The greatest success of Soviet bloc intelligence operations in the West during the Cold War was probably in the field of scientific and technological intelligence. Though the West had little to learn from Soviet technology, the Soviet Union had an enormous amount to learn from the West and from the US defence industry in particular. The plans ofthe first US atomic bomb, obtained for Moscow by British and American agents at the end of the Second World War and used to construct the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, were perhaps the most important scientific secret ever obtained by any intelligence service. The early development of Soviet radar, rocketry and jet propulsion was also heavily dependent on the covert acquisition of technology from the West.
For most of the Cold War, the American defence industry proved much easier to penetrate than the US federal government. By 1975, FCD Directorate T of the First Chief Directorate (FCD), which ran KGB S&T operations, had seventy-seven agents and forty-two confidential contacts working against American targets. SIGINT was also a major source. The SIGINT stations within the Washington, New York and San Francisco KGB residencies succeeded in intercepting the telephone and fax communications of a series of major US companies and laboratories. The United States was a more important - and more productive - S&T target than the rest of the world combined. In 1980, 61.5 per cent of the S&T received by the Soviet Military-Industrial Commission (VPK), which was mainly responsible for tasking in the military field, came from American sources (some outside the United States), 10.5 per cent from West Germany, 8 per cent from France, 7.5 per cent from Britain and 3 per cent from Japan. Documents provided by a French penetration agent in Directorate T, Vladimir Vetrov, provided proof of the huge scale of Soviet S&T operations. In 1980, the VPK gave instructions for 3,617 S&T 'acquisition tasks’, of which 1,085 were completed within a year, benefiting 3,396 Soviet research and development projects.637
During the 1980s, there were increasing attempts to use S&T in the Soviet civilian economy. Kriuchkov told a meeting of senior FCD staff in 1984 that, 'In the last two years the quantity of material and samples handed over to civilian branches of industry has increased by half as much again.’ This, he claimed, had been used 'to real economic effect’, particularly in energy and food production. In reality, the sclerotic nature of Soviet management made it far harder to exploit S&T in the civilian economy than in military produc-tion.638 The Soviet armed forces, by contrast, became dependent on S&T. According to one KGB report in 1979, over half the development projects of the Soviet defence industry were based on S&T from the West. The Pentagon estimated in the early 1980s that probably 70 per cent of all current Warsaw Pact weapons systems were based in varying degrees on Western - mainly US - technology.639 Both sides in the Cold War - the Warsaw Pact as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) - thus depended on American know-how. Intelligence is central to understanding the military as well as the political history of the Cold War.
World History
