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I think that there are several points about the Gorsky memo that need to be kept in mind. As short-hand we refer to it as a KGB document but note that it is dated December 1948. In the autumn of 1947 the Soviet government reorganized its foreign intelligence agencies. What we refer to as the KGB (and its institutional predecessors MVD, MGB, NKGB, NKVD, OGPU, GPU, Cheka) was then the foreign intelligence directorate of the MGB, Ministry of State Security. The MGB foreign intelligence directorate was combined with the foreign intelligence arm of Soviet military intelligence, GRU, to form an entirely new combined agency, the Committee of Information, KI. The KI was in part inspired by the U.S. creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and in theory combined or coordinated all foreign intelligence. The MGB remained as a separate agency but with only domestic responsibilities. (One may note that "KI" occurs in the opening part of Vassiliev's notes.) The new KI not only combined the human intelligence arms of the former MGB and GRU, it also combined the MGB's Fifth (Cipher) Directorate with the GRU's cipher arm to form the Seventh Department of the KI. This was not, however, a happy merger. The Soviet military argued strongly that it needed a dedicated foreign military intelligence arm as well as a combat battle-field intelligence arm. In the summer of 1948 the military personnel in KI were returned to the Soviet military to reconstitute a foreign military intelligence arm of the GRU but under guidelines to stick strictly to military matters. KI sections dealing with the new East Bloc and Soviet emigres were returned to the MGB in late 1948. Finally, in 1951 the KI itself returned to the MGB, and the latter evolved into the KGB in 1954. The point here is that at the time Gorsky wrote this memo Soviet intelligence organization was in flux. To impose on this era the strict separation of KGB from GRU of the high Cold War is anachronistic. {One should also note that briefly in the late 1930s there was a similar quasi-merger when in 1937 the Fourth Department of the GRU transferred from Commissariat of Defense to Commissariat of Internal affairs, NKVD, which, of course already had a foreign intelligence arm. Just as in 1948, the Red Army also succeeded in getting its the foreign intelligence arm back, but in the process losing some of its assets to the increasingly powerful NKVD.) So, the Gorsky memo is a Committee of Information memo, a memo of an agency that had been created with a mandate of combining and coordinating all Soviet intelligence and briefly did control both GRU and what became the KGB. Additionally, look at the subject of the memo. Its subject is the crippling of Soviet intelligence operations in the United States that took place between late 1945 and late 1948. At the end of WWII the success of Soviet espionage in the United States was by any standards remarkable in the number of sources that had been developed and the size of its networks. Yet much of this collapsed due largely to five defectors: Elizabeth Bentley, Louise Budenz, Hede Massing, Whittaker Chambers, and Alexander Koral. (Koral did not so much defect as broke, and only partially, under FBI interrogation.) The number of Soviet sources compromised by these five is astounding. Now, any account of the crippling of Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S. in the late 1940s must include Whittaker Chambers. Gorsky's memo could not leave Chambers out, no matter which agency his network originally reported to in the mid-1930s. Although Chambers' mid-30s network reported to GRU, after he dropped out of Soviet service in 1938, his network was very likely dismantled and his sources temporarily put on ice to see if Chambers went to American security officials and if any investigation occurred. It didn't. However, further confusing this was Stalin's purge of his foreign intelligence services, and several GRU and KGB officers in the U.S. were recalled, leading to additional temporary disarray in Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S. When new GRU and KGB officers reached the U.S. and reactivated Chambers' sources, many of them were reactivated in the early 1940s by KGB, not GRU. Thus one sees many of those Chambers discussed as part of his mid-30s GRU-linked network showing up in the deciphered KGB cables of the Venona project as sources for KGB networks in 1942-1945. Consequently, Chambers finally providing a full account of his espionage work, which he did not do until November 1948, not only affected GRU but affected KGB, and Gorsky's memo had to take into account Chambers as well as Budenz, Bentley, Koral, and Massing. One should also note that the Massings had once been GRU and had shifted to KGB in the mid-1930s. As the KGB foreign intelligence service grew in the 1930s and eventually surpassed the GRU, it picked up a number of officers and agents from the GRU. Walter Krivitsky in his autobiography discusses his shift from GRU to KGB in the 1930s, for example. There were eras when GRU and KGB were strictly separated but others where they overlapped. John Earl Haynes
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