In turn, the operations of the KGB agent network were nested within the larger relationship of society to the state. A seeming paradox is that the effectiveness of informers in information gathering relied on operational secrecy, but the existence of the agentlira was an open secret. The fear of informers that disrupted horizontal trust in society arose directly from this open secret. Fear of informers raised the costs of the mass surveillance on which regime survival relied. The result was long-term damage to society and the economy.
Because their existence was an open secret, informers were talked about in Russian society under a variety of names. The literal Russian equivalent to “informer” was osvedomitel. Slang terms showed unofficial society’s distaste for those who side with authority: donoschik (tell-tale or grass) or stukach (stool pigeon, literally a cellmate who relays information by knocking on the pipes). More ironic was seksot (an abbreviation of sekretnyi sotrudnik, or secret collaborator).
Formal responsibility for the KGB’s domestic informers belonged to the officers of its counterintelligence (second) administration. In internal KGB documentation, the term used for informers generally was “undercover helper” (neglasnyi pomoshchnik). Within that class were two main subcategories, the “agent” (agent) and the “trusted person” (doverennoe litso). The term agent was also the basis of the KGB’s collective term for its surveillance apparatus, the agentura (translated here as “agent network”). As well as agents, the agentura also comprised smaller numbers of “residents” (rezidenty, who provided safe houses) and “supernumeraries” (vneshtatnye operativniki, reserve officers that the KGB placed undercover in facilities that it supervised directly).
The common feature of agents and trusted persons was that they were all civilian helpers of the KGB under secret cover. In other respects, they differed. An agent’s recruitment was formalized by a signed agreement and the selection of a code name. A trusted person had not signed anything and would be identified in KGB paperwork by their initials.[322] At a deeper level, they were separated by political reliability: someone who was politically unreliable or compromised could not be a trusted person. An agent, by contrast, might or might not be politically reliable: there was no presumption either way. Because of this, the motivations of agents could be expected to show greater variety than those of trusted persons. For example, an agent might be recruited by consent or under duress, whereas a trusted person was always a willing recruit.
How many informers were there in the 1960s? In Soviet Lithuania in 1961, the republican KGB of 1,181 officers and staff deployed 2,904 agents and 2,531 trusted persons. This was around 1.9 per thousand of the local population.[323] The share of informers in Lithuania was substantially larger than across the whole country. In 1962 the KGB agent network in the entire Soviet Union was almost 165,000, a little less than one per thousand of the population, so half the density in Lithuania at the time.[324]
Such figures imply two things. First, whether one or two per thousand of the population, the prevalence of informers was low enough that many citizens could pass their lives having little or no contact with a KGB informer. Second, therefore, informers were a scarce resource, not to be distributed evenly, but to be focused where they would be of greatest value. The borderlands represented more immediate security risks than the vast Soviet interior. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Baltic region saw more intensive cultivation of informers than other regions.
The same principle of distributing the informers in proportion to perceived risks also operated within Lithuania. The informers reporting to the Soviet Lithuania KGB were heavily focused on the groups regarded as most susceptible to the adversary’s disruptive influences: young people in schools and colleges and adults employed in education, culture, science, and science-based industry, especially those responsible for teaching or managing others. They included people in towns that might see foreign tourists and in enterprises that might be visited by foreign specialists. Looking at fractions of informers among employees in Lithuania in 1963 and keeping 2 to 4 per thousand in mind as the average across the population, we find 14 KGB informers per thousand among schoolteachers, 19 at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, 58 at the Technical College, 70 at the State Conservatory, 85 at Vilnius State University, 112 at Vilnius Teacher Training College, and 214 (more than one in five) at the Art College. The share of informers was 17 per thousand at Klaipéda’s large Baltija shipyard in 1970, and 27 per thousand at KNIIRIT (a radar research facility in Kaunas) in 1968.[325]
Because most KGB informers were found in such settings, it follows that there were far fewer elsewhere. Those with the best chance of avoiding contact with an undercover informer lived away from the borders, in the countryside, or in communities without external diasporas and unlikely to receive foreign visitors. They worked in farming or small enterprises. They did not go to college, gain higher qualifications, or aspire to highly skilled or responsible work. These were also the people with least opportunity to threaten regime security.
While the Soviet informer network was thinly spread in view of its tasks, it was abundant in international comparison. The American equivalent was the FBI informer. For comparability consider 1971, when the number of KGB informers in Soviet Lithuania had risen to 11,675.[326] As of 1975, the nearest comparable year, the FBI was running 1,500 informers.[327] Thus, little Lithuania had several times more KGB informers than there were FBI informers in the entire United States. Across the Soviet Union, and in proportion to its population, the KGB had one hundred times as many.[328]
What sort of person did the secret police hope to recruit? Some desirable features are obvious. The Romanian Securitate looked for “sociability and social connections.”[329] An informer that lacked these would have nothing to report. Security officials of China’s Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s looked for “discretion, nerve, and self-motivation.”[330] An informer that lacked discretion and nerve would not be able to maintain a cover, and one that lacked self-motivation would not want to.
For the Soviet secret police, we have more precise indications. They arise from an exercise that the KGB undertook in the 1970s to upgrade its data handling capacities, which included designing and circulating a lot of forms for officers to fill in with entries that could become fields in databases of one kind of another.[331] There was a form to register informers who were Soviet citizens, another for foreign informers, and a third for registering changes of status during each calendar year.[332] The greater part of these forms was devoted to recording the kind of factual detail that you would expect to find in anyone’s work record. Worth noting here are the questions that tried to capture the informer’s capacity for social relationships with others, the presence of other propensities that the KGB defined as “negative,” and the quality of the informer’s cooperation with the KGB.
323
Anusauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 71. According to the 1959 census, Soviet Lithuania was a country of 2.7 million people, of whom four-fifths belonged to the titular ethnic group (others were mainly Russians and Poles) TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v i960 g., 18-20.
324
The number of KGB informers in 1962 was given as 164,774 by Vladimir Se- michastnyi in his report “On the results of work of the KGB of the USSR Council of Ministers and its organs in the localities for 1962” to Nikita Khrushchev, 1 February 1963 (Hoover/Volkogonov papers, container 28 [reel 18]). The number had barely increased five years later (in his annual report for 1967, dated 6 May 1968, found in the same location), Semichastnyi’s successor Andropov gave 24,952 as the number of new agents recruited in 1967, being 15 percent of the total number, which would therefore have been roughly 166,350.
327
Church Committee, “Use of Informants in FBI Intelligence Investigations.” At that time, the main focus of FBI investigations was America’s political fringes from the Ku Klux Klan to the Black Panthers. In the following years, the FBI became more engaged with organized crime and narcotics. Informant numbers swelled, reaching 2,800 in 1980 and “well beyond 6,000” in 1986. Ronald J. Ostrow and Robert L. Jackson, “U.S. Agents Make Increasing Use Of informants: But ‘Handlers’ Face Complex Legal Hazards When Condoning Criminal Acts”, Los Angeles Times, 15 June 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-06-15- mn-11287-story.html.
328
As mentioned in the text, there were 1,500 FBI informers in 1975, or 7 per million of the US population at the time. For the Soviet Union, the nearest comparable year is 1967. In his annual report for 1967, dated 6 May 1968 (Hoover/Volkogonov papers, container 28 [reel 18]), Yurii Andropov gave 24,952 as the number of new agents recruited in 1967, being 15 percent of the total number, which would therefore have been roughly 166,350. This made 0.7 per thousand of the Soviet population at the time. Finally, 0.7 per thousand is one hundred times 7 per million. Numbers of informers were on an upward trend in both countries in this period, but a difference of two orders of magnitude could not be closed by shifting the base of one of the measures by a few years.
329
This is noted by Verdery, Secrets and Truths, chapter 3, in connection with informer recruitment by the Romanian Securitate.
331
The related KGB project for a database of informers’ reports on the behavior of Soviet citizens travelling abroad in groups is described by Harrison, One Day, 169-70.
332
Hoover/LYA, 1/3/798, 184-186 (“Explanatory report” by Col. Kurenkov, chief of analysis for the Moscow city and province KGB, 30 July 1974); the forms themselves follow at folios 187-1 to 187-боЬ.