All language subtitles for KGB The Sword And The Shield S01E02 Berija & Co.

Operation Enormous was a great success

for NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria.

A handful of well-placed agents had transformed

the Soviet Union into a super power.

(somber instrumental music)

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.

When Stalin died,

Beria thought that he would be the leader

but Khrushchev out maneuvered him.

Within weeks, Khrushchev mounted a coup

and assumed power, much to Beria's surprise.

He saw that Khrushchev was a Ukrainian simpleton,

only concerned with party matters.

Beria thought, I have all the power,

and I don't think he saw him as an opponent.

It was a fatal oversight.

Khrushchev had him arrested on charges

of working for the enemy.

What happened next remains a mystery.

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 that 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.

Every department was cut back.

64,000 workers were sacked from state security.

They were ridiculed and humiliated.

They called them Beria's dogs and things like that.

You can imagine how it weakened our organization.

For those loyal servants inside the KGB,

Khrushchev was a traitor.

I can see Khrushchev's work in any other way.

My conscience, my inner core and experience

as a KGB officer won't allow it.

(ominous music)

For others, it was the welcome arrival

of a leader who appeared to believe in greater freedom.

He had something humane about him.

He would have been a good man if he hadn't been spoiled

by communist propaganda.

Khrushchev set out to reposition

the communist party as the true defender of the people.

(speaking in foreign language)

Khrushchev saw no point

in punishing everyone with anti-Soviet views,

that's why the number of arrests was lower

than under Stalin.

But the KGB wasn't humane because it was the instrument

of repression in the fight against dissent.

(dark music)

Despite orders from the top

to show more leniency towards political dissent,

the security forces soon found other,

more discreet ways to punish prisoners.

(eerie music)

where the abuse of the prisoners became more sophisticated.

A man would be walked into a cell like this,

and the guards would grab him by the arms and legs

and throw him against the walls.

The victim had no visible signs of physical abuse,

but the internal organs were damaged.

(speaking in foreign language)

Both these men serve time here

for anti-Soviet activities,

but they had very different experiences.

Yvonne Mancho was here under Stalin and then Khrushchev.

(somber music)

Zorian Papaduk was here 30 years later.

(speaking in foreign language)

I was deprived of sleep.

In the daytime I would sit in the corner.

Warders would bang on the doors with their keys and shout,

"No sleeping, no sleeping, no sleeping."

The prison system was less draconian

when Zorian Papaduk was here,

but intimidation was still routine.

(speaking in foreign language)

When the KGB officers came to conduct interrogations,

I immediately saw their extreme brutality.

They wanted to frighten me.

As if prison life here

wasn't terrifying enough,

Moncho was sent to the Kengir prison camp in Kazakhstan.

under Khrushchev, inmates here and at other camps

began to demand their basic rights.

(speaking in foreign language)

One day on the 15th of May, we said enough,

we won't work anymore.

We did not ask for much.

We just wanted them to remove our number badges,

remove the bars from the windows and doors

and take away the slop buckets.

When these simple requests were rejected,

the prisoners took over the camp.

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

(eerie music)

They pushed their guns through the windows

of the barracks and opened fire.

The noise of the gunfire was deafening.

(eerie music)

(speaking in foreign language)

Prisoners who left the barracks were gunned down.

As a result of this criminal...

I'm sorry.

(eerie music)

Later, it was estimated more than 600 people were killed

and wounded that day.

but Khrushchev quickly realized the need for urgent reform.

Mancho was released, along with thousands of others,

impatient for a new era.

(somber music)

(speaking in foreign language)

These uprisings start because of unfulfilled promises

by the state.

(speaking in foreign language)

If prisoners read newspapers and see that the country

is being reformed,

they want these political reforms to apply to them.

The suppression of the Kengir uprising was cruel.

But the regime was beginning to change.

(dramatic music)

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 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,

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 U.S. Air Force reconnaissance pilot.

He is now on a flight to Cuba.

I said, oh really?

Could you give me his schedule, so we can meet.

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

She said, okay and she provided me with his schedule.

So, that was simple intelligence operation.

Kalugin reported immediately to Moscow Center.

Kennedy mounted a Naval blockade of Cuba and went public,

warning Soviets that if any rocket was fired from Cuba,

U.S. strikes would be swift and certain.

He knew that 2,400 targets in the Soviet Union

would be wiped out.

The world watched with growing alarm,

as the two great superpowers squared up for a fight.

(dramatic music)

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,

Alexander Feklisov, set up a secret communications channel

between the White House and Moscow Center.

Kennedy has filtered through this source,

a compromise agreement, where they offer an honorable

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.

(speaking in foreign language)

The KGB played a crucial role during the crisis

because these intelligence channels were extremely important

in enabling Khrushchev and Kennedy

to reach an understanding.

(dramatic music)

Alexander 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.

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.

and 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 a communist,

knowing that he was a communist, was sometime 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.

He was informing us a lot.

Mikhail Lyubimov, a KGB colonel and spymaster,

knew Kim Philby well.

Philby was very nice, man.

He was a dedicated old-time communists,

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.

(somber music)

First time I met Philby he was

(dramatic music)

Luckily, former KGB general, Oleg Kalugin,

understood what Philby was going through.

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

(eerie music)

When Kalugin became head of counter-intelligence in Moscow,

he had to find ways to keep

his most illustrious spy on side.

(eerie music)

I made several arrangements for him.

Among those arrangements,

Kalugin organized soirees to overcome Philby's loneliness.

Young Russian women were introduced.

Of course, some of the ladies will be instructed

to get in touch with him.

That really made him back to life again.

Once again, enjoying his private life,

As late as 1981, he was filmed briefing,

the East German secret police, the Stasi,

on his penetration of British intelligence.

(dramatic music)

It was made perfectly clear to me that the best target,

in the eyes of Moscow, would be the British secret service.

It wasn't he only target

but it was the most important one to aim at.

(dramatic music)

He coolly outlines the routine trade craft,

delivering classified documents to his Soviet handler.

I'd take the files back early in the morning,

and put them back in their place.

(dramatic music)
(clapping)

the same caliber as Kim Philby.

Soviet intelligence had its fair share of high stakes drama,

but espionage sometimes drifts into farse.

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 I was put to live

in the wonderful Foch 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 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.

(dramatic music)

The moment was lost

and the woman escaped the trap.

(dance music)

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

Disarm them by your willingness to accept them,

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 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.

(speaking in foreign language)

He understood very clearly,

what Khrushchev had done with the security forces.

They had no authority in society.

People had no respect for the service in general,

or its agents.

To cast the service in a better light

Andropov commissioned movies and novels,

He restored the prestige of the security forces

and recruited intelligent personnel.

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.

Andropov believed that any element of descent,

anything, could eventually lead to something much bigger.

In 1968, Czechoslovakia, an ally of the USSR,

seem to be drifting away from Soviet style communism.

The Prague Spring gave rise to hopes for more freedom.

Hardliner Andropov used agent provocateur

to plant arms caches,

as proof of a Western-backed conspiracy.

Then used this as a pretext for invasion.

It's said that tomorrow the troops of the Warsaw Pact

will enter Czechoslovakia to crush

the counter revolutionary Western sponsor

(speaking in foreign language), revolt.

Please inform their ambassador

then prepare for potential troubles around to the embassy.

The Soviet ambassador was Anatoly Dobrynin,

a genial diplomat as popular with the Americans,

as he was at home.

(dramatic music)

I called ambassador and show him the cable from Moscow.

I was really risking my reputational career

as a fools.

But the ambassador's reaction was totally unexpected.

They're idiots.

That was Ambassador Dobrynin's reaction

to Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Czech history might have taken a different turn.

(somber music)

Russian humor suggests that it wasn't only the Czechs

that yearned for more liberal times.

(speaking in foreign language)

(crowd laughs)

(dramatic music)

In August, 1968,

Soviet forces crushed the reformist movement

in Czechoslovakia.

(dramatic music)

The Prague Spring was really a sad event.

Quite a few people that were disgusted by the fact

that the Soviets viewed Czechoslovakia

the Soviet's claim of dominance over Eastern Europe.

Everything concerning the Soviet Union

was now viewed through the prism of human rights.

(dramatic music)

While on one hand,

the Soviets declared themselves the most just society,

they did things that other countries found unacceptable.

Soviet policy, in relation to dissidence,

became the center of world attention.

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.

(eerie music)

Myroslav Marynovich was among the founders.

He remembers the intimidation he suffered

at the hands of the KGB.

As soon as I came out from the house,

the car that was standing nearby,

switched on the light

and I was going in the light 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 labor camps.

The checker said,

"You've got yourself a real academy here,"

and we replied, "Chief, we didn't buy tickets to come here."

(somber music)

(speaking in foreign language)

It affects you physically and mentally,

but you try to preserve your human dignity.

Sometimes I would tell myself,

they put me in here for nothing.

They have all their nuclear weapons and the whole world

is afraid of them, but I'm not afraid of them.

(somber music)

But KGB Chief Andropov

applied another method of repression,

but into psychiatric institutions and this was done 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 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

It didn't matter to them.

Gluzman was a psychiatrist himself,

and it was his denunciation of the practice

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

(somber music)

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.

We had skilled calligraphers who wrote in tiny letters

on little strips of paper, which were rolled up

and then, sorry, concealed in the anal orifice.

(dramatic music)

But the writing was already on the wall

for the Soviet Union.

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.

Neighboring Afghanistan had long been a client state

of the USSR,

but in 1979,

internal unrest made the Afghan communist regime

seem dangerously unstable.

(dramatic music)

To secure their influence, the Soviets sent in the troops

with KGB units and regular forces,

taking on a guerrilla army on its own territory.

(dramatic music)
(gun fires)

the fact though, wasn't willing to pay the price

of a long, drawn out war.

(dramatic music)

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.

(speaking in foreign language)

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.

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,

Soon after Gorbachev took power,

the world suffered its greatest ever nuclear disaster.

(speaking in foreign language)

(dramatic music)

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.

We warned Moscow that this type of accident might happen.

Basic building regulations were ignored.

There was a shortage of cement

and other essential materials.

Sadly, no one took any notice.

As a consequence, the entire city of Pripyat,

was uncovered alarming safety alerts raised by KGB agents

long before the catastrophe occurred.

(speaking in foreign language)

The KGB reported on these issues,

but the communist party ignored them.

Instead, they rushed construction to finish it

before the next anniversary of the revolution.

It was very typical of the whole Soviet Union,

to try and complete big projects before an anniversary,

regardless of problems.

After the meltdown,

neighboring countries quickly detected

a massive radiation leak.

Still, the Soviet authorities didn't warn

their own population

and ordered the Kiev Mayday celebrations

Residents of Kiev didn't believe

that the radiation was harmful.

You can't smell it

and you don't feel any ill effects right away.

Families were there with their kids.

Even my little boy was there.

We members of the KGB were expressly forbidden

to evacuate our children.

Discipline was absolute.

As a military man, you had no right to refuse.

No one even considered it.

18 days elapsed before president Gorbachev

publicly acknowledged the disaster.

(eerie music)

(speaking in foreign language)

The true figures are wildly different.

The Chernobyl Museum in Kiev commemorates the thousands

affected by this entirely avoidable calamity,

many of them children.

(somber music)

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 U.S. 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 information he'd provided, tremendous.

And they understood,

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.

but otherwise I didn't know him 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 code name.

Codenamed Night Mover,

the mole was causing immense damage,

with over key Soviet assets working for the Americans,

either imprisoned or executed.

(ominous music)

Whoever he was, FBI investigators knew

he had to be stopped and quickly.

The damage was incredible.

He gave up all of our technical programs

that 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,

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 used 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.

The FBI examined Ames's life,

looking for any scrap of evidence.

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.

And he says, you know, guys,

I think I've got something here.

It 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,

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 trade craft.

One lesson from the Ames case

was that the KGB's most valued trade craft tool

was it's people.

(dramatic music)

You may have thousands of gadgets

and high technology.

Humans are the ones who stand behind everything.

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 will become more powerful than ever.

(dramatic music)