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KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev
This history of the world's largest and most powerful intelligence service, the KGB, from its origin after the Russian revolution to the present day, analyzes its operations against subjects as diverse as the EEC, Margaret Thatcher, Solidarity and Libya. This study also provides an insight into Gorbachev's relations with the KGB and examines the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. Christopher Andrew has also written "Secret Service". Gordievsky was a KGB colonel who worked for British intelligence as a penetration agent in the KGB from 1974. He escaped to the West in 1985.
704 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
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1808 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Andrew
50 books171 followersChristopher Maurice Andrew, FRHistS is an Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cambridge with an interest in international relations and in particular the history of intelligence services. (military.wikia.org)
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 21, 2017
Andrew is a clear, well-researched, but rather dry author of books on the history of espionage. Soviet turncoat Gordievsky, listed as his co-author, did not actually write any of this volume, but did serve as a consultant and source of much 'current' (pre-1990) inside dope about the KGB's operations.
As might be expected, the story of the KGB is a depressing one. Like our own CIA, but often on a vaster scale, it has a sordid history, particularly during the Stalin era.
Going as far as 1990, during the Gorbachev reforms, the story ends on an upbeat note. Sadly, shortly thereafter there was the failed abduction of Gorbachev and the Yeltsin coup in Russia made possible by the breakup of the Soviet Union. The rise of Putin within the KGB occurs after this account ends.
As might be expected, the story of the KGB is a depressing one. Like our own CIA, but often on a vaster scale, it has a sordid history, particularly during the Stalin era.
Going as far as 1990, during the Gorbachev reforms, the story ends on an upbeat note. Sadly, shortly thereafter there was the failed abduction of Gorbachev and the Yeltsin coup in Russia made possible by the breakup of the Soviet Union. The rise of Putin within the KGB occurs after this account ends.
July 17, 2015
A complete and compelling history of a secret organization, co-written by a defector. This made for a great read, even if its later chapters are conspicuously outdated-- this was published right as the Soviet Union was beginning to disintegrate. The anecdotes and reflections on how the government and intelligence services of Soviet Union actually viewed the West, and the details of their conspiracy-theory mindset, made it extremely interesting. This read like a story lurking behind familiar facts, a secret layer of history.
November 20, 2017
Encyclopedic in scope and fairly balanced in the retelling, ultimately there were too many names and eras to keep it all straight in my head. I guess the one theme that comes through is the self-destructive paranoia of the Soviet leadership, starting under Stalin, but continuing effective for the entire time period (1917-1990 or so).
A couple other highlights: The perfume in the early 50s, run by Molotov's wife, called "Stalin's Breath". How delicious.
And this highly relevant anecdote (page 463): "One of Agayants's first targets as head of Department D in 1959 was West Germany, which the KGB sought to portray as riddled with neo-Nazis. To test one of his 'active measures' before trying it in Germany, Agayants sent a group of his officers to a village about fifty miles from Moscow with instructions to daub swastikas, paint anti-Jewish slogans, and kick over tombstones under cover of darkness. KGB informers in the village reported that though the incident alarmed most inhabitants, a small anti-Semitic minority had been inspired to imitate the KGB provocation and commit anti-Jewish acts of their own."
"During the winter of 1959-60 Agayants used the same technique with great success in West Germany. East German agents were dispatched to the West to deface Jewish memorials, synagogues, and shops, and to paint anti-Semitic slogans. Local hooligans and neo-Nazis then spontaneously continued the KGB campaign..."
A couple other highlights: The perfume in the early 50s, run by Molotov's wife, called "Stalin's Breath". How delicious.
And this highly relevant anecdote (page 463): "One of Agayants's first targets as head of Department D in 1959 was West Germany, which the KGB sought to portray as riddled with neo-Nazis. To test one of his 'active measures' before trying it in Germany, Agayants sent a group of his officers to a village about fifty miles from Moscow with instructions to daub swastikas, paint anti-Jewish slogans, and kick over tombstones under cover of darkness. KGB informers in the village reported that though the incident alarmed most inhabitants, a small anti-Semitic minority had been inspired to imitate the KGB provocation and commit anti-Jewish acts of their own."
"During the winter of 1959-60 Agayants used the same technique with great success in West Germany. East German agents were dispatched to the West to deface Jewish memorials, synagogues, and shops, and to paint anti-Semitic slogans. Local hooligans and neo-Nazis then spontaneously continued the KGB campaign..."
July 7, 2020
The reason I read this book is because of a remark in another interesting book i read: The House of Trump, the House of Putin from Craig Unger (a NYT bestseller). Unger wrote that Putin is running Russia the same way the KGB is organized. KGB, the inside story is interesting but very descriptive. Is has many interesting details but the authors do not seem to know their limits. They lacked a good and honest editor (like many authors nowadays).
There is little to none analysis.
Having said that, it is still worth reading because the devil is in the details, which is absolutely true for the KGB. One of the things i took from the book is the very deeply rooted anti-semitism in Russia that goes back to the times of the Tsars. This anti-semitism stems, partly, from another Russian phenomenon which is thinking in complots. The most extreme example is Stalin who, during the second world war, denied all the information of his own security officers that Germany was planning an invasion of Russia. He was convinced, until the last day, and obviously wrongly so, that these were false rumors, constructed by the allied forces, especially the UK.
Nevertheless, the Russians were able to create a secret service that, especially in the first half of the 20th century, was far beyond other world powers. Their greatest achievement was the recruitment of the magnificent 5. This refers to 5 British top spies that were recruited, mainly from Cambridge university in the thirties. Kim Philby, the most notorious, was one of the them. Interesting enough, they were never convicted. They all defected in time.
So what did I learn from the parallel between the KGB and Russia? The most important i think is that both create their own universe in which they firmly believe and they are very proud of it.
There is little to none analysis.
Having said that, it is still worth reading because the devil is in the details, which is absolutely true for the KGB. One of the things i took from the book is the very deeply rooted anti-semitism in Russia that goes back to the times of the Tsars. This anti-semitism stems, partly, from another Russian phenomenon which is thinking in complots. The most extreme example is Stalin who, during the second world war, denied all the information of his own security officers that Germany was planning an invasion of Russia. He was convinced, until the last day, and obviously wrongly so, that these were false rumors, constructed by the allied forces, especially the UK.
Nevertheless, the Russians were able to create a secret service that, especially in the first half of the 20th century, was far beyond other world powers. Their greatest achievement was the recruitment of the magnificent 5. This refers to 5 British top spies that were recruited, mainly from Cambridge university in the thirties. Kim Philby, the most notorious, was one of the them. Interesting enough, they were never convicted. They all defected in time.
So what did I learn from the parallel between the KGB and Russia? The most important i think is that both create their own universe in which they firmly believe and they are very proud of it.
August 13, 2017
I was more interested in the early days of the Cheka in the Stalin era as well as the Stalin era and WWII Cambridge Five era and the latter years 1970-to the end of the Soviet Union. In that respect it was a good read. I skimmed a lot of the middle part. Very dense. But cool stuff on the KGB's operations in Europe and Scandinavia in the '70s.
February 13, 2023
A great and in depth account. A bit long, or should I say certain parts feel a bit long. Some of the numbers cited haven't aged great, but overall really good. Also the 1990 version is an interesting look at this brief period when the USSR was trying to make the switch to a more open society, before it collapsed.
October 30, 2025
Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky's 1990 KGB: The Inside Story is a heavily detailed tome on the history of the notorious KGB published on the cusp of the then-impending dissolution of the Soviet Union, with all text by British author Andrew but fact-checking and also a huge amount of first-hand details provided to him by defector Gordievsky, former "KGB resident (head of station) in London," who from 1974 to his escape in 1985 "had been working for the SIS, the British Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6), as a penetration agent inside the KGB" (1990 HarperCollins hardcover, pages 1-2).
After an Introduction explaining "Gordievsky's growing alienation from both the KGB and the Soviet system...in the summer of 1968 with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by forces of the Warsaw Pact and the crushing of the freedoms that had begun to flower in the Prague Spring" (page 3), and detailing with his drugged interrogation and ultimate harrowing escape, the large book is divided into 14 chapters. The first chapter backs up to outline Tsarist secret police efforts all the way from 1565 to the Soviet revolution in 1917. The chapters that follow work toward chronologically toward the time of publication in 1990 in blocks of generally 5 to 10 years, give or take. Often, as in those covering "The Takeover of Eastern Europe (1944-48)" or other phases of the Cold War, for example, chapters then are subdivided, though without subheaders, only a blank line between, into the activities in different countries.
Josef Stalin looms large in this text, of course, and yet so, too, do Soviet deep-cover agents and also sigint, or signals intelligence.
As Andrew and Gordievsky note, after discussing the occasional Cold War "witch hunts" in the West against Communist penetration, the mustachioed Soviet dictator was "witchfinder-general" on the other side of the Iron Curtain, especially when "during the 1930s imaginary enemies of the people were liquidated in the millions" (page 119). Although my preference would be to quote specific points on Stalin's paranoia here--not just reasonable suspicion but actual nutty paranoia focused on plots that seemed to grow more threatening as ever-deeper digging seemingly mysteriously failed to uncover evidence that actually was nonexistent--it is spread so widely throughout the book that I simply will shrug and comment that the entire Soviet system of intelligence was predicated upon that decades-long insistence from above.
Regarding Soviet deep-cover agents, the book takes us from Kim Philby and his once-unsuspected cohort of idealistic young Communists at various levels of British intelligence itself, through the various naive dupes of the war years and postwar era--including Western politicians--who didn't realize that they were swallowing the Party line from earnest-seeming officials who actually were secret intelligence operatives or that their "peace" organizations were funded secretly by the Soviet Union itself (page 82), and turncoats led to spying for the Soviets by greed or false love scams or embarrassing filmed honeytraps. The crucial Western secrets lost, including not only technological ones but actual logistics for NATO defense of Europe (page 514), are nearly incredible.
Sigint, including cryptanalysis, is another part of the great decades-long game, and one that Andrew and Gordievsky consider to have been under-told at the date of writing. We are told that while "[t]he myth has developed that code-breaking coups are achieved simply by brilliant mathematicians, nowadays assisted by huge banks of computers," actually "most major breaks of high-grade code and cipher systems...were achieved with the help of at least partial information on those systems provided by espionage"; in the 1930s, for example, "Soviet code-breakers...had vastly greater assistance from espionage than their Western counterparts" (page 225). "During the Cold War, as before, Much of the Kremlin's best intelligence on the West came from sigint" (page 450), of course along with bugging the American embassy in Moscow (page 451) and also secretly getting access to embassy safes for code-cracking purposes from Sweden to the Middle East and Japan (page 454) as well.
Although it naturally can be difficult for the reader to try to keep track of so many Russian rogues whose names end with -ov, and although style often is not quite as straightforward as I would prefer, Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky's KGB: The Inside Story, which is thoroughly footnoted and indexed and includes a huge bibliography as well, along with 24 pages of black-and-white photos, will be an engrossing 5-star read to anyone interested in espionage, the Second World War, the Cold War, or military history.
After an Introduction explaining "Gordievsky's growing alienation from both the KGB and the Soviet system...in the summer of 1968 with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by forces of the Warsaw Pact and the crushing of the freedoms that had begun to flower in the Prague Spring" (page 3), and detailing with his drugged interrogation and ultimate harrowing escape, the large book is divided into 14 chapters. The first chapter backs up to outline Tsarist secret police efforts all the way from 1565 to the Soviet revolution in 1917. The chapters that follow work toward chronologically toward the time of publication in 1990 in blocks of generally 5 to 10 years, give or take. Often, as in those covering "The Takeover of Eastern Europe (1944-48)" or other phases of the Cold War, for example, chapters then are subdivided, though without subheaders, only a blank line between, into the activities in different countries.
Josef Stalin looms large in this text, of course, and yet so, too, do Soviet deep-cover agents and also sigint, or signals intelligence.
As Andrew and Gordievsky note, after discussing the occasional Cold War "witch hunts" in the West against Communist penetration, the mustachioed Soviet dictator was "witchfinder-general" on the other side of the Iron Curtain, especially when "during the 1930s imaginary enemies of the people were liquidated in the millions" (page 119). Although my preference would be to quote specific points on Stalin's paranoia here--not just reasonable suspicion but actual nutty paranoia focused on plots that seemed to grow more threatening as ever-deeper digging seemingly mysteriously failed to uncover evidence that actually was nonexistent--it is spread so widely throughout the book that I simply will shrug and comment that the entire Soviet system of intelligence was predicated upon that decades-long insistence from above.
Regarding Soviet deep-cover agents, the book takes us from Kim Philby and his once-unsuspected cohort of idealistic young Communists at various levels of British intelligence itself, through the various naive dupes of the war years and postwar era--including Western politicians--who didn't realize that they were swallowing the Party line from earnest-seeming officials who actually were secret intelligence operatives or that their "peace" organizations were funded secretly by the Soviet Union itself (page 82), and turncoats led to spying for the Soviets by greed or false love scams or embarrassing filmed honeytraps. The crucial Western secrets lost, including not only technological ones but actual logistics for NATO defense of Europe (page 514), are nearly incredible.
Sigint, including cryptanalysis, is another part of the great decades-long game, and one that Andrew and Gordievsky consider to have been under-told at the date of writing. We are told that while "[t]he myth has developed that code-breaking coups are achieved simply by brilliant mathematicians, nowadays assisted by huge banks of computers," actually "most major breaks of high-grade code and cipher systems...were achieved with the help of at least partial information on those systems provided by espionage"; in the 1930s, for example, "Soviet code-breakers...had vastly greater assistance from espionage than their Western counterparts" (page 225). "During the Cold War, as before, Much of the Kremlin's best intelligence on the West came from sigint" (page 450), of course along with bugging the American embassy in Moscow (page 451) and also secretly getting access to embassy safes for code-cracking purposes from Sweden to the Middle East and Japan (page 454) as well.
Although it naturally can be difficult for the reader to try to keep track of so many Russian rogues whose names end with -ov, and although style often is not quite as straightforward as I would prefer, Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky's KGB: The Inside Story, which is thoroughly footnoted and indexed and includes a huge bibliography as well, along with 24 pages of black-and-white photos, will be an engrossing 5-star read to anyone interested in espionage, the Second World War, the Cold War, or military history.
May 10, 2019
Based on some of the reviews I read, I was a little afraid that this might turn out to be dry and hard to get through. Happily that was not the case at all. This was what I refer to in my own weird reading world as "easy reading". There was no struggling to get through it, it was interesting. I did not have to make myself keep going, I wanted to. Obviously it's not up to date, but for what it is, it was very fascinating and I would definitely recommend it. Although I think maybe it would help if you've read some Russian history prior, so you're a bit familiar with things/people.
August 21, 2025
Braidd yn sych, ond i fod yn deg mi roedd yn llawn ffeithiau a gwybodaeth am sut roedd y KGB'n gweithredu ac sut roedd y sefydliad yn cael ei redeg.
A bit boring but, to be fair, it contained a lot of behind the scenes info about it's actions.
A bit boring but, to be fair, it contained a lot of behind the scenes info about it's actions.
February 20, 2020
Excellent. If we only had this information in the early 70's. So much stuff in here. It's truly hard to wrap your head around it all. I cannot wait to find a few more books on the subject.
August 27, 2021
Not a quick read, but a must for those interested in this era of history.
If I retain 5% of it, I’ll have impressed myself.
If I retain 5% of it, I’ll have impressed myself.
January 3, 2016
Pesante.
Il libro tratta la storia del KGB dalla Rivoluzione di Ottobre all'ascesa di Gorbaciov basandosi su una serie di documenti trafugati da un colonnello del KGB che ha defezionato nel 1985
Pesante.
Il tutto è molto dettagliato, anche troppo. E' ottimo per sapere quale spia era controllata da quale agente, magari anche quali erano le sue preferenze sessuali o come è stata reclutata. Interessante anche alcuni dettagli della vita operativa e alcuni episodi curiosi.
Spesso però questi dettagli estremi non sono accompagnati da una visione più d'insieme: quali "danni/benefici" veri hanno portato i documenti rubati o le azioni intraprese?
Pesante.
E' un buon testo anche per vedere la storia del secolo scorso da un altro punto di vista, in particolare come l'URSS vedeva il resto del mondo e come si sentiva sempre al centro di un complotto internazionale.
Ho già detto che è pesante?
Il libro tratta la storia del KGB dalla Rivoluzione di Ottobre all'ascesa di Gorbaciov basandosi su una serie di documenti trafugati da un colonnello del KGB che ha defezionato nel 1985
Pesante.
Il tutto è molto dettagliato, anche troppo. E' ottimo per sapere quale spia era controllata da quale agente, magari anche quali erano le sue preferenze sessuali o come è stata reclutata. Interessante anche alcuni dettagli della vita operativa e alcuni episodi curiosi.
Spesso però questi dettagli estremi non sono accompagnati da una visione più d'insieme: quali "danni/benefici" veri hanno portato i documenti rubati o le azioni intraprese?
Pesante.
E' un buon testo anche per vedere la storia del secolo scorso da un altro punto di vista, in particolare come l'URSS vedeva il resto del mondo e come si sentiva sempre al centro di un complotto internazionale.
Ho già detto che è pesante?
March 23, 2009
Long and ponderous.
August 26, 2014
Un mattone. Nondimeno, molto interessante, in particolar modo la storia che va dalla WWII alla Perestrojka.
August 6, 2014
A book that tells realisticly the comunist system in all estern Europian countries, especialy in Albania.
Thank you to authors.
Thank you to authors.
March 13, 2016
I thought this was going to be boring. It wasn't. An inside look at one of the worlds oldest and most brutal spy organizations
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews