Creating the KGB and CIA The Establishment of the World's Most Famous Intelligence Agencies

However, the KGB did not appear out of thin air. Naturally, the earliest Soviet leaders utilized intelligence agencies that collected information both abroad and within the Soviet Union, targeting foreign opponents and domestic opponents alike. Lenin did not imagine the scale of the opposition he would have to face after the revolution, and he quickly came to the conclusion that "a special system of organized violence" must be created to implement the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Thus, from nearly the beginning of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, Lenin and his successors established and relied on a particularly ruthless agency: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, later abbreviated to the Extraordinary Commission. Known colloquially as the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission), it soon became as feared by non-socialists as the Tsar's secret police had ever been. The main means approved by the Council of People's Commissars on December 20, 1917, which the Cheka had to use to fight the counter-revolution, were "seizure of property, resettlement, deprivation of cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people, etc". Nevertheless, the main weapon of the Cheka for the next 35 years would be terror, and it blazed the path for its more famous successor.
Though it might be hard to believe, the Americans did not have a covert operations organization when they joined World War II, and like the British, it took them some time to realize it could be a powerful tool. As a result, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was not established until June 13, 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Voices within the Pentagon, State Department, and White House all opposed the establishment of this new and untested organization that would carry out activities normally considered unacceptable, so officials within the OSS had to fight for the very existence of the organization, battling through layers of bureaucracy to get the resources he needed and ensure its independence of action. They also worked hard to justify the use of covert tactics in warfare, to the extent that its leader, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, cited precedents that stretched back to the Bible.
In time, all the hard work led to the growth of the OSS into an organization with over 13,000 staff and 40 offices scattered across the world. Its purposes were initially similar to that of Britain's Special Operations Executive, including espionage, sabotage, and intelligence assessments, but with time and experience, it expanded to include economic, psychological, and guerrilla warfare, as well as counter-intelligence work. And of course, it would all chart a path for the early days of America's most famous intelligence agency, the CIA. Although plagued by its own share of problems in its early existence during World War II and the early Cold War years, the agency's early problems, smoothed over by a string of tenured presidents, paled in comparison to those it would face in the coming decades.



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