KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, 1990

Here is the never-before-told story of the KGB--full of stunning revelations, fascinating characters, and crucial moments in history--much of it based on the knowledge of an ex-KGB officer who served as a double agent for nearly twelve years. The most thorough and enthralling history ever of Soviet intelligence. 16-page photo insert.   https://books.google.com/books?id=SCIFAQAAIAAJ&dq=gordievsky%20andrew%20kgb&source=gbs_book_other_versions

-Oleg Gordievsky, ex-KGB

  Gordievsky’s and Andrew’s book claims White House aide Hopkins met regularly with Iskhak Akhmerov….and says Hopkins gradually became an ardent admirer of Stalin and helped persuade Roosevelt to aid the Soviet war effort in 1941 and to give the Soviets free rein in Eastern Europe as the war ended.  

-FDR and Hopkins, both from Wall Street

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/10/18/kgb-defectors-book-revives-british-spy-debate/04087d3a-1a41-4298-8a9f-a657876440cc/?utm_term=.412257b1aace

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- I. Akhemerov, head of KGB ops in USA       http://www.theblackvault.com/documents/nsa/venona/monographs/monograph-3.images.html

There were two chiefs of Soviet Intelligence in the United States during World War II.  One was Vassiliy Zarubin, head of the "legal" station.  The other was Iskhak Akhmerov, head of the "illegal" station. The difference was that Zarubin was employed at the Soviet Embassy as Third, later Second Secretary and had diplomatic immunity. Akhmerov pretended to be an American and had an American birth certificate and passport, which had been illegally secured for him in 1934.  He even registered for the draft under the pseudonym William Grienke, the name on his birth certificate.  He had a fur and clothing business in Baltimore as a cover.  The Americans he met were not supposed to pay attention to his Russian accent but to concentrate on his Iowa-born wife….

A February 10, 1944 letter from the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover to Harry Hopkins for President Roosevelt complained that "a liaison arrangement has been perfected between the Office of Strategic Services and the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD)."  According to Vassiliev's "White Notebook #1" (page 87), Akhmerov had reported that "Hoover has objected to the OSS agreement with Moscow in a letter to Hopkins that was passed along to Roosevelt and sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  The USSR's objective is to get into state secrets."   However, the American "powers that be" said they saw no grounds to alter the OSS-NKVD agreement.  Nevertheless Akhmerov "warns that Hoover will interfere with cooperation" according to the Vassiliev notes.  A later listing of documents showed that the OSS had supplied the Soviets with "lists of its operatives in territory occupied by the Soviet Army" ("White Notebook #1" page 105). 

In the 1980s, Oleg Gordievsky, who had served as a British undercover agent in the KGB, reported shocking news to his British handlers.  When he was a young officer, Gordievsky attended a lecture given by Iskhak Akhmerov.  According to the KGB official, Akhmerov called Hopkins "the most important of all Soviet war-time agents in the United States" [and] "the closest and most trusted advisor of President Roosevelt.”  When Gordievsky discussed this with other KGB officers, "All were agreed that Hopkins had been an agent of major significance." The British Intelligence Service, MI6, decided after Gordievsky escaped from the Soviet Union, to have him write a book with the British academic Christopher Andrew (KGB: The Inside Story, Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Harper Collins, 1990, page 287). Andrew concluded that Hopkins was an "unconscious" agent.

When I spoke with Gordievsky, in 1995, we agreed that the Venona message reporting on a conversation with only Roosevelt, Truman, and a third person present had to come from Hopkins. Akhmerov was exactly right.  https://www.worldviewweekend.com/news/article/valuable-new-book-kgb

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In Bradley Smith's Shadow Warriors (non-fction), 1983 one finds info on the visit of OSS chief Donovan to KGB/NKVD chief, Lt.-Gen. Fitkin (shown above), at Lubyanka in Mosocw in late December 1943.  It was Molotov and FDR-special rep. Averill Harriman who cleared, covertly of course, this linkup, as Bradley Smith points out.  -r          snippets from that book follow:

https://books.google.com/books?id=TQ1nAAAAMAAJ&q=bradley+smith+shadow+warriors&dq=bradley+smith+shadow+warriors&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2__udtuDYAhXJ7YMKHfOIBMIQ6AEIKTAA

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March 2013   Asked whether he thought there was any prospect of democratic change in Russia – an idea nurtured by anti-Kremlin street protests in 2010 and 2011 – Gorbievsky replied: "What a naive question!"   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/11/russian-spies-britain-oleg-gordievsky

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https://books.google.com/books?id=6_PeAAAAMAAJ&dq=next+step+execution+gordievsky&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=michael+foot

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-Michael Foot

  3-5-2010   This week Gordievsky gave me his full account.  At the end of the 1940s, he said, when Foot was editor and managing director of the Left-wing paper Tribune (he continued in the latter role until 1974), the KGB decided that he was “progressive”.  By this they meant that he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, at that time run by the mass-murderer Joseph Stalin.  Their officers in London, describing themselves as diplomats, approached Foot.  He readily agreed to see them in Tribune’s offices.  There they chatted to him and praised the paper, which was always short of money.  They left a £10 note (about £250 in today’s values) in his jacket pocket. 

For nearly 20 years, these meetings continued, roughly monthly. Foot did not conceal them, exactly, but they were not publicly known.  He accepted the money, which was slipped into his pocket in a way which allowed him to ignore it, each time the KGB came. Foot freely disclosed information about the Labour movement to them.  He told them which politicians and trade union leaders were pro-Soviet, even suggesting which union bosses should be given the present of Soviet-funded holidays on the Black Sea. 

A leading supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Foot also passed on what he knew about debates over nuclear weapons.  In return, the KGB gave him drafts of articles encouraging British disarmament which he could then edit and publish, unattributed to their real source, in Tribune.  There was no protest by Foot to the KGB over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and he quite often visited the Soviet Union to a top-level welcome.  The KGB classified him as an agent, codenamed BOOT. 

In 1968, Foot expressed disquiet at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and wanted to meet the KGB less regularly.  They reclassified him as a “confidential contact”, and this he remained when a Cabinet minister in the governments of the 1970s.  The link seems to have been broken off, however, before he became leader of the Labour Party in 1980, and never resumed (although the KGB asked Gordievsky to revive it in 1985, months before he defected). 

It is important to understand that Foot would not have known that he was considered an agent.  That was an internal classification of the KGB – a scalp for the bureaucracy.  There is no evidence that he passed on state secrets.  He probably considered that he was simply keeping the Soviet Union well informed in the interests of peace. 

It is not clear why Foot took the cash, but he probably did not blow it on himself.  Most likely, he used it to pay petty bills for Tribune, accepting the tainted money because he thought it was all in a good cause.  You could not say he was a Communist traitor. 

What you can say, though, is that he was shockingly naïf, and shockingly vain.  Did he not know that it is a classic ploy of secret services to compromise people with money?  Did he believe he was so righteous that he was above the normal moral rules?  Did it not bother him – who always had the cause of liberty on his lips – that, for decades, he made a bargain with the greatest totalitarian tyranny in the world?  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/7377111/Was-Foot-a-national-treasure-or-the-KGBs-useful-idiot.html
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from The Black Chamber by H. Yardley, 1931    https://books.google.com/books?id=wfU6AAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=black+chamber+yardley&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjg5b7j1uDYAhVLz2MKHYUdCwQQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=black%20chamber%20yardley&f=false

-chapter 1            

-Yardley  http://www.nndb.com/people/953/000023884/

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