At the height of its power, with more than one million officers, agents, and informants, the KGB shaped Soviet society more profoundly than any other institution. It recruited agents and planted spies worldwide, gathering, buying, and stealing military, political, and scientific secrets from anywhere and everywhere. It rooted out internal dissent, guarded the Communist leadership, mounted espionage and counterintelligence operations against enemy powers, and cowed the peoples of the USSR into abject obedience. Oppressive, mysterious, and ubiquitous, the KGB penetrated and controlled every aspect of Soviet life. The direct successor of Stalin's spy network, it combined the roles of foreign- and domestic-intelligence gathering, internal security enforcement, and state police. The KGBthe Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or committee of state securitywas the most complex and far-reaching intelligence agency ever created. The Gordievskys lived amid the spy fraternity in a designated apartment block, ate special food reserved for officers, and spent their free time socializing with other spy families. His father worked for the intelligence service all his life, and wore his KGB uniform every day, including weekends. The Soviet spy service was in his heart and in his blood. Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB: shaped by it, loved by it, twisted, damaged, and very nearly destroyed by it.
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