuchs was one of the many scientists scooped up by the British who completely accommodated & vetted the young scientists as they were then quickly shipped into the United States, where the world's greatest concentration of scientific genius would be gathered with a single goal, “Beat the Nazis to a working atomic bomb.”

Klaus Fuchs proved an invaluable addition to the Manhattan project and his work sped along the development of a working bomb. Unfortunately for the US and Great Britain though, Klaus Fuchs was also a Soviet agent recruited by Soviet intelligence and groomed to spy on their behalf. Klaus Fuchs was just one of many Soviet spies who had penetrated the Manhattan project so deeply that Soviet intelligence knew about its existence even before the American FBI did.

The stolen work would ensure that just four years after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had its own nuclear weapon & capabilities. Both the CIA and the KGB are legendary agencies in their own rights and both sides scored incredible victories against each other throughout the 45 years of the Cold War. Yet in the end, the KGB is widely acknowledged by intelligence officials around the world, as being this superior spy agency with capabilities so extensive that for almost 10 years the CIA feared recruiting any Soviet agents for fear of being penetrated by moles.

While the US enjoyed the security of two oceans for the first half of the 20th century, Russian agents were fighting a covert war against their own czars and eventually against the other great powers of Europe. However this vast experience of wartime & intelligence gathering would help to produce one of the most sophisticated networking and capable spy agencies that the world has ever known.

And despite its eventual end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, its capabilities have been passed onto a new generation of Intelligence Agents who now work for the Russian Federal Security Bureau (The RFSB). The cyber war between the CIA and the RFSB is already happening and the superiority of these spy agencies on a global scale outside of National interest has always been the case & is still in full operation as the KGB & the CIA are still working just as hard to subvert, challenge & threaten governments that appear to challenge their idea of the status quo.