15 CIA Vs. KGB Classic Confrontations

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15 CIA Vs. KGB Classic Confrontations

Go behind the scenes of the secret war between the worlds two great powers.

Published 6 months ago

Take a deep dive into the real life "Spy Versus Spy" incidents of the Cold War.

After World War II, former allies the U.S. and the Soviet Union became bitter enemies. Over the next few decades, the Cold War was fought covertly behind the scenes by the CIA and the KGB. Spies on both sides were arrested, planes were shot down, cyanide pills were ingested, alongside just about everything else you thought only happened in James Bond movies.

Get to know the spies, the lies and all the insane events that went down between superpowers fighting a war they wouldn't acknowledge publicly.

1
The Thing
A covert listening device concealed inside a wood seal, given as a gift by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on August 4, 1945 as a gesture of friendship. It hung in the American Embassy in Moscow for six years before discovery.

2
Project Azorian
In 1968, a Soviet submarine sank 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii. The CIA designed the Hughes Glomar Explorer ship, fitted with a claw specifically to recover the wreckage and study it. Although only a portion of the sub was lifted out of the water successfully, it was one of the CIA’s most expensive operations ever, costing an estimated eight-hundred-million dollars.

3
Oleg Penkovsky
A Soviet military intelligence colonel who spied for the U.S. during the early 1960s. He gave information to the Kennedy administration regarding the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations, which provided Kennedy with negotiating leverage during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

4
1960 U-2 incident
On May 1, 1960, a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, operated by the CIA was shot down over the USSR, and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, captured. At first, the CIA claimed it was a lost weather plane. The wreckage of the plane now sits in the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow.

5
George H.W. Bush, Director of the CIA
Bush led the CIA in 1976 and oversaw several espionage efforts against the KGB

6
Ivan Serov, first head of the KGB
Circa 1954

7
Viktor Belenko
A Soviet pilot with the 513th Fighter Regiment he successfully defected to the West by flying his MiG-25 jet fighter to Hakodate Airport in Hokkaido, Japan in 1976. George H.W. Bush, Director of the CIA at the time, allowed for him to be made a U.S. citizen in return for a full inspection of his aircraft, which gave the U.S. unprecedented knowledge of the Soviets flight capabilities.

8
Operation Ivy Bells
In 1971, the U.S. Navy worked in collaboration with the CIA to send the USS Halibut submarine underneath the Sea of Okhotsk to tap essential Soviet communication cables. The operation was discovered by the Soviet Union in 1980, when NSA analyst Ronald Pelton defected and revealed the existence of the program.

9
Ronald Pelton
A National Security Agency intelligence analyst who was convicted in 1986 of spying for and selling secrets to the Soviet Union. One such top secret operation he compromised was Operation Ivy Bells.

10
Operation Monopoly
The embassy of the Soviet Union was relocated to a new building complex in 1977. The Americans purchased a house across the street from the building and began digging a tunnel toward the embassy. The tunnel was poorly planned and provided “no new information”, and was eventually revealed to the Soviets by double agent Robert Hanssen.

11
Moscow Embassy Brick Bugging
In 1960, the CIA discovered the KGB had riddled the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow with bugs—including in structural components, making the building unusable.

12
Aleksandr Ogorodnik
A Soviet diplomat who spied for the CIA throughout the 1960s and 1970s. When found out by the KGB in 1977, he asked for his pen to write out a full confession, which contained a suicide pill that he successfully ingested

13
Klaus Fuchs, atomic spy
Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist who joined the Communist Party in 1932. He fled Germany in 1933, and was later a leading scientist on the Manhattan Project, where he fed knowledge and secrets to the Soviets.

14
Aldrich Ames, KGB mole
A CIA counterintelligence officer who spied for the KGB from 1985–1994, exposing at least 10 U.S. sources who were then executed. He was arrested in 1994.