Soviet Union for the infamous Katyn Massacre of Polish army officers during World War II, meanwhile fighting with his Parliament over control of a 5,000-man "private" security force. Within the other major ex-Soviet republics, particularly Kazakhstan and the Ukraine, there is a pronounced duality in their attitude towards archival intelligence data: where incriminating of Russian participation in a heinous event, such records are open to world scrutiny - there is less candor when dealing with self-reproach.
Such selectivity and subjective-over-objective reasoning when dealing with the issue of U.S. and ex-U.S.S.R. intelligence communities should not be surprising: it is in the nature of the beast. "Intelligence" is the euphemism for melodramatic words such as "spies," "espionage," and "secret police". Yes, theoretically, the purpose of all the above is to provide concrete data, or "intelligence," to the leaders of the sponsoring country, information that will be carefully analyzed and used to make decisions affecting the entire political arena, from diplomatic relations to internal economic priorities. The reality, of course, involves degrees of secrecy that breed suspicion and doubt in even the most idealistic and purely-motivated participants. It is not a recent phenomenon.
The KGB, or Committee for State Security, can trace its lineage back to the age of the Russian czars, when Ivan the Terrible set up the Oprichnina in 1565. Throughout the pre-Revolutionary period, the concept of an institutionalized political police force was an accepted element of imperial rule, evolving in name and function into the Okhrana, with an ever-widening scope of interest: the czar's enemies might not only be within the country, after all.
When the near-bloodless Bolshevik coup of 1917 was answered by foreign support of counter-revolutionary czarists - "White" armies bolstered by an invasion of American, British and French "expeditio...