How the Soviet Union spied on the West for years under the guise of diplomacy

Just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, the United States expelled 13 diplomats from the Kremlin who worked at the UN. The US argument argued that they were Russian intelligence agents or agents working under diplomatic cover. Although the details of the alleged activities are unknown, it is clear that Russia has long used the United Nations for espionage, according to an analysis by Calder Walton, deputy director of the Applied History Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, published in The Cipher Bref.

During the Cold War era, Soviet intelligence services penetrated and modified key elements of the UN. These situations became known when Western governments expelled Soviet “diplomats”.

The Soviet Union saw the UN as a platform to get its message across to the world. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, I had the right of veto that I used frequently.

Between 1945 and 1983, the Soviet government issued 115 vetoes, compared to 38 for the United States and 20 for the United Kingdom. Under the terms of the Yalta Agreement between the Soviet Union and the Western powers in 1945, two of the Soviet Socialist Republics, Ukraine and Belarus, were full members of the UN. Thus, the Soviet Union won three votes against one from the United States.

The clandestine activities of the Soviet Union

A British Foreign Office dossier that was declassified in September 2021, titled Russian Intelligence Service Operating Undercover of the UN, reveals that in the 1970s, the intelligence services of the Soviet Union, the KGB and the GRU fully penetrated the UN in New York and Geneva.

His officials used diplomatic cover for espionage. According to the dossier, quoted by The Cipher Brief, the KGB controlled key parts of the UN bureaucracy as the Kremlin went through a period of relaxation in its relations with the West.

Among the revelations, one stood out in 1978, when it was revealed that the Under-Secretary-General, Arkady Shevchenko, of Soviet nationality, had defected to the American authorities. The official was quick to reveal publicly that he was a KGB officer.

Shevchenko had previously been recruited by the CIA, which convinced him to continue operating as an agent at the UN. After his defection and widespread misinformation, he reveals that the presence of Soviet intelligence at the UN is profound.

He also said that half of Soviet citizens working at the UN headquarters in New York, and at its office in Geneva, were intelligence agents or explicitly given intelligence-related tasks to obtain information about the officials of the member states who worked there. The UN Chief of Staff in Geneva was a KGB officer, according to The Cipher Brief.

The Kremlin has also been appointed Director of the Policy Coordination Division in the Office of Personnel Services in New York. He instructed his undercover agents at the United Nations that their success would be measured by the intelligence gathered, the secrets they stole, not by their work for the multilateral body. This violated UN standards, which required nationals on the job to work for the agency.

The removal of UN posts has enabled the KGB to recruit Western citizens as agents of espionage or influence.

In May 1978, the FBI arrested and successfully prosecuted two Soviet citizens working at the UN Secretariat on charges of espionage. They were arrested for stealing secrets of American anti-submarine warfare from an agent they thought had recruited into the US Navy, but their source was actually a double agent who was secretly working for the FBI.

Then, in July 1978, a Soviet military intelligence officer (GRU) working in the Soviet UN mission in Geneva, Vladimir Rezun, defected to the British intelligence service. His mission, as he later publicly revealed under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov, was to steal scientific and technical secrets from Western powers, especially from the United States. His hunting ground was the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), according to The Cipher Brief.

Soviet intelligence also penetrated other branches of the UN, such as UNESCO and WHO.

The Kremlin had a corps of intelligence officers posing as diplomats. By November 1984, the Soviets had up to 126 diplomats accredited to the UN in New York. Compared to 59 in the US and 20 in the UK. The recently unveiled British Foreign Office dossier indicates that most of these Soviet officials were “engaged in intelligence work,” according to The Cipher Brief. In 1980, Switzerland declared that of the approximately 650 Soviet officials residing there, at least 200 were engaged in espionage.

During the Cold War, both sides exchanged expulsions of diplomats suspected or established to be intelligence agents. By expelling Soviet intelligence agents, Western governments deprived them of their recruitment bases and espionage architecture in the West.

In September 1971, the British government expelled 105 Soviet “diplomats” from the country as part of what it called Operation FOOT. This was the largest such eviction during the Cold War. This operation followed the defection of a KGB officer to Britain, Oleg Lyalin, who worked in his sabotage department.

Operating undercover in the Soviet trade delegation, Lyalin revealed to MI5 that his mission was to prepare for sabotage operations against Britain when World War III broke out, a hot war between the Soviet Union and the West. A former high-ranking KGB officer, Oleg Kalugin, later claimed that FOOT dealt a blow to Soviet intelligence in Britain from which he never recovered.

The Kremlin's spying activities at the UN did not stop at the end of the Cold War. The successor service to the KGB in Russia, the SVR, continued its business, according to Walton's analysis. An SVR defector in the late 1990s, Sergei Tretyakov, defected to the CIA from the Russian UN mission in New York, where he was reportedly close to his then boss, Sergei Lavrov.

At present, Western intelligence agencies are recruiting disgruntled Russian intelligence agents, working under diplomatic cover in the West, who will follow the path of their Soviet predecessors. It's not hard to imagine Russian foreign intelligence agents feeling disappointed and disgusted by Putin's war in Ukraine, ready to share the secrets they know are on the right side of history.

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