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)
• A report by the a Presidential Commission on Organized Crime found that “a significant number of criminals […] were forced to leave Russia” under the guise of ethnic emigration, especially under the Soviet Union’s program for Jewish emigration. “According to a report by the President's Commission on Organized Crime, the more than 200,000 Soviet immigrants who arrived over the last two decades ‘included a significant number of criminals who were forced to leave Russia.’ It suggested that by means of Jewish emigration: ‘The Soviet Union attempted to empty their prisons and rid their society of undesirables, much as (Cuba's) Fidel Castro did several years later during the Mariel boatlift.... Some agents of the KGB were included among the large numbers of Russian emigres.... (A) possible connection (exists) between the KGB and Russian immigrants now involved in organized crime here.’ ‘Approximately 12 Russian organized crime groups’ exist in New York, with other groups in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Dallas, Portland, Boston, Miami and San Francisco,’ the commission said.” (Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1988)
• Israeli officials arrested and charged one Russian émigré with spying for the KGB who had become an international businessman and even held a seat in the Israeli parliament (Knesset). “Western counterintelligence agencies have long suspected that the KGB ‘salted’ the emigres with their agents. One such plant was uncovered in December in Israel when authorities arrested Shabtai Kalmanovich, 46, and alleged that he had spied for 14 years. During that time he had worked briefly for a member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) and, during a period in which he worked as an international businessman, he reportedly helped in at least one U.S.-Soviet spy trade.” (Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1988)
• Two Russian immigrants from the Soviet Union were convicted of espionage in 1985, along with an FBI agent assigned to monitor them whom they recruited to work for the KGB. “In the most celebrated American case involving the KGB and Soviet emigres, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, 55, and his wife Svetlana, 36, were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1985, along with renegade FBI man Richard W. Miller in Los Angeles. Miller, whose FBI duties consisted of surveillance of the Russian community, was allegedly recruited by the Ogorodnikovs to work as a KGB agent. Nikolai Ogorodnikov, who said he had changed his name from Wolfson, pleaded guilty at the trial and was sentenced to eight years, but now proclaims his innocence. In an interview in the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, he denied having been recruited by the KGB but admitted spending over 10 years in Soviet prisons on six criminal charges, mostly burglary, before coming to the United States in 1973.” (Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1988)