Russian Intelligence Operations

1970s: Soviet Agents Were Seeded Among Jewish Emigrants

• 1988: The Soviet Union’s intelligence service (KGB) often recruited criminals to emigrate under the cover of its program allowing Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel according to prominent Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky. “During his years of imprisonment, Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky chanced to meet a Russian criminal, a professional con artist who was pursuing a bizarre goal: Despite the rigors of prison life, he was diligently studying English in hopes of emigrating to America--to ply his trade as a swindler. America, he declared, was a land of easy pickings. Three of his friends were already there. ‘But how will you get there?’ asked the astonished Sharansky, who knew first-hand how hard it is for Russians to get permission to leave their homeland. ‘You aren't Jewish.’ ‘The KGB will help me,’ the confident swindler replied. The Soviet secret police had helped his friends get to the United States by obtaining exit visas to Israel, he said, and he expected the same.” (Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1988)
• Many of these emigres from the Soviet Union were members of ethnic minority groups who were granted a right to leave the Soviet Union in order to migrate to their “historic homelands.” “Under Soviet law, members of ethnic and national minority groups who have relatives in the West are theoretically allowed to emigrate to their ‘historic homeland.’ Soviet Jews make up by far the most prominent group seeking to take advantage of this rule, but ethnic Germans, Armenians and others are also sometimes allowed to leave. Jews get permission to go to Israel but most now come instead to the United States, where they also have relatives. Some of these emigres embark on or continue lives of crime here as part of groups known to U.S. law enforcement officials as ‘the Russian Mafia’ and ‘Russian Jews.’ In fact, although they are often associated with the Italian Mafia, the Russian gangs are themselves not well organized, the officials say.” (Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1988)