Although the Cold War ended with the victory of the Western bloc led by the United States, in fact, the United States did not have a solid life in the whole process. The development of the Soviet Union's military prowess and its style of never fearing any opponent, even fighting on the word, have made Western countries very worried, and many scholars believe that for at least 10 years, the Soviet Union has a great advantage, and even formed a crushing situation.
At the end of October 1961, the famous "Tsar Bomb" in history was successfully tested on Shindi Island, and with such a terrible trump card, Khrushchev even directly confronted the representatives of Western countries at an important international conference:
"Don't you see who's the boss now!"
Ivan the Great's terrifying power made the world tremble, and even the previously aggressive United States had to swallow on some issues. Yet just a year later, the United States showed surprising toughness in the Cuban Missile Crisis that shocked the world. The reason for this is that the United States at that time held a "trump card" in its hands.
It all started in 1960, when in August of that year, the U.S. Embassy suddenly received a secret letter saying that a group of extremely important Soviet military secrets was to be provided to the United States. The sender's name was Ogle Pankovsky, a Soviet colonel who supposedly could be mixed into this rank, but Pankovsky became more and more dissatisfied with his treatment, and even turned against him, and decided to use his power to take revenge on the Soviet military in his own way. Even with serious suspicion that this was a conspiracy, the Americans decided to take a gamble at this critical time.
According to later Soviet investigations, from April 1961 to October 1962, Pankowski provided the United States with at least 5,000 important military secrets, and the Soviet Union suffered immeasurable losses, but Pankovsky did not take anything, and his only request was for the United States to keep his identity strictly confidential and provide him with adequate protection. In fact, the U.S. intelligence services have handled this issue very well, except for a few big people and the top CIA agents who need to contact Pankovsky, no one else knows of Pankovsky's existence, and even the President of the United States does not know much about it.
On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he used his power to find out the "old bottom" of the Soviet Union, and clearly understood that the number of Soviet missiles was not as exaggerated as advertised to the outside world, and the range was even more difficult to pose a threat to the United States. The reason why the Soviet Union risked the world and secretly transported a batch of missiles to Cuba was to solve this problem. The Americans knew what cards the Soviet Union was holding in its hands, and they also knew the calculations played in each other's hearts, so naturally they dared to take an uncharacteristic and tough attitude step by step, which caught the Soviet Union a little off guard. Seeing that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in a Compromise of the Soviet Union, what happened afterwards gave us a glimpse of the kgB's terrible side.
Nowadays, when people mention the KGB, they always use the word "miraculous" to describe it; how big is its "miraculous power"? Let's start with a story that has been circulating for a long time:
A foreigner once came to a small village in the Soviet Union, which was remote and closed to traffic, like a paradise. Almost the only "business" in the village is a small shop whose owner seems to be of good character, easy to get along with and very talkative. Foreigners have lived in the village for a while, and every day they have to run to the small shop to chat with the boss. Nothing seemed so special that one day a few years later, the foreigner suddenly learned that the boss was actually a KGB agent who had been installed in the village to be in charge of liaison.
This story illustrates a problem: agents lurked in the smallest parts of the Soviet Union, one to prevent the infiltration of foreign spies, and the other to prevent people from breaking the law. The KGB boasted 3 million people in its heyday, but of course there was a lot of self-aggrandizement in this claim. Since the establishment of the All-Russian Committee for the Suppression of Repression in 1917, the body has been adjusted and renamed several times, and its power has been expanding. In 1953, the agency, then known as the Ministry of State Security, merged with the infamous Ministry of the Interior and the following year was reorganized into the National Security Council, the precursor to the KGB as we know it. In reliable historical sources, the KGB in its heyday numbered about 500,000 people. Because of the special political system, for a long time, it was almost able to override the system, with power that even the supreme leaders feared.
Speaking of the Soviet Union, we were extremely impressed by its oppressive and serious political atmosphere, in which the KGB had a great influence. In fact, this problem can be seen in the process of absorbing members from itself. In the Stalin era, the selection of personnel in the Ministry of internal affairs was very strict, especially those who had the opportunity to touch the core secrets of the state, and their identities were strictly examined, even if their ancestors had been abroad for generations and lived in foreign countries, and they had nothing to do with it, they would not be absorbed by the KGB. In addition, the KGB's training was also extremely harsh. The soviet high-level believed that the most valuable intelligence,
"It must be stolen directly from the private documents of foreign governments and obtained through public officials who are not firm in that country or who are determined to provide intelligence to the Soviet Union."
With this philosophy, agents must undergo brutal training.
In the movie "Cardinal", there is such a portrayal: the KGB has trained a group of agents who lure targets at the cost of sex and use this as a handle to blackmail each other into submission, men are called "crows" and women are called "swallows". Once absorbed, the special unions were transported to the isolated "spy city" for training, where they not only had to understand the culture and living habits of the target country, but also had to speak the Chinese, even in private. During training, the dignity of the "crows" and "swallows" will be trampled on, and their personal feelings will be destroyed or even completely destroyed, until they can control their lusts at will and use them as a tool to steal intelligence.
Speaking of the KGB's most successful "classic cases", the rebellion against the French ambassador to the Soviet Union, Maurice Dejean, is one of them. In December 1955, after Dejean arrived in Moscow with his wife, the KGB was surrounded by agents, and even the drivers responsible for driving for him were highly trained spies. At first, Dejean was determined and showed no sign of disloyalty to france, and then the KGB sent a large number of "swallows" to seduce him, and even the personal maid of Madame Dejean was replaced by "swallows". In the end, Dejang could not resist the temptation and "established a special friendship with the Soviet Union." Not only that, French President Charles de Gaulle and Indonesian founding father Sukarno were once the targets of the "swallow".
The United States once found 120 wiretaps at a time in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, and even the national emblem given to the United States by the Soviet Union placed wiretaps. Even the Russian Federal Security Service, which has developed on the main body of only one kgb department, is enough to compete with the world's top intelligence services, which shows the strength of the KGB.
We return to the topic at the beginning of the article: Colonel Pankovsky unknowingly brought a steady stream of tsunami-like casualties to the Soviet Union, but because the secrecy work was so good, the Soviet military really couldn't figure out why the Americans seemed to see through them. However, the defeat did not affect much, and when someone suggested that there might be an "internal ghost", the KGB intervened in the investigation, and in a very short period of time, the CIA spent a lot of energy and money to destroy the entire "green channel" created for Pankowski.
On October 22, 1962, Pankovsky was executed for treason, and not only that, but the identities of several top CIA agents were also exposed. Importantly, americans have been looking for what the problem is, but to this day they can't figure out how the KGB did it.