All language subtitles for KGB.The.Sword.and.the.Shield.2of3.Beria.and.Co.1080p.HDTV.x264.AC3.MVGroup.org_track3_[eng]

For the past century, Russian history

has also been the history
of its security services.

They were used by the Soviet state
to crush dissent.

Millions suffered at their hands.

But while many things
may have changed in today's Russia,

its security network
is arguably stronger than ever,

and the reason behind that

is the rise of
a lowly, lieutenant-colonel

to president of this vast country.

I know the KGB
better than anyone else

because I was part of
the inside circle.

This is
the story
of the KGB,

told by its
veterans

and its
victims.

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

Such harmless jokes,

told openly
in a Moscow comedy club today,

had to be shared very privately
during the most repressive days

of the Soviet Union.

(STIRRING ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

But the Soviets were projecting
a very different image

through their propaganda.

Workers were shown
striving together for common good.

(LIVELY ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

In the 1920s and '30s,
this view of a utopian society

also inspired communists in the West.

Some were even willing
to collaborate with the Soviets,

against their own governments.

Nowhere would prove more important
to Soviet intelligence

than a leafy English university town

just 80 kilometres north
of the capital, London.

When the KGB looked at Cambridge,

I don't think they could
believe their luck.

It was a very small establishment

where a very small number of people

were educated for all of the highest
positions in British Government.

It was here,
amongst what largely represented

the arrogant elite
of the English class system,

that the Soviets recruited the most
notorious spy ring in history...

..the Cambridge Five.

IAIN LAUCHLAN:
So, this small group of people

were highly corruptible,
highly recruitable.

Many of them were communists,

many of them had all kinds of vices
which could be worked upon

and used against them
in forms of blackmail.

Most of them were very eager as well
to work for the Soviets.

They don't see,
at this moment in time,

that they're lending help
to a monstrous superpower.

They see themselves as helping out

a plucky, small, socialist state
which is surrounded by enemies.

From 1940, these five Cambridge spies

began to leak details of an American
project to build a superweapon -

something so powerful

that it would rock
the world's military equilibrium.

So, when America detonated
the world's first atomic bomb,

Stalin didn't flinch.

KGB spies were already
supplying intelligence,

ensuring the Soviets
would have their own bomb

in the shortest possible time.

MIKHAIL LYUBIMOV:
There was a decision by Stalin

to concentrate on
the atomic project,

and then there was this...
the plans were made.

'Enormous', it was called.

Operation Enormous was run by

Stalin's security chief,
Lavrentiy Beria.

Soon after the war,

the Soviets accelerated
their own nuclear program.

The job of reverse-engineering
fell to physicist Igor Kurchatov.

Each evening, Kurchatov would go
to an office at the Lubyanka

to study papers
gathered by spies in the West.

A team of secretaries transcribed
and translated each new revelation.

Hard technical data was now supplied
by scientist Klaus Fuchs,

a communist who had fled Nazi Germany
in 1933.

He was a key contributor
to the American bomb program

the Manhattan Project.

IAIN LAUCHLAN:
Klaus Fuchs was committed to

helping the Soviets get the bomb,

more, in many ways,
out of a sense of fairness

than out of a sense of loyalty
to the Soviet state.

He didn't believe
that this was a weapon

that should be possessed
by the West alone.

In August 1949,

three trains raced across
the Soviet Union,

towards the Kazakh Steppes,
where the first test was planned.

One carried scientists
and security personnel,

including Lavrentiy Beria.

Another carried soldiers.

And the last carried an atomic bomb -

almost an exact replica

of the American bomb
which had destroyed Nagasaki.

IAIN LAUCHLAN: In the bunker
in Kazakhstan,

while Beria and the scientists
are waiting for the bomb to explode,

the scientists are nervously asking,

"What will happen
if this doesn't work?"

And Beria jokes,
"You'll all be shot."

Uh, they weren't quite clear
whether he was joking or not.

They may well have been shot.

More likely, they would have
ended up in a Gulag

and be working, still,
on the atomic program.

The glory of the Soviet Union
now rested on one moment.

It was 29th of August, 1949.

When the news broke,
the West was in shock.

The question reverberated
around the world -

how could they have
caught up so quickly?

"Does Russia have the atomic bomb?

Please, please, please, excuse me...

And even today, disputes remain

as to whether it was
the scientists or the spies

who played the major part.

Though Russian scientists would go on
to develop their own nuclear weapons,

it was the NKVD's spy network

that first delivered the Soviet Union
superpower status.

Fuchs was always revered by the KGB.

These unique pictures
were taken in a Berlin cemetery

by the East German secret police
in the 1980s.

They show one of the KGB's
top spy masters, Aleksandr Feklisov,

honouring the grave

of the
spy he
ran,

whom he
still
regarded

as one of the Soviet Union's
greatest heroes.

Foreign spies had put Russia
on a par with the United States -

Stalin's highest ambition.

Stalin believed, first of all,

that the Soviet Union had to be
feared and had to be powerful.

After that, he could focus on
building houses

and raising the standard of living.

Military spending soared

while across the country, there were
shortages of almost everything.

But the Russians could turn
even nuclear war

into a joke about life's struggle
as a Soviet citizen.

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

Operation Enormous
was a great success

for NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria.

A handful of well-placed agents

had transformed the Soviet Union
into a superpower.

('FUNERAL MARCH' BY CHOPIN PLAYS)

When Stalin died in 1953,

it seemed likely that his successor
would be Lavrentiy Beria.

Under his stewardship,

the intelligence service had helped
transform the Soviet Union

into a nation powerful enough to
rival the American military might.

Every bit the leader,

Beria addressed the crowds
at Stalin's funeral.

But he hadn't reckoned with
the ambition of the man on his left -

Nikita Khrushchev,

another high-ranking party-official.

Within weeks, Khrushchev mounted
a coup and assumed power,

much to Beria's surprise.

Beria was unaware that Khrushchev had
garnered the support of the army -

the only force
more powerful than his own.

It was a fatal oversight.

Khrushchev had him arrested
on charges of working for the enemy.

What happened next remains a mystery.

IAIN LAUCHLAN: The official version,
then, is that Beria

is put on trial and executed.

One of the strange things about this

is that there are
no official arrest photos of Beria

in the archives that we've seen.

So, we have the word of Khrushchev
to take for it

that Beria is put on trial in
December of 1953, and executed then.

One way or another,
Beria was now gone.

Khrushchev's next move

was to reduce the power of
the security services at home,

reigning in
its powers of suppression.

For those loyal servants inside
the KGB, Khrushchev was a traitor.

For others,
it was the welcome arrival

of a leader who appeared to
believe in greater freedom.

Khrushchev set out
to reposition the Communist Party

as the true defender of the people.

Despite orders from the top

to show more leniency
towards political dissent,

the security forces soon found
other, more discreet ways

to punish prisoners.

Both these men served time here
for anti-Soviet activities,

but they had
very different experiences.

Ivan Mamchur was here under Stalin,
and then Khrushchev.

Zorian Popadiuk was here
30 years later.

The prison system was less draconian
when Zorian Popadiuk was here.

But intimidation was still routine.

As if prison life here
wasn't terrifying enough,

Mamchur was sent to
the Kengir prison camp in Kazakhstan.

In 1954, prompted by Stalin
and Beria's death the previous year

and the promise of reform
under Khrushchev,

inmates here and at other camps

began to demand their basic rights.

When these simple requests
were rejected,

the prisoners took over the camp.

After 40 days, Moscow finally
sent in tanks and soldiers.

Six of the rebel leaders
were executed.

But Khrushchev quickly realised
the need for urgent reform.

Mamchur was released,

along with thousands of others
impatient for a new era.

Khrushchev was bringing
a lighter touch to domestic policy.

But on the world stage,
he was highly confrontational.

The Cold War
reached its height in 1962,

when the world was brought closer
than ever to total destruction.

Ironically, it was the KGB

which would help pull it back
from the brink.

Nikita Khrushchev knew,
from his spies,

that America had secretly deployed
nuclear weapons on mainland Europe,

directly targeting the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev met threat with
counter-threat in America's backyard.

The Soviets placed their missiles
on the Cuban territory.

And in the United States,
they learned about it.

In a story untold until today,

a chance meeting between a KGB agent
and a young woman

alerted Moscow
that America was on to them.

I was, in some way, involved in
that Cuban Missile Crisis.

He was a radio correspondent
in New York at the time.

That was his cover.

I bumped into a young lady
and I invited her to have a drink,

and then she told me
that she has a lover.

"He's a US Air force
reconnaissance pilot.

"He's now on a flight to Cuba."

I said, "Oh, really?

"Could you give me his schedule,

"so we'll meet
in the meantime, then?

"While he's flying,
we'll get together."

And she said, "OK," and she
provided me with the schedule.

So, that was a simple
intelligence operation.

Kalugin reported immediately
to Moscow Centre.

Kennedy mounted
a naval blockade of Cuba

and went public, warning the Soviets

that if any rocket
was fired from Cuba,

US strikes would be swift
and certain.

OLEG KALUGIN: For the first time
in my life, I thought

maybe tomorrow,
the day after tomorrow,

there'll be a major, you know,
nuclear attack - I mean, mutual -

and we will all die.

At the height of the crisis,

the KGB's most important agent
in Washington, Aleksandr Feklisov,

set up a secret
communications channel

between the White House
and Moscow Centre.

Kennedy has filtered, through this
source, a compromise agreement

where they offer an honourable
stand-down for the Soviet Union

to remove their nuclear weapons

and the Americans guarantee
that they will not invade Cuba.

Kennedy also agreed

to withdraw American nuclear missiles
from Turkey.

With time running out
and both sides arming their warheads,

Feklisov raced back
to the Soviet Embassy in Washington

to send news of the offer

from a secret communications room
in the basement.

Moscow accepted Kennedy's terms.

Nuclear war was narrowly averted.

Aleksandr Feklisov
lies in a Moscow cemetery.

Few who pass by will know
that he played a vital role

in saving the world from nuclear war.

The Soviets had achieved
stalemate with America

because their network
of foreign spies

helped arm them
and kept them informed.

The Cambridge Five moles

had all risen through the ranks
of the British civil service.

One of them, Kim Philby,

was, by now, Chief of
British intelligence in America.

He was actually training recruits
to be deployed in Moscow,

only to betray them,

leading to their
inevitable execution.

It simply didn't occur
to his bosses in London

that one of their own kind
could ever be a spy.

Philby's membership
of the establishment,

its clubs, the right schools,
the right institutions,

his family background,

he was "one of us".

This was key to his
hiding in plain sight.

People also couldn't believe
that he would be a spy

because it was so audacious.

He had a well-recorded past
as a communist sympathiser.

He was so open about his previous
flirtation with communism

that people didn't think
it was possible.

When two of the five
were at risk of exposure,

Philby was able to warn them
and they defected to Moscow.

When he fell
under suspicion himself,

he displayed extraordinary bravado,

holding a press conference
in his mother's London home.

The last time
I spoke to a communist,

knowing that he was a communist,

was some time in 1934.

A sheen of sweat
is quite visible on his face.

He keeps using his tongue
to lick his back teeth.

Any student of body language

could see this was a man
squirming and lying

and, yet, at the same time,

the accent the smile, the charm,
were all on full display.

MIKHAIL LYUBIMOV:
Philby was not a traitor, of course.

He was an inspiration, a hero.

He was informing us a lot.

Mikhail Lyubimov,
a KGB colonel and spymaster,

knew Kim Philby well.

Philby was a very nice man,

he was a dedicated
old-time communist,

completely different from
the communists

who were in the Soviet Union.

Philby failed to cast off suspicion

and in 1963, after a tip-off
that he was about to be arrested,

he fled to Moscow.

But he'd been too used to
the high life in the West.

Now he was in for a shock.

For him, life in Soviet Russia
was mundane.

The first time I met Philby,
he was, um....hmm...

..drunk.

And, unfortunately,
that was his problem,

but he had nothing to do else

and he would drink
and reminisces about the old days.

Luckily, former KGB general
Oleg Kalugin

understood what Philby
was going through.

He'd spent almost a decade himself
spying in America.

When Kalugin became head
of counter-intelligence in Moscow,

he had to find ways to keep
his most illustrious spy onside.

I made several arrangements for him.

Among those arrangements,

Kalugin organised soirees
to overcome Philby's loneliness.

Young Russian women were introduced.

Of course, some of the ladies
would be instructed

to get in touch with him.

That really made him
back to life again.

Once again enjoying his private life,

Philby would go on to serve the KGB
as a trainer.

(APPLAUSE)

As late as 1981,

he was filmed briefing the
East German secret police, the Stasi,

on his penetration
of British intelligence.

He coolly outlines
the routine tradecraft,

delivering classified documents
to his Soviet handler.

(APPLAUSE)

But the valuable Cambridge network
was now history.

It would be 20 years
before Moscow had another source

the same calibre as Kim Philby.

Soviet intelligence had
its fair share of high-stakes drama.

But espionage
sometimes drifts into farce.

Colonel Mikhail Lyubimov
recalls a seduction

that didn't quite go to plan.

The American girl,

who was considered
to be a CIA girl...

..and, uh, I was put to live in
the wonderful, posh hotel in Moscow

where she stayed too.

A tiny camera had been concealed
in the wall,

behind an open-backed chair.

The footage would be used
to blackmail the CIA operative.

And then we started making love,

and, uh, quite suddenly,
a telephone rings,

just at the peak, I would say,
of this wonderful session.

And my KGB man, he says,

"Move the chair,
put away the chair."

When undressing, I put
all my clothes on the chair

and the chair just closed the view
of this wonderful scene.

The moment was lost
and the woman escaped the trap.

(RUSSIAN DANCE MUSIC PLAYS)

If KGB agents themselves
were compromised,

they'd been taught
how to deal with it.

I taught my subordinates
that if they are in trouble

or in a situation

when they are confronted with
some documents or pictures,

tell the guys that..."Oh, wonderful!

"Could you give me copies
and I'll give it to my friends?"

Disarm them by your willingness
to accept that.

Don't feel scared. That's it.

Oleg Kalugin's boss at the Lubyanka,
Yuri Andropov,

understood better than anyone

the KGB's power
to exploit people's weaknesses.

He had been appointed by Khrushchev's
successor, Leonid Brezhnev in 1967.

Andropov was determined
to restore the KGB

to what he believed
was its rightful place,

at the controls of Soviet society.

To cast the service
in a better light,

Andropov commissioned
movies and novels

featuring daring agents
infiltrating Nazi high command.

All for the glory of Mother Russia.

At the same time as
rebranding the service,

Andropov set about reversing many of
the freedoms gained under Khrushchev.

He was a hardliner
through and through.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Andropov believed

that any element of dissent,
anything,

could eventually lead to
something much bigger.

In 1968, Czechoslovakia,
an ally of the USSR,

seemed to be drifting away
from Soviet-style communism.

The 'Prague Spring' gave rise
to hopes for more freedom.

Hardliner Andropov
used agent provocateurs

to plant arms caches as proof
of a Western-backed conspiracy,

then used this
as a pretext for invasion.

Oleg Kalugin received a secure cable
in Washington.

By now, he'd risen to
chief of KGB station there.

The message amounted to
a diplomatic bombshell.

It said that "Tomorrow,
the troops of the Warsaw Pact

"will enter Czechoslovakia

"to crush the counter-revolutionary,
Western-sponsored..."

..you know, revolt.

"Please inform the Ambassador

"and prepare for potential troubles
around the Embassy."

The Soviet ambassador
was Anatoly Dobrynin,

a genial diplomat,

as popular with the Americans
as he was at home.

I called the Ambassador and
showed him the cable from Moscow.

I was really
risking my reputational career.

I said, "Fools."

But the Ambassador's reaction
was totally unexpected.

He said, "Idiots."

That was
Ambassador Dobrynin's reaction

to Soviet invasion
of Czechoslovakia.

(SHOUTING)

If the Americans had intercepted
that cable,

Czech history might have taken
a different turn.

Russian humour suggests
that it wasn't only the Czechs

that yearned for more liberal times.

(LAUGHTER)

In August 1968,

Soviet forces crushed the reformist
movement in Czechoslovakia.

OLEG KALUGIN: The Prague Spring
was really a sad event.

Quite a few people
were disgusted by the fact

that the Soviets
viewed Czechoslovakia

as if it was part of
the Soviet Union.

The invasion

and the suppression of the reformist
movement in Czechoslovakia

asserted the Soviets' claim
of dominance over Eastern Europe.

Everything concerning
the Soviet Union

was now viewed through the prism
of human rights.

In 1975,
after international negotiations,

the Soviet Union agreed to sign up
to a diplomatic agreement

called the Helsinki Accords,

which included respect
for human rights.

Sceptic dissidents
promptly founded the Helsinki Group,

to report to the West when
the Soviets flouted the agreement.

Myroslav Marynovych
was among the founders.

He remembers the intimidation
he suffered at the hands of the KGB.

MYROSLAV MARYNOVYCH: As soon as
I came out from the house...

(CAR ENGINE STARTS)
..the car

that was standing nearby

switched on the light

and I was going
in the light of...of a car.

And I immediately
understood the message.

"You are under control already."

They followed us everywhere.

When intimidation didn't stop him,

Marynovich was arrested

and sentenced to seven years
at Perm-36,

one of the most notorious
Siberian labour camps.

Amongst many activists there
was Semyon Gluzman.

But KGB chief Andropov
applied another method of repression,

more feared, even, than the Gulag.

One of the means he used
to undermine dissidents

was to lock them up not into prisons
but into psychiatric institutions

and this was done, um,
partly from a PR point of view.

Andropov cared a great deal,
from the very beginning to the end,

how it was perceived
by the outside world

and wanted to tell people, "Look,
we don't have political prisoners.

"We just have nutty people
who, for their own...

"..because of their own
mental illness,

"don't appreciate
the greatness of our party.

At the Serbsky Psychiatric Institute
in Moscow,

dissidents were diagnosed
with an invented condition -

'sluggish schizophrenia'.

Sluggish schizophrenia is certainly

a very shameful episode

in the history of Soviet psychiatry,

as it is the psychiatrists
themselves

that come up with this concept
in the early 1960s.

Effectively, if someone
didn't believe in Soviet values,

then they must be mad.

Gluzman was a psychiatrist himself,

and it was his denunciation
of the practice

that got him sent to Perm-36
in the first place.

In Siberia, he was inspired
by a fellow inmate

to write an expose of life
for psychiatric patients.

The work had to be smuggled out
one chapter at a time.

But the writing was already
on the wall for the Soviet Union.

The number of dissidents
was growing rapidly,

and the economy was stagnating.

IAN LAUCHLAN: The Soviet State was
very good at the old technologies -
coal, steel.

But with plastics, new chemicals,
but particularly computers,

the Soviet Union was falling behind
the West at an astonishing rate.

The last thing they needed

was to get sucked into a war
they could ill afford.

Neighbouring Afghanistan had long
been a client state of the USSR.

But in 1979, internal unrest
made the Afghan communist regime

seem dangerously unstable.

To secure their influence,

the Soviets sent in the troops,

with KGB units and regular forces

taking on a guerilla army
on its own territory.

(RAPID GUNFIRE)

The Soviet leadership
made the basic mistake

of seeing its military superiority

as the key to its success
in Afghanistan,

and it didn't think about
the fact, though,

"Was it willing to pay the price
of a long, drawn-out war?"

When the Soviets
withdrew from Afghanistan

after 10 years of bitter war,

15,000 of their soldiers lay dead

and their economy was in tatters.

But at the height of the war,
in 1985,

a spark of hope emerged

in the shape of
President Mikhail Gorbachev.

He introduced reform,
known as 'perestroika'.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: I think the security
officials were the people

who understood the country the best.

They...actually, it's thought
to have been the KGB

who were the leading voices
in perestroika originally,

because they understood exactly
how far behind the Soviet Union was

and how much it needed to do
to catch up with the West.

Soon after Gorbachev took power,

the world suffered
its greatest-ever nuclear disaster.

On the 26th of April, 1986,

Chernobyl's nuclear reactor
suffered a power surge,

releasing lethal radiation.

Yet it was a catastrophe
the KGB had tried to prevent.

As a consequence,
the entire city of Pripyat,

less than 100 kilometres from Kiev,

had to be evacuated.

Andriy Kohut,
director of the KGB archive in Kiev,

has uncovered alarming safety alerts

raised by KGB agents
long before the catastrophe occurred.

After the meltdown,

neighbouring countries quickly
detected a massive radiation leak.

Still, the Soviet authorities
didn't warn their own population

and ordered
the Kiev May Day celebrations

must go ahead as planned.

18 days elapsed

before President Gorbachev
publicly acknowledged the disaster.

The true figures
are wildly different.

The Chernobyl Museum in Kiev

commemorates the thousands affected
by this entirely avoidable calamity,

many of them children.

Chernobyl had been a disaster
for the Soviet Union.

Internally, the system was failing.

It seemed only a matter of time
before it collapsed.

But in the war of spies,
the KGB had just pulled off

the greatest single recruitment coup
in its long history.

Something had gone terribly wrong

within the US intelligence
community.

Our sources, our assets,

were being recalled to Moscow
and being executed.

The KGB had a mole
somewhere at the very top of the CIA.

No-one had a clue who he was.

The value of the information
he provided - tremendous.

And they understood that the KGB

really could do
tremendous things, yeah.

In line with protocol,

his name was only known by
a very close circle inside the KGB.

I supervised hundreds
of foreign assets

and I practically did not know
a single name,

unless those who I recruited myself.

But otherwise, I didn't know name,

and if I would ask a name,
there would be suspicion.

"Why does he want to know the name?
That's suspicious."

You don't have to know the name.
You have to know his codename.

Codenamed Nightmover,

the mole was causing immense damage,

with over 20 key Soviet assets
working for the Americans

either imprisoned or executed.

Whoever he was, FBI investigators

knew he had to be stopped,
and quickly.

DELL SPRY:
The damage was incredible.

He gave up all of
our technical programs

that we were running
against the Russians.

But in addition to that,

he gave up information on, for
example, our satellite programs.

He would get that information,
pass it to the Russians.

Information on acoustic programs
for our submarines,

he would pass that information
to the Russians.

Anything that he could touch.
Anything he could get his hands on.

Many agents fell under suspicion,

but not Aldrich Ames.

Since 1983, he had been
senior counter-intelligence officer

in the CIA's Soviet Division.

Just like Kim Philby,
he was hiding in plain sight.

But unlike Philby,
Ames was no political idealist.

The Russians use an English acronym

to describe the motivations
for any spy working for them.

MICE was the word -

for money, ideology,
compromising material and ego.

And, clearly, money and ego

were the prime recruiting weapons

in the 1980s in the USA.

When at last he was questioned,
'Rick', as he was known,

passed two polygraph tests.

But his flashy lifestyle
betrayed him.

DELL SPRY: All of a sudden, Rick is
wearing Armani suits to work.

He's driving a Jaguar.

He's got, you know,
Italian leather shoes.

And it just doesn't fit
within a GS-13 salary.

The FBI examined Ames's life,
looking for any scrap of evidence.

DELL SPRY: As unseemly as it sounds,

we dug through the man's trash.

Sifting through the rubbish from
Ames's suburban home in Virginia,

one of the FBI team

found shredded remnants of a note

from Ames to his KGB handlers.

DELL SPRY: And he says, you know,
"Guys, I think I've got
something here."

There was an operational message
telling the KGB,

"Either you guys didn't leave
a signal or I just can't see it."

Now, armed with the evidence,

the FBI was closing in.

In 1994, nine years after
his first contact with the KGB,

Ames's car was intercepted
near his home.

DELL SPRY: I grabbed his arms,
put them behind his back,

put the cuffs on him, told him
he was under arrest for espionage.

Then we took off.

Unlike most of those he betrayed,

Ames's life was spared,

and he is now serving a life sentence
with no possibility of parole.

After a lifetime
battling America's enemies,

Dell Spry can't hide his admiration
for his old adversaries, the KGB.

I did respect them.

I wanted to learn from the KGB -
their tradecraft.

One lesson from the Ames case

was that the KGB's most valued
tradecraft tool was its people.

You may have thousands of gadgets
and high...high technology.

Humans are the ones
who stand behind everything.

For 70 years, the KGB had been

a loyal servant
to the Communist Party.

But in a post-Soviet era,

the security services
would need a new champion.

He would arrive in the shape of

a little-known agent
from St Petersburg,

and under his leadership,

the KGB would become
more powerful than ever.

Captions by Red Bee Media
(c) SBS Australia 2021