Intelligence Agencies



Intelligence Agencies

Russian intelligence agencies and People's Republic of China

When looking at the morass and moral and economic decadence into which the former Soviet Union seems permanently mired, one cannot help but wonder just what accounted for its meteoric rise to the largest military power in history. The answer, however, is so simple as to be unbelievable to many Western scholars who for decades had accepted socialism and its variant communism, even with its unworkable economy, as a legitimate alternative to Western democracy and our free enterprise system. The answer is that the Soviet intelligence services successfully stole virtually all the West's military and defense technology secrets, thereby saving the time and enormous cost of research and development. They then spent the bulk of their GNP on building and fielding weapons in large inefficient government owned factories, while ignoring the building of a strong private- sector economy to fill the needs and wants of their people. Many of us remember the crowds of Russians queued up during the height of their world-power status to buy their daily bread from government-owned bakeries. Stalin's own words might best explain the mission of the Soviet Union's intelligence services, the KGB and the GRU (military intelligence), when he said that he wanted only the secrets locked in the American safes. In carrying out Stalin's orders, Soviet intelligence was incredibly successful(2).

Similarities and Differences

The Russian and Chinese intelligence services have seen and understood the change from military competition to worldwide economic competition, have completed the shift in their intelligence collection requirements accordingly, and have now become masters of economic and industrial espionage. This shift to economic and industrial espionage is also reflected by the Russian and Chinese military planners who have stated that in the future they must be prepared to engage in both offensive and defensive information operations and economic warfare. In the meantime and until Russia is back on its feet, they will rely on their continuing development of newer, modern weapons systems, such as the SU-34 bomber, MiG-31 fighter, multi-purpose nuclear submarine launched missile, and the land-mobile SS-29 ICBM, as their place-holders at the super-power table(2). Russian intelligence is attacking other advanced countries as well. According to Japan's largest daily newspaper, Japanese authorities revealed on February 3, 1998, that Russian agents have conducted extensive industrial and economic espionage to collect technical information during the last decade. Similar stories have appeared in South Korea and all other countries with advanced technology commercial industries(4).  

Domestic Power/Influence Do Their Intelligence Agencies

The quest for technological information appears to have motivated U.S.-Soviet espionage for much of the Cold War, particularly its early years as the so-called "arms race" and "space race" heated up, and it became increasingly clear that a technological lag by either country could spell disaster in the event of war(5). While this main goal of espionage between the superpowers remained constant during the Cold War, the operation did go through changes between 1945 and 1991. Ironically, espionage between the two countries increased with the onset of détènte in 1972, although it arguably became more covert. Late Cold War espionage had a different character, however. Motivated in the early years chiefly by ideological convictions--an overwhelming majority of early Soviet spies were members of the American Communist Party--by the ...