KGB

From Acw

An acronym, meaning Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or State Security Committee.

The KGB is the USSR's central security, espionage, and secret policing organisation, although it shares the first two of these roles with the GRU (Military Intelligence). As a result, the rivalry between these two organisations is intense.

History

The KGB has a long and unbroken history, beginning with its inception in 1954 as an umbrella organisation for all internal and external security threats to the Soviet Union.

The Lost Starling

Although, technically, the KGB was not founded until 1954, the unverifiable, but popular story of the 'Lost Starling' is often cited as one of the chief motives behind its creation. It is worth noting that despite the claims made by the Commissariat of the Exterior, the KGB has neither confirmed or denied any of the allegations - nor has the GRU, the other extant player in the drama.

At its most basic level, the myth goes that at the height of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had an informer or agent at the highest levels of the Nazi war machine. This informer, according to various tales, warned of Operation Barbarossa, the mass production of Messerchmit 262's, the Nazi nuclear program, and supposedly every other German advance, innovation, or scheme that tellers of the tale care to bring up. The agent's codename was 'Starling', and he had been a member of the Nazi party since its earliest days, before becoming disillusioned with the injustices inherent in the Nazi system - becoming a fervent Communist. He was, perhaps, the single greatest asset that the Soviet Union possessed in the Great Patriotic War.

Needless to say, 'Starling' was hot property amongst the numerous intelligence departments and agencies operating during the war - foremost amongst them the NKGB, fore-runner of the KGB. In 'Starling', everyone and their boss saw a ticket to the very top of the command structure, and the ear of Stalin himself, who had been chastened by his dismissal of the warnings of Barbarossa. As the purges swung fully into gear near the end of the war, they became a powerful weapon in the battle for control of 'Starling', with whole branches apparently wiped out indiscriminately by factions of the NKGB and GRU (or their predecessors). However, in early 1946, it became clear that the flow of information had dried up. Stalin himself appointed Lazar Kaganovich, a senior bureaucrat with intelligence experience, but who, as Director of Heavy Industry, had been separate from the fighting, to investigate why. It soon became clear to Kaganovich, and a furious Stalin, that 'Starling' had simply been lost - in the fighting, every man who knew the identity of Starling, and all avenues by which he could be contacted had simply been exterminated. An unpopular factional warlord, by the name of Lavrenty Beria, took the fall for the debacle, but virtually every member of the intelligence community had a hand in it.

The NKGB was reorganised - in extremely bloody fashion, and largely by its own personnel. After a year of thorough house-cleaning, it was rechristened the MGB, in October 1946, under the control of Beria's rival, Georgy Malenkov, subsuming all other civilian groups but for the MVD, or Ministry of Internal Affairs. After Stalin's death in 1953, Malenkov moved to take power, by merging the MGB and MVD under his control, but was instead arrested and executed for treason by Red Army officers under the sway of Nikita Khrushchev. The agencies were broken up again, into the MVD, now effectively reduced to a police force, and the KGB, with wide-ranging power over all internal and external threats to the Soviet state's security, and answering only to the Council of Ministers, later the Supreme Soviet.

The story of the greatest bungle in Soviet intelligence history was in wide circulation within the Communist Party by the late 1960s, but was not officially recognised by the USSR until 2014, when the Commissariat of the Exterior confirmed them as part of a propaganda offensive to overshadow the 50th anniversary of Hitler's death. Shaming the KGB, at the time a chief rival of the Commmissariat regarding foreign policy, was probably also an unspoken objective.

According to declassified documents tabled in 2014, investigations later proved that 'Starling' was almost certainly celebrated Nazi high official Martin Bormann, who headed the Reichs Chancellory until his retirement in 1971.

The Cambridge Five

The Migration Crises & The Prague Sit-in

The Chernikov Disaster

The Palace Coup

The Hamelin Insertion Failure and the Nest of Rats

In 2347, Secretary Bazhenov was just starting to feel the onset of Parkinsons', and the treatments at the Mars Dacha he was visiting were not working. With the leader of the Supreme Soviet thus ailing, the young and ambitious Defence Secretary, Reynia Simanova Baguta, launched the first of many extremely daring initiatives. Very few details have emerged since the dramatic failure of the plan, known as the "Piper Insertion" or "Operation Hamelin". It appears that a KGB intelligence scoop pointed strongly to the existence of a CIA enclave, codenamed the "Rathole" operating out of Dostoyevsky, the famed "Spookrock" of the interplanetary intelligence community. With such close proximity to the largest Soviet extrasolar colony, this was clearly untenable, and Baguta devised a brutal and unforgiving solution - the type she would become infamous for.

Under Baguta's dynamic leadership, and due mainly to her charismatic personality, the plans for this operation involved the closest co-operation between the KGB and GRU since their inception. An elite team of SPETZNAZ commandos were to be covertly infiltrated onto Spookrock, their aim to destroy utterly any suspected American presence. The KGB were to provide on-the-ground assistance with their agents already in place. There were even whispers of the Grey Man's involvement - this was a massive and uncompromising operation.

The insertion was an utter failure. Dostoyevsky's advanced Early Warning Systems located the SPETZNAZ team's stealth craft well before it reached insertion orbit, and hailed the captain. It is unknown exactly what transpired, though in their statement on the debacle, the Circle of Dostoyevsky stated that the Captain of the vessel failed to respond the the orders to stand dwon, and were thus destroyed. If this is so, it is certainly within the Circle's edicts on space traffic around Dostoyevsky - no ship may enter without express permission of the Circle, or face summary destruction. The silence of the Soviet leadership on this issue suggests that they recognise the futility of protesting such an uncompromising law.

The botched "Operation Hamelin" nevertheless ushered in an unprecedented era of co-operation between the two Soviet intelligence agencies. KGB agents were allowed access to GRU training, while GRU operations benefited from KGB intelligence files and counter-intelligence maneuvers. A second attempt to destroy the American presence on Spookrock met with success, and was widely touted in the media as a Soviet victory over the capitalist counter-revolutionaries. However, this truce was broken suddenly and unexpectedly in 2364. Again, details are sketchy, but most analysts assume that the three high-ranking KGB officers who were brutally assassinated in 2359 and 2361 were either killed by GRU operatives, or were themselves GRU plants, exposed and killed by the KGB in a house-cleaning operation. Whichever they were, the eradication of this "Nest of Rats", as the intelligence community came to call the incident, seems to have cooled relations between the KGB and the GRU.

Current Activities

Known Resources

The 'Grey Man'

It is unknown whether this is a single operative or a number of high-level agents operating under the same cover. Rumours of this chameleonic agent are sketchy at best and few and far between.

Known Personnel